Ukraine: To avert war, peace diplomacy must win
OSTENSIBLY, it is difficult to predict the future of the Ukrainian crisis, but one thing is absolutely clear that if multilateral diplomacy is given a cold shoulder by the concerned parties, then nothing could be expected to come out of it except the chaos of war.
Unfortunately, despite one hour and forty minutes telephonic talk on Saturday between Russian and American Presidents Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden, also accompanied by French President Emmanuel Macron’s shuttle diplomacy on Ukraine, no positive result has come yet.
So far, the Kremlin has been using dual cards on the Ukraine crisis —the hard power and soft power synergies—reflecting a tendency toward the military option while also opening the doors for diplomatic negotiations.
Given the current Ukraine crisis, a veritable question raises: having revised slightly the territorial status quo of 1991—will Moscow be contended with what the present status quo still leaves the western boundary of its influence far to the East— where it was from 1945 to 1989, and leaves Odesa and Kyiv beyond its control?
Per se, it appears that having annexed Crimea in 2014, Moscow clearly seeks revision of the norms that Europe and the US have underpinned the security of Europe since 1989.
US Secretary of State Mike Blinken said the U.S.response, delivered to the Russian Foreign Ministry by US Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan, gave up no ground on “core principles” such as NATO’s open-door membership policy and the alliance’s military presence in Eastern Europe.
Blinken said the document made clear that the U.S.is standing by its oft-stated positions. “There is no change, there will be no change,” he said.
In western eyes, today, Ukraine is almost surrounded by 100000 Russian troops— along its northern border with Belarus, in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk), in Crimea to the south, and in Transnistria, the Russia-occupied part of Moldova to the west.
Despite these disturbing developments, President Putin officially continues to deny any planned aggression towards Ukraine.
Russia is not only the second-largest natural gas producer in the world – it is also extremely good as gas lighting.
Taking advantage of this by implementing the Minsk-II Accords signed in February 2015, could also open the door to peaceful relations between Russia and the West.
After all, a Ukraine that can accept its own cultural pluralism, and see it as a source of civic unity, would also be strong enough to resist being drawn into the recurring conflicts that erupt between those cultures.
Many EU governments, not least the new German government, but also many others can’t quite believe that a major war in Europe with Russia may be just around the corner.
They are convinced that continuing dialogue and engagement with Russia will do the trick to resolve the situation—resurrecting the triumph of the Helsinki Accords (1975, signed between the Western bloc and the former Soviet Union).
German political thinker Klaus larres foresees that for Vladimir Putin, the only viable option seems to have the full annexation of the Donbas region, which is already under the control of pro-Russian authorities based in Donetsk and Luhansk.
The model for the annexation of the Donbas region, which directly borders Russia, is not only the annexation of Crimea, but also the de-facto annexation of the Georgian territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia after the Russian-Georgian war of 2008 though Moscow declared them to be independent states
Yet, recently the so-called Normandy process, a vital diplomatic chord between NATO, OSCE and Russia (revived on January 26 in Paris) for implementing the 2015 Minsk II agreement among Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany, had a pivotal meeting on February 10 in Berlin.
However, so far only advisers of the four governments rather than senior politicians have participated.
They have advocated the view that if full political autonomy within the Ukrainian state and home-rule status for the Donbas region could be agreed, a Russian invasion and annexation of Donbas could perhaps be avoided.
As for the Russian sanctions issue, a realistic thinking prevails in the mind of the western thinkers is that the western-imposed sanctions after the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine could not properly work out and the fact is that Putin, after all, has survived.
You know, the price of oil has gone up.The Russian Treasury is doing fine, even if the ordinary Russian people are not doing so well.
So, they argue there’s much indication so far that economic sanctions, per se, could hardly dissuade Putin.
Some European believe that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky may still play a paramount role in resolving the crisis.
Meanwhile, Putin seeks security guarantees from the US and its European allies about not deploying missiles along its border, and that Kyiv never joins NATO, and above all, the West must scale back NATO’s military infrastructure.
Currently the joint China-Russia statement in Beijing has condemned US policy in Eastern Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
Beijing and Moscow indicated that sanctions alone would not deter their bids to play larger roles on the global stage.
Though some moderate thinkers advocate for finalization of Ukraine in so far as during the Cold War period, Russia and the West had kept Finland out of the war, this neutrality of the Ukraine crisis is not supported by the hardliners in both the camps.
Jake Sullivan, US NSA has warned Americans to immediately leave Ukraine.The UN Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peace-building Affairs, Rosemary A.
DiCarlo, warned that any military intervention involving Russia, or NATO alliance forces which are also now on high alert, must be averted.
Though the Ukraine crisis leads to the path towards asymmetric peace and war, the peace diplomacy must win in order to save humanity from the havocs of a nuclear war.
Should not the West and Russia be aware of the harrowing consequences of trumpeting third world war if the case for meaningful and multilateral peace diplomacy is ever lost?
The order of the collective wisdom is: all the stakeholders of the Ukraine conflict must join their heads to find a pragmatic way to bilaterally address the Russian concerns vis-à-vis NATO’s eastward expansion, and the western concerns for Ukraine’s sovereignty.
—The writer, an independent ‘IR’ researcher-cum-international law analyst based in Pakistan, is member of European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on IR, Critical Peace & Conflict Studies, also a member of Washington Foreign Law Society and European Society of International Law.
