Overview
THREE NARRATIVES, ONE WAR Russia, the West, and Ukraine: Three Perspectives and an Independent Examination CAN THREE DIFFERENT ACCOUNTS OF THE SAME WAR EACH MAKE SENSE TO THOSE WHO BELIEVE THEM? I decided to explore the Russia–Ukraine war through an unusual intellectual experiment. First, I reconstructed three independent accounts of the conflict, using exclusively Russian, Western, and Ukrainian sources, respectively. Each paper speaks in the first person, attempting to express its own perspective sincerely, coherently, and without interference from the others. WE, RUSSIA: The war through Russian security concerns, historical interpretations, and strategic objectives. WE IN THE WEST: The war through Western concepts of sovereignty, European security, deterrence, and international order. WE, UKRAINE: The war through Ukrainian independence, national survival, resistance, and the conditions for lasting peace. Then I brought these three narratives together in a fourth paper: THREE NARRATIVES, ONE WAR: An independent examination of their arguments, agreements, contradictions, and historical evidence. The first three papers reconstruct perspectives; they do not claim to speak for entire populations or establish the truth of every assertion. The fourth examines what the evidence can actually support. What intrigued me most was discovering that the participants do not merely disagree about events. They often begin with fundamentally different understandings of what the conflict is about. I invite readers to explore all four papers, particularly the perspective they find most difficult to accept. Understanding an argument is not the same as agreeing with it. But perhaps we cannot fully evaluate an argument we have never seriously attempted to understand.