How has Ukraine gotten here? Fighting off Russian troops in the Donbas and struggling to keep the world interested in the 10,000 dead and nearly two million more people displaced from the war that the Kremlin started in 2014.
Many blame the failure of the signatories to enforce the Budapest Memorandum, a 1994 agreement under which Ukraine surrendered its vast Soviet-era nuclear weapons arsenal for a guarantee to territorial integrity. Russia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States signed on to the assurances.
Read also: Everything from the 2018 Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv
Former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma asked at a panel at the Yalta European Strategy conference how U.S. President Donald J. Trump could believe that North Korea, given Ukraine’s sad experience, would give up its nuclear weapons.
“One of the reasons analysts like me believe that North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons because of the Ukraine example,” replied Richard Haass, president of the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations.
The panel, entitled “The Future of Ukraine and Eastern Europe – Beyond Spheres of Influence and Zones of Conflict” and moderated by Munich Security Conference chief Wolfgang Ischinger, also featured Ukraine Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin, U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker and German Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Norbert Roettgen. It focused on Ukraine’s future in the context of “spheres of influence and zones of conflict.”
Most of the discussion focused on Russia’s role in Ukraine’s geopolitical future.
“This is a Russian-led military force in the Donbas with two political entities created and controlled by Russia aimed at putting pressure on and controlling politics in Ukraine,” Volker said.
He added that he believes the best way out of the conflict is a United Nations peacekeeping force to fill the gap left behind by Russian-backed soldiers, providing security to allow the Minsk peace agreements to be implemented.
“We’ve proposed a U.N. peacekeeping force to replace Russian forces and create genuine security,” Volker said. “So there can be legitimate local elections for legitimate local authorities and so we can get through this humanitarian disaster.”
Panelists agreed that the overarching issue facing Ukraine is a Russia which sees its future success as lying in an imperialist foreign policy, which expresses itself in attacks on neighboring countries and interference abroad.
“Putin does not have a domestic economic reform policy, what he has is an imperial foreign policy,” said Haass. “So we need to raise the costs of his imperial foreign policy.”
Haass went on to outline three approaches to raising costs on Russia – further sanctions, stronger public diplomacy explaining the financial cost of Moscow’s aggressive foreign policy to Russians and arming the Kremlin’s enemies.
The public diplomacy would include supplying internal Russian political forces interested in making the high cost of Moscow’s foreign adventures a partisan issue.
Haass added that American legislators were discussing how to help wean Europe off Russian gas as part of a long-term policy aimed at reducing Moscow’s influence in Western Europe.
“What Congress is focusing on is energy dependence and how to adopt a trajectory of reduced energy dependence on Russia,” he said. “I think coming up with a trajectory for that ought to be a priority for the countries of Western Europe.”
Volker, the special representative, took a more diplomatic approach.
“I think the Russian leadership has taken the view that hey can settle in and deal with it for a long time. I think the Russian people, including some powerful Russian people, do not understand why they’re fighting the Ukrainians,” he said, before referring to sanctions as creating “a deteriorating situation for Russia.”
“It’s affecting how decisions are made. I know they put out that it doesn’t matter, but the fact is that it’s making a difference.”
Klimkin, Ukraine’s foreign minister, argued that the problem with Ukraine’s future does lie in Russian aggression, but is underpinned by a more fundamental clash.
“The problem is not only in [implementing] Minsk, but in fundamentally different visions,” he said, while referencing a conversation in which Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov apparently interpreted fulfilling the Minsk agreements to mean keeping separatist structures in place.
“In terms of who is more pro-Russian or less pro-Russian from the [Ukrainian] presidential candidates, it’s nonsense because Russia’s stance is not to establish a pro-Russian state here – it’s over,” Klimkin said. “The Kremlin is too smart for that – the whole idea is to weaken and fragment Ukraine.”
“So for my vision of Ukraine, there will be no compromise at all,” Klimkin concluded.
