The agreement between Petro Poroshenko and Vladimir Putin offers the best chance to end hostilities and avoid a slide into total war in Ukraine. After months of bloody fighting between pro-Moscow separatists and government forces in the country’s south-eastern border region with Russia, a ceasefire was agreed last week in the Belarusian capital Minsk.
As skirmishes continue along the front line, it is clear that neither side controls the proxy fighters on the ground. The Ukrainian army has relied on Kiev-backed militias, while the pro-Russian rebels have enjoyed the support of Russian special troops and sophisticated military equipment.
Both are vying for control over the strategic locations of Debaltseve and Mariupol where the worst fighting has raged. With neither party prepared to back down, the smallest incident could set the whole region alight.
In the West, political and media elites are convinced that Russia has gone rogue. From the outset, the Ukrainian crisis that began last February with the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovich, the former president, was seen as the start of a new Cold War and the resurgence of Russian expansionism. Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in March and its aggression in eastern Ukraine appear to confirm the claim that the Kremlin has a master plan to invade neighbouring states and recreate the former Tsarist empire.
In response to Mr Putin’s putative revanchism, there are calls for a comprehensive containment strategy aimed at Russia’s international isolation through economic sanctions.
More recently, the hawks in Washington and European capitals have raised the stakes by calling for the delivery of lethal weapons to Kiev to inflict much higher Russian casualties and change Moscow’s calculus.
For its part, the Russian leadership has no doubt that Ukraine is part of a wider attempt to weaken and ultimately destroy Russia. Nato enlargement to encircle the Russian Federation and orchestrate regime change in the countries along its border are viewed as the clearest examples of the West’s true intent.
Far from promoting democracy and human rights, the United States and the European Union are accused of supporting a fascist government in Kiev that oppresses Ukraine’s large Russian minority. Crucially, Moscow seeks to defend its traditional civilisation against what it calls the decadent liberal West.
But in reality the Ukrainian crisis marks neither a return to the Iron Curtain nor a new global culture war. Rather, this conflict is about rival and partially overlapping spheres of influence, with borderlands such as Ukraine caught in the crossfire. In this great power game, all sides wage 19th century battles with 21st century means: cyber-warfare, infiltration and destabilisation without full-scale invasion or permanent occupation.
Compared with the Cold War, the absence of ideological division makes this sort of situation all the more volatile since leaders have no clear guiding principles. In fact, the Ukrainian crisis reveals the lack of long-term strategic thinking in favour of short-term tactical gain.
At the moment, the only thing all sides agree on is that this is a game with winners and losers. But ultimately everyone is worse off. By failing to act quickly and decisively, the US seems condemned to “lead from behind”. Even more than at the time of the Iraq invasion, the EU appears hopelessly divided between war mongering and appeasement. Meanwhile, Russia looks set to suffer years of economic decline and consolidated political authoritarianism, which will weaken Moscow both domestically and internationally.
For now, the uneasy truce seems to hold, but last September the first ceasefire that was also signed in Minsk fell apart within days.
The only way out of this spiral of escalation is to recognise that Russia and the EU have vital strategic interests at stake in Ukraine. Like Washington, Moscow has its own version of the Monroe Doctrine. Just as no US president would ever accept a hostile regime in America’s backyard, so too Russia’s leaders won’t tolerate a fully western-aligned Ukraine, let alone Ukrainian membership of Nato.
From today’s perspective, the best way of out of the current impasse is to enforce the ceasefire by all available means and to implement the main provisions of the Minsk deal.
This includes a pullback of heavy weapons, independent observers from the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe as well as direct negotiations between Kiev and the pro-Russian rebels on autonomy and Russian language rights.
Crucially, the West and Russia should agree on Ukraine’s military neutrality (rather like Austria or Finland during the Cold War) and a joint rescue package for its economy. Neither side can afford war or economic collapse.
Such steps are far likelier to bring Ukrainians a modicum of peace and prosperity than a permanent east-west divide. Crucially, they offer a face-saving exit from the crisis precisely because they respect the strategic interests of all. Without that, Europe looks doomed to repeat the follies of the past.
Adrian Pabst is senior lecturer in politics at Britain’s University of Kent and visiting professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Lille (Sciences Po), France
On Twitter: @AdrianPabst1
