By Vitaly Shevchenko, BBC, March 12, 2023

Finding people willing to speak to me from Mariupol was never going to be easy.

After 10 months of Russian occupation, fear and distrust are the two most frequent responses I encountered when looking for someone who could tell me how things really are in Mariupol, in Ukraine’s south-east.

“I think you are a Russian journalist. You won’t like what I’ve got to say. People like you kill if you tell them the truth,” said one social media user who claimed to be from the port city.

Russian forces put the people of Mariupol through a horrific months-long siege, before finally capturing it last May.

I eventually found three residents willing to speak to me at length: a local city councillor, a retired pensioner and an engineer. All spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals from the local authorities installed by Russia (who block access to occupied Ukraine by Western journalists).

They paint a picture of a massively expensive campaign conducted by Russia to win over the hearts and minds of the people of Mariupol, and rebuild a city damaged beyond recognition by Russia’s own troops.

The purpose of this campaign is to assimilate Mariupol and make it Russia’s own.

Their accounts corroborate each other, and are confirmed by social media posts about recent developments in Mariupol.

Before this war began about half a million people lived in the city.

According to UN estimates, 90% of residential buildings were damaged or destroyed, and 350,000 people were forced to leave after Russia attacked in February 2022.

It is difficult to estimate the exact number of people killed as a result of the relentless shelling of Mariupol, but Ukrainian authorities say more than 20,000 died there.

Russian-installed authorities in Mariupol say some 300,000 people are now living there.

The people who spoke to me from Mariupol said their city had been inundated with labourers from across Russia, as well as from Central Asia.

Oleg Morgun, the Russia-installed “mayor” of Mariupol, says some 70,000 of those currently in the city are construction workers and members of the Russian military.

Rebuilding

New buildings have appeared and many buildings damaged during the bombardment have gone.

For example, the Russian military has built a whole new district comprised of a dozen apartment blocks in the western part of Mariupol. It is called Nevsky, after the River Neva, on which President Vladimir Putin’s home city of St Petersburg stands. According to Russian state media, St Petersburg is the main sponsor of the reconstruction of Mariupol.

“It says on the bus: St Petersburg and Mariupol are twinned cities. There are slogans everywhere telling us that we’re part of Russia now,” pensioner Maria (not her real name) told me.

“I liked things the way they used to be. Now we live in fear. We have no idea what to expect.”

In the houses that escaped relatively unscathed after months of fierce fighting, the Russians are replacing windows, radiators and sometimes heating and sewage pipes.

Heating, running water and electricity supplies have largely been restored. Buses are running and full of passengers again, although the electric trolley bus and tram networks are still out of action.

Many schools, hospitals and shops have reopened as well, although numerous traders are selling their wares straight from the pavement.

Maria was particularly impressed with one school rebuilt under Russian rule: “It’s so beautiful, covered in multi-coloured squares.” According to her, the number of children in Mariupol now is greater than schools can currently accommodate, so they have classes in two shifts: one in the morning, and another in the afternoon.

Russia has imposed its own Russian-language curriculum in occupied areas – complicating efforts to get children back to school.

The fast-paced rebuilding of Mariupol has provoked envy in Donetsk, the regional capital occupied by pro-Russian forces since 2014, which has been neglected by comparison.

The Russia-installed head of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, Denis Pushilin, has even had to deny rumours that the capital will be moved to Mariupol.

Assimilation

There are other important ways in which Russia is putting its stamp on Mariupol.

For example, local residents are under pressure to obtain Russian passports.

Ivan, the Mariupol city councillor I spoke to (not his real name), said locals often formed “huge queues” trying to get Russian passports.

They were required if you want to find formal employment, especially with government agencies or in the public sector, he explained.

Also, they made it possible to travel to Russia without additional stringent checks known as “filtration”, he added.

“So they have deliberately created a situation where you get problems if you have Ukrainian papers, you have to deal with red tape, you have to wait. On the other hand, if you get a Russian passport, that’s where your problems end: ‘You’re one of us now’. Things get simpler if you receive a Russian passport,” Ivan said.

Mariupol is also becoming part of Russia’s financial system. The Ukrainian currency, the hryvnya, has been phased out, and now the Russian rouble is the only currency accepted in shops.

Russia is channelling huge amounts of money into pension payments for residents of Mariupol, raising them in many cases compared with what they received from the Ukrainian authorities before the war. So residents of Mariupol are able to draw two pensions – one from Russia, another from Ukraine. Naturally, it is a situation many local pensioners are happy with.

Russian pensions are another reason why elderly residents are queuing up to get Russian passports – many pensioners believe the documents will be required in the future to continue receiving payments from Russia.

The media currently operating in Mariupol are also hard at work promoting a uniformly pro-Russian agenda.

Pro-Russian sentiment

Many current residents of Mariupol are there because they were unable to leave the city when the Russians attacked, due to illness or old age, or because they welcome Russia’s presence.

“We’ve suffered enough under Ukraine. Now we can breathe again,” one social media user told me, before breaking off all contact.

The fast-paced campaign of reconstruction and the resulting sense of restored normality, the generous pension payments and the intensive media campaign targeting the people of Mariupol, all stimulate the spread of pro-Russian sentiment in the city.

“I’m sick of all the propaganda in the papers. They started publishing it from day one, telling us how well things are going,” said Yuri, the engineer (not his real name). “I feel out of place in my own city now. People are different, my city feels different now.”

City councillor Ivan said: “It’s become difficult for me to say pro-Ukrainian things to my voters. It’s tough being pro-Ukrainian in a pro-Russian environment. Unfortunately, Ukraine is losing the hearts and minds of people in Mariupol.”

Those who are still in Mariupol may be happy to see a degree of normality return to their city, but there are those who suspect Russia of pursuing ulterior motives.

Popular Ukrainian journalist Denys Kazansky argues that Russia uses the new houses it has been building in Mariupol to distract attention from all the destruction it caused in the city and elsewhere in his native Donetsk region.

“If they destroyed 10 hospitals and then rebuilt one – this isn’t reconstruction. It’s not something they can be thanked for,” he said.

“You can be happy as much as you like about a school being rebuilt, but what do you do with the thousands of people Russia has killed?” he said.

“You can’t rebuild them. You can’t bring them back.”

Link here.

By Christopher McCallion, The National Interest, 3/13/23

The Russian invasion of Ukraine initially seemed to galvanize the United States’ NATO allies and encourage them to take a more energetic role in Europe’s defense. But some analysts have recently noted that the war actually seems to have had the contrary effect of increasing Europe’s dependence on Washington. This should not be a surprise to anyone, since Europe’s dependence will inevitably increase in proportion to the United States’ own commitment to the continent’s security.

While French president Emmanuel Macron has championed strategic autonomy in recent years, and German chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a historic “Zeitenwende” in defense policy in response to the Russian invasion, both countries have proceeded cautiously over the course of the war. Germany only grudgingly sent Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine following parallel moves by the United States and the UK, while Macron has insisted that a post-war resolution must include a recognition of Russian security concerns.

This has increasingly frustrated Eastern European allies like Poland and the Baltic States, whose hard line on Russia has put them at odds with what they perceive as their Western counterparts’ ambivalence, making them all the more eager to maintain the U.S. presence in Europe.

But the more restrained attitude of France and Germany towards Russia is not based on spinelessness or frugality. Instead, due to geography, relative power, and history, Western and Eastern Europeans have profoundly different threat perceptions of Russia.

This would normally suggest that the two halves of Europe do not in fact make natural treaty allies. Historically, Eastern Europe suffered the misfortune of being a buffer zone between Western Europe and Russia—a role to which Eastern Europeans, all too understandably, do not want to return.

This fundamental asymmetry was introduced into the alliance by enlarging NATO to include Eastern European states from the 1990s onwards—a faultline papered over by the continuing leadership of the United States, but which reduces any incentive for Western Europeans to “step up” the way Washington (officially) wants them to.

The reflexive argument among many Western commentators is to blame France and Germany for not backing Ukraine more aggressively, reducing their credibility in the eyes of Eastern Europe, and compelling the latter to lean even more heavily on Washington to allay their security fears. According to these arguments, Western Europe should instead put itself on a serious war footing and help lead the charge against Russia.

But there are a couple of reasons to view such assertions skeptically. In the first place, the Russian military’s performance makes France and Germany’s response seem relatively proportionate. Russia has been struggling for months to conquer the small regional city of Bakhmut; it is not marching on Warsaw anytime soon. Moreover, while Eastern Europeans would probably like nothing more than for Russian fields to be sowed with salt, France and Germany recognize that Russia will likely always be a power in the region, and that peaceful coexistence requires some sort of reasonable mutual accommodation.

Secondly, the United States shouldn’t expect the over-the-top measures it relies on to prop up the credibility of extended deterrence to be mimicked by Europe should the latter transition towards strategic autonomy and deterring Russia directly. Nor should the Eastern Europeans.

Finally, and more to the point, one would think when listening to American officials and analysts who lament Europe’s security dependence that these folks want the United States out of Europe as quickly as possible. And yet the opposite is the case; most of these same voices are deeply dedicated to America remaining permanently committed to NATO.

According to conventional arguments for greater “burden-sharing” among the allies, the best way for the United States to encourage its capable allies to do more for their own defense is to redouble our own efforts on their behalf and fall over ourselves to insist upon our commitments to them. The causal logic here has never been explained, but it seems self-evidently contradictory: if we do more, we incentivize our allies to do less.

The alternative view is that the best way to encourage the rich and capable countries of Western Europe to assume greater responsibility in a European alliance is to slowly, but steadily and openly, reduce our own contribution to the continent’s security. This would not be greater “burden-sharing,” but rather “burden-shifting.”

If European security is truly the goal, we should expect capable states like France and Germany to act like any other state without a guarantor: to develop the independent capabilities they deem necessary for their own threat environment, and to manage their own alliances. Poland and the Baltic states prefer an American guarantee, but they’ll likely still be able to sleep well at night with a guarantee from their more powerful and nuclear-armed Western neighbors.

If we’re being frank, however, the contradiction at the heart of calls for more “burden-sharing” is probably recognized by those devoted to the permanence of the transatlantic alliance, and this incoherence is precisely its utility. Virtually no one in the American foreign policy establishment actually wants to give up the United States’ seat at the head of the table in NATO, which places Europe within America’s sphere of influence. And for some time, therefore, NATO’s existence, to quote the historian Richard Sakwa, will continue to be “justified by the need to manage the security threats provoked by its [own] enlargement.

Euronews, 3/26/23

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced plans on Saturday to station tactical nuclear weapons in neighbouring Belarus, sending a warning to the West as it steps up military support for Ukraine.

Putin said the move was triggered by Britain’s decision last week to provide Ukraine with armour-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium.

Tactical nuclear weapons are intended for use on the battlefield. They have a short range and a low yield compared with much more powerful nuclear warheads fitted to long-range missiles. 

On Sunday, Ukraine called for an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council, with Ukrainian Security Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov saying the Kremlin had taken Belarus “nuclear hostage”. 

It is a “step towards the internal destabilisation of the country,” he added.

Putin said Russia planned to maintain control over the nukes it sends to Belarus, with the construction of storage facilities to be completed by 1 July.

He didn’t say how many nuclear weapons Russia would keep in Belarus, which shares a long border with Ukraine and NATO members Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. 

The US government believes Russia has about 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, including bombs that can be carried by tactical aircraft, warheads for short-range missiles and artillery rounds.

Washington said it did not believe Russia was preparing to use them.  

Putin argued that by deploying its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, Russia was following the lead of the United States, noting the country has nukes in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.

“We are doing what they have been doing for decades, stationing them in certain allied countries, preparing the launch platforms and training their crews,” Putin said, speaking in an interview on state television that aired Saturday night. 

“We are going to do the same thing.”

The Russian leader claimed the move would not violate existing nuclear-non-proliferation agreements. 

Russia currently stores tactical nuclear weapons at dedicated depots on its territory. 

Moving part of the arsenal to a storage facility in Belarus would up the ante in the Ukrainian conflict by placing them closer to the combat zone and NATO states.

This will be the first time Moscow has based nuclear weapons outside of its borders. 

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it stationed nukes in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. However, they were transferred back to Russian territories in 1996. 

The US said it would “monitor the implications” of Putin’s announcement.

“We have not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture,” the US Defense Department said in a statement.

“We remain committed to the collective defence of the Nato alliance.”

By Nicolai Petro, ACURA, 2/24/23

The new Cold War, like its predecessor, can be traced back to the misinterpretation of Russian intentions. In case of old Cold War, as we now know from diplomatic archives, the West grossly misunderstood the intentions behind the 1948 Berlin Blockade.

Western leaders feared it was the beginning of an attack on the West, while Stalin saw it as a means to gain leverage over an increasingly intransigent Truman Administration, and induce it to abide by the Potsdam Agreements. Later, the Korean War would also be seen as a feint to distract American attention from Europe, resulting in what historian Odd Arne Westad calls, “an entirely avoidable war, created by the intensity of ideological conflict among Koreans and a Cold War framework that enabled superpower interventions.”

The origins of the new Cold War can also be traced back many years, as the late Stephen F. Cohen argued in his last book, War With Russia?, reaching a fever pitch only after NATO cavalierly dismissed Russia’s last minute efforts in late 2021 to negotiate a comprehensive pan-European security agreement that would prevent the expansion of NATO into Ukraine.

Once again, many Western leaders labelled the subsequent invasion of Ukraine as a precursor to an attack on NATO, and began making statements about how it must be used to remold the world for future generations. Once this view becomes the conventional wisdom, it is not hard to see how it will be used to ensure domestic support for foreign military adventures for decades to come.

All this hints at the existence of a long term U.S. foreign policy strategy that outside observers can only guess at. I would not be at all surprised if, thirty years from now, future historians learned of the existence of a new NSC-68—America’s 1950 blueprint for conducting the Cold War—cooked up within the Biden administration in anticipation of just such a confrontation. After all, the contents of NSC-68 itself, although rumored about for years, were only revealed in 1975.

In sum, just as Russia is to blame for the initiation of hostilities in February 2022, so the West is to blame for prolonging them. In this conflict each side is pursuing its own ends, usually at the expense of the Ukrainian people.

As for what the immediate future holds, I would divide this question into two parts: One is “what does the future hold for Ukraine?” The other is “what the future hold for Russia and the West?”

For Ukraine the foreseeable future is catastrophic. Its population, which was estimated at 42 million before the war, has now probably fallen to below 30 million, and with reconstruction costs upward of 350 billion USD, there will be little to attract those who have fled to come back. Ukraine’s long term demographic picture therefore looks exceedingly bleak.

Realistically, one must add to this enormous burden, the conundrum that has plagued Ukraine since its independence in 1991—how to create a single national identity in a pluricultural society. The current war has led many Ukrainians to “rally round the flag” against Russian aggression, but as President Zelensky admitted at the 2023 Munich Security Conference, “To be honest, many have fled our state. Many have remained with the invaders of their own accord. And there is plenty of information of this kind.”

The terrible cost to Ukrainian democracy of trying to impose monoethnic nationalism on a country with substantial Russian, Polish, Hungarian, and Romanian minorities is today a taboo subject. Perhaps even understandably so, given the ongoing war. But, as Alexey Arestovych, President Zelensky’s press spokesman until January 2023, recently noted, it will have to be addressed sooner or later:

“At every turn we shout about being the freest country, but we don’t even have elementary freedom of speech. In our society, it is considered reprehensible to discuss various scenarios. . . [but] then what kind of social contract can there be? A social contract is a broad discussion, examining a wide variety of scenarios, even unpleasant ones.

This is something we are absolutely unprepared for. Take the simplest example. Ukraine actually has only two options: a monoethnic state or a united states of Ukraine. . . [but] the monoethnic project is de facto unfeasible. We won’t be able to achieve it. And if we do achieve it, it will lead to a rapid reduction and aging of the country’s population. We will wind up just like all monoethnic countries.”

This savage combination of economic, industrial, and demographic devastation; cultural, religious, and political rivalry (which the inclusion of Donbass and Crimea would only make more acute); alongside the West’s determination to make Ukraine an instrument for containing Russia, will make it extremely difficult to resist efforts by the Far Right, and the increasingly politically influential military, to transform post-war Ukraine into an ethnic authoritarian enclave. To appease Western sensibilities, the trappings of electoral democracy will likely be preserved, but within a system designed to ensure that no candidate from the East or South of Ukraine can ever again emerge to offer the country a culturally pluralistic political alternative.

The fact that such a Ukraine will continue to be an Apple of Discord between Russia and the West long after the current conflict ends, sadly, seems not to trouble political leaders in the slightest. In fact, if there is one thing that Russian, American and European leaders all seem to agree on, it is that they would rather see Ukraine utterly ruined than allow it to fall into the hands of The Enemy.

The only way that I can see to prevent this from coming about is for Ukraine and Russia to negotiate a ceasefire between themselves, regardless of the West’s objections. It is time to recognize the brutal truth of political realism: that only Russia can guarantee Ukraine’s survival, or extinguish it. The question that anyone serious about ending this conflict should be asking, therefore, is this: what does Russia need to end its violence against Ukraine?

According to former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who served as the intermediary in talks in March 2022, at that time Russia was willing to give up both de-nazification (taking out Zelensky), and the disarmament of Ukraine. What its conditions might be today is anyone’s guess, but the sooner the effort is made to find out, the better the prospects for Ukraine’s survival and recovery.

Ukraine would of course be asked to sacrifice much in any direct negotiations with Russia, but it would survive as a state. And this, as Ukraine’s own historical experience has shown time and again—from the Versailles Treaty of 1919, to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994—is not something that the West has ever been willing to guarantee.