The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

What’s going to happen with Ukraine? The ominous Eastern European crisis has people on edge all over America and especially, throughout Europe. It’s been over 75 years and three generations since Europe has been wracked by a major armed conflict. No one seems to have much of an appetite for what Vladimir Putin is now threatening. Analysts predict if his Russian army (and navy) conduct a full-scale assault on Ukraine, potentially hundreds of thousands of civilians will be killed. There would of course be many other costs as well.

In many minds, there are three possible outcomes from what we’re now witnessing. Putin, apparently still holding all the high cards in this evolving poker game, can pull back his forces and avert a war, opt instead for a partial land grab, or push all his chips into the centre of the table and occupy the entire country. There are knowledgeable experts who support each of these outcomes. Which one is likeliest?

Let’s start with the full-bore invasion and occupation option. Many retired military analysts compare this with the American invasion of Iraq, featuring a quick military triumph and subsequent occupation of that country in 2003. They recall the swaggering moniker for that operation: Shock and Awe. Remember? Every night there would be televised, Star Wars-like, video game style displays of awesome military prowess. Tracers would arc in every direction behind the correspondents perched on rooftops. Thundering explosions would follow.

But that initial spectacular triumph led to years of bungled American occupation of Iraq from which that country may or may not be finally emerging now – not necessarily as a US ally. This foolish invasion also positioned Iran firmly in the Middle East driving seat by eliminating its chief regional rival – Iraq’s vicious dictator Saddam Hussein.

What does that have to do with Russia and Ukraine now? According to a popular analysis, if Russia does launch a full-scale attack on Ukraine - as it has been methodically preparing to do for over a month - the result will likely be a rout on the ground similar to the American and allied military triumph over Iraqi forces nearly 20 years ago. Then, as the Americans did, the Russians will discover, as General Colin Powell once famously said, that “if you broke it, you bought it”.

The Russians would then have “bought” Ukraine, a nation of 45 million people the size of Texas. Most of those people would resist their occupation. Granted, Russia itself is the largest nation on earth. But their centralised, corrupt and inefficient economy could not support such a persistent drain, especially under the pinching burden of Western sanctions. In some minds, Putin would be repeating the Soviet mistakes of 1979 in its own fatally ill-advised invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, in addition to learning little from America’s 2003 folly.

Are circumstances now so different in Moscow and the world that Putin could feel certain a full-scale invasion of Ukraine would be a good idea? Many observers are sceptical. But they could also be wrong. Putin clearly has put in place the pieces to overwhelm Ukraine at any time.

A second option would be to use those military pieces to occupy and annex some of the most Russian parts of Ukraine, as Putin did eight years ago in Crimea. Parts of Eastern Ukraine, like Crimea, are more Russian than Ukrainian linguistically and culturally, and a separatist fight has been ongoing in the “Donbass” (basin of the Don River) region for years. Some speculate this could be followed by occupation of a land bridge sliver of territory linking the Donbass with Crimea and severely reducing or even eliminating Ukrainian access to the Black Sea via the Sea of Azov.

US President Joe Biden has consistently said that in the view of NATO, such a limited occupation would be viewed in the same way and elicit the same Western response as Option One, the overwhelming assault and conquest of Ukraine. It’s not clear why Putin would believe that, especially since Biden was Vice President in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and the West barked but didn’t bite hard enough with sanctions to dissuade Putin from doing what he’s doing now.

In choosing Option Two, Putin would generally be following his own playbook in 2008 when Georgia and NATO were heavily flirting with each other. Putin sent in Russian forces, and 14 years later, they still occupy a couple of Russia-oriented districts that were part of Georgia after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Still, Putin has to be impressed by the solidarity NATO is displaying, especially after the corrosive Trump years when the American President regularly disparaged the alliance that is still the fundamental element of US national security policy. If the most draconian sanctions being openly discussed in the West were applied to Russia in response to their annexation of territory they largely control now anyway, it’s hard to imagine Putin would find that an attractive bargain.

So what about Option Three? That would be a diplomatic settlement of this crisis, as both Biden and Putin have been declaring is their objective for weeks. Under this option, the Russian President would pull back his forces, end all the invasion dress rehearsals his army and navy have been undertaking along Ukraine’s borders, and see what concessions he could extract from Biden and the West in exchange.

The key to a negotiated settlement for Putin would have to be Western assurances that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO and thus acquire its mutual defence protections against military attack. Those assurances would presumably have to be more explicit and binding than they were when George H W Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev were Presidents of the US and USSR. Then, as they were negotiating transformative issues like the reunification of Germany over 30 years ago, the Soviets heard from American negotiators a guarantee against NATO admitting Ukraine to full membership.

The Americans deny it now. Robert Zoellick, a long-time Republican foreign policy expert who rose in the Bush 41 administration to be Secretary of State James Baker’s second in command and later was elected president of the World Bank, told a private audience recently that no such American guarantee was ever given. Zoellick should know, because he was there when Baker and Gorbachev were chatting about NATO expansion – then as now an obsession in Moscow.

In recent remarks at a Washington think tank, Zoellick reiterated that no NATO expansion guarantee was made. He was responding to continued Russian insistence that Baker told Gorbachev in February 1990 that NATO would not move “one inch forward” after accepting most of the former Warsaw Pact countries for full membership. That remark meant no NATO membership for Ukraine, and that’s how Gorbachev and the Russians understood it then and still do today.

But just months later, the USSR, US and their Eastern and Western European allies all signed the Treaty of Conventional Forces in Europe, which stipulated that “all parties agreed that all countries are free to join their own alliance,” as Zoellick reminded his interviewer. (Putin pulled Russia out of the CFE in 2015.)

That’s at the heart of this dispute. Putin and the Russian government want their buffer against Western aggression, for very good historical reasons. Ukraine and Belarus constitute that buffer. The West, now clearly led by Biden, won’t lightly tolerate Russian armed aggression against independent Ukraine.

Both the French President and the German Chancellor have recently visited Moscow and Kyiv. From their visits and other signs, there is a path to a diplomatic solution. Russia withdraws and NATO effectively commits not to admit Ukraine. Good for everyone – except Ukraine.