There is much speculation in the West about Vladimir Putin’s ultimate objectives in Ukraine. The furious speculation speaks to an intense experience of geopolitical impotence within NATO and the European Union in the face of Russia’s criminal invasion, an experience that will undoubtedly disrupt the West’s post-WWll understanding of itself as the author-in-chief and guarantor of liberal democratic norms and a rules-based international order.
Putin’s war on Ukraine’s territorial integrity, sovereignty and diverse peoples began back in 2014 with his “undeclared war” in the east, which set the Kremlin-backed Donestsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) against Ukraine’s central authorities, and which has claimed the lives of over 14,000 people. Putin played his loyalists in these ethnic Russian enclaves to force the accommodation of separatist claims on to the negotiations on ending eight years of violence.
The new 2022 phase of Putin’s war will end only when he has caused maximum damage to the country as a whole and he decides that it is time to reconvene tactical “peace” talks with a view to asserting unprecedented leverage over Ukraine’s future status and borders. At those “peace talks” Putin’s representatives will undoubtedly press for the Russian Federation’s long-standing interpretation of the Minsk Accords (Minsk ll) and more. The Russian version of Minsk ll would, in effect, deprive Ukraine’s central government of its sovereign writ over the national territory and devolve far-reaching powers to the self-declared Republics in the east, including powers to regulate the eastern border, and conduct agreements with foreign states. Minsk-ll also includes provisions for a constitutional amendment committing Ukraine to neutrality (no NATO membership).
Remember that the impacts of kinetic wars and financial sanctions belong to different temporalities: Putin will have calibrated his tactical “peace talks” so that the harshest of sanctions are lifted as part of any deal that sees his forces agree to a partial withdrawal that leaves his Russian-sponsored oblasts in place as a constitutional Trojan horse within Ukraine.
Perhaps there is a clue here about Putin’s ultimate objectives.
Ukraine’s tragic fate contains a message that is being conveyed well beyond its borders. Putin (with China’s lamentable deference at the UN Security Council) is attempting to finally draw the West’s post-WWll rules-based order to a close by staging local conditions in Ukraine that are confronting NATO, the US and the EU with their own studied geopolitical impotence. The Trump election and Brexit were earlier chapters in this script.
With the invasion of Ukraine, Putin is achieving two things: (i) drawing a cathartic line under the West’s celebratory narrative of victory in the Cold War at the expense of the Soviet Union; and, relatedly, (ii) vetoing NATO’s ambition to absorb Ukraine – within its current borders – into its membership. Putin is unlikely to seek a permanent occupation of Ukraine, preferring to resort to an old Russian tactic of partition (e.g. the creation of a land corridor in the south east, linking Crimea to Donetsk and Luhansk) and the creation of rump statelets (“oblasts”) that serve to disable the strategic ambitions of modern Ukraine.
NATO and many of its supporters have pursued the false promise of membership with a reckless disregard for the role that the Ukraine has played as a source of Russia’s experience of extreme geopolitical vulnerability as recently as 1941. In 2008 NATO gave an “Open Door” to Georgia and Ukraine, only one year after Putin had put the world on notice that Moscow would not tolerate further expansion of the Alliance. Putin responded by invading Georgia and launching Europe’s first 21st century war, a landmark event that reset the post-Cold War relationship between Russia and the West.
Today, Putin’s vulnerability is the prospect of his citizens observing the emergence of a vibrant European bi-lingual democracy on his border. The threat of Ukraine’s European ambitions is not its difference but its shared linguistic, cultural and political lineage with Russia, which threatens to hold up a mirror to Putin’s criminal regime as Putin prepares for new elections in 2024.
Putin will have taken great comfort on 1 March when the West’s studied impotence reached its zenith when the serried ranks of Members of the European Parliament, alongside senior representatives of the European Commission, listened to, cheered on, and in the same instant turned their backs on the existential pleas for Ukraine’s accelerated path to membership of the EU in a video broadcast by a khaki-clad Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky. It was a moment of high spectacle that dramatized Putin’s pyrrhic victory and contempt for the West as he presses home - in a profound act of violent political communication - his repeated rejection of the West’s attempts to project its influence within his self-declared post-Soviet space (of coercive diplomacy).
We have only to look to Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan to identify examples of where Putin has demonstrated his ruthless and opportunistic coercion, successfully forcing governments to fall back into line within the orbit of Russia’s sphere of influence (Putin’s “Russky Mir” or Russian World): demonstrating that the power of the geopolitical realist is to render that which is real through acts of violence. For Putin, the borders of the old Russian imperium are still in play.
The invasion of Ukraine is a world-ending moment, understood as the end of a rules-based liberal international order created in the wake of WWll in the image of the West. A modern world order of global institutions that paved over centuries of Empire, colonialism and contradictions with the lure of the glittering prizes of capitalist development.
As Fiona Hill, one of the United States’ “most clear-eyed Russia experts” told the Politico Magazine’s Maura Reynolds:
long arcs and trends of European history are converging on Ukraine right now. We are already in the middle of a third world war, whether we’ve fully grasped it or not.
The information wars and “psych-ops” began some time back and succeeded in, for example, in convincing the former President Trump and swathes of the GOP that Ukraine belongs to Russia. In the UK, Boris Johnson, the head of a Conservative Party deeply compromised by its Russian funding sources, has actively suppressed a 50-page report by Westminster’s intelligence and security committee which concluded, among other things, that the country’s intelligence agencies had failed to conduct any proper assessment of Kremlin attempts to interfere with the 2016 Brexit referendum debacle.
Of course, only those of us who have (in denial of the violent sources of our white privilege) lived under the shelter of nuclear umbrellas and glass-ceilinged cathedrals of consumerism and commoditized distraction have been convinced that the world has not been in a state of total war since 1945. Perspectives in China, South East Asia, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and other parts of the Global South have always been a little different.
The Revenge of Neoliberalism’s Ascendancy
As Katharina Pistor has pointed out in an essay for Social Europe, Ukraine is paying the price for deep failings in the West’s response to the collapse of the former Soviet Union. She observes:
Of course, only those of us who have (in denial of the violent sources of our white privilege) lived under the shelter of nuclear umbrellas and glass-ceilinged cathedrals of consumerism and commoditized distraction have been convinced that the world has not been in a state of total war since 1945. Perspectives in China, South East Asia, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and other parts of the Global South have always been a little different.
The Revenge of Neoliberalism’s Ascendancy
As Katharina Pistor has pointed out in an essay for Social Europe, Ukraine is paying the price for deep failings in the West’s response to the collapse of the former Soviet Union. She observes:
By choosing capitalism over democracy as the foundation for the post-cold war world, the west jeopardised stability, prosperity and, as we now see again in Ukraine, peace and democracy – and not only in eastern Europe.
Where the West does bear some responsibility is in the economic policy it pursued after the end of the Cold War, although this was welcomed by the new, post-Communist regimes. Widely touted as the high point of market fundamentalism the neoliberal strategies of public-expenditure cuts, trade liberalisation and privatisation did not produce the “bourgeois” capitalism liberal democrats had anticipated.
Rather, in most cases they resulted in a criminalised, kleptocratic autocracy. Privatisation turned communist bureaucrats into oligarchs, amid unemployment and extreme inequality.
Putin’s rise can be explained, in part, by a failed 13-month experiment in neoliberal “shock therapy” promoted in 1991 by American economic advisers who convinced Russia’s president Boris Yeltsin that the focus of his extraordinary reform powers should be directed towards radical market reforms, privatisation and liberalisation, while democratic reforms were put on the back burner. In the absence of a legal infrastructure the radical reforms unleashed severe and sudden economic disruption, which turned the public against the reforms and the reformers.
When the Supreme Soviet attempted to call time on Yeltsin’s reforms he responded by declaring the existing Russian constitution illegitimate and assumed power unilaterally, calling in the army to face down the constitutional court and parliament. Yeltsin and his team introduced a new constitution handing the presidency draconian powers before facing political rejection of his reforms and handing over power to his anointed successor, Vladimir Putin and the chief beneficiaries of the “shock doctrine,” namely the emergent superclass of oligarchs.
Power centres know how to manipulate public emotions at times of crises, often engineered by regimes such as Putin’s. In times of conflict, centres of power cultivate binary choices that force us into tribal-like positions to suppress questioning of simplified moral scripts and arguments. Putin and his inner circle have mastered the dark arts of information wars and the deployment of “psych ops” on an industrial scale, resulting in a mass pacification of Russia’s beleaguered population.
Most are convinced that confronting home truths (let alone those of their neighbours) is a price they are not prepared to pay.
“The Minsk Conundrum”
The conflict in Ukraine can also be traced back to Ukraine’s 2007 negotiations with the European Union over an Association Agreement (AA), according to Chatham House. While Ukrainians and the EU saw the move purely in terms of preparations for future accession, Putin’s Russia came to view the development as an unwelcome extension of the EU’s presence in its post-Soviet sphere of influence where coercive diplomacy has come to be the order of the day.
This conflict in interpretations can also be glimpsed in the so called “Minsk Conundrum” that led to the collapse of the Minsk process overseen by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on the eve of the war.
Timeline:
1991, November: Russian Supreme Soviet (parliament) gives Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, extraordinary powers.
1991, December: Soviet Union is dissolved by the Belovezh accord, creating the Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia, Belarus and Ukraine each recognise the others’ independence.
1993, October: One hundred and forty seven people are killed when President Boris Yeltsin calls in the tanks to face down the Supreme Soviet parliament and constitutional court after the failure of his “shock therapy” market reforms.
1993, December, Boris Yeltsin wins support for a new constitution but his reformist parliamentary candidates lose out badly in parallel parliamentary elections.
1996, Boris Yeltsin is re-elected but is now largely a creature of the Davos set and the one group who benefited from his “shock therapy”: the emergent class of oligarchs.
1999, Boris Yeltsin appoints Vladimir Putin as prime minister and anoints him as his presidential successor.
2007, Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko launches negotiations with the European Union over an Association Agreement (AA), including a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA).
2013, Yushchenko’s successor, authoritarian President Viktor Yanukovych, caves in to Russian pressures to step away from the EU’s Association Agreement while also refusing to sign up to Russia’s EAEU.
2014, Yanukovych’s about-turn sparks the Euromaidan protests drawing thousands of people on to the streets of Ukraine, culminating in the killing of dozens of protestors in the capital on 18-20 February. Yanukovych flees to Russia and a new presidential election is set for May.
Following the implosion of Yanukovych’s regime, Russian troops and irregular forces occupy Crimea to secure access to the Black Sea Fleet base on the Crimean peninsula. The Crimea is annexed and an irregular referendum staged to affirm the region’s incorporation into Russia.
2016: Putin’s regime deploys the first radioactive weapon in Europe, when his agents turn their victim, Alexander Litvinenko, into a “dirty bomb” using radioactive polonium. Before he died a painful death, Litvinenko’s doctors told him he had five times the lethal dose of polonium-210.
2020, by February, the death toll in the conflict had risen to 14,000, with more than 30,000 injured.
At the centre of the proposed EU pact was a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA), which would have eliminated most tariffs on trade in goods. In addition, the DCFTA envisaged near legal and regulatory alignment, with Ukraine transposing much of the EU’s acquis communautaire into its own legislation.
Russia came to view the proposed EU Association Agreement with Ukraine as part of an expanding post-2009 EU profile in the non-Baltic post-Soviet space. The EU had launched an Eastern Partnership also targeting Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova.
While the EU did not view the Association Agreement (AA) as a geopolitical instrument, Russia came to view things differently, interpreting the EU’s activities as “a challenge to its view of the post-Soviet space as its self-proclaimed sphere of influence” for coercive diplomacy. This perception mirrors the US Cold War invocation of the Monroe Doctrine, which has long been used to legitimise Washington’s deep interference in the affairs of Latin America and its ongoing Cuban embargo.
Equally threatening was the prospect of the AA resulting in a radically different model of governance on Russia’s doorstep, in a country that Putin and most Russians regard as virtually indistinguishable, culturally and historically, from their own.
The EU’s eastward expansion also posed a challenge to Putin’s own economic integration project, the Eurasian Economic Union, which he once described as one of the poles in a new multipolar global order. The Kremlin viewed Ukraine’s membership as vital.
Putin’s counter strategy once Ukraine’s central government made it clear that they were determined to sign the Association Agreement after the fall of the Yanukovych regime is described as the “Novorossiya project.” This has been a campaign of undeclared war or violent subversion designed to turn the east and south of Ukraine, where many of the country’s ethnic Russians and Russian speakers live, against the authorities in Kyiv. The strategy played on and amplified the Kremlin’s oft-cited view that Ukraine is not a coherent entity and is inherently unstable.
Chatham House has, in all probability, correctly described Putin’s Novorossiya strategy as a means to an end. The local proclamations of the establishment of the Donetsk Peoples Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic have been used by the Kremlin as bargaining chips in negotiations with Kyiv’s leadership, with demands that the oblasts be granted far-reaching autonomy in a new federalized Ukrainian constitution by the central authorities and with powers that could stymie Ukraine’s ambitions to pursue integration into the European project.
After a decisive set-back to Ukraine’s “anti-terrorist” countermeasures, Russia made a decisive intervention with an invasion of the Donetsk oblast in 2014. This was the context for the first Minsk agreement (Minsk-1), signed in the capital of Belarus on 5 September 2014. Minsk-1 called for:
- An OSCE-monitored ceasefire;
- An exchange of prisoners;
- The withdrawal of ‘armed formations’, military equipment and fighters and mercenaries from Ukraine;
- The establishment of an OSCE-monitored “security zone” along the border; and
- An economic reconstruction programme for Donbas.
Drafted in haste to secure a ceasefire, Minsk-ll was an attempt to paper over yawning differences between the Ukrainian and Russian positions, and contain contradictory provisions. Key political provisions would have seen the central authorities in Kyiv re-establish full control over the Ukraine-Russia border, constitutional reform with provision for decentralization taking account of the peculiarities in the Donbas region and linguistic self-determination, and elections in Donbas.
Extraordinary additional provisions were introduced into the process by the Russians on behalf of the DNR/LNR. These provisions would have handed greater powers to the occupied regions, including responsibility for the legal regulation of the Ukraine-Russian eastern border, the right to conclude agreements with foreign states, and a neutrality clause to be written into Ukraine’s constitution thus ruling out membership of NATO and possibly its membership of the EU.
In the Ukrainian interpretation, the Minsk-ll agreement would have seen the re-establishment of the country’s sovereignty established after a ceasefire in the break-away territories, a Russian withdrawal from eastern Ukraine; a return of the Russia/Ukraine border to Ukrainian control; and free and fair elections in the Donbas region. Ukraine had also accepted, in principle, to deliver limited devolution of power to the Russian-speaking regions in the East that have been weaponized as proxies in Putin’s long-running campaign to disrupt Kyiv’s restoration of sovereignty.
In contrast, Putin’s Russia saw the second Minsk agreement as a tool with which to break Ukraine’s sovereignty. In the words of Chatham House, Russia’s interpretation reverses the key elements in the sequence of actions: elections in occupied Donbas would have taken place before Ukraine had reclaimed control of the border; this would have been followed by comprehensive autonomy for Russia’s proxy regimes, crippling Kyiv’s central authority and its capacity to orient itself towards the West and the European Union.
Federalization of the Ukrainian constitution has been a strategic objective of Russian foreign policy since 2014 when it launched a campaign of violent subversion to bring about this objective. Ukrainians fought back but endured crushing defeats. In a war of attrition that followed tens of thousands of lives have been lost in the Eastern territories.
Minsk-ll supports mutually exclusive views of sovereignty: either Ukraine is sovereign (which is Ukraine’s interpretation), or it is not (which is Russia’s interpretation). And this is the Minsk conundrum. Chatham House describes the pre-invasion positions of the United States and the European Union as less than clear or consistent, with some decision-makers focusing on making Russia change its policies, under the threat of sanctions, others content if Ukraine gave in to Russia’s agenda, and still others seeking an ill-defined compromise that does not exist in Minsk-ll. Russia, on the other hand, has been precise and consistent in its objectives.
Since February 2015, Russia has maintained that Ukraine must agree to its interpretation of the political sections of Minsk-ll with the DNR/LNR before it can get the border back.
Conclusion
In geopolitics, historical narratives are often deployed as justifications for changing facts on the ground and to underpin future-oriented narratives. This instrumentalist approach to history – perfected by ethnic entrepreneurs all over the world – can obscure the realpolitik.
Putin’s behaviour might be based on appeals to history that seek to question the legitimacy of Ukraine but his authoritarian regime’s motives are all too modern, combining crony capitalism that has its origins – in part - in the West’s imposition of a neoliberal “shock” treatment in Moscow and the resulting rise of the authoritarian regime embodied by Putin. The toxic and strategic deployment of ethnic nationalisms to underpin populist support at home and manipulate chaos across his border, has been the final ingredient.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine follows a series of violent incursions, using proxy loyalist regimes in the self-declared republics, designed to deprive his neighbour of its sovereignty, territorial integrity and self-determination. The resulting stand-off, reflected in the contradictory and conflicting approaches to resolution set out in the Minsk-ll “agreement” – hastily formulated to end violence but falling well short of a comprehensive basis for an agreed future – has prompted Putin to turn the tables on the West. In a Hobbesian version of the “shock doctrine”, Putin has decided to use a violent assault on a proto-European democracy (Ukraine) to dramatize the limits of Western power in the face of Russia’s nuclear capability.
Stung by the West’s portrayal of the end of the Cold War as a victory over the Soviet empire, Putin has long nursed an ambition to stage a counter-narrative of NATO and European impotence.
References
Duncan Allan, 2020, The Minsk Conundrum: Western Policy and Russia’s War in Eastern Ukraine. Chatham House Research Paper, May.
⏯Peter Doran, Senior Lecturer, QUB Law School Founding member of the Green Party in the north.
Excellent analysis.
ReplyDeleteIt is superb. A sober take from someone who clearly has an immense understanding of the issues.
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