Yet, if this outcome is ultimately achieved, Obama’s much-criticized but
thus far largely effective policy aimed at defending Ukraine from Russian
aggression using diplomatic means while simultaneously twisting the arms of
Ukraine’s politicians to finally give up their Soviet-era methods of governing,
will have contributed greatly to the country’s future success.
The most crucial tenet of Obama’s Ukraine policy has been his refusal to
yield to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trio of phony narratives that 1)
last winter’s EuroMaidan movement was a product of small groups of far-right
extremists assisted by the CIA; 2) that Moscow has a privileged right to a
“sphere of influence” that supersedes Ukrainians’ right to self-determination;
and 3) that Russian mercenaries and, indeed, the Russian state are not
participating in the “civil war” in Eastern Ukraine.
The basis of the Obama response to Putin has focused on multi-stage
economic sanctions against Moscow rather than threats of NATO military
intervention, as any talk of the latter would fracture the broad pro-Ukrainian
coalition that the US administration has successfully forged with the major EU
countries since the start of the protests in Kyiv last winter.
Unlike many of his critics, Obama has refused to engage in the pointless
personal demonization of Putin, which sometimes takes the form of hysterical
comparisons to Adolf Hitler along with statements that 2014 is the new 1938;
rather, Obama has simply been resolute in both his rhetoric and his policy. One
doesn’t need hyperbole or fake historical analogies to disapprove of, and
oppose, the Putin regime’s aggression against Ukraine.
Ironically, both Putinophobes and Putinophiles have been on the same
side of the argument in claiming since March that “Putin won’t be deterred by
sanctions”, and both are wrong. Few in the pro-Ukrainian camp seem to have
given much thought to how much worse the situation in Ukraine could be today
than it currently is, and even fewer have given the sanctions policy any credit
for having limited the Kremlin’s military aggression to Ukraine’s 3 most
pro-Russian provinces.
Although Putin operates in a vastly different political system, he is no
less rational than Obama, Britain’s David Cameron, or Germany’s Angela Merkel.
He wants what he wants, but he also cares about how much he pays to get it. He
understands fully that the West’s sanctions are only in the initial phase of
damaging the Russian economy, and that the pain, both for the elites and the
Russian population at large, is going to increase steadily over time if there
is no peace settlement in Ukraine. The latest comments from all three of the
above Western leaders indicate that they have no intention of rolling back the
sanctions without real de-escalation from the Russian-separatist side in the
Donbass war.
The toughening situation for the Kremlin is further exacerbated by the
recent stunning fall in global oil prices; don’t expect Obama to claim, or
receive, any credit for this development, but the timing is certainly rather
mysterious given how little oil prices had moved over the previous four years
from a tight range near $100 per barrel.
Regardless of who or what is responsible for the oil crash, American
conservatives’ pet storyline of the “macho” Putin repeatedly getting the best
of the “wimpy” Obama, which is enthusiastically parroted by the army of
pro-Kremlin trolls who cruise around the blogosphere, is a comic-book fantasy.
One could be forgiven for thinking that many of the Republicans in Washington
are actually rooting for Putin, and that they are more interested in seeing
Obama’s policy fail than in seeing Ukraine succeed.
By refusing, thus far, to send advanced weaponry to Kyiv, Obama has made
himself an easy target for criticism from the conservative “hawks” who say that
he is not taking a sufficiently muscular stance against Moscow. However, the
idea that providing such arms is going to solve all of Ukraine’s defense
problems is ludicrous, and the plan appears to have been designed primarily as
a tool of instant gratification to ease Western consciences: i.e. a “look, we
did something” proposal.
The advocates for arming Ukraine have been blithely ignoring the danger
that US-provided weapons could fall into the hands of “volunteer” battalions
outside of Ukrainian army control, and might then be used in an effort to
overthrow Ukraine’s democratically-elected government; such threats have been
explicitly made by some of the battalion leaders. And make no mistake, a
right-wing nationalist coup against President Poroshenko is the Kremlin’s dream
scenario for escalating Ukraine’s turmoil.
With the Kyiv government’s command over the country’s armed forces
having improved over the summer and autumn, the writing now looks to be on the
wall for Obama to eventually go along with the incoming Congress in approving
some form of lethal assistance package to help Ukraine’s military, but the
decision to hold off until now was the right one given the uncertainty about
who might actually get the weapons.
The Obama administration’s nuts-and-bolts policy on Ukraine has been
built around a big-picture premise which often seems lost on the international
media and many Ukraine analysts: that what happens in Kyiv is far more
important than what happens in the Donbass. It is Kyiv, not Donetsk, that is
vulnerably perched on the front lines of Western civilization, and it is in
Kyiv, not in Donetsk, where the tough decisions have to be made today to
guarantee the economic and political rights of Ukrainians for decades to come.
Indeed, it seems to be the same shrill “pro-Ukrainian” voices that are
calling for action to re-take the Donbass and Crimea who, in their next
sentence, boast that the new Ukrainian Parliament is the first in the country’s
history without representation of the Communist Party. Well, if the Donbass and
Crimea had voted in the election, the Communists would be back in Parliament
for another term, and the pro-Russian Party of Regions (now re-named the
Opposition Bloc) faction would have 120 members instead of less than 50. Is
that the Parliament that Ukraine and its foreign supporters really want to see?
Both Obama and the EU leaders have recognized that it is not in Western
interests to further tighten the current sanctions regime, as this could
embolden Ukraine’s pro-war lobby and tempt Poroshenko to try to renew the
summer’s doomed military effort to reverse the loss of the Donbass territory.
Rather than wasting new sanctions on a purely punitive move against Moscow,
such measures should be held as leverage against any new Russian attempts to
expand outside of the de-facto borders established by the Minsk peace process.
Time is short, and every day that Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy
Yatseniuk spend huffing and puffing about re-imposing control over the Donbass
is a day that they are not focused on the critical
economic reforms which Ukraine urgently needs to implement to maintain its
financial backing from the West and survive as an independent country.
The cryptic phrase “Putin won’t stop in Ukraine until he gets what he
wants” is uttered almost on a daily basis in analyses by Obama’s critics, along
with the obligatory citations about the Russian president’s high domestic
approval ratings. First of all, this pessimistic reading fails to comprehend
that Putin today is no closer to “what he wants” – a veto over Kyiv’s European
orientation – than he was before he annexed Crimea back in March.
Second, it ignores Putin’s inability to impose his Ukraine narrative in
Western public and governmental opinion, and this is partly due to the
unyielding position staked out by Obama on the moral “self-determination”
aspect of the conflict. For both Obama and Putin, this showdown isn’t only
about who is stronger; it’s also about who is right, and that makes it
absolutely critical that the West’s own narrative on the events in Ukraine not
fall into the trap of echoing the jingoistic nature of Russian propaganda, only
in reverse.
At bottom, such propaganda about “the Nazis in Kyiv”, Ukraine having
been “artificially created” from the ruins of various empires, the Ukrainian
language only being spoken in Lviv, and other nonsense represent an overtly
racist denial of the Ukrainian nation’s right to exist. Obama’s Ukraine policy
has never had any tolerance for this narrative, and it has been an important
factor in shaping his pushback against Putin, who seems to be clinging to the
faint hope that Obama’s resolve will wane – that his administration will
eventually become fatigued by Ukraine or distracted by the Middle East
conflicts, and simply give up on the sanctions strategy.
Putin’s repeated references to Russia’s nuclear capabilities and the
increased Russian strategic bomber flights along US and NATO airspace also
should be seen as indicating the lack of any effective strategy to force Obama
off of the current sanctions position. Putin has proven over many years that he
has a highly rational understanding of where his own interests lie and that he
is anything but stupid. Hinting at mutual global annihilation as a response to
the West’s refusal to accept the Kremlin’s Ukraine narrative is not a credible
threat.
Of course, it can’t be ruled out that Putin will decide to directly
challenge the West by attempting an attack against Ukraine on a much larger
scale than what has been seen so far, which would necessarily include the full
and overt involvement of the Russian military. But it is clear that the costs to
Russia of such a move would be disproportionate in terms of new Western
sanctions (one of the first casualties would surely be the 2018 World Cup) as
well as Ukrainian armed resistance. The Kremlin would also have to keep in mind
that strong support in Congress for Ukraine among both major parties would make
it relatively easy in political terms for Obama to deploy US air power or even
limited ground forces in defense of Kyiv, if it came to that.
Perhaps we should find fault with Obama for his laid-back and
understated demeanor, which could plausibly lead enemies of the United States
to mistake his lack of ostentatious hawkishness for a lack of toughness. For
better or worse, Obama’s persona certainly does not exude the flashy machismo
of, say, parading around shirtless on a horse or sky-diving into Lake Baikal.
His foreign policy philosophy of pragmatism and pursuing incremental
gains – “do what you can, where you can, when you can” – to make the world a
better place, is not the type of over-arching doctrine favored by American
idealists and interventionists. It is, however, well-suited to helping today’s
Ukraine, where the principles at stake are clearly defined, in contrast with
the much more protracted conflicts in the Middle East about which it is often
said that “there are no good guys”.
President Clinton had a comparatively easy time earning his statue in
Pristina back in 1999; all he had to do was launch a few well-publicized
airstrikes against Serbia, a small country that had no means to retaliate and
no choice but to quickly submit to Western calls to allow self-determination
for Kosovo, a region of less than 2 million people.
Obama, on the other hand, is up against a nuclear-armed Russia
intervening with modern weaponry and highly-trained special forces in a country
of more than 40 million, whose citizens are considerably harder to please than
the Kosovars. In addition to protection from NATO, they also want large
quantities of financial assistance, justice for the deaths of their compatriots
at the hands of brutal Donbass paramilitaries, and an end to the economic
oppression under which they have suffered since, well, forever. It is a tall
order that doesn’t offer many triumphal moments, and Obama’s nuanced, long-game
strategy hasn’t gone down well with those who want headline-grabbing moves and
a quick fix.
But, like it or not – and the Kremlin’s hard-liners and the throngs of
West-bashing ideologues buzzing around the Internet certainly do not – Obama
has shown that he is committed to maintaining a firm Ukraine policy for the two
years that remain of his presidency (and what an important two years for
Ukraine they are going be!) There is always room for criticism that the Obama
administration and the EU should be working harder and more creatively to help
Kyiv, but overall, the West has been doing its part; now it is up to Ukraine’s
newly-elected leaders to do theirs.
Will Ritter is a freelance journalist living in Kyiv.
