Experts take on Russia-Ukraine conflict

Editor's note: Since the outbreak of the crisis in Ukraine, problems have emerged on all fronts, and the confrontations and conflicts between religions, cultures, and societies have been deepening. The international community should focus on promoting peace talks, encouraging Russia and Ukraine to return to negotiations, and accumulating conditions of an early cease-fire. Three experts share their views on the issue with China Daily.

Unlike West, China promotes lasting peace

By Benyamin Poghosyan

Feb 24, 2022 will likely enter into history textbooks as a day that finally ended the post-Cold War global order marked by the United States' hegemony, and paved the way for the emergence of a new order, although it is too early to assess the features of that new order.

Will it be a multipolar world with fewer regulations and wars, or will it be a multipolar world where major powers will manage their competition while cooperating on common challenges such as climate change, pandemics, hunger and transnational crime?

As the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to rage with no light at the end of the tunnel, international community members pursue different policies and strategies.

We can identify two primary approaches to the conflict: one is primarily led by the United States and the other by China. The US position is clear: the conflict should continue as long as necessary to defeat Russia militarily, or weaken it significantly and transform Russia into a mid-level power with no resources to shape global developments.

The US has rallied the European Union, NATO and its Asian allies such as Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia and others around this goal. There are extreme voices in this camp that call for the de facto destruction of Russia advocating the dismemberment of Russia into several independent states, similar to what happened to the Soviet Union in 1991.

To achieve their primary goal of engineering Russia's military defeat, this group forced Ukraine to abandon negotiations with Russia in late March 2022, promising an indefinite flow of modern weaponry to the country to continue the fight against Russia. For this group, the war in Ukraine is an excellent opportunity to weaken Russia, creating "a second Afghanistan" for the Kremlin and potentially triggering domestic instability and even regime change in Moscow in the long run.

The US has been using the Russia-Ukraine conflict to strengthen its economic competitiveness against the EU. Recent US actions to increase the attractiveness of its economy, including adopting the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, have led some EU businesses to relocate to the US. The US convinced the EU, especially Germany, to abandon relatively cheap Russian oil and gas while significantly increasing the American LNG exports to Europe.

The supply of large amounts of US weapons to Ukraine and the decision by the US' European and Asian allies to significantly increase their defense budgets have created new channels of additional profits for the US defense industry.

Thus, by pouring oil on the Ukraine conflict fire, the US has been pursuing several goals — to weaken Russia as much as possible, to increase its economic advantages over the EU, and to end all discussions about "European strategic autonomy" pushed forward by France in recent years. The US is using the Ukraine conflict to reinstate its leadership over the EU and its Asian allies.

In this context, the US' interest is in continuing the Ukraine conflict as long as possible. This strategy creates some risks, too, and recently several influential US think tanks, such as RAND Corporation, published reports about the potential dangers of a prolonged war for the US. However, as of now, the mainstream US position has not changed — war should continue until "Russia's defeat", which means war should continue indefinitely.

China pursues a different policy. Recognizing the territorial integrity of Ukraine, China simultaneously accepts Russia's security concerns about NATO's enlargement and the US' policy to encircle Russia with a ring of military bases. China calls for the cessation of hostilities, and the launch of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine to find a lasting solution to the crisis. While keeping its strategic comprehensive partnership with Russia going and refusing to join the anti-Russia hysteria, China continues to work with Ukraine and thus is well positioned to push forward the idea of peace.

Of course, no one is naive enough to hope that the path toward a negotiated solution will be easy. Russia-Ukraine relations started deteriorating during the "Orange Revolution" of 2004. Military activities in 2014-15; no peace, no war in Donbas in 2015-early 2022; and the start of the large-scale conflict in February 2022 have significantly poisoned bilateral relations.

For too many Russians and Ukrainians, animosity between the two countries became a norm, while the deaths and destruction deepened mutual mistrust. But the core task of responsible global powers is not to ignite new conflicts or support indefinite wars for selfish geopolitical interests. Global power status does not imply only benefits in terms of influence and economic and military might. It also implies a necessity to promote peace and stability regionally and globally.

The Ukraine conflict has become the litmus test for global powers' intentions and behavior, and China has passed it.

The author is chairman, Center for Political and Economic Strategic Studies, Yerevan, Armenia.

Ukraine crisis: Think deeper or we all lose

By Jan Oberg

Whatever other reasons there may be for the Russia-Ukraine conflict, a major one is that we live in times characterized by an increasingly dangerous, perhaps fatal, combination of intellectual-moral disarmament and military re-armament. Militarism is now the main factor holding the Western (US-NATO — EU) world together. Militarism is a religion and NATO its church.

In different ways, militarists argue that their side is historically innocent and are justified to do what they are doing. NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg even said NATO is not a party to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. They also argue that they must win, meaning others must lose. The latter is an intellectual fallacy because it is fairly obvious that all parties could also win, all parties could also lose.

Those who have studied conflicts and wars know that, over time, warring parties tend to become mirror images of each other and argue alike — with just the roles reversed — and make the same fatal miscalculations and logical fallacies.

For Ukrainians, Ukraine must win — win back all its territory and get protected by NATO in the future. For Russians, Russia must win — win national security by controlling Crimea and the Donbas region of Ukraine, and ensure that Ukraine never becomes a full NATO member. For NATO-European Union, NATO must win — in the sense of getting Ukraine into NATO, and pushing Russia into a corner and fatally weakening it so it never again transgresses its borders and is economically destroyed, if not dismembered à la Yugoslavia.

These are the parties' completely unrealistically ideal or maximalist goals, illusions, at the war level and the government level. But what about the level of the underlying conflict?

Totally obsessed with weapons and war, neither the media nor politicians seem to have the slightest focus on, or understanding of, the underlying conflicts, the root causes of the violence playing out in Ukraine. They do not understand that the solution — not the win — has to do with an understanding of these root causes. They behave like a quack who diagnoses a patient by asking where the pain is and then applies pain boosters or killers, never asking the most relevant questions: Why the pain and where the pain and what's the cure?

This obsession, together with the three main parties' goals and dreams/illusions, makes for a very long and utterly destructive war which everybody will lose, not only the people in Ukraine but also in Western Europe and Russia.

Only when decision-makers and the media would educate themselves and remove the shroud of conflict — and peace-illiteracy can the focus move to the root causes: What were the conflicts that stood between the parties — the problems which they could not handle peacefully but took to violence to solve — politically, psychologically and militarily?

That is the moment when, in the best of cases, we open a new road to intelligent conflict-handling, to a negotiated solution and a sustainable peace. The think-alike militarists on all sides believe that peace will come when somebody wins militarily. But like the mentioned doctor who never opened a textbook in medicine can't re-create health, this thinking cannot re-create peace. Peace never grows out of the battlefield. Any fool can start a war. Restoring or maintaining peace requires neutral professional expertise and empathy.

If one or more of the parties stop and begin to think — there can be hope that the war will end and the deep conflicts will be addressed — peaceful coexistence can finally become a possibility.

Essentially, Ukraine is about the world's classical dilemma: the mindbogglingly immature realpolitik paradigm with national military "security" based on conventional and nuclear long-range offensive deterrence weapons. Invariably, it will lead to war — which calls for more weapons and leads deeper down into the intellectual and moral quicksand. And eventually someone presses the wrongest of all buttons.

The world of security politics is run by peace-illiterate elites of the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC. The global military expenditure has never been so high as today. The pace of NATO countries re-armament (already 12 times higher than Russia's before the Ukraine war) has never been so fast. A major war in Europe and the use of nuclear weapons have never looked so probable — while civil society is being starved.

If this weapons-obsessed thinking could bring world peace, it would have happened decades ago. The civilizational truth is that the enemy is us. Governments have let militarism loose instead of respecting the world's finest norm in the UN Charter's Article 1 — that peace shall be created by peaceful means. Ask how many military institutes, academies, think tanks, government units, research facilities and associations there are in the world compared with those for peace. No minister or statesman has peace advisers.

The discourse on peace — in research, politics and media — has disappeared. If we do not stop to think more deeply we shall all lose — dying as patients of society's cancer called militarism.

Let's use the NATO-Russia conflict playing out so tragically in Ukraine to stop and think. Let's make it the last war before it makes this humanity the last.

The author is PhD and director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, Sweden.

Conflict does nobody, except US, any good

By Zhao Huirong

With the Russia-Ukraine conflict about to enter its second year, it's time to take a fresh look at geopolitics in the Eurasian region. When Russia commenced its "special military operation", it underestimated Ukraine's determination and capability to fight, as well as the degree of Western involvement in the conflict.

The failure of the Russian troops to achieve their goals forced them to withdraw from northern Ukraine and shift their focus on key targets. Amid all this, the two sides held five rounds of negotiations.

The two sides have been engaged in a tug-of-war and positional warfare in eastern and southeastern Ukraine. Ukraine has carried out counterattacks against Russian troops as Western countries have increased support for the country.

The two sides are unable to negotiate due to mutual distrust and hatred, yet both are confident of eventually achieving victory, and are making plans to continue the conflict.

The conflict has been dragging on because it is not only a confrontation between Ukraine and Russia over some territory, but also a showdown between Russia, which is seeking regional dominance, and the United States, which is pursuing global hegemony. Basically, the conflict is a zero-sum game.

After 2014, Ukraine integrated two issues: joining the Western camp and "gaining true independence from Moscow". On its part, Russia considers Ukraine's choice as a threat to its security and a challenge to its dominance in the Eurasia region. That's why Russia chose to conduct the special military operation in Ukraine to stop NATO's eastward expansion and deter other Eurasian countries from following Ukraine's example.

Although Kyiv's decision is influenced by Washington and its army relies on Western support, the West refuses to get directly involved in the conflict. Instead, the Western countries have been providing "slow but steady" material and strategic support for Ukraine in the shape of advanced arms, ammunition and military equipment to fight Russia, because they believe this is the best way to weaken Russia.

The US believes that only sustained strangulation (military confrontation, economic sanctions and political isolation) can reduce Russia's national strength, allowing it to lay its hand on the country's abundant resources. And since Putin's administration is still stable, the US has been doing everything it can to prolong the conflict in order to weaken Russia.

US President Joe Biden signed the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022, indicating Washington's intention of providing long-term military aid for Kyiv, while the European Union's preference for protecting its security and political interests has prompted it to follow the US' strategy.

The conflict is likely to intensify in the short term with the Western countries providing more and more advanced weapons to Ukraine and imposing more sanctions on Russia and Belarus, which is supporting Russia politically and strategically. And with NATO's involvement in the conflict likely to deepen, Eastern European will become increasingly militarized.

In the medium term, Russia and Ukraine will be engaged in a battle of attrition, because negotiations will not yield concrete results as long as the two parties don't change their rigid stances.

And in the long term, the conflict will end only when one side suffers massive losses, runs out of combat power or there is a political upheaval in Russia. And although a cease-fire agreement may be reached at that time, it cannot resolve the territorial issues.

The spillover effects of the conflict have intensified bloc confrontation, worsened the international security situation, exacerbated the arms race, and triggered price hikes and inflation, slowing down global economic growth and causing food and energy crises in many parts of the world. The conflict has reshaped the Western political landscape, too.

The US wants to prolong the conflict, because that will allow it to consolidate its hold over the EU and strengthen the NATO alliance, while reaping huge profits from energy and arms sales.

The US considers China the most important geopolitical challenge and Russia a direct and constant threat to European security, and aims to counter both countries and create a chasm between China and the EU by linking issues associated with China and Russia with the conflict. But the US' hegemonic actions will face growing opposition from its allies and partners in the long run.

The conflict has led to unprecedented political cohesion among European countries which, following US-like policies, have accelerated the trend of militarization. For example, Germany changed its pacifist foreign policy and greatly increased its defense budget, while Sweden and Finland have applied to join NATO, which Russia sees as another provocative move.

The EU is facing high inflation and a severe energy crisis by banning imports of Russian oil and natural gas. Despite that, the EU prefers to follow in the US' footsteps rather than taking steps to meet the energy and food shortages, which EU citizens want.

Besides, Russia's weakening influence in Eurasia has reshaped the regional landscape. For example, while the Russia-Belarus alliance has strengthened, Ukraine and Moldova have been listed as EU candidate countries, and Georgia as a potential candidate country. And with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan promoting unity among Central Asian countries, the geopolitical game in Eurasia is becoming more complicated.

The future of Eurasia will largely depend on the outcome of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But the fact that the Russian economy shrank by less than 3 percent in 2022, much less than initially forecast, means it is more resilient than expected and Moscow can afford to intensify the conflict in the short term.

However, Russia's development environment will continue to deteriorate in the long run, and the structural transformation of its economy will be delayed, with its weakened economy leading to increasing uncertainties.

On the other hand, the conflict has consolidated Zelensky's political position and accelerated the accession of Ukraine into the EU, although the country lost some of its territory and its GDP shrunk by one-third in 2022, while more than 8 million Ukrainians have fled the country, making its reconstruction very difficult in the short term.

The author is a research fellow at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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