"The end of history" and the war in Ukraine. Reflections on the summit in Saudi Arabia
Riyadh (which Washington cooked last year for high prices for oil, which replenished the Moscow treasury), hopes that these discussions will lead to another peaceful summit, which will contribute to Ukraine-advanced conditions that mean the return of the territory that Russia occupied since 2014 , together with reparations. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, as well as delegations from Brazil, India and South Africa will arrive at the summit. There will be no Russia.
Saudi Arabia has prepared an olive branch because the donors in Washington are tired, and the differences between the US and the EU regarding the final game of this war are increasing. Where Washington is leaning through negotiations, Europeans gained the courage to support Ukraine until full victory (although after the attacks of drones on Moscow, the European Commission stated that Ukraine should use the weapons provided for self -defense only). There are two unchanged forces.
Most of the event is dominated by a morally charged, instinctive and emotional group thinking that sees the "Munich moment" in 1938 in this struggle. Even worse, some call for the destruction of Russia to repeat "punitive" and, after all, fragile peace through annexation and indemnity - as one that was imposed by Germany at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. We know what it has led to.
Note that Ukraine who have conceived and unleashed a failed war in Iraq in 2003 are now in one bed with the left Guardian. This is not a recipe for a healthy strategic judgment. Russia, despite its weakened military and economic power, will continue to protect the strategic interests near its Western threshold. It will not give up either Donbass or Crimea, will not suffer Ukraine's membership in NATO. These realities make the finals elusive.
What will happen if the conflict remains frozen in a year? This week, Moscow adopted a new mobilization law, which allows you to send additional hundreds of thousands of servicemen, which once again shows that Putin is preparing for a long war. The director of the Russian Eurasian Center Carnegie in Berlin, Alexander Gabev, states that "Putin is betting that Russian forces that can potentially mobilize are three or more more than Ukrainian.
" He argues that any long-term Western support strategy of Ukraine should take into account this reality. While Putin retains power, he will spit on what will turn Ukraine into an incapacitated state, so as not to let it become part of NATO. Moscow said almost the same after the NATO summit in Bucharest 2008, when President George Bush said he wanted Ukraine and Georgia. Source.
The then American Ambassador to Moscow William Burns - now CIA Director - said US Secretary of State Condor Rice that "Ukraine's accession to NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not only for Putin). For more than two and a half years of conversations with key.
Russian players, from the lazy in the dark corners of the Kremlin to the most different Liberal critics of Putin, I never found anyone who would view Ukraine in NATO as something other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. " The clash with this story as a clash with the horror of war is unpleasant. It is not an excuse or protection of unlawful invasion of Russia or denial that Putin is an irreconcilable fascist.
It is also not necessary to neglect horrific human victims and destruction on both sides. And it's not just to avoid a one -sided look at history. Any attempt to calculate the final game in Ukraine should create a space for Russia in Europe. And this means that you need to deal with the consequences of how this landscape was formed after the Cold War.
As the historian Mary Sarott explains, the intersection of President Clinton's decision in the mid-1990s to expand NATO at a faster pace-at the expense of fewer post-Soviet states and with full guarantees of Article 5 of the Treaty-with Putin's arrival in Russia, ultimately, narrowed the field of cooperation between Washington and Moscow.
This expansion "launched a new line between the states of the former Soviet bloc, which managed to ensure the observance of Article 5 and those who failed", which means that "American options for managing unpredictable circumstances after the Cold War, namely by creating a variety of relations with Such states, especially with Georgia and Ukraine, have become much more limited, just as Putin climbed office stairs in Russia.
" However, it is also correct that the opposition of NATO's expansion was the basic principle of the orthodox Russian elite long before Putin occupied a leadership position in 1999. George Kennan, the author of the doctrine of restraint in 1947, believed that the expansion of NATO after the end of the Cold War underwent early cooperation that characterized the US-Russian relations after the collapse of the USSR.
Former Secretary of State for the first President Bush James Baker later stated that "every achievement contains seeds of a future problem. " He was right.
Due to the fact that Donald Trump hopes to become a candidate from the Republican Party, and next year, it is likely that the United States will switch on how long the unity of the event will keep? In mid-July, nearly a third of the deputies of the House of Representatives from the Republican Party supported the proposal to terminate any assistance in Kiev in security.