Ukraine – A Country Too Far
In 1944, the British Field Marshall Montgomery had the clever idea of taking the nine bridges in the Netherlands that stood between the Allies and the far bank of the Rhine; allowing the Allies to enter Germany from the Netherlands and end the war earlier. The plan was for airborne troops to take the bridges and hold them until ground forces could relieve them. The offensive failed at the final bridge at Arnhem over the Rhine, “a bridge too far”, as the movie about it is titled. Just as Arnhem was a bridge too far for the Allies in WW2, Ukraine was a country too far for the US and its Western allies.
When Putin first came to power, he attempted to make a workable peace with the West, with Russia accepted as a major power, but that was rejected by a West that only saw it as a future vassal to be exploited. The West turned fully against Putin when he showed that he would not accept the outright looting of his nation and the sale of its core assets to foreigners by taking down the oligarch Khodorkovsky in 2003; who was in negotiations to sell a large chunk of Russia’s oil reserves to Exxon. The aggression of the West was shown in the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, triggered by the Georgian attack on the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia (a fact supported by a later EU investigation[i]), and the Western position that Georgia could some-day join NATO. Putin had already expressed his concerns about the expansion of NATO at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, asking “against whom is this expansion directed?”[ii] Putin’s concerns were reinforced by the 2011 NATO misuse of a Responsibility to Protect UNSC resolution, based upon false propaganda that made it look as if the Libyan President Gaddafi was attacking unarmed civilians, to overthrow the Libyan government[iii] [iv]. Russia had abstained, represented by the then Russian President Medvedev (while Putin was Prime Minister).
The Western actions in Ukraine were a whole other matter, as it was a major country that had a border with Russia only 500 miles away from Moscow and was the site of the Russian Black Sea fleet’s naval base. The EU and NATO had marched through Eastern Europe and the Baltic States (breaking the promises given to Gorbachev when he agreed to German reunification), but the latter were very small states and the others were kept away from Russia by Belarus and Ukraine. In 2005, there was the Western-supported “Orange Revolution” that had brought a Western-leaning Ukraine government that wanted the nation to join the EU and NATO. The result was a Ukrainian application to become a NATO member in 2008 (with the 2008 Bucharest NATO Summit supporting it[v]). Such membership would place NATO armies and missiles 500 miles from Moscow; akin to Russian armies stationed in Canada. This process was halted by the election of a less Western-leaning president in 2010, who officially abandoned the goal of joining NATO and repaired relations somewhat with Russia.
By 2013 the Ukrainian economy was in difficulty, with GDP growth of only 0.2% in 2012 and nil in 2013, and GDP still well below the pre-2008 Global Financial Crisis level; heavily impacted by the mini-EU recession at the time and high oil prices. The IMF refused any package that did not involve the usual brutal “structural adjustment” conditions that would severely reduce living standards; negotiations ended in November 2013. The Ukraine was also in negotiations with the EU on a political and economic association agreement. A complication was that Russia and Ukraine had free trade, so any agreement with the EU would mean that Russia would have to restrict its trade with Ukraine as otherwise it would also be in a free trade zone with the EU. The EU agreement would mean significant net costs for Ukraine (approx. US$160 billion) without offsetting subsidies. Unable to square this circle, the President suspended work on the EU agreement in late 2013. Peaceful protests immediately broke out in Kiev, backed by the leader of the opposition and foreign financed NGOs, journalists and activists, together with Western politicians (including Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Senator John McCain who explicitly sided with the opposition), diplomats and media, became increasingly violent over time[vi]. The President’s negotiations with Russia for a less economically debilitating agreement angered those in Western Ukraine who saw their future with Europe, while the East of the nation was more oriented toward Russia. After months of protests, a unity agreement between the government and opposition had been agreed on February 20th (signed the next day) that would have resulted in a new constitution and elections not later than December of that year. The same day a highly controversial massacre of protestors took place in the Maidan Square, where protests had escalated into greater violence from February 18th onwards, which may have been a false flag (i.e. the opposition shot many of their own protestors and were targeting both sides) to trigger a coup[vii] [viii] [ix] [x] [xi] [xii] [xiii].
On February 22nd the Ukrainian president fled the capital after the threat of armed intervention by the leader of the Maidan protestors was put into action[xiv]. After he refused to resign, stating that he was democratically elected, the legislature passed an unconstitutional resolution of impeachment against him (no articles of impeachment, no three-fourths majority, no review by the courts); a coup. In response, Russia annexed Crimea after a vote of its majority Russian speaking population and provided aid to the majority Russian breakaway republics in the Donbass; facilitating the republics’ victory against a Ukrainian military invasion. There had been significant violence carried out against those opposed to the coup, including the deaths of 42 anti-Maidan activists in a fire in Odessa. The situation with the breakaway republics was supposed to be solved with the implementation of the Minsk Accords, ratified by the UNSC, but Ukraine has made no attempt to implement the Accords; with no pressure from the West to do so. Instead limited military actions against the Donbass republics have continued. Openly discriminatory state laws and actions have also impacted the Russian-speaking community in the rest of Ukraine, as well as other minorities (e.g. the Hungarian community). The new Ukrainian government signed the EU political and economic association agreement and renewed the commitment to becoming part of NATO; with the latter position being supported by NATO at its 2021 Brussels Summit. Russia has repeatedly stated that Ukrainian NATO membership is a red line for it, and President Putin has called for a formal agreement that will limit NATO membership. In the middle of 2021, Russian troops were massed on Ukraine’s border to forestall an escalation in aggression toward the republics at the same time that Western navies were carrying out exercises in the Black Sea.
The 2014 coup in Ukraine and the moves since to thoroughly integrate it politically, economically, and militarily into the US-lead Western alliance, showing no respect for Russia’s core national interests, have helped push Russia firmly into an alliance with China. In addition, the coup-related and other sanctions against Russia have helped to build elite cohesion, economic resilience (through the replacement of imported goods and reduction of dependence upon the Western financial system) and military strength. Until the Ukrainian coup, and the later Russia, Russia, Russia hysteria that forestalled President Trump’s attempt at a detente, it may still have been possible for the West to develop a workable relationship with Russia that would have served to undermine the Russia-China alliance; instead the West has helped cement that alliance. The demands made by President Putin for a new written security arrangement at the end of 2021 were a last attempt to come to a compromise with the West that respected Russia’s basic security needs (e.g. no more expansion of NATO, and no stationing of NATO troops in countries that joined NATO after 1997 and the pulling back of short and medium range nuclear missiles). The Western response has been to continue to deepen military ties with Ukraine, ship significant amounts of munitions to the country, place no pressure on the government to implement the Minsk Accords and refuse to rule out Ukraine’s membership of NATO, or even accept Russia’s right to assert its security concerns. Ukraine has also massed troops on the border of the Donbass republics and increased the level of shelling within recent weeks. The Ukrainian president exacerbated Russia-Ukraine relations further when he started to discuss the possibility of a nuclear-armed Ukraine while still refusing to countenance any negotiations with the Donbass republics. The water situation in Crimea was also becoming critical eight years after the Ukraine built a dam across the canal that supplied 85% of Crimea’s drinking and irrigation water in 2014; the area of irrigated agriculture has already been severely reduced[xv].
The West has severely misjudged Russia, both with respect to the criticality with which Russia views its stated security issues, and the military abilities and economic and financial resilience that it has developed under Putin – especially in the past decade. Its recognition of the Donbass republics, and the “shock and awe” rapid destruction of Ukraine’s military capabilities that followed surprised the West. Its ability to withstand Western sanctions, and the major impact of those sanctions upon the West (especially Europe), was not correctly taken into account. It is notable that the West’s new sanctions, although suspending the certification process for the Nordstream II pipeline, will not affect Europe’s ability to pay for the Russian fossil fuel exports that it relies upon so much. The increased prices of those exports will help buffer the impact of Western sanctions. Russia’s deepening relationship with the economic giant that is now China also provides it with new markets to replace those in the West, as Putin has noted with respect to Russia’s fossil fuel exports. At any time, a statement that Ukraine would not be joining NATO nor stationing Western military groups on its territory, together with an implementation of the Minsk Accords, would have produced peace between Russia and Ukraine. Instead, the US (and the West) kept pushing more and more provocatively and Russia has answered decisively.
NATO has been shown to be a paper tiger, as the rapid scurrying of NATO country officials and military personnel out of Ukraine can attest to. Ukraine may have the West’s “support” but that does not extend to fighting the Russian army; especially after Putin made it clear that any opposition military personnel in Ukraine could be targeted. As with Georgia in 2008, a Western-supported, armed and trained military has rapidly collapsed in the face of the Russian military; mirroring the collapse of the Western-trained and armed Afghan army in the face of the Taliban. The Russian army has displayed its abilities and its weaponry, as it has done in Syria, and seems to be hitting military targets only. The latter point sets it apart from Western interventions that have repeatedly targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure (e.g. Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq). If a truly surgical operation takes out of the Ukrainian military and the “criminals and Nazis” that Putin has referred to it may serve to increase the status of Russia outside the Western media bubble. It will also show the world that the US is no longer the unipolar power that cannot be significantly challenged, as the earlier Russian intervention in Syria attested to on a much smaller scale.
Russia is establishing its sphere of influence across Central Asia, the Caucasus, Belarus and Ukraine; greatly aided by Western overstepping in recent attempted coups in Belarus and Kazakhstan that were forestalled with Russian aid. Russia is now fully committed to the Chinese alliance, having finally turned its back on the possibility of any negotiated settlement with the West that accepts it as a strong, independent nation. This can only increase the position of China, while displaying the weakness of the West in the face of a strengthening Eurasian bloc.
If the West had simply left Ukraine alone there would have been much less pressure on President Putin to ally with China, instead the arrogance and stupidity of its leaders has produced the very Eurasian alliance that it should most fear. Europe especially is now in danger of becoming a slow-growing archipelago at the increasingly irrelevant end of the great Eurasian landmass. Ukraine was a country too far, and now it is lost to the West.
References
[i] Heritage, Timothy (2009, Sep 30). Georgia started war with Russia: EU-backed report. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-georgia-russia-report-idUSTRE58T4MO20090930
[ii] Shanker, Thom & Landler, Mark. (2007, Feb. 11). Putin Says U.S. Is Undermining Global Stability. The New York Times.
[iii] Kuperman, Alan (2013, Sep). Lessons from Libya: How Not to Intervene. Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center. https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/lessons-libya-how-not-intervene
[iv] Zenko, Micah (2016, Mar 22). The Big Lie About the Libyan War. Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/22/libya-and-the-myth-of-humanitarian-intervention/
[v] Mearsheimer, John. Why is Ukraine the West's Fault?
[vi] Parry, Robert (2015, Jan 6). NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine. Consortium News. https://consortiumnews.com/2015/01/06/nyt-still-pretends-no-coup-in-ukraine/
[vii] BBC News. Ukraine Protests: 'Sniper' fires from Ukraine media hotel.
[viii] BBC Newsnight. Snipers at Maidan: The untold story of a massacre in Ukraine.
[ix] InsideOver (Italian Television). The hidden truth about Ukraine - Part 1.
[x] InsideOver (Italian Television). The hidden truth about Ukraine - Part 2.
[xi] Katchanovski, Ivan (2018) The “Snipers’ Massacre” on the Maidan in Ukraine Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association in San Francisco, September 3-6, 2015. https://www.academia.edu/8776021/The_Snipers_Massacre_on_the_Maidan_in_Ukraine
[xii] Lapotanok, Igor (Dir.) & Stone, Oliver (Prod.) (2016). Ukraine On Fire.
[xiii] Katchanovski, Ivan (2019, Apr 22). The Buried Maidan Massacre and Its Misrepresentation by the West. https://consortiumnews.com/2019/04/22/the-buried-maidan-massacre-and-its-misrepresentation-by-the-west/
[xiv] InsideOver (Italian Television). The hidden truth about Ukraine - Part 2.
[xv] Olearchyk, Roman & Seddon, Max (2021, Jul 29). Crimea ‘water war’ opens new front in Russia-Ukraine conflict. The Financial Times.