Europe’s Gordian Knot
After months of speculation that the Russian military might sack Kyiv, Ukrainian and Russian separatist forces ramped up their exchange of artillery fire in east Ukraine last week. International media attention made this appear novel, but it is nothing new. More than 14,000 people have died in the fighting there since 2014. The recent escalation occurred within twenty-four hours of a Russian investigative committee supposedly finding mass graves of ethnic Russian civilians in the Donbas region, where the two main separatist factions are located. Western officials warned that the Kremlin could use such unverified claims as a pretext for a full or partial incursion.
In recent weeks, experts, policymakers and pundits alike have commented on the Ukraine crisis, many of them advocating for appeasement or disengagement as simple solutions to the complex problems facing Russo-Ukrainian relations. Yet Russian President Vladimir Putin made clear in a 2015 speech and again in 2021 that he endorses the flawed Kyiv Synopsis of 1674, which claims that modern Russia was born in Kyiv, Ukraine has no independent history and the land to Russia’s south is simply malorussia (little Russia).
More broadly, senior Russian officials believe the common lineage of Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians, who descended from the prominent European state of Ancient Rus’ (9 – 13 century AD), makes them all Russian rather than all Ukrainian where the capital resided in Kyiv.
Putin already has the favor of Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko, which makes Ukraine the one that got away. In other words, even if Putin withdraws his forces from Ukraine’s border, opting instead to continue with measures short of war, it will not alter his clearly articulated objective of “liberating” ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Should that happen, the ripple effects would not be contained to the European theater.
One lens through which this problem might be better understood is an ancient one. Alexander the Great, the fourth century BCE King of Macedon who nearly conquered Asia before his 30th birthday, “untied” the Gordian knot in 333. Little more than cornel wood gnarled around the yoke of a wagon, it was said that whoever untied the knot would rule all of Asia, and ruling Asia eventually became Alexander’s obsession. The way he went about untying the knot is still uncertain, but the two accounts are instructive.
The first tells of Alexander using his smarts to remove the yoke from the knot rather than untying the knot itself. The second and more likely story is that he hacked at it with his sword until it became undone. These two approaches personify modern schools of thought related to how autocrats might go about pursuing their goals this century: By applying political cunning or by chopping away at the world.
Putin is using Ukraine as leverage to secure not only increased access to and control over Europe’s security architecture, but also to question the international order as it is currently structured. How he might achieve those goals is a subject of intense debate, but both above options remain on the table.
Numerous polls reveal that the 2014 annexation of Crimea pushed Ukrainians away from Russia and into the arms of NATO and the European Union, even though Ukrainian membership in either remains unlikely. As I argued recently in a piece for the Modern War Institute at West Point, this trend, coupled with events of the last few months, lends credibility to the theory that Putin may need to rely on force more than political acumen to cement his role in Europe’s future. Lawmakers should be clear about what this means.
If the withdrawal from Afghanistan stressed Western credibility, the complete destabilization of Ukraine would put it through a gauntlet. Watching Putin shred the Budapest Memorandum (1994) and Russo-Ukrainian Treaty (1997) that guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty would do little to bolster the credibility of international agreements. Those pacts also forced Kyiv to hand over its nuclear arsenal in exchange for Western-brokered security guarantees, which means voiding them would not bode well for non-proliferation efforts either. Despite these facts, some still see no U.S. interests in Ukraine and are racing toward the easiest off ramp, which Russia has conveniently furnished.
In response to Moscow’s demands made last December, numerous public figures and journalists urged President Biden to reassure Putin that Ukraine will never be allowed to join NATO. These advocates should consider more carefully what they are insisting: that NATO abolish its longstanding “open door policy” and the United States command another sovereign nation to abandon goals legally written into its Constitution because its neighbor has threatened the use of military force if it does not. But this is beside the point.
NATO has no intention of inviting Ukraine into the alliance any time soon, and Putin knows this. The belief that simply declaring so publicly could somehow represent Moscow’s criteria for de-escalation from a full-scale invasion is therefore illogical. Using the NATO membership trope as a carrot for the West is more a mechanism for exerting control over NATO’s decision cycle than it is a means of promoting defense equity between Russia and Europe.
These are not the only reasons to question the sincerity of such demands. In 1990 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave up East Germany in response to a promise from U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would move “not one inch” further if he did. While it is important to reiterate that members enter the alliance of their own free will, NATO did expand — a lot. It is therefore unlikely that Putin would place much faith in such a guarantee even if provided and would instead use it as a springboard to demand additional concessions from NATO.
If Harvard history professor Serhii Plokhy is correct in framing Ukraine as the literal and figurative gates of Europe, then Putin is certainly knocking at the gate. Slowly untying the imperfect but important knot of Ukraine gives Moscow the leverage it needs to begin restructuring Europe’s security architecture and repairing the damage done to Russian preeminence after the Cold War. Whether pursued through political guile or brute force, Moscow’s ongoing gambit will, by design, have far-reaching consequences. As much as Western observers might want this crisis to be about Russia and its neighbor, it is not that simple.
Those who ponder whether Ukraine’s future is critical to U.S. interests are asking the wrong question. Instead, they should be wondering what the world would look like if Ukraine were fractured beyond repair. Quite possibly, it cracks open for the world’s autocrats not only the gates of Europe but also those of Asia by ushering in a new era in which the rules of the international order have changed, and neo-imperialism is an acceptable tool of statecraft so long as the imperialist justifies his ends sufficiently. No matter their interest in Ukraine’s affairs, leaders of free nations everywhere should be concerned with what that era might look like.
Capt. Michael P. Ferguson is a U.S. military officer, author and analyst with decades of operational experience throughout Europe, Southwest Asia and Africa. He writes for various publications and is coauthor of a forthcoming book on the military legacy of Alexander the Great.
*The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect official positions or policies of the U.S. Department of Defense or U.S. government.
Πηγή: thehill.com
