Despite the massive material and military support the West has provided to Ukraine, the impulse to appease the Kremlin lingers, because many Western leaders fear the consequences of Russia’s defeat more than the prospect of a defeated Ukraine. But appeasement is a recipe for precisely the escalation leaders say they want to avoid.
BERKELEY – On August 1, 1991, a little more than three weeks before Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union, US President George H.W. Bush arrived in Kyiv to discourage Ukrainians from doing it. In his notorious “Chicken Kiev” speech in the Ukrainian parliament, Bush lectured the stunned MPs that independence was a recipe for “suicidal nationalism,” “ethnic hatred,” and “local despotism.”
The speech was a colossal blunder. Ukraine’s people were being asked to ignore centuries of oppression by decision-makers in Moscow – and this at a time when the Holodomor, the Soviet-engineered “terror famine” that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33, remained embedded in the living memory of many. That December, Ukraine delivered its answer to Bush: a whopping 84.2% of eligible voters turned out for the referendum on independence, and 92.3% of them said yes. But the West’s reluctance to respect Ukraine’s desire for sovereignty was a bad omen, revealing a mindset among US and European leaders that paved the way to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February.
The path to war began in 1994, when Ukraine, at the West’s behest, surrendered to Russia the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. In exchange, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States promised to ensure Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. But how was this assurance supposed to be realized? Unlike Poland and other ex-communist countries, Ukraine was not given a chance to join the European Union in the 1990s, and in 2008 France and Germany blocked its admission to NATO.
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Writing for PS since 2015
5 Commentaries
Yuriy Gorodnichenko is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Writing for PS since 2022
2 Commentaries
Anastassia Fedyk is Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of California, Berkeley.
Writing for PS since 2022
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Ilona Sologoub, Editor of VoxUkraine, is Director of Political and Economic Research at Kyiv School of Economics.
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"The main objective is thus crystal clear: Russia must lose this war and demilitarize."
Wow. Sure sounds like a formula for lasting peace.
I am glad that Ukraine has been able to keep out the Russian invasion, but I do not support a Ukrainian invasion instead. And that is what further advances by Ukraine would amount to. The Kiev government will not be universally accepted as a liberator in the Donbas or in the Crimea. And I am sure its soldiers can be cruel, too, if they are set to rule people who regard them as the enemy.
We should be trying to end this war. We should not be seeking the return of all the former areas of Ukraine. And just how realistic is it to call for the demilitarization of Russia? How do you plan to do that?
Neither Germany or Japan had nuclear weapons back then. Not the same situation. Maybe the most similar situation is when the US lost the conventional guerrilla war in Vietnam (without ever using nuclear weapons). Still, Vietnam was far way. A victorious Vietnam was no direct threat to the US, while a victorious Ukraine is so close that it becomes an immediate threat to Russia. If Russia loses the conventional war, it may not be able to maintain its southern borders, no matter which weapons the Ukrainians are given.
The reason given by western democracies for maintaining the vast arsenal of military material and men under arms is to counter the threat from authoritarian states and dissuading them from engaging in aggressive behaviour against their neighbours and others beyond. But far from upholding the rules-based international order and territorial integrity of member states which is at the heart of the United Nations Charter, this group of democratic countries have ended up deterring themselves from acting against this brutal war on the European continent and bringing it to a swift end.
So, what is the point of spending huge sums of money on procuring all this military equipment and keeping it at a high level of readiness?
The answer lies in the highly unusual relationship between governments and the private sector which now owns the means of defence production, distribution and exchange in its entirety, that is to say, the State is wholly dependent on for-profit organisations for the design, development, manufacture and delivery of new military equipment to the Armed Forces. But instead of supplying equipment which is fit for purpose, adequately sustained in-service and constitutes value for money through-life, defence contractors are using this dependency to serve their business and commercial interests, first and foremost.
The central purpose of any private sector establishment that calls itself an engineering company is to satisfy the equipment needs of its customers, normally expressed as a technical specification requirement.
This essential activity requires the entity to maintain an in-house design, development, systems integration, prototyping and testing as a core capability which is normally understood to mean a team of professionally qualified and experienced engineers who would apply the principles of good engineering practice to advance the developmental status of the starting-point for the technical solution from its existing condition, to a point where it will satisfy the qualitative and quantitative requirements expressed in the technical specification, within a competitive market environment driven by the profit motive and winning mindset.
But the fact of the matter is that defence contractors in the UK no longer possess such a capability and haven’t done so for many years. Additionally, they have shown no interest whatsoever in solving the vast array of technical problems that typically come to the fore on defence procurement programmes.
The lack of a design & development capability arises from the fact that the engineering problem-solving functions of defence contractors’ businesses are made-up entirely of people who were previously in the pay of the State. This total dominance of the payroll has come about because the last several decades has seen the transfer of tens of thousands of people in the pay of the State to the private sector via the “revolving door’, largely due to the resounding success of the policy instituted by Defence Secretaries of all political persuasions – to encourage for-profit organisations in receipt of government defence contracts to take-on people who are just about to come off the public payroll.
These people, who came across from the public sector in their middle-age (armed with a full government pension), have no experience whatsoever of advancing the developmental status of the starting-point for a technical solution, not least, because they were never required to do so during the first half of their career. Indeed, nothing in their prior experience of working in the public sector has prepared these people for the challenges they face in the private sector. And yet, they have been inducted into the engineering problem-solving functions of defence contractors’ businesses! Not surprisingly, the results are entirely predictable – MoD equipment development programmes invariably go from one crisis to another, again and again, with delays, cost overruns and defective equipment as the only guaranteed outcomes.
Yet another problem with people who were previously in the pay of the State is that they are not well-informed about how the private sector works because they have not known anything but the public sector. Indeed, they haven’t got a clue about what it is that drives the behaviour of for-profit organisations in the free market – not least, because they have not spent a single day of their lives in the private sector – and yet had been put in charge of spending taxpayers’ money to the tune of £14bn a year to buy defence goods and services from the private sector. What’s more, these people are very good at talking a “big game” but they can’t “do it”. To make matters worse, they have gone on to transplant the regressive work culture of management by committee and PowerPoint presentations in their new workplaces, which then degenerates into groupthink.
Their standing is further diminished by the fact that their ability to innovate, solve problems, learn from past mistakes and adapt to change, which is a distinctive characteristic of people in the private sector, was erased in the public sector due to incessant conditioning of the mind from an early age.
So, instead of employing talented engineers, problem-solvers, innovators and doers to build-in engineering excellence into their products by tackling technical problems as they emerge, contractors are hiring people who were previously in the pay of the State for the simple reason that they can bring in new defence business – by lobbying their former colleagues in MoD to swing the decision on down-selection in favour of their new employers, which takes priority over resolving technical issues.*
@JagPatel3
* Written submission to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee of the UK Parliament, Inquiry into Propriety of governance in light of Greensill, written evidence from Jag Patel, published 8 June 2021, p.2. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/35317/pdf/
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The story that today’s democratic capitalist societies have told themselves about technological progress is incomplete, at best. While the work of pioneering entrepreneurs and firms certainly matters, the real question is what conditions allowed for their commercial success in the first place.
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