Is Russia a Principled Civilization or a Rogue Nuclear State?


10:24 AM Sunday.

Yesterday in CTBT Ratification and Minimum Credible Deterrence I described Russia as a "rogue nuclear state, not a peer nuclear non-proliferation competitor." Today I am having second thoughts about this characterization.

During my walk this morning, I listened to Tucker Carlson's December 2024 interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. I also listened to the first eleven minutes of Lavrov's 27 October 2025 remarks to a Hungarian interviewer in Moscow.

Lavrov provided an expert view of the Ukraine conflict, and Russian terms for ending the conflict, from November 2004 to April 2022.

My first follow-up question for Google Gemini is whether Russia is a civilization?


Short answer, yes.

My second follow-up question is who won the second round of the 2004 presidential election in Ukraine and what happened afterward? There is no Google Gemini response, but I can piece it together from these sources:


Short answer, Yanukovych won by 3 points according to the Ukrainian CEC; the West refused to acknowledge the results, alleging fraud; the Ukrainian Supreme Court agreed with the West, and demanded another second-round vote, which Yanukovych lost by 9 points. Intriguingly, in 2010 Yanukovych again won in the second round by 3 points, and this time the West upheld his win.

There is no Google Gemini response to my third follow-up question: "Did the Ukrainian Supreme Court have the constitutional authority to overturn the 2nd round election result in the 2004 Presidential election?" This is surprising. It's a basic question and one would expect a yes or no answer. None of the returned results address the issue.

The response to my fourth follow-up question is much more helpful:


Yanukovych won in 2010 because he campaigned to improve relations with both the EU and Russia. Perhaps, given his mandate, it would have been better for all concerned if the EU, Ukraine and Russia had agreed to trilateral talks from the outset.

President Trump and his team are light years ahead of me, of course, but from where I sit, I would counsel Trump to hold off on sending Tomahawks to Ukraine for a while longer yet. At the end of the day, Trump has to decide whether he truly believes that the EU and NATO mishandled Ukraine's deeply conflicted east-west sovereignty crisis and simultaneously overstepped Russia's legitimate trade and security interests. 

This said, even if Trump agrees that his predecessors in the White House fumbled the ball in Ukraine all the way to the point of provoking the Russian SMO, provocation doesn't necessarily mean that the SMO was justified under the UN Charter, and it certainly doesn't mean that permanent Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory is without significant legal complexity. 

Foreign Minister Lavrov makes an excellent case for principled Russian compliance with the UN Charter, but it might help further open the window for dialogue if he acknowledged that the Russian point of view is currently in the minority at the ICJ, the UN Security Council, and UN General Assembly. This is a genuine legal and political problem for all fair-minded observers of the standoff. 

As empathetic toward Russian civilization as Trump may be, the Kremlin surely needs to have a contingency plan for total withdrawal from Occupied Ukrainian Territory. What constitutional changes would Ukraine and Russia each need to make in order for this to happen? What changes would need to be made in European security architecture overall, including at the OSCE and NATO? What changes would need to be made to the UN Charter concerning limitations on use of the veto? It's hard to imagine the crisis can be resolved without considerable alignment between Putin and Trump on the need for strategic compromise on all of these levels. 


End 3:37 PM.

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