After it declared independence in 1991, Ukraine was divided between an unabashedly pro-Russia segment of its population and a more nationalistic one. But by annexing Crimea and plunging eastern Ukraine into open conflict, Matthews writes, Putin has energized Ukrainian nationalism and fed a growing anti-Russia sentiment. And the math does not help. Putin took millions of pro-Russia Ukrainians in Crimea and Donbas out of the country’s political calculus. (Those in Donbas don’t vote in Ukrainian elections because the area is too unstable.) As a result, a Ukrainian politician estimated to me that the pro-Russia seats in Ukraine’s parliament have shrunk from a plurality to barely 15 percent of the total.
In retrospect, if Putin’s aim were to keep Ukraine unstable and weak, it would have made far more sense to leave those parts of Ukraine within the country, supporting the pro-Russia forces and politicians in various ways so that they could act as a fifth column within the country, always urging Kyiv to forge closer ties with Moscow. Instead, Ukraine is now composed mainly of a population that is proudly nationalist and that has become much more anti-Russia.
Putin’s aims are probably twofold — to make Ukraine weak and more dependent on Russia but also to divide the West and render NATO less effective. As far as the latter is concerned, the opposite is happening. NATO, long searching for a post-Cold War purpose, has been energized by the Russian threat. Denmark is dispatching a frigate to the Baltic Sea. The Netherlands is moving fighter jets to Bulgaria. France has offered to put troops in Romania under NATO command. Spain has also offered to move warships east. The United States has put 8,500 troops on heightened alert in case they need to be deployed to Eastern Europe. Some in Finland and Sweden are even reconsidering their long-established neutrality.
The most significant success for Putin has been in Germany. The new German ruling coalition has expressed doubts about arming Ukraine, placing Russia under serious sanctions or canceling Nord Stream 2, the pipeline through which Russia could send more natural gas directly to Germany and Europe, bypassing Ukraine. . . . . The Biden administration has been alert to this problem, sending CIA Director William J. Burns to Berlin and inviting Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, to Washington for a meeting with President Biden.
Matthews points out that Putin would not benefit from a war, especially if the sanctions being discussed are put into place against Russia. While Putin has built formidable foreign reserves, constraining Russian gas and oil exports would devastate the Russian economy. Most young adult Russians — those who would be called upon to fight — are not gung-ho for war against Ukraine, which they regard positively. Putin’s approval ratings have fallen considerably.
This doesn’t mean that war is impossible, even unlikely. Wars can happen because of misperceptions, misunderstandings — and even because, backed into a corner, countries can’t find a path to de-escalate. The Russian foreign minister has said that the West’s recent written responses to Russian demands do not address the “main issue,” by which he means Ukrainian membership in NATO. The truth is that Ukraine is unlikely to become a member of NATO anytime soon. NATO runs by consensus, and there is little agreement on the issue. Germany and Hungary have deep reservations about its accession.
And yet, the United States cannot — and should not — forswear the possibility that Ukraine could join NATO at some point in the future. Between those two realities lies a narrow corridor, a space for creative diplomacy to avert a war that could consume the energies of both sides for years.
As for the mindset of Ukranians who find themselves caught in the middle, a piece in the New Yorker looks at the situation. Here are some highlights:
In recent weeks, Russia has been building up its military forces on the Ukrainian border, raising fears that Vladimir Putin’s regime will launch a full-scale invasion. Eight years ago, Russia annexed Crimea after protests throughout Ukraine led to the fall of its Russia-backed President. Since then, Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine have engaged in protracted fighting that has killed some fourteen thousand people, while Ukrainian public opinion more broadly has moved closer to the West, despite Ukraine’s not being a member of the European Union or NATO. This week, American diplomats presented proposals to Putin’s government seeking negotiation, while rejecting Russian demands that NATO foreclose the possibility of Ukraine’s joining the alliance.
To help explain how things appear from the perspective of Ukrainians, I recently spoke by phone with Nataliya Gumenyuk, a Ukrainian journalist in Kyiv. She is the author of the book “The Lost Island: Dispatches from the Occupied Crimea.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Ukrainians are preparing for a possible invasion, why Ukrainian democracy threatens Putin, and Russia’s reasons for potentially escalating the conflict.
[F]or a while, Russia’s foreign policy stood on the shoulders of what [Mikhail] Gorbachev built, and held that, after the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia and other former Soviet countries would, little by little, become part of the West. For that, there were some requirements: democracy, human rights, rule of law, less corruption, and so on. But, at this moment, Russia feels that it doesn’t want that anymore. Putin doesn’t want any conditions. He actually doesn’t want to join this club. He wants to have a world where Russia is strong, and decisions globally are not taken without Russia, including important decisions in the Middle East and in Latin America. So Russia wants to be, again, a global power, not just a nice member of the international liberal order.
Ukraine is just too big to ignore, and Putin himself seems to have an obsession with Ukraine. This summer, he wrote an article about Ukrainian history. Putin usually achieves everything he wants, but Ukraine is a country where he failed twice. In 2004 and in 2014, he backed a pro-Russia, authoritarian candidate, using great effort to cement his rule, and twice, popular uprisings by Ukrainians did something he feared and didn’t want to have happen. The Ukrainian people voted differently. And, with their protest, they kind of mocked Russia. So Putin feels offended and betrayed by Ukraine and by the Ukrainians—not just by the Ukrainian government. So I think for him it’s quite important to prove that no, this democracy is not really genuine, that it’s the West that wants to impose it on the Ukrainians. To admit that societies can do it themselves is to admit that change could be possible in Belarus, in Georgia, and in Russia as well.
It sounds complicated, but we need to think about the international security architecture, where things still are stuck where they were twenty or thirty years ago. Just look at the way that NATO is designed, and how it is misused by Russia to threaten Ukraine. So the way things are now, either the West does not support Ukraine and betrays it and agrees on something with Russia, or there is a full-scale war.
Is the current architecture of NATO resilient enough for players like Russia or China or anybody? What is the leverage? Because today the only policy other than that is sanctions. But a lot of people debate whether they are working. So what could be other ways to deal with countries like Ukraine? I don’t want to say that there should be some special status for Ukraine beyond NATO. I just generally think that the current impasse isn’t working. Neither Ukraine nor Georgia nor quite a lot of other countries feel secure. It shouldn’t just be a new architecture for Ukraine but for all of these countries. Right now, if you didn’t manage to become a member of the alliance years ago, you are out of the security framework.
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