A new Cold War

PERRYSCOPE
Perry Diaz

In a bold and daring move, Russian President Vladimir Putin asked the Russian Parliament to authorize sending troops to Ukraine and Parliament approved it unanimously.  Within the hour, Russian military forces crossed the border into Crimea.   Obviously, the Russian forces were ready to roll into Crimea and were just awaiting orders from Putin. 

The Russian invasion of Crimea is reminiscent of Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939 when Adolf Hitler broke the Munich Agreement and sent tanks and troops to Czechoslovakia on March 14, 1939.   Within days, the Germans took control of the entire country… without firing a shot.  All hell broke loose and World War II began!

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On February 5, 1994, U.S. President Bill Clinton, U.K. Prime Minister John Major, Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin, and Ukraine President Leonid Kuchma signed the “Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.”  Under the memorandum, Ukraine promised to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and remove all Soviet-era nuclear weapons and send them to disarmament facilities in Russia.  Ukraine complied with the terms of the agreement.

In return, the U.S., U.K., and Russia promised to protect Ukraine’s borders and respect her sovereignty and territorial integrity as an independent state.  They applied the principles of “territorial integrity and nonintervention” in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, a Cold War-era treaty signed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and 34 other states.  The U.S. and U.K. kept their promises.  But on March 1, 2014, Russia broke the 20-year-old agreement by invading Ukraine.   Within days, Russia effectively took control of Crimea. 

The invasion caught the United States and Europe by surprise.  With 150,000 Russian troops deployed near the border of Ukraine, the Ukrainian government reacted by saying that Russia’s action was a “declaration of war.”   

Ukraine immediately placed her military on red alert and mobilized her reserves.  But with 70,000 ground troops, Ukraine is no match for Russia.  However, an attack on Ukraine could draw the 28-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into the conflict… or to be more precise, nuclear war!  All it takes is for Putin – just like Hitler in 1939 – to order an attack. 

The question is: Would Putin risk a conventional or nuclear war – Heaven forbid! -- with the Western powers?   And this brings to mind, what kind of a man is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin?

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Putin’s rise to power was preceded by a 16-year stint as a KGB officer, the notorious Soviet-era spy agency.  He retired with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 1991 -- when the Soviet Union was dissolved – and entered politics in his native St. Petersburg.  He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin’s administration where his meteoric rise to power began. 

Yeltsin resigned unexpectedly on December 31, 1999 and Putin became Acting President.  In 2000, he ran for President and was elected.  He served as President from 2000 to 2008, Prime Minister from 2008 to 2012, and again as President since 2012 to the present day.  Last year, he announced -- rather prematurely -- that he would run for reelection in 2016, seemingly a move to preempt any opposition.

In 2005, in his annual state of the nation address, Putin said, “The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. And for the Russian people, it became a real drama. Tens of millions of our citizens found themselves outside the Russian Federation.”  

Putin was alluding to ethnic Russians in Soviet republics that were once part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which ceased to exist in 1991.  One of these republics was Ukraine, which arguably has the biggest component of ethnic Russians outside the present-day Russian Federation. 

A large number of these ethnic Russians are concentrated in the Ukrainian province of Crimea, which was once a part of the Russian Republic until 1954 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decreed to transfer Crimea to the Ukraine Republic. But since both the Russian Republic and Ukraine Republic were part of the USSR, it didn’t make any difference then.  But now it does.

Little did Khrushchev realize that 37 years later the USSR would disintegrate and Crimea would no longer have any link or association with Mother Russia.  But Putin had none of that.  A few years ago, Russia started issuing passports to ethnic Russians in Crimea.  And with ethnic Russians comprising 60% of Crimea’s population of two million, Russia can then assert hegemony over Crimea.   It is for this reason that Putin sent Russian troops to Crimea ostensibly to protect Russian “citizens.”  However, many believe that Putin has a much bigger agenda, which is to ultimately bring Ukraine back into Russia’s sphere of influence.  Well, that is just for starters.

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Not too long ago, Putin started talking about a “Eurasian Union” that would bring the former Soviet satellite states – Eastern European countries -- and Soviet republics into one cohesive bloc not unlike the European Union (EU).  Interestingly, most of the former Soviet satellite states are now members of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a fact that Putin resents. 

Although Ukraine is not a member of EU or NATO, she is a participant of the Partnership for Peace (PiP), a NATO program aimed at creating trust between NATO and other states in Europe and the former Soviet Union.  But this was not enough to secure her sovereignty territorial integrity.  Putin knows that; thus, making Ukraine an easy target for Russian invasion. 

And with Russian troops in virtual control of Crimea, it would be too risky for NATO to send tanks and troops to Ukraine, particularly Crimea, without starting a war with Russia, which begs the question: would NATO just stand idle while Russia was pillaging Ukraine?

Losing Crimea would be a big blow to NATO.  It would only embolden Putin to invade Balkan states like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which are easy prey to Russian expansionism.  And with Putin manifesting signs of Napoleonic complex, there is no telling which country he’d invade next.  But he knows that a nuclear war with NATO could lead to MAD; that is, mutually assured destruction, which makes one wonder, do we have a Dr. Strangelove on the loose?

 But one thing is for sure: a new Cold War has just begun.  (PerryDiaz@gmail.com)