In an effort to de-escalate the volatile situation in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron embarked on a diplomatic offensive the first week of February. After almost six hours of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Macron arrived in Kiev on Feb. 8 for talks with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. After his meeting in Moscow, Macron said Putin gave him assurances that Russia would not make any aggressive moves against Ukraine, a comment the Kremlin later disavowed.
In addition to Russia’s demand that NATO bar Ukraine from becoming a member state and that the western alliance reduce its military presence in eastern Europe, Moscow accuses the Ukrainian government of failing to implement the 2015 Minsk agreement. The Minsk accord is an international deal sponsored by Germany and France to restore peace to eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed rebels control a region known as Luhansk and Donetsk.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation magazine, who discusses current efforts to reach a diplomatic solution to the threat of war along Ukraine’s eastern border, addressed in her recent article titled, “The Exit from the Ukraine Crisis That’s Hiding in Plain Sight.”
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: The United States — and I don’t mean to be callous — has no vital national security interest in Ukraine. There’s a deeply asymmetrical situation where Russia does — and what is essentially a civil war, Scott, has become a proxy war and now has become a geopolitical struggle.
Even if NATO decided tomorrow to incorporate Ukraine — and that is so much at the crux of what we’re witnessing in terms of the crisis — its own charter, NATO’s own charter would not permit to bring in Ukraine because of the territorial issues still present in Ukraine, which need to be resolved. And I just think there’s enormous amount of talk about NATO in a sense that is delusional because it’s not even in play.
But what is in play is you have two nuclear armed powers, the United States, Russia contesting now in this geopolitical proxy war in a way that could be less World War II, but World War I, you know, a march to folly kind of miscalculation, accidental. What worries me more than sending troops to Eastern Europe, which President Biden has and NATO’s sent troops — is that we have special advisers inside Ukraine. I believe there at least 200 Florida National Guard people and lots of weapons. So if you begin to fund an insurgency with U.S. advisers, they could be on the front lines. And then you just see the stumble, the miscalculation and the dangerous peril that that entails.
Some people think this is as dangerous a time in terms of U.S.-Russian confrontation as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
SCOTT HARRIS: Katrina, you mentioned the fact that although NATO’s military alliance does not want and really cannot extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance, they can’t be seen as “caving in to Russia’s demands that Ukraine remain a neutral nation in Eastern Europe.” So it seems like this is a matter of saving face. In terms of the Cuban missile crisis, United States removed Atlas missiles from Turkey at the time. I don’t think it was known during the negotiations, but there was a quid pro quo, right? I mean, I wonder what you see just in terms of geostrategic issues on the table, how face could be saved for both sides so that both Russia, the United States and NATO could back down?
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: First of all, you’re absolutely right about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the missiles in Turkey.
And I think that you could forge an agreement that essentially this kind of recognition of the reality and law on the ground. So an independent Ukraine in control of its own borders. Separatists in Donbas are disarmed. Full autonomy for the Russian-speaking region of Donbas, the eastern part within a decentralized Ukraine.
But I do think there’s this leeway where Ukraine, as I said, even by NATO’s own charter, wouldn’t fulfill the obligations needed to become a member at this stage. But there could be a moratorium of 10, 15 years, at which point NATO’s membership is reconsidered. And there is the issue of nonaligned neutral Ukraine, a bridge between east and west that is not about appeasement, it’s about a reality. For example, Austria, but also Finland, nonaligned countries have had a quality life. It’s about building a quality life for the citizens of Ukraine. At the moment, 15,000 civilians have died in the Civil War, and the brutality of the trench warfare in the East would continue in this kind of attrition, military kind of low ground warfare. I think part of our problem, Scott, just to do an overarching sense of this is that too often in this country, we’ve been so militarized in our thinking that it’s hard to think of tough, persistent, clear diplomacy as an important tool.
And too many talk of diplomacy as appeasement when it’s something very different. You know, diplomacy is very tough, and part of my concern is the media certainly in this country has a different pace. You know what I mean, Scott. I mean, every day it’s imminent and they want action.
So I just worry there’s going to be a lot of pressure to move, move, move, and that impacts the administration, that impacts the political class. And I guess above all, I’m not saying everyone should agree with me. They don’t, but at least we should have a debate in this country and we have not had one.
It has been so much one hand clapping that it is a disservice to the idea, last I checked, of all American principle of debate.
For more information, visit The Nation magazine at TheNation.com.
