“Europe is on the brink of war. The United States and its allies are convinced that Russia is planning an invasion of Ukraine, and they are threatening “devastating” sanctions should it take that step. Moscow vehemently denies any such plans, while maintaining that Kyiv is preparing for an assault on the Donbas separatists in Eastern Ukraine. Russian military maneuvers in Crimea, Western Russia and Belarus unnerve the West, while NATO plans a buildup of forces along its long frontier with Russia stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Meanwhile, a fitful round of diplomacy preserves hope that the crisis can be defused without military conflict — although the leaked “confidential” U.S. response to Russian demands to halt NATO expansion underscores how far apart the two sides remain.
Is there a diplomatic resolution that will bring enduring peace and stability to the troubled region of Eastern Europe? There is, but getting there requires understanding the essence of the current crisis. It is not simply about Ukraine. It is about the broader European settlement at the end of the Cold War 30 years ago, which Moscow contends was imposed on it at a time of extreme weakness and fails to take into account its national interests. The subsequent eastward expansion of Euro-Atlantic institutions — notably NATO, a political-military organization designed to contain Russia, and the European Union, an economic community that Russia can never join — in Moscow’s views jeopardizes Russia’s security and prosperity. A revived Russia is determined to halt, if not reverse, that process, using all necessary means.”
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“the path forward is treacherous, but it exists. It will take flexibility and creativity on both sides to navigate it successfully. The risk of a war that would prove catastrophic for Europe, and first of all Ukraine, and threaten escalation to a nuclear cataclysm should concentrate minds.”
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“We see four elements to a solution. First, restrictions on military operations along the NATO/Russia border. Second, a moratorium on NATO expansion eastward. Third, resolution of ongoing and frozen conflicts in the former Soviet space and the Balkans. And fourth, modernization of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which created a pan-European forum and articulated agreed principles of interstate relations to undergird East-West detente.”
“Standing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv on Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron proclaimed the Minsk accords to be “the only path allowing us to build peace, the only path allowing us to build a viable political solution.” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and U.S. President Joe Biden have issued similar statements.
Macron also insisted that he had received a personal commitment from Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow the previous day to respect the Minsk agreement. “I believe that now is the time for all participants in these negotiations to engage in a dialogue in good faith. The path is possible,” he declared.
In fact, there is no path — just a dead end, according to senior officials and diplomats who have participated directly in years of tortured negotiations over the agreement and who know a lot more about its terms and its flaws than Macron does.
Russia insists that the Minsk deal once implemented will grant the now-occupied areas of Donetsk and Luhansk political autonomy that would give the Russian-backed authorities there a veto over major decisions in Kyiv, such as whether to join NATO or the EU. Kyiv says the deal provides for a degree of local self-governance but no such sweeping powers over the whole country’s future.
The Kremlin maintains that Ukraine is obligated to rewrite its constitution and immediately call local elections in the occupied territories. Ukraine says that the deal sets out a series of preconditions for elections that have never been met, including disarmament, removal of Russian fighters, and restoration of Kyiv’s legal authority.
Each side insists that only their interpretation of the deal is the correct one — and their interpretations are flatly contradictory.”
“Russia presented the United States with its demands last month. It requested “legally binding security guarantees,” including a stop to eastward NATO expansion, which would exclude Ukraine from ever joining, and that NATO would not deploy troops or conduct military activities in countries that joined the alliance after 1997, which includes Poland and former Soviet states in the Baltics.
Kyiv and NATO have grown closer over the last decade-plus, and actively cooperate. But Ukraine is nowhere close to officially joining NATO, something the US openly admits, and something Russia also knows. Still, NATO says Ukrainian future membership is a possibility because of its open-door policy, which says each country can freely choose its own security arrangements. To bar Ukrainian ascension would effectively give Russia a veto on NATO membership and cooperation. Removing NATO’s military presence on the alliance’s eastern flank would restore Russia’s influence over European security, remaking it into something a bit more Cold War-esque.
Russia almost certainly knew that the US and NATO would never go for this. The question is what Putin thought he had to gain by making an impossible opening bid. Some see it as a way to justify invasion, blaming the United States for the implosion of any talks. “This is a tried-and-true Russian tactic of using diplomacy to say that they’re the good guys, in spite of their maximalist demands, that [they’re] able to go to their people and say, ‘look, we tried everything. The West is a security threat, and so this is why we’re taking these actions,’” said David Salvo, deputy director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.”
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“Russia might not like the responses on NATO, but there are spaces where the US and NATO could offer concessions, such as greater transparency about military maneuvers and exercises, or more discussions on arms control, including reviving a version of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or even scaling back some US naval exercises in places like the Black Sea, which Russia sees as a provocation. “There is still potentially room on those fronts,” said Alyssa Demus, senior policy analyst at the Rand Corporation. “That’s entirely possible that the US and Russia or NATO and Russia could negotiate on those — and then maybe table the other issues for a later date.”
But if the US and NATO extend those olive branches or others, that might not be enough for Putin. Neither of these will resolve Putin’s fundamental sticking point. He has repeatedly framed the US and NATO as a major security threat to Russia for his domestic audience, including spreading disinformation about the West being behind the real chaos in Ukraine. “Having built up this formidable force, and issued all manner of ominous warnings, he’s got to come back with something tangible,” said Rajan Menon, director of the grand strategy program at Defense Priorities.”
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“really, Ukraine is already at war. In 2014, Russia illegally annexed Crimea, and exploited protests in the Donbas region, in eastern Ukraine, backing and arming pro-Russian separatists. Russia denied its direct involvement, but military units of “little green men” — soldiers in uniform but without insignia — moved into the region with equipment. More than 14,000 people have died in the conflict, which ebbs and flows, though Moscow has fueled the unrest since. Russia has also continued to destabilize and undermine Ukraine, including by launching cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and conducting disinformation campaigns.
It is possible that Moscow takes aggressive steps — escalating its proxy war, launching sweeping disinformation campaigns and cyberattacks, and applying pressure in all sorts of ways that don’t involve moving Russian troops across the border and won’t invite the most crushing consequences.
But this route looks a lot like what Russia has already been doing, and it hasn’t gotten Moscow closer to its objectives. “How much more can you destabilize? It doesn’t seem to have had a massive damaging impact on Ukraine’s pursuit of democracy, or even its tilt toward the west,” said Margarita Konaev, associate director of analysis and research fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).
And that might prompt Moscow to see force as the solution.”
“President Joe Biden has warned Russian dictator Vladimir Putin that his country will face severe sanctions if it once again attacks Ukraine. A key question looms, however: Will European countries really go along with serious penalties on Moscow?
On the surface, Europe appears willing. European Union officials and national leaders from across the continent have promised huge economic penalties against Moscow for any new military incursion into Ukraine, in lockstep with their American partners.”
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“While much of Eastern Europe — especially Poland and the Baltic states — is on high alert, the issue is nowhere near the top of the political agenda across most of the rest of the continent, where battling the pandemic and its economic fallout remains the priority. In Brussels, EU officials are more focused on why they don’t have a seat at the table for the Jan. 10 talks between U.S. and Russian officials in Geneva than what’s happening along the Russia-Ukraine border. Some countries are reluctant to undermine their business links with Russia; that includes Germany, which relies on Russian natural gas and has backed the construction of the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline.”
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“Putin has amassed tens of thousands of troops along Russia’s border with Ukraine. If he orders his military forces to stage another land invasion, it will make it hard for most European countries to go easy on him. But if he takes steps that undermine Ukraine short of an invasion — cyber attacks, for instance, or incursions by mercenaries — that could complicate talks between Europe and the United States about how to react.”
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“Another complicating factor for the Europeans is uncertainty about how long the tough U.S. stance on Russia will last, especially if Donald Trump returns to the White House after 2024. Although Trump’s administration imposed plenty of sanctions on Russia, Trump himself regularly sought better relations with Putin. Many European officials even question whether Trump would come to Europe’s aid if Russia were to attack a NATO ally, such as one of the Baltic states.
“If Trump wins the next election, we’re on our own,” one European official said. “And then what?”
Such concerns aside, some European leaders have at times given Putin the benefit of the doubt. In the wake of Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine in 2014, European powers, led by Germany, refused for months to bow to U.S. pressure to endorse sanctions against Moscow. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel was particularly worried about the effect such a move would have on Germany’s substantial trade relationship with Russia.
Merkel insisted for months on fruitless dialogue with Putin in the wake of the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea even as Moscow-supported separatists escalated the war in eastern Ukraine. President Barack Obama tried to win Merkel over when she visited the White House in May of 2014 — to no avail. It took the downing, several weeks later, of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 with 298 people on board for Berlin to agree with U.S. demands to impose sanctions.”
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“The U.S. could impose new or additional sanctions on Russian banks and energy firms. There also are potential targets in Russia’s mining, metals and shipping sectors, according to former officials who deal with sanctions. Another option is cutting Russia off from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a critical global network for exchanging financial information. That would be a particularly tough move against Russia’s finance sector, though Russian analysts and others have downplayed the seriousness and note the country is developing an alternative.
The trick is to calibrate the sanctions in a way that doesn’t rebound in too harsh a way on the European economy or, in the longer run, the U.S. economy.
European leaders for now appear intent on deescalating the crisis with Russia, even if it means mollifying Putin with concessions. Just before Christmas, for instance, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said it would be “false to link Russia’s behavior in the conflict with Ukraine with the operation” of the Nord Stream 2 energy pipeline. That was taken as a signal that Austria would not support any punitive action toward Russia beyond the cosmetic.”
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“Biden and his aides have stressed that they are keeping European allies and Ukraine in the loop as the U.S. talks to Russia. Biden’s top aides, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, have been in touch with a range of foreign officials to discuss the Ukraine crisis, and U.S. officials will be in Brussels during the next week for a series of meetings at NATO HQ, including a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council on Jan. 12.
At this stage, however, the administration, like its European allies, is avoiding mentioning details about sanctions possibilities or new weapons shipments it says amount to negotiating in the open.
“We won’t telegraph the specifics publicly, but there is broad consensus between Washington and key allies and partners in Europe on the need for a high impact, quick action response” to Russian aggression, the U.S. official said.”
“Putin will not discuss his invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, which the West still views as a violation of international law that must be reversed. Putin also has never admitted, and won’t concede now, that active-duty Russian military personnel are operating in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, despite ample evidence to the contrary, including a recent Russian court ruling that discussed contracts for supplying food to Russian forces.
The U.S. and its NATO allies, meanwhile, have already said they will not accede to Russia’s demands that the U.S. remove troops and weapons from Eastern European countries that joined the alliance after 1997. They have already rejected a demand for the removal of all U.S. nuclear weapons stationed in Europe, and also flatly ruled out Moscow’s demand for a guarantee that Ukraine and Georgia will never join NATO.”
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“U.S. officials have identified just two areas in which they see the potential for fruitful discussions: on curtailing missile deployments and on scaling back military exercises.
Russia has long complained about existing U.S. “Aegis Ashore” missile defense capabilities based in southern Romania and has recently voiced concerns that Washington would seek to base missiles in Ukraine.
The U.S. and NATO have previously dismissed the concerns about the missile interceptors in Deveselu, Romania, saying they were installed to protect against threats from Iran or elsewhere outside the Euro-Atlantic area. A second Aegis Ashore installation in the town of Redzikowo, in northern Poland, is nearly complete and projected to be operational by the end of this year.
The Poland site, not far from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, is likely of even greater concern to the Kremlin.”
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“Given the inevitably high cost to Russia of an invasion of Ukraine — in casualties, which could run to the tens of thousands, and in economic and political sanctions imposed by the West — there is some hope in Western capitals that Putin might be willing to back off his threats in favor of negotiations that keep Russia at the center of the geopolitical stage.”
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“Blinken said he saw limited opportunity for major advancements”
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“While Moscow clearly prefers to speak directly to Washington, which it views as pulling puppet strings at NATO, in recent days, Blinken and other U.S. officials have stressed repeatedly that they will not allow Russia to use the bilateral talks in Geneva to make decisions that impact European allies or for that matter, Ukraine, which is not a NATO member.”
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“If Russia has a gun to Ukraine’s head, the West, in its way, has sought to point its own soft-power weaponry back at Moscow — reiterating repeatedly that there will be high-impact economic sanctions. These likely included measures intended to cut Russia’s access to the global financial system.
A fourth EU diplomat said the West would go further than ever before to target not just wealthy Russian figures closely connected to Putin, but also their families — in an effort to severely limit travel to Europe, where Russians often love to spend holidays and shop. While such sanctions might be difficult to defend in court, the diplomat said EU officials were prepared to make the process of fighting the levies as lengthy and difficult as possible.”
“And despite the differences, the three parties are unified around some big things. All three are fairly socially progressive, for example, on things like LGBT rights, and the coalition has proposed an agenda including greater protections for trans people and ending restrictions on blood donations from gay men. The parties, too, may have different ideas of what progress means, but they are coalescing around the idea that Germany has to move a bit forward, and faster, to tackle challenges like climate change.”
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“The coalition wants to lower the voting age in Germany to 16. It wants to legalize weed, an issue Merkel never really got behind. Climate change was a big issue among all parties during the 2021 elections, and this agreement speeds up the timeline for Germany to abandon coal, from 2038 to 2030. The plan also calls for social investments, like building 400,000 affordable housing units and raising the minimum wage to 12 euro an hour.”
“The big idea behind Europe’s Global Gateway strategy is to mobilize up to €300 billion in public and private funds by 2027 to finance EU infrastructure projects abroad. That means building next-generation infrastructure such as fiber optic cables, 5G networks and green energy plants in the developing world, while also trying to compete with China on transport facilities, such as highways and airports.
It’s a long-shot as far as games of catch-up go.
Even if private investors join in, the EU’s spending plan languishes way beneath what it is estimated China is coughing up, and Beijing has bought its way to influence with first-mover advantage in countries from Greece to Sri Lanka. The EU boasts its main selling point is more transparency and higher environmental standards than China, although that doesn’t always go down well in many of the potential partners, which prefer opaque Chinese deals.”
““I sat through many, many defense ministerials when I was working at the Pentagon and was here in Brussels, where every defense minister around the table would all be in violent agreement about the need to spend more on defense and have a more modern capable military,” said Chollet, who has spent more than a quarter-century working on U.S. diplomacy inside and outside of government, including stints at the State Department, White House and Pentagon.
“But then all those defense ministers would have to go back to their parliaments, to their governments and have to defend those budgets or advocate for those budgets, and they were not successful,” he added. “And that’s a dynamic that still exists here.”
Chollet said that if European allies were finally ready to get serious, Washington would be more than happy to provide guidance about the types of capabilities to start building up.”
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“Traveling around the world, he said he sensed that America had not lost its luster.
“There is still a very strong demand signal for American leadership,” he said. “Whether it’s in Bosnia, where I just was, whether it’s in Southeast Asia, where I was three weeks ago, whether it’s in Libya and Tunisia, where I was six weeks ago: People want more of the United States. They want our presence. They want our leadership.”
And that, he said, he tells friends at home is not to be taken for granted: “The U.S. in that position is unique. There are not many countries that you can say that about, if any actually around the world. There’s not a lot of people wanting more of China.””
“Belarus has sent thousands of desperate migrants to its border with Poland in a bid to antagonize the European Union over sanctions imposed last year, in the wake of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s brutal crackdown on political opponents and protesters.
The influx of migrants, which EU officials say Lukashenko has deliberately provoked as a “hybrid attack” on the EU, comes at a difficult moment for the EU as the bloc struggles with internal tensions of its own, but has so far resulted in an increasingly unified EU response.”
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“People trying to leave places like Sulaimaniya, in Iraqi Kurdistan, have received Belarusian visas, bought a ticket on one of the many flights run by the state-operated airline, and headed to Minsk, Belarus’s capital, where some have been housed in government-run hotels, according to the New York Times.
But far from providing humanitarian aid and a safe haven for migrants, the Lukashenko regime is pushing them toward the borders of Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania in an attempt to put pressure on the EU to lift sanctions on the nation.
Belarus has also taken direct action to make things harder for its EU neighbors: The New York Times reports that Belarusian security forces have provided migrants with instructions on crossing the borders and tools like wire cutters and axes to break down border fences.
On Saturday, Belarusian journalist Tadeusz Giczan tweeted that Belarusian forces were attempting to destroy fencing at the Polish border and using lasers and flashing lights to temporarily blind and confuse Polish soldiers stationed there in an attempt to help migrants get across the border.
Despite Belarusian efforts to force migrants into neighboring EU countries, however, the vast majority of those currently at the border are stuck there, with little protection from the elements. As winter sets in, migrants are sleeping in tents, often with inadequate clothing and supplies, and EU countries are thus far refusing them entry. Already, at least nine people have died; some estimates are even higher, and conditions could still worsen as winter sets in.”
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“Despite the severity of the humanitarian crisis unfolding at Belarus’s borders, Lukashenko’s aims appear to be primarily political. The strongman president desperately wants to bring the EU to the negotiating table over sanctions imposed after he was fraudulently reelected last year and force the bloc to again recognize him as the country’s legitimate leader.”