Russia and Ukraine

The very establishment British think tank Chatham House has published a useful paper on Ukraine and its ongoing conflict with Russia by Duncan Allan, The Minsk Conundrum: Western Policy and Russia’s War in Eastern Ukraine 05/22/2020.

What Allan calls the Minsk Conundrum refers to the conflict between Ukraine's claim to national sovereignty and Russia's notion that Ukraine enjoys only limited sovereignty. The latter refers to Putin's outlook that former Soviet republics like Ukraine are part of a legitimate sphere of Russian influence which allows Russia to limit their sovereign decisions. The former Soviet republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are exceptions; they are NATO members and Putin does not apply his concept of limited sovereignty to them. (Which is not to say that there are not legitimate concersn about Russian possible military threats to the Baltic nations.)

It's important to differentiate between de facto Russian influence in former Soviet republicans include Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, on the one hand, and international law on the other. The latter does not recognized Putin's concept of limited sovereignty for those nations.

Allan's paper describes the current international framework embodied in two key agreements: Minsk 1 (2014) and Minsk 2 (2015). These were agreements that achieved the current state of uneasy stalemate after the crisis of 2014. They dealt with the two Russian-dominated areas established in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR).

One important part of Allan's paper is that he describes the seizure of the Crimea and its (illegal) incorporation into Russia as a operation focused on larger military considerations. After the fall of the government of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, who fled to Russia in the wake of massive protests during the "Euromaidan" protests:

Yanukovych’s overthrow rocked the Kremlin, which ordered Russian troops and irregular forces to occupy Crimea. The proximate trigger for the decision may have been concern that the new leadership in Kyiv would cancel the lease on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet base on the Crimean peninsula, but the smoothness of the operation indicated that a contingency plan had been drawn up earlier. Having established control, Russia annexed the region. A referendum on 16 March (prohibited under Ukraine’s constitution) recorded an implausible 96.7 per cent vote for incorporation into Russia on an equally unlikely turnout of 83.1 per cent. Putin announced the annexation of Crimea on 18 March. [my emphasis]

Allan's paper, as its title indicates, is focused on the situation in eastern Ukraine, not Crimea. But it is surprising how little he has to say in it about the subsequent diplomacy of the Russian occupation of Crimea. Because that is obviously a major issue in Ukraine-Russia relations and in the relations of NATO and EU with Russia.

Allan writes:

Annexing Crimea was cathartic for Russia’s leaders and for many ordinary Russians. But it did nothing to counteract Ukraine’s increasingly westward orientation. By the time that Russia had annexed Crimea, Ukraine’s new leaders were making it clear that they would sign the AA [Association Agreement] with the EU. How did Russia intend to stop them?

The answer was the ‘Novorossiya project’, a campaign of violent subversion designed to turn the east and south of Ukraine, where many of the country’s (non-Crimean) ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers lived, against the authorities in Kyiv. The initiative reflected a view of Ukraine that was and is widely held in Russia – summed up by the claim, which Putin often makes, that Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people’ with a shared destiny. In this account, Ukraine is not a ‘real’ country, as Putin told US President George W. Bush in 2008. Supposedly a mish-mash of disparate regions glued together under Tsarist and Soviet rule, Ukraine is thought to be inherently weak and unstable because of its regional, linguistic and confessional fault lines. It is seen at the same time as an organic part of the ‘Russian world’, without which it becomes an unsustainable entity. By extension, Ukraine’s integration into ‘alien’ Western-led structures would be perverse and dangerous. [my emphasis]

But the assumptions by Putin's regime behind the Novorossizy project proved to be wrong. As Allan explains:

For the Kremlin, the Novorossiya project was in fact a means to an end: taking territory and, in return for formal reincorporation into Ukraine, forcing the leadership in Kyiv to assent to far-reaching autonomy for the areas concerned. These regions would then exert a stranglehold over the central authorities, stymieing Ukraine’s Western integration. In short, the Novorossiya project aimed to promote ‘a secessionist revolt that the Kremlin could use to exert leverage over the geopolitical future of Ukraine’. [my emphasis]

But the resistance from the Ukrainians proved to be more formidable than the Kremlin expected:

Russia now intervened decisively. Up to 6,500 Russian troops, organized into battalion tactical groups, invaded Donetsk oblast. They decimated a large Ukrainian force at Ilovaisk, southeast of Donetsk; Ukraine lost several hundred soldiers and many of its armoured vehicles. The ATO [Ukrainian anti-terrorist force] never recovered from this shattering reversal. DNR and LNR units, again supported by regular Russian forces, regained much of the lost territory in subsequent days. [Ukrainian President Petro] Poroshenko felt impelled to seek an immediate ceasefire.

However, this also meant that the Russian assumption and hope that their use of heavily Russian-ethnic enclaves would collapse the Ukrainian state and lead to Ukraine's subjugation to Russia had failed. They still have leverage over Ukraine far more than prior to 2014, not only occupying Crimea but having substantial control in the DNR and LNR enclaves. But, as their longtime American rival has repeatedly experienced (as did the USSR in Afghanistan), imposing their will militarily on other countries is not always as easy as they hoped. 

The Ukraine crisis of 2014 did show aggressive intentions on Russia's part in the former Soviet sphere, as well an effective countermove against any near-term integration of Ukraine into NATO.

But Russia's stalemate in Ukraine is also a sign of the limits of its current power.