Ukraine: Putin's Choices

I am not so sure that Putin had much choice in the matter.  Crimea was very much part of the Greater Russia of Peter the Great and had been totally made Russian.  He also faced a lost game in the Ukraine and what this means is that the new Ukraine can now join NATO and establish a modern liberal democracy as well.  However you paint the pig, this is a huge rebuke to classic Russian ambitions.  What he has done is play a bad hand well.

He has now placated his voters with securing the Crimea which should never have been part of the Ukraine but was through administrative convenience of imperial Russia and the USSR.  Any ethnic liberation of the Ukraine would never have included the Ukraine.  As noted there are remaining issues on the eastern border which may still have to be arbitrated.

What I am saying is that a formal separation was postponed in the hopes of reconstruction the original Russian hegemony.  By taking Crimea that aim has been surrendered and the Russian bargaining position is hugely diminished.

Without question, Putin is attempting to restore parts of the original Russian hegemony, but really in the form of prudent snippets on his natural borders were the argument is well made that these areas should have remained Russian to begin with.  Unfortunately this sets up the counter reaction in which the border state jumps firmly into a vigorous alliance against Russia.

We are still approaching a natural end game though.  The Ukraine will negotiate as a member of NATO for well-defined borders and mutual security.  Sooner or later the last hold out on authoritarian communism in Belorussia will also roll over and we will see an active political class work toward accommodation with the West as well.  There will simply be too much to gain.  I then suspect that Putin’s successor will seriously look at the virtues of real democratic process and NATO membership.  After all their natural borders will be generally resolved and secure.

Ukraine: Putin's Choice

March 21, 2014

By Gwynne Dyer

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20140321/cleisure/cleisure3.html

Crimea is going to be part of Russia, and there is nothing anybody else can do about it. The petty sanctions that the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) are currently imposing have been discounted in advance by Moscow, and even much more serious sanctions would not move it to reconsider its actions. But Vladimir Putin still has to decide what he does next.

One option, of course, is to do nothing more. He has his little local triumph in Crimea, which is of considerable emotional value to most Russians, and he has erased the loss of face he suffered when he mishandled the crisis in Kiev so badly. If he just stops now, those sanctions will be quietly removed in a year or two, and it will be business as usual between Moscow and the West.

If it's that easy to get past the present difficulties in Moscow's relations with the US and the EU, why would Putin consider doing anything else? Because he may genuinely believe that he is the victim of a Western political offensive in Eastern Europe.

Paranoids sometimes have real enemies. NATO's behaviour since the collapse of the Soviet Union, viewed from Moscow, has been treacherous and aggressive, and it doesn't require a huge leap of the imagination to see the EU's recent policy in Ukraine as a continuation of that policy.

After non-violent revolutions swept the communist regimes of Eastern Europe from power in 1989, the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, made a historic deal with US President George H.W. Bush. It was unquestionably the most important diplomatic agreement of the late 20th century.

Gorbachev agreed to bring all the Soviet garrisons home from the former satellites, and even to allow the reunification of Germany - a very difficult concession when the generation of Russians that had suffered so greatly at Germany's hands was still alive.

In return, the elder President Bush promised that the countries that had previously served the Soviet Union as a buffer zone between it and Germany - Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria - would not be swept up into an expanding NATO. They would be free, but NATO's tanks and aircraft would not move a thousand kilometres (500 miles) closer to Moscow.

It was a wise deal between two men who understood the burden of history, but they were both gone from power by the end of 1992 - and Gorbachev had neglected to get the promise written into a binding treaty. So it was broken, and ALL those countries were in NATO by 2004 - together with three other countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - that had actually been part of the Soviet Union itself.

A NEW COLD WAR

To Russian eyes, what has been happening in Ukraine is more of the same. If Putin believes that, he thinks he is already in a new Cold War, and he might as well go ahead and improve his position for the coming struggle as much as possible. Specifically, he should grab as much of Ukraine as he can, because otherwise, the western part will be turned into a NATO base to be used against him.

Crimea is irrelevant in this context: the Russian naval bases there are nostalgic relics from another era, of no real strategic value in the 21st century. What Putin does need, if another Cold War is coming, is control of the parts of Ukraine where Russian speakers are a majority or nearly so, not just the east, but also the Black Sea coast. But he shouldn't occupy western Ukraine, because he would face a prolonged guerrilla war if he did.

My money says that Putin will stop with Crimea, because he's not THAT paranoid, and because he understands how weak Russia is economically and how quickly it would lose a new Cold War. He has already saved his face; why run further risks? But I have been wrong in the past, once or twice.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.

Crimea and Punishment: Imperial Blowback from Iraq to Ukraine

by Randall Amster

March 20, 2014

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/20-1

Russia's President Vladimir Putin (C), Crimean parliament speaker Vladimir Konstantionov (L) and Sevastopol's new de facto mayor Alexei Chaly sign a treaty on the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula becoming part of Russia in the Kremlin on March 18, 2014 (AFP, Kirill Kudryavtsev)

Russia’s brazen annexation of Crimea presents a vexing foreign policy crisis for the Western powers. How can these actions be denounced without pointing a finger back upon their own forays and interventions? Indeed, President Putin said as much in his recent address in the Kremlin, chiding the West for its condemnations of Russia’s actions and stating that “it’s a good thing that they at least remember that there exists such a thing as international law – better late than never.” Putin reinforced this view by citing the “Kosovo precedent” – which he takes as “a precedent our western colleagues created with their own hands in a very similar situation, when they agreed that the unilateral separation of Kosovo from Serbia, exactly what Crimea is doing now, was legitimate and did not require any permission from the country’s central authorities.”

Without validating Russia’s motives and the ways in which such arguments provide rhetorical cover for its own imperial aspirations, there is a salient point here that coheres with arguments often cited by progressive voices in the West. In particular, as to the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other interventions, there are echoes of anti-war perspectives to be found in the Russian President’s deflection of Western criticisms: “Our western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun. They have come to believe in their exclusivity and exceptionalism, that they can decide the destinies of the world, that only they can ever be right. They act as they please: here and there, they use force against sovereign states, building coalitions based on the principle ‘If you are not with us, you are against us.’”

"As many pointed out at the time, the invasion of Iraq in particular foretold a world wracked by disregard for international norms and defined by the mercenary pursuits of national self-interest."

The fact that Russia is now explicitly validating these misguided principles seems to be of no moment to President Putin. A stronger argument, to be sure, would be to refuse to participate in exceptionalism-oriented policies, perhaps instead arguing for Crimean autonomy rather than its annexation. Certainly the presence of Russian troops there during an electoral referendum gives the appearance of coercion rather than liberation. If the US and its allies are to be critiqued for hypocritically advocating “democracy” through “the rule of the gun,” then it is difficult to see how Russia’s invocation of similar principles to justify its behavior represents more than mere cynicism and an elaborate rationalization for its own ambitions in the region.

We can thus perceive in all of this a sense of foreign policy blowback from the US-led wars and interventions of recent years. By citing Kosovo as well as Iraq and Afghanistan (among other instances, such as Libya), Putin connects the policies of the last three US Presidential Administrations, essentially constituting the period since the dissipation of the former Soviet Union. Further, by reaching back into Crimea’s status as part of Russia’s “common historical legacy” and its longstanding cultural importance to Russia, an attempt is being made to turn back the clock to the halcyon days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. (No mention was made, of course, of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, which helped form the basis for a world in which aggressive interventions – and eventual blowback – would soon define a “new normal” for international affairs.) While perhaps not quite (yet) representing a reassembly of the Iron Curtain, the annexation of Crimea clearly presents numerous strategic implications for the balance of power both regionally and globally.

To wit, Putin specifically notes the strategic importance of Crimea as the “main base of the Black Sea Fleet” and as a potential bulwark against NATO incursions eastward. Reinforcing this mindset, Putin observes that Sevastopol (in southwestern Crimea) is a “fortress” and that Crimea’s deep connections to the homeland symbolize “Russian military glory.” Not explicitly cited in Putin’s speech is the centrality of Crimea as a locus for oil and gas production, which as Businessweek notes has already drawn the interest of Big Oil. Others have observed the importance of the region for agricultural distribution and production, and the pipelining of gasacross the continent. There has been relatively little analysis of the situation in Ukraine as a “resource conflict,” but in the present state of geopolitics such implications are always at hand.

"In abdicating their already-tenuous hold on moral legitimacy in international affairs, the US and its allies have eroded one of the last potential bastions against the imminent realization of a world dominated by strategic resource acquisition as a function of security."

In this light, we can read the Crimean crisis as a form of comeuppance for policies set in motion and continually reinforced by nations in general and the US in particular, bent on promoting a form of “security” that devolves upon control of resources and a penchant for unilateralism in achieving this end. In fact, President Obama unabashedly affirmed such policies in his speech to the UN in September 2013: “The United States of America is prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force, to secure our core interests in the region…. We will ensure the free flow of energy from the region to the world. Although America is steadily reducing our own dependence on imported oil, the world still depends on the region’s energy supply, and a severe disruption could destabilize the entire global economy.” As such, President Obama was not so much announcing a new policy as validating an ongoing one: the legacy of the Bush Doctrine based on unilateral action and calculated intervention. Once these terms of engagement have been set, it becomes difficult to condemn others taking up the mantle for their own purposes.

And this, in the end, may well be the lingering retribution for the US-led wars of recent years. As many pointed out at the time, the invasion of Iraq in particular foretold a world wracked by disregard for international norms and defined by the mercenary pursuits of national self-interest. In setting a template for the policy engagements to follow, this archetype of adventurism ushered in an era in which exceptionalism has become the norm, where the cavalier disregard of domestic and/or global objections is considered politically acceptable, and where powerful nations can exercise a free hand in determining the future of less powerful ones when strategic interests are involved. It would be hard to conceive of a more pointed version of realpolitik, and the term is doubly poignant in light of the outcomes we are seeing today.

Russia’s rhetorical reliance on misguided Western policies does little more than render concrete that which has already been known and deployed by powerful interests for decades, if not longer. But the invocation of recent US-led forays and the specific use of the word “exceptionalism” in Russian discourse add a dimension that is deeply troubling for the future prospects of peace. By making realpolitik more, well, real, the annexation of Crimea is less likely to draw a military response from the West than it is to elicit wider forms of emulation. In abdicating their already-tenuous hold on moral legitimacy in international affairs, the US and its allies have eroded one of the last potential bastions against the imminent realization of a world dominated by strategic resource acquisition as a function of security.

Again, none of this should be surprising by now, although we might take a moment to lament its further instantiation as the dominant modus operandi of powerful interests across the globe. Such a state of affairs asks us to revisit the past and reassess our narrowing options for the future.