A dangerous illusion

It is time peace brokers step up their efforts to end the war in Ukraine. UAE President Sheikh Mohammad bin Zayed Al Nahyan joined their number when he visited Moscow on Oct.12 for discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin with the aim of resolving the conflict diplomatically and avoid risky escalation. As the UAE has good relations with Putin, this visit might impress him as well as the Western powers which have gone overboard to pursue this US/NATO proxy war with Russia.

Coming on top of the two-year long covid pandemic, this conflict was totally unnecessary. The causes could have been eliminated long ago if NATO forgot about recruiting Ukraine and Kyiv dropped this ambition and Ukraine halted attacks by Ukrainian forces on the Russian sector of the Donbas region.

This conflict has not only wrecked Ukraine but also has had a destructive impact across the world by disrupting the flow of Russian and Ukrainian grain to developing countries and boosting the cost of energy, driving inflation.

Bin Zayed was preceded by Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has tried to get the two sides to negotiate since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. While the course of this conflict has shown Putin that the Russian military has not been able to capture the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and install a pro-Moscow government, the Western powers mistakenly believe that they can defeat Russia without paying a high price. Ukrainw will pay the highest price, but Europe is already paying for following the US and the US itself has suffered higher petrol prices.

By training, arming and financing the Ukrainian military the Western powers, led by US President Joe Biden, have not only enabled Ukraine to defend itself but also given its President Volodymyr Zelensky the impression the West will back him in liberating all the territory Russia has held since 2014, including the Crimean peninsula which was part of Ukraine for nearly 60 years.

This is a highly dangerous illusion. Russia will not cede Crimea, a strategic, historic and cultural asset seized from the Ottoman Empire by Empress Catherine the Great in 1776 and formally annexed in 1783. She invested heavily in Crimea and Sevastopol became one of the few Russian warm water ports. Crimea joined the Soviet Union in 1922 but was ceded to Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev — although 75 per cent of its 1.1 million inhabitants were ethic Russians — during a power struggle within the Kremlin and civil conflict in Ukraine. Russia took back Crimea in 2014. Crimea has a population of 2.5 million, 68 per cent Russian, 16 per cent Ukrainian and 13 per cent Crimean Tartar.

Therefore, peace brokers will have to start with the assumption that all the territory claimed by Ukraine will not be returned as part of a settlement to end the conflict. Writing in The Washington Post, Ishaan Tharoor said that billionaire Elon Musk “drew flak [for] tweeting his version of a peace plan” that would involve Ukraine ceding Crimea to Russia. He argued that Russia would use tactical nuclear weapons rather than accept the loss of Crimea.  Although Musk is not an expert in foreign affairs, on this issue he is probably right. Crimea should have never been handed over to Ukraine in the first place but in the 1950s no one predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the close connection Ukraine had with Russia.

Tharoor wrote, “The backlash was scathing — with policy experts and Ukrainian and Western officials scoffing at the logic of nuclear blackmail imposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and parroted by Musk.” Putin was called a “rogue state.”  Putin is not a state but a man. (These policy experts and officials say nothing about invasions and occupations by friends of the West such as Israel’s increasngly brutal occupation of Palestine and Turkiye’s longstandiing occupation of northern Cyprus which Erdogan is gradually annexing.)

The Donbas would probably have to be split along the 2014 lines, returning the situation to the status quo before the Russian invasion. In the Donbas region, with more than 4 million inhabitants, 39 per cent of the population is ethnic Russian, making the it largest minority in the region which was predominately Russopone before the war. It is also a major source of coal and hosts steel plants and other manufacturing enterprises.

Tharoor continued, “The United States and its European partners continue to provide military aid and arms to Kyiv in the hope that Ukraine can press its current advantage, reclaim territories seized by Russia over the past eight months and, at the very least, win itself a stronger hand whenever the warring parties do attempt meaningful negotiations.”

Russia has replied by striking Ukrainian cities and, lately, power plants, knocking out 30-40 per cent of electricity supplies as winter is closing in. Russia is also raising energy costs in Europe by cutting natural gas supplies to major customers. While Putin is escalating, Biden is pumping Ukraine full of weaponry without considering the highly dangerous consequences. Tharoor quoted Hal Brands on Bloomberg Opinion: “The result of all this is a violent, unstable equilibrium that cannot hold forever as committed participants pursue irreconcilable goals.”

Photo: AP