Putin’s move barely ‘chess halt’

The smoldering Ukraine crisis has taken a turning point this week, leaving diplomacy back. On 24 February, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a “special military operation” aimed at “demilitarization of Ukraine”, but did not “capture” it. Just days earlier, Russia had stepped forward by recognizing the sovereignty of two of Ukraine’s easternmost provinces, the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, and deploying Russian peacekeeping forces in these regions. A meeting between United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been canceled and the prospects of a summit between US President Joe Biden and Mr.

Russia’s actions have been strongly condemned and sanctioned by the US, European Union (EU), United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Japan. This is the second time since 1945 that national borders are being redrawn by force; The first was the 1999 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air raid on Serbian forces that led to the creation of Kosovo. Russian and Chinese protests about NATO’s “operating out of the region” without UN Security Council approval had little weight.

crisis brewing

In the post-Cold War world, which promised a rules-based liberal international order, Thucydides’s message of the Peloponnesian Wars clearly continues – “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer.” what they should do”.

Russia fired the first shot in 2022 but NATO is also not innocent. The Ukraine crisis has been brewing for more than a decade. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, then-US Secretary of State James Baker meeting with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in February 1990 to help ease the way for German reunification. He assured Mr Gorbachev that NATO understands “the need for reassurance to countries in the east”, adding that while Germany is a part of NATO, “there will be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction an inch to the east”.

By the end of 1991, the USSR had broken up into 15 countries; Mr. Gorbachev faded into history and the White House was undergoing change. Instead of seeking a new European security framework, the newly independent Baltic and Central European states sought security in US-led NATO. The old caution that the cost of expansion increases as it gets closer to the Russian border and NATO adopted an ‘open door’ policy.

Starting in 1999, NATO has added 14 new members in phases. At the 2008 NATO summit, at the insistence of US President George Bush, a principled opening for Ukraine and Georgia was announced, although France and Germany, conscious of Russian concerns, successfully opposed defining a time limit. did. It was a bad deal and the damage was done.

Later that year, Russia intervened in Georgia on the grounds of protecting Russian minorities and annexed the northern provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In 2014, Mr Putin annexed Crimea, following a Euromaidan protest against pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich. For Russia, Crimea is important because the peninsula hosts Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which gives it access to the Mediterranean and its bases in Latakia and Tartus in Syria. At the same time, pro-Russian separatists, with the help of Russian mercenaries, created autonomous regions in the Donbass region.

Ukraine was named a NATO Enhanced Opportunity Partner in 2020, despite no deadline for membership. The presence of British and American warships in the Black Sea began to increase. In 2019, the UK entered into a cooperation agreement with Ukraine to develop two new naval ports, Ochakiv on the Black Sea and Berdyansk on the Sea of ​​Azov, a move that Russia saw as a potential threat.

Clearly, Mr. Putin’s complaints, starting with the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and color revolutions in engineered regimes, led to the US unilaterally withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002. Combined with the withdrawal, missile defense deployments in Poland and Romania that Russia had considered offensive were piling up.

faltering european diplomacy

France and Germany began negotiations for the Minsk Agreements between Ukraine and Russia in 2014 and 2015 under the Normandy format. The first was for a ceasefire between Ukraine and the Russian-backed separatists, and the second was for Ukraine, Russia, between the two separatists. Region of Luhansk and Donetsk and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Supporting announcements by France and Germany were intended to address Russian security concerns. Ukraine took the lead in introducing some constitutional amendments to grant some degree of autonomy to the two provinces and to aid in the withdrawal of all foreign powers to Russia. However, neither side enforced it and conditions have hardened since then.

In intense diplomacy during the past six weeks, there has been talk of reviving the Normandy format, particularly in back-to-back visits to Moscow and Kiev by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Schulz. But Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky was in no mood to oblige, with more than 150,000 Russian troops on his border and Mr. Putin was looking for a face shield. Mr Macron’s re-election in April is difficult and Chancellor Schultz has already been criticized for being soft on Russia due to energy dependence.

Mr Biden faces a crucial midterm election in November that could move the Senate under Republican control and has already faced much criticism for his messy withdrawal from Afghanistan last year. Their aim was to ensure trans-Atlantic unity in NATO. Russia’s threatening moves particularly upset NATO members, especially the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and Central Europeans such as Poland and Romania. In the end, NATO remained united but was unable to provide an off-ramp solution.

Putin’s Chess Gamble

With a military strength of 200,000 and the same number of reserves, Vivek suggests that Mr. Putin would not want to take over Ukraine. However, separatist groups that currently control only a portion of the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, seek to expand their territory beyond the current line of contact dividing separatists and Ukrainian forces.

Along the Black Sea coast, Russia may seek to extend a coastal corridor to the Crimean peninsula. It would strengthen its hold on the Azov Sea, give it control of Mariupol and Berdyansk, and limit Ukraine to Odessa in the west.

Ideally, Mr. Putin would have liked to bring about regime change in Kiev, but that doesn’t seem possible now. Domestic troubles in Belarus have made President Alexander Lukashenko dependent on Russian support in power since 1994. The two countries announced that 35,000 Russian troops would remain in Belarus for “training, cooperation and observation” for the joint exercise concluded on February 20. A Russian military presence in Belarus puts pressure on the 65-mile-long Suvalki Corridor that forms the border between Lithuania and Poland and, more importantly, separates Belarus from Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea that shares its territory. Hosts the Baltic Fleet.

Mr Putin may claim victory in the near future, but in the long term, he has outdone himself. NATO has rejuvenated, trans-Atlantic unity strengthened and Russia’s economic ties with Europe have been adversely affected. Given Russia’s foreign exchange reserves of about $640 billion, sanctions imposed by the US and EU may not hurt immediately, but will eventually bite both the elites and the common people. Worse, Russia will become more dependent on China – for political support as well as a market for its energy exports. It would eventually weaken its hand in Central Asia.

The Russians have been the greatest of chess players and President Putin knows that a move on the chessboard will close some options while opening up others. The challenge is to limit the opponent’s options while increasing their own options and room for maneuver. Strategic gains may come from their actions this week, but the test of strategic victory is unlikely to pass.

Rakesh Sood is a former diplomat and currently Distinguished Fellow at Observer Research Foundation