What began as a civil war inside Ukraine is now a proxy war between NATO and Russia which has serious potential to become a nuclear war. The question for everyone, and not least everyone else, is whether and how that can be avoided. To think this through, it is necessary to confront a basic feature of a world with nuclear weapons: nuclear-armed states are a fact of life, and they will fight to defend the interests they see as vital. Unless this is respected, nuclear Armageddon becomes likely. This is a very unpleasant reality, but moral judgements on events in Ukraine that do not recognise it are worthless.
To see the force of this, we need to pay due attention to the contrast between what happened in Cuba in 1962 and what has happened in Ukraine between 2014 and 2023. In 1962, after the Americans’ failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Khruschev agreed to Castro’s request to site nuclear weapons there. The US saw that as threatening its security, and Kennedy made it clear that the US was ready to go to war to prevent it. Nuclear war seemed imminent. Through ‘back channel’ negotiations, Khruschev eventually agreed to remove all missiles from Cuba. In return, Kennedy promised not to invade again and secretly agreed to withdraw US nuclear missiles from Turkey.
In the case of Ukraine, the anti-Russian nationalist government that came to power in Kyiv in 2014, besides precipitating a civil war in the Russia-oriented Donbas region of Ukraine, pressed for Ukraine to join NATO. Russia, however, had made it very clear from 2008 onwards that Ukraine joining NATO—which would involve the siting of nuclear weapons even closer to Moscow than Cuba is to Washington—would be a threat to its national security that it would never accept.
But unlike Khruschev in 1962, the US and NATO did not back down. On the contrary, instead of encouraging a settlement between Kyiv and Moscow based on the second Minsk accord of 2015, NATO established a Comprehensive Assistance Package for Ukraine with the aim of ‘achieving interoperability with NATO forces by 2020’. Over the next five years, the Ukraine army was radically reorganised, retrained and re-equipped. In 2019 the government in Kyiv wrote the aim of joining NATO into the country’s constitution. In June 2021, NATO ‘reiterated its [2008] decision… that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance’, and in August and November, the US signed two bilateral military agreements with Ukraine involving large-scale military supplies and ‘command and control’ support. In December 2021, Russia made new proposals providing for Ukrainian neutrality. The US and NATO refused to discuss them.
The military support given to Ukraine made it possible for it to resist the relatively limited forces that Russia committed to the ‘Special Military Operation’ it launched in February 2022, though with severe losses. Thereafter, the US not only redoubled its aid and involvement but also intervened to prevent a settlement from being reached at the peace talks sponsored by Turkey in Istanbul in March 2022. Zelensky put forward a proposal involving Ukrainian neutrality which Russia accepted as a basis for negotiation. He was then visited by both Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to make it clear that they would not support a negotiated peace on that basis. Without ‘the West’s backing, he could not survive politically and broke off the talks. The slaughter continued, and Russia mobilised 300,000 more troops. The ‘Special Military Operation’ became a proxy war between Russia and the US/NATO.
Western politicians and the media uniformly endorse the idea that Ukraine–really, the US and NATO–must win the war. The US Defense Secretary says it will be a long one, but the Russians have huge superiority in manpower and armaments, and the Russian economy has not so far been seriously damaged. As many as a third or more of Ukraine’s frontline troops have been killed or wounded, the population has fallen by a fifth, and the state is bankrupt. Russian forces could conceivably sweep through to Kyiv and even Lviv.
Either way, what possible ending can we envisage? We need to recognise that Russia has a lot at stake in Ukraine, whereas, before last year, few people in the West could have found it on the map. As the Harvard international relations expert Stephen Walt commented in February 2022, ‘When your opponent has local military superiority and cares more about the outcome than you do, resolving a dispute typically requires some adjustments on your part. This isn’t a question of right or wrong; it’s a question of leverage.’ Is it clear why the ‘West’ should not make that ‘adjustment’? Who in the West would be seriously injured if Ukraine was neutral, like Switzerland? Or, like Mexico is, in practice?
The key issue is what the aims of the US and NATO really are. Some leading figures in the US government want ‘regime change’ in Russia. But as the Brussels-based expert on Russia, Gilbert Doctorow, warns, they should be careful what they wish for: ‘Russia can level to the ground the United States in 30 minutes. Is this a country in which you want to create turmoil? Moreover, if [Mr Putin] were to be overturned, who would take his place? Some little namby-pamby? Some new drunkard like Yeltsin? Or somebody who is a Rambo and just ready to push the button? … I think it is extremely imprudent for a country like the United States to invoke regime change in a country like Russia. It’s almost suicidal’. And not just for the member countries of NATO..
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