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68 Opinion bne May 2021
Russia-Ukraine war alert – what’s behind it and what lies ahead?
Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center
Perhaps the most important thing for the Russian leadership in this episode was to prevent the need to actually go to war against Ukraine in the future. Going for overkill in terms of military manoeuvres on the Ukrainian border now may avoid the need to do terrible things at a later point.
The troops are not yet back at their bases, but the war alert along the Russo-Ukrainian border has passed. In fact,
a war was never on the cards. Yet the alert, while it lasted, was profoundly disturbing. For the West, it highlighted the dangers of a large-scale direct clash between Russia and Ukraine. For Russia, which hitherto has dismissed the Donbas conflict as a civil war in Ukraine, it opened up the prospect of having to wage a real war against a large neighbouring country. And for Ukraine, such a war might have been existential.
With the threat of war receding, it is important not to waste this dangerous experience, and instead to draw conclusions from it. For that, it’s essential to understand what was driving the behaviour of the parties involved, to explain the moves that they made, and to consider the short and medium-term results of the face-off.
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Drivers
Seven years after its Maidan revolution, Ukraine is a country in considerable difficulties. Economically, its GDP is still 20% below its pre-Maidan level; politically, it has not yet established a stable balance among the vested interests; ideologically, and in many ways culturally, it continues to be split. Ukraine has become a ward of the West, but its prospects of being admitted to NATO, not to mention the EU, are very remote: essentially non-existent for the foreseeable future. Since being elected president in 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his party have lost much of their once astounding popularity. The Servant
of the People party has come under heavy pressure from the Russophone opposition based in the east of the country, and the nationalists rooted in Ukraine’s west.
Seven years after the start of its confrontation with the United States, Russia is bracing itself for even more pressure from Washington. For US President Joe Biden, Russia is
a lower foreign policy priority than it has been for any
US administration since FDR. Biden talks tough, imposes sanctions, and is going after Russian interests such as the Nord Stream II pipeline. Russia’s relations with Europe are worse than they have ever been since the days of Mikhail Gorbachev. The special relationship with Germany is no