A Russia-NATO war may have been more likely than you thought: Few paid attention when UK defense chief Ben Wallace said in October that a Russian jet fired a missile in the vicinity of a British plane. It now turns out that the firing resulted in a “near-shoot down” of the British surveillance plane off the coast of Crimea on Sept. 29, according to the leaked U.S. intelligence documents. Two U.S. defense officials quoted in the leaked documents said the Russian pilot had misinterpreted what a radar operator on the ground was saying to him and thought he had permission to fire. The pilot, who had locked on the British aircraft, fired, but the missile did not launch properly. Had the missile struck the plane, the UK could have invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty in a move that may have led to a full-blown war.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is attending the fourth ministerial conference of Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries on April 13 in the Uzbek city of Samarkand to try to find a solution to the Afghan problem.
Russia and the Central Asian states are seeking to uncork the southern trade route out of Central Asia that is currently blocked by instability in Afghanistan.
Since extreme sanctions were imposed on Russia it has entered into a process of re-orientating its trade to the South and East. In theory it could redirect some of its oil and gas exports to the huge markets of South Asia, starting with Pakistan and India, by running pipelines and improving rail and road links, but the infrastructure has to run via Afghanistan, which has been in chaos since the Taliban took back control of the country last year.
The Central Asian states are very interested in the same idea, but have made little progress. Uzbekistan has taken a lead on the Afghan question with President Shavkat Mirziyoyev calling on the UN to set up a special group to deal with the problem during his inaugural UN speech in September 2020. The Uzbek president had identified an unstable Afghanistan as Central Asia’s most pressing security issue long before the Taliban retook control in August 2021 and the war in Ukraine changed the geopolitical landscape in Eurasia from February 2022.
Uzbekistan has been trying to help its neighbour improve its economy. For instance, it signed an electricity transition deal to provide the country with power. There are other even more ambitious projects for a transmission line that would transit Afghanistan and provide power to northern Pakistan, where there is an electricity deficit. There are also plans for a trans-Afghan railway line from the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, near the border with Uzbekistan, to Pakistan. The railway line could even be extended to ports on the Indian Ocean.
However, more recently relations between Kabul and Tashkent have soured. One sore point with the Afghans is that Uzbekistan shut down power exports to Afghanistan when it was hit by severe winter cold and a shortage of generation capacity early this year.
China is also interested in opening up transit via Afghanistan as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to build transport links between Asia and Europe and other continents. Beijing recently signed off on the first large mineral extraction project in Afghanistan to tap that country’s significant mineral resources. A US report a few years ago identified over $1 trillion worth of mineral deposits in the country, including large amounts of lithium, essential for making electric vehicle (EV) batteries.
Russia was also quick to cosy up to the new Taliban leadership and signed off on deals to provide the embattled country with oil, gas and wheat in September last year to help stabilise the crisis-pressured government.
Work to bring Afghanistan into the fold is ongoing as Russia starts to reform the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). Previously the idea of the EAEU was to provide a partner to the EU in creating President Vladimir Putin’s long-standing foreign policy goal of forming a single market that would stretch “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” Since the war in Ukraine has led to a breaking of relations and trade with Europe, the EAEU has been retasked with building up trade ties with the Global South, making transit via Central Asia key.
Likewise, China is already moving on to its second phase of developing its foreign relations by building up the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Eurasia, which overlaps with the EAEU, by improving trade, economic and cultural ties. That makes the EAEU, SCO, Russia, China and the states surrounding Afghanistan natural partners.
Lavrov’s meetings in Samarkand on April 13 will include representatives from Russia, Iran, China, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The agenda will focus on discussing steps to facilitate the political settlement process in Afghanistan, and stabilise the humanitarian, social and economic situation in the country.
Russia has suggested creating a five-party “G5” platform to resolve Afghan’s problems, bringing together Russia, China, India, Iran and Pakistan. President Putin has expressed concern that the situation in Afghanistan has not improved since the withdrawal of US troops in the summer of 2021, and “international terrorist organisations are increasing their activities in the country.”
Russia and the Central Asian states, especially Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, have suffered from terrorist attacks originating in Afghanistan. The heroin trade flowing from the Afghan poppy fields is also a problem for all the countries along the path of its export to Europe, largely via Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Russia.
Putin also said that Russia is worried about “non-regional countries” building and expanding infrastructure facilities under the guise of fighting international terrorism, in a reference to US meddling in the region, “without doing anything required for a genuine fight against global terrorism.”
The ministerial conference will also focus on regional economic integration and the implementation of transport and energy projects with Kabul, based on previous agreements. Last year, the Taliban’s interim government, which Russia still officially designates as a “terrorist organisation banned in Russia,” said it would provide security and push hard to get the trans-Afghan railway project completed.
The parties may also discuss gas supplies, with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak stating last December that Russia might send its natural gas to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
After the US announced its plans for a troop pullout from Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban rapidly took control of the country, easily defeating the US-backed Afghan national army, which scattered to the wind. In August 2021, Taliban fighters captured Kabul without any resistance, and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani stepped down and fled the country. The US completed its troop withdrawal in September 2021, ending its almost 20-year presence in the country.
The national flag of Finland was raised for the first time at the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in Brussels on Tuesday, which also marked the 74th anniversary of the western alliance. It signifies for Finland a historic abandonment of its policy of neutrality.
Not even propagandistically, anyone can say Finland has encountered a security threat from Russia. This is an act of motiveless malignity toward Russia on the part of the NATO, which of course invariably carries the imprimatur of the US, while being projected to the world audience as a sovereign choice by Finland against the backdrop of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.
Quintessentially, this can only be regarded as yet another move by the US, after the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines last September, with the deliberate intent to complicate Russia’s relations with Europe and render it intractable for the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, suffice it to say, this will also make Europe’s security landscape landscape even more precarious and make it even more dependent on the US as the provider of security. The general expectation is that Sweden’s accession to NATO will now follow, possibly in time for the alliance’s summit in Vilnius in July.
In effect, the US has ensured that the core issue behind the standoff between Russia and the West — viz., the expansion of the NATO to Russia’s borders — is a fait accompli no matter the failure of its proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.
Responding to the development, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned on Tuesday that Finland’s NATO membership will force Russia “to take countermeasures to ensure our own tactical and strategic security,” as Helsinki’s military alignment is an “escalation of the situation” and an “encroachment on Russia’s security.”
On April 4, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated that Moscow “will be forced to take retaliatory measures of both military-technical and other nature in order to stop threats to our national security.”
Finland’s NATO membership would extend NATO’s frontline with Russia by 1,300 kilometers (length of border Finland shares with Russia), which will put more pressure on Russia’s northwestern regions. Don’t be surprised if NATO missiles are deployed to Finland at some point, leaving Russia no option but to deploy its nuclear weapons close to the Baltic region and Scandinavia.
Suffice to say, the military confrontation between NATO and Russia is set to deteriorate further and the possibility of a nuclear conflict is on the rise. It is hard to see Russia failing to preserve its second strike capability at any cost or prevent the US from gaining nuclear superiority, and maintain the global strategic balance.
The focus will be on the upgrade of defensive nuclear capabilities rather than on conventional forces, compelling Russia to demonstrate its nuclear strength. Russia has already front-loaded its deterrent by deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus in response to the UK’s irresponsible decision to provide depleted uranium munition to Ukraine. It is all but certain that Russia will also double down in the Ukraine conflict.
Meanwhile, the US has for long deployed tactical nuclear weapons in European countries, including Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey, which means the US has long deployed its tactical nuclear weapons at Russia’s doorstep, posing a significant threat to Russia’s national security. Russia’s deployment in Belarus is aimed at deterring the US’ potential provocations, anticipating what is about to happen.
Belarus’ geographical location is such that if Russian tactical nuclear weapons are deployed there, it will have a huge strategic deterrent effect on several NATO countries such Poland, Germany, the Baltic states and even the Nordic countries. A vicious cycle is developing, escalating the nuclear arms race and ultimately developing into a doomsday situation that no one wants to see.
The big picture is that knowing fully well that the situation could become extremely dangerous, the US is nonetheless relentlessly piling pressure on Russia with the objective of perpetuating its hegemonic system. Ronald Reagan’s strategy to use extreme pressure tactic to weaken the former Soviet Union and ultimately drag it down, is once again at work.
In immediate terms, all this would have negative consequences for the conflict in Ukraine. It is plain to see that Washington no longer seeks peace in Ukraine. In the Biden Administration’s strategic calculus, if Russia wins in Ukraine, it means NATO loses, which would permanently damage the US’ transatlantic leadership and global hegemony — simply unthinkable for the Washington establishment.
Without doubt, the US-NATO move to persuade Finland (and Sweden) to become NATO members also has a dimension in terms of geoeconomics. The alliance’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg recently stated, “if Finland and Sweden join the alliance, NATO will have more opportunities to control the situation in the Far North.” He explained that “both of these countries have modern armed forces that are able to operate precisely in the harsh conditions of the Far North.”
The US hopes that the “expertise” to operate in the Arctic and sub-Arctic conditions that Sweden and Finland can bring into the alliance is invaluable as a potential game changer when a grim struggle is unfolding for the control of the vast mineral resources that lie in the Far North, where Russia has stolen a march so far.
As polar ice melts at unprecedented speed in the Arctic, the world’s biggest players are eyeing the region as a new “no man’s land” that is up for grabs. Some recent reports have mentioned that moves are afoot for the integration of the air forces of four Nordic countries — Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden — undertaken with an undisguised anti-Russian orientation.
In military terms, Russia is being forced into sustaining the heavy financial burden of a 360 degree appraisal of its national security agenda. Russia has no alliance system supplementing its military resources. In an important announcement in February, paying heed to the straws in the wind, the Kremlin removed from its Arctic policy all mentions of the so-called Arctic Council, stressing the need to prioritise Russian Arctic interests, and striving for greater self-reliance for its Arctic industrial projects.
The revised Arctic policy calls for the “development of relations with foreign states on a bilateral basis,… taking into account the national interests of the Russian Federation in the Arctic.” This came days after a US state department official stated that cooperation with Russia in the Arctic was now virtually impossible.
The Ukraine tragedy is a twofold thing. First, most obviously, there is the tragedy of the people killed or displaced, the damage to an already fragile economy and the widespread destruction of Ukraine’s physical infrastructure. Second, there is the tragic fact that it could all have been prevented.
This latter is an unfashionable point of view, to say the least. Inevitably, understandably, the daily diet of news in the Western press serves up images and reports of a grim, attritional struggle for ruined towns and territory, with back-and-forth “success”, a prevailing narrative of the heroic David (Ukraine) stoutly resisting the invading Goliath (Russia). The incremental nature of the war’s progress and the weapons with which it is fought suggest nothing less than the trench warfare of World War One.
For those of us who raise the tattered flag of the Minsk Agreements of 2014-15, who try to argue that had the drumbeat of diplomacy been heard instead the drums of war, there is the routine countervailing argument that Russia’s behavior in its former sphere of influence is incorrigible, its appetite insatiable. There is also a collective retreat from Minsk, including by one of its architects, Angela Merkel, who admitted that these substantive proposals to end the conflict were nothing more than a ruse to buy time for Ukraine to gird its loins for battle—with massive NATO support, of course.
This generic indictment of Russia was recently advanced in an opinion piece by Robert Kaplan in the April 3rd edition of The Wall Street Journal. Titled, “Putin’s Shakespearean Demons”, Kaplan argument may be summarized thus, through the following series of quotes from his article:
1. “Ukraine is engulfed by Russia on the north and east, its history and language entwined with its neighbors.”
2. “The geopolitical argument that Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was expanding completely disregards the Russian leader’s Shakespearean demons” [Othello’s jealousy? Macbeth’s overweening ambition? Lear’s folly? Kaplan does not fully explain the Bard’s “Demons” trope.]
3. “Given Putin’s paranoia, isolation and delusions of grandeur, the question arises: would Europe today be at peace with Putin’s Russia had NATO not expanded East after the Cold War and had there been a Western guarantee of recognizing Russian interests in Ukraine? Certainly not”.
4. Instead, Eastern Europe would be “vulnerable to Mr. Putin’s mischief”….. [he] would be “breathing down the neck of every country between Berlin and Moscow”.
5. “NATO and the EU have created many durable bureaucratic states with reliable militaries in Central and Eastern Europe able to do their part to withstand Russian aggression. The West has grown in both economic and political might. Thus the business of World War II and the Cold War has been closed.”
6. “NATO expansion throughout Central Europe was virtually inevitable because of the decisive and one-sided way the Cold War ended.”
Kaplan’s narrative is worthy of John Le Carre, but it is one that simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. First, there is the accusation that Putin’s Russia is an omnivorous beast, with “a belt of democratic states” from the Baltics to Ukraine as its prey. The fact is that Vladimir Putin has been [de jure or de facto] calling the shots in Moscow for more than twenty years, and, until Russia’s negotiated lease on the Sevastopol naval base was threatened by the Ukrainian Rada in 2014, it showed no imperial, neo-Soviet, expansionist ambitions toward Ukraine or anywhere else. Russia’s one foreign intervention–in Georgia’s Russian-majority South Ossetia in 2008–came after an attack on the region by Georgian government forces, documented by an EU report on the conflict. The early 90s-era warnings of Russian adventurism in the Baltics were spurious and continue to be so.
Second, Kaplan is absolutely correct in describing the “entwining” of Russian and Ukrainian history, language and culture. It is precisely because of this fact that the proposal at the 2008 NATO summit to extend invitations for membership to Ukraine and Georgia was so incendiary [although, as already noted, Russia took no preventive action, even though such expert voices as the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and current CIA director, William F. Burns, warned that Ukraine in NATO was a “red line” for Russia.]
Third, and building on the unique bond between Russia and Ukraine [undervalued by us because we have nothing approaching this attachment to any other country on the planet] one asks: We in the United States have what we see as a legitimate sphere of interest [since 1823, no less]; is Russia as a great power to be denied one? The question is all the more salient when one considers both history and geography: The USA has to its north and south friendly neighbors, and to its east and west vast expanses of water. From North Korea in the East to the proximity of the greater Middle East on its Western flank, Russia borders some pretty rough neighborhoods. Throw in the odd invasion or two in modern history from the West, and we might begin to understand what Kaplan describes as Russian/Putin “paranoia”.
Fourth—and I believe most telling in countering Kaplan’s argument—if Putin was so dead set in swallowing Eastern Europe whole, why did he—circa 2010—raise the question of Russia’s application for membership of both NATO and EU? Similar requests came from both his immediate predecessors, President Yeltsin and Secretary Gorbachev; all three were, of course, summarily rebuffed. And if, as Kaplan says, “NATO expansion throughout Central Europe was virtually inevitable because of the decisive and one-sided way the Cold War ended”, why did the George H. W. Bush administration and its German ally reassure Gorbachev otherwise?
Fifth, Kaplan’s view of the current state of affairs is roseate. Quite apart from the ghastly consequences for Ukraine of standing up to Russia rather than following through on Minsk [and there have been proposals for returning to the negotiating table, such as that offered by Turkey’s Erdogan a year ago], Kaplan overstates two points: One, the notion that what were once described as “old” and “new” Europe had been living in perfect, democratic, rule-of-law comity. He does cite the exceptions of Hungary and Bulgaria, but Poland too deserves an asterisk for its recent actions concerning the judiciary. Second is his interpretation of the West’s economic and political ascent (“Thus the business of World War II and the Cold War has been closed” is echoic of the premature “End of History”). Challenges abound to the U.S.-led articulation of a global conflict between a democracy “good” and a dictatorship “evil”—just consider recent developments in the greater Middle East, a China-brokered handshake between Iran and the Saudis; Saudi Arabia possibly joining the BRICS group; and the rise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Russia, China and Iran we may see as intractable adversaries to varying degrees; but in the Wall Street Journal of April 4, Walter Russell Mead offers a lengthy list of states that we must engage constructively in countering these opponents, and whose democratic credentials are flimsy, in some cases nonexistent.
Finally, to return to Kaplan’s image of a Ukraine “engulfed” by Russia. Turn the clock back a year, before a tragic and preventable war. Mr. Kaplan, I’ll see your Ukraine surrounded by Russia and raise you Russia surrounded by NATO-armed states from the Baltics to Turkey [and, if we had our way, Ukraine and Georgia.] And now, of course, we can add Finland. To repeat: the war is a humanitarian tragedy, and Russia’s invasion is to be deplored.
