The next obstacle to stopping Putin is the self-imposed paralysis of the leaders of Europe and the G7. The hard truth is that the only sanctions, or actions of any kind, that will affect Putin’s conduct are those that directly or indirectly target his hold on power in Russia. It’s all Putin cares about because he knows what happens to people like him when they lose that grip. This is why Secretary of State John Kerry’s comment to his counterpart Sergei Lavrov after Crimea was so precisely wrong. “We hope President Putin will recognize that none of what we’re saying is meant as a threat,” Kerry said. “It’s not meant in a personal way.” With one feeble remark, Kerry took the only things Putin cares about, threats and personal power, off the table.
Obama repeated this mistake two days later when he announced America would not send troops to defend Ukraine. Nobody was asking for troops anyway, and Obama likely thought he was defusing tensions. But where Obama sees a gesture of peaceful intent, Putin simply sees more weakness. Dropping your weapons to calm a hostage situation might work on a scared kid but it doesn’t work against someone like Putin. In Putin’s eyes, Obama is his only real opponent in the world and his opponent had just voluntarily surrendered one of his greatest advantages: America’s overwhelming military strength. On Iran, on Syria, and then again in Ukraine, Obama outsourced his foreign policy to Putin and, by so doing, he crippled the power of the office he holds in ways that will outlast his White House tenure for years.
On March 28, Putin called Obama to discuss Ukraine, although what was said is different from what was heard. Analyzing the discrepancies between the White House and Kremlin press releases of these calls has become a cottage industry and usually you would never guess that the reports are about the same conversation. The White House report mentioned the need for “constitutional reform and democratic elections” in Ukraine and Russia pulling back its troops from Eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin summary referred to the “rampant extremists” in Kyiv and added the separatist Moldovan region of Transnistria to the conversation in a blatant threat to up the ante once again.
I was more interested in a word that wasn’t mentioned in either summary: “Crimea.” Evidently this chunk of sovereign Ukrainian territory, invaded and annexed by Putin just weeks earlier, had already ceased to be part of the conversation. Just a day earlier, the UN General Assembly had done what the Security Council could not do due to Russia’s veto there. The General Assembly resolution in defense of the territorial integrity of Ukraine received a hundred votes and even intense Russian pressure produced only ten allies, a predictable rogue’s gallery that included Cuba, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Syria, and North Korea. And yet Obama suddenly appeared ready to let Putin shift the frame of the negotiations to whether or not Russia would conquer more of Ukraine.
A month previous, Western pundits had been full of more “Putin would never” predictions, and many warned not to “corner” Putin but to instead offer him a “face-saving retreat” from Crimea. Putin was not interested in any retreat at all and he reversed the tactic against Obama and the West, offering them a face-saving retreat with Eastern Ukraine as the new line in the sand. Over a year later, in the summer of 2015, the fighting there still rages despite several pathetic “ceasefire” agreements that also existed only for Western leaders to save face.
Negotiating with another country’s territory as collateral has a long history. The most obvious example is from 1938, when Hitler graciously offered not to take all of Czechoslovakia in exchange for getting the Sudetenland without any complaints from Britain and France. North Korea and Iran also like to have one-on-one talks with the United States, a way of saying nobody else matters. But Ukraine is not USA versus Russia; it’s the civilized world versus a dictator, and the United Nations vote supported that assessment ten to one.
The mandate for continued pressure on Putin is clear, if only the West has the courage to maintain it and increase it. Otherwise, just as Czechoslovakia was absent from the “great power” negotiations in 1938, Ukraine’s fledgling government will be relegated to the role of a spectator, a patient under local anesthetic watching helplessly as the surgeons slice away. For the United States to participate in talks is well and good, especially as a signatory of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine’s territory. But Ukrainian representatives should be present at every step and the people of Ukraine must be kept informed throughout before other nations get too far along in deciding what is in Ukraine’s best interests.
Putin once again refuted the predictions of his defenders in the West and continued his invasion of Eastern Ukraine. A few months later, as summer approached, thousands of Ukrainians, including many civilians, were dead and hundreds of thousands had been forced to flee. The Ukrainian military was severely overmatched by the “rebel” forces, not that there had ever been a rebel or separatist movement in Eastern Ukraine worth mentioning before Putin discovered a huge and very well-equipped army of them. Europe and the United States refused to provide weapons to Ukraine, limiting themselves to humanitarian assistance and nonlethal aid.
Actions directed at Putin were also shockingly weak despite the clear presence of Russian forces and Russian arms flooding into Ukraine. It’s one thing for academics and pundits to calmly sympathize with Putin and his “vital interests” and his “sphere of influence,” as if 50 million Ukrainians should have no say in the matter. It’s quite another thing for Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Angela Merkel to fret about the “instability” and “high costs” caused by sanctions against Russia, as if that could be worse than the instability caused by the partial annexation of a European country by a nuclear dictatorship, carried out with impunity.
This fecklessness was sad and expected, but I thought it might finally come to an end on July 17 when Malaysia Airlines flight 17 (MH17) was blown out of the sky over Eastern Ukraine by a surface-to-air missile, killing all 298 people aboard. The local separatist leadership immediately boasted about shooting down what they had thought was another Ukrainian military plane, only recanting their statements and deleting their posts when it was revealed to have been a civilian aircraft.
Of course the shock and horror would turn to rage and shame among the leaders of the free world that the war in Ukraine had been allowed to fester. Of course Putin would realize he’d overplayed his hand and attempt to preempt the backlash by withdrawing his forces and his support for Ukrainian separatist terrorists. Of course the fact that two-thirds of the passengers were European (193 of them Dutch) would lead to massive Western protests and stiff penalties against Russia.
Of course none of that happened.
I said at the time that MH17 wouldn’t change Putin’s calculations in any way, but I hoped it would provoke a Western response that would. Somehow I managed to underestimate the cowardice of the Western world once again. The rhetoric changed a little, and briefly, but little else. An investigation was announced, although it would take a long time to get started since the separatist forces would not allow the wreckage and bodies to be collected until they had looted them. Where was the rage? Nobody believed the separatists’ excuses or Russian propaganda about anything other than a Russian missile. Was it because Ukraine was far away, was poor and unimportant, and had been turned into a war zone? Had Putin’s forces shot down that same aircraft over Amsterdam or Kuala Lumpur would it have made a difference? I’m not sure I want to know the answer.