Ukraine crisis needs resolute arbitration

Journalist and Author

Ukraine’s invasion by Russia has demonstrated the failure of existing institutions of global governance in preventing human loss and humanitarian crisis afflicting the war-ravaged country. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is paralysed with predictable grandstanding by the P-5 in the backdrop of tensions between the two blocs. What further complicated the UNSC dynamics this time around was the fact that, Russia, a P-5 member, is a direct party to the conflict, thus making the discussion on Ukraine practically a futile exercise.

As the international community grapples with the crisis, there are some interesting trend lines to understand the scope of mediation in contemporary peace and security issues. A mediator should command the credibility of the two sides and also has the required levers to influence the behaviour of the parties in conflict. And equally has the institutional knowledge about the granular nuances of regional conflict. There is hardly a doubt that there is a vast corpus of Russia-related knowledge, particularly within Europe and the US. With Europe, Russia shares geography and in the past, even royal family members of Russia and some European countries were related.

For both the US and Europe, the recent ties with Russia have a baggage of history. A lot of bad blood exists. While the US saw the 1990s as a decade of its foreign policy success, the same period has been internalised by a section of Russian elite as a period of shame. The state of affairs was so bad that former Russian Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev recently said that when President Boris Yeltsin agreed with President Clinton that Poland can be part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), he was drunk. Sizeable scholarship on the basis of declassified information from the US Department of State indicates that a lot of ambiguity was left while the Soviet Union and the US were engaging in the 1990s. Scholar ME Sarotte demonstrates in her recent book — Not one Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate — how the then US President Bill Clinton was firm on allowing NATO to extend towards the Russian territory. That is why it is often insinuated that Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential elections, when Hillary Clinton was one of the presidential contenders, is on account of the visceral personal animosity of President Putin with respect to Clintons. Europe, for obvious reasons, is directly impacted by real and perceived Russian designs of territorial expansion.

With this background of the European and US handicap on Russia, there are three countries that have either mediated or being sought to play the role behind the scenes. Turkey, the only non-EU NATO ally, has direct stakes in the conflict as it has control over the maritime routes which provide Russia and Ukraine access to Mediterranean sea through Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits to Russian ships. In line with the 1936 Montreux Convention, Turkey has control over the straits and can limit warship passages during wartime or if threatened with some caveats. It has leverage on both countries to an extent. On March 29, Russia and Ukraine had held talks in the Dolmabahçe Palace, which was Atatürk’s presidential palace upon the declaration of the Republic and built during the Ottoman rule, in Istanbul.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is another player outside Europe that had been proactive and has met both sides. No Israeli political leadership can simply shy away from the current crisis. Ukraine had been one of the strong bastions of Jewish community for centuries. Ukraine was one of the few countries where Yiddish, which was the most popular language among Jews before Hebrew took over after 1948, was the official language in the 1920s. Babi Yar in Kyiv is remembered as one of the prime sites of World War II atrocities against Jews by the Nazis in September 1941. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has often invoked his Jewish roots and repeatedly urged Israel to abandon its effort to maintain neutrality. On his part, President Putin has alleged the presence of Nazi-minded group supporting Ukrainian army as one of the arguments in support of the invasion.

Meanwhile, in contrast to other two countries, India has not tried to proactively mediate. It has abstained in all the nine resolutions in various multilateral fora that were related to the Ukraine crisis. Nevertheless, there had been a flurry of high-level visits that seem to be directly relevant to the crisis. From the US, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (a position de facto equivalent to that of Foreign Secretary) Victoria Nuland, US Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh and UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, have visited New Delhi. The greater surprise is the visit of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Much of the focus is on Russian imported weaponry and that is often cited as the reason that India had to adopt a calibrated approach without outright condemning Russia. It is seen both as a leverage as well as constraint. Apart from defence and oil imports from Russia, the Indian stance of neutrality is also a byproduct of the domestic reality. No foreign policy is in isolation and can disregard the domestic opinion. The domestic opinion in India is against the Russian territorial invasion but because of historical reasons, it is still not in favour of outright Russian condemnation. Since the 1990s, ever since the break-up of Soviet Union, the political elite in both countries have often framed their relations as a continuation of four-decade deep-rooted and multi-layered connections between the body politic of the Soviet Union and India that continued till the Soviet collapse.

A sizeable number of Indian citizens from various states studied in the Soviet Union on scholarships. The Soviet Union gave scholarships to students of the global south, including those studying medical sciences. In a 1970 paper — The Soviet Union and International Education — Seymour Risen, a specialist in comparative education, stated that as per the 1964-65 data in a UNESCO report, there were about 11,000 from the other communist countries, about 10,000 from Asia, Africa and Latin America, and less than 200 from the West studied in the Soviet Union.

The role of the three countries in the Ukraine crisis demonstrates the need to expand the ambit of mediation on global peace and security issues as well as the potential of various levers in the international system to reflect complex geopolitical and historical realities. The crisis has also demonstrated that the modern institutions of global governance have to respond to these trends or they risk becoming more effete and stagnant.