Well worth a read for historical context and how little is appreciated about the history of “Ukraine”.
Agree or disagree, it seems to boil down to whether political or territorial integrity will decide the outcome of the present conflagration.
Where are the historians when we truly need them?
Barry Sahgal
Zaara Management LLC
+1.646.552.3748
By
Russian service members take part in tactical exercises of an assault engineering unit at a training ground in Kamensk-Shakhtinsky in Rostov Region, Russia, January 17, 2022. (Sergey Pivovarov/Reuters)
Despite what you think, it’s not about land.
Despite recent reports of a slight lessening in tensions, Russia seems to be on the brink of invading Ukraine, with perhaps 150,000 troops massing on three sides. Americans of both parties are increasingly resolute in their anti-Russian stance, wary of once again appeasing a tyrant with territorial ambitions. But is it really territory that Russia wants now?
For most American experts, the answer is obvious. Putin has already annexed the Crimean peninsula on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. He is supporting the breakaway “people’s republics” of Luhansk and Donetsk in “Donbas,” the Russian-speaking region of eastern Ukraine. The conflict has already killed perhaps 14,000 people. And as we know, Putin considers the fall of the Soviet Union a geopolitical disaster. There is no doubt that he would redraw all of Russia’s frontiers if he could, and he has gone so far as to tell at least one American president that Ukraine “is not a real country.”
And yet things are not what they seem. The more closely you look at the crisis, the more you realize the government of Ukraine has played its own role in bringing matters to a head, for its own reasons. I am not assigning blame, mind you. Kyiv’s motives are entirely justifiable: They’re sick of the Russians pushing them around and have decided to stand up to the bullies in Moscow. In short, Ukraine has been turning the tables on Russia. Hence, Russia is responding to what it sees as a rapidly deteriorating situation in which it is running out of options fast. As America’s politicians are getting ready to unleash full-blown economic warfare against a dangerous adversary that thinks it’s being cornered, it’s important for America to understand a few things about the conflict we are wading into.
The first thing to understand is that Kyiv has apparently decided — with good cause — that it would rather leave Donbas (not to mention Crimea) in Russian hands indefinitely than reintegrate them back into Ukraine on the basis of the Minsk cease-fire agreements of 2014 and 2015. That is the main topic of the crisis diplomatic talks currently being mediated by France and Germany within the “Normandy format.”
Under the terms of the Minsk Agreements, which are enshrined in U.N. Security Council Res. 2202, Ukraine promised to let Luhansk and Donetsk conduct local elections under a special-status law with guarantees of local autonomy, the right to use Russian in official communications, and a general amnesty; Russia’s right to intercede on behalf of Russians inside Ukraine was thereby implicitly recognized. In exchange, the separatists agreed to disband their “people’s republics,” lay down their weapons, and allow the Ukrainian military to regain control of all Ukrainian territory in Donbas to the Russian border.
The Minsk Agreements were not immediately implemented because of disagreements over sequencing. More important, they were deeply unpopular among the more nationalist elements in Ukraine, who thought undue concessions had been made to Moscow.
The years since the agreements were signed have revealed another very good reason for Kyiv to sour on them. Multiple elections have been held in Ukraine since 2015 without the participation of millions of Russian residents of Crimea and Donbas. As a result, it has become impossible for pro-Russian parties to win elections. The era of Ukrainian governments paralyzed by the desire to please both Russia and Europe is over: Unencumbered by Crimea and Donbas, the government of Ukraine has been able to adopt a much more unified Ukrainian identity — and a much more unambiguously European orientation.
I argued in the Federalist recently that, within the artificially enlarged borders left behind by the fall of the Soviet Union, it is almost impossible for Ukraine to preserve both territorial integrity and political independence at the same time. The government in Kyiv has apparently drawn the same conclusion and has opted for political independence, even at the price of territorial integrity.
Kyiv’s decision to prioritize political independence over territory has become clearer as Ukrainian nationalism has grown stronger. A recent Wall Street Journal story shed light on how anti-Moscow sentiment has hardened even among the ethnically Russian population of Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv. Ukraine’s military, too, is now much stronger than it was in 2014, and not just in terms of men and material: The low-intensity conflict along the frontier of the breakaway provinces in Donbas has left Ukrainian units battle-hardened and ready to fight.
As Ukrainian nationalism has strengthened, so has its defiance of Russia — and its willingness to walk away from the Minsk Agreements. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Ukraine dammed up the canal on which the population of Crimea depends for most of its fresh water. In 2017, Kyiv imposed an economic embargo on the separatist areas of Donbas, leading to their economic collapse; they are now dependent on Moscow, which spends more than $1 billion annually just on humanitarian assistance to the area. In April 2019, Ukraine passed a law establishing Ukrainian as the country’s official language. For the first time in history, Russian is not permitted in official communications and most broadcast media. The most prominent Putin ally in Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk, has been under house arrest since May 2021, his television stations and other enterprises shuttered.
Indeed, Kyiv’s provocations are now focusing the attention of European diplomats almost as much as Russia’s threats. Kyiv was advancing a draft law “On the Principles of State Policy of the Transition Period” that would have effectively abrogated the Minsk Agreements. Russia had all but warned that this would be casus belli. Within the “Normandy format” talks, France and Germany basically took Russia’s side on the issue.
President Macron insists that the “strict and total” implementation of Minsk can be the only basis for peace. Under pressure from Paris and Berlin, Ukraine just agreed to withdraw the law. President Macron has not been supportive of Ukraine’s refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements because Moscow would see that as further provocation. But it’s not clear that Macron fully understands the implications of embracing Russia’s demands for strict implementation of the Minsk Agreements. What if Kyiv refuses? Are the Donbas regions to remain in limbo forever? This is simply impossible, so Russia could conclude that Paris and Berlin have already implicitly accepted the predicate for Russia’s annexation of the Donbas.
Notice, however, that if the Russians wanted to annex the Donbas territories, they would have done it years ago when they annexed Crimea in 2014 — both areas declared independence from Ukraine around the same time. Yet while events in Crimea unfolded according to Russian plans, the rebellions in Donbas appear to have been more organic, even if Russian troops quickly invaded and coopted the rebels once those rebels started losing ground. Even so, Moscow hasn’t moved to integrate the area administratively into Russia, instead offering 600,000 passports to the region’s residents, thereby establishing another predicate to intercede on their behalf inside Ukraine.
This is crucial, because the problem Russia is trying to solve — namely, keeping NATO from assuming a stranglehold on Russia’s vital interests along the Black Sea — will not be solved by annexing the Donbas, except to the extent that a territorial dispute prevents Ukraine’s accession to NATO. The point is that what Russia wants is influence over Ukraine. If it has to be satisfied with territory instead, it will almost certainly want more territory than just the Donbas.
Americans may be confused about what Russia wants, but European diplomats are clear that what Russia wants is for Ukraine to implement the Minsk Agreements. Russia wants that for the same reason that Ukraine doesn’t: It wants to maintain a foothold inside Ukraine, to keep Ukraine in Russia’s orbit at least firmly enough to keep it out of NATO.
That is the paradox of the Ukraine conflict. Leaving aside the annexation of Crimea for a moment, Moscow is now more interested in the territorial integrity of Ukraine than Kyiv is, precisely because it knows that in its current borders, with Donbas fully reintegrated, Ukraine cannot be fully independent of Russia.
Crimea is a special case. Moscow might not care that Crimea was part of Ukraine as long as Ukraine was ruled by Moscow. But the notion of Crimea being part of a Ukraine that is totally independent of Moscow and oriented to the west is simply unacceptable to Russia, and American officials should understand why.
Crimea is the site of Sevastopol, Russia’s most important naval base in the world, home base of its vaunted Black Sea fleet. It sits astride Russia’s vital commercial lifeline from the port of Novorossiysk. Indeed, it is only by historical accident that the province was left inside Ukrainian borders after 1991 at all. Crimea came to Russia independently of Ukraine centuries ago, and there were never large numbers of ethnic Ukrainians there. The first time Crimea was administratively part of Ukraine was after Germany dismembered Russia under the terms of the Treaty of Brest–Litovsk in 1918; the Ukrainian rump state under German control overran Crimea and held it briefly in the short period before the Soviet Union was fully consolidated. It was only in 1954 that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev nominally “transferred” Crimea to the Ukraine S.S.R., and then only to put up appearances of multipolarity.
After the Soviet Union fell, both NATO and Moscow had more pressing issues than the long-term status of Crimea, so that particular issue was kicked down the road with a 20-year lease on Sevastopol signed in 1997. Russia was fine with that, mostly because it continued to exercise preeminent power over Ukraine. Indeed, the Euromaidan protests started when the pro-Russian president pulled off a European Union accession agreement that he had been negotiating with Brussels under pressure from Moscow. And Ukrainian nationalists had made clear their intention not to renew the Sevastopol lease, leaving the Black Sea fleet without a home base. American officials need to understand that offering NATO membership to Ukraine while it still lays claim to a disputed area that was never considered part of Ukraine before 1954 and which contains Russia’s most important naval base in the world is outlandish and dangerously provocative, and serves no obvious American interest.
For American officials, the situation is simply one of standing up for Wilson’s Fourteen Points as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, in particular the principle of “political independence and territorial integrity” of sovereign states. But just as blood is thicker than water, history is heavier than paper. America thinks it’s enforcing the U.N. Charter. What it’s actually enforcing are the terms of Russia’s surrender to Germany in the Treaty of Brest–Litovsk in 1918, terms which were seen as outrageous at the time and were bitterly opposed by the United States.
Since the fall of the Soviet Empire, Russia has continued to cause problems for America and the world, often through opportunism, playing a weak hand for outsized influence. The government of Vladimir Putin is a murderous kleptocracy, a danger to its own people and to all people. Governments in Poland and the Baltic states are understandably wary of the Russian boot, and admitting them to NATO made sense from the point of view of geography and strategy. It is almost certainly true, as Anne Applebaum and others have said, that if Russia were a democracy it would have no problem with NATO’s expansion to Poland and Baltic states, and NATO’s expansion wouldn’t be necessary.
But Ukraine is different. Even if Russia were a democracy, there would be a major conflict over the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine as long as Ukraine continues to claim the full territory bequeathed to it in 1991. Here, Russia sees itself as trying to solve an existential problem created by its unusual state of weakness in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War.
That problem is potentially explosive and could blow up in America’s face if it is not handled with care, patience, and a much better sense of history than any American official is exhibiting today.
Mario Loyola is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the director of the Environmental Finance and Risk Management Program of Florida International University, and a visiting fellow at the National Security Institute of George Mason University. The opinions expressed in this column are his alone. @Mario_A_Loyola
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