Crimea Redux: Russia invades the Don Valley

Rome, 14^th April 2014

 

Crimea Redux: Russia invades the Don Valley

 

This morning, Ukrainian forces attacked the pro-Russian fighters that had taken over the town of Slovyansk in the self-proclaimed ‘People’s Republic of Donetsk’, a Russian-speaking region in eastern Ukraine’s Don River valley. A number of those fighters bear Russian arms and appear to be advance units of the Russian forces massed along Ukraine’s eastern borders.

An undeclared Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine is now underway: Moscow seems only to be waiting for an armed Ukrainian response to send in its regular forces to protect the region’s Russian speakers from Ukrainian ‘aggression’.

If that happens, Russian forces will be far more numerous and better equipped than Ukraine’s. Their superiority will mean that Ukraine will not be able to withstand a Russian advance without outside help, for which it will inevitably turn to NATO.

NATO will have to make a careful decision about how to respond to Kiev’s requests. It can try either to resist and roll back the Russian advance or contain it. Each course of action comes with different costs and potential paybacks; each relies on a different assessment of the kind of threat Russia presents.

Stopping and then reversing a Russian takeover of eastern Ukraine will require the use of force, either directly by deploying NATO planes and tanks or indirectly by supplying the Ukrainian army with such equipment. This is a high-cost option whose potential risks and benefits the alliance needs to weigh carefully.

Because Russia considers eastern Ukraine rightfully Russian territory, it won’t give up lightly whatever portion it ultimately seizes. The loss of prestige Moscow would endure would be so great that it will be prepared to suffer heavy losses to avoid it. And a history of stoical resistance to foreign invasion—whether against the Poles in 1613, the French in 1812 or the Germans in 1941—would dispose the Russian public to patriotic support for the Kremlin’s defence of the ‘Fatherland’.

If it decided to try to stop a Russian invasion or roll one back, NATO would have to be prepared to match Moscow in commitment. This would lead to an all-out war with Russia in a scenario where its own forces were directly employed, or to a ruthless and bloody Yugoslav-style civil war if the alliance decided to limit itself to equipping the Ukrainian army with the assets necessary to wage a guerrilla resistance.

Civilian casualties would be high and damage to the region’s infrastructure great, which would exert a steady pressure on many alliance members to abandon or run down their support for the operation. Russia is much readier to tolerate both than NATO. The chances of success would be remote.

Even if NATO were successful in forcing Russia out of Ukraine, it would be left to foot the bill for the region’s reconstruction. And it would have to prevent nationalist-minded Ukrainians from exacting revenge on Russian-speaking friends and relatives who perhaps supported Moscow’s invasion.

It would also be forced to prop up Ukraine as a whole indefinitely, with little leverage to bring about the reforms the country needs to stamp out economic corruption or political extremism. An impoverished, dysfunctional and still divided Ukraine is not an alliance partner NATO needs or wants.

Above all, Russia—a country of some 140m and a permanent member of the Security Council—would become the West’s sworn enemy for at least a generation. Cooperation on anything of importance to the West would be next to impossible. Geopolitically, it would gravitate even closer towards China.

The alternative—containing a Russian invasion to eastern Ukraine—is a better goal. This can still be achieved by a combination of diplomacy and the threat but not, at least in the first instance the use, of force.

The aim would be to agree to avoid both a direct NATO-Russia confrontation and a Yugoslav-style civil war through a partition of Ukraine with Moscow that left it in control of the eastern districts it hankers after, but preserved the survival of a truncated Ukrainian state centred on Kiev and the country’s Ukrainian-speaking west.

To do this, NATO will have to pressure on Kiev not to try to retake the eastern cities, by refusing to offer it help in the event of the inevitable Russian counter-attack. It will have to talk directly to Moscow, offering it the possibility of recognition—perhaps through OSCE-organized referenda—of its gains. NATO’s price for agreeing to such a redrawing of the border would be Russia’s foreswearing any designs on Kiev itself and its giving up its objections to the admission of a rump Ukrainian state to NATO and, in time, the EU.

NATO should also visibly increase the deployment of its forces to the Baltic states, Poland and Romania. This will send a clear signal that the alliance will match its words with force if Russia reneges on its commitments (for example by making an advance on Kiev). Its members—above all the United States—should state clearly and repeatedly that they will honour their treaty obligations to one another in the event of Russian aggression against one or several of them.

Such a course of action would go against the alliance’s best instincts—seeming to represent the surrender of national freedom before naked aggression. And critics will call this a second Munich, a sell-out of Ukraine indistinguishable from Britain and France’s sell-out of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in 1938.

But both notions should be resisted. Ukraine is clearly divided—perhaps not as much as Russia claims but certainly more than its better-functioning neighbours—and those divisions are the underlying reason for its weakness. NATO isn’t obliged to defend a form of freedom even a sizeable minority of the population feel ambivalent about.

Secondly, Putin’s Russia isn’t the threat to European let alone world peace Hitler’s Germany was. Russia isn’t seeking to overturn the world order but ensure its place in it as a great power. Outside Russia’s backyard, NATO’s strategic advantage—political, economic and military—is overwhelming, its security guarantees credible where the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland was more an expression of moral support.

Fundamentally, Putin’s effort to regain historically Russian or Russian-majority territories is about prestige not Lebensraum. A desire for prestige makes Putin especially receptive to diplomacy (in a way Hitler never was). He understands the risks of war and is cautious by nature—as his restraint in the 2008 war with Georgia demonstrates. He also knows that a negotiated outcome is the only way of bestowing international legitimacy on his acquisitions. But to be induced to make a deal, he needs to be assured that the West takes Russia’s interests seriously—something NATO’s frequent insistence on a complete back down in his view tells against.

Confronting Russia, directly or indirectly, might be morally more satisfying and easier to explain to the public. But it doesn’t in fact serve the alliance’s interests. NATO’s primary purpose is guaranteeing the security of its members. For many good reasons, Ukraine isn’t a member of that alliance.

Indeed, NATO can guarantee its members’ security without committing itself to a war over Ukraine. By resorting instead to diplomacy, it can at the same time preserve the footing for a pragmatic relationship with Russia, something of great long-term value beyond the current crisis.

Some will say that ‘standing up’ to Russia is important to demonstrate the sanctity of international frontiers. But at what price ‘should’ NATO defend this principle? And, given Ukraine’s history and divided politics, are those particular borders really worth it?

If we hold our noses and ready NATO to defend its members if and when they’re threatened, diplomacy can still make the same point without the bloodshed. So far, Moscow has been able to swallow Crimea. But, who knows, perhaps in the ethnically more diverse Don Valley, where public opinion doesn’t seem as united behind the Kremlin as it was in Simferopol, Russia’s bitten off more than it can chew. It can after all ask Washington about what it’s like to get bogged down in a guerrilla war with nationalists.

On the other hand, if Moscow’s new territories happily accept the restoration of rule from the Kremlin, then perhaps they’re better off Russian rather than Ukrainian anyway. Certainly, a smaller, more ethnically coherent and culturally more Western-oriented Ukraine would be a much more valuable candidate for both NATO and EU membership.

‘Ukraine isn’t a state’, Vladimir Putin is said to have remarked. Millions of Russians seem to agree. Before 1992 Kharkov, Donetsk and Lugansk had been ruled from Moscow for over 300 years. It never planned to let them go.

With their monuments to Lenin and heavy Soviet past, these cities mean infinitely more to Moscow than they do to us.

We lose nothing by keeping this Russia’s crisis.

 

Illegal But Not Unlawful: What Crimea says about Putin's Russia

Rome, 8^th April 2014

 

 

Illegal But Not Unlawful: What Crimea says about Putin’s Russia 

 

 

On 18^th March before the assembled deputies of both houses of the country’s parliament, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law an annexation treaty with the recently proclaimed independent republic of Crimea. The setting—the Kremlin’s marbled and gilded tsarist-era St George’s Hall—was gaudy and awkward at times, but on the whole stately and not undignified.

 

Of course, the United States and European Union have repeatedly called both the treaty and the referendum that preceded it ‘illegal’ and ‘illegitimate’. But everything about the symbolism of that afternoon in the Kremlin seemed designed to convey quite the opposite message: that this was the act of a state governed by the rule of law.

 

This seems deliberate and part of a broader strategy. Writing last week in Foreign Policy, Katie Engelhart noted the elaborate lengths to which Putin has gone to give his annexation of Crimea an aura of legality. [1]  

 

Because the Russian constitution actually bans the admission of new territories without Moscow’s signing a formal inter-state treaty from which they hope to secede, on 28 February the Duma introduced a bill that would have done away with the need for such a treaty in cases where: 1) a state had failed to maintain law and order in the territory seeking admission (as, in fact, Russia claimed Ukraine failed to do in the aftermath of the Kiev revolution); 2) and where the people had expressed their desire for admission to the Russian Federation through a ‘democratic referendum’.

 

As Engleman points out, however, the Council of Europe’s legal commission strongly criticized the proposed legislation as unconstitutional. Surprisingly, perhaps, this was enough to prompt the Russian leadership to drop the bill and opt for another route to legalize Crimea’s annexation.

 

This was by having Crimea declare independence from Ukraine, which it duly did just before the referendum on accession to the Russian Federation on 16 March. As an independent sovereign state, Crimea was then able, two days later, to sign its own accession treaty with Moscow without any reference to Ukraine.

 

That the West still called all of this illegal did nothing to diminish Putin’s solicitude for the law. On the contrary, as Engleman notes, he immediately sent the treaty to the Constitutional Court for judicial approval and to the Duma’s upper and lower houses for ratification by the legislature. Both bodies enthusiastically endorsed it.

 

And Engleman is surely right in suspecting that this annexation will be but the first of many: the same legal script could be followed in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria which are all already ‘sovereign states’ in theory but Russian territories in practice.

 

If I object to anything in Engleman’s analysis, however, it’s her idea that Putin’s new-found preoccupation with the law is just a charade, a feigned ‘legalism’ designed to win domestic support for the annexation and mollify the West.

 

She writes, for example, that this is all ‘part of a broader trend of sham legalism that was a hallmark of Soviet despotism and remains firmly entrenched in the Kremlin today.’ For confirmation she cites Maria Lipman, chair of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Society and Regions Program:  ‘Putin has this obsession with the letter of the law, with no regard to the spirit.’

 

To me, there are two problems with this view. The first is that it’s not Putin’s punctilious observance of the legal niceties that explains the popularity among ordinary Russians of his activities in Crimea citizens—national feeling seems to have sufficed. As for the West, the Kremlin must have noticed that it’s beyond mollification on this one.

 

There’s a problem with the notion that Russia is just reverting to type. The Soviet Union never tolerated referenda of the kind Putin relied on in Crimea. Neither did it remotely tolerate anything like the cycle of elections that have become the norm in post-Soviet Russia. And no tsar ever made the duma as essential a partner in power as Putin has done—and certainly not Nicholas II whose 1905 Manifesto brought the first Russian parliament into existence.

 

Rather, the assumption that Putin’s legalism is purely a charade is wrong—a failure to understand what’s really going on in Russia that has come about through the constant imposition of Western analytical categories on Russian history and experience.

 

I have compared Putin to the eighteenth-century empress Catherine the Great before. Apart from extending Russia’s frontiers deep into Poland and down along the shores of the Black Sea, Catherine is also remembered for her legal reforms. An autocrat, certainly, Catherine none the less conceived of her powers in terms that perhaps throw some light on the way Putin understands the origins and purpose of his own.

 

Consider, for example, how Russia-expert Geoffrey Hosking describes Catherine’s ‘vision of the rule of law’:

 

She believed that law is a means by which the state mobilizes the resources of society to augment its own strength and wealth and to provide for the welfare of the population. It was not in her eyes an impersonal force mediating between autonomous and sometimes competing social institutions, but rather an instrument through which the monarch exercise authority and puts moral precepts into effect.

 

Hosking then quotes the empress herself. According to Catherine, ‘In a State, that is, in a Collection of People living in Society where Laws are established, Liberty can consist only in the Ability of doing what everyone ought to desire, and in not being force to do what should not be desired.’

 

This seems a decent description of Putin’s own inclinations, where recent laws outlawing the promotion of homosexual activity or stricter bans on the use of ‘offensive language’ in print or online are presented as protecting the wider Russian community from harm.

 

Perhaps, like Catherine, Putin sees such laws as helping Russians to do what they ‘ought’ to desire and, in that sense, as liberty-promoting—a notion outrageous to us but which, as Hosking points out, nevertheless has its roots in the European Enlightenment. 

 

Episodes like last month’s Crimea treaty-signing remind us that, like Catherine, Putin also seems to believe it important to have, as Hosking puts it, ‘the law validated by representatives of her peoples.’

 

This might also describe the Duma’s role in Putin’s Russia.

 

We see a rubber stamp. From the point of view of the Russian legal tradition embodied in Catherine’s reforms, however, the Duma might be said to play an essential role in the ritual of power, giving visible expression to the covenant between ruler and people whose object is not the promotion of the rights of individuals or the relative welfare of competing social groups but the health and prosperity of the nation as a whole.

 

This isn’t a pantomime emptily aping reality; it’s a ceremony designed to imbue it with significance. Ask a Catholic priest about the difference.

 

Where does this leave us?

 

Let’s go back to the Kremlin. Dressed in a slim black suit and flanked by the double-headed eagle of the presidential insignia, Putin came across as a kind law-giving basileus serenely restoring order to his kingdom with a flourish of his pen and his own unassailable strength of will. All in all, we’re a long way from the bare-chested, tiger-hunting strong-man we’ve come to expect.

 

I think this is a sign of things to come. Expect more law-making from Putin’s Kremlin—but don’t necessarily expect Russia to become more liberal as a result. And to understand what it all means, do expect to turn to Russian, rather than Western, historical experience.

 

Russia isn’t the West. It’s Russia.

 

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[1] Englehart’s article is here: (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/24/putin_legalism_crimea_annexation)

 

 

 

 

Unhappy in Paris: Kerry, Lavrov and the First Partition of Ukraine

Rome, 31^st March 2014

Given the gulf between their countries’ positions, it’s not surprising that US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had little to show for their meeting in Paris on Sunday.

Yet a couple of things suggest that a ‘diplomatic solution’ to the crisis in Ukraine might now be more than just a bland form of words.

For the moment at least Russia seems to be stepping back from an invasion: Mr Lavrov has said publicly that Russia has ‘no intention’ of carrying one out. This might be a tactic to buy time and goodwill in those NATO capitals less disposed to Washington’s tough line. But the threat of war could resurface any time Moscow wants to apply more pressure.

America’s concession was agreeing to talk at all about anything other than sanctions—an approach unlikely to have achieved much other than Russia’s even deeper embitterment.

It’s now clear, though, that Putin is asking the West to partition Ukraine with him. He’s even getting Ukrainians to make his case. Thus, in the lead-up to Sunday’s talks, Russian media reported that in an address to the Ukrainian people, ex-president Yanukovich (in Moscow’s eyes still Ukraine’s only legitimate leader) called for a ‘referendum to determine the status of every one of Ukraine’s regions’.

And the federalized constitution Mr Lavrov argued for in Paris—enshrining Russian an official language and outlawing Ukraine’s membership of international ‘blocs’—is the same strategy the Kremlin has pursued all along: divide the country along its regional and linguistic fault lines and so prevent a disunited Ukraine gravitating into the West’s nefarious orbit, whether in the form of NATO or the EU.

The only real change is that Putin apparently now sees the ballot box as at least as effective an instrument for partitioning Ukraine as the rolling of tanks—and possibly a better one if he can win the West’s consent to it.

That Mr Kerry returned to Washington still fulminating about the ‘illegality’ of Russia’s fait accompli in Crimea and without plans to meet again with his Russian counterpart shows how tough it will be for the West to agree to such a hard-nosed, ‘Bismarckian’ solution. The problem is that it’s probably the only diplomatic outcome that will entice Russia to rule war out.

A diplomatic solution remains possible, but it doesn’t mean Mr Kerry—whose pained face on Sunday said it all—will, or even should, enjoy making it.