Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 6 – Vladimir Putin’s
invasion of Ukraine and the failure of the West so far to repel it has a
longer-term consequence that few are prepared to face: The Kremlin leader’s
actions will lead ever more countries to seek to build or otherwise acquire
nuclear weapons as the only reliable means of self-defense.
In a new commentary, Ukrainian
commentator Vitaly Portnikov says that Putin’s aggression against Ukraine opens
the way to a dangerous new world in which far more countries will feel
compelled to go nuclear as the only reliable means of defending their existence
as independent countries (rus.newsru.ua/columnists/05Dec2014/kaspastimir.html).
They will see what happened to
Ukraine and will be able to draw no other conclusion unless Putin’s forces are
not only expelled from Ukrainian territory but also that his country is
punished as an aggressor, given that in the Budapest memorandum, signed 20
years ago, Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons on its territory in exchange for
security guarantees.
The responsibility for the emergence
of that vastly more dangerous world lies both with Putin, who has violated the
provisions of that accord, and with the United States and Great Britain, who
have failed to live up to the requirement that they defend Ukraine’s
sovereignty as a non-nuclear state.
This pattern, Portnikov says
provides the best possible argument for staying nuclear if your country already
has such weapons or for seeking to acquire them if your government does not.
“If the territorial integrity of
Ukraine is sacrificed,” he continues, “then a decade from now there will be
more nuclear states” because “it will become clear that only a nuclear status
is a firm guarantee of sovereignty and territorial integrity and that no
sanctions of the existing nuclear powers will change anything because no one
believes them any longer.”
Such
an expansion of the number of nuclear states, one that Putin bears direct
responsibility for because of his invasion of Ukraine and that the West bears
indirect responsibility for by its failure to stop him will be a far more
dangerous one, with a far greater likelihood that local and regional conflicts
will grow into a worldwide conflagration.
“As a result, “millions of people
will die, tens of millions will remain without the basis for life, and the
resources of any who survive will have to be spent on the liquidation of the consequences
of numerous humanitarian catastrophes,” a price that those wondering about
whether and how to aid Ukraine resist Russian aggression should reflect upon.
According to Portnikov, there is “another much
less dangerous path forward.” That is to “sacrifice the territorial integrity
of Russia,” a country “which has violated its most important international
obligations.” By organizing that future, he continues, the international community
would be sending a clear message: nuclear states that violate the territorial
integrity of non-nuclear states will suffer in a serious way.
Such change is “the only chance to
save humanity” from a nuclear disaster in the future, he argues.
“For this, one need not fight
Russia.” Sanctions, cutting the price of oil, freezing contacts with Moscow and
blocking the activities of its oligarchs – “all these are effective levers,” he
says, “for stimulating a cleansing crisis in a country” which exists only as an
oil exporter and a violator of international norms.
Just what configuration such a
Russia should have – be it a single federal state, a community of regions or
independent countries – “will be defined by the citizens of Russia. That is not
our affair. Ours is to solve the question about the return to within Ukraine and
to within other countries which have suffered from Moscow’s aggression.”
Portnikov says that if this happens,
it will be a useful lesson for the entire world, but in the first instance it
will transform Russia from “an organized criminal group masquerading as a state
into a good neighbor who respects humanistic civilizational values and will
seek to resolve with other countries in Europe the tasks of economic
development and security.”
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