A recent article in the heavyweight German magazine, Der Spiegel, reports growing German concern about the belligerent approach to Russia by the USA and NATO.
It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet day in an extended stretch of relative calm. The battles between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped and heavy weaponry was being withdrawn. The Minsk cease-fire wasn’t holding perfectly, but it was holding.
On that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once again “upped the ante” in eastern Ukraine — with “well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery” having been sent to the Donbass. “What is clear,” Breedlove said, “is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day.”
German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn’t understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn’t the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).The pattern has become a familiar one. For months, Breedlove has been commenting on Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the border, the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and over again, Breedlove’s numbers have been significantly higher than those in the possession of America’s NATO allies in Europe. As such, he is playing directly into the hands of the hardliners in the US Congress and in NATO.
In any area of potential conflict it is worth considering the position of the other side, this is the mechanism by which trade offs and negotiations can defuse flash points, and can lead towards a mutually acceptable compromise. From the perspective of Moscow, NATO has continued to encircle the Russian Federation, including the incorporation of former republics of the USSR, who now discriminate against ethnic Russians within their own states. Indeed it could be argued that with the ending of the Warsaw Pact, the potential military threats that NATO faces are those created by its own continued existence and enlargement.
Putin certainly takes a robust approach in prosecuting what he sees as Russia’s national interest, and is prone to characterising those who challenge his own approach as treasonous. He is a figure in some ways reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher.
Let us consider though how the crisis in the Ukraine evolved. In 2014 the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych was overthown by unconstitutional means, which included the murder of police, the intimidation of members of parliament, and the open involvement of the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party, according to International Business Times:
The leader of Svoboda, Oleh Tyahnybok, who has appeared at the Kiev protests, has a long history of making inflammatory anti-Semitic statements, including the accusation during a 2004 speech before parliament that Ukraine is controlled by a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” Miroshnychenko also called the Ukrainian-born American film actress Mila Kunis a “dirty Jewess.”
Tyahnybok has also claimed that “organized Jewry” dominate Ukrainian media and government, have enriched themselves through criminal activities and plan to engineer a “genocide” upon the Christian Ukrainian population. Another top Svoboda member, Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn, a deputy in parliament, often quotes Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, as well as other Third Reich luminaries like Ernst Rohm and Gregor Strasser.
Notwithstanding these unpleasant participants in the Maidan protests, the revolution which has cloven Ukraine asunder has received confused but consistent support from British liberals, particularly from the Guardian. Indeed the Guardian took the unusual step of publishing a rather gushing portrait of women in a neo-Nazi terrorist militia on 5th March, including a photograph of a militia woman posing in front of a van decorated with the neo-Nazi slogan “1488” and a Waffen SS insignia. Only after complaints did the Guardian put an appropriate caption to the photograph online, which actually made their puff-piece for the Nazis even more incomprehensible.
At the start of the crisis in 2014, there is no doubt that the Yanukovych government was deeply unpopular, Ukraine was suffering corruption and graft, and was in danger of being pulled apart by differing sectional interests. As it stood at the crossroads, Ukraine would either resolve those issues constitutionally, and within the rule of law, or it would descend into the abyss.
The rule of law requires that a sufficiently robust shared framework of economic, ideological and political assumptions exists to allow, sometimes very deep, internal conflicts to be resolved constitutionally and without violence. It requires that the opposition limits its efforts to replace the government to constitutional means, and it requires that the government is prepared to surrender power to the opposition.
While it was proportionate for foreign states to urge caution upon Yanukovych, and pressurise the Ukrainian government towards compromise, unfortunately, several politicians from outside Ukraine, such as Senator John McCain, seemingly deliberately exacerbated the situation, visiting Maidan and pushing the trajectory further towards an extra-constitutional outcome. At the point where those states and international bodies ostensibly committed to the rule of law could have fought to keep the Ukrainian conflict away from violence, they encouraged the opposition to stand against compromise. The picture above shows John MCain with neo-Nazi, Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of Svoboda
Most remarkably, as Channel Four reported, a bugged conversation between the EU foreign affairs spokesperson, Baroness Ashton and a man believed to be Urmas Paet, the Estonian foreign minister, showed that Baron Ashton seemingly knew that snipers who shot opposition protesters were actually a false flag operation organised by the opposition itself, presumably to provide a pretext for the resulting coup d’etat.
Tragically, violence has its own autonomous logic. Now that civil war has been unleashed, then it will be extremely difficult to restore peace, this is of course especially true where Western governments act deliberately to impede peace. the deployment of British military advisors to Kiev would seem to be a provocation to Russia explicitly against the provisions of the Minsk agreement, that calls for the withdrawal of all foreign military forces.
As Seumus Milne notes, the increasingly grandstanding talk about a Russian military threat has the inherent danger of becomming a self fulfilling prophecy:
In the west, Ukraine – along with Isis – is being used to revive the doctrines of liberal interventionism and even neoconservatism, discredited on the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, Angela Merkel and François Hollande have resisted American pressure to arm Kiev. But when the latest Minsk ceasefire breaks down, as it surely will, there is a real risk that Ukraine’s proxy conflict could turn into full-scale international war.
The alternative is a negotiated settlement which guarantees Ukraine’s neutrality, pluralism and regional autonomy. It may well be too late for that. But there is certainly no military solution. Instead of escalating the war and fuelling nationalist extremism, western powers should be using their leverage to wind it down. If they don’t, the consequences could be disastrous – far beyond Ukraine.
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