The Risk of a Radical Escalation Leading to Actual Conflict Between NATO and Russia Grows
The future of Ukraine and Russia, of European security, and of US-Russian relations now all hang on a few small half-ruined towns in the northwestern part of Donetsk province. Indeed, given the continued risk of a radical escalation leading to actual conflict between NATO and Russia, the stakes may be higher even than that.
The Russian government continues to demand that Ukraine withdraw from this territory as part of a peace settlement, and during a visit to Russia this month, very nearly everyone I talked with said that it is politically impossible for President Putin to give up this demand, even if the Trump administration were to offer major concessions on wider security issues. Equally, every Ukrainian I have talked to in recent months has said that it is politically impossible for the Ukrainian government to accede to this. Almost all the other key issues can be resolved by the Trump administration in direct negotiation with Russia if Trump can come up with a concrete set of proposals. Not this one.
How on earth did we get to this point? If during the Cold War you had said that European security depended on who controlled the northwestern Donbas, even the very greatest hawks would have called you a lunatic. At that time, let us remember, Soviet armies stood in the “Fulda Gap” in the middle of what is now a united Germany, barely a hundred miles from the French border. The Donbas is more than 1,200 miles east of Fulda. That is a measure of the West’s victory at the end of the Cold War.
Key to an understanding of this grotesque situation is that since the end of the Cold War, two different issues have become horribly entangled, and to achieve a peace settlement requires disentangling them. On the one hand, there is the wider geopolitical issue: the way in which the expansion of NATO and the European Union expelled Russia from the European security order, leading to Russia’s attempt to force its way back in again. On the other, there is a rather typical postcolonial struggle over borders, territory, minorities and identity between Russia and Ukraine. The fall of every empire in modern times has led to such conflicts, and the fall of the Soviet Union was no exception.
