Tom Friedman writes in tomorrow's New York Times that the current conflict in Ukraine is an existential struggle for both Russia and Ukraine. He recently traveled to Kyiv, where he interviewed some of the protestors for their take on the conflict. The first person he interviewed has a fair question:
At one point, one of the activists, the popular Ukrainian journalist, Vitali Sych, erupted: “Did anyone ask us whether we wanted to be part of his buffer zone?”
That's a totally fair question. Ukraine has a right as a sovereign nation to join the EU if they so desire. But they should not have to choose between the EU or Russia. Ideally, they should court ties with both.
Russia and Ukraine, as Friedman notes, have ties going back to the 9th century.
If Putin loses, and Ukraine breaks free and joins the E.U., it would threaten the very core identity of the Russia that Putin has built and wants to expand — a traditional Russia, where the state dominates the individual and where the glory of Mother Russia comes from the territory it holds, the oil and gas it extracts, the neighbors it dominates, the number of missiles it owns and the geopolitical role it plays in the world — not from empowering its people and nourishing their talents.
However, the notion that Russia will empower the ethnic Russians living in the East is what, in part, drove the protests over there. The challenge for the West and for the current Ukrainian government is to present a credible alternative that will keep the country together. Belarus' solution is to remind its people that they are not Russian or Belorussian, but one country. Friedman continues:
If Putin wins and prevents Ukraine from holding a free and fair election on May 25, his malign influence over his neighbors would only grow. And you would see more of what you saw last week when Joe Kaeser, the chief executive of Siemens, the German engineering giant, went to Moscow to slobber over Putin and reassure him that all their deals would proceed — despite what Kaeser called “politically difficult times.”
And we note that BP, Exxon Mobil, and other big oil companies are saying the same thing as reported by Foreign Policy Magazine. The other problem is the perception that this is a short-term crisis and that things will go back to business as usual. Not according to the protestors Friedman interviewed. This is a long-term struggle that Ukraine happens to be the center of, according to them.
“The Heavenly Hundred died here for human rights and European values,” Popovych told me. But for these to get consolidated into a new politics in Ukraine, the fledgling new state “has to survive” and that will require the E.U. and America to help protect it.
While the use of military force is not a feasible option for the West, they do have one ace in the hole -- the US could bring down Russia's economy tomorrow if they wanted to by imposing oil sanctions on Russia and barring American oil companies from doing business there.
And even without such a move, for Russia, the negatives outweigh the positives of an invasion even though they could overrun all of Ukraine in 3-5 days.
At first glance, the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, seems to have strong reasons to dispatch his tanks: shaping the Ukraine he wants well before elections scheduled for May 25 put a new, legitimate government in place; reclaiming an area that was historically part of Russia; gaining direct access to natural resources and factories that have been crucial to Moscow’s military-industrial complex since Soviet times. And his land grab of Crimea in March made him wildly popular at home.
Yet the reasons for Mr. Putin to refrain from further military adventurism make a longer, more tangled list: the cost of a huge occupation force and the responsibility for the welfare of millions more people; the effect of new, more severe Western sanctions on an already weak economy; the possibility of significant Russian casualties caused by an insurgency in eastern Ukraine; a new, implacably anti-Russian western section of Ukraine; and likely pariah status internationally.
On balance, the negatives would seem to outweigh the positives, analysts said.
The problem for Putin is that he has gotten popular in part by raising his standard of living in Russia drastically. He can't have it both ways; he can't maintain this sort of social welfare state and then turn around and launch a massive full-scale invasion. The other problem is that Ukrainians have extensive experience in partisan activities from World War II. The cost of actually occupying Ukrainian territory would dwarf that of Iraq. And even if they were to grab just a small chunk of territory to open a pathway to Crimea and Moldavia, there would be rampant chaos, institutions would cease to function, and people could not buy or sell land or have access to basic services.
So Putin is likely to maintain his low-grade pressure on Ukraine. But even that has its dilemmas. If Ukraine succeeds in localizing the conflict to Slovyansk and a few other towns, it is unlikely to disrupt the May 25th elections, one of Russia's objectives. And it could be that Russia has opened a can of worms that even it cannot control. The Slovyansk militants have seized some OSCE military observers who were there by treaty. They refuse to release them.
Antigovernment militants in eastern Ukraine on Saturday rebuffed international calls for the release of a group of European military observers, but suggested that they would consider a prisoner exchange.
The Russians want them released.
Andrei Kelin, Russia’s representative to the security and cooperation group, said Russia would take “all possible steps” to help secure the observers’ release. “We think that these people need to be freed as soon as possible,” he said, according to Itar-Tass.
This means one of three things. Either the Russians don't have as much influence over these militants as is popularly believed, or the Russian government is divided and their people are at loggerheads. It could be that the Foreign Ministry wants a diplomatic solution to the crisis, while elements within the Special Forces and Defense Department want to bait Ukraine into some sort of action that they could spin as "ethnic cleansing" and provoke a pretext for invasion. Or else the Russian government is saying one thing in public and doing another thing in private.