Cementing front lines risks entrenching Putin’s Ukraine sway
Cementing front lines risks entrenching Putin’s Ukraine sway
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Parent Category: World
Category: International news
The buffer zone being carved out to bring peace to eastern Ukraine may also cement the conflict’s front lines and preserve Russian President Vladimir Putin’s influence over the region for years to come.
More than 3,500 people have died in the 10-month crisis that sent the economy into a tailspin before a tenuous cease- fire this month. As the Ukrainian army prepares to pull back to create a buffer zone, a move pro-Russian rebels say they would match, it’s leaving behind parts of Ukraine’s industrial and coal-producing heartland known as Donbas — a region that’s home to more than 50 suppliers for Russia’s defence industry.
The new 30-kilometre wide demilitarized area risks creating a simmering conflict that gives Putin a lever over Ukraine’s future and threatens to slow the country’s integration with the European Union, according to Joerg Forbrig of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. The Russian leader has suggested Ukraine switch to a federal system that would give regions a veto over major state decisions, such as EU or NATO membership.
“Indications are indeed that Donbas will be turned into a frozen conflict,” Forbrig, a senior program officer for central and Eastern Europe in Berlin, said by email. “There is no chance that Kyiv can re-establish its control of the area, the buffer zone effectively establishes a demarcation line.”
Ukraine won’t delegate “key state functions” such as determining foreign policy, President Petro Poroshenko told reporters in Kyiv Thursday.
“The question of territorial integrity, the question of independence can’t be put up for bids,” he said.
Preserving the deadlock would follow a template Russia has used elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. The Kremlin has troops based in Moldova’s separatist region of Transnistria and in Georgia’s breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. While both Moldova and Georgia have formal ties with the EU, neither is an official candidate for membership.
That state “could last for months, years, or even decades in the absence of a definitive solution,” Tatiana Orlova, an economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group in London, said in an emailed report.
“Transnistria condemned people living there — who used to live in one of the richest Soviet republics — to 20 years of poverty and misfortune,” Poroshenko said. “The experience of Transnistria, Ossetia and Abkhazia gives me grounds for optimism that we will be able to preserve the integrity and sovereignty of our country.”
Signs of the conflict easing have helped Russian stocks and the currency to rebound even as sanctions still threaten to tip the economy in the recession. The ruble is the fifth-best performer in the past five days among 24 emerging-market currencies tracked by Bloomberg, having stayed little changed, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The Ukrainian hryvnia, the world’s worst-performing currency this year with a 36 per cent plunge against the dollar, has gained 4.6 per cent in the past month, more than any of the more than 170 currencies tracked by Bloomberg, except the Ghana cedi.
Shaky as the cease-fire may be, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Sept. 21 praised it for de-escalating tensions and reached out to the rebels by blaming rogue groups for violations. His comments were echoed by a separatist leader the next day as both sides said they were preparing to pull back to establish a no-fire zone between them.
“I have no doubt that the main, most dangerous part of the war is over,” Poroshenko said today. “I have no doubt that my peace plan will work.”
The two sides hashed out the cease-fire agreement in Minsk, Belarus and lawmakers in Kyiv agreed to give special powers to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions for three years. The pact was amended last week to create a buffer zone and NATO said that it detected signs of Russia pulling back its forces. The government in Moscow has denied involvement.
Fixing the front lines pegs Ukraine’s army at the edge of a swathe of the country’s industrial heartland extending westward from the Russian border. The military had the upper hand early last month, encircling Donetsk and Luhansk, the largest cities in the conflict zone. A counteroffensive in the last week of August pushed government forces back and threatened the key port city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov coast.
Replicating a deadlock like the one in Moldova, which has lasted more than 20 years, would allow Putin to influence Ukraine’s future, according to Otilia Dhand, an analyst at Teneo Intelligence in London.
“A frozen conflict will discourage Ukraine’s integration with the EU and the NATO and give Moscow some leverage over Kyiv, but not a very reliable one,” Dhand said by e-mail.
Putin was forced to change tack with the February ouster of Russia-backed Viktor Yanukovych from the presidency, which derailed his push to lure Ukraine into his Eurasian trading bloc. While the Russian leader would still prefer to turn Ukraine into a federal state where regions have veto power over foreign policy, leaving the conflict deadlocked is probably an acceptable “Plan C” for him, Dhand said.
US and EU sanctions triggered a flight of capital from Russia and raised the risk of a recession. That prospect may be difficult to swallow for Putin, according to Andras Racz, an analyst on Russia and the EU’s Eastern Partnership at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki.
“If you add Western sanctions to the picture, these are becoming increasingly inconvenient for Moscow so at this point, going for the frozen conflict gives Russia higher chances of removing the sanctions,” Racz said by phone.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, urged the US and the European Union not to lift sanctions until his country regains control all of its territory.
While the cease-fire is holding, having cut casualties to a fraction according to Poroshenko, hostilities may flare up at any time, Yatsenyuk said. He called Putin’s peace plan that presaged the truce as “window dressing for the international community,” saying in an e-mailed statement that it’s a ploy to duck US and EU sanctions.
For now, though, the fighting has abated. The pause comes after direct damage of 345 million euros, more than 600,000 people have been displaced and with the availability of food “fragile” for the more than 5 million people living in the conflict zone, according to the UN Ukraine’s central bank estimates that the country’s economy may shrink as much as 10 per cent this year.
“While choosing among the other alternatives, a frozen conflict may not be the worst,” Yuriy Yakimenko, head of the political department at the Razumkov Center in Kyiv, said by phone. “The other alternative is full-scale war.”
Daryna Krasnolutska – Bloomberg News
– With assistance from Ott Ummelas in Tallinn and Volodymyr Verbyany in Kyiv.
Image: Anatolii Boiko / AFP / Lehtikuva