When Zelensky did not invoke NATO. Limes analysis of 2020
The thought of Ukrainian President Zelensky on NATO according to the reconstruction of Limes magazine in 2020
That going under the NATO umbrella was not only a bad idea, but the most damaging option for Ukraine, not without ambiguity, Volodymyr Zelensky had it all in all clear two years ago. A line that contrasted him with his predecessor – and challenger at the polls of 2019 – Petro Poroshenko .
Zelensky dominates the electoral scene by announcing reforms and a tough fight against corruption. "But the promise, managed with cunning in the key of national interest and never completely explicit in the times and ways, also had a great deal of weight, to get the country out of the impasse into which it had driven, even out of necessity, Poroshenko's old-atlantist politics ”, is the judgment of Fulvio Scaglione in a dense article of June 2020 for Limes ( “ Something new on the Ukrainian front ” ).
Former President Poroshenko said to the West: help us and Ukraine will be the first bulwark against Russia, our common enemy. "A pact that brought with it, included in the price, the ostentatious desire to join NATO". Probably even the Ukrainians at that time were not too sure of the total goodness of the project. Despite the important American aid to the military expenses to be guaranteed: weapons, equipment and 300 million a year paid to Kiev to support the commitment in the Donbas.
The country's guardian angels in Europe, France and Germany probably looked with skepticism at a NATO membership of Ukraine. It is no coincidence that the most critical of the Atlantic Alliance.
For the majority of the main actors on the stage, the point to be safeguarded was rather to seek a new balance with Vladimir Putin 's Russia. Presenting a marriage certificate between Ukraine and the Atlantic in the Kremlin could only provoke their anger.
Speaking of NATO, Scaglione observed, it is "a mixture of God (see the birth of the native Orthodox Church, so dear to Poroshenko), homeland and army, which could have pleased the Atlantic Alliance but which had as its only certain horizon the permanent conflict with Russia. After 14,000 deaths, one million displaced persons, three and a half million people in need of humanitarian assistance and a large part of the population in poverty or almost (according to some estimates, as much as 60%), it is not surprising that the Ukrainians have decided to turn the page ".
Indeed Poroshenko comes out of the vote overwhelmed by 73% of Zelensky. The oligarch and chocolate industrialist is beaten by the former actor who made it clear during the election campaign that he wanted to deal with Russia. "Repeating, of course, the mantra on the Crimea and Donbas to be liberated, but putting the prospect of an agreement, and not a military victory, at the basis of the program".
An availability – Limes wrote in 2020 – that has flushed out the Kremlin, "forcing it to reciprocate". There have been prisoner exchanges. In December 2019, in Paris, under the aegis of Macron and Merkel, Zelensky meets Putin . The result is a truce that goes on for several months. "Small steps forward, of course – underlines Scaglione -. An agreement on the conduct of elections in eastern Ukraine, a fundamental chapter of the Minsk 2 agreements, is still far off. But it would not be right to underestimate the slow rapprochement between the parties".
Putin also makes gestures. In February 2020 he appoints Dmitry Zozak as his special envoy in talks with Kiev and with the pro-Russian separatist republics of Donbas. Zozak – Putin 's loyalist – takes the place of the intransigent Vladislav Surkov . "One of the Russian moves that prefigured a different attitude towards open questions with the West," writes the former deputy director of Famiglia Cristiana in Limes .
It is a moment that appears favorable, very far from the catastrophe of February 24, 2022.
Moreover, Zelensky is quite clear how central the Russian question is for political and social stability. Not to mention the economic aspect. Scaglione reports: "Still in 2019 Russian direct investments in Ukraine amounted to 220 million dollars, preceded only by the Dutch ones (438 million) and by those from Cyprus (761 million) which, as everyone knows, is one of the favorite markets Russian oligarchs ".
Zelensky also knew he has to keep two inner souls at bay. That they are, Limes analyzed: “The ultra-nationalist, anti-Russian, uncompromising and combative one, who has accepted his irruption on the political scene, but is not willing to give discounts. And the one who supported his ride to the presidency with more conviction, calling for bread and reforms, the fight against corruption and well-being ”.
To succeed, the president must, among other things, tackle international politics decisively. Net of some turbulence with Donald Trump – at least for his dialectical exuberance decrypted via phone calls of effervescent judgments on European countries; Gascon judgments to which the young Zelensky was unable to respond immediately – and embarrassing relations with Hunter Biden , Joe 's son, observed Scaglione that "the relationship with the United States remains essential".
In the background, the Atlantic sirens remain winking.
It is a matter to be handled with care. Poroshenko had pushed hard on Ukraine's accession to NATO, as an instrument of defense of the country from the aims of the Russians. After all, according to a poll last December, 54% of Ukrainians would like to join.
At the time, Poroshenko has long aligned himself with the analysis of many Western policy makers , convinced that the Kremlin's goal was, after Crimea, the annexation of Donbas as well. An apt forecast, seen by those who witnessed the first weeks of 2022. But what about the times?
Scaglione observed in June 2020: “Few considered that Putin's moves in 2014 had a primarily defensive function. Moscow could not accept that, following the regime change carried out in Kiev, NATO would settle in the ports of Crimea ”.
For the Kremlin, the political reason of the Donbas is not “to become an extension of the territory of the Russian Federation but to exert pressure on the government of Kiev in an anti-NATO function. It is no coincidence that Moscow insisted so much on the Minsk 2 accords. They provide for a special status, within a federal Ukraine, for territories where ethnic Russians are a majority. This would offer Russia a privileged and completely legal instrument to influence the future decision-making process of the Ukrainian government ”. Scaglione concluded: "Zelensky knows that if he wants to achieve something positive on the Crimea and the Donbas, he must do everything except press the pedal of NATO membership".
Macron and Merkel , closest to Kiev, are in 2020, the leaders in Europe, perhaps in the world, more lukewarm towards NATO. Limes summed up: “Macron dreams of the European army and the Atlantic Alliance has even decreed brain death. Merkel wears as medals the arrows that Trump regularly throws at her, accusing her of not wanting to spend on the alliance and thus of sabotaging it from within ".
France and Germany cooperate economically with Ukraine. As Limes lists. They were among the main supporters of the free trade agreement between the European Union and Kiev launched in 2016. German investors have poured almost two billion euros into Ukraine. Over two thousand German companies had settled in Ukraine, employing more than 600 thousand people (more than 30 thousand in the automotive sector alone). The German market has offered Ukrainian exports an excellent outlet, especially in the textile, metal, chemical and agricultural products sectors. Exports to Germany could grow by another 35%. In short: there were interesting prospects for the country which, according to the estimates of the World Bank, with just over 2,500 dollars (data before the Russian invasion), has the lowest per capita income in Europe. France compensates with a more conspicuous political activism, as the promising meeting at the Elysée between Zelensky and Putin at the end of 2019 made it clear.
Two years ago it could be said “that no one among Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine has an interest in fomenting the conflict. Neither directly nor through the Atlantic Alliance. Russia, which needs European markets, would like to take advantage of the gap that has opened between the two sides of the Atlantic ”.
So what happens? Scaglione recalled that among the most recent and sensational initiatives of the White House in controversy with the Kremlin, there are the unilateral withdrawal of the nuclear treaty in 2019, then in 2020 from the Open Skies one. Donald Trump is in the White House.
Europe is once again a potential battleground. In those days the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov , met the Limes journalist. He is very hard on the States, underlining the reduction of the continent as a basis of NATO's nuclear rearmament. "But – recalls Scaglione – he also admitted that in some European capitals a new sensitivity to the situation is developing and therefore a different desire to participate in a possible process of detente".
However, Russia will only be able to enter that gap when it stops being considered a destabilizing factor for European peace and, in practice, accepts the fact that Ukraine, as the CIA's World Factbook says, is now completely and definitively Europe. . “In short, to fully return to Europe, Russia will have to go through Ukraine. As always, after all ". Eventually she got through it. With weapons.
Limes wrote that as long as Russia perceives Kiev as a capital aligned with the enemy, Moscow will not concede anything to anyone. But for the Kremlin – Scaglione noted – "the enemy is not Europe, at least not all of it, and not even the US itself, but the mass of political and industrial interests that NATO embodies".
It is in this puzzle – which has now exploded with the Russian invasion – that even then Ukraine was in danger, for Limes , of becoming one of the proving grounds for the tightness of the European Union itself. And this while the clash between China and the US rages (goes) and Europe was being pulled by both.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/quando-zelensky-non-invocava-la-nato-analisi-limes-del-2020/ on Sat, 12 Mar 2022 11:23:25 +0000.