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Russiavsthewest:theconsequencesofPutinsinvasionofUkraine

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Russiavsthewest:theconsequencesofPutinsinvasion
ofUkraine
Russias invasion of Ukraine has destroyed the peace in Europe for a generation.
BY ELIZABETH POND

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P UBLISHED 5 MA R CH, 2015 12:12

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I llustration by Andr Carrilho

A year since Vladimir Putin shocked Europe by annexing Crimea and fomenting rebellion in Ukraines previously quiet Donbas region, his
undeclared war on the Russians east Slav brothers has become the newold normal on the continent. I t has displaced the sevendecade
interlude in which Europeans thought they had established a postmodern order of peace in their heartland. I t has induced a loss of hope
that Europes embodiment of the liberal peace first envisioned by I mmanuel Kant can be restored within less than one or two generations
if at all. I t has confronted the west with a stark choice between appeasement of a regional bully or war with no mutually understood
restraints in a nucleararmed world.
Already the truce hammered out by the Ukrainian, Russian, G erman and French leaders on 12 February in allnight negotiations held in
Minsk, Belarus, has collapsed in reality, if not in name. Separatists in eastern Ukraine and their allied Russian paid volunteers never
halted their saturation shelling of the town of Debaltseve at one minute past midnight on 15 February, as had been agreed, but kept up the
barrage for three and a half more days until the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers surrounded there died, or were captured, or managed to

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retreat under blistering fire to contiguous Ukrainian territory.

Only a few of the heavy weapons that were supposed to begin being withdrawn from the designated buffer zone on 16 February have been
pulled back on either side. The rebels have not allowed international monitors to take up their designated posts in the ceasefire zone and on
the Russiancontrolled Ukrainian border.
The truce that was patched up again after the destruction of Debaltseve will probably provide no more than a brief winter respite before a
spring offensive by rebels and Russian professional soldiers in eastern Ukraine. Moscow still denies that any of its troops and modern heavy
weapons are there, despite all the direct photographic, electronic and eyewitness evidence of their presence and the indirect evidence of
artillery and multiplerocketshell targeting on Debaltseve with a precision that only welltrained Russian crews could provide. Since fighting
began last April, nearly 5,700 people have died and 1.5 million have fled their homes, according to the United Nations.
Even before the ceasefire that never was, the G erman chancellor, Angela Merkel, provided the epitaph for European peace by warning that
she could see no realistic scenario in which any arms the west might give Ukraine would significantly change the balance of power in the
conflict. Russia cares more about the fortunes of Ukraine than any other outside country, and possesses the military strength, resources and
capability to counter any new weapons that Ukraine may be gifted. The only hope Merkel could offer was that, with strategic patience, the
west might eventually triumph, just as it ended the cold war in tandem with the unmentioned Soviet statesman Mikhail G orbachev
with the bloodless fall of the 28yearold Berlin Wall in 1989.
This dark prognosis has been reached only in recent weeks. Throughout 2014, Europeans still hoped that their accustomed order could be
restored soon. As Russian special forces in unmarked uniforms and masks abruptly ended the quartercentury of amicable coexistence of the
Russian and Ukrainian fleets in their Crimean port and deposed the peninsulas regional government at gunpoint last March, the US
president, Barack Obama, dismissed postsuperpower Russia as little more than a regional nuisance.
Chancellor Merkel took Putins irredentist threat far more seriously. She warned the US president that his Russian counterpart was living in
another world of tsaristera nationalism that, she implied, precluded any costbenefit rationality or compromise. Obama, preoccupied with
pullback from Americas overstretch in the Middle East and Afghanistan and his socalled pivot to Asia, in effect outsourced secondrank
diplomacy about Ukraine to Berlin. For the first time since 1945, G ermany had thrust upon it a geopolitical leadership of Europe
commensurate with the countrys economic clout. And for the first time Merkel, whose hallmark had been leading from behind, stepped out
in front.
As Putin raced towards annexing Crimea, Merkel told the Bundestag on 13 March 2014 that the previous 69 years of reconciliation, peace
and freedom that had been created by an integrating Europe and the transatlantic democratic alliance were a feat that can still be
considered a miracle. Russias theft of Ukrainian territory was unacceptable in 21stcentury Europe and represented a reversion to the law
of the jungle and to the law of the strong against the strength of the law, Merkel said.
She reprimanded Russia for violating international law and specific treaties to which Moscow was a party, including the 1975 Helsinki ban
on changing European borders by force and Russias 1994 assurance of Ukrainian independence, sovereignty and borders in return for Kyivs
surrender of its huge arsenal of inherited Soviet nuclear weapons to Moscow.
I n dozens of phone calls she warned a disbelieving Putin that Europes hardwon peace trumped commercial interests and that this time he
could not count on G ermanys proRussian business lobby to veto economic retaliation for his provocation. Europe and the US announced
that they would not intervene militarily to defend Ukraine, a nonmember of Nato, but would gamble instead on countering Russia with
slowimpact financial sanctions on his entourage.

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Roses on an army tank in Hrashevatoe, eastern Ukraine, abandoned by Ukrainian troops fleeing the Russian onslaught. Photo: Larry
Towell/Magnum Photos
Merkel was the wests logical interface with the Russian president. She was the ultimate PutinVersteher, or Putin understander, not in
line with the original coinage of this euphemism to describe G erman apologists for Putin, but in the sense of someone who grew up in
Communist East G ermany, spoke Russian and sensed the Russian mindset intuitively.
She understood Putins paranoia about being encircled by Nato, even if that alliance has expanded not by armed seizure of neighbours
territory but by responding to the clamour for membership by central Europeans fearing Russian recidivism to Sovietstyle forced
hegemony. She comprehended the threat to his own rule that Putin feared from street protests in Kyiv he had served as a KG B recruiter of
spies in East G ermany in the 1980s and watched the Berlin Wall fall to people power.
Merkel also grasped his resentment at the subsequent Soviet collapse that he calls the 20th centurys greatest geopolitical catastrophe
and at the independent Ukraine that emerged from the Soviet Union and illicitly tempted its people, in his view, to betray their elder brother
Russians by no longer obeying them as tradition required. The humiliation he felt over the cumulative shrinkage of his influence in Ukraine
was well known in Berlin.
Putin first lost all of Ukraine when his protg Viktor Y anukovych, then president of Ukraine, allowed police snipers to murder scores of
proEuropean, prodemocracy
Euromaidan protesters a year ago. The violence alienated even Y anukovychs own party and left him no choice but to abscond to exile in
Russia, thus ensuring that Ukraine would not add its Slavic weight to Putins pet Eurasian Economic Union project. Putins insistence that
Kyiv join the newborn Union, sometimes called the Soviet Union lite, was the original spark for the Euromaidan demonstrations in late
2013.

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Putin next lost Novorossiya, as he anachronistically called the eastern third of todays Ukraine that he suddenly claimed for Russia. (The
term dates back to the time of Catherine the G reat, who seized New Russia from the Ottoman empire in the 1780s.) He seemed to believe
his own propaganda that discontented Russian speakers in the region would rise up if Russian special forces ignited a rebellion there.
Y et the masses failed to revolt. Only in the rust belt of the Donbas could Russian proxies mobilise illpaid retirees and buy or coerce enough
additional support to set up the selfproclaimed Peoples Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. I ndeed, in the east of Ukraine as a whole,
where many made no clear distinction between Russian and Ukrainian ethnicity, opinion polls showed that most people favoured staying
within the Ukrainian state.
Merkel understood that Moscows costfree takeover of Crimea in the name of restoring Russias lost greatness the greatly outgunned
Ukrainian army on the peninsula did not resist the regional coup, and no Russian blood was shed was boosting Putins popularity ratings
to more than 80 per cent. This gave him renewed domestic legitimation even as his decadeold social contract of restoring order and
offering a better life to a new, urban middle class in postSoviet Russia was becoming ineffectual at a time of economic slowdown.
Merkel therefore did not expect the Russian leader to budge from his zerosum view of international relations. Nor did she expect to deflect
him from his reversion to Russias historic sense of victimhood and need for a security so absolute that Moscow required the insecurity of
neighbours in its sphere of influence.
She did, however, see Putin as an improvising tactician rather than a singleminded strategist. This made him unpredictable, but it also
allowed for movement.
At the first stage of the Ukraine crisis Merkel repeatedly offered to help Putin save face if he would cease his depredations, to the point of
suggesting European UnionEurasian Union talks about creating a common economic space. She hoped to keep him talking rather than
shooting for as long as possible and to nudge him towards a more realistic perception of the advantages he was losing and the tactical costs
that he was incurring in his drive to punish both the Ukrainians and the west for its treatment of Russia as a secondclass power.
Merkel first prepared the domestic foundation to support her diplomacy. She forged a close policy partnership with her Social Democratic
foreign minister, FrankWalter Steinmeier. He and others in his SPD parliamentary caucus weaned the Social Democrats from their
romantic nostalgia for the old O stpolitik days of Chancellor Willy Brandt. Together, the grand coalition between the SPD and her own
conservatives gave Merkel an 80 per cent majority in the Bundestag in support of targeted sanctions against Russia.
The chancellor then rallied G erman business to the cause of sanctions well before the shooting down of a Malaysian passenger airliner
over rebel Ukrainian territory last July, an event that is commonly credited with causing a change of heart among G ermanys proRussian
elite.
Finally, Merkel took the sacrifices that G erman importers and exporters were ready to make (the huge trade between Russia and G ermany
shrank by onefifth between 2013 and 2014) to her EU partners. She argued that the French should make their own sacrifices by not
delivering two Mistralclass helicopter carriers they had contracted to sell to the Russians, and that the British should enforce their money
laundering laws in dealing with the many Russian tycoons who have made a second home in London.
I n the end, Merkel delivered the unanimous vote of all 28 EU members that was required to approve sanctions and she saw to it that the
authorisation was written with enough flexibility to add names to the target list and subtract others without making every shift subject to a
new vote of unanimity. I t was a quiet tour de force.
However, one task the chancellor did not take on was persuading the generally Russophile G erman public that Putins behaviour was
unacceptable. That did not matter, because foreign policy remains an elite exercise in G ermany and because the Malaysia Airlines tragedy
did alter popular perceptions of the Russians and yield 70 per cent public approval of sanctions.
I n midApril last year, Merkel initiated a brief G eneva agreement that put on paper a basic wishlist: stopping the violence, disarming illegal
armed groups, returning seized buildings to their rightful owners and giving international observers from the Organisation for Security and
Cooperation in Europe a monitoring role in eastern Ukraine. By bringing the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and his Ukrainian
counterpart together at the same table, the G eneva accord also finessed Moscows tacit recognition of the legitimacy of the interim
Ukrainian government (appointed by parliament after Y anukovych fled), which Russian propaganda was presenting as the illegitimate result
of a fascist coup.
I ronically, the west was aided by the weakness of the provisional Ukrainian government. Over five weeks in April and May, Putin mounted
menacing war games by placing up to 80,000 Russian troops on high alert on Ukraines northern, eastern and southern borders. But he did
not need to invade in order to extend his influence. Local mercenaries, criminal gangs and other proxies under the command of special
Russian forces were occupying administrative buildings in a string of mediumsized towns in eastern Ukraine. Putin presumably thought he
could control whichever leading politicians emerged in Kyiv without having to shed Russian blood. I n this decision he displayed tactical
caution, preferring the weapon of intimidation to that of military occupation, with its risks of quagmire and even guerrilla resistance.
The next phase of the Ukraine crisis began in late May with the unexpected landslide election as president of Petro Poroshenko, the
chocolate king oligarch who
built his confectionery empire in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and who also has construction and media businesses.
Poroshenko had served in several crony governments and was briefly trade minister under Y anukovych. But he had been a strong backer of
the Orange Revolution, which began in 2004, sparked by elections rigged in favour of Y anukovych. He also supported the Euromaidan
demonstrations from the beginning.
Poroshenko quickly sent the Ukrainian army and militias on an antiterror counteroffensive to recover territory lost to the rebels and their
Russian special forces allies. I n April the longneglected and underfunded army had failed miserably in the same mission, in part because
hardly any soldiers had such simple protection as Kevlar vests or nightvision goggles, and also because the Ukrainians couldnt believe that

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they must shoot at brother Russians who were shooting at them. There were defections to the proRussian side.
By the summer, however, older Ukrainian soldiers who had once served in the Soviet army helped the ragtag Ukrainian forces and the
betterequipped militias to get their act together. They gradually recovered most of the territory held by the rebels and by midJuly were
besieging the remaining rebel strongholds in the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. I n Kyiv, hopes rose that the Ukrainians could prevent
further dismemberment of their country.
On the rebel side, Colonel I gor Strelkov, the designated Russian military intelligence commander of the local proxies and mercenaries who
were being pushed back, complained bitterly that they were being deserted by the leadership in Moscow and asked for more heavy weapons.
The Russians obliged by rolling over the border into the Donbas more multiple rocket launchers, antiaircraft missile systems, plentiful
ammunition and the powerful groundtoair Buk missile system, which can reach an altitude of 10,000 metres.
I n late August the first known direct invasion of eastern Ukraine by Russian paratrooper units followed, rolling back the Ukrainian sieges
and delivering Putins clear message that he would not let his proxies in the Donbas be defeated. Some, perhaps all, of the Russian airborne
troops returned to their home bases after their punitive raid.
Poroshenko understood Putins line in the sand instantly and, on 5 September, he agreed through an envoy to a truce with rebel leaders that
made the half of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions then under rebel control a nogo zone for Ukrainian troops. The ceasefire was never
fully observed but it deescalated the fighting to lowintensity shelling, and the front line remained relatively stable for four months.
G erman diplomacy in this interlude consisted of trying to freeze the conflict by converting the September truce and subsequent protocol into
a permanent, comprehensive ceasefire, or at least into an acceptance of common constraints on escalation. The fear was that if that could
not be agreed on, Europe would enter an era of acute Russianwestern hostility without even the mutual restraints that the two
superpowers settled on at the height of the cold war.
Menacingly, Putin boasted that his troops could be in Kyiv within two days if he so ordered and could reach the capitals of Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, Poland and Romania, all Nato member states, just as fast. I ndeed, he has been illustrating the point graphically by aggressively
testing Nato defences of the Baltic and Atlantic states daily on the seas and in the air and endangering passenger flights by sending
bombers with their transponders turned off into airspace that civilian liners use. On 18 February, RAF jets were scrambled after two
Russian military aircraft were spotted off the coast of Cornwall.
The debacle of this months attempt to secure a truce has killed the last residual hope of a swift peace. Clearly, the end of the neocold war
will not occur the way its superpower original did a quartercentury ago, when Washington ostentatiously outspent and outinnovated
Moscow in weapons as well as general prosperity just as the Soviet economy and society reached a dead end, making Mikhail G orbachev
decide to trade in empire and feud in return for soft power and animal spirits.
Nor will it come alone from Angela Merkels strategic patience, which Philip Stephens of the Financial Timesparses as long on patience but
short on strategy. And it is unlikely to stem from Vladimir Putins progressive foreclosure of his own options by doubling down militarily
after every failure to persuade nonRussians of the splendours of G reat Russian hegemony. The only certainty is that the war between
Russia and Ukraine will go on.
Elizabeth Pond is a journalist based in Berlin and the author of several books about Germany, Europe and the Balkans. They include
Beyond the Wall: Germanys Road to Unification (Brookings I nstitution)

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