After the ceasefire negotiated in Minsk, a peace settlement in eastern Ukraine remains distant. Most of the points in the agreement, including Ukraine’s constitutional reform and the resumption of Kiev’s control over the entire Ukrainian-Russian border, would probably never be implemented. The most one can hope for is that the conflict is frozen and people stop dying. However, even that cannot be taken for granted, as continued fighting ahead of the ceasefire’s formal entry into force suggests.
If the truce sticks, it would be the first negotiated arrangement in a newly divided Europe, leaving Russia almost alone on the east, with much of the rest of Europe supporting Ukraine. This split can grow much worse if the conflict in Donbass continues.
However, even if it stops, reconciliation is not in the cards. This means that in the foreseeable future there would be no common security system on the continent of Europe, no commonly agreed-upon norms and no rules of behavior. The world disorder has entered the recently most stable and best-regulated part of the globe: Europe.
Illustration: Mountain People
The idea that a combination of Western sanctions and low oil prices could bring a change in Kremlin policies, or a change in the Kremlin itself, has so far not been borne out by the facts. Putin remains defiant, the elites do not turn against him, and his popularity among the bulk of the Russian people, despite the hardships they have begun to feel, is at record levels. These people are not ignorant of the dangers a continued conflict over Ukraine can pose to them, but lay the blame for these on Kiev, Washington and European leaders. Putin, whether as war leader or a peacemaker, is their champion.
At Minsk, he has achieved his minimal goal. Kiev has conceded the failure of its efforts to wipe out the Donbass rebels backed by Moscow. If the ceasefire becomes permanent, the “people’s republics” would be physically safe and can start turning themselves into functioning entities on the models of Transnistria. Russia would need to supply them with more than weapons and humanitarian assistance, straining its resources even more, but there is hardly an alternative. For Putin, and most Russians, these are “our people.”
Yet, in Minsk, Putin reaffirmed Russia’s official position that Donbass should remain part of Ukraine. This is not a concession. Within a formally unified Ukraine, Donetsk and Lugansk are a protected center of resistance to the political leadership in Kiev. The situation in the rest of the nation permitting, they can expand their influence beyond Donbass and link up with those who, a year after the triumph of the Maidan, have become disillusioned with their government, which is woefully unable to tame corruption and improve the lives of ordinary Ukrainians. Indeed, if the truce in the east of the nation holds, the future of Ukraine would depend on how it manages reform and popular discontent.
Russia has not so much “lost Ukraine,” as, at least for the time being, its European option. The recent trip by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande to Moscow, which paved the road to Minsk, was a rare top-level visit to Russia by Western leaders these days.
The German-Russian relationship, a mainstay of Europe’s post-Cold War stability, has frayed dangerously. With politics adversarial and history divisive, the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II has led to controversies, with a number of politicians in Poland, the Baltic states and Ukraine seeking to minimize the Soviet Union’s contribution to the defeat of Nazism, or accusing the Soviets of crimes to exonerate those who sided with Hitler against Stalin.
Thus, as a result of the Ukraine conflict, the gulf between Russia and the EU is wide, deep and growing. The Russian government does not expect the lifting of EU sanctions for a long time and, even then, it is hard to expect business as before.
Putin’s idea of a “greater Europe from Dublin to Vladivostok,” which he was seeking to sell to the European, particularly German business community, only five years ago, is being replaced by the reality of Russia’s increasing closeness to China and the rise of what can be called a “greater Asia from Shanghai to St Petersburg.” When Putin reviews the Victory Day military parade on May 9, his most honored guest would be Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), with US President Barack Obama and most other Western leaders boycotting the celebration.
De facto expelled from the G8, in confrontation with the US and with its European option closed, Russia is not isolated elsewhere. Apart from China, it is trying to expand ties with India, which is also joining the Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO) this year.
When Putin hosts the summit of BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — and the SCO in Ufa, Russia, in July, he would be in the chair of the two most prominent clubs of the non-Western world. Thanks to China’s economic and financial might, and Russia’s international experience, these clubs have a potential for evolving into serious organizations capable of providing a measure of financial and political leadership.
It is not all symbolism. In a dramatic move, Russia has dropped Gazprom’s pet project, the South Stream, in favor of a gas pipeline running through Turkey to meet the EU on the Greek border. Turkey, a NATO member and US ally, is strengthening economic links with Russia.
So is, albeit more quietly, South Korea, another key US ally. Nor has Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe given up on his vision of a normalized and economically vibrant relationship with Russia.
In the Middle East, Russia has intensified its outreach to Iran and Egypt, while keeping active relations with Israel and courting Saudi Arabia, not to count its involvement in Syria, of course. From Latin America to Southeast Asia to Pakistan, Russia has been looking for customers for its newly revived defense industry.
Ukraine is not the center of the geopolitical universe, nor is Russia central to the future of the globe. Yet, Ukraine and the global crisis over it point to the start of a new period in world politics.
Great powers — Russia overtly, China covertly — are challenging the US-dominated order. Nationalism, on the rise in places from Turkey to India to Japan, leads to a further erosion of that order. Attempts to degrade and destroy the Islamic State group, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, have yielded only partial, reversible results.
Having lost Russia as a partner and gained Ukraine as a new responsibility, Europe is uncertain about what to do. Germany has provided a modicum of diplomatic leadership to the EU as a whole, but the larger issue of strategic goals and how to achieve them has not been properly addressed.
Europe, an island of stability and peace for the past quarter-century, is rejoining the world.
Dmitri Trenin is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
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