Why the Ukraine mess is of the West’s making

Welcome back from the beach! Did you have a good time? Are you rested and relaxed? Good.

We will soon be at war with Ukraine. This alarming situation has been escalating for months, while you were buying presents and planning a socially distanced Christmas, and came to a head while you were lying on the sand trying to get more than nine pages into the latest diversity novel. 

The United States is speaking of giving very heavy assistance to the Ukrainian government in its dispute with Russia. Russia, in turn, is speaking of putting forces into Cuba and Venezuela, to show the US what it’s like to have enemy “big power” (read: nuclear-armed petro-kleptocracy) forces on its borders. In the West this is being portrayed in a familiar fashion, as the relentless hunger of the rapacious Russian bear coming once again for the sweet Ukrainian maiden. 

From the Russian side, it is about the West’s relentless attempt to encircle Russia, with the absurd notion that NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) should extend all the way into western Asia. The West says it’s the Russians’ fault; the Russians say it’s the West’s fault. Is there a way to cut this Gordian knot? Yes. It’s the West’s fault.

The dispute goes back to 2014, as a proximate cause, and all the way back to the late 1980s, as a more extended explanation.

As the eastern bloc began to break up in the late ’80s, George HW Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev made a deal that nations departing from the Warsaw Pact would not be recruited into NATO, thus lying as a neutral buffer zone between NATO and what was still the USSR. When the USSR dissolved in 1991, that commitment was restated, somewhat more vaguely to the new Russian (Commonwealth of Independent States) leadership. 

But in the ’90s, that Western commitment was reneged upon, as the US’s lone superpower status looked set to extend well into the 21st century. NATO extension was not merely geopolitical expansion, but the extension of a neoliberal realm in which the “Washington consensus” could operate, and post-socialist nationalist economies could be broken open and made into dependent markets. 

There were some leaders of the old eastern bloc who were eager to join, with countries like Poland not unreasonably believing that a renewal of Russian nationalism had no good news for it. But even if it didn’t, it got it anyway. The “Rambouillet agreement” presented to Serbia as the take-it-or-leave-it way to avoid a war over Kosovo, absolved all potential peacekeeping forces of any local criminal culpability, and specified that Kosovo would be a free market economy. It was designed to humiliate or crush Serbia, the last outpost of Russian influence within Europe. 

By the 2000s, much of the old Warsaw Pact was in NATO. In 2004 the Baltic states, former Soviet republics, were signed up. In 2008 Georgia, its government taken over by a bunch of Economist-reading Erasmus exchange students, was briefly invaded by Russia, largely to reassert the interests of several Russian-oriented pseudo-republics inside its borders. They were out in a few weeks, and the invasion stalled Georgia’s path to membership, which remains on the table. 

Ukraine has been a more complex proposition. Until 2010, under leaders Viktor Yushchenko (the poisoned guy, Frankenstein lookalike) and Yulia Tymoshenko (remember her — hair in circular plaits, waitress in a Tolkien-themed theatre restaurant), Ukraine reoriented to Europe and NATO.

In 2010, pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych was elected. He steered away from the EU and NATO and signed loan agreements with Russia. A resistance from pro-European Ukrainians — very well-funded by Western agencies — began, a revolution/coup/putsch forced Yanukovych out (and into exile) and the country swung back to Europe — which prompted Russia’s annexation of Crimea (with Russia’s only warm-water ports), uprisings in the eastern, pro-Russian Donbas region, and the creation of two people’s republics unrecognised by anyone much, except Russia.

Russia continues to have military in those areas; Kiev recognises that its writ does not run there. 

This land of warm-water ports has become hot now, because the current Ukraine government has made moves to breach a buffer zone between western Ukraine and the self-declared republics of eastern Ukraine, as established by the Minsk accords in 2015.

A first move in April was stood down. Now 90,000 Russian troops are massed at the eastern Ukraine-Russia border, ready to come in and defend the “people’s republics” if they are breached by US- and Turkish-armed and -advised Ukrainian forces, ahead of a renewed push for Ukraine’s “right to choose” NATO membership.

It is this that has prompted Putin to (wryly?) threaten troops in the western hemisphere. 

How much of the portentous talk of war is real, and how much is media wars with an on-the-ground component, is hard to discern. But the pro-US flacks are somewhat hampered by the utter absurdity, in realpolitik terms, of suggesting that Russia has no reasonable concern about a small(er) nation’s sphere of influence — especially after the 2014 pro-European “orange revolution/coup” was so visibly and vastly funded by US and European agencies to get the result they wanted. Hence much of the pro-US talk harks back to the wheezy notion of “respect” rather than concrete geopolitical interests.

The NATO hawks are infuriated by various steps back the Biden administration has made — such as cancelling sanctions imposed by Donald Trump on companies working on the Nord Stream 2 Russia-Germany pipeline — but NATO membership has not yet been renounced or refused. Indeed Biden has calibrated, saying that an “incursion” would attract less concerted US actions than a full-scale invasion. Over here, Greg Sheridan is on holiday, trying to recreate the shroud of Turin with a microwave and a tea towel (“I can’t! The gospels are true!”), so the task falls to Peter Jennings, head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI): 

America’s credibility as an ally is on the line … If Biden concedes to Putin’s claim, American credibility and power fades … We need a confident America operating with a sense of its own power and purpose. 

Who needs this exactly? Jaded cold-warriors in search of a dose of geopolitical viagra to make themselves feel alive again, in a world where state conflict lacks any sustaining historical narrative. To sate their pathetic desires, they want a NATO that extends across the world, save for Russia and China, and is nothing but a renewal of the notion of the US as a territory-less empire enforcing an unargued idea of truth and goodness.

Those days have flown, with the last plane out of Kabul airport. If central Europe and west Asian nations want to create an independent treaty group, I wouldn’t bloody blame them. But NATO has no role there. Still less ourselves, as the US’ bayonet-cloth for which there is zero public support after the failure and debauch (with which groups like ASPI are splattered) of the past two decades.

Ah well, back to the beach for the last rays of summer. Don’t forget to pack a diversity novel!