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Why Russia does what it can and Ukraine will suffer what it must

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By Avram Lytton:

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At the moment of writing, Russian troops have completed a de facto annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Ukrainian military installations are holding out but are under siege. A referendum is to be held in a few days to determine whether the Crimea should join the Russian Federation or not. The outcome seems certain. Meanwhile, Russia has refused to recognise the government in Kiev and has proceeded with a rolling series of military drills. Pro-Russian agitation, small in numbers, but likely supported by Moscow, has continued in parts of Eastern Ukraine. This provides the Kremlin with a flimsy excuse, should it choose to exercise it, to invade and annex other parts of the country as well.

Is the West ready to stand up to these unprovoked acts of Russian aggression?

The short answer is no. US Secretary of State John Kerry recently decried Russian behaviour as being from the ‘nineteenth century’[1] while numerous others have declared Vladimir Putin to be crazy, irrational or impulsive. Western leaders should understand that Putin’s decision making is neither irrational nor somehow archaic, it is firmly planted in deep historical truths. When the Austrian Emperor Charles VI died in 1740, leaving his empire to his young daughter Maria Theresa, it did not take long for Frederick II of Prussia to invade Silesia in a blatant land grab. Legality mattered little when there was a woman on the throne and wealthy provinces up for grabs. Going further back, to Thucydides, one of the first historians, the exercise of power is illustrated starkly in his famous Melian dialogue. When Athens, in the midst of confrontation with Sparta, demanded that the (nominally) neutral island of Melos pay tribute or be destroyed, the Melians stood firm on moral, legal and religious grounds. The Athenians made the case that no one, including the gods, would come to the aid of Melos and that in reality, ‘the strong do as they can and the weak suffer what they must’.[2] Melos resisted, and Melos was destroyed.

So it is with Ukraine. Some have compared Russian interventionism now with western actions in Kosovo, Iraq, Libya and so on.[3] This argument is absurd. Recent western interventionism, while sometimes misguided, was largely based on humanitarian principles and was transient in nature. Conversely, Putin’s land grab in Ukraine is not based on anything other than the desire to increase Russian power and influence. There is no threatened Russian minority, there are no fascists coming to power in Kiev, just familiar politicians such as the newly freed Yulia Tymoshenko. The lease on the Russian naval base at Sevastopol was not threatened until it was used as a springboard to occupy the whole of the Crimea. There is no crisis except that created by the Kremlin, using the recent upheaval in Kiev as a pretext, in order to justify its bald faced exercise of power.

How should the West respond?

As illustration, I will provide another example from antiquity. In 168 BC, as the Seleucid King Antiochus IV led his army to Alexandria and looked about to triumph over his enemy, the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, he was approached by a Consul of the Roman Republic. Drawing a line in the sand, the Consul made Antiochus understand that if he continued on to Alexandria, he would have war with Rome. The Seleucid army withdrew.[4] Like Antiochus IV, Vladimir Putin is rational and he knows that he cannot win a military showdown with the West (the United States). That is why such a scenario needs to be credibly threatened. A tripwire force in Ukraine proper could accomplish this, words and weak economic threats most likely will not.

However, it does not appear that anything like this is in the offing. I have written before about the risk aversion that guides the foreign policy of the Obama administration,[5] and I doubt that will change. Diplomacy is the only tool in the arsenal of the Obama White House. The trouble with this is that diplomacy follows events on the ground. If Putin is getting what he wants through the exercise of power, then there is little incentive to negotiate. The Crimea is lost, but the rest of Ukraine can still be salvaged. Limits could be put on Russian expansion and sanctions could be put in place to apply pressure on the Kremlin. Perhaps then diplomacy might accomplish something. At the moment, however, Putin is strong and the West chooses to be weak.

Avram Lytton is a PhD student in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. His research focuses on British intelligence assessments during the First World War.

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NOTES

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/02/us-ukraine-crisis-usa-kerry-idUSBREA210DG20140302 (accessed 3 March, 2014)
2] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7142/7142-h/7142-h.htm#link2HCH0017 (accessed 3 March, 2014)
[3] https://strifeblog.org/2014/03/02/vox-populi-vox-dei-a-few-words-on-ukraine-crimea-and-the-west/ (accessed 3 March, 2014)
[4] http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/Livy/Livy45.html (accessed 3 March, 2014)
[5] https://strifeblog.org/2013/11/16/why-failures-in-american-leadership-endanger-peace/ (accessed 3 March, 2014)

After the revolution: Kiev’s future role in the Eurasian heroin trade

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By Calum Murray:

Injecting_heroin
‘Injecting Heroine’
(photo by Juan Manuel Garcia, ‘a hundred visions and revisions’)

Whilst it would be a fool’s errand to forecast success in the face of grave uncertainty, it seems at last that the Ukrainian opposition is making headway. Quite how a ‘victory’ could manifest itself, however, remains unclear. As Russia’s influence remains polarised between East and West Ukraine, it even remains possible that the country could fragment after the early election is contested.

Add to this the financial incentives and political posturing from both Moscow and Brussels and it becomes clear that this is about far more than just national self-determination. Moscow in particular has made its position clear, conducting military drills near the Ukrainian border and placing fighter squadrons on combat alert.  As we all no doubt realise, the result of this revolution will ultimately set the frontiers of the European Union with Vladimir Putin’s proposed Eurasian Union.

However, in the scramble to analyse the political and strategic consequences and significance of what Hillary Clinton suggested will be ‘the new USSR’, academics and commentators alike have been slow to acknowledge the hidden danger that lies between these two supranational unions. After the revolution, Kiev could well find itself on the front line of Europe’s defence against a new wave of heroin trafficking.

Europe’s biggest source of heroin is Afghanistan, in part because it holds a 65% share in global opium cultivation, but also because its rivals in Burma (Myanmar), Laos and Mexico are too small to supply significantly beyond their own regional markets. However, routes from Afghanistan to the EU are both diverse and flexible. With three major arteries running south through Africa (the ‘Southern Route’), west through Turkey and the Balkans (the ‘Balkan Route’) and north through the Commonwealth of Independent States (the ‘Northern Route’), heroin can easily find its way to the European market.

Having been the primary route for decades, the Balkan route has been increasingly choked through counter-narcotics operations in Turkey and Iran, which has led to a substantial proliferation of heroin smuggling along the Southern route via Africa. The Northern route, by contrast, has remained relatively stable, supplying a regional Russian market.

However, the Northern Route may be set to be flooded. The reason is simple: economic unions facilitate trade of all kinds. The Schengen Agreement itself facilitates drug trafficking through Europe by removing border controls, and this is likely to proliferate on a massive scale. The proposed Eurasian Economic Area would build upon the existing Customs Union between Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan to include Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan; thereby providing just two border controls between Afghanistan and the EU. Billed for 2016, this arrangement could dramatically increase opiate flows through Central Asia and Russia to Europe in just two years’ time.

Reports from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) have demonstrated yearly that drug interceptions amongst the Central Asian Republics are systematically compromised by state corruption and geographical constraints, particularly in Tajikistan. Coupled with the prevalence of Russian organised crime in existing heroin trafficking and the level of Russian state corruption, it would seem naïve to trust an infant Eurasian Union to be able to adequately control heroin flows through the region.

As such, the Northern Route may well emerge as a viable alternative to the long and costly Southern Route, whose recent rise has attracted the attention and reaction of the international community. Just as the squeeze on the Balkan Route fed the Southern Route, international efforts to seize drug shipments from West Africa and the Maghreb could see more Afghan heroin leave through the northern border with Tajikistan with greater frequency.

Such a situation would undoubtedly place Ukraine, or perhaps a new West Ukraine, on the front line of European counter-narcotics. With over 1,150km of borders with EU member states, Ukraine provides an excellent entry point to the European market, especially through its ability to link up with existing heroin trafficking routes through Romania and the Balkans. Additionally, its sheer size and relatively porous borders with Russia have already led to it being described somewhat hyperbolically as ‘the centre of the East-West drug trade’, whilst its comparative proximity to Central Europe would give it the edge against an EU-bound trade via Belarus.

But could Kiev control such a flow? It’s not possible to say with precision, but the outlook seems bleak. Not only are drug traffickers endlessly creative in methods to circumvent law enforcement, but Ukraine is structurally and situationally limited. Even before the revolution, the US Overseas Security Advisory Council noted that ‘limited budget [sic] resources hamper Ukraine’s ability to effectively counter this threat’ and that ‘coordination between law enforcement agencies responsible for counter-narcotics continues to be stilted due to regulatory and jurisdictional constraints’. After the revolution, either Ukraine’s new parliament or the remnants of Yanukovych’s administration will almost certainly be preoccupied with entrenching their respective regimes, putting state restructuring ahead of counter-narcotics.

Europe’s best hope, therefore, remains to support Ukraine’s pro-European movement in a bid to increase European involvement in Ukrainian policing. Europol established intelligence sharing with Ukrainian authorities in 2009, but drawing Ukraine into the EU sphere of influence would enable greater direct technical, financial and operational support from EU partners. What is certain is that drug security across Europe depends greatly on how quickly the EU can respond to this impending threat and establish effective counter-narcotics partners on its eastern frontiers.

Calum Murray is an MA student in the War Studies Department and is currently collecting open-source intelligence on drug trafficking in the EU.

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NOTES
[1] Ukraine Crime and Safety Report, OSAC, 21st January 2012.