The stark choice facing the Ukrainian leadership is even bleaker than many in the West might recognize. The alternative is not only and not so much between a self-sacrificing war, on the one side, and denigrating peace-deal with Russia, on the other. Instead, Kyiv’s possible partial satisfaction of Moscow’s appetite entails secondary domestic and foreign dangers that could turn out to be, in their sum, larger than the hazards of a new armed escalation today.
There is widespread fear of an escalation of the current Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict into a large and prolonged inter-state war in Europe. This could lead West European governments to agree to Putin’s key demand of reneging on NATO’s future inclusion pledge for Ukraine and Georgia. Should this happen, the West needs to compensate the two countries for the de facto broken 2008 Bucharest NATO summit promise. Ukraine and Georgia as well as Moldova can be provided with official EU membership perspectives and an assurance that Brussels will start accession negotiations once the three republics’ Association Agreements have been implemented.
When Angela Merkel took office as Federal Chancellor in 2005, she was more prepared for the challenges on the EU’s eastern border than any other West European head of government. However, Berlin had, already before Merkel’s take over of the chancellorship, sent wrong signals to the new neo-imperial leadership in Moscow by inviting Putin to the Bundestag in 2001 and starting the Nord Stream projects in 2005. Consequential missteps before and after Merkel came to power put German Ostpolitik on the wrong path in the new century. In 2014, there was only a partial correction of the Russia course set by Germany’s 1998-2005 Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Today, politicians, diplomats and experts in Moscow likely wonder what has gotten into the Germans since the annexation of Crimea: Weren’t Russian special rights in the post-Soviet space an unwritten law of post-Cold War Eastern European geopolitics accepted by Berlin?
The Russia-controlled East Ukrainian separatists have been operating a small concentration camp in the city of Donetsk, Ukraine, for more than six years now. Outside any regular jurisdiction, men and women are being physically and psychologically tormented on a daily basis, in ways reminiscent of Europe’s darkest times.
By Tamar Chapidze and Andreas Umland Over the last two decades, Georgia and Ukraine have become close geopolitical allies vis-à-vis both Russia and the West. In 1997, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova created between themselves a multilateral consultative forum that, in 2001, was upgraded into the Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, better known […]
https://www.ibidem.eu/en/reihen/gesellschaft-politik/ukrainian-voices.html The book series “Ukrainian Voices” publishes English- and German-language monographs, edited volumes, document collections and anthologies of articles authored and composed by Ukrainian politicians, intellectuals, activists, officials, researchers, entrepreneurs, artists, and diplomats. The series’ aim is to introduce Western and other audiences to Ukrainian explorations and interpretations of historic and current domestic as well […]
Four factors make further tensions between Russia and Ukraine along the shores of the Crimean peninsula and Azov Sea probable. On 25 November 2018, at the Kerch Strait, Russia attacked as well as captured three Ukrainian navy vessels, and arrested their 24 sailors. The maritime clash indicates that the focal point of the […]
Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism. By Charles Clover. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia. By Mark Bassin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe-Russia Relationship. Edited […]
Western comments on Russian domestic and foreign affairs have, during the last years, become more and more gloomy. Among other topics, this pessimistic discourse (to which I too have contributed) features Putin’s neo-imperial plans for the post-Soviet area, the many varieties of post-Soviet Russian ultra-nationalism, the fragility of the geopolitical grey zone between the Kremlin-dominated […]
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