Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 20 – Petr
Iskenderov, a researcher at the Moscow Institute of Slavic Studies and a
commentator for Russia Today, says that it now appears the US has accepted what
he calls “the Donbas Model” for the resolution not only of the conflict in
Ukraine but for similar conflicts elsewhere.
That model, he says, is where
decisions are reached not by the country whose territory is directly affected
but rather by diplomatic efforts “among the leading world powers” to find “a
balance of forces” acceptable to them not just between states but within them (fondsk.ru/news/2016/01/20/roditsja-li-v-mirovoj-praktike-donbasskaja-model-38097.html).
Given Iskenderov’s role as a
propagandist, it is entirely possible that he is presenting what he and his
bosses would like to be the case as a reality already achieved. But his words
are important because of what they say about Moscow’s thinking now not only
about Ukraine but about the international system as such.
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Among the
commentaries about the January 15 meeting between Vladislav Surkov and
Victoria Nuland, the Moscow analyst says, he was especially struck by one by
Aleksandr Chalenko on the Internet portal Ukraina.ru (ukraina.ru/opinions/20160116/1015334477.html).
Citing an unnamed source “close
to one of the members of the Russian delegation at the talks in Kaliningrad,”
Chalenko wrote that “’Surkov and Nuland achieved a number of compromises on
Ukraine’ concerning the methods of ‘forcing Kyiv to the fulfillment of Minsk
2.’”
That source also said that “’the
American side had agreed to consider the status of the Donbas proposed by the
Kremlin,’” which would involve among other things the right of the
governments there to be involved in foreign policy activity and even to
conclude international treaties.”
That there might be “an analogy
between the conflict in the Donbas which has divided Ukraine and the Kosovo
conflict has been remarked even earlier,” Iskenderov says. But this report
about the Surkov-Nuland talks suggests that the Americans and Russians may be
converging on that option.
That makes a re-examination of
the Yugoslav case especially instructive and “useful,” he says.
During the 1990s, five
elf-proclaimed states arose on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, but
they have had very different fates depending on how much support they
received from the outside world. The problems arose because the international
community sanctioned the division of Yugoslavia “along the borders of former
republics” but “refused to recognize” any divisions within them as the basis
for changes.
“As a result,” Iskenderov says,
what happened there “became not ‘the self-determination of nations’ but the
self-determination of administrative units (republics) which in and of
themselves had a conflict-generating potential.” As a result, the peoples of
the former Yugoslavia and “in the first instance the Serbs remained divided
and ‘un-self-determined.’”
(Iskenderov does not say but
clearly implies that exactly the same thing happened in the case of the
demise of the USSR, with “administrative units” achieving
“self-determination” but peoples and especially the ethnic Russians not
having any opportunity for that within the other republics.)
“One must recognize that the
adaptation of ‘the Kosovo model’ to the Donbas is thinkable only if the West
applies pressure, but it is improbable considering that the application of ‘the
Kosovo model’ in the Donbas would give force to movements in support of ‘the
Russian world’ in many parts of post-Soviet Eurasia,” the analyst continues.
That isn’t something the US and
the EU would welcome, and just as baseless are expectations that the DNR and
the LNR could be “liquidated” militarily as was the Serbska Kraina in
Croatia. Thus what remains is “the Dayton model” which is quite applicable,
he argues, to “the conflict which has divided Ukraine.”
Of course, Iskenderov argues, “models
for the resolution of conflicts similar to those which is now present in the
Donbas exist not only in the Balkans.”
They exist in the Caucasus in the cases of Abkhazia and South Osetia. “Besides
this, world practice is familiar with a broad specter of legal forms of the
existence of state formations” in which part of the territory of one state
may enter into relations or even be subordinate to another state.
This arrangement may be called “a
confederation” or “associate statehood” or something else. And he points out
that the last such example involved Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878-1908 “when
these two provinces formally remained in the Ottoman Empire but in fact were
under the administrative control of Austro-Hungary.”
But what matters, Iskenderov
says, is not the name but arrangements which correspond to “the balance of
forces between the leading world powers [and] that concerns the future fate
of the people of the Donbas.
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