A chocolate king rolls back new Cold War
The presidential election in Ukraine on Sunday promises to be a turning point in the Ukraine crisis. Both the West, especially Europe, and Russia peered down the abyss, didn’t like what they saw and would appear to be gradually pulling back in tandem, which in turn is investing the outcome of Sunday’s election with much importance.
The frontrunner in Sunday’s poll is the 48-year old “chocolate king” Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire who fits into the classic mould of the oligarch who made it real big out of the debris of the former Soviet Union — buying languishing state assets cheap, turning them into gold and amassing a fortune overnight to become a robber-baron wielding political power.
Poroshenko has an overall reputation of being “pro-Western” but in the former Soviet space increasingly, such descriptions have become meaningless. He served as foreign minister in the government that was formed after the color revolution in 2005. But he later served as foreign trade minister under the “pro-Russian” president Viktor Yanukovich.
The only constancy in his career lies hidden in the subsoil. He kept connections throughout with Russia — both in terms of business interests and in personal contacts with the Russian elites, including possibly with the Kremlin. True, the Russian state media lately kept up a tirade against Poroshenko, casting him in very poor light as an oligarch and an opportunist. But then, it could have been smoke and mirrors as well.
Interestingly, his main opponent in Sunday’s election Yulia Tymoshenko, the glamor girl of the Orange Revolution, has accused Poroshenko of being Moscow’s fifth column and that his is doing roaring business with Russia. (Ironically, former prime minister Tymoshenko herself also has a lingering reputation of having been a favorite of the Kremlin, and of having made her fortune largely via Ukraine’s opaque gas deals with Russia’s energy leviathan Gazprom.)
Conceivably, Moscow may have waged a “psywar” and succeeded in nudging Poroshenko closer toward a “centrist” position, which in Ukraine’s circumstances today would mean he is utterly free to remain “pro-Western” but would be expected to remain sensitive to Russia’s core interests nonetheless.
Thus, Poroshenko lately began speaking of the likelihood of Ukraine’s European Union membership circa 2025, but firmly puts aside the possibility of Ukraine’s membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in any conceivable future.
Indeed, Poroshenko exudes confidence (for reasons best known to him) that if he were elected president, within three months thereafter, he’ll have mended Ukraine’s tattered ties with Russia. The German media reports speak of him enjoying a warm friendship with the Russian ambassador in Kiev, and being an Orthodox Christian (although often accused of being a Jew by ultra-right Ukrainian nationalists), he often makes pilgrimages to Russian monasteries.
Thus, all in all, in Poroshenko, we’d have someone unique whom the West could consider as “our man in Kiev”, but with whom Russia looks forward to doing business with. There seems to be a tacit recognition of ground rules emerging between the West and Russia over the presidency of Poroshenko, which would in turn explain the overall lowering of rhetoric by both sides lately and Moscow’s decision to allow Sunday’s election to go ahead.
To ease the tensions ahead of Sunday’s poll, President Vladimir Putin has ordered the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Ukraine’s eastern border.
What could the “Poroshenko formula” between the West and Russia look like? The WaPo columnist David Ignatius wrote last week about the “Finlandization” of Ukraine as the buzzword in the Washington circuit, and it seems to approximate to a settlement.
In a nutshell, Ukraine shall have the freedom in theory to make its own choices as any sovereign country would have, but having said that, Kiev would also be trusted to know what is good for itself as regards its future relations with Russia.
What makes such an agreeable outcome possible? First and foremost, Russia took a forceful stance that it wouldn’t accept the regime change in Kiev (which the West sponsored whilst President Vladimir Putin was preoccupied with the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.)
Moscow dug in, insisting it has legitimate interests, historically speaking as well as politically and culturally and in the economic sphere, and intended to safeguard them no matter what it takes. Most important, Moscow displayed that it holds the trump cards and a stabilization of Ukraine is impossible without Russia’s cooperation.
Equally, it became clear to the West that the alternative to accommodating Russia would be a path to confrontation, with the high risk it entailed insofar as Ukraine could become a failed state at Europe’s doorstep. Clearly, the West has no stomach to undertake a military intervention, nor does it have the financial wherewithal to salvage the debt-ridden Ukrainian economy. The EU is far from ready to absorb new members, either.
However, what counted significantly is also the interdependency that has developed between the major European powers, especially Germany, on the one side and Russia on the other in the post-cold war setting.
However much Washington tried to assert its cold-war era leadership of the Euro-Atlantic space, it failed to gain the traction needed for effectively isolating Russia from the Europeans.
Behind the stage, Germany worked diligently to ease tensions. Putin operated at multiple levels in Berlin to ward off the cold warriors in the US, bringing into play his range of contacts in German business and industry and among politicians.
If a Ukraine settlement holds — the pitfalls are many, given the trust deficit in US-Russia ties — the credit also goes to the “Obama Doctrine”. President Obama left the Kremlin with an existential choice — if Russia opted for military intervention in Ukraine, it would encounter no “enemy”.
Posted in Diplomacy, Politics.
Tagged with New Cold War, Ukraine crisis.
By M K Bhadrakumar – May 23, 2014
