INVASION: An unwelcome intrusion into another's domain. Inhuman, unlawful, evil. Yet it’d offer current events clarity to look back to where/when the armed hostilities started. By doing so, we would see some sense in knowing more about geopolitical power play and the forces involved, and why.
First, let’s go to 2014: Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, then part of Ukraine. In that year, NATO allies agreed to halt the cuts they made after the Cold War ended. National military budgets were upgraded, and moved toward spending 2 percent of GDP on defense by 2024. With that target date closing in, and the biggest land war in Europe in decades ravaging Ukraine, NATO is expected to commit to a new budget goal.
Vladimir Putin said that Russian troops in the Crimean peninsula were aimed "to ensure proper conditions for the people of Crimea to be able to freely express their will," whilst Ukraine and other nations argue that such intervention is a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty. And so on and so forth.
THEN there’s the war in Donbas. The coal-rich Ukrainian region was already crushed by war since 2014, at least, as part of the broader Russo-Ukrainian War. Russian-backed separatists versus the Ukrainian military. Armed hostilities were still at it until it was subsumed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Yet the world never really paid attention with Donbas, although the oblast turned into ruins and rubble with almost 15,000 dead as of 2021.
Clearly, conflict between Russia and Ukraine is deep. You may google more history before 2014, including the Chernobyl disaster in Kyiv in 1986. Yet per natural gas export, the two countries somehow found reason to sit for mutual profit. Approximately 80 percent of natural gas that Russia sends to the E.U. used to pass through Ukraine territory. Moscow then paid Kyiv billions$ as transit tax for the passage.
Then came the unresolved “gas dispute” between Moscow’s Gazprom and Kyiv’s Naftogaz, dating back to 2008. These disputes have grown beyond simple business disagreements into transnational political issues—involving political leaders from several countries—that threaten natural gas supplies in numerous European countries dependent on natural gas imports from Russian suppliers. Repeat: Russia provides approximately a quarter of the natural gas consumed in the European Union.
During this conflict, Russia claimed Ukraine was not paying for gas, but diverting that which was intended to be exported to the EU from the pipelines. Ukrainian officials at first denied the accusation, but later Naftogaz admitted that because of harsh winter (lower than minus 30C) some natural gas intended for other European countries was retained and used for domestic needs. Etc etcetera.
NORD Stream 2, which is mainly funded by Russia, was nearing completion when the war broke out in early last year. NS 2 was half-Moscow funded and the other half by 4 European utility/energy giants Uniper, Wintershall Dea, OMV, Engie, and Royal Dutch Shell. The pipeline negates Ukraine. Moscow’s natural gas would instead pass by the Baltic Sea onto Western Europe to Germany.
Russia’s business rivals, mainly U.S. corporate giants, loudly sounded that Nord Stream 2 was Russia’s tactic to (politically) rule Europe via its massive fuel exports. The U.S. was only #4 in fuel (gas and oil, or either) export in E.U. that time.
By now, we know how stuff went down. Meanwhile, due to perennial double-digit unemployment in Ukraine, around 4 million Ukrainians used to work in Russia before the war.
NEWS: “How NATO's expansion helped drive Putin to invade Ukraine.” I don’t sincerely believe that Vladimir Putin will to invade Ukraine. A major reason was China inked a $117 billion oil deal with Russia, on a discount, a week or so before the war. The summer before, China also signed a $400 billion oil deal with Iran. Take note that prior to all these, Saudi Arabia was China’s top importer. Yes, China is world’s #1 oil importer. As we know it by now, these three giants are BFFs. With BRICS buddy India, priority of these “emerging economies” is economy, and war–especially prolonged war–easily derails economic activity.
China’s purchase of oil and major commodities from Russia totaled $88.3 billion in 2022. Although Russia isn’t China’s top importer, overall. What I am saying is, a war that is expected to shudder the global market because Russia is involved, would adversely affect China’s business, especially financial investments and contractual cooperation with 147 countries via Belt and Road Initiative projects. Meanwhile, as of 2022, China has sunk almost $68 billion on BRI, which is of course a modest estimate. This: China has loaned $900+ billion to 151 lower-income countries before Feb 2022.
Why would the CCP want a war? Doesn’t make an iota of sense to the intensely trade-minded Chinese.
BACK to NATO and Russia. Boris Yeltsin in 1991 in Helsinki: "We believe that the eastward expansion of NATO is a mistake and a serious one at that," the ex-Russian post-Cold War president said. "Nevertheless, in order to minimize the negative consequences for Russia, we decided to sign an agreement with NATO." Those agreements included an array of security and economic issues, including further sharp reductions in the two nations’ nuclear arsenals.
In the most ambitious accord, the two countries agreed in principle to negotiate a new arms control treaty that over the next decade would reduce the number of deployed strategic warheads by about a third from the levels agreed to.
How would arms control work if a huge military alliance continues to expand? What is the sense in that? Remember, Russia dissolved the Warsaw Pact, NATO’s counterpart in Eastern Europe, alongside dissolution of the USSR and end of Cold War in 1991.
However, to Kremlin’s dismay, NATO further expanded, adding the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (1999), Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004), Albania and Croatia (2009), Montenegro (2017), North Macedonia (2020), and Finland (2023).
WHY Ukraine is important?
Ukraine, as the largest former Soviet republic in Europe besides Russia itself, has been a key part of alliance talks since it declared independence from the USSR in 1991. In the three decades since, NATO expansion has put four members on Ukraine's borders.
Putin himself has long said that he believes Ukrainians and Russians to be a single people, unified by language, culture and religion. In July 2021, he wrote a long essay about the "historical unity" between the two nations. Before the war, there are 5.8 million Ukrainians living in Russia; 8.3 million Russians in Ukraine. Easily, they are kin, pretty much like the Chinese in the Mainland and in Taiwan.
For the U.S. and its Western allies, a successful and independent Ukraine was a potent potential symbol that Russia's time as a powerful empire had come to an end, political watchers say. A NATO membership would have sealed it? Maybe.
Meanwhile, in April, Finland joined NATO in a major blow to Russia. Sweden’s accession seems imminent. However, on Ukraine’s requested admission into NATO, President Joe Biden told CNN in an interview: “I don’t think it’s ready for membership.” Or the West isn’t ready to 101 percent infuriate the Kremlin?
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg adds there’s no timetable set for Ukraine’s membership. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy blasted the organization’s failure to set a timetable for his country’s admission as “absurd.”
While it’s not on the agenda, NATO hopes that Belarus, Lithuania’s big neighbor, and Russia’s main backer, will not do some surprise moves. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said in June that his country has received Russian tactical nuclear weapons.
Despite all these, Western countries are still willing to keep sending weapons to help Ukraine do the job that NATO was designed to do — hold the line against a Russian invasion. Why not just end the war? The United States has forwarded $75 billion (out of $113 billion approved by Congress) of taxpayer’s money to Ukraine, as of end of 2022. The European Union has given $35 billion, so far. NATO members actually committed at least 75.2 billion euros (or $80.5bn) in financial, humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine between January 24 and November 20, 2022.
Yet darkness still shrouds the glade. As I end this post, Russia’s threat to pull out of the Ukraine grain deal raises fears about global food security. And more movements of valuable merch, fuel, and products are shuddered. At this juncture, major global businesses are competing for gargantuan profit. Sure. But if this monstrous idiocy goes on, it is not just China’s BRI or FDIs or India’s shrewd trade juggling would suffer big. Peoples of the world are easy victims, of course. And I am not talking about a full-blown world war either. (Despite my fears, I am not that paranoid.)
But Western powers don’t seem to care. Sad and tragic. ☮️☮️☮️
No comments:
Post a Comment