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.