Letters

‘Can neither side lose nor win in Ukraine?’

There is currently no interlocuter in the Kremlin with which to begin negotiations

Mon Feb 13 2023 - 00:06

Sir, – Paul Gillespie’s analysis concluding that Joe Biden and the EU must set the conditions for when and how Ukraine should seek peace, and that China and others do likewise with regard to Russia, cannot go unchallenged, and offers no suggestion as to what such a peace might look like (“Can neither side lose nor win in Ukraine?”, Opinion & Analysis, February 4th).

That Germany’s foreign policy towards Russia might appear to be changing slowly – though many argue that it has changed almost overnight – can be explained by its own historical involvement in Russia and by 50 years of foreign policy characterised by dialogue and trade in the expectation that closer ties would lead to continued peace in Europe and greater democracy in Russia. And there are perfectly practical reasons why the US may have been reluctant to supply the Abrams tank: any competent truck mechanic ought to be able to repair the diesel-powered Leopard, but repairing the turbine-powered Abrams requires jet-engine technicians, of which there are vastly fewer. Some current and former US officials have described it as a proxy war, which is problematic on several fronts: there is no agreed definition of what a proxy war is and, most egregiously, it denies agency to Ukrainians, and their right to self-determination and control over their borders. This, however, has been seized upon by the Kremlin to portray the war as in defence of the motherland against Nato; how else could it coerce Russian men to go to their demise in their tens of, and possibly hundreds of, thousands; regime security just wouldn’t cut it.

And, in the event of ultimate defeat, it is much easier to explain to a domestic audience that Russia had to fight the might of all of Nato rather than just Ukraine.

Russia’s objective superiority is also highly questionable. Notwithstanding an increase in military expenditure from 3 per cent to 4 per cent of GDP – the pre-invasion budget being approximately 10 times that of Ukraine’s – and an ambitious reform programme following the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, the Russian military has performed poorly against its Ukrainian counterpart, losing much of its best equipment in the failed assault on Kyiv. It never gained air superiority, nor is it likely to, and even its advances in the Donbass and Luhansk oblasts, where it has used the time-honoured artillery bombardment strategy, came to a halt once the Ukrainians secured weapons that had the range and accuracy to hit Russian supply lines.

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As far as making attempts to reach a negotiated settlement are concerned, there is currently no interlocuter in the Kremlin with which to begin negotiations. Vladimir Putin denies the right of Ukraine to exist as an independent country or Ukrainians as a separate people: at an April 2008 Russia-Nato summit, it is reliably reported that he told George W Bush that Ukraine wasn’t even a state; in an address to Russian Federation Council members and Duma deputies in March 2014, following annexation of Crimea, he stated that Russians and Ukrainians were one people, a claim he repeated in his July 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”. Dimitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, in an article published in October 2021, agrees with Putin’s essay and goes on to state that there will be no negotiation with Ukraine until the Ukrainian government is replaced. A further difficulty is Putin’s obsession with Russia’s place in the world following the breakup of the Soviet Union, an event he described in his annual state of the nation address in 2005 as “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the century”. This breakup resulted in a population reduction from 286 million (1989 census USSR) to 146 million (Russia 2023) and a corresponding decrease in world GDP ranking from second or third (estimated) to 11th (World Bank, Russia 2021).

The harsh reality is that Russia is no longer the world power it was in its guise as the former USSR. It is this loss of influence in its European near-abroad generally, and the impending loss of influence in Ukraine as the latter pivoted towards the EU that provoked the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and subsequent state-sponsored unrest in the Donbass; the prospect of Russians looking across the border in years to come at a democratic Ukraine with a free press, strong independent institutions, the observance of human rights and a competitive market economy, and wondering why they too couldn’t have that, was viewed by the Kremlin as a major threat to regime security.

The threat of using nuclear weapons has been evoked frequently, though much less of late, by various Kremlin spokespersons, and while it should never be fully discounted, many professional military analysts, such as Anders Puk Nielsen, to name but one, consider it improbable.

Of far greater concern would be the likely consequences of a Kremlin-sponsored puppet regime installed in Kyiv followed by one in Chisinau: a mass influx of refugees into the EU accompanied by the prospect of cross-border insurgency; a ratcheting up of tension between Nato and Russia; and a vastly greater increase in Nato-member defence spending than currently planned.

The Kremlin’s war on Ukraine ends when whoever is in power in Moscow accepts Ukrainian right to self-determination, to sovereignty and to territorial integrity, withdraws it troops and accepts whatever arrangements need to be made to ensure Ukraine’s long-term security.

What it will take to get there is a matter of much speculation, but whether it can be achieved without the Kremlin losing in some form or other is highly questionable. In the meantime, we should continue to fully support Ukraine; it is in Europe’s interest. – Yours, etc,

BRENDAN O’REILLY,

Sutton,

Dublin 13.