The Russian enclaves in Ukraine

Blog: JOSEP COLOMER'S BLOG

Abstract

At the end of January, the National
Security Archive declassified new documents from thirty years ago that show
how the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, was deceiving the
president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, about the expansion of NATO towards ex-communist
countries. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia had accepted
and supported a Partnership for a United Europe that would include both NATO
countries and former members of the Warsaw Pact. Clinton offered the compromise
of accepting Russia in the Group of 7, which became the Group of 8, and in
other multilateral organizations, but at the same time he was accelerating the
integration of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary into NATO, which would be
followed by the three Baltic republics and the other four Eastern Euro
countries.

Before this, Secretary of State
James Baker and several European leaders had already deceived Russian President
Mikhail Gorbachev by promising him that there would never be NATO troops in the
former East Germany or beyond its territory.

Despite everything, Yeltsin
chaired the G-8 summit in Moscow in 1996 and Vladimir Putin chaired the summit
in St. Petersburg in 2006. A year later, the United States presented a plan to
deploy missiles in Europe that Putin described as a "serious provocation that
reduces the level of mutual trust…no one feels safe." In 2008, President George
W. Bush offered NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia, which was considered by
the French and German governments, followed by other European ones, as an
"unnecessary offense to Russia." Already in 2014, NATO carried out military tests
on Ukrainian territory. And in 2019 Ukraine enshrined in the Constitution the
aspiration to join NATO and the EU as the "strategic course of the country."

A year ago, the US and NATO
offered Putin a disarmament deal at the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe in exchange for a de-escalation of
the military threat to Ukraine. Moscow declared that this was an acceptable
starting point for negotiations and announced the withdrawal of part of the
troops deployed along Ukraine's borders. However, former British Prime Minister
Boris Johnson, who had already landed theatrically in Kyiv when he was in
office, returned and persuaded President Volodymyr Zelensky to "keep fighting."

CIA Director William Burns had
predicted that last summer would see which alternative was more likely: a rapid
military turnaround followed by negotiation and peace or an escalation into a
protracted war. Since then, we have seen that the Ukrainian counteroffensive
failed and Zelensky has fired the head of the army. Regarding the other side, I
could be wrong, when Putin now says that he would prefer the next president of
the United States to be Joe Biden, it seems that he is not considering holding
out for another year with the dubious expectation that Trump would "end the war
in 24 hours," as he says.

As things stand, neither side can
win a total victory in the foreseeable future. Both should prefer peace
negotiations. If, under these conditions, they continued bombing and
destroying, there would be only a so-called attrition war. The longer the war
lasts, the more difficult it is to end it because a political compromise can
make the sacrifices suffered seem unnecessary, as if all the costs were for
nothing. Game theory exemplifies this behavior with duopoly competition when
both firms lose money but hope that one day the other firm will fold and the
"winner" will be the one that has lost the least. He who has the least to lose
(in this case, Russia) persists the most. But it is a pyrrhic victory because
if the attrition lasts long, the losses are greater than the gains for the
"winner" as well. As Plutarch tells it, Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, achieved a
victory over the Romans at the cost of thousands of his men and, contemplating
the outcome of the battle, said: "With another victory like this, I am
lost." In the end, those who win are the producers and sellers of weapons.

After two years of war, Ukraine's
future does not look very favorable. NATO has changed its mind three times
about its candidacy. Full integration into the European Union is imaginary
because Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe and would absorb all the aid
to agriculture, which is half of the EU's total spending. Meanwhile, millions
of Ukrainians have fled the country, elections have been suspended, and martial
law remains in effect.

Seen in perspective, the war in
Ukraine evokes other processes of expansion and contraction of great empires. The
dissolution of the USSR brought about the separation of half of its population
and one-fourth of its territory, thus generating new borders, new areas of
foreign influence, and also extraterritorial enclaves. This way were formed the
pro-Russian enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, Transnistria in
Moldova, Kaliningrad in Lithuania, open to the Baltic and then to the Atlantic,
and now Crimea and Donbas in Ukraine with access to the Black Sea, which
entails passage to the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal.

There are examples of these disarrangements
in all parts of the world. For example, the breakup of the British Empire left
an English enclave in Northern Ireland, a Turkish one in Northern Cyprus, and Gibraltar
in Spain. Regarding the latter, you may also want to check the location on the
map of the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla, and Western Sahara.