27.01.2022

On the brink of war?

The US drive to subordinate Russia, not Putin’s imperial ambitions, are the main explanation for any further conflict, argues Paul Demarty

The Ukrainian crisis is remarkable, in the end, due to the contrast between the pitch of fanaticism it has provoked, and the ordinariness of the motives at work.

The immediate cause of the present panic is the slow build-up of Russian troops on its Ukrainian border, more recently the Ukrainian-Belorussian border as well. The Ukrainian government insists that this is preparation for an invasion. This insistence is parroted in increasingly deranged terms in the mainstream media of the west, especially Britain and the United States. Exactly what this invasion involves - a tank-thrust to surround Kiev or the annexation of the eastern territories over which Ukrainian and Russian militias have been fighting since 2014 - is a matter of dispute. What is not disputed is that this is all a matter of Vladimir Putin’s megalomania, or else some depraved characteristic of the Russian national psyche.

In vain do sceptics point out that the number of troops assembled - a modest 100,000 or so at most - could not possibly take the Ukrainian capital and secure it for more than a moment; or that no evidence is available of any loss of message-discipline on the part of Putin’s government, the message being that their actions are purely a response to provocations of various sorts (compared to frequent leaks from the Ukrainian side to the effect that they do not really believe the ‘invasion’ scenario either). Like the common-or-garden leftist, the western neo-conservative ideologue needs to believe that they are on the side of a plucky underdog against the galactic Empire of Star Wars. In the name of this confusion of fantasy with reality, they denounce Joe Biden for repeatedly declaring that there will be no troops on the ground in eastern Ukraine (of course, the obligatory squads of special forces types and mercenary companies do not count as ‘troops’ on this point).

Promises

How did we get here? The story, like so many others, is rooted in the particular way the Soviet Union collapsed. After the eastern European satellite states gave up their ‘socialist’ regimes, Mikhail Gorbachev cut a deal with the west - Germany would be allowed to reunite, on the condition that Nato expansion would go no further east than Germany. Once the Soviet Union dissolved itself, the US considered that agreement null and void - after all, it had been with the USSR, which no longer existed. The rump Russian state was stung by the rapid accession of Poland and the Baltic states to the Nato alliance. The sense of humiliation attached to that phenomenon is not incidental to the rise of Putin and his resurgent nationalism. Russia began, again, to cleave apart from the US-led order, though this took time to fully work itself out.

A crucial flashpoint came in 2008, when the possibility of Ukrainian and Georgian membership of Nato was first taken seriously by the US. Buoyed by this prospect, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili found a pretext to retake two border areas, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which had, since the USSR’s break-up, been under the de facto control of pro-Russian separatists. The Russians took a dim view of that development and beat the hell out of the Georgians in a brief war. The result was effectively the status quo ante - except now Russia recognised South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states. Whether they cared to admit it or not, both Nato and the Georgians knew that, under such conditions, Nato membership was impossible for Georgia; so long as these formally-Georgian territories are under dispute, such a move would immediately invoke mutual defence obligations and demand a global war against Russia. Nobody had an appetite for that, though Saakashvili seems genuinely to have believed that the Americans would come to his rescue.

The South Ossetian war served notice that the Russian state was prepared to go to war to prevent its encirclement by Nato, which was received with alarm among the pro-western elements in Ukrainian ruling circles, who coexisted uneasily with pro-Russian opponents. In the course of the Soviet era, the eastern part of Ukraine had been extensively industrialised and had an influx of Russian workers to meet demand. Post-Soviet deindustrialisation hit these areas hard. In parts of the west, meanwhile, Ukrainian national sentiment was triumphant, and resented the cautiousness of the country’s elite towards its eastern neighbours. Such was the background to the political crisis of 2014, when president Victor Yanukovych’s stymying of closer relations with the European Union inadvertently set off a colour revolution that placed, ultimately, an alliance of ‘moderate’ and far-right nationalists in charge.

Defensive

The popular reaction in majority-Russian areas of the country was intense, and the Russian government responded by annexing the Crimean peninsula and discreetly supporting ethnic-Russian irregulars in the Donbas. The Ukrainian government - not in possession of a terribly effective army - became reliant on openly fascist paramilitaries to fight the Russians. Low-level conflict has reigned ever since. Just as in the Georgian case, this situation rules out Ukraine joining Nato for the foreseeable future, at the cost of a combustible irregular war not far from the Russian border.

Russia’s actions in both these theatres are of the same type. They combine offensive tactics - annexing the Crimea, aggressively retaking South Ossetia and Abkhazia - with a defensive strategy. The latter part of the equation is the one that gets lost. Russia is, militarily at least, a capital-G, capital-P Great Power. It takes an interest in its near abroad, and this interest is characterised by resisting attempts to break these countries from its sphere of influence. It’s not completely clear that Russia could militarily conquer Ukraine from one end to the other (though you’d bet on them to do more damage than the Ukrainians), but it could certainly have conquered Georgia, and it didn’t. So far as Ukraine goes, Russia has shown no interest at all in any part of it other than the majority-Russian eastern provinces and the Crimea, which has a vitally important Russian naval base and was part of Ukraine only as a result of a Khrushchev-era lines-on-a-map exercise.

In 2015, the outline of a deal was reached between Ukraine and Russia, brokered by the west - the so-called Minsk II protocol. From the Russians, it demanded real military withdrawal from eastern Ukraine and the demobilisation of pro- and ethnic-Russian militias. From the Ukrainians, it demanded regional autonomy for these territories. In practice, the Ukrainian political system has failed to deliver governments that can meet this agreement; and, whether due to strategic incoherence or active malice, the US and its allies have refused to apply the pressure that might to get it done. The result, as we noted, is a slow-burning conflict that has quietly claimed 14,000 lives in the last seven years.

Shades of opinion are discernible within Nato on all this. Germany - ironically, given how this all started - seems the least enthusiastic. After all, it is extremely dependent on Russian fossil fuels, and recently signed off on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project (much to the irritation of Russophobe elements in the US). Kay-Achim Schönbach, the chief of the German navy, caused a minor scandal when he told an audience in Delhi that Russia only wanted “respect”, and respect was due; the important thing was to enlist Russia in global competition with China. After an outcry, he found himself out of a job; but he is presumably guilty of little more than saying the quiet part out loud.

On the opposite fringe - naturally! - we find our own government, which has gone so far as to manufacture a bizarre conspiracy theory about a looming coup that would put a Russian patsy in charge of Ukraine. No evidence has been presented, and the proposed patsy seemed as bewildered as Putin and Sergei Lavrov to find out about it. In the Baltic states, meanwhile, fear of Russia is very real, and rather more serious a matter for them than for a punch-drunk Boris Johnson.

Realism

Our emphasis, so far, has been on ‘demythologising’ this conflict. The sheer pitch of hysteria over ‘Russian aggression’ is supposed to hide the plain fact that over the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, US strategy has been uniformly aggressive in expanding its direct sphere of influence at the expense of Russia. The present crisis - indeed, the apparent unassailability of Putin’s position domestically - is wholly the result of this aggression. The western powers have cornered themselves into a situation where they can be manipulated onto the brink of great-power war by a few screw-loose MI6 analysts and an ultra-nationalist constituency in Kiev.

To this point, we have an account substantially similar to the sort of thing being put forward by certain ‘realists’ in the foreign policy sphere. Anatol Lieven, of the ‘realist’ Quincy Institute think tank, provides a lucid version of this case at great length¹: that western scaremongering refuses to take seriously the fact that Ukraine “is vital to Russian interests”, and that not only can a deal be worked out - it has been worked out, and it is called Minsk II. Western powers should use their leverage to compel a constitutional amendment recognising the autonomy of the Donbas, and a peace treaty to ensure Ukraine’s neutrality “for the next generation”.

Much the same note is struck by a statement from Britain’s Stop the War Coalition:

Britain should be advancing serious diplomatic proposals to defuse the tension and seek a solution to the crisis rather than ratcheting it up. This involves taking both Ukraine’s integrity and Russian security concerns seriously … There needs to be a new all-inclusive security architecture in Europe, not under the hegemony of any one state. We demand that the British government and the Labour Party distance themselves from the policies and priorities of the USA and develop an independent foreign policy.²

It is very strange, for someone of my age who came into radical politics as a result of the anti-war movement, to read phrases like “international security architecture” and “security concerns” in an “anti-war” statement. I have argued that Russia does have such concerns that ought to be intelligible to any ordinary observer; but to leave things there implies they are morally legitimate concerns, which thereby demand that StWC should give an account of its indifference to the “security concerns” of the United States.

For communists, this is in the end beside the point. We don’t want to live in a world composed of relatively less and more powerful states, with the less powerful tugged between the ‘spheres of influence’ of the greater. But to speak of such a world is to move from being abstractly anti-war to positively internationalist (and therefore to leave behind first-order concerns for “territorial integrity” of nation states …) The (notionally communist, by and large) forces behind StWC are happy to stay in a world where they can hop from Quakerish pacifism in one statement to Kissingerish ‘realism’ in the next.

If that won’t do, neither will false equivalences of the sort Socialist Worker proposes when it characterises the whole issue as one of “sabre-rattling between US and Russian imperialism”.³ The SWP seems to be reverting to its old ‘neither Washington nor Moscow’ line, which - whatever its demerits - at least held somewhat true in an era of roughly-symmetrical competition between the two. With the ‘sabre-rattling’ coming down, in the end, to the right of one named party to encircle every significant rival, and the attempts of the other to avoid being so encircled, the attitude ends up like the typical pious statement of some bishop “condemning the violence on both sides”. The characterisation of both as ‘imperialist’ has at least the sense that both operate with a ruthless attitude to the questions contested between them; but it wholly obliterates the weakness of Russia’s position. There is, after all, no Mexican Maidan movement for Putin to exploit on America’s borders by sending extensive ‘lethal aid’.

The SWP at least concludes, correctly, that “in Britain socialists should build opposition to the US and British states beating the drums of war”. Indeed, that is our first and only duty, especially given our own state’s foul role in furthering the drive to a conflict that could - with a snake-eyes roll of the dice - wipe out human civilisation.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk