Rusia clearly violated international law with its aggression, both from its own territory and from Belarus. Probably, before it, both had stopped complying with the Minsk Agreements of 2014, signed to find a framework for a solution to the conflict between Ukraine and the separatist provinces, in the virtual civil war that had begun in the Donbas region. Undoubtedly, there had been a breach of the Budapest Memorandum and the assurances given to Kiev, for having renounced in 1994 the nuclear bombs and the missiles that carried them.
As in any war there is destruction and death, and on the part of the West, there was no deterrence or this was not enough, since Putin was convinced that soldiers from NATO member countries were not going to arrive, nor did they reach Georgia in 2008 or Crimea in 2014. Perhaps his will was underestimated.
Even before, there was a struggle of narratives through the media where each side sought to impose its version on the whole world. By the way, the Russian action was not a surprise, although analysts differ about the proper simile is in the past. Personally, the early military actions reminded me of what happened in the first Gulf War, with the attack on the infrastructure of control and direction to leave blind and deaf the firepower of the adversary. Also, in 1990 the coalition that Washington put together had different interests within it, although nothing similar to the energy dependence of Europe. However, the main difference is that the US threat does not have the same credibility, perhaps because today the world is not unipolar.
It is not known whether the sanctions will have the desired effect, although they will serve to measure the extent of the engagement that exists today between China and Russia, since the large Chinese wallet – if the hand is generous – can make a big difference, although there is an indicator of Moscow’s readiness for this moment, so is the increase in their reserves, including gold.
Other debates focus on whether the NATO that was born to confront the Soviet Union should have disappeared along with the Warsaw Pact, and others point to Ukraine mattering more if the right lessons are drawn for the United States and the rest of the world.
For me this is the time to introduce the purpose of these lines, since we know what is thought in Washington and Moscow as well as in London, Paris or Bonn. However, we have heard less from Ukrainians, both from the government and from separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk.
We know the emotion, but little about how they will react if they become victims of the resolution of this crisis. My fear, and that of many, is that Crimea will be repeated, and that NATO will limit itself to making public statements, or that Chinese support will make the teeth of sanctions not bite. Perhaps a real paradox would be that the conflict raises the price of fuels even more, in such a way that it benefits Moscow and harms a weak government like that of Biden and / or his coalition, in addition to affecting the post-pandemic recovery in many economies of this globalized world, following what is already shown by the markets.
Perhaps the Western coalition was once again wrong with the motivation behind Putin, who contrary to what is said does not seem to seek the recreation of the former Soviet Union but of Greater Russia, that is, closer to tsarism than to the communist hierarchy. George Keenan, one of the most influential American diplomats of the twentieth century and author of the policy of containment towards the Soviet Union, argued when opposing the extension of NATO to the east, that Putin was motivated more by geopolitics than by the economy.
Putin may not have moved an inch from the strategy present since he assumed the presidency, that of becoming the champion of the Russian minorities left in other countries when the Soviet empire collapsed. That is to say, as well as the end of the Spanish empire, in Latin America new countries emerged from the administrative divisions of viceroyalties and captaincies general, in the Soviet Union new countries appeared from the 15 republics that made it up, a process that has not yet ended, as Chechnya showed.
In Latin America there were wars in the nineteenth century to fix the border boundaries and that would be what Putin would be dedicated to in the name of Greater Russia, exactly what Slobodan Milosevic could not do in the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, and the creation of Kosovo is a recurring theme in Russian argumentation.
How could Ukraine be harmed, becoming the most punished party again?
The first thing would be to rightly affect their sovereignty, accepting that an essential principle of international law is that the threat or use of force cannot and must not violate border treaties, whatever the historical arguments, whether it is Russia or Iraq with Kuwait. This is true in the Donbas, regardless of the mother tongue or passport of many of its inhabitants.
The principle of respect for sovereignty applies to the incorporation of the two provinces into Russia as well as to support for the civil war that has been experienced in Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014, whether its intensity high or low, and that principle should not be altered, even if Ukraine did not fully comply with that part of the Minsk Agreements that spoke of a path to the federalization of Ukraine, and therefore, of those provinces.
A second path would be to impose against their will a type of solution found in the Cold War for special cases, such as forcing neutrality on Finland or Austria, which became symbols of solutions imposed by history and the correlation of forces.
A third path would be for the discordant interests between the United States and the European Union to lead them to increase what divides them over what unites them. It would be the case of the dependence on Russian gas or in the case of the United States, that the so-called Russian plot continues to polarize and divide the country, in an issue where not enough evidence has been found that Russia determined the electoral result in the presidential election of 2016, and for a percentage of US’ citizens it has been rather an excuse.
Finally, and perhaps most seriously, Ukraine would be simply forgotten in the scenario that the west accepts Putin´s recurrent request to negotiate a security agreement for Russia, to replace the one that collapsed with the end of the former USSR., but where it has not been recreated with Russia, as a successor. Like any negotiation, this request would be the starting point, but not necessarily the point of arrival, and the opportunity to represent what cannot be accepted in today’s Russia conduct and actions.
The negotiation could take place in the medium term (just as there was one on US missiles in Turkey, months after the withdrawal of the soviets in Cuba in 1962) with an offer that could be very important for the USA, that of greater neutrality of Russia in the conflict that will mark this twenty-first century, and that it is not Ukraine, but the struggle for world supremacy between China and the United States, which acquires greater historical importance when it is remembered that it was recently 50 years since Nixon’s visit to Mao, and one of the most important events of the last century, which was the opening of China, and his goal of not approaching the Soviet Union after the chaos caused by the Cultural Revolution, only now it would be the other way around.
Science-Fiction? I don’t think so, rather a possible scenario, and its degree of probability will depend on the winners and losers in the conflict that we are witnessing in Europe. What is important and morally enforceable is that Ukraine is not forgotten.
I think in the need of rescuing a crucial concept during the cold war, which was the one of the red lines, that is, those issues of the greatest importance that could not be violated without being considered either aggression or provocation. They fulfilled even a pedagogical function since it was known, both the acceptable and the unacceptable. Rarely, two powers in search of world domination did not end in direct war. When they existed, were always through proxies or third parties.
The world needs such an understanding and for world peace it would be healthy. Perhaps Ukraine would not have happened, or at least not in this way.
Lawyer, Ph. D. in Political Science; former presidential candidate (Chile, 2013)’
“The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author”.
