© REUTERS/Denis Sinyakov

The NSA (or maybe the BND – the provenance remains murky) just made the coup of the year. It intercepted the top secret 2015 Christmas congratulations the KGB (sorry – the FSB) sent to its operatives in Ukraine. Back in President Vladimir Putin’s own time in Dresden as a young KGB major, the annual pat-on-the-back was issued at New Year’s; but ever since Putin embraced Russian Orthodoxy, the chief official benediction has come instead on Christmas (valid this year until January 7, following the Orthodox calendar).

Here it is, in an exclusive for the Berlin Policy Journal:

Comrades! You have performed beyond all expectations, as even the dullard Barack Obama will finally have to concede in 2016. Here’s the state of play:

By pulling our 100-mm-plus guns back from the Donbass frontline in September and killing no more than one or two Ukrainian fascists per day with 82-mm mortars and Grad multiple rocket launchers, we have convinced our Younger Brother upstarts that we no longer pose a threat to them. You FSB folks have therefore helped to accomplish what the hotshot spetsnaz and even our glorious military troops failed to achieve: we have made the Ukrainians lower their guard, even as we continue to send tanks and other persuaders over their border.

Take the Ukrainian oligarchs. (OK, they aren’t as rich as our oligarchs, with only five billionaires, but they did deploy start-up militias that prevented us from reconquering Catherine the Great’s Novorossiya in 2014.) Even these tycoons don’t worry about us anymore, and have resumed fighting each other tooth and nail. Dmytro Firtash (a has-been dropout from the billionaire list) has found out in his Vienna exile and Ihor Kolomoysky (#2 on the billionaire list) in his Swiss and Israeli domiciles that what we always said about the West was true – that its kleptocracies are no different from our own. The pious condemnations of Ukraine’s “cancer of corruption” voiced by American Vice President Joe Biden are just hypocrisy; isn’t his own son on the board of a minor Ukrainian oligarch? Make sure the Russia Today (RT) TV broadcasts in your area keep pounding away on this kompromat.

True, we tried to induce Ukrainian complacency once before, in spring of last year, and didn’t succeed, even when we massed 80,000 troops on high alert on three sides of Ukraine and feinted as though we planned on attacking. Oddly enough, this didn’t convince our Younger Brothers that they owe us Older Brothers their allegiance – instead, they just got more and more anti-Russian. We were too optimistic when we bluffed and didn’t actually attack; we thought the Kiev government would just collapse on its own. But it didn’t – not then.

This time, though, we’re playing it smarter, while Ukraine is playing it dumber. Our genius president is totally ignoring Ukraine and showing that Russia is a great power in Syria instead. That has made Ukrainian oligarchs think they can savage each other scot-free, and they’ve abandoned their crisis solidarity. They’re doing our job for us, just as they did a decade ago, when the first Maidan revolution imploded. And none of the top crooks are being investigated, let alone jailed.

Even the Euromaidan fanatics are helping us. The nationalist right (not a good nationalist right like the Front National we finance in France, but a bad nationalist right that demonizes us) is picking street fights with the center, and some of them seem to be amateurishly fencing stolen paintings from a provincial Dutch art museum. The whole Euromaidan crowd (with a lot of assistance from Georgia’s expat Mikheil Saakashvili) are firing their rhetorical big guns at marginal guys like Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. The PM is now down to 1 or 2 percent in the polls anyway, since the public blames him for the reforms that tripled electricity prices and for the 12 percent drop in GDP this year. That’s super – the good old trick of using an anti-corruption drive to crush your weaker enemies works every time.

The upshot is this: Ukrainians are tired of the war after taking a beating for two years. They are tired of the government reforms, which still bring nothing but trouble. Some nostalgia for stable Russian hegemony is even coming back – a good point for RT to stress in its broadcasts, for those of you in the influence department. (Just don’t push it in the separatist Donbass, where the villagers who have stayed in their wrecked houses are eager for the end of war, and are starting to demand wages equal to the Russian “volunteer” soldiers – who are officially not there, but are getting paid quadruple the locals’ wages.)

Ukraine’s fatigue will therefore inevitably lead to the fall of Yatsenyuk and the present government coalition – and to early parliamentary elections next spring, which will restore an old guard that understands the respect they owe us Older Brothers.

So keep up the good work! S novym godom! Slava Rossii!

The post Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, “Volunteer” appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Kazbek Basaev

The biggest surprise in Ukraine this month is the dog that didn’t bark. In the first week of September not a single Ukrainian soldier was killed in the Ukrainian-Russian battleground in the eastern tip of Ukraine; in fact, the big guns have now been silent there for two weeks. The combined Russian and local rebel forces “still violate [the year-long] ceasefire up to ten times a day” in skirmishes, says Andriy Lysenko, Ukraine’s presidential defense spokesman, but they have stopped shelling the Ukrainian lines with heavy weapons.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak calls this reprieve “the lowest number of shootings over the past year-and-a-half” in Russia’s undeclared war on Ukraine. It follows twelve months in which heavily armed Russian/rebel forces, breaching the Minsk agreements of September 2014 and February 2015, have driven Ukrainian troops out of pockets along the truce line in bloody firefights and made incremental gains – but have not been able to break through Ukrainian defenses in any major offensive. Even NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, after a summer in which NATO generals were expecting a new Russian attack at any moment, admits that “so far it looks like the ceasefire is now more respected than it has been for a long time.”

Could a fortnight of unusual quiet presage a solution to what Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London Lawrence Freedman describes as a crucial conundrum in the fluid post-superpower world: how to convert a military deadlock into a stable political settlement? (For German efforts to bring this about, see Berlin Policy Journal’s interview with Markus Ederer, State Secretary at the German Foreign Office.)

What the relative quiet doesn’t mean is that Russian president Vladimir Putin has won his war. On the contrary, Putin has long since given up his expectation that eastern Ukrainians would rise up against Kiev if only they were nudged into revolt by Russian special forces infiltrated into the region – and that such rebellion would lead to the “return” of Catherine the Great’s 18th-century “New Russia” territory to Moscow. In this light the Russian president’s periodic saber-rattling toward Ukraine looks more like a mimicry of threat to maintain his macho domestic image.

The clearest measures of Putin’s lowered goals are the conspicuous absence of that long-awaited summertime offensive by up to 24,000 Russian regular troops already in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine and 50,000 Russian troops massed in nearby Russia, along with squabbling among Russia’s proxy rebels in the Donbass. Both fall and spring are bad times to attack because the seasonal mud makes roads in rural Russia and Ukraine difficult to navigate. Moreover, it appears that Moscow is now damping down the militancy of its unruly Donbass proxies by demoting militants and promoting those who favor political over military conquest of Ukraine.

Western analysts who regard continuing deadlock as a victory for Putin’s “hybrid war” argue that Moscow is creating another “frozen conflict” and could manipulate the Donbass at will to sabotage the Kiev government as it does in the quarter-century-old “frozen conflicts” in Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Yet since Putin has single-handedly consolidated a newfound national identity in Ukraine by attacking it, his army would now have to occupy the whole country in order to control it. The half-measures of deniable hybrid warfare – Russian officials still claim, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that there are no Russian regulars in Ukraine – have shown their limits.

The biggest deterrent to overt occupation is the prohibitively high costs, as Putin seems to be acknowledging for the first time in his new-found restraint. These include the rising numbers of dead Russian soldiers, the prospect of a quagmire of guerrilla warfare in Ukraine itself, military overstretch and a shortage of Russian troops for other contingencies in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and abroad, increasing Western financial sanctions, and domestic economic degeneration.

To outsiders, the deaths of anonymous Russian soldiers in Ukraine might not appear to be a real disincentive to belligerence for a ruler who enjoys almost 90 percent popularity, exercises vast power over domestic media, and has jailed the few political dissidents who have dared to cross him. Nor would it seem possible that the West’s long-term financial sanctions could have damaged Russia’s economy so fast.

Yet in retrospect Western analysts credit the casualties of Russian soldiers in Afghanistan with Moscow’s withdrawal of these troops in the 1980s. The extraordinary buildup of the ragtag Ukrainian army of early 2014 to a force that almost routed Putin’s Donbass proxies a year ago (and were themselves routed only by the first Russian regular invasion of Ukraine in August 2014) is another deterrent to Putin. So is the measured Western response to Russian belligerence, providing small-unit military training to Ukrainian troops and conducting joint military exercises in the Baltic and Black Seas while refraining from sending “lethal” weapons to Ukraine. These moves have signaled NATO’s determination to defend alliance members and to give Kiev help for self-help without escalating the war in a dramatic gesture that would prompt Putin to do the same.

The upshot is that now the Donbass stalemate – or “exhaustion”, as Freedman terms it – is actually beginning to look like something of a victory by default for Ukraine. As the attacker, Moscow loses if it does not seize more of the Ukrainian territory Putin has claimed for Russia. As the defender, all Kiev has to do is to maintain the stalemate. Freedman suggests that at this point “Russia might be more vulnerable to exhaustion than Ukraine…. The longer the conflict continues along the current path, the more time Ukraine has to reform its military and economy and deal with corruption.”

By contrast, time is no longer on Putin’s side. The trick will be to “prepare for the point at which the most exhausted side can slide away from its previous stance under the cover of implementing an established agreement.” In this case, that would of course be the much-maligned Minsk agreements.

The post Truce At Last? appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Handout/Ukrainian Presidential Press Service

We are still playing a waiting game in Russia’s undeclared war on Ukraine, but it is evolving. The Obama administration recently reengaged directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin after more than a year of minimal contact (which the Russian media is spinning as proof that the United States has finally prioritized Russia over Ukraine). The West, while still refusing to give lethal weapons to Kiev to counter the equipment that Russia is pouring into eastern Ukraine, has begun cautious training of Ukrainian troops, and is sharing more battlefield intelligence with Kiev. And the West, including Japan, showed unexpected unity at last weekend’s G-7 summit in threatening to adopt even tougher sanctions if the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine fail to adhere fully to the “Minsk agreements” – both the stricter original ceasefire signed last September and its more lax implementation deal worked out in February of this year.

In the European Union German Chancellor Angela Merkel has successfully linked any easing of EU financial sanctions on Russia to full implementation of the Minsk accords from Moscow and the Ukrainian separatists. And in Moscow, Russian President Putin has shown that he can still control his country’s nationalist passions when he curbed hothead separatists in Ukraine’s Donbass and quietly dropped his signature campaign to wrest all of “Novorossiya” east of Ukraine away from Kiev without sparking any Russian backlash.

Russian mathematician and Putin critic Andrey Piontkovsky detects a “new toughening of the West’s position,” saying that the transatlantic community has decided that it “must stop Putin in Ukraine by non-military means” today to avoid having to use military means tomorrow to defend the Baltic states. This will present Putin with a choice, Piontkovsky concludes, between “political death as someone who will be held responsible for corruption, responsible for the downing of [Malaysia] airliner [flight 17] and a mass of other unattractive affairs or be the fighting leader of ‘the Russian world’ who throws a challenge to the entire West.”

In this changing environment, the asymmetric waiting games being played in Kiev, Moscow, Berlin, and Washington might best be summarized as follows.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is braced for a “full-scale invasion” by Russia carried out by the estimated 9000 heavily-armed Russian troops inside Ukraine’s Donbass and 50,000 massed just over the Russian border. He expects a Russian/separatist attempt to seize more Ukrainian land at any moment, probably starting with an offensive like last week’s 12-hour battle in Maryinka.

The biggest potential threat to Ukraine’s stability is that contingent of 59,000 Russian soldiers in and near the Donbass. Last summer Ukrainian forces came close to dislodging eastern separatists until Putin reinforced his Ukrainian proxies with elite Russian airborne troops. Since then he has steadily funneled ever more Russian T-72 main battle tanks, multiple rocket launchers, artillery, and armor over the border into Ukraine, while rotating Russian troops and generals in and out of the Donbass in varying numbers. Poroshenko acknowledged the weakness of his position when he agreed to the first Minsk truce of September 5. Now the barely disguised Russian forces in the Donbass are well situated for either intimidation or blitzkrieg.

President Putin, according to German Kremlin-watchers, is expecting the Ukrainian government to collapse from its own – to use Soviet-speak – “contradictions.” He correctly sees Kiev’s basket-case economy as far worse off than Russia’s, and expects fratricidal instincts among Ukrainian oligarchs and politicians to lead to a repetition of the meltdown that consumed the government elected after the 2004 Orange Revolution. He might therefore just prefer to wait for the Kiev government to fall instead of launching an offensive that would surely increase Russian combat deaths, which Putin is already taking pains to hide from mothers and wives.

Moreover, the Russian president expects that Europeans will soon lose interest in Ukraine and ease sanctions, just as he (wrongly) expected the Russophile German business lobby to block sanctions in March 2014 and as he (wrongly) expected Ukraine’s chaotic interim government to fail before Poroshenko’s election a year ago. He could very well make the same decision he made in spring of 2014, when he mobilized some 80,000 troops on high alert for a month on Ukraine’s north, east, and south, choosing only at the last minute to forego invasion and wait for an implosion that never occurred.

Merkel’s ability to hold the 28 EU members together thus far on unanimous sanctions threatens to upend Putin’s plans, however, as do Russia’s growing economic and financial losses under the sanctions and Ukraine’s surprising resilience in the face of 15 months of undeclared war.

Chancellor Merkel has been playing a long game since the Ukraine crisis began. Last year she succeeded in offsetting the West’s utter military absence in Russia’s neighborhood – and public refusal to put boots on the ground of non-ally Ukraine – by orchestrating a de-escalation of violence in the initial September 5 Minsk truce. This averted a dangerous escalation spiral one in which Russia could have triumphed at every turn. The truce was never an end in itself, but a search for equilibrium at a lower level of violence. After this equilibrium collapsed in the face of a Russian/separatist offensive in January, Merkel and Poroshenko sued Putin for a new equilibrium in the February “Minsk-2” implementation that tacitly recognized new Russian gains.

Merkel still hopes that the longer the West can confine Putin and his separatist protégés to a quasi-frozen conflict, the greater the chances Putin will be compelled to see the economic, international, and even domestic costs to Russia. She has always offered to help the Russian president save face if he reverses his aggression, and she continues to do so, even if face-saving has become ever harder as Putin narrows his options.

The greatest potential spoiler for Merkel’s plan to restore heartland Europe’s seven-decade peace, then, is Vladimir Putin’s 19th-century fixation on national military greatness.

For his part, President Barack Obama is pairing reluctant direct reengagement with Russia with conspicuous NATO exercises to reassure Poland and Baltic NATO members, and with steadily increasing non-lethal military aid to Ukraine. And the administration is floating the ideas of modifying the missile defense it is now building in Europe against any Iranian nuclear breakout to target Russia missiles too – and possibly even returning intermediate-range nuclear-capable missiles to British bases.

The greatest hurdle he might face is distraction from all the other world crises, and by the all-consuming 2016 presidential campaign, which is already gaining momentum.

All are now waiting to see what the key player, Vladimir Putin, will do next. In this confrontation, Andrey Piontkovsky concludes that, emotionally, Putin will indeed be drawn to the role of “the fighting leader” – but some of his entourage may start to think that his “political death” might be a preferable alternative.

The post The Waiting Game appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

(c) REUTERS/RIA Novosti

Analysis of the Ukraine crisis by Ukrainian-American historian Alexander Motyl and German Chancellor Angela Merkel differs sharply from that of John McCain and John Mearsheimer in that it regards Russia as the loser rather than the winner so far. This view by no means belittles the dangers in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s zero-sum adventurism, but it sees a glimmer of hope that diplomacy could help deescalate Putin’s aggression. Such hope is conspicuously absent in McCain’s drive to arm Ukraine with lethal weapons, and in Mearsheimer’s appeal to let Moscow rule unchallenged in its own sphere of influence.

Beyond the role of diplomacy, there are some areas of overlap between the four views. In part, Motyl, Merkel, and McCain implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) heed the constraints of Mearsheimer’s realpolitik. Motyl argues that, pragmatically, Kiev should cede to Moscow both of the “two economic sinkholes – Crimea and the Donbass” that Russian troops and local separatists already control physically, the better to transform and modernize the remaining nine-tenths of Ukraine. The West as a whole has tacitly accepted Russian control of Crimea, and even McCain, by rejecting the risky deployment of Western boots on the ground, has implicitly endorsed the consensus fear that Russia’s 771,000-strong armed forces and 20,000 tanks could quickly trump a tiny Western augmentation of Ukraine’s 121,000 servicemen and 2000 tanks. In an era with fewer agreed taboos on state violence than existed during the Cold War, all want to avoid sleepwalking into tit-for-tat escalation that could unwittingly build momentum toward a nuclear showdown.

In today’s most urgent policy debate, Motyl and McCain both support arming Ukraine with lethal defensive weapons. Both Merkel and Mearsheimer oppose this move, the former because of the danger of uncontrolled escalation, the latter because the West shouldn’t meddle in Russia’s hegemonic “near abroad.”

The Motyl View

Motyl builds his case on the premise that Russia no longer possesses the “escalation dominance” it enjoyed in Ukraine a year ago from its regional military superiority, its fierce perceived national interest in subduing a neighbor, its ability to export heavy weapons and soldiers at will across Ukraine’s unprotected eastern border, and Kiev’s lack of allies. What may by now be making even Putin rethink a new offensive – one that NATO commanders believe to have already been planned – is the unexpected cost, in blood and treasure, of Russia’s undeclared war on Ukraine.

The Russian president never dreamed that the fractious West could agree on financial sanctions that would lead Russia to a projected GDP drop of some 4 percent this year and block key new investments from the West. Or that the weak interim government in Kiev would survive. Or that Russian-speaking peasants in eastern Ukraine would decline to rally to the secessionist cause, even after Russian Spetsnatz officers lit the fuse of rebellion. Or that the Russian army would be overstretched by the intervention. Or that Russia’s incursion would prove counterproductive in accelerating the formation of a distinctive Ukrainian identity unified against Russian aggression, resuscitating the NATO alliance, sparking closer Scandinavian defense coordination with NATO and the formation of a joint Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian brigade, and condemning the Russian economy to stagnation at the level of mineral extraction.

Above all, Putin never guessed that the ragtag Ukrainian army and volunteer militias would take up a doomed fight against the Russian behemoth and kill an embarrassing number of Russian soldiers. In fact, the Ukrainian forces would actually have defeated Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine last summer, had Putin not sent Russian paratroopers with devastating firepower to rescue the insurgents. And although the “cyborg” Ukrainians who held out for months at the Donetsk airport and the Debaltseve salient failed to stop the final fall of those enclaves to insurgents under clandestine Russian command in January and February 2015, they took a heavy toll on Russian combatants. If Putin were to escalate from mere seizure of Ukrainian territory to a far more demanding occupation, he would have to expect high casualties from guerrilla forces, similar to those inflicted by western Ukraine’s two-year underground resistance to Soviet takeover after 1945. This (despite official denials that any Russian troops are fighting in eastern Ukraine) would make it impossible for the Russian populace to remain ignorant of the combat deaths of Russians, which the Russian army is doggedly hiding from the mothers and wives of the dead at the moment.

Motyl does not by any means think that the outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian forces could win set battles against the mix of Russian regulars, local mercenaries, and criminal gangs in eastern Ukraine by themselves. What he argues instead is that if the Ukrainians and their Western supporters can hold Putin to a stalemate, they will have won the war. Motyl summarizes: “Anything short of such a victory amounts to a defeat for Russia. Having destroyed the Russian economy, transformed Russia into a rogue state, and alienated Russia’s allies in the ‘near abroad,’ Vladimir Putin loses if he doesn’t win big. In contrast, Ukraine wins as long as it does not lose big. If Ukraine can contain the aggression, it will demonstrate that it possesses the will and the military capacity to deter the Kremlin, stop Putin and his proxies, and survive as an independent democratic state.”

Former US presidential security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski agrees, saying the West should offer Russia “genuine accommodation, and at the same time convince Russia that crossing certain lines is prohibitively expensive for Russia itself.” He sees an “analogy here between the German general staff after Anschluss, warning Hitler that if he pursues the efforts against Czechoslovakia too energetically, he will plunge the Germans into a war for which it is not yet ready but will be ready in about four years.”

The Merkel View

Chancellor Merkel’s approach is less an analytical school than a psychological reading of Vladimir Putin and a pragmatic guideline to the crisis diplomacy that she is leading. She is the Western head of government best equipped to talk with Putin, and she has stuck with the need to do so, no matter how fruitless the dialogue has been.

As a Russian speaker who grew up in the Soviet client state of East Germany, she understands Putin’s bitterness at the abrupt loss of Moscow’s empire in 1989 and the loss of all of Ukraine last year through the political failure of Viktor Yanukovych. She sees the Russian president’s fury at a Ukraine that gutted his pet project of a Eurasian Union by not joining it. She famously warned President Barack Obama early on that Putin was living “in another world.” She declined to elaborate, but Western pundits take this as meaning a poisonous paranoia that regards Russia as all-powerful militarily in its own neighborhood, but simultaneously as the greatest victim of Western exploitation when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to withdraw Moscow’s armed forces from Berlin and Central Europe a thousand miles to the east.

Merkel’s diplomatic goal might best be described as operationalizing, incrementally, what Brzezinski defines as the “balance between deterrence and accommodation.” Her method is to maintain contact so as to be available for compromise whenever Putin finally realizes that the costs of his present belligerence – including being forced to accept a junior role in a new partnership with China, rising jihadism among Russia’s Chechens and other Muslims, Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s tentative moves to put more distance between Belarus and Moscow, and continued capital flight and brain drain from Russia – far outweigh the benefits. Her mantra is that there is no military solution in Ukraine. For her this truism excludes delivery to eastern Ukraine of Western lethal weapons, which could be matched and surpassed instantly by Russia’s heavy weapons anyway and risk pushing Putin to up the military ante and blame the West when he feels cornered. But it also requires Putin to keep his own military and the trigger-happy proxies he has empowered in the Donbas on a short leash.

Thus, in May and June of last year, she played the West’s weak geopolitical hand to get Russia’s signature on a Geneva agreement, however ambiguous, that she could measure Putin’s future actions against – and to win time for the fledgling Ukrainian government to pull itself together. Simultaneously, she successfully rallied support for financial sanctions on Russia from businessmen in the pro-Russian German industrial lobby, and achieved the required unanimous approval of all 28 members of the European Union. In September, after Putin revealed his red line – he would not let client insurgents in eastern Ukraine be routed – she choreographed a truce that at least deescalated the violence. Last February she renewed the imperfect truce to provide a three-month relative lull, one that the United States and Britain – soon to be joined by Canada and Poland – are now using to send a modest few hundred trainers to western Ukraine to drill Ukrainian troops. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has also used the lull to get NATO and the Russian military to reintroduce a hotline for the first time since the end of the Cold War.

If Chancellor Merkel’s instincts are right, President Putin might play the peace card and roll over today’s uneasy ceasefire for another few months to encourage dissenting European Union members to peel off at the EU’s next decision rounds in July and December. If Senator McCain’s instincts are right, the truce could explode into a heavy battle in eastern Ukraine within weeks.

The post A Farewell to Arms? appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

(c) REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

US Senator John McCain sees Russia’s undeclared war on Ukraine as an epic (and hotter) re-run of the Soviet-American Cold War that the wimpish United States is losing to Putin’s military juggernaut and superior political will. University of Chicago purist realist John Mearsheimer, by contrast, regards Russia as behaving normally for a great power in invading a smaller neighbor, annexing Crimea, and then stoking secession in eastern Ukraine through military coercion and patronage.

Rutgers political scientist Alexander Motyl, on the other hand, contends that Russian President Vladimir Putin is losing the contest in the long run and that Ukraine finally holds the initiative, despite the Russians’ overwhelming superiority on the battlefield. And German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who leads the West’s diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the violence in Ukraine, argues – to put it more bluntly than she herself does – that it is Putin’s post-empire paranoia that makes the current state of play so dangerous.

The difference matters: the four premises imply very different Western responses. In essence, the McCain thesis assumes that the ongoing Russian military buildup in eastern Ukraine is laying the groundwork for Moscow to overturn the present fragile truce and launch a fresh offensive in Ukrainian “Novorossiya” in the next few weeks, and that there is no non-military solution to Russia’s regressive violation of Europe’s seven-decade taboo on forcible seizure of a neighbor’s territory. The West must therefore avoid appeasing Putin as it once appeased Hitler, and instead give Ukraine lethal weapons to defend itself while calling Putin’s bluff that he would trump any Western escalation all the way up to the nuclear level.. For his part, John Mearsheimer blames the West itself for provoking the Russian bear, and counsels Washington to simply defer to Moscow in its sphere of influence.

Motyl maintains that Kiev should cede to Moscow the half of the Donbass that is already controlled by Ukrainian rebels and Russian soldiers, defend the remainder of Ukraine and make it a showcase of economic and democratic development, and deter further Russian encroachment on Ukrainian territory. Deterrence could be achieved, he believes, through the cumulative impact of the West’s financial sanctions, rising Russian casualties, and Russian generals’ worry that any escalation of the army’s mission to occupying Ukrainian territory against probable partisan guerrillas would overstretch its capabilities. At this point, he posits, it is Moscow rather than Kiev that would lose if there is a stalemate.

Finally, the pragmatic Chancellor Merkel insists that there is no possible military solution given the West’s weak geopolitical position in Russia’s backyard. She focuses instead on deescalating the level of violence in Ukraine to a semi-stable level and relying on the long-term policy of containment that won the first Cold War.

This blog explores the McCain and Mearsheimer theses. A second post will examine the Motyl and Merkel variants.

The McCain View

It became clear how sharply Senator McCain’s view diverged from Merkel’s last February on the sidelines of the blue-ribbon Munich Security Conference. In a private meeting between German officials and American politicians, he lambasted the chancellor (and President Barack Obama) for not sending lethal weapons to Ukraine, and compared the European pursuit of peace talks with Putin to Neville Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler in 1938. Shortly thereafter, in unusually caustic criticism of an allied leader, McCain complained to a German TV interviewer that one could think Merkel “either had no idea that people in Ukraine were being butchered, or was indifferent to it.”

Former NATO commander Wesley Clark, the most prominent spokesman for the McCain approach today, recently made the case that delivering weapons was the only course that could deter further “military adventurism” by Putin in Ukraine. He said that Ukrainian forces, although they are vastly inferior to the Russian military machine in manpower and weapons, are ready to fight, and even came close to defeating the Russian-led secessionists in eastern Ukraine last August. Ever since, the Russians have been augmenting their already superior arsenal in the area despite making tactical withdrawals under the truces that Merkel negotiated with Putin in September and February. Moscow has used the barely monitored ceasefires to infiltrate ever more tanks, rocket launchers, and drones into the Donbas, amass some 50,000 troops on the Russian side of the Russian-controlled border, and fire artillery from Russian soil onto Ukrainian strongpoints. Last January Moscow also sent “rotating commanders” into the Donbas to lead the secessionists’ renewed surge there and push the truce line westward along the 400-kilometer front.

Neither financial sanctions nor diplomacy can stop “the Russian war plan,” Clark argued. Therefore, Ukrainians – who are fighting “the battle of Western civilization” for all of us – should be provided with the lethal defensive weapons that would enable them to repel “the next wave of the attack” that Clark expects the Russians to mount in the next few weeks. Specifically, he wants the West to equip the Ukrainians immediately with portable Javelin fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles.

The Mearsheimer View

Mearsheimer also perceives the Ukraine crisis in black and white; however, he flips the colors by declaring that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis.” The trigger was not Russian actions, but NATO enlargement in the past quarter century as “the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West.” American and European leaders “blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border.” This threatened Russia’s “core strategic interests.” Putin was understandably displeased, which he demonstrated in 2008 by invading NATO applicant Georgia and in 2014 by seizing Crimea. The Russian president feared that Crimea “would host a NATO naval base,” and he therefore began working “to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.”

“The EU, too, has been marching eastward,” Mearsheimer continues. “In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion.” Moreover, “[T]he West’s final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow has been its effort to spread Western values and promote democracy in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding pro-Western individuals and organizations” like the pro-Europe demonstrations by Ukrainian activists in the center of Kiev at the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014. “[T]he West’s triple package of policies – NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion – added fuel to a fire waiting to ignite.” It was therefore understandable that Putin would not tolerate more Western meddling in the “buffer state” that has long been the gateway to Russia, just as Washington would not tolerate a Chinese attempt to incorporate Canada or Mexico into a military alliance.

Mearsheimer does agree with McCain in dismissing financial sanctions as ineffective. But his policy prescription is diametrically opposed to McCain’s: “The United States and its allies should abandon their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia … And the West should considerably limit its social-engineering efforts inside Ukraine.” The super-realist rejects any protest that the independent state of Ukraine should be free to determine its own future as unrealistic. “The sad truth is that might often makes right when great-power politics are at play.” Since Ukraine is not a vital interest for the United States, Washington should simply reject Kiev’s clamor to join the European Union and NATO and not let Ukrainian wishes “put Russia and the West on a collision course.”

The post What Next for Ukraine? appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

(c) Mikhail Palinchak/Handout via REUTERS

For once there is some good news from the politically challenged periphery of the European Union. Chalk it up to nascent democracy, womanpower, and, believe it or not, the enduring attraction of joining the EU family.

In Ukraine, as the initial shock of Russia’s attack last year faded in memory, oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky tried to return to business as usual and grab new state assets. After his private protection squad recently took over the head office of the huge Ukrnafta oil and gas concern in Kiev, however, he was sacked by the central government from his post as the governor of Dnipropetrovsk province. In Romania – a nation renowned for graft – the highest serving official to be investigated for corruption in the past quarter century, Finance Minister Darius Valcov, actually resigned. And in Serbia, for the first time since ethnic Serbs massacred some 8000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica in 1995, police arrested suspected Serb perpetrators of Europe’s worst atrocity in half a century for trial in Serbian courts.

Dangers still abound, of course. Russian President Vladimir Putin continues his nuclear saber-rattling. There are widespread fears that he may end the current fragile truce in eastern Ukraine when the spring mud hardens and overpower the outgunned Ukrainian army and militia defenders to seize more territory, and the crackdown on Kolomoisky has not stopped the greater menace that Vienna-based oligarch Dmytro Firtash poses to the Kiev government, as he wields influence by funding parties and politicians in Ukraine and throughout German-speaking Europe. In Romania, the political system there remains largely populated by unreformed members of the old pre-1989 Communist Party, who have formed a kaleidoscope of cozy clientelist parties. And in Serbia, Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic still says that Serbia will never recognize the 2008 independence of Serbia’s one-time province of Kosovo, while the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights reports that respect for human rights deteriorated in Serbia in 2014.

Nonetheless, taming Ukraine’s oligarchs, putting previously immune Romanian officials on trial, and finally bringing Serb suspects in the genocide at Srebrenica to justice in Serbia’s own courts all mark turning points.

In Ukraine, the trigger to Kolomoisky’s fall from grace was neither the opening move of a coup, as widely reported, nor a repetition of the internecine feuding of the political winners of the earlier Orange Revolution. It was instead a backsliding to the oligarchs’ snatch-what-you-can reflex on the part of a billionaire who is skillful at murky deals but also feels some sense of civic responsibility. He tried to prolong his previous low-cost control of Ukrnafta, which he had maintained as a minority shareholder by blocking corporate meetings under an old sweetheart law requiring a quorum of 60 percent of shareholders. When Ukraine’s reformist Rada changed the law to a 50-percent-plus quorum, Kolomoisky sent his protection squad into Ukrnafta headquarters, allegedly to prevent a Russian raid. His quick dismissal from the Dnipropetrovsk governorship warned other oligarchs that undue political influence really is being curtailed – and that they would do well to emulate America’s 19th-century barons, support the rule of law to protect their new wealth, pay their taxes, and become philanthropists.

Everyone agrees that the oligarchs must be coopted into the new Ukrainian system if it is going to succeed, and Kolomoisky had himself already started to evolve in this direction. He contributed handsomely to construction of the world’s largest Jewish community center, which opened in Dnipropetrovsk in 2012 and quickly became a cultural magnet for the entire city.  After Russia attacked Ukraine a year ago, he returned from his homes in Switzerland and Israel to become governor of the key province of Dnipropetrovsk in central Ukraine, where he personally paid and equipped volunteer militias that helped hold the line against pro-Russian incursions from eastern Ukraine last summer. His downfall came when he wanted to keep his favored position in both his civic and tycoon worlds – and his disciplining will continue as all volunteer militias are gradually brought under army command.

Moreover, a number of the civil society watchdogs who ignited last year’s “Revolution of Dignity” – learning by doing as they camped out in Kiev’s “Euromaidan” square for three months and organized seminars on good governance and writing legislation – now hold seats in parliament alongside oligarchs. They are continuing their crusade inside elected institutions.

In Romania, even as a post-Soviet kleptocracy took root in the quarter century since the end of the Cold War, it was women who bucked the hierarchy and kept a fledgling anti-graft movement alive. Human-rights activist Monica Macovei was appointed justice minister in the three years before Romania was admitted to EU membership in 2007, survived death threats, and managed to improve the country’s human-rights protection sufficiently to meet the minimum EU legal standard. Laura Codruta Kovesi, Chief Prosecutor of the National Anti-Corruption Directorate since 2013, won 90 percent of her indictments last year, convicting a former prime minister, five parliamentarians, 24 mayors, and 1,108 others. Romania’s women lawyers are now fully backed by Klaus Iohannis, a straight shooter from Romania’s tiny ethnic German minority who was elected president in a surprise upset last November. In order to allow the government to work without suspicion, Iohannis persuaded Finance Minister Valcov to resign last week while he is investigated on charges of accepting a two million-euro kickback for the award of a public works contract. This is a common precaution when senior officials come under investigation in northern EU member states, but not in Romania. Other senior politicians are already becoming more circumspect, especially since surveys show that the 55 percent of the electorate who supported Iohannis last November has now swelled to some 75 percent who approve of his fight against graft.

In Serbia it is the female human-rights activists, male prosecutors, and Brussels eurocrats who have worked together for transformation. Sonja Biserko founded the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Belgrade and railed against Great Serb hubris. Natasa Kandic founded the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade and in 2005 broadcast a secret selfie video made by the Serb paramilitary Scorpions as they murdered six unarmed Bosniak boys and men from Srebrenica in 1995. The women braved death threats from compatriots who deemed them traitors to Serbdom. So did the unpopular male prosecutors who pursued Serb war crimes perpetrators.

Political pragmatism finally took hold as Aleksandar Vucic – who started his career as a wunderkind acolyte of strongman Slobodan Milosevic –quit Serbia’s most chauvinist party, won a decisive election, and, as prime minister reached an EU-brokered partial accommodation with Kosovo in 2013. This was the price demanded by Brussels for starting negotiations with Belgrade on Serbia’s coveted accession to the European Union. Today, twenty years after the Srebrenica massacre, Serb prosecutors are finally able to arrest Srebrenica suspects for trial in Serbian courts without igniting riots.

These are all harbingers of a healthy evolution in the region.

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