EU leaders at their Brussels summit last Thursday and Friday kept up the pressure on Russia by expanding its list of people targeted by sanctions in response to Moscow’s intervention in Crimea.
Also at the summit, in a show of support for Kiev, EU leaders signed the political part of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement.
After last Sunday’s referendum in Crimea, the EU had ordered the freezing of assets and travel bans on 21 people (another 12 people were added to this list at the summit), while the US imposed such sanctions on 11 individuals, including Valentina Matviyenko, a former Russian Ambassador to Malta and the current head of Russia’s upper house of Parliament. Matviyenko is now also included in the EU’s new list of targeted individuals.
On Thursday, US President Barack Obama announced further sanctions on Russian officials and a Russian bank. Before the referendum, the EU had already suspended talks on closer economic cooperation with Russia and the G7 put on hold preparations for the forthcoming G8 Summit in Sochi. The UK, along with France and the US, froze joint naval exercises with Russia as well as military co-operation.
Last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the G8 “doesn’t exist anymore, neither does the summit or the format as such”.
The referendum to integrate Crimea with Russia was officially approved by 97 per cent of voters and on Monday President Putin and the leaders of Crimea signed a Bill to absorb the region into Russia. Mr Putin told the Russian Parliament that Crimea had “always been part of Russia” and he had corrected a “historical injustice”. On Friday Putin signed the treaty on Crimea joining the Russian Federation, after this was approved by the Russian Parliament.
The annexation of Crimea effectively took place with the stroke of a pen and the international community has been unable to prevent this. The imposition of sanctions on individuals has been largely symbolic, although on Friday the Russian stock market and rouble fell considerably and two major ratings companies downgraded Russia’s credit outlook and growth forecasts for the year.
Both the EU and the US have made it clear that economic sanctions could be introduced if Russia continues to cause trouble in eastern Ukraine, which seems to be a new ‘red line’ both Washington and Brussels have drawn.
In reality, nobody wants a new Cold War with Russia and certainly nobody wants a military confrontation with Moscow. However, there has been a shift in EU-Russian and US-Russian ties, and this is unfortunate. This crisis has undermined the relatively warm relations and rapprochement between the two sides over the last two decades and could have a negative effect on other questions such as the conflict in Syria and Iran’s nuclear programme.
Russia’s disrespect towards Ukraine’s territorial integrity also sends the worst possible example to countries thinking of giving up their nuclear weapons or not developing them. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine found itself in possession of 176 intercontinental ballistic missile launchers and 1,240 nuclear warheads, as well as over 3,000 tactical nuclear weapons.
However, Kiev was convinced by the international community to return these to Moscow’s control and an agreement was signed in 1994 by Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, John Major and Leonid Kuchma, the then-leaders of the US, Russia, UK and Ukraine, guaranteeing the security of Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nuclear arsenal. In that deal, Russia, the US and UK agreed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and reaffirmed “their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine”.
If such agreements are not respected, what message does this send out to the world? Indeed, would Russia have taken Crimea, and would it be causing trouble in eastern Ukraine if Kiev possessed nuclear weapons?
Our concern is that Russia won’t stop here- Nato secretary general
Even though I doubt Putin wants to start a new Cold War, I do believe his actions reveal a centuries-old paranoia about the states that border Russia. It is clear that Russia wants influence over Ukraine as a whole, is not at all comfortable with a European-leaning Ukraine on its border and assumes it has the right to intervene militarily in countries with large Russian-speaking populations.
The 2008 crisis with Georgia, which saw Moscow effectively establishing two Russian-speaking protectorates carved out from Georgia-proper, was an example of this. Another case in point is the separatist region of Trans-Dniester, a narrow strip of land which proclaimed independence from Moldova in 1990 and borders Ukraine. The majority of the population are Russian speakers and the region has now officially requested to be part of Russia. Will Moscow annex this region now?
And will Russia start stirring things up in Kazakhstan, which has a 40 per cent Russian population, or in Latvia and Estonia, where a quarter of the population is Russian-speaking?
We do not know whether Russia will now stop at Crimea or will find an excuse to annex eastern Ukraine. In his speech to the Russian Parliament last week Putin said: “After the revolution, the Bolsheviks added large sections of the historical south of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic make-up of the population, and today these areas form the southeast of Ukraine.”
Putin seems to be implying that the Russian speaking southeast of Ukraine should really be part of Russia too, and this is worrying.
Nato secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in an interview with Foreign Policy last week that Russia’s annexation of Crimea would be difficult to change and that he was increasingly concerned that Moscow might invade eastern Ukraine.
“Our concern is that Russia won’t stop here,” Mr Rasmussen said.
“There is a clear risk that Russia will go beyond Crimea and the next goal will be the eastern provinces of Ukraine.”
“More or less we took for granted that the Cold War belonged to the past,” Mr Rasmussen said. “And while I’m not yet ready to call recent incidents a new Cold War, there are of course similarities that remind us of old-fashioned Cold War attitudes on the Russian side, and that is a matter of concern.”
OSCE observers are now being sent to Ukraine’s southeastern areas to monitor the situation and Russia is isolated diplomatically – last week the UN Security Council voted 13-1 to condemn Russian actions in Crimea.
Moscow vetoed the resolution, and significantly China abstained. The situation is delicate and one hopes it does not escalate. Perhaps Russia will see some common sense and will go no further.
In a way, the international community has turned a blind eye to the annexation of Crimea, but it certainly cannot and should not do the same if Moscow tries to grab parts of eastern Ukraine.