When Henry Kissinger was born in Germany in 1923, the founder and leader of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, was still alive, and the ghosts of World War I still haunted Europe.
He grew up as a Jewish child when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, fleeing with his family to the United States of America (USA) in 1938.
He was 29 when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died in 1953, and 39 during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
He was 45 and already nearing the center of the US foreign policy establishment when Soviet-led Warsaw Pact tanks quelled the 1968 Prague Spring.
"Henry Kissinger's age was not easy, but great challenges suit his great and curious mind," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Platform X on November 30 in response to the news of the death of the doyen of American diplomacy at the age of 100.
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Supporter of realpolitik
A historian by education and profession, Kissinger was a representative of realpolitik, which views international relations through the prism of the politics of the great powers.
From his doctoral dissertation on early 19th-century politics, published in 1957 under the title "A World Restored," to the end of his life, Kissinger argued that the world order—tacitly accepted by the great powers—was "legitimate ".
"Legitimacy as used here should not be confused with justice," Kissinger stated in the book.
"It means nothing more than an international agreement on the nature of achievable arrangements and the permissible goals and methods of foreign policy," he believes.
As a result, Kissinger was dealing with dynamic events following the Cold War transition -- including the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of authoritarian Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom he met frequently, and turbulent relations between Russia and Ukraine.
In a July 2022 Der Spiegel interview, Kissinger was puzzled when asked to find an "instructive" historical precedent "for understanding and ending the war in Ukraine."
"I can't give a direct answer right away," he said.
"Because the war in Ukraine is on one level a war about the balance of power. But, on another level, it has aspects of a civil war and combines a classic European type of international problem with a completely global one. When it ends, the question will be whether Russia will achieve a coherent relationship with Europe - which it has always aspired to - or it will become an outpost of Asia on the border of Europe," Kissinger pointed out.
"And there is no convenient historical precedent for it," he concluded.
For many experts, Kissinger's focus on the strategic balance between global and regional powers burdened and blinded his analysis.
"Such an approach may work in normal times, but it inevitably fails to see the possibilities of change or what happens when it begins," Paul Goble, a retired CIA analyst and expert on former Soviet republics, told Radio Free Europe (RSE).
"That's how major turning points in world history are missed, and this is also true of Kissinger throughout his career. He failed to foresee the collapse of the Soviet empire globally and domestically, nor to understand the power of people to change things, no matter how much power they seem to have government", Gobl points out.
"Kissinger neglected Ukraine for a long time"
In an essay for Radio Free Europe's Ukrainian service in July, Ukrainian academic Petro Kraljuk argued that Kissinger had long neglected Ukraine. It was mentioned only twice in Kissinger's 1994 book Diplomacy.
The first mention, Kraljuk notes, was Kissinger's endorsement of US President George W. Bush's August 1991 speech, dubbed by critics the "Chicken Kiev Speech" in the Ukrainian parliament, three weeks before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
Bush warned Ukrainian lawmakers against "suicidal nationalism" and urged them to seek "freedom, democracy and economic reform" under a new federal agreement proposed by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
In another – and, in Kraljuk's opinion, even more striking – reference, Kissinger wrote:
"The vast majority of leading figures in Russia, regardless of their political beliefs, refuse to recognize the collapse of the Soviet empire or the legitimacy of the successor states, especially Ukraine, the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy."
"This thesis that Ukraine is the 'cradle of Russian Orthodoxy' shows that Kissinger considers Russia and Ukraine as one entity and therefore understands the position of Russian politicians who do not accept the independence of the former Soviet republics," wrote Kraljuk.
For much of Putin's rule, Kissinger has pushed for "cooperative relations" with Moscow, as he told a US Senate committee in January 2018.
In this period, the Kremlin was allegedly a client of Kissinger's political consulting firm "Kissinger Associates".
Kissinger first met Putin in the early 1990s, when he worked in the administration of St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak and was a member of the bilateral Kissinger-Sobchak commission to promote Western investment in Russia.
"Apologist of Russian imperialism"
"Kissinger became an apologist for Moscow's imperialism, seeing Russia as a great power that has the right to dominate its 'sphere of influence,'" Janusz Bugajski, a senior research fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, told RSE.
"He was stuck in the Cold War narrative and mostly ignored the interests of smaller or emerging states," adds Bugajski.
"It is not possible to bring Russia into the international system by converting it," Kissinger told The Atlantic in 2016.
"For that, agreements are needed, but also understanding. It is a unique and complicated society. Russia must be dealt with in a way that reduces its ability to reach for military options, but so that it can feel dignified when it comes to its own history." Kissinger pointed out.
After Russia's occupation of Crimea in 2014 and fueling of the separatist conflict in parts of eastern Ukraine, Kissinger appears to have continued to see Ukraine as part of Russia's sphere of interest.
In a commentary for The Washington Post, less than a month after Russia annexed Crimea, Kissinger claimed that "Ukraine can never be just a foreign country for Russia."
He called on "wise Ukrainian leaders" to "opt for a policy of reconciliation between the different parts of their country" and openly said: "Ukraine should not join NATO."
In a 2015 interview with the American magazine "The National Interest", Kissinger said:
"The relationship between Ukraine and Russia will always have a special character in Russian consciousness. It can never be limited to the relationship of two traditional sovereign states, not only from the Russian point of view, maybe not even from the Ukrainian point of view."
"The idea of a neutral Ukraine no longer makes sense"
In a speech in Moscow in 2016, Kissinger said Ukraine should serve "as a bridge between Russia and the West, not as an outpost of either side."
Even in May 2022, Kissinger called for a ceasefire in Ukraine and the restoration of the line of contact that existed before the all-out Russian invasion in February of that year.
The remarks were widely seen in Ukraine as a demand that Kiev give up its rights to Crimea, although Kissinger said in a July 2022 interview with Spiegel that he believed Crimea's status should be subject to further negotiations.
However, in January 2023, in an address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Kissinger expressed his "admiration for the President of Ukraine and the heroism of the Ukrainian people."
And in September, he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington and admitted that the continuation of Russian aggression had changed his thinking.
"Before this war, I was against Ukraine's membership in NATO because I was afraid that it would start exactly the process we are seeing now," Zelensky said.
"Now that the said process has reached this level, the idea of a neutral Ukraine under these conditions no longer makes sense," Kissinger concluded.
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