Tag: Russia
Battlefield to conference room
Today’s US/EU/Russia/Ukraine Joint Diplomatic Statement aims to de-escalate a conflict that has been spiraling for weeks. The steps it proposes are straightforward:
All sides must refrain from any violence, intimidation or provocative actions. The participants strongly condemned and rejected all expressions of extremism, racism and religious intolerance, including anti-Semitism.
All illegal armed groups must be disarmed; all illegally seized buildings must be returned to legitimate owners; all illegally occupied streets, squares and other public places in Ukrainian cities and towns must be vacated.
Amnesty will be granted to protesters and to those who have left buildings and other public places and surrendered weapons, with the exception of those found guilty of capital crimes.
The Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE) is to provide monitors, as had been hoped in Crimea (but Russia did not permit it, preferring to annex the peninsula).
Like many diplomatic statements, this one is well-intentioned but riddled with ways to wriggle out. There will always be violence, intimidation or provocation on which one side can base its own violence intimidation or provocation against the other. Disarmament of armed groups generally requires a superior force to undertake the task. Which building and other seizures are illegal is in the eye of the beholder. Where are those who allegedly committed capital crimes to be tried and by whom?
Whether the statement is a turning point will depend on political will. It is difficult for me to imagine that President Putin is ready to de-escalate. He has been on a winning wicket both in Ukraine and in Syria. Why would he want to stop now? The statement presumably forestalls further EU and US sanctions, but he knows as well as everyone in the DC and Brussels press corps that agreement on those was going to be difficult. Ukrainian military and police action to counter Russian-sponsored takeovers in the east has so far failed. I suppose Putin knows even better than this morning’s New York Times that Russia’s economy was on the rocks even before the Ukraine crisis. It will get worse, but since when did Putin or Putinism worry about the economy? Oil prices around $100/barrel are all he has needed to get Russia up off its knees. Crisis helps keep the oil price up.
So I’ll be surprised if this agreement holds, or even begins to change the perilous direction Ukraine is heading in. But the statement includes an important bit that should not be ignored:
The announced constitutional process will be inclusive, transparent and accountable. It will include the immediate establishment of a broad national dialogue, with outreach to all of Ukraine’s regions and political constituencies, and allow for the consideration of public comments and proposed amendments.
The Ukraine crisis, like the Syrian one, is fundamentally a political crisis: it is more about perceptions of legitimacy and distribution of power than about who military balance or who speaks which language. We’ve seen in Libya, Egypt and Syria the results of failure to conduct an inclusive and transparent discussion of the kind of state their people want and how its leadership will be held accountable. It is very difficult to move from violence to the negotiating table unless one side is defeated or both sides recognize they will not gain from further violence. Tunisia and Yemen have done it, but they are the exceptions, not the rule.
The odds of successfully moving from the battlefield to the conference room in Ukraine are low. But that is the challenge our diplomats now face, along with the OSCE monitors. I can only wish them success, no matter how unlikely that may be.
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Pulitzers don’t make Snowden a hero
Monday’s Twitter blizzard of Pulitzer congratulations has given way to questions yesterday about the significance of Pulitzer prizes going to reporters who published the Edward Snowden revelations about the National Security Council.
I have no problem with the Pulitzers. All professions celebrate themselves: diplomats do it, the intelligence community does it, universities do it, business does it. Why shouldn’t media give themselves awards? Certainly the revelations made big headlines and generated much discussion, both within the US and abroad. What is news about if not big headlines and lots of talk?
Here is where I dissent: Barton Gellman, one of the Pulitzer recipients, said this on NPR yesterday morning:
Our publication of material that Snowden gave us was our judgment that Snowden did the right thing by telling us what he told.
The Washington Post is entitled to its view on whether Snowden did the right thing, but there is really no need for them to make that judgment in order to publish the material. They only needed to find it newsworthy. Nor is there any need for me to accept their judgment.
It is not the media or the Pulitzer committee that should judge what Snowden did. The main judgment should come from the courts, which are now considering what the government was up to in its collection programs and should also consider what Snowden did. You may think Snowden a whistle-blower, but the only way of knowing whether he is or not is for him to return to the US and face a jury of his peers. He may continue to refuse to do that, and prefer to be sheltered by a government whose behavior he surely knows is at least as bad as that of the one he fled, but that doesn’t make him a hero. It makes him a fugitive.
Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that the journalists involved did anything wrong. The government is responsible for protecting its own secrets. The press in the US is entitled to publish them. I might wish they had shown more discretion, but they have a right to decide what to publish and what to withhold, which need have nothing to do with whether they thought Snowden justified or not.
Even if he does not return to the US, Snowden will eventually be judged by history, when we know more about why he did what he did rather than pursue other channels available as well as what his relationship has been to the foreign governments that have hosted and protected him. I obviously have suspicions on those scores–I don’t claim to be neutral in the matter. I wish the journalists involved had pursued these questions more vigorously than they have. But I am willing to wait for my answers.
The issue of Snowden’s justification, or not, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Pulitzers, Barton Gellman or other journalists. They did their job well by the standards of their profession and should be left to enjoy the prizes that come their way. But they should not tell me that Snowden did the right thing. That’s for you and me, courts of law, and history to decide.
PS: To help with your decision about how Snowden is to be judged, here is what President Putin and Edward Snowden had to say today (April 17):
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Passover wandering
Like 70% of American Jews, I spent last night at a Seder, celebrating the story of liberation from pharaoh. Here are some of the thoughts that were on my mind.
Three years ago I wrote with enthusiasm about the Passover of Arab liberation. Two years ago Syria seemed already in the midst of ten plagues and ruled by a pharaoh who wouldn’t let his people go. Last year I thought things in the Middle East better than expected.
This year I’ve got to confess things are a mess, not only in the Middle East but also in Ukraine.
The war in Syria rages on. Israel/Palestine peace negotiations are stalled. Both sides are pursuing unilateral options. Egypt is restoring military autocracy. Libya is chaotic. Parts of Iraq are worse. The only whisper of good news is from Morocco, Yemen and Tunisia, where something like more or less democratic transitions are progressing, and Iran, where the Islamic Republic is pressing anxiously for a nuclear deal, albeit one that still seems far off.
In Ukraine, Russia is using surrogates and forces that don’t bother wearing insignia to take over eastern and southern cities where Russian speakers predominate. It looks as if military invasion won’t be necessary. Kiev has been reduced to asking for UN peacekeeping troops. NATO can do nothing. Strategic patience, and refusal to recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and any other parts of Ukraine it might absorb, seems the best of a rotten bunch of options.
This is discouraging, but no one ever promised continuous progress. Even the Israelites wandered in the desert. Everyone forgets the part about getting stuck in one lousy oasis for 38 of those years. Freedom is not a one-time thing. It requires constant effort. There are setbacks. And there are breakthroughs.
Americans face their own liberation challenges. While the past year has seen giant strides in acceptance of gay marriage, there have been setbacks to the right to vote. Money is now speech and corporations are people, according to the Supreme Court. I’ll believe that when a corporation gets sent to prison and banks start accepting what I say as a deposit. The right to bear arms continues to expand, but not my right to be safe from those who do, except by arming myself. In Kansas City Sunday a white supremacist and anti-Semite allegedly shot and killed three people at Jewish facilities, all Christians.
The plain fact is that liberation, as Moses discovered, is hard. It requires persistence. There are no guarantees of success. The only directions history takes are the ones that people compel it to take. Some of those people are genuinely good. Others are evil. Sometimes they are both, as son Adam’s piece on LBJ this week suggests. There may be a right side and a wrong side of history, but it seems difficult for many people to tell the difference.
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Putin and Putinism are not foreover
There are things that are difficult to write, even when obvious. People all too often mistake analytical statements for normative ones. They fail to recognize that I can think something is likely to happen without wanting it to happen. Let’s be clear: what I am about to write is not what I want but what I think likely if the Russian takeover of eastern Ukraine continues.
Russian speakers, in an effort coordinated by Moscow, are seizing key government and police sites. But most people in eastern and southern Ukraine before this crisis considered themselves Ukrainian, not Russian, even if they spoke Russian better than Ukrainian. Anyone even remotely attached to Ukrainian identity will take offense at what Moscow is up to. Maintaining that sense of Ukrainian identity has to be a primary objective for those who want the country to remain united. If ever Kiev gets the upper hand, those who are today supporting the Russian takeover will find themselves unwelcome.
We’ve seen this happen in the Balkans, where Milosevic sponsored supposedly local Serb takeovers in parts of Croatia and Bosnia. Both had ample backing from Belgrade, including from its army. Once the Croatians got the upper hand several years later, 180,000 or so Croatian Serbs ended up leaving and entering Serbia. In Bosnia, the 500-600,000 Serbs who lived during the war in Republika Srpska were saved from a similar fate only by the Dayton agreements. In Kosovo, many Serbs left Albanian-controlled areas south of the Ibar once Serbian troops withdrew.
Someone more erudite than I am could extend the analogy to the Sudetenland, where Hitler’s takeover ended not so many years later with expulsion of German speakers.
I am trying in what I say above to avoid the fraught question of whether people were expelled, left of their own volition, or were summoned out. More often than not, such mass movements of population have multiple origins. Having mistreated others during their time in control, some people expect, justifiably or not, similar mistreatment when power is given to their enemies. Others are expelled. Still others respond to calls from their “homeland.” The mix is different in different places, and exponents of opposing sides won’t readily agree on what happened.
But I can be pretty sure that if Kiev ever regains control of the sites Russia is now seizing that an outflux of Russian speakers will ensue. Some will justifiably fear arrest or mistreatment. Others will be expelled by hotheads on the Ukrainian side of the ethnic divide. Still others may respond to an invitation by Moscow, which no doubt will be passing out passports to those who want them, as it did in Crimea.
The only real doubt I have is whether Kiev will ever regain control. It seems unlikely. Russia will always be much stronger. Even with a well-equipped and well-trained army that would take decades to create, Ukraine is not going to be able to defeat Russia in a slugging match. So long as it is prepared to devote the resources required, Russia should be able to maintain control.
There’s the rub. Moscow has a lot of problems other than maintaining dominance in Russian-speaking Ukraine. Russia is not much different in this respect from the Soviet Union. Its internal difficulties, both economic and political, are challenging. While today Russians are enthusiastically backing the takeovers, they are likely to feel differently when the bills start coming in. Putin and Putinism are not forever.
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What to do about whoppers
The Russian Foreign Ministry tweeted this today:
#Lavrov: Active Russian involvement in European affairs has always brought long periods of peace and growth to all European countries.
He must have lived through a different Cold War than the one I experienced, along with millions of Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians. Not to mention Ukrainians. In another whopper, he denies that there are Russian agents in southeast Ukraine.
NATO today gave the lie to Moscow’s claims that it has not built up military forces on the Ukrainian border by publishing satellite photos. Moscow appears to be hesitating to use them, because it knows as well as any Ukrainian that invasion (and its aftermath) will not be a cakewalk. Instead it is bargaining for a federal Ukraine, one that affords the eastern and southern provinces a wide degree of autonomy. That is not the worst idea I’ve heard, but Kiev will have to be careful to ensure that the result is not a kind of stealth independence. Americans may have forgotten where and what Republika Srpska is, but the Russians know and no doubt see it has an attractive model. They are even offering it hundreds of millions in euro loans.
But Ukraine is different from Bosnia. Residents of eastern Ukraine identify as Ukrainians even if relatively few say it is easier for them to speak Ukrainian than Russian. A pre-crisis Bertelsmann Foundation study of language, identity and politics in Ukraine found:
Nothwithstanding any linguistic, political, or cultural differences, the vast majority of Ukrainians consider Ukraine their motherland. Even in the south of the country, 88% believe that Ukraine is their home country. This conviction is even more popular among residents of the allegedly pro-Russian east–93% share this belief, in comparison to the traditionally patriotic west and centre (99%).
Nor is there much difference between Russian and Ukrainian speakers in Ukraine on the importance of democracy (both rank it close to 8 on a 10-point scale) or satisfaction with how democracy has performed in Ukraine (4.6 on a 10-point scale). Crimea was “poles apart” from the rest of the country on whether Ukraine should favor a Russian or European orientation.
The question is what can be done to prevent a Russian invasion and to make one unsuccessful if prevention fails. Moscow is working hard to polarize opinion in eastern and southern Ukraine, trying to ween Ukrainians from their Ukrainian identity and promote the Russian alternative. Kiev has to be careful not to make that task easier. This means caution in dealing with Russia-supporting protesters, who are occupying government buildings in several eastern cities. It also means avoiding legislation or other moves that would infringe on existing rights to speak and use Russian. The right posture if Ukraine wants to avoid invasion is one that is welcoming and friendly to Russian speakers, ensuring as much as possible that they retain their Ukrainian identities.
But invasion may not be avoidable. Some have talked of an armed insurgency against any Russian takeover in the east or south. The trouble with that idea is that insurgencies take a long time and are far less often effective than nonviolent struggles, as Maria Stephan and Marciej Bartkowski discuss this morning. Nonviolent resistance succeeds quicker, better and more often, regardless of the character of the regime against which it is used. Violence would compel Russian speakers in Ukraine to make a choice between speaking Russian and being Ukrainian. That’s what Moscow wants. Kiev, as well as Brussels and Washington, should not.
Lavrov’s whoppers are advantageous. The more he says things that can be readily and definitively disproved, the less appealing the Russian alternative will be. If Moscow invades, presumably claiming to protect Russian speakers from alleged abuse, the West and Kiev will need enormous self-control to avoid making things worse. Washington should be supporting pro-Western civil society groups in eastern and southern Ukraine even now. They will be the nucleus of any nonviolent resistance that emerges later.
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A potent symbol
Montenegro’s Prime Minister Djukanovic is in DC today (and yesterday) to plump for his country’s NATO membership. His talking points were good (extrapolated from what he said):
- Montenegro has prepared well and meets the membership criteria, even if its population is still more or less evenly divided on the proposition;
- an invitation to NATO at the September Summit in Cardiff will have a positive impact on Balkans regional stability, including by encouraging Bosnia and Serbia to move in the same direction;
- the Alliance needs to send Russia a strong message about its willingness and ability to expand and defend its members in response to the Ukraine crisis.
The trouble of course is that Montenegro is tiny (Google says 621,081). However meritorious its candidacy, it is hard to see Montenegrin membership in NATO as a serious response to Russian malfeasance or even to regional instability.
Cardiff requires a broader vision , with an invitation to Montenegro as one component. How to frame this broader vision is the issue. Here are some possibilities:
- the Alliance could explicitly state its intention to invite, when they are ready, all the remaining Balkans non-members (Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia in addition to Montenegro) to join;
- the intention could be broadened to all European democracies, including not only the Balkans but also Moldova, Sweden and Finland as well as Ukraine and Georgia;
- it could even include some non-European democracies, like Colombia, which cooperates closely with the Alliance.
3. is a stretch. 2. risks provoking further Russian reaction in what it regards as its “near abroad,” even if much of it has been said before. It would also potentially saddle NATO with members whose defense would be difficult (especially Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia). In this era of constrained resources and retrenchment, the Alliance should be looking for members whose net contributions will be positive, not negative. I’d plunk for 1., which is neither a stretch nor likely to provoke the Russians, who will campaign against NATO membership for Serbia and Bosnia (as they are already doing in Montenegro) but can do little more than that.
The Balkans owe their current democratic institutions to NATO action. Kosovo in particular sees things that way. More than ninety percent of its population supports NATO membership, which isn’t possible right away because the six-year-old country is just now beginning to build its armed forces. The Albanians of Macedonia are likewise heavily in favor of NATO membership, which they regard as a guarantee of Skopje’s continued adherence to democratic norms (and decent treatment of its Albanian citizens). The ethnic Macedonians are not far behind. The only thing that holds Macedonia back is Greek refusal to accept it as an Alliance member. Bulgaria’s echo of Greek objections will fade quickly if Athens changes its mind.
Serbia and Bosnia are more equivocal. NATO bombed Serbs in both countries–notably Bosnia towards the end of the war there and Serbia in the 1999 conflict over Kosovo. Nevertheless, the current leadership in Belgrade seems to be ready to at least start down the path towards NATO. Membership for Montenegro would encourage them to do so. Once Serbia embarks, it will make no sense for the Serbs in Bosnia to hold back, especially as the Serb units of the Bosnian army are reputedly highly professional and won’t want to suffer exclusion from the club.
So far as I am aware, Montenegro and Macedonia are the only fully qualified NATO aspirants at the moment. Macedonia would have to enter as The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, as provided for in a 1995 interim agreement between Athens and Skopje, whose applicability to NATO membership has been confirmed by a decision of the International Court of Justice. The merits of the case aside, getting The FYROM into NATO will require some heavy political lifting by the United States and Germany, which will need to convince Athens to drop its objection.
In addition to stating its intentions, the Alliance should add substance to its vision by advancing each of the Balkans aspirants as far as possible along the path towards membership. What this means for each country would vary, but the clever bureaucrats at NATO headquarters can figure it out. If Sweden or Finland wants to take some additional steps towards membership, that would be icing on the cake.
A substantial Balkans/Scandinavian move towards NATO would shore up the Alliance’s flanks. It would be a serious diplomatic blow to Moscow, one for which it has no ready diplomatic or military response. All the countries involved would be net contributors to the Alliance. The move would help stabilize the Balkans and give Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia hope for the future. It would demonstrate that aggression in Ukraine has real costs and give contemporary substance to traditional US sloganeering about “Europe whole and free.”
Montenegro is tiny, but wrapped in the right package it could become a potent symbol of an alliance prepared to pursue its ideals, come what may.
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