Sleepless in Kiev

Conflict in Ukraine: The unwinding of the post-Cold War order

By Rajan Menon and Eugene Rumer

The MIT Press.  2015.

The Ukrainian crisis stemmed from what must have struck the Kremlin as quotidian arm-twisting.  In November 2013, President Victor Yanukovych was on the verge of signing a pact with the European Union that would have made Ukraine an ally, though not a member, of the EU.   

Putin countered with a bouquet of carrots and sticks.  Russia would lend $15 billion, which was the amount that the International Monetary Fund had said it would lend before it backed away, in 2011, when Yanukovych had refused its strict conditions.  The Kremlin would also knock off almost a third of the price of the natural gas that it sold to Kiev -- a $3 billion discount.  And only God knows what goodies were in store for Yanukovych & Friends.  In return, Mr. President need only tell the EU to take a hike and sign up instead with Putin’s customs union.  Kazakhstan and Belarus were already members.  And if Yanukovych refused?  Well… about that natural gas….

Yanukovych had not anticipated that accepting an $18 billion gift, maybe with a little lagniappe, would draw a hundred thousand demonstrators into the streets of Kiev.  In February 2014, when the confrontations had turned bloody, he hightailed it to Russia, which received him with noses held high.  Yulia Timoshenko was released from prison, as the EU had long demanded.  The old outsiders became the new insiders:  The new president, Petro Poroshenko, had been an official under Yanukovych.

The revolution set the scene for the Kremlin’s favorite strategy – divide and conquer.  “Local separatism… had been used and worked well in Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia by creating permanent frozen conflicts that became Russian outposts for protecting and projecting Russian power…,” write Menon, a professor at the City College of New York, and Rumer, a director at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  Crimea would make an ideal outpost, since it was already home to a Russian navy and to thousands of retirees from Soviet military life.  The Russians went to work.  By March, Crimea had parted ways with Ukraine.

Frozen treats

To the Kremlin, Crimea was valuable because it could check Ukrainian aspirations to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  As NATO expanded in the early 2000s, doubling its number of member states, Russia fretted.  There was no longer a Warsaw Pact to counter NATO’s encroachments.  To understand Russia’s touchiness, “imagine what the American reaction would have been had the Soviet Union won the Cold War, incorporated Canada and Mexico and the other Central American states into the Warsaw Pact, and declared that Washington had no cause for worry….”

Still, Russia may fret too much.  “Throughout the crisis,” the authors note, “NATO leaders have shown no interest in offering Ukraine membership….[They] have made clear that a military conflict with Russia over Ukraine is out of the question.”  The first secretary-general of NATO, Lord Ismay, once joked that the organization’s aim was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Russia was to be out, but not down and out.

NATO’s reluctance miffs the Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – which draw virtually all of their natural gas from Russia and fear Kremlin coercion in the depths of winter. But the Kremlin might well prefer a frozen conflict in east Ukraine to outright annexation.  A frozen conflict would “spare [Russia] the costs and the uncertainties of a military occupation” and yet enable it to intervene in Ukraine. 

Prudence is the better half of power politics.  In 2010, the US and the EU accounted for nearly half of the global economy (measured as gross domestic product); the EU alone accounted for nearly half of Russia’s trade in 2013, particularly Germany.  You don’t want to mess around for too long with customers like these.  The alternative for the Kremlin – allying with China, with which it shares a 2,670-mile border – could occasion conflicts that, for Russia, are anything but frozen. -- Leon Taylor tayloralmaty@gmail.com