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88 Opinion
US joining the Normandy Four group that is trying to broker
a peace deal in Donbas.
Likewise, in Europe the new German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said last week that the certification for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline would be suspended
“if Russia invades Ukraine”, but in the meantime Germany has suspended arms sales to Ukraine via its state procurement agency.
Biden continues to make very tough statements about the severity of the response “should Russia invade Ukraine,” but increasingly this is looking like a smokescreen that allows Biden to appear strong, but actually buys him the room to engage with Russia on the more subtle job of working out
a workable deal with Putin.
Most of the war talks that started at the end of October have been driven by US intelligence briefing US newspapers. “One scenario that a Democrat party member told me,” says Robinson, “was that you can talk tough about Ukraine’s invasion, but when it doesn't happen then somehow the US and Biden can take some credit for that not happening.”
In the New Year a much more difficult process starts of the Kremlin negotiating with a reluctant Washington on a new security deal. At this point it is not clear if Washington is even willing to contemplate any sort of deal at all. However, if that happens then Putin is very likely to turn up the temperature again and cause a fresh flaring in tensions – possibly with the increasingly participation of China.
New Cold War
What Putin is proposing in effect is a return to the Cold War relations between East and West. And many of those security arrangements are reappearing.
In this sense the current showdown is better understood as a modern version of the Cuban Missile Crisis where Putin, like John F Kennedy, finds the possibility of western missiles on Ukrainian soil, a few minutes flight time to the largest part of Russia’s urban population, anathema. Like in 1962 no one actually wants to go to war and are willing to do
a deal, but like then the threats of war are serious and remain a real possibility.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has explicitly compared the current crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis and went on to say on December 13 Russia may be forced to deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe in response to what it sees as NATO's plans to do the same.
Ryabkov said if the West did not engage in the talks that Putin is proposing the Russia would escalate by moving
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missiles west. Specifically he said if the West declined to join it in a moratorium on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Europe, that is included in the Russian Foreign Ministry’s list, “It will be a confrontation, this will be the next round," he said, referring to the potential deployment of the missiles by Russia.
Poignantly Ryabkov said Russia has a "complete lack of trust" in Nato, which was the basis of the Cold War thinking.
"They don't permit themselves to do anything that could somehow increase our security - they believe they can act
as they need, to their advantage, and we simply have to swallow all this and deal with it. This is not going to continue," Ryabkov added, echoing Lavrov's "new rules of the game" speech.
Another trope of Putin’s is to complain about the US unilateral withdrawal from the ABM missile treaty in 2002, a key piece of the Cold War security infrastructure. The decision marked the end of the bonhomie between Putin and Bush and arguably started Russia off on the road that would lead to
the current clash.
Following that, the US withdrew from several other Cold War treaties, with the most recent being the US nixing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) and Open Skies treaty under Trump.
One of the positive signs in the prospects for a deal between Biden and Putin is that the US president is in favour of these old deals and was vocally opposed to the US exit from the ABM treaty while he was a senator. Moreover, in the first week on the job Biden rushed through renewing the START III missile deal and broached the topic of new arms deals during his meeting with Putin in Geneva.
For its part the Kremlin is also keen to see these deals back in place and one of the items on the Russian Foreign Ministry list is to restart the INF treaty, which was also mentioned by the Russian side when the START III deal was done in January.
However, this set-up is to concede that all hope of friendly relations between Russia and the West are over. Security will be based on arms controls deals, backed by the threat of force. Russia is now actively avoiding engaging with multilateral organisations other than the UN, where it has a veto, and the G20, where it is actively building a networ of allies and illiberal and barely democratic countries are in the majority.
But this set-up will bring peace and quiet. It could end the war in Donbas relatively quickly. And it could mean that Putin steps down as president in 2024, as he is clearly tired of the job, but Ukraine’s status is his big legacy issue and he won’t leave as long as that is unresolved.
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