What Happens in Ukraine Doesn't Stay in Ukraine

Why is Ukraine so important to Putin and Russia? There are several reasons.

 

One, Crimea (in Ukraine) is the only port that the Russians have that remains unfrozen all year around. Imagine having a navy that can’t go to war because, hey, winter is here! That makes Crimea indispensable to Russia. I wrote about it the last time Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014:

“The EU had been wooing an in-dire-economic-straits Ukraine for some time to come into their orbit. Just when it looked Ukraine would say Yes (and Russia would lose access to the Crimean naval bases), Putin got the Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, to back off. A revolution followed, Yanukovych was overthrown and Ukraine seemed to be slipping away. And that is when Putin moved in with his military might.”

 

Two, Russia has fretted and fumed in impotence even has NATO expanded eastwards after the Cold War, taking more and more eastern European countries under its wing. NATO in Ukraine is simply unacceptable to Russia – it brings NATO literally to the doorstep (Remember how America reacted when Soviet nukes came to Cuba in 1962? Or how ballistic India gets at the prospect of the Chinese navy setting shop in Sri Lanka?). I assume Putin’s statements that he was going on nuclear alert this time around is signalling the same – Ukraine is critical enough for Russia to talk of nukes; is it really anywhere near that critical to the West?

 

The US failing in Iraq (or Afghanistan) is an irrelevant comparison to the situation here. There are plenty of ethnic Russians citizens in Ukraine whom Putin can bank on for support; whom he has used repeatedly since 2014 to practically have 2 regions of Ukraine under Russian rule since 2014. In addition, Ukraine needs Russian oil and gas to keep running. Putin can turn off the taps entirely; or he can do what he did in 2014, as Foreign Policy wrote last time:

“Moscow has jacked up the price it charges Ukraine twice in recent days by a total of more than 80 percent.”

America had no such levers in either Afghanistan or Iraq. Apples and oranges.

 

When it comes to Putin, the West is blinded by its hatred and contempt. Remember what happened in Syria? With the West doing all it could to overthrow Assad, Russia moved in to supposedly “help fight ISIS”. This was a masterful PR move – it put Putin on the same side as the West! Remove Assad, don’t remove Assad, Putin didn’t care. What he did care was that the new regime in Syria had to be acceptable to Russia – that’s proxy for “Russian bases in Syria would remain intact”. Russian interests would get served regardless.

 

Russia isn’t anywhere comparable to America militarily. Obviously. But Putin is smart enough to pick only the fights he has a very good chance of winning.

 

For the West though, not doing about Ukraine beyond sanctions sends the worst possible signal to everyone else on the planet. Will China read this as a sign of Western weakness, a sign it can move even further into the South China Sea and someday even Taiwan? Will India read it as a sign that it can’t/shouldn’t rely on Western help to take on China?

 

And lastly, there is the counterfactual (what if scenario). Ukraine had nukes when the USSR fell apart in 1991. It surrendered them to Russia under the unwritten promise that the West would “protect” it, should the need arise. As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2014:

“If Ukraine still had its nukes, it would probably still have Crimea. It gave up its nukes, got worthless paper guarantees, and also got an invasion from a more powerful and nuclear neighbor.”

Western inaction now will be yet another signal to the likes of Iran that the only way to be truly safe is to get those nukes.

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