WASHINGTON With the Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute now settled, in a murky but apparently satisfactory fashion, it is time to reflect on what the affair says about the West's relations with Russia and, still more important, the West's relations with Ukraine.
The reason a serious debate is necessary is that the West's strategy toward Ukraine has been founded on a bizarre illusion: that Ukraine would leave Russia's orbit and "join the West," and that Russia would pay for this process.
Consider the figures: Until the latest price hike for gas, Russia was supplying Ukraine with a de facto annual energy subsidy estimated by independent experts at somewhere between $3 billion and $5 billion a year. That is more than the whole of the European Union's aid in the 14 years since Ukrainian independence.
As for U.S. aid, last year it stood at a mere $174 million - and this after all the talk of U.S. admiration and support for Ukraine's Orange Revolution. Even after the latest price rise, Ukraine will remain greatly favored by international standards, though now more at the ultimate expense of Turkmenistan than Russia.
Equally important for the Ukrainian economy have been the remittances sent back annually by the millions of Ukrainians working legally in Russia. Once again, contrast Western approaches to this question: It remains extremely difficult for Ukrainians to gain permits to work legally in Western countries. When the last German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, tried to relax the terms for entry into Germany, the result was an outburst of chauvinist hysteria about a supposed flood of Ukrainian criminals and prostitutes.
Recent days have seen a great deal of moralizing in the U.S. and European news media about Russia using energy as a political tool. It would be better if the Americans and French in particular turned the question round and asked themselves whether there would be the slightest possibility of their countries giving aid on this scale without expecting concrete geopolitical and economic returns.
The underlying thinking in Brussels and Washington concerning Ukraine is rather different, with Europeans holding the prize for cynicism and Americans for recklessness.
Under all the talk about Ukraine's European path, a majority of West European governments and EU officials privately hope that any real prospect of Ukrainian membership in the European Union can be postponed virtually indefinitely - or at least until after Turkish membership, which may come to the same thing. They are certainly not going to ask their voters to come up with anything like the massive aid that Ukraine needs in order to reform its economy along Western lines.
Nor of course is the United States going to take up this burden. Instead, a growing number of U.S. officials and politicians seem to see early NATO membership for Ukraine as a cheap alternative, with little economic cost to the United States, and that little offset by benefits to U.S. arms manufacturers.
This, however, would mean taking into what remains in effect an anti-Russian alliance a country which is still deeply entwined with Russia economically, demographically and culturally; where in the last round of the presidential elections, 44 percent of the population voted against a Western path and in favor of alliance with Russia, and where, according to opinion polls, an overwhelming majority of the population is opposed to NATO membership.
In addition, as events since the Orange Revolution have demonstrated, Ukraine remains a volatile and unconsolidated democracy, whose political and business elites remain deeply ambivalent about real economic reform. And a future world economic crisis, especially one consequent on international energy sources, could completely redraw both the political and geopolitical maps of Ukraine.
Meanwhile, unless Russia can somehow also be integrated into the West, Ukraine's successful move out of the Russian orbit would face Russia with another set of terrible economic, cultural and geopolitical defeats, including in the long term the loss of Ukrainian markets for Russian goods. That does not make Russia's opposition to this process correct, but certainly understandable, especially to France and America.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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