As the cup fills to the brim, we are finally witnessing what has been pending since 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Thursday morning local time that he was launching a “special military operation” in Ukraine, a move that was followed up by reports of explosions around cities, including Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and the capital Kyiv.
On the Ukrainian side, the foreign minister confirmed soon after that “Putin has just launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Peaceful Ukrainian cities are under strike.” Russian troops and tanks had entered the country on three fronts by the afternoon in Ukraine. After air and missile strikes, Russian troops launched attacks from Ukraine’s northern border with Belarus, across its eastern frontier, and in the south from Crimea.
According to the Pentagon, Russia launched more than 100 missiles into Ukraine, an opening salvo that defense officials said may be leading up to a full-on effort to take the capital of Kyiv.
In a televised address, Zelensky, who said he remained in Kyiv, thanked western leaders for their support but questioned their willingness to go further? “Who is ready to fight with us? Honestly, I don’t see anyone . . . I’m asking them, are you with us?”
The important question that arises here is why the situation escalated to this point? As the desperation in the Ukrainian President’s address is clear we can see that western powers were not ready to provide any support to Ukraine. The biggest mistake on Ukraine’s part was aligning its interests with the US and NATO. Whereas its geographic location demanded that it engaged in talks and a peaceful resolution with Russia so that the threat could be neutralized in a peaceful manner.
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The constant lack of peaceful political resolve on Ukraine’s part, bolstered by US-backed warmongering, has given Russia an excuse to protect what it calls its own interests. Russia claims Ukraine had been getting military aid in the shape of weapons that could cause massive destruction and throw the region off balance. Russia claims that the invasion was precipitated by the inability of the U.S. and NATO to uphold commitments made under a complicated truce agreement called the Minsk Protocol.
Now, as the Russian invasion begins, Ukraine seems to have run out of options. The US has only resorted to sanctions against Russia. Other than that NATO has already issued a statement that it is undecided on any type of military engagement and that NATO has no presence in Ukraine.
China on the other hand has played a delicate geopolitical balancing act. Beijing has been careful not to explicitly endorse nor condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a phone call with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in which Wang responded ambiguously. “China respects each country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” he said, according to a readout from China’s foreign ministry. “At the same time, we also see the Ukraine problem has a complex and particular historical state of affairs and we understand Russia’s reasonable concern on security issues.”
China has grown ever closer to Russia, naturally to counter American influence globally. Earlier in February both heads of state released a lengthy joint statement pledging solidarity ideologically. Putin was among the few global leaders who attended the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. This partnership has allowed China to hit back against apparent American intrusion.
The Russia-China partnership will ultimately pay off as China faces a similar situation in the shape of Taiwan. This also according to the Chinese perspective is “a problem that has a complex and particular historical state of affairs”. Like Ukraine, the US is meddling in the Taiwan affair as well which, when time is ripe, will require Russian support.
On the economic front, alarm over the conflict ripped through international markets, with the price of European natural gas contracts jumping as much as 70 percent to €142 per megawatt-hour. Europe relies on Russia for about a quarter of its oil and more than a third of its gas which makes Russia an important producer of raw materials.
The international oil benchmark has crossed the $100 threshold of 2014 as Brent crude prices rose to more than $105 a barrel. The price dropped back to about $99 after the Biden administration announced a raft of sanctions that focused on Russia’s financial sector, rather than its energy industry, which is an important supplier to many western countries. But in Asia on Friday morning, oil prices climbed back above $100, with Brent crude up 2.6 percent to $101.61 a barrel.
So, are we witnessing a prelude to World War 3? No. The situation does seem bad there is no doubt about that but it is highly unlikely to result in a direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia. On the other hand, as Russia built up a force capable of invading Ukraine, the US and Britain rapidly pulled their military trainers and advisers out of Ukraine.
“That’s a world war when Americans and Russians start shooting at each other,” said US President Joe Biden earlier this month, vowing he would not deploy American troops to Ukraine under any circumstances.
An absolute redline for NATO and the West would be if Russia threatens a NATO member state because under Article 5 the entire western military alliance is obliged to come to the defense of a member state under attack. This is where Russia clearly downplayed the West as they attacked Ukraine before the West’s attempt to make Ukraine a NATO member.
Eastern European countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, or Poland – once part of Moscow’s territory in Soviet times – are all now NATO members. They are definitely threatened that Russian forces might not stop at Ukraine and instead use some pretext to “come to the aid” of the ethnic Russian minorities in the Baltics and invade. Hence NATO has recently sent reinforcements to bolster its Eastern European members as a deterrent.
As long as there is no direct conflict between NATO and Russia, there is no reason for a crisis that reaches a World War scale. Let’s not forget that Russia and America have, between them, over 8,000 deployable nuclear warheads so the stakes here are stupendously high. The old Cold War maxim of “MAD” – Mutually Assured Destruction – still applies.
