When we sit down at a table with Russia to discuss peace, in one conflict or another, are we starting off with an incorrect premise? The conventional wisdom is, should be, that Russia wants to help find peaceful solutions to the world’s problems.
But is this notion borne out of reality, or wishful thinking?
Last week saw the sudden passing of Vitaliy Churkin, a man who had been Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations for a decade. He was one of the most recognized figures in Russian “diplomacy” because of his role as one of the five veto wielders on the United Nations Security Council. In a surprisingly compassionate article, his former adversary on the UNSC , former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, revealed a lot about Churkin the man, as well as about how his hands were often tied.
Syria
The eulogy by Ambassador Power, something I saw praised and criticized in roughly equal measure, included the following paragraph:
“It is well known that it was Vitaly Churkin who raised his hand six times to veto Syria-related resolutions, but it is less known that it was Vitaly who worked frantically (and in the end futilely) to try to secure enough changes to the drafts that Moscow might support them.”
This leads to an obvious question, who was guiding Churkin’s hand as he raised it to signal his country’s veto? While, apparently, Churkin tried to get his masters to come to terms with basic demands on Syria, he was told “no” and he presented that refusal. The number of vetoes used by Russia regarding Syria just extended to seven, as Ambassador Churkin’s understudy and temporary replacement yesterday vetoed a resolution condemning the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
If no support can be found from Russia on this topic, the use of chemical weapons, we have to ask, does Russia want peace? The failure to persuade Russia to condemn the actions of Syrian President Bassar Al Assad has clearly led to a prolongation of the Syrian civil war, in turn this has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, and millions of people, families with children, have become refugees as they have fled the horrors of that war.
Europe
When we see Russian propaganda channels repeatedly ply a message that these refugees are a danger to Europe and create false narratives aimed at undermining the European Union, we must again ask, does Russia want peace?
Away from the wars with bombs and bullets, Russia is also fighting many other conflicts with bytes and bots, and the conversation about Russian interference in the election process in the United States of America is only the tip of the iceberg. As Al Jazeera recently reported, Russian interference has been detected across Europe, specifically in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Norway, and Italy. All countries that have elections slated for this coming year (Italy hasn’t yet announced this, but the indications are that early elections are likely.)
The Al Jareeza report goes on to state that “the United Kingdom, Turkey, the Baltic Countries, Ukraine, Georgia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Finalnd, Sweden, and many other countries” have also all complained about Russian cyber-attacks. Clearly, Russia is not a country that is looking to pursue peace. Russia has no interest in a peaceful and prosperous EU as a trading partner, Russia seeks to undermine the bloc and works actively towards this aim. The strategy is multi-faceted as well. Covert cyber ops, deployed many times over and in multiple countries, backed up by sly propaganda from Russian state “media’ outlets, these activities are not perpetrated by a partner for peace.
Ukraine
Russia, quite literally, manufactured the conflict in eastern Ukraine. To understand this reality we need to look at who were the faces driving the conflict in the early days. If they had been respected local figures, people who had some kind of backing or reputation among the local population, we would have seen their faces and known their names. We did not. The war commenced in early March and April of 2014 in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine respectively.
We know from tapped telephone conversations involving a senior Putin aide, Sergey Glazyev, that the activities that we witnessed at that time were instigated by the Kremlin, who failed to garner enough critical mass to pull the same thing off in the oblasts of Odessa, and Kharkiv, and Zaporizhya, and Dnipropetrovsk. The failure to get a critical mass to create havoc in those parts of Ukraine was not for the want of trying.
In reaction to Putin’s meddling in the internal affairs of another country, something he swears he never does of course, diplomats were summoned. The perceived wisdom at the time was that Putin was basking in his Crimea snatch job, and had maybe bitten off more than he could chew. He was setting into motion a chain of events that would have dire consequences, and so a meeting of Foreign Ministers and Senior officials from the United States, Russia, Ukraine and the EU was called in Geneva.
The Geneva meeting lasted for seven hours, and a peace deal was struck. While in comments to reporters then US Secretary of State John Kerry did mention Russian involvement specifically, the text of the Geneva Agreement itself did not. A reasonable explanation for this is that the parties to the negotiations wanted to give Putin a face-saving way out. He could, at that point, have backed off, realized that his forays into eastern Ukraine were a mistake (so was Crimea, of course, but that’s another topic.) and walk away without the public scolding that his actions deserved.
This opportunity for peace, like many other later efforts, was spurned. The calculation being made in the Kremlin was that Russia could afford to push on, some time had been bought in which they could entrench their positions in the Donetsk basin, and continue to build their war in and against Ukraine. The off ramp that was on offer was ignored. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that once again Russia did not want peace.
Pragmatic realities
World leaders know that Putin is a fragile man, that is why he had to be presented with a face-saving way out of Ukraine (more than once in fact,) but a few years down the road, where we only see aggression on the rise from the Kremlin and in multiple theatres and in a myriad of forms, it is time to look at the fundamental question of whether Russia actually wants peace. The only natural conclusion, based on the activities of Russia and nothing else, is, no. Russia does not want peace.
That conclusion is the start point that the world must use for dealing with Russia in the future. The conversations that follow look then like this:
Talk to Russia about Ukraine? Ceasefire, get out, and your goal of having any say in Ukraine’s sovereign choices is thoroughly rejected. Non-negotiable.
Talk to Russia about Syria? You have committed gross war crimes there. There will be costs.
Talk to Russia about Cyber Attacks? A swift SWIFT cut off might be an appropriate response to such actions.
Talk to Russia about working together on international terrorism? Why would Russia start this now? Putin hasn’t been interested or motivated to go after ISIS in any meaningful way before now.
Why work from a base assumption that Russia wants peace when the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming?
