Stephen Cohen has been drawing a fair amount of criticism for his iconoclastic coverage of Russia and Ukraine. Personally I was always a bit sympathetic to Cohen because of his excellent writing on the 1990′s: few other American analysts are as willing as he to talk about the economic and social catastrophe that befell Russia during its period of “reform.” More generally, Cohen accurately places the blame for the the development of Russia’s currently hyper-centralized political system not on the dread Vladimir Putin but on the ruddy faced Boris Yeltsin, someone who was comfortable using tanks to break up parliament and who rushed through a constitution that legally gave the Russian president sweeping powers.

But while I greatly respect Cohen’s writing on the 1990′s, he and Katrina vanden Heuvel have now penned a truly shocking editorial at The Nation, one of the more shocking that I’ve read since the crisis in Ukraine exploded this past winter. Cohen and Heuvel don’t content themselves with making the observation that the Ukrainian military has been inexcusably clumsy in its battle against the Russian-backed separatists or that some residents of Eastern Ukraine harbor resentments against the new government in Kiev. Both of these things are true. Hundreds of innocent civilians really have died at the hands of the Ukrainian military (not through deliberate malice but mostly because it is using extraordinarily out of date and poorly maintained equipment) and Eastern and Western Ukraine really are sharply divided on the advisability of joining the European Union.

Cohen and vanden Heuvel, however, make a far more dramatic and bizarre indictment: that Ukraine’s new pro-Western government was plotting to seize its own territory. Plotting to seize it’s own territory? What? Does that sound too extreme to be true? Well, here is what the article says. Perhaps my reading comprehension isn’t what it used to be, but I don’t see how it’s possible to interpret the following in any other way (emphasis added):

"If any professional “intelligence” existed in Washington, Putin’s reaction was foreseeable. Decades of NATO expansion to Russia’s border, and a failed 2008 US proposal to “fast-track” Ukraine into NATO, convinced him that the new US-backed Kiev government intended to seize all of Ukraine, including Russia’s historical province of Crimea, the site of its most important naval base. In March, Putin annexed Crimea."

“Russia’s historical province of Crimea,” of course, was sovereign Ukrainian territory and had been ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. I think it’s perfectly fair to criticize the Ukrainian government, I myself have done so on numerous occasions, but these criticisms have to be realistic in order to be effective. Attacking a country for “intending to seize” territory it already controls and over which there was no legal disagreement does not strike me as a terribly realistic criticism. It fact it strikes me as an extremely tendentious one. Crimea was Ukrainian and, until Russian troops started moving, no one had the slightest reason to doubt this. Stating that there was some kind of debate or argument over Crimea’s affiliation is engaging in post facto justification of the crudest variety.

There’s a difference between being receptive to Russian concerns and justifying whatever the Russian government ends up doing. By criticizing the Ukrainians for attempting to govern their own country, Cohen and vanden Heuvel have engaged in the later.