Page 71 - bnemagazine bne_December 2021_20211203.pdf

bne December 2021
Opinion 71
rising tensions in Eastern Europe, which is why the bewilderingly radical American statements require special scrutiny.
“Our concern is that Russia may make the serious mistake of attempting to rehash what it undertook back in 2014, when it amassed forces along the border, crossed into sovereign Ukrainian territory and did so claiming falsely that it was provoked,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on November 10.
Blinken was reacting to the Russian military build-up in
areas adjacent to Ukraine. It was the Americans who started sounding alarm bells. European allies and even the Ukrainian military initially took it sceptically. But the US shared intel and soon at least Ukraine and France were on board.
Russia's build-up near Ukraine is a repeat of similar developments last spring, when the US and its East European allies were also up in arms with what they saw as a threat of imminent Russian aggression.
The prehistory of this year’s seemingly perpetual crisis begins with the election of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the spring of 2019. His landslide victory over his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, was in no small part achieved thanks to his promise of making peace with Moscow and ending the war against Russian-backed separatists in the east of the country.
At the beginning, things seemed to be on the right track. The Ukrainian and Russian leaders met for talks in Paris in December 2019, with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel as mediators. Both
“Our concern is that Russia may make the serious mistake of attempting to rehash what it undertook back in 2014, when it amassed forces along the border, crossed into sovereign Ukrainian territory and did so claiming falsely that it was provoked”
sides expressed cautious optimism with the results, which soon showed – the war in the east of Ukraine came to a near- halt, with the lowest number of casualties since its beginning in 2014. There was even a big prisoner-of-war swap just before the long New Year’s holidays, a feather in Zelenskiy's cap.
But later on things became difficult. First, Zelenskiy encountered strong resistance from Ukraine’s own security community, backed by members of far right volunteer units
that were openly sabotaging de-escalation agreements achieved in Paris. Secondly, he got sucked into the American domestic political cycle, as President Donald Trump tried to use him as a weapon against Joe Biden.
Finally, his popularity bubble began deflating. December 2020 polls showed the pro-Russian Opposition Platform/For Life (OPZZh) bloc overtaking Zelenskiy’s Servant of the People Party in electoral ratings.
Another development around the same time was Azerbaijan's stunning attack and victory over Armenia, which was achieved largely thanks to Bayraktar drones supplied by Turkey. That small and victorious war, which saw a Russian ally defeated, instilled hopes in Ukrainian security circles that it could be somehow repeated in Donbas.
But it might be the factor of Trump going and Biden coming, with his strong views on Ukraine, which contributed to Zelenskiy's abrupt change of tack with regards to Russia and the peace process.
It started with a full-blown assault on Putin’s man in Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk, the person behind the OPZZh bloc. That involved a criminal case against the man himself as well the closure of popular TV channels he was alleged to control via a proxy.
Simultaneously, Zelenskiy and his foreign ministry went on a PR offensive, whipping up international support for Ukraine’s Nato membership and, on occasions, even reprimanding Nato countries for not accepting Ukraine into the block. A series
of programmatic publications by senior American diplomats and military on the website of Atlantic Council, a Nato-linked think-tank, suggested that the campaign was co-ordinated with circles close to the Biden administration.
In early March, several senior figures affiliated with the Atlantic Council recommended that the Biden administration grant Ukraine the status of “major non-Nato ally” and threaten Russia with activating a membership plan for Ukraine should the Kremlin fail to be more co-operative on peace settlement.
Inevitably during the same month, the effective cease-fire on the frontline in Donbas collapsed, while Russia started demonstratively amassing troops near Ukrainian borders. A series of strong-worded statements by Nato countries and the alliance itself followed, with the Russians retorting
in kind. The standoff ended when both sides seemingly exhausted their strategic reserves of cockiness.
In the following months, Putin and other Russian officials began spelling out what they see as red lines with regards to Ukraine.
In broad terms, that pertains to preventing any talk about Ukraine’s Nato membership, which would bring the US-led alliance within 550 km from Moscow on the southern flank,
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