The security crisis in Europe took on more dark colors on Wednesday (12), after the failure of talks between a Russian delegation and NATO (the US-led military alliance).
It was up to the club’s general secretary, the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg, to make the predictable announcement. “There are significant differences between NATO and Russia that will not be easy to accommodate. But it is a positive sign that everyone has sat down at the table and talked about the topics.”
On the other hand, he told reporters, “there is a real risk of armed conflict in Europe.” US negotiator Wendy Sherman said that “if the Russians have left the negotiating table, it will be clear that they were never serious in their intentions.”
Indeed, since 2019 there has not been a meeting of the so-called NATO-Russia Council, and both sides broke off diplomatic relations last year. For the most urgent problem, the crisis in Ukraine, there is still more fog than clarity.
The meeting takes place after a conversation in the same tone, but with some openness, which took place in Geneva between Russians and Americans on Monday (10). And it precedes a final meeting, this Thursday (13), at the forum of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, in Vienna — finally with the presence of the Ukrainians.
The fact that the meeting in Brussels — which lasted four hours while the meeting in Geneva lasted for seven — took place with the Russians carrying out military exercises with live ammunition on the border with Ukraine set the general tone.
The current crisis dates back to 2014, when the government of Vladimir Putin intervened in the neighbor after the pro-Moscow government was overthrown and the new management promised military integration with the West – something unacceptable for the Kremlin, which has already seen NATO gain 16 former members. -communists since the end of the Cold War, approaching its borders.
The West accuses the risk of invasion by Putin, who has deployed more than 100,000 troops in areas close to Ukraine, where the east has two territories dominated for almost eight years by pro-Russian separatists. In 2014, Crimea was fully annexed by Russia, generating sanctions that last until today.
The Kremlin denies the idea of ​​invading, not least because the human and economic cost may be priceless, but the military move is an unmistakable sign of pressure — which had already occurred in the same way last April.
Stoltenberg reaffirmed the negotiating path that US negotiator Sherman had set out on Monday: opening diplomatic channels and discussing arms control, intermediate-range missiles ahead, and mechanisms for scrutinizing military exercises.
The Russians said they would study the case. “NATO is ready,” said the secretary-general. The head of the Russian delegation, Deputy Chancellor Alexander Gruchko, has yet to comment.
In addition, Russians have again put the red lines established by Putin in an ultimatum: they want guarantees that Ukraine and other countries, such as Georgia, are never admitted to NATO, and the withdrawal of troops from ex-communist members around them.
This will not happen. NATO, as US President Joe Biden himself has said earlier, was adamant in denying the hypothesis — which was predictable.
Now it is a matter of knowing whether the Russians will be satisfied with the reopening of specific negotiations to claim victory or whether the cue given by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be heeded, wanting to hold a summit with Putin and the leaders of France and Germany to try to resolve the issue.
Zelensky, an unpopular president, has been reinforced with his homeland defense speech, but the precarious situation in Donbass (the Ukrainian east) and the flexing of Russian military muscles pressure him to perhaps accept terms that were inconceivable before – such as maintaining autonomy. from the rebel areas.
If that’s fate, the West will have handed Putin a geopolitical victory, given that territorially fractured countries cannot be accepted into the clubs in the west — NATO and the European Union, for starters.
In practice, if that happens, Ukraine will remain a strategic buffer against the West. Putin already has it in Belarus, where he decisively supported the local dictatorship against opposition protests and established himself as a political leader.
Not just there. Support for the Kazakh autocrat to defeat the uprising against him last week has put Russia on another level of influence in Central Asia. This, as well as in Ukraine, with explicit support from Xi Jinping’s China, interested in weakening the West.
Even if that happens, and not the most ghastly scenario of a conflict that could escalate to a clash between Russians and NATO, there are still Western instruments to put pressure on Putin.
There is already a new sanctions package being cooked up in the US Congress against Russia, and the unfinished status of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a headache for the Kremlin.
The pipeline, which links Russia to Germany and takes natural gas through Ukraine, depriving the country of billions of dollars in taxes, is ready, but faces bureaucratic questions seen as political.
The Russian still has other gains at the moment. Little is said at the moment about the increased repression of opposition and civil society entities in Russia, which has gained an unprecedented scale in 2021.
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