[Salon] Ukraine conflict exposes dangers of a new Cold War Ukraine conflict exposes dangers of a new Cold War

Ukraine conflict exposes dangers of a new Cold War

A look at Ukraine’s distant and recent past reveals a complex and dangerous example of the risks posed by a world where superpowers are once again clashing.

A Ukrainian tank moves during military drills near Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022. (AP Photo/Andrew Marienko)

(CN) — Ukraine, a land best known for its fearsome Cossack warriors of old and the Orthodox onion domes of Kyiv’s churches, is a multiethnic and complex country of 44 million people nearly the size of Texas full of potential with its vast and fertile plains, industrial cities, position on the Black Sea and rich history.

But this large country that sits at the crossroads between Europe and Asia is now the embodiment of just how dangerous the world has become in an age of struggle between nuclear-armed superpowers vying to bolster their economic, cultural, military, cyber and political regimes in a context of growing competition over developing nations like Ukraine. Many experts warn this is a new Cold War.

On Friday, Americans living in Ukraine awoke to the news that U.S. President Joe Biden was urging them to leave the country because “things could go crazy quickly” in the region within days. Biden's alarm-filled warning was the most dramatic statement yet about a perceived threat that Russia plans to invade Ukraine and start a war. The Kremlin denies any such plans.

In the short span of the two months since Ukraine became the focus of world events, people around the globe have been shown how long-simmering unresolved problems in a country as pivotal as Ukraine can bring the world to the brink of the unthinkable: Another major war between great powers in Europe.

For the general public, making sense of Ukraine isn't easy.

Experts in foreign policy circles offer wildly different versions of the reasons for the crisis. Politicians are stoking animosities with warmongering rhetoric. Academics can't agree on basic facts. Propaganda is rife on all sides. Social media platforms are crammed with unvarnished truths, new explosive information, exaggerations, lies, vitriol and trolls.

All the while, arguments rage in and outside Ukraine over the roots of this military, political and cultural crisis and who is to blame. Academics tear each other apart. News outlets all too often push the agenda of their country's powerbrokers.

Muddying the waters even more are dark layers of political corruption in a country that is among Europe's poorest. Events in Ukraine are pickled by power struggles between oligarchs, webs of espionage and a flow of weapons and mercenaries from the United States and Russia, sizeable public support for armed and violent far-right extremist groups who openly declare Russians and other minorities in Ukraine are state enemies, and an internecine religious and ethnic conflict between Russophiles in eastern Ukraine and Europhiles in western Ukraine.

“There are multiple conflicts in Ukraine,” said Nicolai Petro, a politics professor at the University of Rhode Island and expert on Russia and Ukraine, in an email to Courthouse News.

“At one level, it is a conflict between the United States and Russia over whose sphere of influence Ukraine should belong to,” he said.

This is the primary reason for the current showdown between the Kremlin and the White House over Ukraine. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Washington has coveted Ukraine and steadily pushed to make it a NATO base of operations in a bid to neutralize Russia's global ambitions.

Following the end of the Cold War, American geopolitical thinking saw conquest in Eurasia as a key to unlocking new markets and gaining global strategic advantages, and Washington has successfully steered Ukraine away from Moscow and into the arms of NATO and the European Union.

Tina Jennings, a scholar at the Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, said this American strategy was carried out in late 2013 and early 2014 during the so-called “Maidan Revolution,” a chaotic period of protests and violence that led to the overthrow of Ukraine's pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovich.

“It is worth recalling that this part of Europe enjoyed almost 70 years of uninterrupted peace since World War II – until the U.S. and EU intervened directly in Ukraine’s internal affairs to orchestrate a de facto political coup,” Jennings said in an email.

She said Yanukovich had been democratically elected and was forced out of office by the interference in Ukraine’s domestic politics of U.S. President Barack Obama and his allies in Congress.

Yanukovich incurred the wrath of the U.S. and many in Ukraine after he ditched a deal, under pressure from Russian President Vladimir Putin, sealing a pact of cooperation with the EU. After his removal, Ukraine's new anti-Russian and pro-Western government signed the pact, accelerating Ukraine's path towards inclusion into the EU and the NATO club.

“It is important to call this event what it was: a violent coup, in the center of Europe, in the 21st century,” Jennings said. “This dramatic chain of events culminated in Russia annexing Crimea within weeks, in a swift, bloodless takeover, a territorial annexation that is highly unlikely to ever be reversed (due to the fact that it is the home port of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet).”

Fast forward to today and the U.S. strategy to confront Russia is back in play as President Joe Biden resumes the doggedly anti-Russian campaign he and Obama were carrying out before former President Donald Trump won the White House and called for a reset in relations with Putin.

The problem, though, is that Putin, a tsar-like leader seeking to keep his country's vast imperial territories intact, and the country's elite are determined to not let Ukraine become what they see as a potential nightmare on Russia's crucial southern border: A NATO-armed foe espousing anti-Russian rhetoric and fomenting anti-Russian sentiment across a fractured and war-torn Russia at risk of coming further unglued by ethnic, religious, political and regional conflicts.

Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to French President Emmanuel Macron during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow on Feb. 7, 2022. (Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Putin came to power in 1999 with a mandate to end a horrendous war in Chechnya and stabilize a Russia teetering under a pall of violent crime, corrupt privatization, dramatic declines in living standards and life expectancy, crumbling infrastructure and weakened military strength.

He also came into the Kremlin with an eye towards the West as Russia's elite contemplated the possibility of joining NATO and the EU.

“I recall in the 1990s there was very serious consideration about either joining NATO or having a very close partnership with NATO,” said Andrey Kortunov, the director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a Moscow-based think tank, in a telephone interview.

“Of course, the assumption was that NATO would change itself and it would become a kind of embryo for the new collective security system in Europe, an inclusive democratic system which Russia might find a place in,” he added. “Even Putin when he came to power entertained this idea that under certain circumstances Russia might even consider joining NATO.”

But that time of dalliance between the old Cold War rivals is over.

“These days it's no longer realistic to accept such a development because in Russia NATO is perceived as a hostile alliance and NATO perceives Russia as the most important raison d'être which keeps NATO together because the only thing that NATO can do is to deter Moscow," Kortunov said.

The potential for military cooperation between the West and Russia was perhaps best seen in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the U.S.

Putin was the first world leader to call President George W. Bush to offer his help. Russia opened its air space to U.S. military airplanes and gave the green light to the U.S. to use military bases in former Soviet republics in Central Asia to launch an invasion against Taliban-held Afghanistan.

But by 2007, a shadow had fallen between the West and Russia.

With a foreboding and polemical speech in February 2007 at the Munich Security Conference, Putin warned that a global order where only America's rules, laws and interests counted was “plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflict,” destroying the international system of laws and interests and leaving humanity unable to resolve complex problems.

“I want to emphasize this: No one feels safe because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them for such a policy stimulates an arms race,” he said, as translated in a video by RT, a Russian state news outlet.

Putin accused the U.S., European leaders and NATO of expanding toward Russia despite promises to the contrary made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. He blasted the West for installing anti-ballistic missile systems in Europe in contradiction to previous agreements and building up military forces ever closer to Russia. He accused the West of selfishly reaping the economic benefits of a world order it dominated.

“We should not forget that the fall of the Berlin Wall was possible thanks to a historic change, one that was also made by our people, the people of Russia, a choice in favor of democracy, freedom, openness and a sincere cooperation with all the members of big European family; and now they are trying to impose new dividing lines and walls on us,” Putin said.

He finished his speech saying Russia wanted to cooperate and work with the West to construct a “fair and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only for a select few but for all.”

But little more than a year later in April 2008 at a NATO meeting in Bucharest, the die was cast when Bush declared that the NATO alliance would expand the “circle of freedom” and put Ukraine and Georgia, two former Soviet republics with deep historical importance to Russia, on the path to NATO membership.

The Kremlin was furious and felt betrayed. Only four months after the Bucharest NATO summit, Russia invaded Georgia in a war between Russian-backed self-proclaimed republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and the central government in Tbilisi.

Tensions also grew in the breakaway pro-Russian region of Moldova known as Transnistria where Russian troops were stationed and the political landscape in Ukraine became more acrid.

Then came the complete rupture with the Maidan Revolution and the overthrow of Yanukovich. After Russia annexed Crimea, it was kicked out of the Group of Eight, heavily sanctioned and demonized by the West. Relations have only worsened since.

In this photo released on Feb. 4, 2022, tanks and armored vehicles move during Belarusian and Russian joint military drills at Brestsky firing range in Belarus. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)

For Kortunov, the dangerous state of affairs that hangs over Europe today, and by extension the world, was avoidable.

“It was not only about NATO [expanding], it was about the failure to give power to pan-European institutions like OSCE,” he said, referring to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a Vienna-based nonmilitary organization that seeks to foster peace in Europe and Central Asia. It's made up of 57 nations, including the U.S. and Russia.

“NATO turned out to be the only game in town,” he said. “So the European security system gradually evolved around NATO and that implied that if you are not within the NATO alliance you are not in Europe. And if you're not a stakeholder, you are tempted to become a spoiler – so that's how it evolved in my view.”

Other experts are not so sure and see Russia as caught in a process of traumatic imperial decline and dissolution since the end of the Soviet Union.

“The state of antagonism is not new unfortunately, it arises out of long-standing tensions that arise from the breakup of empires,” said Sarah Whitmore, a Russia and Ukraine expert at Oxford Brookes University in England, in an email. “There are always after-shocks and death-throes as the former imperial center seeks to come to terms with its loss of empire.”

In tandem, the Ukraine conflict is fueled by the inability of Russian elites “to understand that Ukraine is independent, that this was supported by 90% of the people in a democratic referendum and continues to be supported by a majority of the population in all regions,” she added.

Meanwhile, Putin and his inner circle – who she said are suffering from “flagging legitimacy” – see domestic political advantages by confronting Ukraine because they enjoyed a boost to their popularity following the Crimea annexation, she said.

Putin wants to bolster his sagging poll numbers by “ramping up of Great Power rhetoric that Russia will expand” and preserve its sphere of influence, she said.

“This has become an important pillar of domestic legitimization efforts,” Whitmore said.

She pointed to Vladislav Surkov, a key architect of the Putin regime and a presidential adviser on Ukraine, who proffered that Russia “will expand not because this is good, and not because this is bad, but because this is physics.”

Besides being a superpower conflict between the Kremlin and the White House, Petro said the clash over Ukraine can be seen as a conflict between Russian and Ukrainian elites over whether “relations should be friendly or antagonistic.”

“Those who support antagonism fear that friendly relations will prevent the emergence of an independent Ukrainian national identity,” he said in his email.

But he said the real nub of Ukraine's crisis has to do with a deep internal cleavage.

“It is a conflict within Ukraine between its more Russophile East and more Europhile West,” Petro said. “From my perspective, the conflict within Ukraine is the most important of the three [conflicts], because resolving it would remove the source of the friction that is being used to stoke the other two conflicts. It can be resolved by dialogue, compassion, and reconciliation.”

This internal conflict reaches back into the turbulent history of a region that was a crossroads of cultures and a cradle of civilization for both Russia and Ukraine. In the 10th and 11th centuries, Kyiv was the center of the first eastern Slavic state, Kyivan Rus, and it was the largest state in Europe and arguably its most powerful.

By the 17th century, Kyiv was absorbed into the Russian tsardom, allowing Russians and the Russian language to dominate a flourishing Kyiv.

However, the spread of romantic nationalism across Europe in the 19th century took root in Kyiv too and a new independent history – one that wanted to be free of Moscow and Russia – began to be written.

With the collapse of the Russian Empire, the land of the old Cossacks was plunged into a series of horrors. Between 1917 and 1945, the end of World War II, Ukraine experienced 28 years of sheer madness and horror.

More people died or were killed during this tragic period than in any other European country: Thousands were killed in the civil wars following the Bolshevik Revolution; an estimated 3.3 million died during the Great Famine, known as the Holodomor, caused by Joseph Stalin's forced industrialization; and millions more were killed by the Nazi invasion with up to 1.6 million Jews in Ukraine murdered in the Holocaust. World War II also saw nationalist Western Ukrainians join the war with the Nazis and commit massacres against Russians and communists, historical grievances that live on to this day.

Following the war, Ukraine was forced to become an industrial heartland of the Soviet Union, underwent a Russification process and suffered yet another horror with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The dissolution of the U.S.S.R saw it finally gain independence in 1991.

Ukraine is now in the throes of a new era of chaos and bloodshed.

Petro likens Ukraine's internal conflict to a Greek tragedy where the participants need to purge themselves of historic hatreds and open a dialogue to bring about social harmony in a trauma-torn land defined by Russophiles to the east of the Dnieper River and Europhiles to the west.

“Solving the problem then is about shifting the conflict away from superpower conflict to solving the conflict within Ukraine,” he said in a recent discussion about the crisis for Johns Hopkins University.

“There are two schools of thought about achieving unity: one says the Russian contamination must be eliminated, and this idea of cleansing has been going on for a long time and they say it just needs go deeper and deeper; through cleansing a true Ukraine can be constructed,” he said. “The other view is that Ukraine is what Ukraine is today; they see eradication as dangerous and that it will fail; they say you have to accept Ukraine as the diverse place it is. This will take a lot of dialogue."

He said Ukraine's best hope is to bring the country together through dialogue and truth and reconciliation efforts like those that took place in Northern Ireland. One solution, he said, would be to allow for more federalism and autonomy for pro-Russian eastern regions.

The Donbas conflict in eastern Ukraine, which has killed about 14,000 people, is in danger of escalating because Kyiv has refused to consider granting the regions more autonomy, as stipulated by a ceasefire deal struck in 2014 called the Minsk Agreements.

“Today federalism is taboo,” Petro said. “If you mention it, you are immediately viewed as beyond the pale and labeled as a separatist.”

He said the current showdown between Russia and NATO over Ukraine is not what is needed.

“My solution is simple: if the policies you are pursuing are aggravating tensions, then do the opposite,” he said. “If troop exercises aggravate, halt them; if supplying weapons aggravates, stop; if sanctions cause hostility, try removing sanctions to encourage dialogue."

“In sum, we should imagine being in a car that is driving toward a cliff at high speed,” he added. “To avoid going over that cliff, we should first stop the car, then put it in reverse. Needless to say, such an obvious approach is typically dismissed as naïve.”

Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is bas