In an article in these pages, ‘No one wins a war’ (June 17), the writer Abdul Sattar has attempted to assess the prospects for settlement of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
The article promotes a Western concept of a so-called rule-based world, which is widely unacceptable in the Global South. Pakistan has wisely adopted a principally neutral stance on the conflict and ignored every questionable initiative on the matter. According to the article, “What Moscow needs to realize is that small states will always be concerned about their security, especially if they have a powerful state next door”. But through this narrative, Russia is by default stripped of any rights to be concerned about its own safety, even if it has states next door allegedly “striving to join” a military alliance, but in reality, being exploited by the alliance to grow and expand its influence.
We can easily track the unfolding of events from the very dissolution of the USSR. Moscow is accused of a hegemonic attitude towards Georgia but Georgian militarist regimes’ chauvinist campaigns against Abkhazia and South Ossetia since the early 1990s are ignored, where innocent civilians fell victim. Russian peacekeeping forces, on the other hand, played a crucial role in protecting, at times with their own lives, the oppressed populations of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
In the current political crisis in Georgia, the US, impudently interfering with domestic matters, is orchestrating protests to sabotage a law on foreign agents by the country’s government. Is that not what hegemonic ambitions look like?
Why are the calls to realize the impossibility of changing modern states' borders by force not addressed to the US and Nato? Has it been forgotten that in 1999 the world witnessed the Nato aggression in Yugoslavia, unapproved by the UN Security Council but carried out “to stop human rights violations and civil victims”?
As a result, indiscriminate bombings of Yugoslavia took the lives of 2000 civilians, including 89 children. Then followed the invasion of Iraq by the US on false claims in 2003, which was termed illegal by the United Nations. It is remarkable in this context that Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under the administration of US president Bill Clinton, calmly said in an interview about the 500,000 Iraqi children who had died in the previous years of the US anti-Iraq campaign that "it was worth it."
In 2011, the Nato-led intervention in Libya, ignoring UN Resolution 1973 and abusing its provisions aimed at protecting the civil population, resulted in numerous civilian deaths from bombings. Finally, in today's Syria, several US military bases are located near oil fields without any permission from the Syrian authorities, and numerous violations of Syrian airspace by the US are recorded daily – again, in violation of international law.
But all of those cases, it seems, do not go against the rule-based order favoured these days. Per that order, the protection of Russians is not a valid enough reason for Russia’s decisive actions. However, stemming from the provisions of the UN Charter, the Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic had every right to declare their independence in 2014, which they used. Russia, in turn, had a right to recognize that independence based on the same provisions and strike friendship agreements with them, and did so after eight years of fruitless efforts of resolving the escalation through negotiations.
But it is instead suggested that Moscow strike some sort of a remorseful deal with every former Soviet republic (most of which, by the way, enjoy cordial, strong and fairly beneficial ties with Russia) where it would “state respect for their territorial integrity and consider them equal”. Let it be known that there is an extensive legal framework in the form of bilateral Treaties of Friendship and Cooperation with every former republic of the USSR except for the Baltic countries that joined Nato, and Georgia, due to the situation in Abkhazia provoked by the above-described actions.
In 2018, Ukraine unilaterally decided to terminate such an agreement with Russia. These documents, among other things, stipulate mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity. In addition, Moscow has been systematically cooperating with the CIS countries for a long time within the framework of, for example, such organizations as the EAEU, the CSTO, and the SCO. Moreover, Russian President Vladimir Putin in his speech on June 14 voiced a proposal to intensify that work.
The article originally mentioned has suggested three main points as a way out:. Unfreezing Russian assets is necessary because this amounts to breaching the trust Moscow reposed in Western banks, and would deter other countries from trusting the Western banking system. The second step would be a halt to attacks by both Russia and Ukraine, and the third is gathering an international conference where Russia is actually present. These steps sound reasonable.
What is important to notice here is that before the notorious Bürgenstock summit that lured whoever it could to take collective photographs rather than actually make peace (and which Pakistan sensibly abstained from partaking in), the Russian president on June 14 straightforwardly stated the following. The fire will be immediately ceased after Kyiv declares that it is ready to withdraw troops from Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions and agree on a non-bloc status and begin negotiations, and (a message to the West) in entails removal of all Western sanctions against Russia as well.
Anyone wishing to understand the underlying issues and realistic ways out of an escalation of this scale is expected to critically assess its key reasons and conduct a proper unbiased fact-based analysis. As far as the real-life solution is concerned, state actors’ reactions show who actually wants to stop the conflict. Everything else is fiction.
One must not forget that the peace treaty drafted in Istanbul in 2022 (published recently by the New York Times) was mainly never signed because – as acknowledged by Zelensky’s negotiation team – another ardent supporter of the rule-based order, Boris Johnson rejected it and suggested: “let’s just fight”.
Champions of the order based on rules promoted by the collective West must be aware that the inventors of those rules do not only side with the Kyiv regime in the Ukrainian conflict but have also sided with Israel in the Gaza conflict.
The writer is the former head of the Department of Russian Language at NUML.