Ukraine tries to adjust to present-day reality
KYIV – In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a list of grievances towards the West, namely America, at the yearly Munich Security Conference in Germany. It was a harbinger of things to come as Russia was growing stronger amid booming oil prices and began to more aggressively reassert influence in its near abroad.
Presidential Administration of Ukraine
Kurt Volker (left), U.S. special representative for Ukraine negotiations, with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on the sidelines of the 2019 Munich Security Conference in Germany on February 16.
Lamenting the expansion of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a post-World War II defense alliance that took in former Warsaw Pact countries and the three Baltic states, Mr. Putin also criticized the invasion of Iraq and other places where the West was taking action.
Two years earlier he even said that the collapse of the USSR was a “major geopolitical disaster of the century” during a state of the union address.
Then, a month after the Russian leader’s speech in Munich that left many present aghast, a cyberattack paralyzed Estonia. Attributed to the Kremlin, the countrywide hack – on a NATO member country – was deemed a response for Estonia moving a Soviet World War II monument further from its central location in the capital of Tallinn.
It was the “beginning of the kind of bullying and intimidation that increasingly Russia begins to show toward the near abroad, its new neighbors… and former satellites from the Soviet period, or actually part of the Soviet Union during the Soviet period,” former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told the PBS program “Frontline.”
The following year, 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, whose Rose Revolution five years earlier had ousted a Kremlin-friendly, Soviet-era leader. Two regions were subsequently severed. Similarly, Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine’s territory of Crimea in 2014 and invaded the two easternmost regions of Luhansk and Donetsk that same year after Viktor Yanukovych abandoned office.
More than 10,300 people have died in the Donbas war, and over 1.5 million people have been internally displaced.
Now this new reality – one in which two European countries’ borders were forcibly altered for the first time since World War II – is replacing what is commonly called the international liberal order.
That was a key theme at the 55th Munich Security Conference (MSC), where more than 30 heads of state, governments and ministers assembled to grasp and, perhaps, come to terms with the fact that “might is right” politics is returning.
This year’s event report – subtitled, “The Great Puzzle: Who Will Pick up the Pieces?” – also acknowledged that the world could be returning to “great power competition,” one in which more powerful countries assert their dominance amid constantly shifting alliances with other countries.
The reality is that America is creating a vacuum as it withdraws from the Euro-Atlantic alliance that has ensured a prosperous Europe mostly at peace. Now, “China and Russia… want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model – gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic and security decisions,” the MSC report read, quoting former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s resignation letter to President Donald Trump.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, while speaking in the Bavarian capital on February 16, reiterated his country’s commitment to the two key institutions that have offered peace and stability on the continent: NATO and the European Union, consisting of 29 and 28 member states, respectively.
“We cannot ignore security challenges. The only efficient system for today is NATO. That is why I have taken an initiative with the Parliament on amendments to the Constitution regarding Ukraine’s future membership in NATO and the EU,” he said during the panel discussion “Security in Eastern Europe.”
On February 19, after returning from the weekend-long conference, the Ukrainian president signed the respective constitutional amendments.
In terms of what he called the “hot Donbas war,” Mr. Poroshenko said that the “world completely changed” after 2014 and that Russia, as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, rendered that body irrelevant “and Ukraine pays a huge price for it.”
He added that another set of sanctions against Russia was recently coordinated for implementation with the U.S. and the EU following Moscow’s attack on Ukrainian vessels in November 2018 in shared waters of the Black Sea during which 24 Ukrainian servicemen were taken captive.
Regarding Ukraine’s existential survival, Mr. Poroshenko said that, in the end, it’s up to Ukraine to defend itself: “I hate the idea when I hear some people say that Ukraine and Russia must stop shooting. If Russia stops shooting, there will be peace. If Ukraine stops shooting, there will be no Ukraine.”
He was not alone in his assessment. U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker noted on the sidelines of the MSC that Russia doesn’t want to see Mr. Poroshenko get re-elected in the March 31 presidential vote.
“They [Russia] very much want to see him removed from power and I think they are hoping that they will be able to cut some kind of deal that favors Russia with a new government because they are not getting that from Poroshenko,” he said as cited by French news agency AFP.
For these reasons, Ukraine was ranked ninth among 10 “conflicts” to watch this year by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based non-profit that conducts research on violent conflict.
“With U.S. leadership of the international order fading, ‘more leaders are seeking to bolster their influence by meddling in foreign conflicts,’ ” the latest MSC security report read, citing the policy research center.
The Kremlin’s line
Russia, which had the second largest delegation at the MSC, maintained the Kremlin line that Kyiv has a civil war on its hands and is at fault for the November attack in the Black Sea.
Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Ukraine’s first war-time president “needed a scandal… for his personal aims in order to launch his presidential election campaign and represent it in a favorable light.”
He maintained that the vessel attack and capture of Ukrainian crewmen came “in Russian territorial waters” despite a 2003 treaty that allows for free navigation in the Kerch Strait. He also neglected the fact that Ukraine enjoys free navigation in the Black Sea and that the Crimea should belong to Kyiv.
“Instead, the conflict is spreading to the Azov Sea,” where Russia “now asserts exclusive territorial claims over the area despite a 2003 treaty with Ukraine that guarantees both countries freedom of movement in the area,” the MSC security report stated. “Moscow is continuing to militarize Crimea, having stationed 28,000 forces there and upgraded its Black Sea fleet. This aims at deterring NATO and establishing an anti-access/area-denial zone in the Black Sea Basin.”
German chancellor’s position
Germany’s fourth-term chancellor, Angela Merkel, received applause for her speech that also mentioned Ukraine, Russia, and a second underwater gas pipeline project that the latter is building and which will further bypass existing European transport routes that flow through Ukraine.
MSC / Kuhlmann
German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the 2019 Munich Security Conference on February 16.
She first acknowledged the changing world order while defending the faltering multilateral relations between states that are anchored by the post-World War II institutions that were created to prevent another bloody conflict at the cost of millions of lives.
“All of this has implications for global security and for the issues that are being discussed right here, right now,” Ms. Merkel said. “But what we sense at the beginning of the 21st century… is that the structures in which we operate are essentially those that emerged from the horrors of the second world war… but that these structures are coming under incredible pressure because developments require them to undergo reform.”
After noting Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, she said that “we must admit that we are far from achieving a solution; we must continue to work on this at all costs” – a reference to the unsuccessful truce that she, along with the leaders of France, Ukraine and Russia, brokered to quell hostilities.
Yet she still urged Russia to remain a “partner,” especially on economic cooperation when speaking of Nord Stream 2, an $11 billion underwater pipeline project that Moscow is building to reach Germany and circumvent existing routes to Europe via Ukraine.
According to her speech, it doesn’t matter how Germany gets Russian gas as long as Moscow doesn’t turn to China, whereupon dependency could become an issue.
“That means that the question of how dependent we are on Russian gas cannot be resolved by asking which pipeline it flows through,” Ms. Merkel said. “Do we want to make Russia dependent on China or rely on China to import its natural gas? Is that in our European interests? No, I don’t think so, either. We also want to be involved in trade relations. That, too, is something we need to discuss frankly.”
Although acknowledging the political aspect of Nord Stream 2, the German leader said Ukraine still should remain a gas transit country. She did not mention that Nord Stream 2 makes no economic sense because Germany won’t get new gas and that gas is sourced from the same supplier and extractor: Russian state-owned Gazprom that has cut off gas supplies in 2006 and 2009.
EU energy market rules forbid gas from the same supplier and extractor, but that doesn’t apply to foreign sources, although changes were made to regulate Gazprom’s additional future supplies on top of Nord Stream 1, which was inaugurated in November 2011.
Moreover, Ukraine’s pipeline system – from which it derives about 0.2 percent of gross domestic product on Russian transit fees – has enough capacity. It’s much cheaper to upgrade it if more demand is required, but that is unlikely given the EU’s ambitious push toward renewable energy.
Such moves have prompted British news publications The Economist and the Financial Times to label Nord Stream 2 a political ruse in separate analyses.
“In short, Nord Stream 2 could make Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states less secure, undermine the EU’s energy strategy, give Russia a bigger stick for threatening Western Europe and sow discord among NATO allies,” The Economist wrote on February 16. “To Mr. Putin, causing so much trouble for a mere $11 billion must seem like a bargain. For Europe, it is a trap.”
New security realities
What was left was Europe’s willful denial of the new security realities that the continent is facing, wrote Judy Dempsey, a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment’s European unit and chief editor of Strategic Europe magazine.
“This obsession with the ‘old’ West during this year’s… conference will delay any strategic realignment of its priorities as Russia and China, but also Japan and India, move on to define their interests,” she wrote after attending MSC.
Instead, she urged for the West to use “globalization and digitization” to create a “wider security, political and economic architecture that could include Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, and African and Latin American countries.”
None of the issues about “widening and deepening democracy and its values” were brought up at the event’s main sessions, she regretted.
Anniversary of Heavenly Hundred
Back in Kyiv following the conference, Ukraine was commemorating the fifth year since the slaying of protesters, the Heavenly Hundred, during the Euro-Maidan Revolution.
Among the dignitaries who addressed the Verkhovna Rada was European Council President Donald Tusk.
The Polish leader said the following: “When we Poles started on our road to Europe, Pope John Paul II told the world: ‘There can be no just Europe without an independent Poland.’ And so today I want to say that there can be no just Europe without an independent Ukraine. That there can be no safe Europe without a safe Ukraine. To put it simply: there can be no Europe without Ukraine!”