Ukraine and Syria crises: Moscow’s assessment of US and European policies vis-à-vis Russia
The Ukraine and Syria crises have marked two important turning points in Russia’s relations with the outside world, particularly the West. The Ukraine crisis has led to Russia’s break-out from the post-Cold War U.S.-dominated global order. It resulted in a confrontation between Russia and the United States, and in Russia’s alienation from Europe. Both represent the new normal and will have long-term consequences. The Russian intervention in the Syria crisis represents the first case of Moscow’s use of force outside of the ex-Soviet space. It is aimed at changing the situation on the ground in Syria in Moscow’s favor; creating favorable conditions for a political settlement conducive to Russian interests; and ultimately winning U.S. recognition of Russia as a great power. In both cases, Russia is essentially seeking to improve its standing vis-à-vis Western countries, until recently called partners and now frankly described as competitors.
The two cases are very different. In the Ukraine situation, the Kremlin was responding to a perceived Western-stimulated incursion into its geopolitical/geo-economic/cultural area. In Syria, by contrast, Moscow took the initiative in a region from which it had withdrawn politically a quarter-century before, and where it had never before intervened with military force. However, both in reacting to its rivals’ moves in its own “near abroad” and in stepping into territory where these rivals had heretofore exercised virtual monopoly on the use of force, the Russian leadership remained primarily focused on the United States and, particularly in Ukraine, on America’s European allies. Consequently, Washington’s, Berlin’s and Paris’s actions and reactions related to Russia were key to the Kremlin’s decision-making.
UKRAINE
In the run-up to the Ukraine crisis of 2014, Moscow had been watching with growing unease as the European Union was negotiating association agreements with Ukraine and several other former Soviet republics. It tried to play a co-equal third party role in these talks, but this attempt was rebuffed by the EU. To Moscow, the Eastern Partnership (EaP) project had always been an enterprise designed to re-orientate Russia’s former borderlands away from it, and join them with Europe. Moscow’s suspicions were heightened by the fact that the EaP project had originally been the initiative of the then (2009) foreign ministers of Poland and Sweden, which had a strong reputation of Russia-skeptics.
Moscow, however, was confident it would prevail over the EU. It had easy access to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who ostensibly controlled the situation in the country. The oligarchical opposition was weakened, disunited and did not appear threatening. Popular movements, which played a key part in the 2004-5 Orange Revolution, were considered passing phenomena. The Kremlin showed Yanukovych how much he would win if he were to make a decision in favor of integration with Russia, and how much he was likely to lose if he opted to go for an association with the EU. By late November 2013, when the cabinet of ministers in Kiev announced the suspension of the negotiations on the EU association agreement, many in Moscow felt they had won.
They soon proved to be wrong. As the stand-off in Kiev’s Independence Square (Maidan) emerged, deepened, and came to a denouement, the Russians noted the European governments and political establishments pinning their hopes on for those seeking to topple the Yanukovych regime in Ukraine. Again, the Europeans were not taken too seriously in Moscow. Putin sent a personal envoy to negotiate a compromise peace deal between Yanukovych and the opposition, but the envoy was not allowed to sign the document. Essentially, the Kremlin was preparing to enter a new round of horse-trading in Kiev, expanding its clientele to include, alongside and eventually instead of Yanukovych, a few of his oligarchical rivals, most notably, Yuliya Tymoshenko. The European-brokered power-sharing agreement between Yanukovych and the opposition was to have set the stage for this.
The shock came when the Europeans failed to preserve the compromise, which fell apart as the Maidan protesters summarily rejected it. Meanwhile, Yanukovych fled from the scene, which was now completely dominated by the two forces inimical to Russia: western Ukrainian nationalists and pro-Western elites of Kiev. With Yanukovych on the run, the EU did not try to salvage the accord it had helped to put together, and stepped back. At that moment, the United States stepped in, quickly recognized the popular revolution against Yanukovych’s corrupt and repressive regime, and gave backing to a group of politicians it had certified as good for Ukraine in the new era.
To Moscow, this was a clear illustration of the EU’s fickleness and the US’s perfidy. The latter was symbolized by the figure of Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State who had fed cookies to the Maidan revolutionaries and used foul language while referring to the EU. In the Kremlin’s thinking, color revolutions are results of plots and provocations by the United States, where the government, special services and NGOs work hand-in-glove toward a common goal: regime change. In the Ukraine case, the goal of regime change was to tear Ukraine away from Russia, and derail Putin’s plan of post-Soviet integration under the rubric of a “Eurasian Union”.
Seeing the danger, and obviously exaggerating its implications, President Putin gave the order to the military to take full control of Crimea to prevent the new authorities in Kiev from establishing their authority on the peninsula. He later explained his action by saying that he preferred welcoming the U.S. Sixth Fleet on a friendly visit to Sebastopol to being invited to Sebastopol, dubbed “the city of Russian sailors”, by NATO. When ordering the military operation, Putin was considering potential Western response, and later admitted thinking about putting the Russian nuclear deterrent on high alert, to warn off the United States and its allies. This turned out to be unnecessary – the West was surprised by the Russian action in Crimea, but did not move to oppose it.
In the weeks that followed, Moscow sought to gain an “understanding” of its decision to intervene militarily in Ukraine and to give the Crimean population a “chance to vote on joining the Russian Federation”. It was bitterly disappointed, however. Putin’s parallels between the Crimeans’ self-determination and the German reunification fell flat with the Germans. Putin’s notion of Russians as Europe’s biggest “divided nation” drew no sympathies, but growing apprehension across Europe. The parallels drawn were not to 1989, but to 1938, Germany’s annexation of Sudetenland.
There was more to come. The Russians had long believed that the German economic interest in their country was strong enough to withstand political pressures, particularly in areas of high importance to Russia and only marginal one for Germany. Within six weeks in late February 2014 – early April 2014, however, they watched, in disbelief, the German business community meekly accepting Berlin’s political guidance on introducing economic sanctions against Russia. There was practically no debate. Eastern trade, which even in the years of the Cold War, was a major factor in West German foreign policy, surrendered even without a fight.
The Russians mistook this turn of events as a sign of U.S. dominance in Europe, and Washington’s influence over Berlin’s policymaking. Some even speculated, improbably, that U.S. security services which had been secretly listening to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone conversations, were blackmailing the German chancellor into talking a harsh stance toward Moscow. The Russians failed to realize the strength of Germany’s commitment to the “europaeische Friedensordnung” and its rejection of force as a means to change borders; the requirements of leadership in the EU which demanded that Germany speak also on behalf of other members’ interests, including those of Poland and the Baltic States; and the Protestant convictions of the pastor’s daughter from the former East Germany. Russia’s Germany expertise, 25 years after the end of the Cold War, proved itself unreliable.
The Russians, however, were more successful with what came to be known as “hybrid warfare”. While virtually no one in the West believed Russia’s denial of its direct military involvement in Donbass, Russia managed to operate in the region without much hindrance from the West. The much higher stakes for Russia in the conflict, and the geographical proximity to Donbass put Moscow in the dominant position in the region. Things turned badly for Moscow only as a result of the downing of the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 in July 2014, which was immediately blamed by the United States and its allies on the Russia-supported rebels and on the Russian military itself.
The killing of 270 passengers, most of them Dutch, led to the EU imposing tough sectoral sanctions on Russia. The daylight which had existed between the tougher U.S. stance on the Russian actions in Ukraine and the more moderate approach by the Europeans was closed. A common Transatlantic front to oppose Russia emerged for the first time since the end of the Cold War, and it used economic sanctions as its weapon of choice. Without EU full participation, U.S. pressure on Russia would not have been even marginally effective, outside of the financial sphere.
Thus Russia entered a new reality of having to deal with a generally hostile West, which was more consolidated than at any time in three decades. Russia’s main ally, the European business community, had abandoned it. NATO, at its September 2014 summit in Wales, rediscovered its founding mission of “keeping the Russians out”. Full political isolation of Russia was impossible, of course, but the country lost its seat on the G8 group, which reverted to its G7 all-Western formula; the partnerships between the EU and NATO, on one hand, and Russia, on the other, were discontinued; Russia stood alone in the Council of Europe and in the OSCE. Even at the United Nations, half of the world’s nations condemned Russian actions in Ukraine, while the other half abstained.
Russia could still deal with the major European countries, Germany and France, in the so-called Normandy format, which also included Ukraine, to discuss stopping and ending the conflict in Donbass. The United States limited its engagement to frequent meetings between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Yet, in both cases the West sided clearly with Kiev and leaned on Moscow to make it back down. Russia’s attempts to reach out to friendly European countries did not produce much result. EU/NATO discipline has held firm.
SYRIA
Things began to change for Russia with the start of its military operation in Syria. Arguably, this was another attack on the U.S.-supported and –dominated global order. While Moscow’s immediate objective in Syria was to forestall the imminent defeat of Assad’s forces and the inevitable takeover of Damascus by ISIL, the fundamental Russian goal has been – and remains – to win U.S. recognition of Russia’s role and status as a great power outside of the former Soviet Union. This goal can be attained by means of a peace process co-chaired by Moscow and Washington and leading to a Syrian political settlement and a new regional arrangement in the Middle East, under a Dayton-a-deux formula.
The Russian tactic of getting to this fundamental objective was to get the attention of the United States by a massive arms build-up in Syria ahead of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York in September 2015. This tactic “won” Putin a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama, which Obama did not originally want, but which he could not have failed to agree to, given Russia’s actions in Syria and Putin’s presence in New York. At the meeting, Putin announced to Obama the imminent start of Russian airstrikes in Syria. A formal message to the U.S. military was delivered by a Russian general to a U.S. counterpart in Baghdad – of all places.
By inserting itself into the battlefield where the United States had been waging a campaign against ISIL for a year and where Americans and their allies had been fighting virtually non-stop for a quarter-century, Russia messed things up. This, however, was precisely the plan. Americans and others had to take note of the Russian presence, over which they had no control and about which they knew little. Simple necessity made the proud Pentagon enter into talks with the Russian Ministry of Defense which the U.S. military had long stopped considering a peer. The talks were about deconflicting each party’s military activities, but this was good enough for the Russians.
Russia’s military activism coupled with its unusual diplomatic activity – during 2015-early 2016 Vladimir Putin had hosted in Russia virtually all leaders of the Middle East – spurred the U.S. effort to reach a peace settlement in Syria. Kerry and Lavrov continued to meet at a high pace, pushing the Syrian parties and the regional actors to the negotiating table. Russia, which had been branded a problem country for peace in Europe, suddenly turned into an indispensable force in a region which Moscow had abandoned on the eve of the First Gulf war in 1990. The sudden rupture between Turkey and Russia, resulting from Turkey’s downing of a Russian military plane, did not, contrary to Ankara’s expectations, lead to the NATO alliance coming to Turkey’s rescue. Fighting ISIL and international terrorism was an interest that now united Russia and the West.
2014 was a turning point in Russo-Western relations. The most serious attempt ever to integrate Russia into the West has ended in failure. In Ukraine, Russia broke out of the post-Cold War order and openly challenged that order and its dominant power, the United States of America. The United States could have not ignored this challenge. Asymmetrical U.S.-Russian confrontation and new alienation between Russia and the European Union countries is the new normal, which will stay with us for a long period of time.
2015 was the year of stabilization of this “new normal”. The relationship touched bottom; it will not bounce back, but things will probably not get much worse in the foreseeable future. The West and Russia, however, are not out of the danger zone. An air incident, like the one between Russia and Turkey, had it happened over the Baltic or the Black Sea and involved a U.S. plane or warship, would have much more serious consequences. Thus, it is imperative that Russia and NATO countries make full use of confidence building measures to prevent such incidents; that they make sure that the military exercises which they hold on both sides of the new dividing line between Russia and NATO territory are not overly provocative to the other side; and that the mechanisms designed for security cooperation, such as the NATO-Russia Council, are remodeled to work as points of contact to manage crises and handle differences.
Confrontation/alienation will take their heavy toll, and a range of issues will have to play themselves out before there is a chance for significant improvement in the relationship. As 2016 starts, there are signs in all corners – Europe, Russia, even the United States – that a pragmatic approach to the relationship is gaining ground. Americans and Europeans, on one hand, and Russian, on the other, have discovered overlapping interests which demand a degree of engagement.
Cooperation will not be comprehensive. Ukraine will be neither forgotten nor forgiven by either side, all the current focus on Syria notwithstanding. Thus, any limited interaction will proceed in the future within the bigger reality of confrontation/alienation. Mutual trust will remain conspicuously absent, and mutual suspicions will continue to rule the day. Yet, this total mutual disillusionment could, paradoxically, result in a healthier relationship with tangible, if closely circumscribed, results.
