Showing posts with label Ukraine Crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ukraine Crisis. Show all posts
Russian President Vladimir Putin must understand one, singular message from the West: Get out of Ukraine immediately. He obviously is testing the United States and Europe and fully believes Russia can withstand any economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation or other punishment the West tries to mete out.
The key to disabusing him of any notion that he can get away with his invasion of Ukraine is to muster powerful sanctions immediately, without delay. If President Barack Obama allows this to become a meandering, dribs-n’-drabs series of pinprick sanctions, none of this will mean anything. What got Iran’s attention? Clearly, the the slow increase in trade sanctions — blockage of computers and other consumer items — didn’t do it. Iran finally heeded the West’s message when its international bank accounts were frozen and Iran couldn’t get access to hard currency or repatriate its oil earnings from abroad.
That’s what has to happen with Russia — now. Any Russian cargo ships currently in U.S. or European ports should be ordered to depart immediately. Russians visiting this country should be notified that their visas are subject to cancellation immediately. I guarantee, the Kremlin would grasp very quickly how serious the West takes its aggression in Ukraine when its own citizens register their concerns about the West’s anger.
But right now, I don’t think Putin takes Obama and Europe seriously at all. He believes we are weak, indecisive and easily manipulated.
His argument for invading Crimea is to protect the lives of Russians living there. The rationale is absurd. First, there is no evidence whatsoever that Russian lives are in danger. If that were the case, an evacuation would be in order, not an invasion. Second, it has been Russia’s goal for decades to populate Ukraine, and particularly Crimea, with Russians, kind of like Israel has done in the West Bank. Now that Russian lives as “in danger,” Russia treats Crimea as effectively Russian territory. (The irony is that Russia has historically stood on the side of the Arabs in condemning Israel’s settlement and military occupation of the West Bank and has rejected Israel’s rationale — to protect the lives of Israeli citizens — for its continued crackdown on Palestinians. Now Russia appears to be doing exactly the same thing.)
Major powers, superpowers, don’t behave this way. Even if Putin were to compare this to the ill-advised, U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the comparison would be false. The build-up to the U.S. invasion took months of diplomatic back-and-forth. Washington painstakingly went to the Security Council and worked through a series of resolutions to obtain a patina of legal sanction for its invasion. The international community was deeply divided, but no one can argue that the United States didn’t broadcast its intentions well in advance.
Russia flat out lied. It mobilized troops late last week and told the world it had nothing to do with Ukraine. Russia insisted it had no plans to invade. Then it invaded — all in the span of three days. There was no attempt to consult with the Security Council or obtain some kind of resolution. It was a blatant violation of international law, which is why a strong and quick Western response is required.
For the United States and Europe, economic retaliation against Russia will come at a heavy price. Russian businesses, led by Putin allies, are deeply entangled in U.S. internet ventures. For years, they have developed the ability to sabotage internet communications in this country and can be relied upon to do it if Putin asks them to. The United States opened the door to Russian investment in key U.S. internet ventures, believing that free trade was the key to good relations between the two countries. Against the advice of many experts who recognized our vulnerability, Washington gave trade a higher priority than national security.
Europeans are even more vulnerable. They rely heavily on Russian gas supplies, and they have known for years that their vulnerability put them at a strategic disadvantage in the event Russia chose to put the squeeze on its petroleum shipments. Well, that day might have arrived.
Putin, I don’t doubt, has made these calculations. He knows there will be no military response from the West. He believes he can bring the West to its knees, and that we will ultimately acquiesce to his demands for the ongoing Russian military and political domination of Ukraine.
The best way to make him reconsider is for the West to act in unison and with an, overwhelming economic response. Make Russia feel the pain immediately. Anything less will only confirm Putin’s assumptions about our lack of resolve.
Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine and the Ukrainian opposition leaders signed an agreement on Friday that ended the deadly protests in Kiev by promising a new constitution and early elections. But the Russian president’s envoy to Kiev refused to co-sign it. While Moscow welcomed an end to the violence, it basically viewed the agreement as a diktat by the Western-backed Ukrainian opposition. The opposition has seized power in Kiev, and Moscow is wary that the crisis will not end anytime soon. Some radical groups remain well-armed; there are deep political, cultural and regional cleavages in Ukrainian society; the country’s elites are in disarray; and its economic situation is rapidly deteriorating. The mess is very much Ukraine’s own, and Russia has far less influence on it than is commonly appreciated.
The most popular myth about Moscow’s role in the Ukrainian crisis is that Mr. Yanukovych has been but a puppet of President Vladimir V. Putin. In reality, Mr. Putin has been very frustrated with his Ukrainian counterpart. To Mr. Putin, Mr. Yanukovych is unreliable, forever vacillating between the European Union and Russia; and now, a totally spent force, he has fled from Kiev to Kharkiv, a Russian-speaking city in eastern Ukraine. Moscow knows that the Ukrainian oligarchs, most of whom used to support Mr. Yanukovych, are largely anti-Russian. Though they in effect rule Ukraine, they fear being taken over by the richer business giants next door. Even those who made their money in Russia, like the protest-funder Petro Poroshenko, prefer to keep it in the West.
The protests erupted when Mr. Yanukovych refused to sign the so-called association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union, which would have established a free-trade area, among other things. Despite what he claims, it wasn’t the Kremlin that made him do that. Moscow had clearly signaled it did not want Kiev to sign the deal when it introduced de facto sanctions on Ukrainian products last year, but ultimately Mr. Yanukovych was guided by his own calculations, rather than Putin’s admonitions or advice. The fundamental reason Mr. Yanukovych demurred was fear that he would not be re-elected in 2015 if he signed the agreement. At some point he realized that the deal would bring no financial support from the European Union and saw no way to offset the inevitable drop in trade with Russia or cushion the blow to Ukraine’s Soviet-era heavy industry.
During the months of standoffs in Kiev, Russia’s actual role was much more modest than advertised by the international media or the rumor mill in Kiev. The Russian ambassador to Ukraine, Mikhail Zurabov, was conspicuously absent from public view. The Kremlin ordered all Duma members to stay out of Ukraine. Dmitry Rogozin, a deputy prime minister and a former Russian ambassador to NATO with a knack for making in-your-face comments about the West, has largely remained silent on Ukraine. The only Russian official to display any continuous interest in Ukraine was Sergey Glazyev, Putin’s adviser for Eurasian integration, who spoke at conferences and wrote articles about the high costs of Ukraine’s turn to the European Union.
Mr. Putin did receive Yanukovych several times, in Sochi and Moscow. And in December Russia did offer to buy $15 billion in Ukrainian-government bonds — dwarfing any conditional aid the European Union could cough up via the International Monetary Fund — and lower by one-third the price of its gas shipments to Ukraine. This financial support was extended without any strings attached, with the dual purpose of helping Ukraine avoid a likely default and building goodwill for closer economic relations in the future.
But it was a risky proposition, given the political uncertainties in Kiev. And the move may be ineffectual. Moscow’s gesture of support was built on the belief, which Mr. Putin himself has expressed, that Ukrainians and Russians are one people. This obviously is not true, if only because Ukrainians themselves are not — at least not yet — one people. Just compare Lviv and Sebastopol: Western Ukraine, which was annexed by the Soviet Union only under Stalin, is vehemently anti-Russian; the east and the south are Russophone, with the Crimea mostly Russian ethnically. To the vast majority of the elite in Ukraine, the country’s independence from the Soviet Union meant, above all, independence from Russia. There are virtually no Ukrainian politicians who can be called pro-Russian: This simply goes against the grain of Ukraine’s national idea.
Thus Mr. Putin’s offer that Ukraine and Russia forge closer economic integration by way of a customs union are not very compelling to many Ukrainians. The idea also is potentially hazardous for Russia. Under that scheme, Moscow would need to pump a lot more money into Ukraine and give it a large say in joint bodies such as the Eurasian Economic Commission, with little guarantee that Ukraine wouldn’t break away again once it recovered from its current financial crunch.
Ukraine’s “February Revolution” may be a blessing in disguise for Moscow, as it could help debunk the notion that Russia cannot be a great power without Ukraine as its junior partner. Moscow does not need to govern more people; it needs to raise the health, education and work standards in its own people’s lives.
Despite what some Ukrainians suspect, Moscow is unlikely to try bringing about the breakup of Ukraine in order to annex its southern and eastern parts. That would mean civil war next door, and Russia abhors the idea. Moscow’s best option at this point is to stand back and wait, while quietly favoring decentralization in Ukraine. Although federalization is seen in Kiev and western Ukraine as a step toward ultimate partition, it could in fact help hold Ukraine together. With more financial and cultural autonomy, the country’s diverse regions could more easily live and let live, and keep one another in check. Promoting decentralization in Ukraine would be a realistic long-term strategy for Russia, something Moscow has lacked so far.
Posts
