In this discussion of the key issues for negotiation, Vijay Prashad says continuing to use military force will only cause further intense suffering.
By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Erik Bulatov, U.S.S.R., “Horizon,” 1971–72.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has begun a massive military exercise called Steadfast Defender 2024 that will continue until the end of May.
Over 90,000 troops from NATO countries (and one partner country, Sweden), including 50 naval groups and more than 80 air platforms, will deploy in 13 countries to demonstrate the alliance’s capacity and “send a robust message about its readiness to protect all Allies in the face of emerging threats.”
Of the 31 NATO member states, six share borders with Russia; Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Norway.
This NATO exercise comes just as the European Union announced that it will provide Ukraine with €50 billion in financial support between now and 2027, a reduction compared to the North Atlantic support over the past two years.
As public support for the war in Ukraine declines in the Global North states, governments have decided to ramp up tensions along the Russian border through NATO.
Following the announcement of the Steadfast Defender 2024 exercise, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg travelled to the United States and met U.S. Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon.
Interestingly, their public comments did not express a shred of concern for the Ukrainian people. Stoltenberg referred instead to the Global North’s anxiety about Russia and China, saying that support for Ukraine is “an investment in our own security because the world will become more dangerous if President Putin wins in Ukraine,” warning that the result of this conflict “is also closely watched in China.”
So, it is not the Ukrainians and their wellbeing that matters but the geostrategic necessity for the Global North to see Russia (and by implication, China) “weakened,” as Austin said in Kyiv two years earlier.
To shed light on this conflict, its global implications, and the possibility of peace, the rest of this newsletter is dedicated to No Cold War’s briefing No. 12: “The War in Ukraine Must End.”
Two years ago, on Feb. 24, 2022, Russian forces entered Ukraine. This act was not the start of the war in Ukraine. Rather, it was the acceleration of a conflict that dates back to at least 2014.
That year, at the behest of the United States, a new government was imposed on Ukraine, aiming to bring the country closer to the European Union. This initiated the sustained persecution of the country’s Russian-speaking population.
The conflict moved swiftly, with Crimea de facto becoming part of Russia once again and the Donbass region of Ukraine becoming a frontline in the conflict between Ukrainian far-right nationalists and Russian speakers.
In May 2019, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took office and pledged to end the battle in the Donbass. Instead, due to pressure from NATO, the conflict intensified, eventually leading to the Russian intervention three years later.
It is imperative for the people of Ukraine, Russia and the world that the war be halted and that the issues be transferred from the battlefield to the negotiating table.
Tuyo, Germany, “Elephant,” 2021.
Impact of the War
In any conflict, casualty figures become a matter of dispute. However, there is little disagreement that over 500,000 Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have died or been injured in this war, that over 6 million Ukrainians have fled the country and that over 7 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced (out of a pre-war population of nearly 44 million).
If the war is not brought to a halt, tens of thousands more will be killed and tens of millions more will suffer.
Ukraine’s economy has been devastated, shrinking by 29 percent in 2022 alone, according to the World Bank. The impact of the war ricocheted across the globe, causing wheat prices to rise by 21 percent and some fertilisers to rise by 40 percent within the first month of the conflict.
Global South countries were hit particularly hard by sharp increases in food and energy prices in many regions while the European economy inches towards a recession.
In other countries, astronomical amounts of resources have been diverted to the war which instead could have been used for social and economic spending. The U.S. and Europe have already spent well over $200 billion on the war.
In December 2023, the head of the Ukrainian armed forces asked U.S. Defense Secretary Austin for a further $350–$400 billion to pursue “victory.”
In reality, no amount of money will lead to a military triumph. It is clear, particularly after the failure of the Ukrainian “counter-offensive,” that there has been no significant change in the military situation, nor is there a credible prospect of one.
The continued payment of such huge human and economic costs would be purposeless.
Below is a discussion of the two major issues to resolve.
No 1 — Ukraine & the Military Blocs
At the end of the Cold War, Europe had an opportunity to pursue peaceful economic development. A coherent and balanced economy with enormous potential could have been formed by reducing military spending while combining Western Europe’s high value-added manufacturing and service industries with the former Soviet Union’s energy, raw materials, agriculture, and high-technology industries such as space.
In East Asia, which overcame a period of even greater Cold War division and conflict (as seen in the Korean and successive Vietnam and Indochina wars), a focus on mutually beneficial economic development and an avoidance of military and political blocs led it to become the world’s most rapidly growing economic region.
This is evidenced by the fact that, since 1990, the GDP of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has grown by more than 400 percent.
However, in Europe, the U.S. insisted that such policies not be followed and that, instead, the region was to expand the NATO military bloc into Eastern Europe, breaking the commitment it had made at the time of German reunification that NATO would not advance “one inch eastward” towards Russia.
The U.S. was fully aware that NATO’s expansion would greatly inflame tensions with Russia and across Europe. Of particular sensitivity was the possibility of Ukraine’s entry into NATO, which would bring the nuclear-armed bloc within immediate striking range of Moscow.
Numerous experts on Eastern Europe and Russia strongly and repeatedly advised against such expansion of NATO. Most famously, George Kennan, the original architect of U.S. Cold War policy, predicted in 1997 that, “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”
In December 2021, Russia proposed an agreement that Ukraine would not become a NATO member. In negotiations in March 2022, Ukraine proposed adopting a neutral status in exchange for security guarantees, inspired by NATO’s collective defence clause, which could have involved Poland, Israel, Turkey and Canada as guarantors.
This was blocked by NATO, directly conveyed by way of an urgent visit from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Ukraine in May 2022, thereby preventing a rapid end of the war.
No. 2 — The Russian-Speaking Minority
A 2001 census found that nearly 30 percent of Ukraine’s population considered Russian to be their native language. States with large linguistic and ethnic minority populations can only maintain their unity if the rights of such minorities are respected.
The policies of the Ukrainian government after 2014, which included suppressing the official use of the Russian language in numerous spheres, were therefore bound to lead to an explosive crisis within the Ukrainian state.
As the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, which certainly cannot be accused of being pro-Russian, stated:
“the current Law on National Minorities is far from providing adequate guarantees for the protection of minorities… many other provisions which restrict the use of minority languages have already been in force since 16 July 2019.”
There are only two ways to resolve this situation: restoration of the full linguistic and other rights of the Russian-speaking minority within the borders of the old Ukrainian state or the secession of these regions from Ukraine. Which outcome is realised will be a key subject of the negotiations.
Nonetheless, it is clear that any attempt to maintain the Russian-speaking minority within the Ukrainian state while continuing to deprive them of their rights will not succeed, nor will any attempt by Russia to impose another state on the Ukrainian-speaking population of western and northern Ukraine.
All efforts to resolve these issues by military means will continue to be futile and will only result in further intense suffering, above all for the Ukrainian people. These realities will become increasingly obvious if the war continues — which is why it must be brought to a halt as rapidly as possible and negotiations must commence.
Mahamoudou Zinkone “Babs,” Burkina Faso, “Maquis Las Palmas,” 2015.
In 1961, the Soviet poet Volodymyr Mikolayovich Sosiura wrote a song on the power of words. Sosiura was born in Debaltseve (which is today in Donetsk) in 1898 within the Tsarist empire and died as a member of the communist party in Kyiv in 1965.
He wrote several poems that oscillated between his patriotic love for Ukraine and his commitment to the Soviet Union and to the communist struggle. Above all else, Sosiura — who fought in World War I in Bakhmut and then later joined the Red Army — had a great disdain for war.
He recognised the importance of the war against the Nazis, but — like many of his generation – bemoaned the terrible loss of life incurred by this war. Twenty seven million Soviet citizens died in the fight to defeat the Nazi armies, amongst them 19 million civilians. This was the context of Sosiura’s beautiful poem about words:
I know the power of the word.
It is sharper than a bayonet
and faster than even a bullet,
Faster than an airplane.
…
Oh, weapon of happiness: word!
I am used to living beside you.
You are a flower in love,
you are a bayonet in hate.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
“The stated goal of this ‘special operation’ is the “de-nazification” of Ukraine”
Some rely on precedent and hence to some degree continue to interact with the ideological past whilst time is a lateral process whose constant is change whose variables include but are not limited to trajectory or velocity.
Omniscience is consequently never an option, only interpretation is.
The designation of “special military operation” was primarily assigned for reasons of flexibility including within juridical limitations in matters of “war”. which opponents sought to simultaneously expand to include NATO into the geographical expanse of its operation and limit “denazification” to Ukraine, to which the NATO reacted by de jure superceding “the special military operation” by illustrating/practicising their co-beligerancy.
“When you get beyond that limit, then the only solution to Auschwitz is the Red Army.”
Your observation is likely framed by “war” being restricted to things that go bang and those who facilitate the banging, plus the illusion that winning/losing is the only solution, rather than a catalyst of the winning/losing continuum, and hence the sustainable option is transcendence.
This war has to be one of the most unnecessary and dumbest wars in history. And I would assess 90% of the blame to the US/NATO/EU side. 10% to Russia … maybe they could have done something extra, although I don’t know what that might have been. The Rand Corporation scripted this war out, and Western governments were very, very eager for the war to start. They financed it with printed, fiat currency. They merely had to find a stupid, naive, vain Ukrainian President to say, Okay, we will provide the cannon fodder for you. And what a find the West got. Stupid, naive, and vain Zelinsky beyond any expectation.
I never thought it would go on this long, but Lindsey Graham is likely to get his wish. The war ends when the last Ukrainian soldier dies (or refuses conscription. And the war validates something else. An empire in decline is more dangerous than an empire ascending.
The stated goal of this ‘special operation’ is the “de-nazification” of Ukraine. A worthy goal, and one that should not be aborted. No matter how much the modern ‘left’ cries about how horrible such a thing would be. Notice of course that nobody in the modern ‘left’ has ever suggested that perhaps this “de-nazification” could continue beyond the latest borders of Ukraine? Nope, the modern ‘left’ insists that the “de-nazification” must end now. Apparently the modern left’s answer to Nazis is a big hug and round of singing Kum-Bah-Yah. Yep, that always stops people like Biden and Nuland.
Love is better than Hate. But, if you go putting flowers into gun barrels, you are trusting that the teenager holding the gun is not Kyle Rittenhouse or some other member of the modern Hitler Youth. You are trusting that this teenager with an assault rifle has not been ‘taught’ for years that you are a hated sub-human who is a threat to all that is ‘right’ and ‘good’. Non-violence only works when the violent have limits they won’t cross. When you get beyond that limit, then the only solution to Auschwitz is the Red Army.