UKRAINE: ON THE ROAD TO CAPITULATION?

Where is Europe's Congress of Berlin to contain Russia's territorial and political expansion?

Prologue

This article is based on realpolitik, in a situation where power has been exercised, where power is limited, and where power has been lacking. While recognising the longstanding Russia complaint about NATO advancement, it in no way excuses Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on which I am on the record of condemning as a war crime.

Two of the World’s major institutions damaged

There are already two major casualties, other than Ukraine, from the Alaska and White House meetings - the United Nations and the European Union. The former is now looking more and more like the League of Nations which proved wholly inadequate as Italy’s aggression in Ethiopia and Japan’s invasion and atrocities in China went unpunished in the 1930s. The latter, far from being a major power has been reduced to a subservient bit player in a Trump constructed drama.

The United Nations: who can ever again take it seriously on matters of security when two of the Security Council permanent members are about to carve up a member state, against every principle in the UN Charter which prohibits the threats of force or the use of force in resolving disputes, and declares the territorial integrity of states as sacrosanct.

The UN, unlike the League of Nations, has an extensive apparatus on humanitarian, cultural and political subjects well beyond the basic original intention of the Security Council as an instrument for keeping the peace. It will not, therefore, fold as the League did, but when two powers at its core act on Might is Right, its ability to intervene decisively and punish aggressors, as it did with Saddam’s Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, has gone.

The EU, a paralysed giant, has only itself to blame for being locked out of the Alaska meeting, and consigned to a White House side room while Trump held court before the world’s media, acknowledging the 20 times Ukraine’s president thanked hm. Right at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was a military shambles on the Kremlin side, had the EU Nato states given the weapons, tanks and aircraft Zelensky asked for, Ukraine would have inflicted defeat on Russia within Ukrainian territory. But that didn’t happen.

What happened was that EU Nato states, with the exception of the UK, dithered and temporised; sent tanks in penny numbers, set conditions on how some of the more lethal weapons were used (don’t fire at Russia), and didn’t supply the aircraft. That allowed Russia to learn from its mistakes and use the first winter to construct a three-belt defence of minefields, barbed wire, and deep trenches, ready for the expected Ukrainian summer offensive.

Everyone with military knowledge knew that Ukraine, lacking massive fire power and air superiority could not break through those Russian defences, and they never did. From then on, Ukraine was on the defensive, fed just enough weapons not to be defeated, but never enough to win back territory. It’s incursion in Kursk proved a false episode: it couldn’t hold the land.

The trilateral meeting trap

There are four things that most, but not all, people are avoiding in relation to Trump’s proposed trilateral meeting, with the EU and UK excluded.

• First, Trump will not be a neutral arbiter. Both in rhetoric and action, he has shown hostility to Zelensky and has blamed Ukraine for starting the war. Even before the White House meeting on Monday, he claimed Zelensky could end the war, which would be true only if Ukraine gave Putin everything he demanded.

  Then there is the American state interest which will be in play, not to Ukraine’s advantage. For the Trump administration, the US state interest is to re-establish relations with Russia to an extent that weans it away from its close alliance with China. As well as being a European power, Russia is a Pacific one too, and the Pacific, and China, is where the United States sees its main interests to be. There is no USA state interest in Ukraine. It is an inconvenient sideshow best got out of the way.

• Second, Trump has threatened Russia, but never actually did it any harm beyond the present range of sanctions which have long been in place, but have not prevented Russia’s war economy building capacity. He has never condemned Putin as an aggressor. The red-carpet treatment in Alaska, preceded by threats of what the US would do to Russia if there was no ceasefire, produced no punishment for Russia, only a self-assessment of 10 out of 10 because they got on great together, manifested by the display of being on first name terms. Alaska was consistent with the US state interest in re-engaging with Russia as an important power, and getting out of Ukraine.

• Third. Putin has not moved one iota from his demands that are aimed at restoring Ukraine to Russia’s sphere of influence. There has been no comment on what was an important piece of symbolism on display in Alaska, by Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. He is one of the highest-ranking diplomats in the world, always soberly dressed, conscious of the dignity of the office he holds. But at Alaska he arrived wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the USSR on the front. A signal that Ukraine is one of the states Russia regards as its “near abroad” over which it must have influence.

  Then there is the battlefield. Putin has no reason to modify his demands for territory being formerly transferred and recognised, and Ukraine kept out of Nato, because he is winning there and cannot be defeated there. The brutal truth is that Russia’s military strength is superior to that of Ukraine.

• Fourth. The president of Ukraine has no cards to play. Something that Trump told him in that infamous meeting in the White House. America will not supply him directly with the weapons that might drive the Russians back a bit. They will sell them to the Europeans to give to Ukraine, but there will be the stings attached of no targets on Russian soil. Europe is good on talk “as long as it takes” but not so hot on the level of supply, and is now, supposedly, rebuilding its own weapons production.

Ukraine is in the awful position of being reliant on others, with personnel losses it cannot afford, when its enemy is self-sufficient in both manpower and weapons.

There is, of course, the constitution which prohibits any transfer of land from Ukrainian sovereignty. But that was recently dismissed as no obstacle by Trump. So, as well as dealing with Trump and Putin, whose state interests are aligned to a considerable extent, president Zelensky will face a political crisis internally if he gives away land and people, to which he will have no solution. The man is in a trap.

Security for Ukraine– what happened to the one already in place?

When the Soviet Union collapsed most of its nuclear weapons were in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Those countries agreed to give them up and the USA, Russia and the UK , in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, agreed to “respect the independence and sovereignty of the existing borders” as a prize for them becoming non-nuclear. So, Ukraine security done and dusted. But how cast iron would those guarantees be if the geopolitical positions then in place changed? And change they did.

At that time of Budapest, Ukraine was neutral and Russia had received assurances from Nato officials (and the USA) that there would be no advancement eastwards. In a seminal speech given to the 2007 European Security Conference, President Putin stated that “Nato expansion represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of trust” and went on to quote Nato Secretary-General Woerner stating in May 1990 “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory may give the Soviet Union a firm guarantee.”That backed up US Secretary of State James Baker’s promise to Gorbachev that NATO would advance not “one inch.” NATO has advanced big time towards Russia, the succeeding state to the USSR. Worse from Russia’s perspective, Ukraine deserted its neutrality and indicated a wish to join NATO, thus altering the situation when Budapest was signed.

Putin was not alone in his complaint of provocation. Away back on 26 June 1997 Robert McNamara, former defence secretary, along with Senators Bill Bradley and Gary Hart wrote to President Bill Clinton warning that the “US led effort to expand NATO is a policy error of historic proportions” and would “foster instability in Europe.”

They were not a fringe on the US foreign policy establishment. George Kennan, the architect of the cold-war containment policy, was forthright: “expanding Nato would be the most fateful error in American policy.” Senators Ted Kennedy, Sam Nun and Thomas Friedman, also warned against the policy of expansion.

The point to grasp is that whatever may be written in a security guarantee by any outside power or group of powers to Ukraine today in the present circumstance, will not hold if there is any change in that circumstance in future.

Even in the unlikely event of no change, I cannot see the USA give a security guarantee that it would in fact carry out. I can see it give some sort of guarantee to extricate it from the present, but does anyone believe that any US administration would engage in conflict with Russia?

The only security guarantee that Ukraine can have is one that it establishes itself. That is it builds its own formidable defence production capability; has conscription that works; militarises its society; and declares as policy that any possible invader will be severely punished in its own territory. It will have to adopt a new role, as Henry Kissinger advised in his Davos speech in May 2022, as a neutral “buffer state rather than the frontier of Europe.”

How has this come about?

There is a full-scale war in Europe in which the European members of Nato have played a minor role, ceding to the United States the role of main supplier to Ukraine and political mastery of the situation. Statesmanship and statecraft have been conspicuous by their absence. Dance to Biden’s and then Trump’s tune has been the policy. There has been nothing more pitiful in all European diplomacy than witnessing the Nato Secretary-General playing to the Trump ego by describing him as their “Daddy.”

What has been needed is what our present so-called leaders are incapable of thinking and delivering: telling the USA that it being a European problem, they will call all parties together in a new Congress of Berlin, where the legitimate interests of the combatants, along with the legitimate interests of all others, the EU states and UK, Russia, the USA, would be considered and a solution hammered out by the major powers combining to enforce one. In that setting the EU, with 12 times the GDP of Russia, could have set and dictated the agenda. It never crossed one mind in that union of 27 states.