Insight
First help Ukraine win the war. Then help it win the peace by Ian Bond, 28 July 2022 Even a partial Russian victory in Ukraine would damage Western interests. Ukraine needs much more help to expel Russian forces, and to rebuild its infrastructure, economy and institutions afterwards. Many Western leaders still act as though what is happening in Ukraine is someone else’s war. They are not neutral – they have imposed sanctions on Russia, and they are supplying weapons to Ukraine – but they are not treating the outcome of the conflict as a matter of vital interest to their countries. They should. They need to make the case publicly for decisive action to help Ukraine expel Russian forces from its territory. Western leaders also need to ensure that Ukraine becomes a successful country, integrated into Western structures, so that Russia would never be tempted to attack again. There should by now be no doubt that the war Vladimir Putin has been waging since February 24th is designed to remove Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its language and to destroy Ukrainian identity. Since at least 2008, Putin has been telling Western and Russian audiences that “Ukraine is not even a country”. Last year, he argued that Ukraine’s existence was the result of the efforts of Russia’s enemies “to pit the parts of a single people against one another”. More than a million Ukrainians who did not leave the east and south in time to escape occupation have been relocated – it is unclear how willingly – to Russia, often to remote areas. State-controlled media in Russia normalises the idea that it may be necessary to kill millions of Ukrainians in order to ‘de-Nazify’ the country. Russia is also offering large financial incentives to teachers from impoverished Russian regions to move to Ukraine to teach the Russian language and the official version of Russian history to any remaining Ukrainian children; as in Crimea, there will be no education in the Ukrainian language. This is not a war about territory that can be solved by territorial concessions, as some Western commentators recommend. Ukraine has already tried that. In the Minsk agreements in 2014 and 2015, France and Germany brokered a solution which put Ukrainian territory into Russian hands de facto, though not de jure. Even though Ukraine made no attempt to regain control of Crimea or the occupied areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts by military means, the conflict did not end. Putin paused his attacks, but he did not give up his ultimate objective of reuniting the (as he sees it) lost Russian territory of Ukraine with the Motherland.
CER INSIGHT: First help Ukraine win the war. Then help it win the peace 28 July 2022
info@cer.EU | WWW.CER.EU
1