Though the British version, like its American predecessor, is full of daring British accomplishments, its real, undeclared thesis is that if America did everything to achieve victory in Ukraine, the United Kingdom did everything to make what America did possible.

The New York Times piece credits Britain for managing “the logistics hub.” The British piece claims they did much more. It opens with the same drama as its American counterpart: “the extent of its involvement and influence – last-minute dashes to Kyiv, help forging battle plans and collecting vital intelligence on the Russians – has remained largely hidden. Until now.”

The Sunday Times claims credit for Britain for three pivotal roles in the war. The first is that they were the vanguard of the operation, the first to push many of the red lines. The UK “played a leading role in getting Ukraine the weapons it needed in the early days of the war.” Britain’s Secretary of Defense, Ben Wallace, we are told, was affectionately called “the man who saved Kyiv” by the Ukrainians. Later they would be the first “to provide Ukraine with long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles to boost its chances of success.” Anti-tank missiles, tanks, long-range missiles “all happened as early as they did because of” Wallace and Britain.

But it was not just in sending weapons to Ukraine that Britain was the first. It was also the first to put boots on the ground. In its cheap novel narrative style, The Times says that the UK had “the derring-do to deploy troops inside the country when no one else would.” The UK, The Times reports, had boots on the ground in Ukraine from the beginning. Early on, London had sent “a few dozen regular British troops” to Kiev “to instruct new and returning military recruits to use NLAWs, British-supplied anti-tank missiles that were delivered in February 2022 as the invasion was just beginning.” Later, they would “secretly” send troops “to fit Ukraine’s aircraft with the [long-range] missiles and teach troops how to use them.”

While U.S. military chiefs would only go to Ukraine “on rare occasions… Britain’s military chiefs… were given the freedom to go whenever necessary.”

The second pivotal role claimed by Britain is that it was the brains of the operation. “Behind closed doors,” The Sunday Times reports, “the Ukrainians refer to Britain’s military chiefs as the “brains” of the “anti-Putin” coalition.” They helped in “forging battle plans and collecting vital intelligence on the Russians.”

The Sunday Times piece also flirts with familiar themes from The New York Times article, like the known risk of nuclear war and the incompetence of the Ukrainian government and military command that led to defeat. There was “nervousness,” we are briefly told, “that giving Ukraine increasingly heavy weaponry could escalate tensions with Russia.” The Russians “had been rattling the nuclear sabre.”

We are told that the United States and Britain had carefully planned Ukraine’s counteroffensive but that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and General Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s ground forces commander, “had other ideas.” To emphasize again the thesis that the U.S. and Britain had done all they could and that defeat rests with the Ukrainian political and military leadership, The Times stresses that the U.S. was getting “frustrated” and “impatient.”

Though it again spends less time on these digressions, The Times also touches upon one of the more cynical aspects of The New York Times’ reporting. The New York Times reports that one value of the war in Ukraine is that it was “a grand experiment in war fighting, one that would not only help the Ukrainians but reward the Americans with lessons for any future war.” While “the Ukrainians were the ones fighting and dying,” the U.S. was “testing American equipment and tactics and sharing lessons learned.” The Sunday Times makes a similar cynical point: “Ukraine has paid a terrible price in defending themselves but they’ve also given us a window on modern warfare.” The UK would take “the lessons [they] learnt during the spring and summer of 2023 to the army, which [they are] seeking to transform into a more lethal, agile force.”

But the third and most pivotal role that The Times piece claims for Britain is that they played the role of mediator between the U.S. and Ukraine that kept the partnership together and made the war effort possible. “Most crucially,” The Times reveals, “as the Americans provided the ‘cream’ of the weapons to Ukraine and the precise targeting data to use them effectively, it was British military chiefs, under Operation Scorpius, holding Washington and Kyiv’s difficult relationship together.” Unreported at the time, while the Biden administration was “still presenting a faultless, united front with its Ukrainian allies… behind the scenes tensions had been mounting for months and by the early summer of 2023 had reached a point where they threatened to spiral out of control.”

At the point that “relations between the Ukrainians and Americans hit rock bottom,” British Admiral Sir Tony Radakin broke off “a long-planned holiday” and, telling Wallace that it was getting “too fractious,” said “he needed to get out to Ukraine to pull both sides together.” Radakin “would sit down with Zaluzhny, hear the Ukrainians out, and try to explain their perspective to the Americans.”

Britain’s mediation was a success. Its “diplomacy brought the two sides back together and in mid-August, Radakin, Zaluzhny, and [commander of US Army Europe and Africa] Cavoli met in person on the Polish-Ukrainian border. During a five-hour discussion, they thrashed out plans for the counteroffensive and plotted for the winter, as well as the following year. It was a sign that the Americans were not going anywhere soon.” Once again, Britain had saved the partnership and kept America in the war. This was a regular role for Radakin: “He was the person keeping the U.S. on side, and keeping the Biden administration leaning into Ukraine.”

The U.K. has done everything it can to help Ukraine win the war. It has provided “unwavering support” for Ukraine. It led the charge to send weapons and long-range missiles, and it put boots on the ground “when no one else would.” It was the “brains” of the coalition and brought “vital intelligence… to the table.” “Most crucially,” The Sunday Times tells us, the British provided the indispensable mediation that preserved the American-Ukrainian relationship and kept America in the war and the war effort and the partnership possible.

There is a pattern emerging in Western mainstream media reporting of the history of the war. It is not Ukraine that did everything it could and the West who let them down with insufficient weapons and limits on their use. It is the West who did everything that it could and Ukraine who let them down by not following orders. The New York Times’ March article led the way, and The Sunday Times’ April article establishes the pattern. The undeclared purpose of all these top-secret revelations American and British officials are choosing to share with the press seems to be the preparation of the public in the West for defeat in Ukraine and preparation for whatever comes next.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.

Instead, the general did everything in his power to prevent the reunion of the Lozansky family.

Lozansky settled in the United States and became a professor of nuclear physics at the University of Rochester. Lozansky, in America, and Tatiana, in Moscow, went on hunger strikes. They organized protests and wrote petitions to make the Soviet government relent and let Tatiana and her daughter leave the Soviet Union.

It was to no avail.

When Lozansky learned that during the 1980 Winter Olympic Games held in Lake Placid, New York, the Olympic People-for-People Program would be organizing the hosting of Soviet athletes in American homes, he came to Lake Placid to seek support for his quest to reunite with his wife and daughter.

Lozansky turned to me, as the organizer of the Olympic People-for-People Program, to secure the support of prominent officials and Olympic athletes.

The mayor of Lake Placid; the chairman of the Olympic Organizing Committee; speed skater Eric Heiden, who won five gold medals; and other individuals signed a petition and we sent it to Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev.

It wasn’t until Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union that Tatiana and her daughter were permitted to leave the country.

When communism collapsed and the Soviet Union was dissolved, Lozansky returned to Moscow and become the founder and president of the American University in Moscow. His aim was to build bridges between American and Russian educational and cultural institutions.

As part of his effort, he extended an invitation to Joel Levine, a veteran NASA space scientist who currently serves as an applied science professor at William & Mary, to give a Zoom lecture at Moscow State University.

Since the collapse of communism and the demise of the Soviet Union, Lozansky, who has dual citizenship and homes in Washington, D.C., and Moscow, has been working to make the relationship between the United States and Russia as friendly as can be.

Lozansky maintains that after the collapse of the USSR, American values, free enterprise and democracy enjoyed astounding prestige and popularity among Russians. Building ties with the U.S. was a top priority for the Russian leadership. Until 1993, Moscow harmoniously cooperated with Washington on almost the entire range of international issues, including arms control. It culminated in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty II, or START II, which reduced the nuclear arsenal of the U.S. and Russia by 66%.

However, Lozansky pointed out, the Clinton administration’s “fatally flawed macroeconomic policy toward Russia came in August 1998, when Russia’s default on its debts and the ruble’s devaluation led to its complete economic collapse. By all accounts, the disaster was more serious than America’s economic collapse in 1929.”

Lozansky quotes veteran Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who wrote: “What makes the situation with Russia so sad is that the Clinton administration may have squandered one of the most valuable assets imaginable, namely the idealism and goodwill of the Russian people that emerged after 70 years of communist rule.”

Ever an optimist and a peacemaker, Lozansky advocates “resetting the clock with Russia.”

On March 6, 2009, in Geneva, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a red button, accompanied with the Russian word “peregruzka” — reset. Indeed, between 2009 and 2012, a great deal of cooperation took place between the U.S. and Russia. In early March of 2014, however, Russia was censured by the United Nations over the annexation of Crimea and some Russian populated areas of Ukraine. The “reset” was over.

Now that the Trump administration is in charge and President Donald Trump has repeatedly declared that “the killing in Ukraine has to stop,” Lozansky believes it is “time to reset the clock with Russia again.”

Frank Shatz is a Williamsburg resident. He is the author of “Reports from a Distant Place,” the compilation of his selected columns. The book is available at the Bruton Parish Shop and Amazon.com.

Thus, it is hardly a surprise that the Caucasus continues to be a major strategic priority for both Moscow and Tehran.  For the Kremlin, its importance is second only to Ukraine and has been amplified at a time when Western political leaders have called for a “strategic defeat” of Russia.  Especially important for both Tehran and Moscow are the three independent former Soviet republics of the South Caucasus, or Transcaucasia – Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. These countries have been of particular interest to war hawks, neoconservative intellectuals, and big energy interests in Washington and London for decades. All of these groups hold an especially strong desire to realize a Trans-Caspian gas pipeline. The aim is to use the Caucasus as a bridgehead to access the energy riches of post-Soviet Central Asia, as a means of “containing” Russia, Iran, and ultimately, China.  Israel – and especially the hard-right of the Israeli political elite – has likewise long held interests in the region, with an eye toward using post-Soviet Azerbaijan as an instrument against Iran’s territorial integrity.  Baku regularly receives generous military aid from Tel Aviv in exchange for sending oil to Israel, all while keeping conspicuously mum on the atrocities against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.  Azerbaijan’s closest ally, Turkey, is another major player interested in weakening Russian and Iranian influence in Caucasia. In fact, NATO has delegated to Ankara the task of projecting Western influence into the region, given that Turkey is the one alliance member in closest proximity to the Caucasus.  Ankara pursues this task alongside its own interests, which nevertheless correspond with those of NATO.

From Tbilisi to Yerevan

In the current geopolitical configuration, the one country in the Caucasus that is quickly emerging as the most reliable for both Moscow and Tehran is, perhaps surprisingly, Georgia.  Once upon a time, Georgia, under its erstwhile president Mikheil “Misha” Saakashvili, was the darling of the American neoconservative movement.  This love affair reached its peak in 2008, when the Bush administration encouraged the bungling Misha into a failed crusade against the breakaway region of South Ossetia.  In the end, Saakashvili was handed a resounding defeat, first by Russia in the 2008 war, and then by the Georgian people in 2012, with the ascendancy of Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream party.  Although Tbilisi today still officially voices aspirations for NATO and the EU, it has de facto diversified its foreign policy, maximizing Georgian independence by opening up the country to greater cooperation with Russia, Iran, and, most significantly, China. An attempted Western-backed “Maidan” in Tbilisi ended in failure in 2024 and only brought Georgia closer to Moscow and Tehran. Nevertheless, full reconciliation between Tbilisi and Moscow has yet to be achieved, and Georgia’s conflicts with the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia remain unresolved.

Moscow and Tehran face much greater challenges in their relations with Armenia and Azerbaijan. A member of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), Armenia once served as the unquestioned bedrock of the geopolitical security architecture for both Russia and Iran in the Caucasus.  However, since his arrival in office, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has actively worked to undermine this historical position.  Pashinyan came to power in what was effectively an NGO-instigated “color revolution” in 2018, just as the incumbent Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan began implementing a plan of military modernization. Although Pashinyan and his team insisted that their “revolution” had “no geopolitical context,” they have actively worked to undermine Armenia’s national security architecture ever since.

Initially, the supposed “populist” Armenian PM took the rhetorical position of a hardline Armenian nationalist on the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh), a stance that later proved to be less than sincere.  His talking points served to endanger the Karabakh Armenians by provoking the 2020 war with Ilham Aliyev’s Azerbaijan.  At the same time, Pashinyan dismissed some of Armenia’s best military commanders and willfully ignored all warnings of an impending war from his own military, as well as from Russia and the CSTO. Pashinyan poorly managed the war itself, while Azerbaijan gained the upper hand, with extensive support from Turkey and NATO.  Had it not been for major Russian diplomatic pressure, Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh would have fallen completely to Azerbaijan already in November 2020.  However, as subsequent events have clearly shown, losing Nagorno-Karabakh was Pashinyan’s intention all along.

The resulting November statement of 2020 effectively “froze” the Karabakh conflict along new lines that were severely disadvantageous not only for Armenia, but also for Russia and Iran.  Russian peacekeepers, together with the Karabakh Armenian self-defense forces, were left in control of a dramatically weakened, amoeba-like Nagorno-Karabakh.  Lost to Azerbaijani control was the historic city of Shushi as well as the Hadrut district and a broad overland link to Armenia via the districts of Kelbajar and Lachin, leaving a single road – the Lachin corridor – as Nagorno-Karabakh’s sole lifeline to Yerevan.  Districts that Karabakh Armenian forces had controlled along the Iranian-Azerbaijani border were also lost, and Baku wasted no time in providing Israel access to these strategic areas overlooking Iran’s northern provinces. On the eve of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, Russia sought to dissuade Aliyev from provoking further clashes. However, no Russian concessions could stop Aliyev from his determined effort to undermine the tenuous peace.

For his part, the pro-Western Pashinyan was already eyeing the possibilities of using the new geopolitical outcomes of 2020 to push Russia and Iran out of the region. Almost too conveniently, Aliyev provided Pashinyan with the perfect excuse to fully “break” from the Russian embrace.  In September 2022, Azerbaijan launched an all-out attack on Armenia proper.  Given Russia’s focus on Ukraine, the response from Moscow and the CSTO could only be of a limited nature, but Pashinyan, being Pashinyan, took full advantage of these circumstances to blame Russia and the CSTO for “abandoning” Armenia.  Only one month later, the Armenian PM, with no consultation from Armenian voters or the Armenian public, moved to promptly recognize the entirety of Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan in the Prague statement of October 2022. Pashinyan’s unprecedented act of national betrayal enabled Aliyev’s subsequent blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh, culminating in Baku’s full ethnic cleansing of the Karabakh Armenian population in September 2023.  Conveniently for the Armenian PM, it also resulted in Baku’s arrest of major Karabakh Armenian political figures, including Pashinyan rival Ruben Vardanyan.

Since that time, Pashinyan has openly declared his intention to move Armenia toward the US and the EU. However, much like Saakashvili at the end of his tenure in Georgia, the Armenian PM has faced a series of opposition protests, including a recent movement led by an Archbishop of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Although Armenia has yet to reach its “Ivanishvili moment,” Pashinyan’s popularity has plummeted, and the vast majority of Armenians remain sympathetic to Russia and Iran. Thus, Pashinyan’s plot to pivot to the West has only further eroded his standing in Armenian society as social discontent continues to grow.  Most recently, the Armenian PM’s controversial remarks calling into question the 1915 Armenian Genocide have prompted strong rebukes and condemnations, both in Armenia and in the Armenian Diaspora.

Militarism, Chauvinism, Instability

In the larger regional view, the progressive weakening of Armenia under Pashinyan has led to a relative strengthening of the positions of NATO, Turkey, and Israel at Russian and Iranian expense.  Moreover, Aliyev’s ability to achieve successive “victories” by military aggression without any consequence makes the prospect of any lasting peace between the peoples of Armenia and Azerbaijan much more distant.  Virtually nobody in Armenia, aside from Pashinyan and his government, perceives Azerbaijan’s hostile takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh and its subsequent ethnic cleansing as a legitimate form of “conflict resolution.”  As far as the Azerbaijani government is concerned, the use of military force has been legitimized and is now perceived by Baku as preferable to dialogue and diplomacy.  Thus, rather than promoting peace in the Caucasus, the recent “victories” of Azerbaijan have only emboldened Baku to press its advantage, by laying claim to the strategic southern Armenian province of Syunik.  Even more ambitiously, official Baku has also laid claim to the entire Armenian Republic itself as “Western Azerbaijan.” The claims do not stop with Armenia. Historical Iranian Azerbaijan is claimed by Baku as “Southern Azerbaijan,” with not-so-subtle encouragement from Israel.  

To long-time observers of the Caucasus, the ambitiously aggressive agenda of Aliyev is a hardly a surprise. Enabled by a good dose of “caviar diplomacy” and Western “expert neutrality,” Aliyev’s regime has long promoted national hatred to the level of a state ideology. From a young age, schoolchildren in Azerbaijan are taught to hate the “Armenian enemy,” while the books of Azeri authors calling for dialogue with their Armenian neighbors are burned in Baku. In the exclave of Nakhichevan, the khachkars (stone crosses) of the medieval Armenian cemetery at Djulfa (Jugha), which had stood for centuries untouched, were turned to dust in a matter of years by the sledgehammers of Aliyev’s army.  The scene was caught on camera by eyewitnesses in Iran and was described as a “crime” by Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The seeming ease with which Aliyev’s government destroyed Djulfa’s centuries-old cemetery raises serious concern about the fate of historical monuments in now-Azerbaijani-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh.  More ominously, it also calls to mind the words of Heinrich Heine, which in this case, one might paraphrase as “where they destroy monuments, they will also ultimately destroy people.”

The destabilizing force of such state-backed chauvinism is matched only by Aliyev’s newfound hubris in his relations with Russia and Iran, as his attitude on the Caspian plane incident recently demonstrated.  The proposal to run the Russo-Iranian north-south pipeline through Azerbaijan therefore runs the risk of further empowering, rather than subduing, Baku.  This risk will make alternative routes of north-south connectivity, such as through Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, much more attractive to Moscow and Tehran.

Preventing a “Second Syria” in the Caucasus

The ethnic cleansing of the Karabakh Armenians – historically one of the most pro-Russian populations in the Caucasus – was predictably met with a muted response in the West. Privately, however, neoconservatives in Washington were giddy with delight.  The visible weakening of Armenia and the strengthening of Azerbaijan via Turkey, NATO, and Israel prompted strong protests from Tehran. Iranian leaders expressed particular concern that Russia was being too cautious and too restrained in its policy toward the region. Yet, despite Russia’s reserved official reaction, the concern was also palpable in Moscow. Indeed, as Putin himself likely knows, the historical weakening of Armenia had in the past played a crucial role in the demise of Russia’s spiritual and political predecessor, the Byzantine Empire. Tehran’s vocal concerns thus served to bring Russia and Iran even closer together and reflected the degree to which Pashinyan had undermined the region’s long-standing security architecture. Earlier, when the more reliable Serzh Sargsyan was in office in Yerevan, neither Moscow nor Tehran felt compelled to get so directly involved in Transcaucasian affairs.

The recent fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, orchestrated jointly by Ankara, Tel Aviv, and Washington, has further underscored the need for coordination between Moscow and Tehran to prevent a similar scenario in the Caucasus.  At the center of such a potential scenario is Armenia’s southern Syunik province, known in Baku and Ankara as the “Zangezur corridor.” This highly strategic province is the only overland link between Iran and the EAEU and, if seized by Baku and Ankara, would provide NATO with direct access to the Caspian Sea, a point not lost on Tehran.  This critical link is now threatened both by Pashinyan’s pro-EU overtures and Aliyev’s threats of military aggression.  Ironically, both Baku and Yerevan are strikingly aligned in their apparent desire to cut off Iran from Russia, a dynamic that is compounded by the fact that both states have aligned themselves with anti-Russian and anti-Iranian interests. However, if Aliyev and Pashinyan are hoping for passive acceptance by Moscow and Tehran of “new regional realities,” then they are making a very serious miscalculation. As Article 12 of the Russo-Iranian partnership pact underscores, Russia and Iran will never tolerate a “second Syria” in the Caucasus.

Pietro A. Shakarian, PhD is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union and a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Historical Research at the National Research University–Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia.