Ukraine: time for a constructive and realistic initiative by Labour

The mounting crisis in Ukraine and the ignorance that underlies much of western governments’ response to it (including our own), impose on the Labour opposition a duty to inject some realism into the debate. Labour should offer constructive, practical proposals for lowering tension and paving the way to cooperation, not competition, between Russia and the West in a coordinated effort to promote the independence and prosperity of Ukraine. This would serve everyone’s interests far more effectively than the current knee-jerk mudslinging, deserved or otherwise.  Here are some positive suggestions for Labour.

Solemn commentators are wringing their hands over the west’s alleged inability to do anything to de-escalate the situation in Ukraine in the face of alarming Russian military activity. They are wrong.  There is one move that the west can make to undo some of the consequences of past western blunders, reassure Moscow about western respect for Russia’s legitimate strategic and security interests in its own region, and compel Ukraine’s leaders of all communities to adopt a more realistic attitude to its geopolitical situation and the limits which that imposes on its options.  The west should give a clear assurance that there is no question of Ukraine, or any part of Ukraine, ever becoming a member of either the EU or NATO.

This would be no more than a recognition of reality.  Russia’s interests in Ukraine – strategic, cultural, historical, and personal (given the substantial minority of Russians in Ukraine) – are such that no government in Moscow could passively stand by while the closest of its neighbours is being drawn into the west’s orbit.  The west’s reckless dangling of an unfulfillable promise of EU and even NATO membership before successive incompetent and corrupt Ukrainian régimes, contemptuously ignoring predictable Russian concerns, bears much of the responsibility for the mess we’re all now in.

The dangerous crisis in Ukraine, and especially in Crimea, will not be resolved by pompous condemnation of Russia’s aggression or by unconvincing warnings of high but undefined costs for Russia if it continues to violate Ukraine’s integrity – warnings that sound especially hypocritical coming from politicians (not, incidentally, including Barack Obama) who loudly supported western aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999 and Iraq in 2003.  The rush by William Hague to Kiev on Sunday will be interpreted as implying some kind of commitment to UK support for the interim régime in Kiev, many of whose members dream of eventual membership of the EU, perhaps also of NATO.  If that is the interpretation that Mr Hague intends, he should not be in charge of UK foreign policy.

If anyone should be rushing overseas in search of de-escalation, it should be to Brussels to agree urgently on EU and NATO declarations of the impossibility of Ukrainian membership of either.  Meanwhile western leaders should be telling the Russians that:

• it is no part of EU or NATO policy to threaten Russia’s legitimate interests in Ukraine, including Crimea, or to bring Ukraine into the EU or NATO:
• it is in Russia’s, the West’s, and Ukraine’s interests that stability, prosperity and uncorrupt government should be promoted in Ukraine;  and that
• the EU and the US wish to discuss with Moscow institutional arrangements for cooperation in economic support for Ukraine once a stable, representative and democratically legitimate régime has been installed in Kiev.

The basis for such a peacemaking initiative by the west is set out in an eloquent and scholarly article by a great British diplomat, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former British ambassador to Moscow, in yesterday’s Independent on Sunday which should be required reading for all those who seek to understand the background to the crisis and a realistic way to deal with it. As Braithwaite says,

Much recent comment on Ukraine in the British press has been marked by a barely forgivable ignorance about its history and politics, an overhasty willingness to put the blame for all its troubles on Vladimir Putin, and an almost total inability to suggest practical ways of bringing effective Western influence to bear on a solution….

Sir Rodric’s article deserves to be read attentively and in full, as does a piece for Chatham House by another distinguished former British ambassador to Moscow (and current member of the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry), Sir Roderic Lyne.

Finally, a comment by yet another equally distinguished former British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Bryan Cartledge:

The key point, I believe, which the media largely overlook, is that the revolution in the Ukraine is primarily a protest against domestic corruption and misrule, not a vote for the EU or against Russia. The EU issue provided the occasion but was not the cause. In converting an internal protest into an East-West issue, the EU is making a huge mistake — Putin, of course, has been bound to follow suit. And quite apart from all this, the last thing the EU needs now is responsibility for an almost bankrupt and almost failed state.

These three know whereof they speak.  Our noisy and belligerent political leaders and their media cheer-leaders would do well to listen to them. They provide a solid basis for a practical and constructive initiative by Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, which would expose the hollowness of the British government’s response so far and steer the debate in a more positive direction.

[Full disclosure:  both Bryan Cartledge and Roderic Lyne are friends and former Diplomatic Service colleagues.  All three of us served together many years ago in the British embassy in Moscow.This is an edited version of a longer blog post here.]