In 2004, Russian President Putin said that the collapse of the Soviet Union “It was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” which our hawks took up as Moscow’s desire for more Cold War.
They should have waited for the rest of the sentence: “Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and compatriots found themselves beyond the borders of Russian territory.”
Putin was right, as reflected in the fate of the pro-Russian people of South Ossetia stranded in Georgia, versus that of the Russian-speaking minority stranded in Ukraine.
Arbitrary borders
In Soviet times, borders between republics were often determined more by political or geographical issues than by linguistic or cultural ones. Thus, the Ossetian people, which stretched out on both sides of the Caucasus Mountains, were divided in two: the northern part remained in Russia and the southern part was arbitrarily placed in the Soviet Republic of Georgia.
Russian speakers in Ukraine were simply told that they were no longer part of Russia and that they had to consider themselves Ukrainians from then on.
In Soviet times that didn’t matter much: everyone was part of the great Soviet Union.
Putin’s concern is justified
However, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, did issue. To protect South Ossetia, Moscow placed peacekeepers along the borders with Georgia.
When Georgia attacked the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali on 8 August 2008, killing Russian peacekeepers on the border, Moscow immediately responded with a full-scale war.
Georgia was defeated and forced to recognize South Ossetia as an independent republic.
Ukraine is wrong to rely on diplomacy
With Ukraine, Moscow simply relied on the 2014-2015 Minsk Agreements, which had promised autonomy to some of the Russian-speakers stranded in Ukraine, in the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.
But for Ukraine’s extremist nationalists and neo-Nazis, the agreements were nothing more than a dead letter. In the eight years until 2022, they managed to attack and kill around 14,000 people in the two autonomous regions.
Meanwhile, Moscow was eagerly seeking to give diplomatic force to agreements: the NATO-Russia Council, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the US-Russia strategic stability talks, culminating in the Normandy Format with its Trilateral Contact Group.
Eventually, and under some domestic criticism, Putin realized that he had been tricked and that the West had used the agreements simply to give Ukraine time to rearm.
It decided to launch its “special military operation” against Ukraine on February 22, 2022.
But he still wanted to rely on diplomacy. Just two days after launching the “special operation,” Moscow began peace talks with Ukraine, which began in Belarus and culminated in the Istanbul Communique at the end of March, in which both sides agreed to mutual concessions to end the war that had just begun.
But Boris Johnson stepped in and told kyiv it did not have to make any concessions to Moscow and could rely on the West for any support it needed.
So instead of peace, we have had a war that lasted more than two years, hundreds of thousands dead on both sides, and a NATO-dominated West willing to supply even more weapons to keep the war going.
Worse still, Moscow now faces the prospect of NATO-allied Ukraine just 313 miles away and within range to launch an unanswered nuclear strike.
The nuclear threat of not responding: there is no time to react if you are attacked
Putin should reconsider his stance. If Moscow had relied on the South Ossetian model of maintaining peacekeeping forces along the borders of the two autonomous provinces from the beginning, it could have launched its “special operation” the moment hostile forces entered the scene.
Instead, relying on diplomacy, it had to dither and delay while many died. Worse, it now also faces a hostile Finland, newly recruited by NATO thanks to the Ukraine war, just 500 miles from Moscow and also within range to launch an unanswered nuclear strike.
Some now suggest that Russia should move its capital, which is 3,360 kilometres from Moscow, to Novosibirsk in Siberia, and away from any potential enemies.
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