During most of the Cold War period after the internal armed conflicts in Greece and Turkey (that were the occasion of the Truman Doctrine of 1947) were resolved, the US and the USSR established a practice of avoiding proxy wars in Europe. Now we have one in Ukraine, although the West is leery of calling it a "proxy war" because Russia is using that as a propaganda phrase. The Russian role is more direct than "proxy".
Historians, foreign policy experts, and war partisans will take some time (if ever) before everyone agrees whether the current war began in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and established effective control over part of the Donbas area, or with the new Russian invasion that began on February 24th of this year.
I'm inclined to think 2022 is a better defining point. But things can look different after a few years.
Reading analyses of the Ukraine-Russia conflict from the last decade or so, I'm struck once again by how a situation that looks in retrospect like an inevitable outcome was in earlier years a situation open with possibilities and alternatives now superceded by later events.
For instance, a 2020 collection of essays (Peter Schulze and Winfried Veit eds, Ukraine in the crosshairs of geopolitical power play 2020) featured various essays on the conflict. In one of them, Andrey Kortunov - director of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) - looks at how the post-2014 situation looked like another so-called frozen conflict in the post-Soviet space:
Almost seven years have passed since the start of the dramatic events of the Maidan in Kiev [the "Euromaidan" protests of 2014], which engendered a profound crisis in Russia’s relations with both Ukraine and the West. This is not a short period of time: World War One lasted a little over four years, World War Two dragged on for six years, and only about five years passed between the start of Perestroika and the collapse of the USSR. All wars and crises come to an end, and, as a rule, the more acute the crisis, the faster it moves towards some kind of a resolution. [my emphasis]How closely Kortunov's RIAC may tied to the Russian government, I don't know. The Carnegie Endowment has featured columns by Kortunov. He was interviewed briefly by Christiane Amanpour in late March (Andrey Kortunov on the Future of the Ukraine War 03/29/2022), where he said, "I think that the most important thing is for the Russian leadership to recognize that Ukraine has the right to exist as an independent country, that it has the right to choose its own political trajectory, its own domestic directions of development."
The EU's European Institute for Security Studies published an "expert opinion" by him in 2016. Internationale Politik Quarterly published this online analysis of his on 05/31/2022, Moscow’s Painful Adjustment to the Post-Soviet Space, in which he writes:
The launch of a “special military operation” in Ukraine is clearly an exception from the trend toward a more rational, more risk aversive, and more pragmatic approach to the post-Soviet space. It seems that in the eyes of the leadership in the Kremlin, a West-oriented Ukraine collaborating closely with NATO presented a formidable challenge not only to Russia’s security interests, but even to Russia’s existence. Any rational cost-benefit analysis would suggest that the Kremlin has a lot to lose, but not much to gain by trying to reconstruct Ukraine by military means. It is premature to analyze the outcome of the Kremlin’s move in Ukraine, but one can speculate that this will be remembered as the last act of the 30-years-long drama of Russia struggling with its imperial legacy. [my emphasis]Kortunov looked at the options at that point (end of 2020) in terms of the options of a strong Ukraine/weak Ukraine and of a detente/confrontation stance between NATO and Russia. This was a way of emphasizing that Ukraine itself had critical agency, but that it also really was a part of the geopolitical calculations of spheres of interests between the West and Russia.
One of the developments in the polemics over the current war that I find particularly unfortunate is the insistance by some anti-Russia hawks that Russian leaders could not have seriously perceived any legitimate security issues with Ukraine aligning with the West. That's a sign of how superficially foreign policy issues including wars are often discussed.
Because almost any discussion of Ukraine's pre-2022 situation recognized that Russia did regard Ukraine's alignment with the West as a security problem. Not least because Vladimir Putin was saying openly and explicitly starting in 2007 that Russia did see the possible accession of Georgia and Ukraine to NATO that way. That obviously doesn't mean we shouldn't look at other Russian motives for their Ukraine policy. But to pretend that Russia wasn't paying attention to the defense implications for itself is not only unrealistic. It makes much of the actual policy discussions of 2014-2021 around Ukraine nearly incomprehensible.
Here's a more recent interview with Kortunov a few days after February 24, 'Russia has a lot to lose, not much to gain,' says senior policy advisor Andrey Kortunov Deutsche Welle News 03/02/2022:
It appears now that Ukraine has taken more of the "strong Ukraine" route that Kortunov described in 2020, which involves increased public trust in the elected government and a movement toward meeting the governance standards of the EU, though without near-term EU membership being feasible. In this option, "Kiev will succeed in overcoming ehe temptations of political authoritarianism and radical ethnic nationalism, instead being oriented towards political plurality and the European model of a civic nation."
From what we've seen this year, Ukraine certainly seems to have largely taken that route. Although war itself is often not good for democracy. Kortunov expected that in this case, Ukraine would become "a significant additional asset" to "the West in its protracted confrontation with Moscow."
And he summarizes the likely Russian evaluation of that development as follows:
If this scenario materialises, then for Russian authorities, Ukraine will become not merely a major nuisance, but a fundamental existential challenge. The prospect of Ukraine inevitably joining NATO entails the intensive militarisation of the Russia-Ukraine border. Perceiving the Ukrainian development model as a functional alternative to the political system established in Moscow, the Russian opposition will borrow inspiration and practical experience from the story of Ukraine's success. Young educated professionals will emigrate from Russia to Ukraine in great numbers. In response, the Russian leadership will have to isolate their country frotn the alien Ukrainian inßuence with progressive determination, thereby further expanding the abyss between the two societies and countries. [my emphasis in bold]However much one may want to dismiss such Russian concerns as illigitimate or even as sinister propaganda, this is how power-politics works. And ten thousand Putin-is-the-New-Hitler messages on Twitter won't change that. (Reminder: America's opponents in an international conflict since 1945 pretty much always get labeled the New Hitler. We only have wars against "Hitler".)
Kortunov gives this modest definition to the NATO-Russia detente option: "While not friendly, Russia-NATO relations at least emerge from a state of acute conßict."
Well, that didn't happen.
Kortunov's vision of what a Happy Ending might have looked like prior to 2022 does contain some hints of what a positive, definitive peace settlement to the war might include:
For this scenario to materialise, it is crucial that Russia - not only the current Russian authorities, but also a significant portion of Russian society today - recognise and accept Ukrainian people and Ukrainian authority as an independent agency. That is, to accept as given a fact that is far from apparent to everyone [in Russia]: that Russians and Ukrainians are two different peoples, even if they are close both historically and culturally, and that Ukraine is not and will not in the foreseeable future be another failed state. Over the seven years of the crisis [early 2014-2022], Ukraine has not collapsed, nor has its economy collapsed. And the so-called Kiev junta has not been overthrown by phantom pro-Russian [so-called] healthy forces. [my emphasis in bold]In short, continued Ukrainian political cohesion around independence and an acceptance of that independence by Russia. That's not a development that is going to be right around the corner now.
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