UKRAINE NEXT FLASHPOINT?

Vice-President Dick Cheney knows his history as well as anyone and it has not escaped his notice that Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula could be the scene of a new conflict between East and the West following Russia’s invasion of the Georgian province of South Ossieta.
Before the vice-president’s recent visit to Ukraine he would have known that the Crimea has always had an important place in our history books. At school, many of us learned Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” depicting how 600 British lancers charged Russian guns at Balaclava during the Crimean War of 1854-56. That war was between the Russian Empire and the combined armies of Britain and French, all of them battling for what remained of the Ottoman Empire. While it was a conflict that gave us Florence Nightingale, above all it was a war of folly, epitomized by the Light Brigade Charge, which a French General described as “madness.” But that comment by the general was not the one that historians have chosen to best remember. The general’s most quoted line has always been: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre” - it’s magnificent but it’s not war.
Another major event of that war was the siege of Sevastopol where the Russian Tsar had his fleet. Today the port hosts the Russian Black Sea fleet and the city is like a Russian city teeming with Russian sailors. Ukraine, which gained independence in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, has leased the port to Russia until 2017 but is threatening it will not renew the lease.
The Ukraine is a mainly Christian nation that looks westward and hopes, like Georgia, to join NATO. Its landmass makes it the 44th largest country in the world with a population of 45 millions, of which 17% claim to be Russian. During World War II, millions of its citizens died and of the almost 8 million soldiers of the Red Army that perished on the Eastern front at least 25% of them were Ukrainians. Later, when the Cold War began, Ukraine achieved greater autonomy than many Soviet Republics and it was hardly surprising that it eventually declared independence from Moscow.
One of its first moves after independence was to hand back to Moscow a massive nuclear arsenal and to sign up to a nuclear non-proliferation agreement. However, it kept its large military and naval forces, making it second to Russia in the number of men it had under arms – some 445,000. Its economy remains strong and it can claim to have an edge over many countries in missile and satellite technology. Many of the Soviet space and nuclear missile experiments were designed and carried out by Ukrainians.
Overall, the country’s vulnerability, like many European nations, lies in its reliance on Russia for energy, especially oil and gas. It also uses nuclear power but again has to rely on Russia for fuel to run its nuclear power plants. Ironically, the vast majority of Russian gas piped to Western Europe is routed through the Ukraine, making it a vital energy hub for East and West.
A sign that Moscow sees Ukraine, and especially the Crimea, as important to its national interests is that Russian leaders have made it clear they have no intention of vacating the port of Sevastopol in 2017 no matter what the Ukrainian government decrees. That has encouraged observers in the West to conclude that Russia intends to expand its presence in the Crimea. Should Russia launch the type of military action it undertook in Georgia, the Ukraine would be effectively split, depriving it of a major port and a strategic economic corridor. The Ukrainian authorities have been warning Washington and the EU for some time that Russia has been secretly issuing Russian passports to people in the Crimea. The aim, say the Ukrainians, it to permit Russia to argue that the Crimea has a large Russian population, which Moscow is obliged to defend it; an argument similar to the one Russia used for invading South Ossieta.
The West has close relations with the Ukraine because Ukrainian forces have been involved in peacekeeping in Kosovo and in Lebanon and have been assisting the US Coalition in Iraq and Afghanistan. As soon as the US and its NATO allies realized they were blindsided by Russia’s invasion of Georgia, where it appears Russia intends to maintain a military presence, Western leaders turned their attention to the Ukraine, focusing on its Crimean peninsula. NATO cannot afford to allow Russia to take control of the Crimea because that would further weaken the transatlantic Alliance and would indicate that Moscow cannot be stopped from continuing a strategy to regain territory lost during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Vice-President Dick Cheney on his visit to the region bluntly warned that Russia was acting provocatively and that Ukraine’s security mattered to the West. That latter assertion implied the West will not stand idly by if Russia tries to repeat its South Ossieta strategy by sending is military into the Crimea. The Ukraine would be no military push over and any conflict there could expand into a much larger confrontation between Russia and the West.
Russia says it is angered by the presence of US warships in the Black Sea, which the Pentagon claims have been bringing much needed humanitarian supplies to Georgia. In recent weeks the Russian president has twice warned that Russia will find a way to respond to what it sees as this US military presence at its backdoor, without specifying what the response will be. A hint of what it could be came in the form of a television address given by the Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez. He said he had been told by Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev that the Russian Fleet hoped to visit Venezuela for a “friendly and working visit” before the end of 2008. In other words, the Russian Fleet will soon be in the Caribbean at America’s backdoor. Russia has developed an ongoing relationship with Chavez and has increased its links to Cuba. In recent years, Chavez agreed to purchase billions of dollars of military equipment from Russia, including fighter planes and ground to air missiles. He was one of the few world leaders to publicly support Russia’s invasion of South Ossieta.
It is unlikely, however, that Russia will seek to develop the kind of Cold War relationship it had with Cuba by putting missiles onto Cuban soil. Instead, it will probably use Cuba as and Venezuela as a way of saying to the United States: “If you can come into my back yard I can visit yours too.”
While those kinds of games can get out of hand, the most pressing issue is what is likely to happen on the ground in the Ukraine. The West’s military and political leaders are watching the Crimea for the slightest hint of a sudden Russian military move against the peninsula. This time NATO does not intend to be taken by surprise. But, as we all know from reading Tennyson’s poem about the charge of the ill-fated Light Brigade, the Crimea is a place where wars can follow a pattern of madness as that French general learned in 1854.