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Great Powers fail Ukraine

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Ukraine agreed to surrender its nuclear arsenal and become a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1994. In exchange, the United Kingdom, Russia and the United States signed a memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine’s national security.

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That year, American President Bill Clinton stopped off in Kyiv on his way to a summit in Moscow. Clinton met with Ukraine’s president, Lenoid Kravchuk, to thank him in person for “committing Ukraine to eliminate 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 1,500 nuclear warheads targeted at the United States,” Clinton writes in his memoir entitled My Life. “Kravchuk faced considerable opposition in parliament to getting rid of his nuclear weapons, and I wanted to support him.”

Bush and NATO

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Ukraine, along with Georgia, applied for NATO membership at the alliance’s 2008 summit at Bucharest. However, Germany and France were not supportive of their membership bids. “They worried NATO could get drawn into a war with Russia,” former U.S. Ppresident George W. Bush writes in this 2010 book Decision Points. “They were also concerned about corruption.”

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However, Bush believed that Russia posed a security threat to Ukraine and Georgia. “Russia would be less likely to engage in aggression if these countries were on a path into NATO,” Bush writes. And on the corruption issue, Bush asserts that putting them on track to join the alliance would have encouraged them “to clean up corruption.”

Obama and Maidan

In late 2013, Viktor Yanukovych, then the pro-Moscow president of Ukraine, began to lose his grip on power when faced with a growing grassroots reform movement. The precipitating event was Yanukovych’s decision, under heavy pressure from the Putin regime, to abruptly pull out of a proposed trade pact with the European Union in favour of a closer economic relationship with Russia. By reneging on the deal, Yanukovych dashed the hopes of ordinary Ukrainians that they would one day join the European Union.

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Meanwhile, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, determined to restore the old Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, pressured the Yanukovych regime to resist massive pro-democracy street demonstrations.

Yanukovych responded to the so-called Revolution of Dignity in Maidan Nezalezhnosti with brutal force on the streets of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. But the Maidan movement had grown too powerful to be held back with violence. Yanukovych fled Ukraine in late February 2014, and the reformers took power. And before long, Ukraine held democratic elections, setting out on a course independent of Moscow.

“Vladimir Putin, displeased that he had lost his puppet in Kyiv, immediately sent a force across the border and annexed the Ukrainian oblast (province) of Crimea,” former U.S. vice-president Joe Biden writes in the 2017 edition of his book entitled Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.

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Despite Russia’s expulsion from the G8 and the imposition of international economic sanctions, Putin stepped up his aggression in Ukraine. “He menaced other oblasts in the east of Ukraine for the next six months and sent Russian tank units across the border to slaughter Ukrainians who resisted,” Biden writes of the military campaign. And the Minsk agreement of 2014 failed to produce a lasting ceasefire.

U.S. President Barack Obama, wary of stumbling into a direct military confrontation with Russia, made the decision not to commit U.S. troops or provide lethal military assistance to Ukraine. And Obama tapped Biden to be his point person on the Ukraine file.

Fearful of angering Russia, a major supplier of natural gas to Europe, the Europeans offered only timid assistance to the democratically elected government of President Petro Poroshenko. And Biden was concerned that the failure of the Poroshenko government to vigorously fight corruption in Ukraine’s government, military, and private sector would give the Europeans an “excuse for walking away from the sanctions regime against Russia.”

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Biden, with the support of the Obama administration as well as the International Monetary Fund, continued to push for reforms while helping Ukraine secure aid packages from the fund and loan guarantees from the U.S.

At the end of 2015, Biden travelled to Kyiv to address the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. “Time was running out on the Ukrainian government to get it right,” Biden recalls of that difficult time. He points out that Ukraine’s economy was buckling under the pressure applied by Russia.

Biden observed that “corruption was strangling economic growth, hollowing out the military, and destroying trust in government.” Although the Rada had established the National Anti-corruption Bureau, Biden lamented the fact that it “had not yet prosecuted anyone, and graft was still rampant in both the major political parties.”

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The vice-president was also aware that Ukraine’s prosecutor general at that time was “tainted by corruption.” With the backing of Obama and the support of the IMF, Biden demanded that Poroshenko fire the prosecutor general and replace him with an official who would vigorously pursue corruption cases.

Russian aggression at sea

On Nov. 25, 2018, the Russian Coast Guard attacked three Ukrainian naval vessels in the Strait of Kerch, ramming a tugboat and firing on the other two vessels. The Russians then seized the Ukrainian vessels and took 23 Ukrainian sailors prisoner.

The Kerch Strait is the passage between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Under international maritime convention, the strait is considered an international waterway through which ships have the right to pass freely.

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Last year, Putin tightened his grip on Crimea, opening a newly constructed bridge across the Kerch Strait that provides a physical link between Russia and Russian-occupied territory. And Moscow is illegally asserting total control over the Kerch Strait and all waters off the Russian-occupied Crimea Peninsula.

Trump plays politics

In addition to the annexation of Crimea, Moscow has been backing Russian-speaking rebels in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine. The Putin regime has been using insurgents to further destabilize and disassemble Ukraine.

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reports that approximately 13,000 have been killed in the conflict, including more than 3,300 civilian deaths.

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The United Nations High Commission for Refugees website reports that “Ukraine is the ninth-largest country in the world in terms of the number of internally displaced persons.” There are currently 1.5 million internally displaced persons in Ukraine.

While Ukraine has been fighting for its very survival, U.S. President Donald Trump has been recklessly playing politics.

Earlier this year, Trump withheld approximately $400 million in military assistance earmarked for Ukraine while the White House supposedly conducted a corruption review. However, the Pentagon had already conducted its own review and concluded that Ukraine had undertaken institutional reforms to reduce corruption. The money was finally released by the White House on Sept. 11, 2019.

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Late last month, a whistleblower complaint alleged that the president had attempted to leverage U.S. military assistance to Ukraine to gain opposition research on Biden, the leading contender for the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination. In a nutshell, Trump made it clear that he wanted the Ukrainians to investigate Biden and his son Hunter for corruption.

A declassified memorandum of a July 25 telephone conversation between Trump and Ukraine’s President Zelensky shows that the Ukrainian leader was eager to acquire Javelin missiles from the U.S. Trump responded by saying that he wanted Zelensky “to do us a favour.” And that was when Trump asked Zelensky to investigate the Bidens.

On Oct. 3, Kurt Volker, Trump’s former special envoy for Ukraine, appeared before two Congressional committees. And he provided legislators with U.S. diplomatic text messages about the Ukraine affair. The texts were made public that night.

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“It’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” William Taylor, U.S. diplomat and Kyiv Charge d’Affaires, complained in one of the texts.

On Oct. 3, the U.S. State Department announced a proposed sale of 150 Javelin anti-tank weapons and 10 launchers to Ukraine.

Capitulation

On Oct. 1, the Ukrainian government and pro-Moscow separatists in war-torn eastern Ukraine signed a deal that would sanction local elections in rebel-controlled areas. The Kremlin had insisted that Ukraine agree to the deal as a precondition for a peace summit involving Zelensky, Putin, Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron. Former Ukrainian president Poroshenko has publicly derided the deal as a capitulation to Russia.

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Ironically, the Germans and French, having refused Ukraine admission to NATO back in 2004 and left it vulnerable to Russian aggression, are now mediating the peace process that could very result in Ukraine’s breakup.

In the final analysis, Ukraine has been failed many times by the Great Powers. The security guarantee given to Ukraine in 1994 by the U.K., U.S. and Russia was worthless. Having declawed Ukraine, Russia is now moving in for the kill.

Meanwhile, successive American presidents have failed Ukraine, leaving it vulnerable to invasion. And Donald Trump’s attempt to leverage Ukraine’s urgent need for military assistance for political gain is a shocking abuse of power that further diminishes America’s international reputation.

Follow Geoffrey P. Johnston on Twitter @GeoffyPJohnston.

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