Schulze / Veit Ukraine in the crosshairs of geopolitical power play

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-593-44569-4
Verlag: Campus Verlag GmbH
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 178 Seiten

After years of stagnation, the neglected Ukraine conflict has once again returned to the international agenda. Volodymyr Zelensky's 2019 presidential election victory has led to changes in Ukraine's system of political governance. The new government broke the ice by abstaining from military narratives and cautiously opening avenues for communication with the separatist authorities in the Donbas region. Such changes forced the signatories to the Minsk II agreement and the parties to the Normandy Format, Russia, Germany, Ukraine, and France, to act. If the Ukraine conflict is seen as one of the main obstacles to a revitalized dialogue between the EU and Russia on a common European security and peace order, steps to resolve the conflict could be a key to embarking on such a path. The authors of this volume attempt here to define and analyse the variety of European and Russian objectives and the limits of compromise.

Peter W. Schulze (1942-2020) war Privatdozent für Internationale Politik an der Universität Göttingen und Gründungsmitglied des DOC RI Berlin. Winfried Veit ist Politikwissenschaftler und Publizist.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schulze, Peter W.

Veit, Winfried

Leseproben

Russia and Ukraine
Four scenarios for the future Andrey Kortunov Almost seven years have passed since the start of the dramatic events of the Maidan in Kiev, which engendered a profound crisis in Russia’s relations with both Ukraine and the West. This is not a short period of time: World War One lasted a little over four years, World War Two dragged on for six years, and only about five years passed between the start of Perestroika and the collapse of the USSR. All wars and crises come to an end, and, as a rule, the more acute the crisis, the faster it moves towards some kind of a resolution. It would appear that in seven years, the future of Russia-Ukraine relations should have taken definite shape, just as the future of Ukraine itself should have done too. Today, however, the situation within and around Ukraine is still, just like seven years ago, characterised by many factors of uncertainty. The Ukrainian glass remains either half-full or half-empty. Social and economic reforms in the country are gradually moving forward, but not at a speed that many had hoped for back in early 2014. Ukraine, however, has not become a failed state, has not declared a default on its foreign debt, and has not abandoned its course towards a liberal market economy and towards a status as a European political democracy. The Minsk agreements signed in February of 2015 are far from being implemented in full, although all the signatories have repeatedly confirmed their commitments to Minsk. People in Donbas continue to die, but there is no major military escalation in the east of Ukraine: the Donbas militia are not attempting to take Mariupol, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine ae not starting a large-scale offensive against Donetsk. Moscow and Kiev have traded harsh political statements and economic sanctions. At the same time, Russia remains one of Ukraine’s largest trade partners, and around one million Ukrainians continue to work in Russia. Ukraine is desperately fighting to become fully energy-independent from Russia. Still, Ukraine’s Naftogaz and Russia’s Gazprom signed a deal in December 2019 regarding the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine to Europe for the next five years. In other words, although the current situation between Moscow and Kiev may appear abnormal, fragile, and unsustainable, it nevertheless demonstrates a high level of stability. Consequently, while the current status quo may not suit Ukrainian and Russian societies as a whole, to a certain extent it does at least suit certain influential forces within the political leaderships of the two countries. In other words, the parties see the risks involved in a possible change to the status quo as higher than the risks connected with preserving the present state of affairs. The status quo, as imperfect as it looks, is perceived as affordable—at least for the time being. In 2019, after the emphatic success of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Ukrainian presidential election in April, followed by another decisive victory of his Servant of the People political party at the parliamentary elections in July, it seemed that a breakthrough between Kiev and Moscow became possible. After all, Zelensky always positioned himself as a ‘president of peace’ in contrast to his predecessor Petro Poroshenko, who ran his unsuccessful re-election campaign as a ‘president of war’. The Russian side also sent a positive signal to Kiev by announcing an important personnel change: Vladislav Surkov, who for a long time had held the Ukrainian portfolio in the Kremlin and who had been perceived as a committed hardliner, was replaced by Dmitry Kozak—one of the prominent technocrats in Vladimir Putin’s team and arguably much less hostile to Kiev. In the summer of 2019, one could conclude that the momentum in Russian-Ukrainian relations started to change. The two sides somewhat moderated their rhetoric toward each other, they were able to achieve progress in the exchanges of detainees, and in de-escalation in Donbas. Finally, after a three-year pause, the Normandy Four summit took place in Paris in November of 2019. Unfortunately, these positive changes have not produced a breakthrough or even steady progress towards a resolution of the crisis. The practical implementation of agreements reached in Paris never got very far, and the next summit meeting scheduled for the spring of 2020 never took place. The Russian side routinely accused Kiev of failing to deliver on its commitments made in Paris, while the Ukrainian leadership accused Moscow of inciting authorities in Donetsk and Lugansk to sabotage the ceasefire agreements. In the meantime, the popularity of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine has begun to decline, and his own faction in the Verkhovna Rada started demonstrating less discipline and less loyalty to the presidential administration. On top of that, in early 2020, both Moscow and Kiev had to shift their attention from working on the bilateral agenda to managing domestic problems caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the global economic recession. It would not be an over-exaggeration to state that by the summer of 2020 the state of bilateral relations had reverted to where they had been a year ago. A question arises: How long can this relative and clearly sub-optimal stability last? In another seven years, will we still be discussing Ukraine’s domestic situation and Russia-Ukraine relations using current parameters, noting merely insignificant shifts and delaying the ultimate resolution of the Ukrainian question to some indefinite future? Or does the current status quo already contain premises for radical shifts in the coming years, if not months? Selecting independent variables
Many extremely diverse factors—domestic politics; social, economic, military, strategic, and even psychological factors—affect the state of Russia-Ukraine relations. Some are situational, for instance, the multiple pressures of the global recession on both countries; whereas others are long term, such as the process of shaping Ukraine’s civic nation or Russia’s political evolution under the renewed constitution. Some can be considered primarily within the bilateral context while others need to be analysed against a pan-European or even global background. Given the great diversity of these factors, a matrix of possible scenarios of Russia-Ukraine relations may be constructed along two axes. The first axis reflects the possible evolution of Ukrainian society and state: the weak Ukraine-strong Ukraine axis; the second reflects the possible evolution of the general international background of bilateral relations: the Russia-West confrontation-détente axis. Both axes of selected independent variables require certain explanations. What is a strong Ukraine? I believe it does not necessarily need to be a highly centralised state based on the principles of ethnic nationalism and defining its identity through an opposition to Russia. The strength indicator is the capacity of the political elite to conduct a long-term independent foreign policy that reflects a broad public consensus; that is, strength is Ukraine’s capacity to be not just an object, but a subject in European and global politics. A strong Ukraine is a state with strong institutions rather than strong leaders. Naturally, strength entails the implementation of a whole set of socioeconomic and administrative reforms, the improvement of the quality of state governance, the successful fight against corruption, and the further development of civic society. A détente in relations between Russia and the West also needs to be defined. We can hardly imagine Moscow going back to the 1990s model in its interaction with its Western partners. Still less can we see Russia becoming a part of the consolidated West. However, even with the East-West confrontation generally remaining in place, individual formats of such a confrontation can be very different, from balancing on the verge of a big war in Europe to a particular combination of elements of confrontation and cooperation, as was typical of the 1970s–1980s. By détente, we primarily mean stabilised relations, the effective management of elements of confrontation, and the gradual build-up of elements of cooperation. By confrontation, we mean sliding down to the model of the start of the Cold War, i.?e., to a confrontation without red lines that are clearly understood by both parties, without a developed infrastructure of arms control, etc. Of course, the specifics of the general political background will ...