By Xola Pakati
The Russo-Ukrainian war will yield voluminous chapters in geopolitical, strategic and security studies for decades to come. These crucial disciplines will hopefully be liberated from the false dichotomy of devils versus angels that is currently in vogue about this epoch-making conflict.
The falsehood helps to proliferate oversimplifications and caricatures which stultify rather than enrich public and policy discourses, more so prospects for peace.
A critical enabler of the dichotomy is the crude censorship by western governments – led by the US – and Moscow alike. The world needs peace, not war. And the cause of peace will not be served by the erasure of other viewpoints, paradoxically even by self-proclaimed champions of free speech and other freedoms.
Humanity is facing a potentially unprecedented economic disaster in recent times. According to Russian Deputy Prime Minister, Alexander Novak, a ban on Russian oil will “lead to catastrophic consequences for the global market,” and an “unpredictable” surge in oil prices of “$300 per barrel if not more.”
Novak’s might well be the false alarm bells of a government facing a ruinous political and economic siege. But what if it turns out to be true? Who bears responsibility for throwing caution to the wind?
Mohammed Barkindo, the Secretary-General of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, has warned that no country can replace Russian oil. Could the ban on Russian petroleum lead to a disruption in global supplies, with all the socio-economic and political implications?
This begs broader questions about the conflict. What really is at stake? In March 2014, former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, suggested that as a matter of principle: “Russia must accept that to try to force Ukraine into a satellite status, and thereby move Russia’s borders again, would doom Moscow to repeat its history of self-fulfilling cycles of reciprocal pressures with Europe and the United States.”
By the same token, he counselled the west to “understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then. Some of the most important battles for Russian freedom, starting with the Battle of Poltava in 1709, were fought on Ukrainian soil. The Black Sea Fleet — Russia’s means of projecting power in the Mediterranean — is based by long-term lease in Sevastopol, in Crimea.”
Implicit in Kissinger’s advice, which appears to have fallen on the rocky obtuse political ground or rather eclipsed by other interests, is that the solution lies in both Washington and Moscow accepting each other’s legitimate security concerns and making commitments by which they both abide.
Let us illustrate the point through a look in the rear-view mirror. In April 1961, the US covertly financed and directed the invasion of Cuba via the Bay of Pigs. The expedition failed spectacularly and the would-be-coup makers mercilessly obliterated.
Concerned about the survival of their young state – young Fidel Castro and his comrades had just recently (1959) defeated the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship – the Cubans entered into an agreement for the deployment of ballistic missiles to the island by the Soviet Union. By 1962, the missile base was under construction, which unsurprisingly irked the US, which in turn demanded an immediate cessation of the building programme.
In an October 22, 1962 address to the American people, US President John F. Kennedy declared: “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union...” He called on Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to “halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations” and to “move the world back from the abyss of destruction.”
After 34 days of the spirited boardroom and megaphone diplomacy, the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles from Cuba.
What, in the substance, is the difference between President Kennedy’s stance in 1962 and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s objection to Ukraine’s potential membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato)?
Furthermore, contrary to agreements entered between the US and the Soviet Union in the early 1990s to the effect that Nato would not “move one inch to the east,” the organisation has admitted several Baltic States much as the US has been encircling China with military bases in the Asian Pacific to the umbrage of both the Russians and the Chinese.
Part of what is being airbrushed by current censorship efforts insofar as Russia is concerned, is that in all honesty, the war in Ukraine has been raging since 2014 after the US-sponsored coup which overthrew the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych.
Thousands of people, mainly Russian speakers, have been killed in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, often with the involvement of neo-Nazi gangs who are brazen enough to flaunt their hideous political identity with the tacit approval of the government in Kyiv even as it protests the contrary. It was only a matter of time before this blew into a full-scale war.
Calls for the South African government to “get off the fence” deliberately omit these crucial aspects of the conflict and lessons from history as they do critical events since the 2014 coup.
The solution to this conflict will come from both Washington and Moscow because it is a contest of their geostrategic interests and imperatives. We do not have to agree with either side, but we must see it for what it is – a US-Russia conflict in which Kyiv is but a theatre. Unfortunately, apart from hallow cries for military assistance, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appears to have little if any meaningful agency and sovereignty.
*Pakati is executive mayor of the Buffalo City metropolitan municipality, chairperson of the South African Cities Network Council and Deputy President of the South African Local Government Association.