{"id":19090,"date":"2015-03-19T12:30:56","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T01:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=19090"},"modified":"2015-03-19T14:58:51","modified_gmt":"2015-03-19T03:58:51","slug":"ukraine-the-mariupol-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/ukraine-the-mariupol-test\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine: the Mariupol test?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hans<\/a><\/p>\n

Frustrated by European reluctance to arm Ukraine, two prominent former US officials\u2014Hans Binnendijk, formerly senior director for defence policy at the US National Security Council, and John Herbst, US ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006\u2014recently called in a New York Times<\/em> piece for the imposition of what they have labelled \u2018the Mariupol Test\u2019<\/a>. They argue that if and when the rebels move on the south-eastern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, the West must punish Moscow and its minions by giving Kiev the military wherewithal to expel Russian forces from its territory, doubling down on sanctions and, perhaps most seriously of all, \u2018suspending Russia from the Brussels-based Swift financial-messaging system\u2019, a measure which, they assert, \u2018could cripple the already reeling Russian economy\u2019.<\/p>\n

Mariupol lies on the land approaches to the isthmus linking Crimea to the Ukrainian mainland. If the rebels did capture the city, Russia would win an unofficial land route to a piece of real estate which, a year after its annexation, it\u2019s still having trouble supplying. According to Binnendijk and Herbst, however, Mariupol would be just the beginning of a longer campaign by the Kremlin to reassemble the tsarist-era Novorossiya \u2018one slender slice at a time\u2019, taking Russia\u2019s informal border back to where it lay from the end of the eighteenth century to the 1917 revolution: all the way to Odessa and the Russian-sponsored enclave of Transnistria.<\/p>\n

If we conclude that the Kremlin\u2019s aim is indeed a massive, if informal, increase of Russian power across the upper western arc of the Black Sea that would return Russian influence to the doorstep of the Balkans\u2014then it\u2019s possible to indulge the former officials their twitching fingers. But, since dropping Novorossiya into an interview<\/a> last April, Russian President Vladimir Putin has studiously avoided the term. And he pointedly refused to recognise Novorossiya\u2019s Crimea-style referenda and declaration of independence last year.<\/p>\n

Instead, what the Russians have repeatedly said they want in Ukraine is regional autonomy for the Donbas, protection of the linguistic and cultural rights of Russian speakers across Ukraine, federalisation of the country\u2019s presently highly-centralised political structure, and official acceptance of Ukraine\u2019s formal neutrality, including a permanent commitment by NATO not to invite Kiev into the alliance. As Fiona Hill has recently argued, Putin doesn\u2019t want to restore<\/a> the Russian empire or the Soviet Union: what he wants is the revival of Russia\u2019s prestige as a great power, including other powers\u2019 respect for the primacy of its political interests in and longstanding historical and cultural ties with Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean Mariupol isn\u2019t a military objective for the separatists or the Kremlin. Nor can we be sure whether, having secured Mariupol, Russia won\u2019t then turn its attention towards Odessa. But the Kremlin\u2019s options are constrained by Russia\u2019s parlous fiscal and financial situation. That, along with the mounting public discontent provoked by sharp inflation, ought to serve to keep Russia focused on the achievable in the Donbas and to discourage it from enlarging the zone of the conflict.<\/p>\n

Any attempt on Mariupol, therefore, would probably have more to do with strengthening Moscow\u2019s hand in pursuit of its more \u2018limited\u2019 political aims above than with spreading a neo-tsarist dominion across the Black Sea. (Certainly Turkey, Hungary and Slovakia all seem unfazed.) And that points to two things. The first is the relative weakness of Russia\u2019s position: notwithstanding the Ukrainian army\u2019s lacklustre performance, Russia\u2019s political aims in Ukraine far exceed its ability to coerce either Kiev or the West into accepting them. The second is each side\u2019s mutually divergent views on what the Minsk Agreement means.<\/p>\n

In the West, many have interpreted the agreement as implying Russia\u2019s capitulation. The Guardian<\/em> recently quoted the new President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, former prime minster of Poland, as saying that<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u2018The Minsk agreement makes sense only if fully implemented. Partial implementation would be very risky for Ukraine\u2026.First, we need full implementation including full control of Ukraine\u2019s borders.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The problem is that Minsk ties control of the border to Kiev\u2019s prior delivery of constitutional \u2018special status\u2019<\/a> for Donetsk and Lugansk\u2014something hard-line Ukrainian nationalists in the Rada adamantly oppose. For Russia, Minsk is thus a step towards the creation of those conditions\u2014genuine autonomy in the Donbas\u2014which it considers preliminary to achieving the rest of its political goals in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

The bad news, then, for those looking forward to a complete Russian backdown is that only old-fashioned diplomacy, however unpalatable, can bring an end to the war. The good news is that the conservatism of Russia\u2019s political culture, that has seen it risk economic meltdown for the sake of defending what many in the West consider to be a nineteenth-century vision of its national interests, means that it is also open to the kind of compromises that lay at the heart of old-style, Concert-of-Europe diplomacy. Not for nothing is the Kremlin celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary this year of the 1815 Congress of Vienna<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The human cost of an attack on Mariupol would be tragic. But Mariupol won\u2019t change Russia\u2019s fundamental aims; and getting sucked into a proxy war with Moscow over it won\u2019t help the West negotiate a lasting political deal with the Kremlin that returns peace and stability to the whole of eastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n

The only thing worse than trying to bludgeon Russia into defeat in eastern Ukraine and failing might be bludgeoning it into defeat and succeeding. If Putin did fall, nationalistic Russians would be unlikely to entrust their country to a liberal constructivist leader. US Secretary of State John Kerry has said that he\u2019s willing to try diplomacy<\/a> with Assad. He should do the same, just as belatedly, with Putin.<\/p>\n

Matthew Dal Santo is a Danish Research Council post-doctoral fellow at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen. Image courtesy of Flickr user CSIS<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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