To what extent do you remain politically sane under a steel helmet? At the end of May, the Green co-chairman Robert Habeck got one on when he showed up in a Ukrainian army shelter on the Donbass, spoke to his hosts and said that more defensive weapons needed to be shipped to Ukraine. Was he subject to a disturbed perception? Wasn’t it about offensive weapons? Only then was it possible to shoot well at the renegade enclaves Donetsk and Lugansk and to put more pressure on these refuge of disobedience. Which has so far resulted in more than 3,300 civilian casualties.
Determined like never before
Habeck’s exploration and demonstration were proof of how much the misleading handling of causalities belongs to the western standard repertoire in the Ukraine conflict. The reflections after the video summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin this week deepen this impression. The fact that such a meeting came about is less of a concession by the USA to Russia, as is suggested everywhere along the lines of: If Russian troops are massed, diplomacy stirs in Washington. Out of responsibility for peace, of course.
In fact, the admission is an admission. The US is responsible for preparing Ukraine as an unsinkable aircraft carrier and anchoring it on the border with Russia. Since Biden is thus underpinning a confrontational relationship with Moscow, he has to react politically if Putin replies militarily (no major power simply accepts a threat on their own doorstep). Especially since an attack by the Ukrainian armed forces on the Donbass – with the backing of the USA and NATO – is quite conceivable. In any case, the Russian high command seems to be assuming it. It bundles deterrent powers and borrows from NATO’s Cold War doctrine. After all, core interests of one’s own statehood are affected. There is absolutely no shortage of comparison: what would the USA do if a Russian-Cuban military alliance wanted to win Mexico as an outpost and insist that they were not acting with provocative intent, of course, in order to show Washington the instruments? You just show solidarity with a friendly regime. Nobody needs to feel threatened. What did the US do when Soviet missiles were deployed in Cuba in 1962? Even a world war did not seem too high a price to force their withdrawal.
In the Ukraine, on the other hand, it should be completely harmless if existing facts become fait accompli and the links with the West take off militarily? Obviously, NATO has come to terms with the fact that official membership of Ukraine is initially inappropriate because it is too risky. A state that brings an unresolved territorial conflict like the one in eastern Ukraine into the alliance as a dowry can, in an emergency, invoke the requirement of assistance under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. In order to remain credible, the alliance would then have to act and would have less to do with the state-like entities Donetsk and Lugansk as their protecting power, Russia. An open exchange of blows would be inevitable, the outcome open, losses enormous. The collateral damage is likely to be catastrophic and irreparable for a long time. NATO could avoid such an inferno if it induced the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyj to recognize the autonomy of Donbass and to confirm this constitutionally, as provided for in the Minsk Treaty of 2015.
But why should NATO do this? So far, the Donbass conflict has offered it enormous advantages as long as it does not get out of hand. If the region remains contested, Russia allows itself to be scourged as an aggressor and what follows from it justified. The upgrading of the Ukrainian army with anti-aircraft systems, tanks and anti-tank guided missiles, helicopters and drones, completed by NATO maneuvers in the Black Sea, US troops on Ukrainian soil, military instructors from Great Britain, and from 2022 also from the EU. In addition, Ukrainian ministers are present at NATO meetings, as was the case a few days ago at the meeting of foreign ministers in Riga.
A country is becoming unmistakably from a potential to an informal NATO state, to a militarily well-secured bastion, to complete what the North Atlantic Pact has been doing in terms of strategic provision since 1999, the beginning of eastward expansion, from the Baltic to Bulgaria. If, under these circumstances, Ukraine’s direct entry into NATO was previously considered a “red line”, it is now being drawn against hidden integration, as promoted by the USA and flanked by NATO. Russia seems more than determined to definitely stop this “military expansion” (Putin). Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov demands that there must be long-term guarantees for national security. One could “not think about it all the time” about what would happen tomorrow in Ukraine. But who should give these guarantees? The West would have to question a Ukraine policy that has been pursued for decades. Because that does not happen, all that remains is a controlled confrontation with an escalation scale that is open to the top. Russia has by no means exhausted the reservoir of reactions by pulling together troops.
If Kiev attacks
The repeated warnings of catastrophic consequences for the “Ukrainian statehood” should Kiev attack the Donbass not only point to the inevitable armed conflict. At the same time, any negotiated solution would be obsolete for Donetsk and Lugansk and their separation from Ukraine would be final. Russia would not even have to get out of the Normandy group. It would have ended as a negotiation format, since in an emergency the partisanship of the new government in Berlin and probably also that in Paris would clearly fail.
Europe would be torn apart in a way that was not even the case during the East-West conflict, when the Cold War was also fought to avoid a hot one. Joe Biden would have been well advised if he had promised Vladimir Putin a treaty that precludes any further eastward expansion of NATO.
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