2020! What a year it’s been. A year of shocks!
An extremely difficult year, but not all bad. If it’s resulted in shock therapy positive things will emerge from it – so be it. Let’s mention at least some of the most significant developments.
The biggest shock was the unexpected lockdown in our lives brought by the unexpected appearance at the beginning of the year of the Coronavirus, since redubbed the COVID-19 pandemic. It caught us totally off guard, restricting our social interaction, travel, and economic activity, stunning us, and disrupting our mode of living.
Like the Black Death in the Middle Ages or Spanish influenza in the early part of the 20th century, the new pandemic exposed our human frailties and our very mortality even as we “tame” nature and continue to reach for the stars. Even the initial great skeptics – from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko have had to eat humble pie and acknowledge that this latter-day medical scourge is far more serious than their political arrogance and paternalistic dilettantism led them to believe.
On the verge of 2021, even as we are being told that vaccines have been developed to immunize us, we are also being warned that the plague of our days is mutating, and that even more resilient strains might appear.
The existential French genius Albert Camus managed so eloquently and prophetically to connect metaphorically the medical nightmare that a modern plague would create, with the toxicity and danger for society that, if unchecked, the lethal political virus of intolerance, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism, whether of the fascist or communist type, brings.
Writing in 1947, shortly after World War II ended and just as the British writer George Orwell was preparing his anti-totalitarian masterpiece 1984, Camus called for the reaffirmation of human values and solidarity in the face of such threats – biological and political. “All I can say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims – and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence.”
This brings us to some of the political shocks of the year stemming from the pestilence of intolerance. So, whereas Hong Kong was too far away, and Belarus too closely identified with Russia we, by and large, preferred not to notice how freedom was being extinguished there.
Most of us were focused on what was happening during this decisive presidential election year in the United States. The outcome seemed to hold the key to the future – how things would turn out in 2021 and beyond.
We knew it would be a tough struggle, and that the unpredictable occupant of the White House President Donald Trump was not expected to observe conventional courtesies. Nevertheless, few of us could have imagined how dirty and close-run the contest for the US presidency would be.
Trump’s crude blustering, and refusal to accept defeat, was offensive and divisive. Given his disgraceful behavior, even as he is supposed to be packing his suitcases (refusing to acknowledge Moscow is behind a major cyberattack against the US, vetoing a defense-spending bill, and pardoning his corrupt crony Paul Manafort) many remain anxious about the damage he can still do, and what other implicit services he can still perform for Putin’s anti-Western Kremlin.
Joe Biden’s victory has brought new hope out of a dark year and reassured Europe, the North Atlantic Alliance and others, that the United States will soon be back on track again and resume its role as an international leader that can be relied on – that the Trump interlude was an aberration and is behind us.
Ukraine, as President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated in his recent interview for the New York Times, has also breathed a sigh of relief. Trump tried to implicate Ukraine in his scurrilous internal political maneuverings. Now, if Ukraine pulls its weight and delivers on reforms and combatting corruption, it will be able to rely on more consistent support from Washington.
With Trump removed from the scene, the new US administration can be expected to have a refreshing impact on Europe as a whole, and on the EuroAtlantic institutions. This should be good news for Ukraine, if it can tame its internal demons and it stick to its declared pro-European course. And, of course, if post-Brexit Europe also gets its act together and is sufficiently interested in Ukraine becoming, not just an associate, but a potential member.
To what extent will the Biden Administration be ready to boost efforts to stop Russia’s war with Ukraine and its occupation of the eastern Donbas – provide alternatives to the hamstrung Minsk and Normandy Four negotiations formats – and Crimea? Will it be able to persuade Berlin to abandon its Nord Stream 2 project with Russia? How firmly will it back Ukraine’s membership in NATO and the European Union, and use conditionality to encourage Kyiv to do what’s necessary to meet the criteria?
In 2020 Europe was reconfigured geopolitically by Brexit and the withdrawal of Britain. The fact that this rupture materialized, and that it was touch and go until the last moments whether London or Brussels would agree to part on amicable terms, were also shocks.
To the credit of both London and Kyiv, they were able to agree against the background of these strains, on a historic and precedent-setting agreement on a strategic partnership. It opens new opportunities for both countries located at the opposite ends of the continent.
Simultaneously a reconfiguration has also got under way in eastern Europe. Now, within the European Union, eastern and central Europe, if united in purpose, can provide a significant counterweight to the remaining traditional heavyweights in the West – Germany and France. And Ukraine, through the closer association it forged in 2020 with Poland and Lithuania in the Lublin Triangle, has a new valuable new link that can bolster their influence.
At the end of 2020, except for Ukraine’s enduring difficulties with Hungary, it’s a Western interface with Europe was in better shape overall. Moreover, in November a pro-European candidate, Maia Sandu, won the presidential election in Moldova, defeating the pro-Russian incumbent. She immediately called on Russia to withdraw its “peacekeeping” force from the Transnistrian enclave and has agreed to make her first official visit to Kyiv.
Belarus was an even more unexpected, and in the longer-term potentially game-changing, factor in eastern Europe. The peaceful democratic revolution in Belarus that began after Aleksander Lukashenko rigged the presidential election of 9 August was undoubtedly a major shock. The ruthlessness with which the dictator has tried to suppress it – another.
Kyiv has condemned the repression in Belarus and followed the EU’s line, spearheaded by Lithuania and Poland, on not recognizing the validity of the election and endorsing the need for sanctions to be applied.
But the Zelensky administration has not rushed to oppose the Lukashenka junta and implement sanctions. Ukraine is at war with Russia and does not want to see the Russian military suddenly deployed on its norther border worth Belarus. It also continues a significant level of bilateral trade, especially in petroleum products. Clearly, in 2021 the issue of how to respond to developments in Belarus, and its geopolitical implications, will need to be readdressed.
To the south, during 2020 Ukraine appeared to bolster its relations with Turkey and Israel.
Azerbaijan’s blitzkrieg war, with Turkey’s support, to recover territories that Armenia had occupied with Russia’s help for around 20 years, ended in an emphatic victory. Although Russia was requested to deploy a peace-keeping force to protect the truncated Armenian state, the real victor alongside Baku was Ankara. It is Turkey, rather than Russia, that has confirmed itself as the major regional power in that area.
Although officially neutral, Kyiv has not concealed its preference for Baku. It is not only a traditional partner in the GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova) Organization for Democracy and Economic Development established in 1997 – will it be revitalized in 2021? – but also, an important source of energy, and consistent supporter in the UN on issues connected with Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the eastern Donbas.
Fortunately for Ukraine, 2020 was not a good year for Russia. In addition to the debilitating impact of the COVID 19 pandemic it has had to face a number of situations which can be considered setbacks – Biden’s victory, the blockage of the completion of the Nord Stream 2 project, failure to force the Zelensky administration into making the types of concessions it was seeking as regards the Donbas, Azerbaijan’s defeat of Armenia and recovery of its territory, the fiasco surrounding the attempted poisoning of Kremlin critic Navalny, domestic protests in Khabarovsk and elsewhere, and of course the white-red-white national democratic revolution in Belarus and the election of Sandu in Moldova.
In Ukrainian-Russian relations, while there was no real substantial follow-up all year to last December’s Normandy Four summit in Paris, at least a ceasefire was more or less observed for most of 2020 along the contact line in the Donbas.
So, as we enter 2021, we take with us no shortage of enduring problems and challenges, but we can also look forward to the new opportunities opening to us. How will we and especially the country’s leadership respond and manage? What have we learned from the shock therapy that 2020 brought?
Will should heed the wise words of Camus: “What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.” Or, at least it should.
