Page 89 - bne magazine February 2022_20220208

bne February 2022
Opinion 89
Alienating Russia and the western-made Frankenstein monster
Leonid Ragozin in Riga
The end of 2021 was marked by hair-raising confrontation between the two greatest nuclear powers, the US and Russia, over Ukraine - a country defending itself against Russian aggression since 2014. It suddenly felt like the ghost of the Cuban missile crisis has come to life, threatening us with nuclear Armageddon.
It was the culmination of a year-long standoff, which began with the Biden administration and its Ukrainian allies attempting a more assertive policy towards Russia.
In a major change of tack, which coincided with Biden’s arrival in the White House a year ago, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy made several moves that were meant as a slap to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s face.
He sanctioned Russia’s ally in Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk, and outlawed TV channels associated with him. He brought the issue of Russian-occupied Crimea back into the spotlight by announcing the Crimean platform. Most irritatingly for the Kremlin, he launched a campaign, co-ordinated with influential DC lobbyists, for Ukraine’s membership of Nato.
That, quite expectedly, triggered Moscow’s heavy-handed response. By April, nearly 100,000 Russian troops were deployed not far from the Ukrainian border in a menacing show meant to signal Putin’s readiness to go to war, should one of his “red lines” be crossed by the perceived adversary.
The interim result of this year-long confrontation, now interrupted by US President Joe Biden and Putin agreeing to launch negotiations, can be illustrated by two publications on the website of the Atlantic Council – a Nato-linked think-tank, which advocates hawkish policies towards Russia.
The first one, released a couple of weeks before Russia started pulling troops to the Ukrainian border in March 2021, was a proposed Ukraine strategy for the Biden administration. The document called for granting Ukraine a membership action plan for Nato should Russia prove “intransigent” in peace talks. It called for arming Ukraine and stepping up Nato’s
Following the fall of the Soviet Union the West welcomed most of the countries of the Former Soviet Union into the trans-Atlantic family except one – Russia.
naval activities near Russian shores in the Black Sea. Finally, it unequivocally stated the goal of derailing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, which would allow Russia to supply gas to Western Europe bypassing Ukraine.
The second Atlantic Council document, signed by an even more stellar cohort of American diplomats and top brass military commanders, was published in the last days of 2021. The goals it set were markedly less ambitious. It contained no more talk about Nato membership plans for Ukraine and only mentioned Nord Stream 2 in the context of putting pressure on Berlin into suspending the project, should Russia invade. But
it still called for providing weapons to Ukraine and for a more assertive military posture in the Black Sea.
As the dust settles, Putin has good reasons to believe that his blackmailing of the West with the prospect of full-out war in Ukraine has worked. Nato membership is clearly off the table, with Russia having embarked on a counter-offensive and demanding that Nato guarantees its non-expansion into post- Soviet space.
Nord Stream 2 is completed and awaits certification by the German regulator. Despite token gestures towards the US allies, Berlin appears to be largely unfazed by the Russian invasion panic which was fanned by the Biden administration at the end of 2021 in the last-ditch attempt to shut down the project, with the newly formed German government as the target audience.
The only real big loss for Putin is Medvedchuk’s exclusion from political life in Ukraine at the start of the new election cycle. That diminishes Russia’s chances of altering Ukraine’s course by political means. But there is no doubt that Putin will keep trying to salvage his protégé.
But the most significant result of the standoff is clarity.
Putin demonstrated where his red lines are, beyond which
the prospect of war becomes all too real. He means it. The prospect of Nato in Ukraine raises the same kind of panic as Soviet missiles in Cuba did in the US. Putin knows he will have Russian society rallying behind him if that prospect becomes
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