Indecisive Europe is acting too late to save Ukraine from Kremlin discipline
LIKE a slow-motion car wreck, the tragic violence that has erupted in Ukraine over the last few days – which some fear could result in bloody civil war – has been inexorably coming for some time. In November 2013, the country’s President Viktor Yanukovych abruptly broke off talks with the EU over a political and free trade pact, which would have allowed Kiev access to the European Single Market. There is no doubt that Russia – the big kid on the block – played a central role in exerting pressure on Yanukovych to abandon closer ties with Brussels, as the Kremlin sees Kiev as its own vassal.
Critically, Vladimir Putin – who understands how power politics works, unlike his European rivals – immediately offered the Ukrainian government a tangible reward for doing his bidding. The Kremlin pledged to dispense $15bn (£8.9bn) in soft loans and discounted gas supplies; Moscow directly bought $3bn worth of Ukrainian bonds, a huge inducement to an economy teetering on the brink of disaster.
But the people of Kiev correctly saw all this for what it was: the selling of their country’s autonomy to the Russians. Thousands took to the streets, turning Independence Square in Kiev into a tent city of pro-European insurrectionists, determined not to meekly accept the squalid outcome lying down.
Since November, Yanukovych has equivocated. But Putin finally tired of the whole charade. Meeting privately with Yanukovych at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, it is now clear that he laid down the law. Two days ago, Russia threw Ukraine a new financial lifeline, buying $2bn more in government bonds; Putin had been holding this back as a stick to prod the Ukrainian government into decisive action to crush the protests once and for all. It is no coincidence that the day after was the bloodiest in post-Soviet Ukrainian history, with at least 25 killed and 241 injured, as the security police began to clear the protestors out of Independence Square. And there are real signs that the country is now falling apart. Authorities have reported violence spreading across Ukraine.
Three gloomier long-term lessons are painfully clear from Ukraine’s tragedy. In political risk analysis, we often forget about the “geo” prefix in geopolitics. But we would do well to remember it. Any seven year old looking at a map can figure out that, based on geographical proximity (let alone ties of language, culture, and history), Ukraine is simply more important to next-door Russia – fading power though it is – than it is to far-away America, or to the Great Powers of Europe. And while Russia may be increasingly weak globally, it can still bring a great deal of economic, political, and military clout to bear in adjacent Ukraine, in a way that is simply not possible from Berlin, Paris, or London.
Second, we must stop talking about “the West” as though it were some united political force; it has not been so for quite some time, and surely is not so now. Some have sought to reassure us that the US has been playing bad cop in the current crisis, with Europe playing its usual role of good cop, as though our positions were somehow coordinated to exert maximum diplomatic leverage. Nothing could be further from the truth; the two poles of power simply do not agree, hence a US assistant secretary of state’s recent embarrassing outburst (gleefully relayed by the Russian Secret Service) to “f*** the EU”. The West simply cannot be counted on to solve the world’s problems anymore.
As ever – and unlike a disciplined Kremlin, which has coherently pressed ahead with decisive, clear foreign policy outputs – the EU has been divided over Ukraine. Sweden and the Baltic states have been quick to call for sanctions against high Ukrainian government officials. The gormless Germans, meanwhile, hoped instead to offer Yanukovych’s thugs the “carrot” of forgoing economic pressure.
When will the Germans ever learn? Having carrots, and carrots alone, in the foreign policy toolkit only works when one is dealing exclusively with rabbits. Yanukovych and Putin are many things, but rabbits they are not. A day late and a dollar short, EU foreign ministers are meeting today in an emergency session to levy sanctions on officials in the Yanukovych regime, with the German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier having quickly changed his tune.
But until Germany understands that diplomacy almost always necessitates the decisive use of both carrots and sticks, look for the European neighbourhood to be fraught with risk. And Ukraine will continue to suffer.
Dr John C Hulsman is president and co-founder of John C Hulsman Enterprises (www.john-hulsman.com), a global political risk consultancy. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of Ethical Realism, The Godfather Doctrine, and most recently Lawrence of Arabia, To Begin the World Over Again.