Ukraine isn’t over
With the G7 countries issuing a strongly worded statement yesterday against Russia’s annexation of Ukraine, optimists will want to go back to worrying about Malaysia Airlines flight 370. That would be a mistake. Despite President Putin’s disavowals, there is still serious risk to Ukraine from a Russian push into its southern provinces, perhaps as far as the Russian-occupied Transnistria area of Moldova:
Why? Let me count the gains to Moscow:
- Crimea would no longer be cut off from Russia proper.
- The southern provinces of Ukraine are home to heavy industries that cater in part to Russia’s military.
- Having annexed Crimea, pro-Russian political forces are unlikely in the future to win any national elections in Ukraine, so “protection” of Russian speakers requires their incorporation into Russia.
- Ukraine would be reduced to a landlocked remnant with little prospect of being more than a burden to the European Union and the United States.
- Rump Ukraine will find it necessary to make its peace with natural gas supplying Russia.
If thinking along these lines predominates in Moscow, it is hard to imagine anything the EU and US could or would do to prevent a Russian military move. The Ukrainian army is in no position to resist. Washington and Brussels imagine that Ukrainians would mount an insurgency against Russian occupation. That could be a sanguinary affair that could last a decade or more.
It is not easy to come up with reasonable policy options. Deployment of observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is already in progress, is a good idea. But if Putin decides to move, they will stand by to document how many tanks and armed personnel carriers have entered and where they are located.
Military options are out. Though the credibility of the Alliance is at stake, NATO has no obligation and few means with which to defend Ukraine, even though it is a member of Partnership for Peace. The Alliance will have its hands full protecting its Baltic and other easternmost neighbors. It may be able to provide some intelligence and logistical support to Ukraine, but that’s about it.
Thoughts fly to the money Kiev owes Moscow. Does it really have to pay its debts if Russia invades? Probably not, but it would then have to worry about where to find natural gas for heating next winter. There is no quick alternative available, so far as I know.
The ruble and the Russian stock market are already down, but that is likely to be a temporary response with no substantial long-term impact. Only if the EU and US come up with sanctions that really bite Russian banks hard is Moscow likely to pay attention. That’s unlikely, as the Europeans export too much to Russia and depend too much on Russian gas to get serious about financial sanctions anytime soon.
It looks as if we are in for a long-term response to the annexation of Crimea and whatever other parts of Ukraine Putin goes after. We’ve been in this situation before. We had no really good policy response to the Soviet occupation of the Baltics at the end of World War II, of Hungary in 1956 or of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Nor have we done anything substantial about South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which declared independence from Georgia in 2008.
What we had going for us during the Cold War was strategic patience. In the 1950s, I was taught in junior high school that the Baltics were “captive nations.” It seemed quixotic at the time to imagine that they would ever be free. But they were liberated at the end of the Cold War and have since become NATO and EU members.
We have wanted to believe that the ideological contest that gave us strategic patience is gone. Unfortunately, a new one appears to be taking its place. Autocrats like Putin are not relying any longer on state-controlled economies. They are not even pretending to read Marx or Engels. They are enjoying the fruits of at least partly free economies, under the control of their favored oligarchs. We may need even more patience than in the four decades or so of the Cold War in order to see the backs of Putin and his like.
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Kosovo has been on the Russian mind recently – they’re learning from the problems Kosovo has had with its Serbian citizens, and taking measures to prevent them from being repeated in Crimea. For example, Ukrainians without Russian passports have been told they have to leave Crimea by mid-April (one month from the incorporation of Crimea into the RF). Once “abroad,” they can apply for permission to return as foreign nationals. One woman reported that she had been told she could not sell her house in Crimea without a Russian passport. (No word yet on how many suitcases they can take.) Why didn’t Prishtina think of this? It would certainly have simplified matters of inter-ethnic tensions if there had been only one ethnos. – The move probably passes for humor in the Kremlin.
As for a repeat of the Cold War, we won’t be stepping into that river again. Russia is not the Soviet Union, if nothing else. Its neighbors are not nearly as firmly under Moscow’s control as after WWII, for one thing. Even countries that tried to sit out the Cold War are taking Russia’s seizure of Crimea with great seriousness – Sweden may decide to join Nato, after all these years, and even the Finns are showing some signs of interest, according to a Danish paper. The Georgians are beating on the door, and after providing the largest non-Nato contingent in Afghanistan for all these years, really deserve the hearing the Europeans have not been willing to grant them in the past. They are also offering air, land, and sea routes (with Azerbaijan and Turkey) for the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2015 if Russia decides to close its airspace.
Russia is also economically more vulnerable than the USSR was, thanks to having done away with its state-controlled economy and turned to foreign capital for its development. The government has promised increases in wages and pensions that a decline in the price of its hydrocarbons would make impossible to pay, and it’s foreign debts are greater than its holdings of foreign reserves. Putin’s popularity today is over 80%, but the bill for annexing part of another country hasn’t come due yet. The idea of releasing oil from the Strategic Reserve may have its problems (which I imagine the Saudis will be able to point out), but it is tempting. And at least until the end of this week, the Europeans will probably stay focused on further reducing their dependence on Russian gas. If Putin is intent on moving on Ukraine, he has nothing to gain by waiting.