[LINK] "The new cold war Russia (again) won't win"

[rfmcdonald]

At Open Democracy, Stefan Wolff and Tatyana Malyarenko make the argument that a replay of the Cold War with Putin-era Russia is even less likely to end with a Russian victory than this one.

While it may not look like it at the moment, the rebel-held areas in eastern Ukraine are on a straight course to become yet another so-called frozen conflict in the Russian periphery. Russian actions over the past few days and weeks have all the hallmarks of policies that were tried and tested in the early 1990s: a shaky, Russian-mediated ceasefire (the Minsk talks leading to the agreements of 5 and 19 September), modest gestures of conciliation towards the affected state (the EU-mediated Russian-Ukrainian gas deal of 30 October) and military and humanitarian support to consolidate the separatist regime and increase its dependence on Moscow (the various official and unofficial forms of assistance rendered to the rebels over the past several months). That said, it is also worthwhile to remember that establishing de facto states, such as in Georgia and Moldova, was always a means to an end—to dictate the terms of “reunification”, to gain permanent control over some former Soviet republics' foreign-policy choices.

Russia, it seems, may be getting away not just with the illegal annexation of Crimea but also with establishing yet another de facto state under its control, thus frustrating another country’s sovereign choice of seeking closer integration with the EU—either through permanent Russian-controlled instability like we see now or through a federated Ukraine in which the eastern regions would be able to represent Moscow’s interests effectively in Kiev. But this may be a serious miscalculation on Russia’s part.

Unlike 20 years ago, Ukraine’s Western partners have imposed gradually harder-hitting sanctions, the escalation of the crisis has sent the Russian rouble into free-fall and the Russian economy teeters on the brink of recession. Moreover, sustaining four million people in eastern Ukraine is of an entirely different magnitude to doing so for tens of thousands in South Ossetia and Abkhazia or a few hundred thousand in Transnistria.

Russia may not need a full-scale war to retain a foothold in eastern Ukraine at the moment, but it can hardly afford one either—and decreasingly so. We may well be at the beginning of a new cold war but, as with the last one, Russia is unlikely to win it. This offers some hope in the long term, but it is hardly a cause for yet another round of the Western triumphalism that Gorbachev considers the main reason for the regression in East-West relations. Because, when Russia eventually loses, this will have come at a much higher cost to many more people and countries than Russia and Ukraine.