THE HELPLESS OF UN IN THE WAKE OF THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINE WAR

1. Introduction

During the last twenty years, the world has witnessed an increased number of international peacekeeping operations designed to ensure politically sustainable transformations. Although the number of multinational and state actors such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United States, European Union (EU), the African Union, and others leading peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions has increased significantly, the United Nations (UN) still plays the most critical role in dealing with international conflict resolution. Today there are 15 different peacekeeping missions directed by the UN Department for Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), and many have come under immense criticism for falling short of expectations (Woodhouse, 2010).

This criticism is twofold. On the one hand, UN missions were unable to meet targets laid out by their own mandate, as observed in the missions in Cote d’Ivoire (UNOCI), Haiti (MINUSTAH) and Somalia (UNOSOM). On the other hand, and more importantly some missions could not meet the expectations of the general public as has been observed in the tragic cases of the Srebrenica massacre (UNPROFOR) and the Rwandan genocide (UNAMIR) (Panizza, 2011: 109).

1. Background to the Study

During the 1989 and 1990 when the Cold War ended, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunited Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand. The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004, it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (Grieger, 2023).

Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO’s 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, “This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. . ..”. The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe.” But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail NATO’s eastward movement which, at any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic countries (Woodhouse, 2010).

Then NATO began looking further East. At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but France and Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Russia. In the end, NATO’s members reached a compromise and the alliance did not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and boldly declaring that these countries will become members of NATO. Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise.

Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister lamented that Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security. Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a direct threat to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist (Mearsheimer, 2014).

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 was to dispel any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO, he had decided in the summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and divided and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its point. Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance and NATO expansion continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in 2009 (Panizza, 2011).

The EU too has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to their country’s interests. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a “sphere of influence” in eastern Europe. In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion. The West’s final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow has been its efforts to spread Western values and promote democracy in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding pro-Western individuals and organizations.

Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in December 2013 that the United States had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve the future it deserves. As part of that effort, the U.S. government has bankrolled the National Endowment for Democracy. The nonprofit foundation has funded more than 60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in Ukraine, and the NED’s president, Carl Gershman, has called that country “the biggest prize.” After Yanukovych won Ukraine’s presidential election in February 2010, the NED decided he was undermining its goals, and so it stepped up its efforts to support the opposition and strengthen the country’s democratic institutions (Mearsheimer, 2014).

When Russian leaders look at Western social engineering in Ukraine, they worry that their country might be next. And such fears are hardly groundless. In September 2013, Gershman wrote in The Washington Post, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.” He added: “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself (Woodhouse, 1999).

The West’s triple package of policies NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion added fuel to are waiting to ignite. The spark came in November 2013, when Yanukovych rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead. That decision gave rise to antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the following three months and that by mid-February had led to the deaths of some one hundred protesters. Western emissaries hurriedly flew to Kiev to resolve the crisis. On February 21, the government and the opposition struck a deal that allowed Yanukovych to stay in power until new elections were held. But it immediately fell apart, and Yanukovych fled to Russia the next day. The new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists (Mearsheimer, 2014).

In 2014, Ukraine faced the greatest threat to its national security since the collapse of the Soviet Union, of which it had been part for most of the 20^th century. Months of popular protest swept pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych from office in February, and he was replaced by a pro-Western interim government. As the interim government attempted to deal with a reeling economy, heavily armed pro-Russian separatists seized government buildings in Crimea and, with the support of Russian troops, declared independence from the central government in Kiev. Russia formally annexed Crimea in March 2014, a move that was broadly criticized in the West as a gross violation of international law, and separatist activities spread into eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian security services initially were unable to resist the attacks, which were often conducted by soldiers bearing Russian arms and equipment but wearing uniforms that lacked any clear insignia. With tens of thousands of Russian troops massed just across the border and the memory of the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia fresh in their minds, leaders in Kiev were forced to weigh any possible military response against the likelihood of triggering overt Russian intervention. As Ukrainian forces began systematically reclaiming contested territory ahead of the May 2014 presidential elections, the United States and the European Union (EU) expanded economic sanctions against an increasingly wide circle of Russian companies and individuals (Ray, 2023).

The conflict in Donbas left Russia facing escalating economic penalties from the United States and the European Union that stifled its economy. In 2016, NATO responded to the fears of member states along Russian borders by reinforcing its military capabilities in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania and standing by its 2008 pledge that Ukraine and Georgia will become members. In 2019, the United States also abandoned the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty after accusing Russia of noncompliance, a step that would allow for nuclear deployments in Central and Eastern Europe as well as around the Russian periphery in Asia. Faced with this deteriorating security environment and calculating that the West was too divided and distracted to respond forcefully, Putin gambled on an all-out invasion in February 2022. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine constitutes the biggest threat to peace and security in Europe since the end of the Cold War (Mankoff, 2022). The Ukraine/Russian war also constitutes one of the biggest challenges of the United Nations since its creation in 1945.

• Causes of Russian-Ukraine War