Listen to this article :
If we want to understand a geopolitical situation, and predict its evolution, we must first make the assumption that all the actors have good reasons to act as they do. In particular, in order to understand the gravity of the Ukrainian situation, one must understand why each actor is doing what he is doing, and deduce what future actions will be in the best interests of each actor in this confrontation.
The Russians, first of all, cannot allow themselves to let Ukraine, the cradle of the Russian nation, become a hostile democracy and a member of all the Western alliances; while they, the Russians, have been denied for thirty years all prospects of being admitted one day, even very far away, into the European club; and while an American president, George Bush Sr, had solemnly committed himself, at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that Ukraine would never join an alliance hostile to Russia.
The Ukrainians are also right to think that no one can decide their fate for them and that, if they want to join the European Union and NATO, it must depend on them and their eventual partners. They have written this objective into their constitution.
This contradiction of objectives, between two overarmed neighbours, can have dramatic consequences in the weeks or months to come.
The Russians are now demanding that the Americans and their allies reaffirm their long-standing commitment never to admit Ukraine into NATO, and that they also undertake not to install strategic nuclear weapons in the other European countries bordering Russia. The Americans, and their European allies, obviously absolutely refuse to promise this.
The Russians may then think that this is the best possible moment to take militarily what they are being denied diplomatically. And, to show their determination, they have assembled more than 100,000 highly trained soldiers and very high-level technological forces on the borders of Ukraine, at a time when the freeze of land (which will not last much longer) allows their armoured vehicles, in a lightning attack, to reach Kiev in less than a week and to install by force a pro-Russian government, which would be led by one of the former Ukrainian presidents or by another notable of the country.
The timing would be all the better for them as the Europeans and the Americans do not have many means to oppose them:
The Europeans, anxious not to lose access to Russian gas, are very divided over possible retaliation; the new German chancellor still has no credibility in Moscow and France is still in the midst of a five-month election campaign.
The Americans are also very weak, entangled as they are in immense domestic problems, with a public opinion that does not seem ready to risk the life of a single American soldier to protect Ukrainian territory; They have even just made it known (considerable news, which went relatively unnoticed) that, in the event of an invasion of Ukraine by Russia, they will not implement their main threat, the cutting off of Russian banks’ access to the Swift system, which would ban the Russian economy from the world financial system; because this cutting off would have two unacceptable consequences for the West: the disruption of the supply of Russian gas to Europe, and the incentive for Russia to organise as quickly as possible the marketing of its energy in renminbi, by strengthening its alliance with China, and by causing the dollar to plunge, which would no longer be the only world reference currency for the exchange of fossil raw materials.
The Russians may be all the more tempted by this Chinese alliance as no other is open to them; and as China itself is weakened by its very poor management of the Covid epidemic, the ineffectiveness of its vaccines and the dictatorship of a single party, which weakens its most dynamic companies, cannot claim a dominant role in such an alliance.
A war in Ukraine is therefore anything but unlikely. Of course, just because Russia has every reason to enter Ukraine in the coming weeks does not mean that it will do so: geopolitics is not reduced to reason. But the military, economic and geopolitical consequences of such a conflict would be so considerable, especially for Europe, that it is urgent to prepare for it.
j@attali.com