Ukraine: the West is playing with fire
News & Social Media / Post
The EU needs to back off
It’s difficult to tell with any certainty what the tactical situation in Ukraine looks like. The best bet right now is to read all but trust nothing. We have seen more use of indiscriminate weapons but not quite the intensification we might have expected. It may be that the Russians are holding off while there are talks in progress.
What we can say is that Putin is losing the propaganda war and is increasingly isolated internationally. Sanctions are already causing economic disturbances within Russia. This action will make Russians poorer. It is not by any means assured that these sanctions will influence Putin’s actions, and when you consider the real world implications, they may even provoke him.
Quite dangerously, Putin this week has lowered the bar for deploying atomic weapons, allowing them to be used against non-nuclear strikes. Superficially this seems disproportionate but banking sanctions and cyber attacks combined could bring Russia to a standstill. Frustrating the normal functioning of Russia on the domestic front will be seen as a direct attack. Economic warfare is still warfare.
What’s certainly not helping is the EU’s determination to ramp up the tension by sending more combat aircraft into Ukraine. This is fast becoming a proxy war and Zelensky is doing his own bit to provoke by applying to join the European Union. It is highly provocative and he damn well knows it, and it all but guarantees that captured eastern territories will never be returned. Though that is already a working assumption.
Much now rests on how serious Putin is, and how far he is likely to go. Russian forces thus far have been inordinately incompetent. Much more and Putin might give up with conventional warfare and lob a few low yield tactical nukes within Ukraine. At that point it’s all over. The West knows if it retaliates then it’s going to be a full scale nuclear war – which is something we should seek to avoid. You would think that would go without saying but not if you’re listening to Western liberal politicians. They’re a bloodthirsty bunch.
What isn’t helping the domestic debate is the superimposition of WW2 on to current events. This isn’t 1939 and Putin isn’t Hitler. All the macho talk of stopping him now before he comes knocking on our door is deeply juvenile stuff. This conflict pertains exclusively to Ukraine and its position between the great powers. This is unfinished business from 2014. Peace can still be bought at a low price by abandoning NATO and EU expansion. The main barrier is western arrogance.
A negotiated settlement, however, has been described as “appeasing Putin” and worse. There is a knee-jerk impulse against the notion of appeasement - which means simply to accede to a demand for the sake of peace. If backing off from expanding a semi-redundant defence alliance and giving up a scrap of rust belt in order to avoid a long and bitter civil war that will destabilise the region – or even trigger a low level nuclear war, then it’s the right call.
Moreover, the longer term consequences of isolating and humiliating Russia could be devastating. There is open talk about decapitating the regime from within, and as usual, on the optimistic assumption that whatever follows will be an improvement. It is not a given that any successor to Putin would be western friendly or any less corrupt or militaristic.
But even if Putin backs down, we’ve now created a very serious problem within Ukraine. The weapons the Ukrainian government has been dispensing on behalf of the EU will more than likely not find their way home, and we could see yet more rogue militias and separatist groups destabilising the country.
If the EU is stupid enough to accelerate accession then they’ll have opened the floodgates to corruption, organised crime and far right politics that makes Viktor Orbán look like Ed Miliband. In addition to the centuries old ethnic tensions in Ukraine, there is a convoluted sectarian situation which makes Irish or Scottish sectarianism seem straightforward and cordial.
Were the EU not so careless it could have approached Ukraine and Russia in 2014 with an NI backstop sort of deal instead of the association agreement that could have prevented all of this, but now we’re almost certainly looking at a permanent split of Ukraine – if it survives at all.
As it happens, Ukrainian EU accession will end up being a long limbo much like the Turkish accession process. Essentially Schrodinger’s membership. The original association agreement was in place of a formal accession process – and for good reason. The EU has never been serious about Ukraine, and there’s no reason to believe recent events have changed matters. Right now it needs another recipient state like a hole in the head – especially following the departure of the UK.
In just a week all the remaining certainties of the era have been upended, taking us into more uncertain and more dangerous times. Western leaders are foolish to believe that sanctions and international isolation of Russia won’t also have repercussions for the West. If they had any sense they would realise, especially in the wake of Covid, that we simply cannot afford further economic instability, and would seek peace at almost any price. That window is closing by the day, yet the EU seems determined to slam it closed and lock it.
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