Ok,miről szól?Ideally a peace settlement would also include a treaty establishing Ukrainian neutrality for the next generation, modeled on the Austrian State Treaty and associated Austrian law on neutrality of 1955, but to be ended or renewed after 30 years. Though not strictly necessary, such a treaty would remove the greatest motive by far for Russian interference in and intimidation of Ukraine.
Ukraine and the United States would sacrifice nothing by such a treaty, since it is impossible for Ukraine to join NATO so long as the Donbas conflict and Crimean dispute remain open. Furthermore, the treaty would be a barrier against any future Russian attempt to dominate Ukraine, for it would also rule out Ukrainian membership in any Russian-dominated alliance. This treaty would therefore prevent Russia from repeating its bid to draw Ukraine into the Eurasian Union, an attempt that provided the initial spark for the Ukrainian revolution of 2013–14. From Moscow’s point of view, this would be a blow: Ukrainian membership is essential to any hope of making the Eurasian Union into a serious international bloc. By contrast, Ukrainian membership in NATO and the EU, far from strengthening those bodies, would in fact drastically weaken them. On balance, therefore, Ukrainian neutrality would disadvantage Russia more than the West.
As for Ukrainian membership in the EU, this is ruled out for at least a generation to come by Ukraine’s corruption, political dysfunction, and lack of economic progress. The deep internal problems of the EU also make Ukrainian membership in the near to medium term quite implausible. These challenges include the immense costs of economic recovery from the Covid crisis and of EU promises to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2055, a pledge that would leave little money for the huge task of subsidizing Ukraine’s economy to the point where it could join the EU.
At $285 million a year (in 2020), US economic development aid to Ukraine does not begin to meet Ukrainian needs, let alone help prepare the country for EU membership. The miserable examples of corruption in the new EU member states of Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia, and of chauvinist authoritarianism in Hungary and Poland, also make it exceptionally unlikely that the EU would seek a large and impoverished new Eastern member for many years to come.
Ukrainian politicians might wish to study the examples of Finland, Sweden, and Austria during the Cold War. These states lost nothing through neutrality and developed as prosperous, law-abiding, democratic Western societies that were able to join the EU after the Cold War ended. They could achieve this not through an EU or NATO accession process but rather because the elites and populations of these countries were genuinely committed to democracy, the rule of law, and regulated market economics.
The Minsk proposal for a solution to the Donbas conflict ignores the other territorial dispute between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian annexation of Crimea. This was, however, inevitable. Since Russia has annexed Crimea (in accordance, it seems, with the wishes of a majority of the region’s population), no Russian government can give it up short of decisive defeat in war. Like other such issues in the world (Kashmir and Kosovo, for example), this question will simply have to be shelved until it is either quietly forgotten or fundamental changes in the international scene permit its solution.
These proposals will meet with strong opposition from Ukrainian nationalists and their supporters in the West, including some in the US Congress. Such opponents, however, have a duty to say what they themselves are proposing as an alternative to a settlement based on the Minsk II Protocol. Is it remotely likely that the West can bring enough economic pressure to bear on Russia to force it to abandon the Donbas without guarantees of autonomy? If not, can Ukraine win a war against Russia to force Russia to do so? If this is impossible, will the United States ever deliberately go to war with Russia to compel it to abandon the Donbas? Without a solution to the Donbas conflict, can Ukraine ever hope to join the EU?
Since the answer to all of these questions is no, the only basis for a settlement is that of the Minsk II Protocol. At present, the US approach to Ukraine is a zombie policy—a dead strategy that is wandering around pretending to be alive and getting in everyone’s way, because US policy-makers have not been able to bring themselves to bury it.
Opposition to a reasonable compromise over Ukraine also stems in part from a fear that Russia’s strategy there is a key component of much wider Russian ambitions, and that compromise will automatically lead to Russian aggression elsewhere that “challenges the entire architecture of the post–Cold War order,” as former US ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns put it in 2014. Yet this attitude shows a serious lack of historical knowledge, international perspective, and intellectual balance. By this standard, the Pakistani claim to Kashmir is the prelude to a Pakistani invasion of Myanmar, and the Argentine attack on the Falklands was part of a plan to conquer Brazil. The Donbas, Crimea, and Ukraine’s international alignments are vital issues for Russia in themselves, not paths to somewhere else.
For US policy-makers to be motivated by a wider hostility toward Russia to block a Ukrainian settlement would be a failure of logic as well as of statesmanship; the current Western hostility toward Russia stems above all from the crisis in Ukraine and Russia’s actions there, and this hostility will be greatly reduced by an end to the Ukrainian crisis.
No serious explanation has ever been given by a US administration to the American public of why eastern Ukraine—a region that historically was of minimal concern to the United States—should in recent years have supposedly become so strategically important. The advocates of bringing Ukraine into NATO also forgot, or never learned, a rule of geopolitics: In the end, all real power is to be judged not on a global and absolute basis but on a local and relative one. That is, it depends on the degree of power that a state is willing and able to bring to bear on a given issue versus that which a rival state is willing and able to commit.
Russia’s willingness to bring power to bear in Ukraine has much deeper roots than that of the United States. In the case of the Donbas, if US attention to the region dates back some 30 years, the interest of the Moscow-based Russian state (later the Russian Empire) dates back some 600 years, and that of the previous state of Kievan Rus (whose legacy is disputed between Russia and Ukraine) up to 600 years before that.
To say this is not to justify Russia’s actions in the region since 2014, any more than to acknowledge permanent US interests in Central America is to justify all past US actions there. But great powers will inevitably take a strong interest in regions on their borders, and will react with suspicion and hostility to the appearance of rival great powers there.
The argument that Ukraine constitutes a US asset in the event of Russian aggression against the West is illogical and dangerous. First, the only really serious threat of military conflict with Russia is precisely over the disputed territories in Ukraine. Second, it is NATO, of which Ukraine is not a member, that exists to deter and repel any Russian attempt to dominate Europe—something that in any case is extremely unlikely, given both the comparative size of the Russian and EU economies and the lack of any evidence of such a Russian ambition.
America’s greatest interest in Ukraine is the prevention of a conflict there. Even a limited new war between Ukraine and Russia would distract the United States from much more important challenges elsewhere. If the US were drawn into such a war (not deliberately but as the result of a series of accidents), this would be a catastrophe for America, Russia, the world—and Ukraine itself."
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Akinek The Nation nem lenne ismeros: a legregebbi valoban fuggetlen, 156 eve folyamatosan publikalt politikai hetilap, kifejezetten balos, de abban mindenfele iranyzat (rengeteg fel is tud bosziteni az idiota komcsi okorsegeivel), de mindenkeppen szinvonalas.
Befolyasara talan egy jo pelda 1925-bol (bal felso olvasoi level):
Van értelme belekezdeni a fordítózásba ,így korán reggel?
Gondolom már sokan tudtodra adták mennyire visszatetsző ez a viselkedésed. Most kénytelen vagyok én is ezt tenni, bármennyire is hiábavaló.
