Russia’s invasion of Ukrainian Crimea under cover of the closing ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics was the most despicable use of the Olympic ideal in the Games’ modern era. The subsequent proxy war in eastern Ukraine, the murder of 298 people on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the human rights abuses by Russia’s agents and proxy thugs, and the stream of lies about all of it have continued the crime begun with Sochi.
As these events unfolded I marveled at how quickly elites of both left and right discarded the meager gains of all the blood spilled in Europe in the 20th century – international law, the United Nations and the protection of sovereign nations from the predation of imperial powers. Evil developments, all. But, from the start, the geopolitical catastrophe of Russia’s invasions of Ukraine was the undermining of international nuclear arms control.
Ukraine had willingly given up possession of its Soviet-era nuclear arms, as well as the capacity to produce them in the future. In return, in a 1994 agreement – known as the Budapest Memorandum – Ukraine’s sovereignty within her existing borders was guaranteed by Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and several later signatories.
Russia’s violation of that agreement (as well as the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership of 1997 signed by Russia with Ukraine) ought to have produced consternation amongst nuclear arms-control experts. Instead – to a one, as far as I know – they indulged themselves in sophistry: that the agreements violated by Russia had been “assurances,” not guarantees, and that, since Ukraine had not had operational control over the weapons, it was not a real nuclear power. This showed that our experts had an agenda, all right, but that it wasn’t nuclear arms control.
More importantly, the rogue nations of the world, which had already seen what the West’s guarantee to Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya had not meant, now saw what its guarantee to Ukraine did not mean. Several of these real and potential nuclear states are evil. But they are not stupid. The evil ones will humor the West with bogus agreements. But they will not give up their nuclear ambitions. With the closing ceremony of the Sochi Olympics, nuclear arms control was upended, perhaps fatefully, in our time.
That was in 2014. In 2016 Russia has dropped the other shoe in Ukraine and in the Kaliningrad Oblast – the onetime part of German East Prussia that the Soviet Union took as a spoil of World War II. It is the Iskander, a mobile, ground-based conventional and nuclear-capable missile system. It replaces the Oka, which had been banned under the INF arms-control treaty. Oka and Iskander both replaced the Soviet-era Scud. With multiple warheads and sophisticated targeting technology, the Iskander has a range of 250 to 310 English miles. In June, Russia was reported to be clandestinely deploying Iskanders in Crimea; in October in Kaliningrad, which lies west of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Kaliningrad City, the capital, lies due north of Warsaw.
The Soviets and Russians have always, arguably, been better at deception and espionage than democratic Westerners with anti-authoritarian traditions. Mr. Putin tries to conceal his military intentions, and like the early Hitler (in this regard) makes thrusts as tests he is prepared to reverse if they are opposed. What can be certainly said is that he will deploy Iskanders in Crimea and Kaliningrad, and arm them with nuclear weapons, whenever he chooses to.
For Crimea that has a special meaning. Ripped from Ukraine by cynical violation of the 1994 and 1997 agreements – they were “land-for-peace” agreements, really – Ukrainian Crimea was to have been forever non-nuclear, and would have been. Russia’s move to exercise a stolen right to redeploy nuclear weapons there affirms that international arms control is fatefully interrupted.
As regards Ukraine, for the heartbreak of war on its territory, for 2 million internally displaced refugees, for the murderous acts of Mr. Putin’s proxies – all of which this writer knows well – the greater geopolitical catastrophe is the return of nuclear arms as a threat to humanity.
David A. Mittell Jr. is a Boston-based journalist. He has been to the former Soviet bloc 25 times.