The recent proposal for a peace deal worked out between the U.S. and Russia has attracted a range of reactions. Putin was quite pleased with the 28-point plan, not surprisingly given that it was described by one pundit as a Kremlin wish list. Ukraine, which wasn’t consulted, was not pleased, and European powers said it needed work. The U.S. and Ukraine are meeting in Geneva, with Ukraine’s other allies dialing in, to negotiate a revised proposal.
While demanding next to no concessions from Russia, the original plan offered it land not won on the battlefield in addition to requiring Ukraine to cap its military at 600,000 and amend its constitution to drop it’s commitment to joining NATO.
Putin apologists, who now seem to include the president of the United States, have long suggested that Russia has a right to diminish/dominate its neighbours in order to safeguard its security. Considering that Russia is Eastern Europe’s resident imperialist, they seem to have it backward. If anyone deserves enhanced protection it is Russia’s neighbours. The bear has been attempting to absorb its neighbours throughout most of its history.
It is precisely because they have just emerged from occupation by the latest version of the Russian Empire, a particularly brutal version known as the Soviet Union, that Russia’s neighbours invited NATO into their countries.
No country is more in need of unassailable security than Ukraine. In 1994, it signed the Budapest Memorandum with Russia, along with the United States and the United Kingdom. It agreed to relinquish the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, turning the weapons over to Russia, in return for assurances that its independence, sovereignty, and existing borders would be respected by all parties. Russia specifically agreed that it would refrain from the use of force against Ukraine’s territorial integrity or political independence, or use economic coercion to subordinate Ukraine to its interests.
Putin has, of course, violated the agreement about as egregiously as possible Having gained possession of the nukes, he annexed Crimea as a warm-up and then launched a full-scale invasion to take over the rest of of the country. Possessed by visions of Peter the Great and grievance over the West’s defeat of his beloved Soviet Union, he desperately desires his Slavic neighbour.
Some say Ukraine should have hung onto its nuclear weapons, the ultimate security blanket, but that’s water under the bridge. The task now is to achieve a peace with what French President Emmanuel Macron has referred to as “robust security guarantees,” not “paper guarantees.” The Budapest Memorandum illustrated how much paper guarantees from Russia are worth.
As for Russia’s security, Putin apologists frequently invoke Napoleon and Hitler as justification for Russian paranoia. Both these two tyrants did indeed march on Moscow, but they also marched through Ukraine. In any case, that was then. Russia today has almost four times the population of Ukraine and a massive army equipped with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. When you have enough might to blow up the world you have nothing to fear from a country a quarter your size, or indeed no need to fear anyone. What Putin really fears is the invasion of Western values, not Western armies.
A peace agreement between the two combatants will necessitate some concessions to Russia because, in the world of realpolitik, might unfortunately still conveys a lot of right. Nonetheless, if only for its own sake, the West should ignore the appeasement favoured by Putin apologists and gain for Ukraine Macron’s robust guarantees.