The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
Canberra Times (Australia)
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
March 8, 2014 Saturday
Deciphering Putin’s plan in Ukraine
Vladimir Putin ‘It remains to be seen whether Putin wants to crush
Ukraine, or merely cripple it as a regional player, which, he would
hope, would leave it at his mercy economically’
Paul McGeough, Chief Correspondent, Washington
Never has one man been so misunderstood, so underestimated.
Researchers have crawled over the life and learning of Vladimir Putin,
hoping to understand a man whose designs on Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula
have the world in a spin.
There was George W. Bush’s famous “I looked the man in the eye”
observation in June 2001, in which the former US president judged the
Russian leader to be very straightforward and trustworthy: “We had a
very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man
deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his
country.”
In November 2004, then German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder shared his
thoughts on Putin – a “flawless democrat”, he said. And when Barack
Obama took over the White House in January 2009, he charged secretary
of state Hillary Cliton with the task of “resetting” the US
relationship with Moscow. That’s the same Hillary Cliton who this week
was accused of reckless endangerment for likening Putin to the Nazi
dictator Adolf Hitler.
Speaking in California, Cliton observed, like many others, that
Putin’s objective was to “re-Sovietise Russia’s periphery”. Cliton,
the likely Democrat nominee for the presidency in 2016, was partly
right. Putin indeed looks to the past, but to an era of Russian
greatness that predated the Soviet Union by about 200 years – the
ruthless reign of Peter the Great.
A Der Spiegel profile in 2012 tells of Putin having switched from
working for the KGB to a post in municipal government in St Petersburg
on the eve of the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 –
which he later lamented as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of
the 20th century”.
On moving ito his new office Putin unceremoniously junked the
standard-issue portrait of Lenin, calling instead for a portrait of
Peter the Great. A janitor duly arrived with two images of the tsar.
Then aged 39, Putin might have opted for the image of Peter as a young
man, described as “amiable and idealistic, a moderniser who wanted to
open the ‘window to Europe’.” Nope. Putin picked the portrait of Peter
near the end of his 53 years, gnarled and bruised by palace intrigues
and wars of conquest and suppression.
Ivan Krastev, of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, writes in
Foreign Affairs: “He surely dreams of the pre-1914 days, when Russia
was autocratic but accepted, revolutions were not tolerated, and
Russia could be part of Europe while preserving its distinctive
culture and traditions.”
Putin wears a deeply held sense of Russian grievance on his sleeve and
his uncompromising toughness is bent towards restoring Russia to the
top of the pile, either in the sense of Peter’s great modernising or
with Moscow going toe-to-toe with Washington during the Cold War. So
he happily intervened in Syria last year to head off an American
attack; and the opening ceremony to last month’s Winter Olympics was
Putin’s telegram to the world – Russia is back; get used to it.
As Putin reclaimed the Russian presidency in 2012, the Moscow
commentator Vladimir Pozner told a visiting reporter: “For the average
Russian, who is a very proud person with a sense of history and a
belief that his is a great country, Putin has given him back his sense
of pride – you cannot ignore us any more, the way you did when [former
president Boris] Yeltsin was in power and Russia was on its knees.”
This was the context in which Putin told a campaign rally: “We’re a
victorious people. It’s in our genes, in our genetic code, passed down
from generation to generation. The battle for Russia continues! We
will be victorious! We won’t let anyone meddle in our domestic affairs
… don’t cheat on your motherland!”
Putin already had taken that battle to Georgia, back in 2008, when he
marched troops over his southern border, on the same flimsy pretext as
he has in Ukraine – to protect the local Russian population. Those
troops still occupy the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
As now, back then there was uproar in the West. There were diplomatic
sanctions and threats of economic sanctions, but the world moved on
and Putin got away with it. Just as with Bush on Georgia, Barack Obama
now faces an angry chorus of demands for retaliation on behalf of
Ukraine – everything from military exercises on Russia’s doorstep to
Iran-style sanctions to lock Moscow out of the international financial
system.
But London and Europe are having none of that – too much of Russia’s
money churns through the City of London and too many homes and
factories in continental Europe are heated and fired by Russian gas.
Articulating the Putin agenda as an attempt to reconstruct the former
empire, but “on a Russian model, rather than Soviet”, former US
national security adviser Stephen Hadley explained this week: “He has
been cunning and shrewd. His preferred tools of intimidation and
blackmail succeeded in keeping Armenia and Belarus in Moscow’s orbit.
“Where those tools were inadequate, he turned to force, moving
incrementally – first in Georgia, now in Ukraine – so as not to
destroy economic and diplomatic relations with Europe and the US.”
In both these incursions, Putin does not require total submission by
the locals, just to muck up the atmospherics enough to make the
European Union and NATO think twice about signing up the victims of
his aggression as members – thereby leaving them susceptible to
whatever pressure or blandishments he might apply to hoike them back
ito his orbit.
Since 2010, Putin has been touting the Eurasian Union, a trade block
he envisages as a counter to the power of China, Europe and the US. So
far, this free-trade customs union comprises just Russia, Kazakhstan
and Belarus.
Both Armenia and Kyrgyzstan are succumbing to Putin’s browbeating and
now are expected to sign up for membership in the coming year –
Armenia was rewarded with a 30 per cent cut in its gas price when it
dropped its bid for closer ties with the EU last year.
But Azerbaijan, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan
reportedly have cold feet – and instead are casting glances to Europe.
After being clobbered by Putin in 2008, Georgia is a reluctant starter
and as for Ukraine, the current crisis is all about which way Ukraine
should look – East or West?
As in the EU, Putin envisages uniform economic and legal systems
forming a bridge between Europe and Asia – with himself as pointsman.
And here we come to the vital role of Ukraine in Moscow’s calculations
– if Putin can’t keep a foot on Ukraine, then how can any of the rest
of the former Soviet republics be cajoled or bludgeoned ito sticking
with the Russians?
It was Soviet policy to encourage Russians to migrate to these former
republics. By the time of the final collapse of the USSR in 1991, more
than 25 million Russians had done so. The Russian infiltration ranges
from 37.8 per cent of the population of Kazakhstan to just 1.6 per
cent in Armenia. According to a 2002 study by the Washington-based
Migration Policy Institute, the vast majority of them had remained as
citizens of the new nation states.
Just as Russians who comprise about 60 per cent of the population of
Crimea are Putin’s pawn in Ukraine, tiny Moldova has its own tinier
pockets of Russians, areas known as Transnistria and Gagauzia, which
analysts expect can be manipulated to do Putin’s bidding. In a recent
plebiscite, Gagauzia voted 98.5 per cent in favour of joining Putin’s
trading bloc, despite a decision by the Moldovan government to seek EU
membership.
It remains to be seen whether Putin wants to crush Ukraine, or merely
cripple it as a regional player, which, he would hope, would leave it
at his mercy economically, rather than in the embrace of the European
Union.
Loud opinion pieces in the US are comparing Putin’s encroachment in
Ukraine with the American-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Eugene Robinson said in The Washington Post: “We’re supposed to be
shocked – shocked! – that a great military power would cook up a
pretext to invade a smaller, weaker nation? I’m sorry, but has anyone
forgotten the unfortunate events in Iraq a few years ago?”
None of the players in today’s Crimea were in office during the Cold
War, the post-World War II decades in which many chafed for a global
dynamic freed of the constraints of a doctrine referred to as MAD
[mutually assured destruction], by which hair-trigger settings for
Washington and Moscow’s huge nuclear arsenals created an imperative to
avoid and to defuse crises such as that roiling Ukraine this week.
There were wars – Korea and Vietnam – but generally caution prevailed
over confrontation. And when there were fisticuffs, it was usually in
the context of tightly controlled proxy skirmishes.
In this context, it’s worth pondering how much of the conflict since
the turn of the century might have been averted if the MAD doctrine
were still in place – the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; Syria,
Egypt, Libya and even the 9/11 attacks on the US.
So, when one of the giants of the Cold War strode to the centre of the
Crimea debate on Thursday, his critique sounded more MAD than mad.
Writing on the opinion page of The Washington Post, former secretary
of state Henry Kissinger argued that Ukraine should not be seen as
either of the East or the West – “it should function as a bridge
between them”.
Russia had to understand that military force would not work; the West
needed to appreciate that to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a
foreign country. Europe needed to see that its “bureaucratic
dilatoriness” and subordination of strategy to domestic politics in
its negotiations with Kiev had contributed to causing the crisis.
It remains to be seen how this plays out. There’s talk of finding an
“off-ramp” for Putin, if indeed he wants one. So far, he’s staring
down the West, refusing to blink. But it’s conceivable that if he’s
allowed to maintain his economic and security influence over Ukraine
generally and the Crimea in particular, he’ll happily withdraw the
troops – save for the thousands who are garrisoned at his navy bases
on Crimea’s Black Sea coast.
And strategically, it would be counter-productive for Putin to have
the Crimea hived off from Ukraine, because millions of Russians in
Crimea no longer would get to vote in Ukrainian elections, producing
outcomes that most likely would tip Ukraine more towards Europe and
the West.
In which case, the only fly in the ointment is Ukraine itself – has it
been so discombobulated by its role as the meat in an East-West
sandwich that it can’t calm its internal differences and settle down?
How long would it take for even the most marginal of local grievances
to be massaged to the point of new appeals to Moscow or NATO for
intervention?
And what if such actions found imitators in those postage stamps that
didn’t exist as independent nations during the Cold War – Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan,
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan; and even the bigger of the former Soviet
republics – Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan?
Kissinger was kind to today’s players. He didn’t single out Hillary
Cliton or former Republican presidential candidate, Senator John
McCain, for their Hitlerian comparison, but he issued this rebuke:
“For the West, the demonisation of Vladimir Putin is not a policy –
it’s an alibi for the absence of one.” And he warned all the sabre
rattlers – and that’s about two-thirds of Washington – that “the test
of policy is how it ends, not how it begins”.