July 14, 2014
Is Ukraine a promising model for the management of future international crises? At first glance, it looks like nothing of the sort. Kiev is in the middle of a bloody military campaign to regain control of towns and cities in the east of the country from pro-Russian rebels. More and more civilians have been caught in the crossfire. As Janek Lasocki of the European Council on Foreign Relations has noted, roughly 200,000 Ukrainian citizens have registered as internally displaced personsinside the country or moved to Russia. “In the past week alone,” he adds, “over 10,000 more have formally registered, and some estimate the total number could be two or three times larger.”
Meeting at the World Cup final in Brazil, Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed that the crisis has “a tendency toward degradation.” There is little else that Russia and the West have managed to agree on, however. The European Union announced new sanctions against rebel leaders last week. Although Moscow closed several major border crossings last week, Ukraine claims that reinforcements and supplies for the rebels continue to flow in from Russia.
There is still a danger that this conflict could escalate further, possibly without much prior warning. Moscow has accused Ukrainian forces of firing on a village in Russia, killing one, and the Kremlin is reportedly considering limited precision “answering strikes” as a riposte. Yet the most striking feature of the crisis is just how limited it has remained to date.
Three months ago, as instability in Kiev and the Crimea initially spread to eastern Ukraine, it appeared all too likely to culminate in a full-scale Russian incursion there. Up to 40,000 Russian troops were poised just across the border. American and European efforts to defuse the crisis, including the agreement of a rapidly discarded peace plan in Geneva in mid-April, appeared to be going nowhere.
Experts on the Russian military questioned whether it was really ready to launch a conventional invasion of eastern Ukraine in the face of concerted resistance. Yet Moscow had other options. Its mix of irregular forces and local strongmen were able to seize patches of territory and hold them against the government’s amateurish counterattacks. Pro-Russian leaders called on Putin to send “peacekeepers” to protect them. Had he done so, Kiev and the West would have struggled to respond.
Although the threat of direct Russian action has not disappeared, it has receded. Moscowstill has a large military presence on the Ukrainian border, but the Russian parliamentrevoked an authorization for a ground invasion at Putin’s request. The mere fact that Ukrainian forces have been willing to mount intensive operations in the east in recent weeks implies that they doubt Russia will intervene. What has changed the two sides’ calculations?
There are three potential answers. One is that Putin has failed in his gamble to dismember Ukraine. Western sanctions have put his inner circle under pressure, and his irregular forces found it far harder to get a grip on eastern Ukraine than on Crimea.
The second is that Putin has nevertheless come out ahead, even if his gains are not as decisive as once seemed possible. Although he has not annexed more Ukrainian territory, he has succeeded in weakening the already fragile new authorities in Kiev. And as Neil MacFarquhar observes, Putin might be proceeding more cautiously than before, but Ukraine “needs to reach an agreement with Moscow on natural gas supplies, now cut off, before temperatures start dropping in November.” That could help Putin solidify Russia’s position through negotiations, rather than military action.
The third answer is that Russia and the West have decided that they can live with a limited fight in Ukraine, and let it burn within a set of tacit but firm limits. After an initial period of chaos, both sides have signaled that they do not want the conflict to escalate beyond their control. Despite resorting to targeted sanctions, the U.S. and EU have avoided all-out economic warfare, in part because of the concerns of European governments with strong economic links to Russia, like Italy. Moscow has reciprocated by constraining its military posture and acceding to international monitoring of the situation, although this has not halted many episodes of violence.
These signals of restraint have not necessarily averted big-power competition inside eastern Ukraine. Dmitri Trenin, a well-informed analyst of Russian security affairs, described this in May as “a full-scale intelligence war” between Washington and Moscow. Outside observers can only speculate about how this murky confrontation is developing on the ground. Yet it does not seem to have spilled over into other diplomatic domains. Russiahinted that it could cut cooperation over the Iranian nuclear issue to gain leverage over Ukraine. But while talks with Tehran remain on a knife’s edge, this does not seem to be attributable to targeted Russian interference.
The West and Russia have thus arguably fallen into a form of uneasy cooperation over Ukraine, ensuring that the conflict does not scuttle their broader relationship. What happens in Ukraine, to adapt the old adage about Las Vegas, stays in Ukraine.
If this third interpretation of the situation is correct, it is dispiriting but may point to options for controlling future clashes with a fiercely assertive Moscow. As I noted last week, Russia and the U.S. have built an “ugly modus vivendi” over the Syrian war: Their cooperation on destroying Damascus’ chemical weapons has not turned into a genuine joint effort to end the war or even mitigate its humanitarian impact.
The situation in Ukraine is not vastly better. But whereas the Syrian crisis ballooned from being a second-order source of tension with Russia when it began in 2011 to an extremely disruptive geopolitical stand-off, the Ukrainian conflict has taken the opposite trajectory, proving to be marginally less destructive than it first appeared. If the current bout of combat in the east ends fairly quickly, Western officials may feel that they can get back to business as usual with Moscow.
This in turn could lead to talk of new “rules” for managing confrontation and cooperation between Russia and the West, a topic I will discuss in next week’s column. Yet it is too early to conclude that the Ukrainian crisis is under control. The battle for the east of the country could easily engender new international tensions, making previous efforts to limit the conflict look optimistic at best and delusional at worst.
Richard Gowan is research director at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation and a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His weekly column for World Politics Review, Diplomatic Fallout, appears every Monday.
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