For one year, Russia has pursued a long,
costly war of aggression against Ukraine. Its objective is obvious: to
destabilize Ukraine so that the new democratic regime fails. Therefore, the
West should adjust its goals accordingly to offer Ukraine financial support.
The Kremlin has presented one false objective
after the other for this aggression. On February 27, 2014, "little green
men"—that is, Russian special forces in Russian uniforms but without
insignia—occupied the Crimean regional parliament. The next day, they took over
the peninsula's two international airports. Within two weeks, these troops had
skillfully occupied all of Crimea.
Initially, Moscow presented its occupation as
a separatist uprising, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has admitted that
his troops participated en masse. The Russian people—for whom Crimea was a lost
Soviet holiday paradise—supported this naked, unprovoked aggression. And
because it was a complete surprise, conquering Crimea was easy.
Interpreting the rest of Moscow's war on
Ukraine is more complex. Russian leaders discussed three major strategies.
One was an early leaked plan from the
National Security Council, reportedly connected with Putin's Chief of Staff Sergei Ivanov, about taking 10 eastern and southern Ukrainian
regions—including Kiev—to unify the Soviet military-industrial complex. That
would have required a march on Kiev in the spring of 2014, which did not
happen.
Putin publicly presented a second idea April
17: the seizure of "Novorossiya," the Catherine II-era term for eight
eastern and southern regions of Ukraine. That would also have involved a major
spring attack, but this did not take place either.
Instead, the Kremlin opted for a third
strategy, identified with Putin's diabolic aide Vladislav Surkov: a limited but bloody war in the eastern and
southern part of only two of Ukraine's 25 regions, Luhansk and Donetsk, known
as the Donbas.
The destruction has been horrendous. The
territory now occupied by Russian troops or their subordinates once harbored
3.3 million people, but most have since fled—1.3 million to other parts of
Ukraine, 500,000 to Russia, and 100,000 to other countries, according to the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Only pensioners, the destitute
and criminals remain.
The economy in this rustbelt of dangerous
coal mines and obsolete steel mills is stagnant, but it accounted for 10
percent of Ukraine's GDP in 2013. The war is the main reason for Ukraine's
economic catastrophe. However, Moscow's drastic trade sanctions have also
crippled the country's economy.
Last year, Ukraine's exports to Russia fell
by half, equivalent to 12 percent of total exports. That caused Ukraine's GDP
(excluding Crimea) to shrink by 6.8 percent. This year, GDP is likely to drop
by a further 9 percent. About 75 percent of this contraction is due to the
fighting in the Donbas and Russian trade sanctions against Ukraine.
With its war of destruction, the Kremlin's
apparent objective is to destabilize Ukraine to the point of political
collapse. In his documentary
film about the capture of Crimea, Putin said he acted when
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was falling. Yet he also piled scorn on
Yanukovych.
Clearly, Putin attacked Ukraine's democratic
breakthrough as a preemptive strike against democratization in Russia. Rather
than a sign of political strength, this was proof of his political
weakness—combined with relative military strength and Western cluelessness.
The European Union and its March 2014
Association Agreement with Ukraine was completely irrelevant. Putin has made
clear that he views the EU as a political dwarf.
Yet the EU was important in other ways.
Incredibly, the European Commission sees the Russia-Ukraine gas conflict as a
commercial dispute rather than an act of war. That's why, late last year, it
made Ukraine pay Gazprom $3.1 billion in disputed arrears, depleting Kiev's
reserves and forcing the collapse of Ukraine's currency, the hryvnia. It also obligated
Ukraine to buy gas from Russia without offering any competition for its harmful
acts.
Ukraine should stop trading with Gazprom,
which corrupts Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. Tellingly, during the
Minsk peace talks, Russia urged Kiev's destitute government to pay pensions and
subsidies to the occupied Donbas, where Ukrainian officials can neither enter
nor collect taxes. Russia wants the Ukrainian government to bleed.
Last spring, the EU proudly announced that it
had opened its markets to Ukraine, but some 40 key quotas remain, causing its
imports from Ukraine to fall sharply in the last quarter of 2014. Europe must
open its markets to Ukrainian exports more widely, especially since Russia has
closed its own markets as an act of war—and especially since the EU has delayed
launching its vital Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with Ukraine at
Russia's behest.
Meanwhile, Ukraine's first serious, able
government in years has quickly adopted vital reforms the West had called for.
It quadrupled household gas prices on April 1 without sparking any popular
protests. It abolished corrupt coal subsidies and has opened up public
procurement for competition, and it has cut the oligarchs down to size.
Kiev is doing exactly what it's supposed to do,
but what is the EU doing? It has committed merely €5 billion in loans to
Ukraine, compared with €200 billion for Greece. This makes no sense.
Ukraine does all the reforms, while Greece
has ignored similar demands for years and now openly opposes them. Ukraine has
more than four times as many people as Greece, and it is far more strategically
important for Europe.
Having lost Greece, Brussels needs a success
story—and Ukraine is the obvious choice. But the EU must do far more.
If it won't give Ukraine the military aid it
badly needs, it could at least offer crucial financial aid. The European
central banks could easily give Ukraine a €10 billion credit swap, which would
stabilize the hryvnia without costing the EU anything, because the ECB could
impose strict conditions that force Kyiv to change policies before it needs the
swap. The money would stay with the ECB in Frankfurt.
There is no reason not to offer such
assistance.
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