Ode to Odessa
It is time to surrender. How can Kiev give up the lost cause and how can we begin to sketch out a future solution to The Ukrainian Question?
A murmur penetrates the hallways of think tanks and foreign policy institutions in NATO countries: ‘We must offer Russia to go back in time and pick up where we left at the negotiation table in Istanbul, late march early april 2022.’ The misunderstandings related to this new pibedream of Western governments is symptomatic of their inherent blind spots of perception and reluctance to face up to the facts. It is time to get a grip if the disaster in the former Republic of Ukraine shall not lead directly to its demise. Whether a viable entity ‘Ukraine’ can be established is still up in the air; that is what the conflict is about. What is the issue here, is the posture to be taken by NATO and basically, this means Washington: How to end the fight before the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) are completely exhausted?
Unconditional surrender
UAF is not able to establish a defense and the contact line is moving westward as Kievs forces retreats towards the Dnipro river: The forces of the Russian Federation are superior in number and quality of troops, artillery capabilities, use of electronic warfare, and have now established a steady upper hand in the air. There is only one thing to do: Surrender. The question is how. Kiev is in no position to make demands. It has chosen war, by giving up on negotiations in Istanbul that followed the Russian invasion, and cannot even hope for the fighting to stop before the opposing side is satisfied with the outcome of a diplomatic agreement: When Zelensky said no, two years ago, in Istanbul, April 2022, Moscow had retreated from Kiev in a show of good will; this time there will be no ceasefire or stalling of hostilities during negotiations, following the plea for capitulation hence subsequent talks will be about meeting Moscows demands fast, to end slaughter. The Russian ambassador to the United Nation Security Council made that clear last week: There will be no conditions to be observed from Kievs hand. Only unconditional capitulation. What was not said, was the position of the Kremlin concerning the conditions for talking at all. It remained implicit: No Zelensky.
Three demands
When you offer to surrender, you do that in the hope that your resignation will be acknowledged. If the other side does not trust you, then there will be no dialogue. The first step is for NATO to find someone with whom Moscow is willing to talk. Zelensky does not represent anybody, seems to be Moscows point: He is a simle dictator without support in the army or with his people in general; Zelensky only has support in the parliament, who sustains his position as president, without constitutional mandate: Elections are suspended in Ukraine and the Russian propaganda, with good success, hammers in the point, that the regime in Kiev is tyranical, criminal, and terminal. Secondly, NATO must have an answer to the question: What does Moscow want? The foreign policy elite in and around the Kremlin has been open about this for at least 30 years, since William Burns reported home to Washington from the embassy in Moscow, back in 1995: Moscow wants a security architecture in Europe that takes Russias interest into account: Concretely, concerning southeastern Europe, there must be no NATO dominance in the Black Sea, hence no NATO presence in Ukraine and Georgia. It must be expected, that a mechanism must be put in place west of the Dnipro river, where Russia will be able to verify the withdrawal of NATO personel and weapons. This leads us the discussion about the nature of the regime in Kiev. Here it could be suggested, that Kiev and Odessa should be free cities and that the capital of ‘Ukraine’ becomes Lviv, the intellectual center in western Ukraine. The auspices of ‘de-nazification,’ a somewhat difficult notion, employed by the Kremlin to denote ultra-nationalist and anti-Russian sentiments in Kiev, will entail restrictions for the current plutocracy and their nationalist allies within the West-Ukrainian polity to manifest organized rebellion on the territory of the new political entity. Then, thirdly, comes the question of concrete demarcation of ‘Ukraine’:
The Odessa Issue
Russia wants territory as means to an end. There are two concerns here. One is the stabilization of Moscows southwestern flank vis a vis NATO. In this respect, the control over the Odessa oblast would enable Moscow to project power into and through Transnistria, the separatist enklave in Moldova, where the population is overwhelmingly positive about geographical and political proximity to Russia. This would means that ‘Ukraine’ will become a frontier zone between NATO and Russia, what is often called ‘a buffer state.’ The other concern is what Kremlin refers to as its responsibility to protect ethnic Russians in the post-Sovjet space: Russia will be willing to take control of Kharkiv and Odessa beyond the already annexed oblasts Kherson, Zaparozhzha, Donetsk, Lugansk, and Crimea. Kiev, as already indicated, will be a hurdle to settle, and some creativity will be needed to resolve the issue, not least because of the cultural connotations of the old Viking fortress. If ‘Ukraine’ shall ever come to sustaining itself, then it must be able to ship its agricultural produce out via Odessa: Ukraine never produced a surplus on its national budget, but to uphold a GDP of 2500§ per capita, will be a minimum requirement for a succesful state-building. When we speak about a viable political entity emerging in the area nowadays referred to as ‘Ukraine,’ this is the first and most prominent issue: The status of Odessa. A central question is here: Can Kiev act fast enough and obtain unconditional surrender, before it loses any chance of keeping Odessa, and thus to secure its survival? Does the u-turn of western understanding of the conflict between Kiev and Moscow mature fast enough for there to persist a ‘Ukraine’?