This was today in my Inbox as I have subscribed to the New York Times newsletter. This edition is about the conflict concerning Ukraine and Russia and the role of the US and European countries...Although I hate to bring this topic here in my blog, I think it deserves debate and knowledge.
My position is clear - war has to be avoided at all costs and the West should not play this power game in the name of protecting the Ukraine, seeing all the military preparations going on makes me sick to the core...
“This is not going to be a war of Ukraine and Russia. This is going to be a European war, a full-fledged war.”
Those, in the words of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, are the stakes of the crisis that has enveloped his country, now the site of the worst diplomatic dispute between Russia and the West in decades. Over recent months, Russia has massed about 130,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders, prompting fears of a full-scale invasion. |
President Biden responded to the escalation this week by ordering about 3,000 additional troops into Eastern Europe, but has stressed that war is not inevitable. “If Russia is sincere about addressing our respective security concerns through dialogue, the United States and our allies and partners will continue to engage in good faith,” he said on Monday. |
How should the Biden administration go about defusing the conflict, and what consequences, if any, should it impose on Russia if it fails? Here’s what people are saying. |
Wait, how did we get here? |
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine won its sovereignty from Russia in exchange for dismantling its nuclear arsenal, and for decades the country aligned itself with neither Russia nor the West. In 2008, however, Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yushchenko, sought membership in NATO, earning strong public support from President George W. Bush. |
Russia saw this development as an act of aggression. “Were Ukraine to join NATO, the alliance would then have a 1,200-mile land border with Russia, a situation no major power would abide, no matter how loudly the Atlantic alliance claims to be purely defensive,” The Times editorial board explained. |
The situation escalated in 2014, when Yushchenko’s more Russia-friendly successor was overthrown amid widespread protests. |
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In recent weeks, President Vladimir Putin formally demanded that Ukraine never join NATO and that the organization withdraw troops and nuclear weapons from former Soviet countries. “The immediate aim, to be sure, is to return Ukraine to Russia’s orbit,” Lilia Shevtsova writes in The Times. But “Putin’s design is grand: to refashion the post-Cold War settlement, in the process guaranteeing the survival of Russia’s personalized power system.”
Would Russia actually invade?
Some analysts and politicians doubt it. The Russian government has said repeatedly that it has no plans to launch an attack — and restraint might actually be in its best interests. |
“Europeans and Ukrainians believe that a hybrid strategy — involving military presence on the border, weaponization of energy flows and cyberattacks — will serve him better” than a hot war, Ivan Krastev, a political scientist, writes in The Times. “By hardening the conflict, Mr. Putin could cohere his opponents. Holding back, by contrast, could have the opposite effect: The policy of maximum pressure, short of an invasion, may end up dividing and paralyzing NATO.” |
The case for ‘peace through strength’ |
To some commentators, the United States has a moral imperative to do everything it can, short of mounting a ground war in Ukraine, to combat Russian aggression — and not just because Biden made a campaign promise to “hold the Putin regime accountable” for its crimes.
“Weakness makes conflicts more likely, not less likely,” Jim Geraghty argues in National Review. “If Putin concludes the U.S. and NATO isn’t really willing to strain itself to defend applicant country Ukraine, he might conclude the U.S. and other NATO states like Germany wouldn’t really come to the aid of member states like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.”
A more aggressive response would also serve the interests of the Ukrainian people, Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister, has argued. In a December Foreign Affairs piece, he called on the Biden administration to take three steps to safeguard Ukraine’s independence: |
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“Ukraine’s goal is simple: peace through strength,” he wrote. “For now, the United States and its European allies should talk to Putin to win time while strengthening Ukraine to the extent that Russia will simply have no feasible military option for invading it.” |
Is there room for diplomacy in such a strategy? The Times columnist Bret Stephens doesn’t think so. “We should break off talks with Russia now: No country ought to expect diplomatic rewards from Washington while it threatens the destruction of our friends,” he writes. “Biden needs to stand tough on Ukraine in order to save NATO.”
The case for military restraint
As Fiona Harrigan points out in Reason, one immediate objection to U.S. military intervention is the absence of a popular mandate for it. “While the president is authorized under the Constitution to direct the U.S. Armed Forces, he can only do so following a congressional declaration of war,” she notes. |
But it’s also not clear whether military aid would prove an effective deterrent. If Putin is indeed committed to invading Ukraine, Samuel Charap and Scott Boston of the RAND Corporation argue that he “is unlikely to be deterred by whatever U.S. military assistance can be delivered in the coming weeks.” They are not alone in that analysis.
In the view of Stephen Wertheim and Joshua Shifrinson, the Biden administration should instead pursue a diplomatic approach that supports Ukraine’s independence, but does not seek to tether it to the West through NATO. “Do Americans really wish to risk war with other great powers, near those countries’ borders and over issues of questionable importance to America’s security and prosperity?” they wrote in The Washington Post in December. “If the answer is no, the United States should halt the expansionist drift of its post-Cold War policies.”
If diplomacy fails, economic sanctions are another option with broad support among foreign policy experts. A survey of 362 international relations scholars found that nearly 90 percent of respondents would support their use in the event of an invasion. |
With sanctions, however, the administration would face a difficult balance to strike between maximizing pressure on the Russian government and minimizing the suffering for ordinary Russian citizens (as well as for Europeans, who depend on Russian natural gas). Putin’s wealth is well concealed and difficult to target; more broad-based assaults on Russia’s financial system could raise prices of food and clothing, or, worse, cause a market crash that decimates pensions and savings accounts. |
For now, the White House is reportedly preparing sanctions on oligarchs who are “in or near the inner circle of the Kremlin.” Bill Browder, once the largest foreign investor in Russia, believes this is the right idea: “If you ask any Russian dissident or opposition politician what would stop Putin, they would all point toward this strategy,” he writes for Time. |
In the longer term, the Biden administration could try to broker a compromise called the Minsk II agreement. Initially proposed between Russia and Ukraine in 2015, it won the support of the European Union and the United Nations but was never implemented. On the one hand, the agreement would guarantee an independent Ukraine with Russian forces removed and separatists disarmed; on the other, it would promise full autonomy for the Donbas region and an end to Ukraine’s NATO ambitions. |
“A new round of ‘Minsk talks’ will be held in Berlin in the second week of February,” Katrina vanden Heuvel notes in The Washington Post. “As we confront the worst U.S.-Russian confrontation in decades, isn’t it time for the United States to join with its allies to revive a path to a settlement that might lead to a stable peace?”
Source:
- New York Times Newsletter
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