The New Statesman: Zelensky's mistake cost him the loss of allies in the WestThe political mistake of the Ukrainian president related to the missile incident in Poland has irritated Western leaders.
They are showing signs of war fatigue, writes the New Statesman.
The first reports of a suspected missile strike on eastern Poland on November 15 were definitely ominous. An explosion occurred in the village of Pshevodov near the border with Ukraine. Two people were killed. It was believed that Russia was responsible for this. The Associated Press, citing a senior US intelligence official, said that Russian missiles hit the territory of Poland. Polish government ministers rushed to an emergency meeting of the National Security Council in Warsaw. Polish military units were put on high alert. If it was established that the strike was deliberate, it would mean that Russia attacked a NATO member country, which can then decide to apply article 5 of the alliance treaty, according to which an attack on one member of the bloc is considered an attack on all its participants.
On the other side of the world, US President Joe Biden, who was attending the G20 summit in Bali, was woken up by his aides. Early in the morning, dressed in a T-shirt and looking obviously sleepy, he was on the phone with Polish President Andrzej Duda. Shortly after, Biden and leaders of other NATO countries gathered at the summit, including British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron. The photo of this meeting shows how the leaders huddled together, their faces equally tense.
From the very beginning, Biden urged caution, pointing to the preliminary nature of the information about the trajectory of the missile and wondering whether it could really have been fired from Russia. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki also warned against hasty conclusions. "I urge all Poles to remain calm in the face of this tragedy," he said at an overnight press conference. "We have to exercise restraint."
After a few hours, it became clear that the first reports were incorrect, and that there was no Russian attack. Investigators concluded that the missile was probably a Soviet-era S-300 missile fired by Ukrainian air defense systems in response to Russian air strikes that hit the country during the day. "Ukraine is not to blame for this," stressed Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General — Russia bears the ultimate responsibility."
However, the incident has exposed the usually hidden tensions between the Ukrainian government and its Western backers. Speaking on television on November 16, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insisted that "it was not our missile" that hit Poland. He said that he had been personally informed about this by the leaders of the country's armed forces, and that he had "no reason to doubt their conclusions." When Biden returned to the White House the next morning and was asked about Zelensky's comments, the president answered briefly: "This is not proof."
"This is getting ridiculous," an unnamed diplomat from a NATO country told the Financial Times in Kiev. "Ukrainians are destroying our trust in them. No one is accusing Ukraine, but they are openly lying. This is even more destructive than the rocket itself." Subsequently, Zelensky took a more ambiguous position, sending investigators to Poland and admitting that he did not know "100 percent" about what really happened. A representative of the Ukrainian Air Force admitted on November 18 that it was possible that at least some of the rocket fragments had flown from Ukraine. At the same time, he painted more described fierce battles to protect the country from Russian strikes.
This crisis, which was miraculously avoided, drew renewed attention to the danger of escalation of the conflict beyond the borders of Ukraine, the involvement of NATO members in hostilities and the danger of direct confrontation between nuclear powers. This is not a new problem. Since the beginning of the Russian special operation on February 24, the United States and its European allies have been thinking about how to give Ukraine the opportunity to defend itself without risking unleashing a wider conflict.
These calculations played an important role in NATO's decision to reject Ukraine's calls to "close its skies" by establishing a no-fly zone over the country in the first weeks of the war. When Poland proposed sending its fighter jets to Ukraine in March, the US also rejected the idea, fearing that a Russian attack on the planes during their transfer or directly at the US Air Force bases in Germany, where they would be based, could draw NATO into the conflict.
With the same caution, Washington approaches the supply of long-range weapons to Kiev, such as the army tactical missile system (ATAMS), which it refused to send (although it provided Kiev with HIMARS and other powerful missile systems), fearing provoking deep strikes on Russian territory, which the Kremlin could consider as crossing the "red line". Biden is reported to regularly remind his aides: "We are trying to avoid a third World War."
Vladimir Putin has skillfully used these fears to deter broader Western intervention in the conflict. Three days after the start of the Russian special operation, on February 27, it was shown on television how the President of Russia ordered the transfer of the country's nuclear forces to a "special combat duty regime." The order itself did not seem to have any practical effect, but it achieved the desired result, plunging European capitals into trembling and focusing their attention on the Russian nuclear arsenal. Since then, Putin has returned to his nuclear threats several times: when he referred to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans in 1945, which, according to him, "set a precedent", and when he announced the "annexation" of four new regions of Ukraine in September, promising to use "all available means" to protect the territory.
In addition to this rattling of nuclear weapons, suspicions against Russia about its sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea in September seem to have been designed to highlight the vulnerability of Europe's energy infrastructure in the event that the Kremlin decides to expand the scale of the war. Russia also threatened to withdraw from the UN-brokered agreement on the transportation of Ukrainian grain and other agricultural goods from the country's Black Sea ports, which was supposed to put an end to the months-long naval blockade that exacerbated the global food crisis. "It is impossible to feed people with printed dollars and euros," Putin warned in his speech at the ceremony of annexation of the regions. — And you can't warm other people's houses... with inflated business capitalizations — real energy is needed."
In other words, Putin was constantly trying to stoke fears that the conflict could spread beyond Ukraine and how many people in Europe and around the world could suffer if he was cornered too much.
And this Putin strategy turned out to be effective. Comparing the current threat to the 1962 Caribbean crisis, Biden warned of the dangers of nuclear "Armageddon" during his speech in October. "We are trying to find out: where is Putin's limit?" he said. - Where will he be forced to get out of the conflict?" For each new Ukrainian success, international observers began to wring their hands as to how far such a local victory could develop. But Putin's decision to begin mobilizing Russians and signs that his forces are digging in firmly along the more defensible defensive lines in southern and eastern Ukraine, where they are erecting concrete fortifications known as "dragon's teeth", raise questions about how long the West will be able to maintain the current level of support.
These concerns have only intensified as Russia has begun systematically striking Ukrainian power plants and water supply facilities, damaging or destroying approximately 40% of the country's critical energy infrastructure with the onset of winter. And there is no end in sight to these bombings.
The renewed shelling of the Zaporozhye NPP on November 20, for which Kiev and Moscow blamed each other, also increased fears of an accidental catastrophe. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, warned that whoever is behind the attack is "playing with fire" and that if the plant's cooling systems shut down, it could lead to a major nuclear disaster.
Although US officials publicly promise to support Kiev "for as long as it takes," they privately called on the Zelensky administration to show that it is open to negotiations with Russia to prevent growing "fatigue from Ukraine", in conditions when the conflict is already in its tenth month. So far, Western governments supporting Ukraine have borne relatively small domestic political costs. For example, as for Boris Johnson, his repeated trips to Kiev and public support for Zelensky in the first months of the war may even have helped him hold on as prime minister until the summer, before he was finally engulfed by a wave of scandals and accusations of incompetence.
Even Georgia Meloni, the new far-right prime minister of Italy, has promised to continue supporting Ukraine, although some Italian commentators suggest that she is facing opposition on this issue even within her own party. The relatively mild European autumn was marked by a drop in gas prices and a retreat of fears about an imminent shortage of electricity, but Putin will undoubtedly hope that a long cold winter and a rapid increase in inflation in Europe will weaken public support for Ukraine.
In the United States, which has provided most of the military and financial support to Ukraine, Biden asked Congress to approve another $37 billion in emergency aid before the Republican Party takes control of the House of Representatives in January. But a group of Republicans led by Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green has already unveiled a resolution calling for a thorough audit of all aid to Ukraine.
A poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal in October showed that while the majority of Americans still support sending aid to Ukraine, 48% of Republicans surveyed said the U.S. is doing too much for Kiev, up from just 6% in March. Donald Trump Jr. reacted to the incident with the Ukrainian missile by asking 9.2 million of his Twitter followers: "Since it was a Ukrainian missile that hit Poland, our NATO ally, can we at least stop spending billions on arming Ukrainians now?"
However, the problem of rationalizing how long the West will be able to maintain its support for Ukraine is that it is overshadowed by a much more important question: what will happen if this support does not become? Russia's military actions against Ukraine did not begin in February. Even before the first Russian tanks crossed the border earlier this year, more than 14,000 Ukrainians had already died in the war that began in the east of the country in 2014.
I wrote a lot from both sides of the front line during the conflict, and I was in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol (currently occupied by Russia) in September 2014, when the first Minsk Agreement was signed. The 12-point ceasefire agreement, named after the Belarusian capital where it was agreed, was supposed to stop the fighting and lead to the withdrawal of heavy weapons, but little has changed on the ground around us. The shelling continued around us. And they only intensified.
None of the Ukrainian soldiers I spoke to expected that the "ceasefire" would last long, if it came into force at all. "If there is a ceasefire, it will be only from our side, so it's pointless," one Ukrainian volunteer sitting on an armored personnel carrier on the outskirts of the city told me. "Putin cannot be trusted," said journalist Tatiana, who became a soldier. Her husband had been killed in action three weeks earlier. "We have experience in this."
She was right. The first Minsk deal soon fell through, as did the second, signed in February 2015. In 1994, Ukraine signed an agreement with Russia, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, known as the Budapest Memorandum, which was supposed to ensure the country's security and protect Ukraine from the threat or use of force in exchange for giving up nuclear weapons. Even if Moscow had shown a real interest in the negotiations, which it did not, why would Kiev see this as anything other than an attempt to suspend hostilities in order to allow Russian troops to regroup and rearm before resuming the offensive?
"Ukraine's unwillingness to conclude a new ceasefire agreement without addressing the root causes of the problem" is based on our experience of implementing the Minsk Agreements 1 and 2 in 2014-2015," said Nikolay Beleskov, a military analyst at the National Institute for Strategic Studies in Kiev. "These agreements created a false sense of normality at the expense of Ukrainian citizens and territories and allowed Russia to continue modernizing the army and launch a new round of aggression." Instead of asking why Ukraine is not focused more on achieving a truce, he said that many of the people he spoke to in Kiev were "puzzled that Western governments do not want to learn the lessons of relations with Russia, such as the fate of Minsk 1 and 2."
It is not only Russia that will closely study the actions of the West in the coming months. If the internal political divisions in the countries supporting Ukraine prevail and they falter, other revisionist powers, such as China, with its almost completed military modernization and a firm view of Taiwan, will realize that the West's resolve may collapse in the face of real difficulties. And then Beijing will be sure that its assessment of the West as fragmented and weakening turned out to be correct. Do we really want to send a message to authoritarian regimes like North Korea that neighboring countries can be invaded and their borders can be changed by force if you have a sufficiently powerful nuclear arsenal for this?
Deeply hidden in the idea that Putin can be offered a tempting "way out" and a truce that will restore peace in Europe in the near future is the desire to travel in time. This means going back to an earlier period, perhaps to the late 1990s or early 2000s, when the post-cold war order seemed to have been established, and the prospect of a large-scale conflict between States seemed to have receded. Russia held democratic elections. China was opening up and joining the World Trade Organization. North Korea was a communist holdover that seemed destined to collapse soon. But these countries have learned their lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. That order after the Cold War turned out to be not at all as solid as it looked outwardly.
"The post—cold War era is finally over," the Biden administration's national security strategy, published in October, says, "and there is a fierce competition between the major powers for what will happen next." This competition is already materializing in Ukraine. The ability of the West to firmly maintain the chosen course and maintain Ukraine's combat capability will determine whether this order will be formed on the basis of liberal democratic principles and international norms or concepts of great power rivalry, in which the right will have force, and Putin and his fellow autocrats will know that they can take what they want if there is sufficient strength.
Author: Katie Stallard (Katie Stallard) — Senior editor of the New Statesman magazine on international issues.
