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Taras Kuzio: “There is little morality in international relations”

Feb 10, 2015 | Featured, Politics, Newpathway

This week may become a focal point of the current war and Ukraine's destiny in general. The war has intensified with hundreds dead across the front in the Donbas, while the West has intensified diplomatic negotiations with Ukraine and Russia. But are those negotiations enough and what could they lead to? The New Pathway addressed these questions to Taras Kuzio of the Centre for Political and Regional Studies at the University of Alberta.

We do not agree with everything that Mr. Kuzio said here, in particular with his opinion about the level of Canada's assistance for Ukraine and Ukraine's chances to survive the crisis. But we acknowledge Mr. Kuzio's expertise in the matter and believe that his opinion deserves to be known by the community. We invite our readers to express their opinions on these and other pressing issues of the crisis.

NP: The West's attempts to solve Ukraine's problem with diplomacy seem to be going in circles. Is this a flawed diplomacy or should the West apply different kind of measures?

TK: The three things can go together: economic sanctions, supply of defensive military equipment and diplomacy. Economic sanctions and supply of military equipment are the way to change Putin's behaviour. There is no other way. The European Union on Monday drew up additional sanctions against Russia which will go into effect next Monday if there is no agreement reached this Wednesday between Russia, Ukraine and the EU. All these measures have their positives and negatives. Ukraine is insisting that, under moral conditions, it should be provided with some kind of defensive equipment because Britain and the United States signed the Budapest Memorandum. But of course many countries in Europe are worried that this proxy war could evolve into a full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war. I don't think that this is a serious threat but this is what of course is in the minds of West Europeans.

Western countries don't believe anything that Putin and his foreign minister Lavrov say; they think those are literally a bunch of liars. So, this is a problem that Ukraine and the West do not trust Russia. But the more complicated problem is that, I don't think, that Putin is on this planet. His demands are completely unrealistic. For example, to end the conflict, he is demanding Ukraine to surrender. This is not going to happen. No Ukrainian president, even a moderate, like Petro Poroshenko, is going to agree to surrender. He is also demanding that the government in Kyiv and the leader of Ukraine be changed for Russian puppets. How is that physically possible if the free and fair elections, according to the European Union, were held in May and October 2014? He is also insisting that the Ukrainian Parliament signs a declaration that Ukraine no longer wants to join the EU and NATO. Again, how is that physically possible if the Parliament voted in December to overturn the non-block status by a constitutional majority and public opinion in support of the EU and NATO membership is between 50% and 75%?

Another demand that makes sure how Putin lives in the past is to sit down with Western leaders and draw up the second Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which would divide Europe into spheres of interest, with Ukraine in the Russian sphere. No Western government or international organization is going to do that. Or the demands for federalization of Ukraine. Federalism is not popular in Ukraine, it has support of maybe 10% of the people. And even if Ukraine agreed to a federal system and greater autonomy for the Donbas, there is no federal system in the world where a region controls foreign policy and security of the country.

But even more importantly, public opinion in Ukraine does not support Putin's demands. There was an article published on Friday in the Washington Post, by Oxford University political scientists Paul Chaisty and Stephen Whitefield which drew on public opinion and showed that support for separatism is minimal. So, Putin's demands are completely unrealistic which makes me very pessimistic about the outcome of the negotiations because Putin has no intentions to stop the war.

NP: But that means that the West is not pressing hard enough.

TK: We don't know what the additional economic sanctions involve, which were agreed today. But the West could have been a lot tougher until now, you are absolutely right. For example, David Kramer, the head of Freedom House, proposed last week in the Wall Street Journal that you put senior people in the Russian government, including Putin, foreign minister Lavrov, and the head of Gazprom Miller, on the visa black list; remove Russia from the SWIFT international payment system.

NP: Do you think that switching Russia off SWIFT is feasible?

TK: It's difficult to say. I think the biggest problem is that the West is still unwilling to accept what kind of regime there is in Moscow. And that regime is worse than the Nazi regime in Germany. It's worse because it's a fascist regime, like the Nazi one, but it also has nuclear weapons and strong ties to the organized crime, both of which the Nazi regime did not have. And the Russian regime is doing the same thing – “protecting” Russian speakers in other countries. But I think the Western leaders still think there is some way to deal with the Russians, that it's a teddy bear, not a grizzly bear.

NP: You don't think that the Munich Conference last week showed that they are starting to realize that?

TK: It's one thing to realize it privately, it's another thing to act upon it publically. Privately, they've known the reality of Russia for ten years. If you look at the documents made available to the court in London over the investigation into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, the British government and therefore its allies knew what kind of regime is in Moscow. But this is internal. Publicly they say something else, diplomats are good at that.

There is another aspect, how the Canadian government has been a big disappointment to the Ukrainian community. There is no support in the Parliament for supplying defensive equipment to Ukraine. When the Canadian Ukrainian Congress tried to raise this question, the Parliament found only two MPs supporting it, a Conservative and an NDP. Secondly, there is nothing in the Canadian Parliament similar to what was adopted in the U.S. Congress, Ukraine Freedom Support Act. Former Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj asked “As the founder of what at one time was the most active parliamentary friendship group “The Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Friendship Group”, I do not understand why the group has not passed a resolution demanding that Canada send defensive lethal weapons to Ukraine?”

So, at this moment of need, when Ukraine is literally fighting for its survival, the Canadian government has not been very supportive and that inevitably is going to have an effect upon the relations of the Ukrainian community and Ottawa. There has been a lot of publicity about divisions between the US and Europe but divisions between the US and Canada over the sending of military assistance to Ukraine have been ignored.

NP: It's often said that Canada is actually not a focal point in terms of weapons supplies to Ukraine.

TK: So, Canada can send special forces to Iraq but it can't send them to Ukraine?

NP: What is behind the reluctance of the Western governments to realize what the Russian regime actually is, which you talked about earlier? The fear of nuclear weapons?

TK: It's partly seen that it could escalate into a full-blown conflict between the West and Russia, yes, and the fact that Russia has nuclear weapons, yes. The concern is, what will happen next after the supply of weapons? And this is something that nobody can predict.

NP: But what's the moral side of this situation, that it's taking many Western governments so long to realize it?

TK: There is unfortunately little morality in international relations. Ukraine gave up its third largest nuclear weapons arsenal and has been invaded by one “guarantor”, and its security is not sufficiently supported by the US and UK.

NP: So, what is your forecast?

TK: I am not very hopeful about a peaceful outcome of the current peace talks. It's enough for Russia to continue destabilising Ukraine, it does not even need to invade further into Ukraine. The Euromaidan authorities inherited an economic crisis and financially bankrupt country with high public expectations of change that are a major challenge to deal with during a war. There is a likelihood that Ukraine could default this year and it will be difficult for Ukraine to deal with these crises in 2015 as Putin is seeking to destroy it's independence.

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