Humanitarian intervention sowed the seeds of the Ukraine War

In the 18 months elapsed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the newly independent states, Ukraine among them, the Enneragie endowment had convened a blue Ribón commission composed of the main foreign political leaders in the United States. It included former Defense Secretaries and CIA directors, diplomats, trade experts and several people who turned out to be the Bill Clinton cabinet waiting. I attended most of the commission’s work sessions. His report promised to be a dramatic deviation of the consensus of the bipartisan foreign policy of the Cold War.

During the meetings, I heard as Richard Holbrooke, the special representative of former President Barack Obama for Afghanistan and Pakistan until his death in 2010, he passionately argued by US intervention in the Balkan wars. But nothing I had heard or read in the first drafts of the commission’s findings prepared me for the bomb that was launched at the press conference.

The Commission proposed that the United States adopt “a new principle of international relations: the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention.” He advised that the United States should “realign NATO and (the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) to face new security problems in Europe” and urged military intervention for humanitarian purposes. The report proposed the revolutionary idea that a first military strike led by the United States was justified, not defending the country but to impose highly subjective political settlements for others.

Humanitarian intervention was a completely new concept for NATO, which was born as a purely defensive alliance against the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact. If these changes became policies, they would transform NATO during the night. The world’s largest military alliance could be used to intervene where it is justified to impose political settlements or protect vulnerable minorities within a statement. Real or attenuated repression incidents could become reasons for military intervention in dozens of countries where there has been nothing like a melting.

Dmitro and I exchanged alarmed looks. Ukraine had a considerable Russian minority. Its population of almost 52 million was 73% of ethnic Ukrainian, 22% ethnic and 5% “other”, including Crimea’s tartar. Throughout the former USSR and their satellites in Eastern Europe, the only most explosive problem than that of national minorities was how to get rid of the thousands of “loose nuco” and other armament that Moscow left in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Russia had already declared its red lines: nuclear weapons had to be returned to Moscow, and any abuse of ethnic Russians in the “close abroad” or new republics would be reasons for military intervention.

After the press conference, Dmitro was bleak. He warned that one day, Russia could use this new principle to intervene in Crimea or southeast Ukraine, where most ethnic Russians in the country lived. It was obvious for the two that this new justification for the use of military force had the potential to face the United States and NATO against Russia, more immediately in Balkans, but also in the Baltic and Ukraine.

On one of my trips after kyiv, Valery Jacovich Matvieko, a main advisor of former President Leonid Kravchuk, asked me to meet him privately to discuss Crimea. I worked closely with Matvieko in high priority projects, and my firm had recently created a joint company between him and three Ukrainian businessmen, Grigoriy Surkis, Bogdan Gubsky and Viktor Medvedchuk. Over time, the trio became the best oligarchs in Ukraine. Later, Medvedchuk achieved notoriety as the election of Russian President Vladimir Putin to happen to Volodymyr Zelensky as president of Ukraine if Russia’s invasion succeeded.

In Crimea, there was a growing dissatisfaction with Kyiv, and public opinion was deteriorating. During most of the one hour, I tried Matvieko for more details, trying to apply Western political management techniques to problems. The task was harder for the Ukrainian dependence on the old Soviet methods to measure public opinion. Instead of probe a representative sample of people, the Soviet technique involved interviewing factory directors, local officials, collective farms and other leaders. A byproduct of our meeting was an agreement for my company to carry out the first Western -style political survey in Ukraine.

Just before our meeting ended, Matvieko surprised me when he asked if paying the salaries of workers in Crimea would increase the support of kyiv. They bit my swallow. I knew that in the immediate post-Soviet era, workers, officials, doctors, military officers, factory chiefs, scientists and pensioners sometimes spent months without a payment check. When the controlled economy centrally collapsed in the USSR, so did any appearance of economic stability. I have written about misery suffered by the people of the USSR after their dissolution, but in Ukraine, it was worsened by episodes of hyperinflation and currency devaluations.

Pay them, I agreed. Capital idea. But I went with the feeling that Ukraine control in Crimea was slipping. A few months of salary controls could delay a breakdown in relationships, but the impulse would be transitory without constant economic improvement. Not long after that meeting with Matvieko, NATO demolished four Serbian aircraft that carry out strikes in Bosnia and began bombing the military positions of Serbia in the escape Republic. The United States and NATO had changed their forms.

Boris Yeltsin was president of the Russian Federation when the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia signed the Budapest memo Later that year. Memorandos force each nation to respect not only the territorial integrity of Ukraine but also Belarus and Kazakhstan. The Ukrainians interpreted the agreements as legally binding security guarantees, while the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia never believed that commitments increased to the threshold of international law.

Someone who was not a signatory for security guarantees was Putin, then the first mayor of St. Petersburg. In 1998, Putin was appointed head of the Russian Federal Security Service. Under Putin’s watch, NATO launched a Offensive against Serbia In March 1999. The second humanitarian intervention of NATO in the Balkans was in the name of the Albanian population in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia. The bombing campaign lasted 2 1/2 months. Approximately one month after the NATO campaign ended, Putin became one of the first attachments of Russia. In 2000, he was elected president.

In 2008, Russia invaded the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. It had become an independent nation in 1991 when the USSR broke out. In what is now widely seen as the case of Russia’s proof on how the West would respond to the military force against its former territories, the Russian-Georgia War He drew few repercussions of the United States and Europe.

In 2014, the fear of Dmitro that Russia used its ethnic minorities to justify the intervention in Ukraine came true. Putin’s “Little Green Men”, the Mercenaries of the Wagner Group and the Russian Special Forces, combined with local local leaders to achieve the annexation of Crimea. In his March 18 speech before the Russian Duma and the gathered dignitaries, Putin justified Moscow’s seizure of the Ukrainian territory in terms that reflected the language of the 1992 Carnegie Endowment report.

Today, Russia occupies about 20% of Ukraine, mainly in the southeast. A succession of US presidents, Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden, have not been able to stop the Russian aggression against their former republics. Safety guarantees without teeth and easily avoided sanctions have not deteriorate Putin to their impulse to claim Russia’s domains.

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If President Donald Trump can achieve a result in the war that preserves the independence of Ukraine, provides security guarantees and creates inviolable borders, he will have surpassed each of his predecessors after the cold war. If so, Trump will have created not only greater security for Ukraine and Eastern Europe, but will have stabilized relations with Russia and, therefore, has created the new world order that has eluded all our leaders since the fall of the Soviet Union.

In doing so, you must reverse the use of NATO as an offensive alliance and eliminate the principle of humanitarian intervention in the affairs of a sovereign nation. It is the root of the problem in relations between the United States and Russia.

John B. Roberts II served in the White House of Reagan and is an former international political consultant and executive producer of the McLaughlin group. He worked extensively in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union on nuclear disarmament, nuclear energy security and democracy construction. Your website is www.jbrobertsauthor.com.