There will be no winners in Ukraine’s rumbling crisis

In an escalating war of words, no one can back down without losing face, argues Adrian Pabst

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On April 17, representatives of the USA, Russia, the European Union and Ukraine signed a surprise agreement to de-escalate the standoff between pro-Russian separatists and Kiev’s pro-Western government. Less than two weeks later, this peace deal is dead in the water. The armed groups that Kiev and Moscow have unleashed are spoiling for a fight.

Ukraine seems to be sliding into a civil war that could drag the West into a military confrontation. Some see parallels with the onset of the First World War, while others point to US and Russian meddling as proof that a new iron curtain has descended upon Europe.

However, the unfolding events in eastern Ukraine neither foreshadow a repeat of 1914 nor portend a rerun of the Cold War.

After Afghanistan and Iraq, the US and its European Nato allies show clear signs of war-weariness. Except air strikes against Libya or Mali, they have no will to intervene in Syria for fear of being bogged down in another military quagmire. The West has no appetite to fight Russia and start a Third World War, certainly not over Ukraine.

For its part, the Kremlin does not intend to take over the Russian-dominated parts of Ukraine in the way it annexed Crimea last month. The reasons are as much psychological as strategic.

Psychologically, the Russian leadership remembers the traumatic loss of life during the occupation of Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion in 1979. President Putin sometimes sounds nostalgic about the USSR, but he is shrewd enough not to repeat Soviet hubris.

In fact, his disposition and self-perception is much more that of a 19th-century “great power” statesman who seeks to defend his country’s sphere of influence against what he views as pernicious foreign ideas.

Strategically, a full-scale invasion of eastern and southern Ukraine would spell disaster for Moscow. A majority of people living there feel neither Ukrainian nor Russian. They favour self-rule, which is why some have proclaimed independent mini-states like the People’s Republic of Donetsk.

In 1918, their ancestors had created an eponymous republic that refused to join either Ukraine or Soviet Russia. Faced with foreign troops, the indigenous population would rise up and join a violent insurgency that today’s Red Army could never win.

Moreover, civilian deaths in a country viewed by most ordinary Russians as a brotherly nation would unite them against the Kremlin. Western sanctions would cripple Russia’s flatlining economy. All this would threaten Mr Putin’s grip on power, and he knows it.

If Ukrainian nationalists systematically attacked ethnic Russians in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine, Moscow would have to come to their aid because otherwise it would lose all credibility and appear weak – a scenario Mr Putin could never tolerate.

In such a case, Russia’s incursion into Ukraine would be brief, aimed at destroying the Ukrainian army and then withdrawing.

That was the strategy in the five-day war with Georgia in August 2008, at the end of which the Kremlin recognised the independence of the two disputed regions – Abkhazia and South Ossetia – instead of integrating them into the Russian Federation.

Since the 2008 conflict, which exposed Russia’s hapless army, Moscow’s military modernisation has proceeded apace.

Nowadays it could crush Kiev’s troops, but not occupy the country’s east and south permanently. Therefore Russia’s long-term goal in Ukraine is to prevent a viable pro-western leadership and to keep control of the Russian-dominated parts – both as a buffer and as an economic resource.

What looms is a permanent division of Ukraine between two rival spheres of influence: Kiev and western Ukraine would seek protection by Nato and close ties with the EU, while the country’s east and south would gravitate even further towards the Russian orbit. In today’s volatile context, divorce would hardly be as amicable as between Czechs and Slovaks. A violent break-up à la Yugoslavia is a much more probable scenario, for four reasons.

First, Ukraine is so deeply divided along ethno-national, cultural and religious lines that partition looks likeliest. If many ordinary Ukrainians won’t defend the interim government or the unity of their country, the West can’t prevent dissolution.

Second, neither side has reined in the armed groups on the ground. The first deal in February between the then President Yanukovich and opposition leaders did not survive the pressure from protesters, quite a few of whom are hard-line nationalists and fascists.

Now the second deal faces the same fate, as pro-Russian separatists continue their violent uprising that Kiev is powerless to stop. Both the US and Russia have supported mob rule, which they could never control.

Third, the powerful Ukrainian oligarchs who control the heavy industry in the Russian-dominated regions have done a deal with new leadership in Kiev to escape Moscow’s tutelage and access Western markets.

But since westernisation inflicts a kind of shock therapy, the workers will suffer cultural betrayal and a looming material degradation that pushes them into Russian arms.

Finally, the propaganda battle over Ukraine opposing Russia to the West diminishes the credibility of all. In an escalating word of wars, no one can back down without losing face.

So the contest continues between old empires that vie for power, consolidating their spheres of influence and waging war by proxy. But this time there’ll be no winners, except perhaps the oligarchs and the violent mob.

Adrian Pabst is senior lecturer in politics at Britain’s University of Kent and visiting professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Lille (Sciences Po), France