Revival of the dreaded Cold War tensions

07 March 2014 

SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY

Nato activism keeps hostility alive even though the eight-nation Warsaw Pact was dissolved in 1991. US goal is the total elimination of Moscow's influence in Europe. Happenings in Ukraine are a pointer to this reality

The revival of Cold War tensions in Ukraine again places India in a quandary. When newly-independent Ukraine signed a major arms deal with Pakistan in 1995, India appealed to Moscow. Soon to become Prime Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, who was born in Soviet Ukraine and authored the concept of a Russia-India-China “strategic alliance” to balance the United States, responded to the appeal. In effect, the Russians took over some of Ukraine’s armaments production units. The Pakistan pact was cancelled. India cannot forget that. But it cannot support a Russian invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s industrialised eastern Provinces including the Crimea while the new pro-Western regime in Kiev flirts with the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

Admittedly, many of the 46 million Ukrainians are keen on becoming EU citizens so that they can travel freely and work in glamorous Western European cities like London and Paris. But the crisis really erupted three months ago when the ousted President, Mr Viktor Yanukovich, spurned a pact with the EU in favour of closer ties with the Kremlin. His decision plunged the country into chaos and cost nearly 100 lives. Encouraged by the anti-Yanukovich faction’s bloody protests, the pro-West majority in Ukraine’s Parliament voted to remove him from power on February 22, hours after he signed an accord with the opposition to end the stand-off.

His deposition precipitated another crisis. While Ukraine’s pro-Russian eastern Provinces refused to accept the new rulers in Kiev, the pro-Western protesters violated the accord, refused to surrender their arms or suspend their agitation, and stormed the former President’s office and house. Had Mr Yanukovich not fled, he would surely have been lynched. Not only did Parliament order the police and military not to intervene but in calling for new elections for May 25, it released from jail the formidably militant pro-Western hawk and former Prime Minister, Ms Yulia Tymoshenko. Star of Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ in 2004, she narrowly lost to Mr Yanukovich in the 2010 elections. Mr Yanukovich jailed her for alleged abuse of power. Now, she lauds the anti-Yanukovich, anti-Russian protesters as “liberators”, and seems the likely winner in the May presidential election.

Behind the drama, Ukraine, like many other former Soviet satellites in East European, is teetering close to bankruptcy. Its GDP of about $157 billion is only a fifth of Turkey’s. The former parliamentary Speaker and interim head of state, Mr Oleksandr Turchynov, warns that Kiev would have to default on foreign obligations amounting to $13 billion due this year if the West doesn’t provide the $15 billion bail-out package that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had promised Mr Yanukovich. There are hopes that the “planned volume of macroeconomic assistance may reach around $35 billion by the end of next year”. Kiev expects Western nations and the International Monetary Fund to convene a donor conference to allocate funds for modernisation and reform.

Although the EU is mired in its own financial problems, its foreign policy chief, Baroness Catherine Ashton, has promised help. So has Germany. Washington, DC’s generosity is legendary even if the suspicion of political motives means recipients are often not conspicuously gracious. However, effective reconstruction needs more than money. The stable and peaceful environment it demands will remain elusive if tentative talks in Paris and Rome continue to founder and US President Barack Obama and Mr Putin continue to speak at each other in increasingly menacing tones.

Washington’s interest is strategic one-upmanship. Mr Obama will probably regard the $13 billion Mr Turchynov needs as a small price for the “regime change” that has become the principal instrument of American foreign policy. The American strategy is to eliminate Moscow’s influence. The octogenarian Russophobe and Cold War warrior, Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who mentored Mr Obama at Columbia University, outlined in his book, The Grand Chessboard, that it is the manifest destiny of the US to reign supreme in Eurasia. Nato’s continuing eastern thrust despite the reported assurance to Mr Mikhail Gorbachev that it would not expand “one inch to the east” if Moscow agreed to German reunification, is a major cause for Russian uneasiness.

Formed in 1949 to contain the Soviet Union, Nato now has 28 members against the original 12. Many of the new members —Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Croatia — either border Russia or were Russian satellites. Cyprus, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Georgia are waiting to join. Nato wants Ukraine to be next. History records how John Foster Dulles pressured India to join Nato’s eastern counterpart, the South-East Asian Treaty Organisation. Pakistan joined both Seato and the Central Eastern Treaty Organisation, thereby receiving the arms it used against India in the 1965 and the 1971 wars.

Russia sees its former adversary (and continuing challenger) advancing right up to its borders and trying to isolate it. For American strategists, this is the legitimate reward of global victory. Richard Nixon exulted when the Soviet Union collapsed: “The time has come for America to reset its geopolitical compass. We have a historic opportunity to change the world.” The Gulf War and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were consequences of that heady triumphalism. We do not yet know how much the ‘Arab Spring’ or the Syrian uprising owes to American endorsement and the material support of pro-American Asian regimes like those of Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

If the new regime in Kiev does join Nato, the more Russified southern and eastern regions (made up of historic Russian provinces like Kharkov, the Black Sea and the Crimean peninsula) might secede and be absorbed by Russia. Moscow claims that a mutual defence treaty entitles it to post up to 25,000 troops in Crimea. Any serious attempt to activate the agreement (if it exists) would probably mean civil war with each side fronting for foreign powers, in other words, a proxy war between Russia and the US.

Ukraine remains a weapons supplier to Pakistan. This is a modest commercially-inspired arrangement and given the current equation between India and the US, may not present much of a problem. But Nato enlargement and activism keeps hostility alive even though the eight-nation Warsaw Pact was dissolved in 1991. The American goal is the total elimination of Moscow’s influence in Europe. It’s the Cold War all over again.