JVLV: TURNING RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES, By Jiri Valenta , with Leni Friedman Valenta, 5-15-15

 JVLV:  Together with my partner and wife, Leni, I am responding to Elizabeth Pond´s four “M” scenarios – Mearsheimer, McCain, Motyl and Merkel -- for resolving the trenchant Ukraine crisis.  Sadly, none of these scenarios yet present a comprehensive and workable solution. 

 John Mearsheimer has written an elegant contrarian piece in Foreign Affairs, which aligns facts, and his interpretation of them, into Kremlin appeasement. Any serious historian must get red-faced with his narrative that 1812 "Napoleonic France ...crossed [Ukraine] to strike at Russia itself...” History shows that the Napoleonic campaign´s main route went from the Lithuanian borders through the Belorussian forests and marsh, not the Ukrainian steppes.  But that overture is small potatoes compared to his crescendo, that “… The West played a role in the Yanukovych ouster.”  With that statement he concludes, Putin responded with his invasion of the Crimea aimed at preventing the Ukraine from joining NATO.   His forte is in writing contrarian tales that cannot be taken seriously in forging serious crisis resolutions.

Fortunately Alexander Motyl convincingly showed that the West had little to do with the outbreak of regime change in February 2014.  Nobody plotted or expected it.  Nor was  Mearsheimer right that hard working  Victoria Nuland, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Eurasian Affairs who spoke in expletives on an insecure phone, was the brain orchestrating  a Washington-backed,  “fascist coup” in Kyiv. It is preposterous. 

The regime change came on February 22.  2014. The blame lies primarily with  Viktor Yanukovych,  Putin´s Kremlin stooge, though perhaps also with Putin himself, since he tried twice to engineer the election of a man who had already been run out of Kyiv on corruption charges. 

All this might have still been tolerated by the protestors who gathered at the Maidan Square.  What helped to shape the revolution towards regime change was that Kremlin-backed snipers shot into the crowd killing about a hundred people.  Some accounts name Putin´s eminence grise, Viktor Surkov, as the instigator, but surely the killers did their work on behalf of corrupted and discredited Yanukovych.

Curiously, this scenario in some respects resembles the Hungarian one of October 23^rd, 1956.   Yanukovych acted as did Hungarian leaders Erno Gero and Andras Hegadus when protestors gathered at Budapest Radio, and the Kremlin propaganda also blamed  “fascists.”  But the killing of  protestors was the real turning point in both Budapest and later  in Kyiv.  In the latter, it resulted y in the Ukrainian parliament unanimously asking for Yanukovych´s resignation the next day, joined by all the members of his own Party of Regions.  Like Gero and Hegadus, hated Yanukovych had to be rescued by Kremlin security forces.  Meanwhile Putin, having lost his stooge, activated long-in--the-making contingency plans to stage the almost bloodless invasion of the Crimea.

To listen to Mearsheimer  is a hazard we cannot afford.  His suggestion to halt the westernization of the Ukraine is like saying we should cease our support for the westernization of Russia.  His article only served Kremlin propagandists, and should have been accompanied immediately in Foreign Affairs, by more informed and objective analysis. 

 The second M, Alexander Motyl, is a different cup of borsht.  Emerging as the Ukrainian expert of our time, a renowned political scientist, novelist and painter, he could teach Mearsheimer Ukrainian History and Politics 101.  Motyl´s own scenario is not, in our view, flawless, however.  In the event of a Russian victory, he  posited, “…Ukraine would emerge more compact, more homogeneous, and more unified in purpose: Along with its eastern territories would go much of the electorate that routinely votes for the Communist Party and for former President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. As a result, anti­-Ukrainian and anti-Western sentiments would decline. The new Ukraine’s government could confidently proceed with a radical political and economic reform program… and pursue rapid integration into European and international structures… Ukraine’s economy would be more open to foreign direct investment and could be poised for takeoff.”

 We surely must not accept Motyl´s conclusion, however, that Ukraine should give up to the Kremlin the Crimea and Donbas as devastated regions. Alex, who taught us so much about Ukraine, is deadly wrong here.  Giving up on these two regions would mean to accept, de facto, a change of the world order in Europe with all its consequences.

As we concluded elsewhere, in Donetsk and Lugansk, unlike Crimea, Putin could not achieve strategic surprise.  The Ukrainian rag tag army fought bravely to prevent it.   Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians sacrificed their lives to stop Putin´s incursions into the eastern Ukraine and Russia cannot be rewarded for trampling on Ukraine´s territorial integrity.

We are familiar with Russian sentiments and the pride of the Russian naval personnel in the Crimea, whom we interviewed in 2009.  We also remember how students and faculty at Taras Schevchenko University in Kyiv, laughed at us when we suggested in 2009 that Putin might invade the Crimea.  But the post WWII conquest of foreign territory, even if  bloodless, is simply not acceptable.   Perhaps during the post-Putin era, an innovative, diplomatic resolution of the Crimean issue can come to the fore.

The third and fourth M´s are McCain and Merkel.  McCain is our exemplary American patriot, defense expert and national hero! He himself witnessed the revolution in Kyiv as it unfolded.  Thereafter, his unswerving support for military aid to Ukraine has provided the indispensable bedrock of any new strategy.   Our dilettante, adolescent, Harvard Law school- educated president has yet to accept it.

Angela Merkel, the fourth M, is a clever, almost Bismarck-like diplomat.  We love the trick she played on Putin arriving a day after the May 9 victory over fascism celebration, by denouncing Putin´s criminal invasion of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine. She got away with it because of Putin´s peculiar respect for Germany and its economic might, and his knowledge of the German language and culture.  However, Angela, East German born and educated, does not bring military power and its use directly to the table as Bismarck or Metternich would. 

Understandably, Merkel´s Germany is not interested in the use of force in a direct or indirect way, particularly since its armed forces or Bundeswehr has only a few dozen operational tanks.  But the only way to reach a compromise with Putin is to begin with what we cannot accept, which is further appeasement.  The  Ukraine should be armed because our failure to  do so as we  proposed a year ago in the Kyiv Post, is one of the reasons Putin escalated the intervention in the eastern Ukraine. The annexation of the Crimea should be neither forgiven nor forgotten.  

Naturally, some face-saving measures will be necessary to extricate Putin from the Ukraine mess.  We understand that face-saving is more important to him than to our president who at this point, only retains his stubborn chin and hope for a Chicago Presidential Library-turned foundation. Our embrace of a limited partnership with the Kremlin, in fighting the Islamo- fascists, may be one of these measures as we have repeatedly proposed in The National Interest, RIAC and jvlv.net. In the long run, America and Russia need each other,as they increasingly face this growing menace.  To Putin, a Christian autocrat and nationalist patriot molded by the ideas of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, this is a viable option.

In short, a fifth scenario must still be forged to finally accomplish the melting of swords into plowshares.  Sadly, that  probably will not happen until there is regime change not in the Kremlin, but in early 2017 Washington!

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