【新政治家 20150305】俄罗斯VS西方

满仓

【中文标题】俄罗斯VS西方：普京入侵乌克兰的后果
【原文标题】Russia vs the west: the consequences of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
【登载媒体】新政治家
【原文作者】ELIZABETH POND
【原文链接】http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/03/russia-vs-west-consequences-putin-s-invasion-ukraine




弗拉基米尔•普京在一年前兼并克里米亚、煽动乌克兰一向平静的顿巴斯地区人民叛乱之后，他对俄罗斯东部斯拉夫兄弟的不宣而战，已经形成了这片大陆的一个“新-旧秩序”。它结束了欧洲已经享受了70余年、自以为在核心地区已经建立起的后现代和平局面。它让伊曼努尔•康德最初的设想、后来由欧洲所代表的自由和平，以及在一两代人时间里恢复起来的希望丧失殆尽。它让西方面对一个无可回避的选择——安抚这个区域恶棍，还是在核武器横行、双方没有任何克制底限的条件下与其宣战。

乌克兰、俄罗斯、德国和法国领导人于2月12日在白俄罗斯明斯克所彻夜商谈所达成的停火协议，已经名存实亡。乌克兰东部的分裂分子和他们的盟友——俄罗斯招募的“有偿志愿者”——从未停止炮轰德巴尔特斯夫小镇。在协议停火日期2月15日午夜过后1分钟也没有停止攻击，密集的弹幕持续了三天半，直到被包围在那里的数千名乌克兰士兵全部死亡、被俘，或者在密集的炮火中被迫撤退到乌克兰境内。

本应在2月16日开始从缓冲区撤回的重型武器，只有少部分退回到双方的战线之后。叛军拒绝让国际观察机构在停火区和俄罗斯控制的乌克兰边境取代他们的位置。

德巴尔特斯夫小镇被毁之后，仓促达成的停火协议，仅仅是为叛军和俄罗斯职业士兵对乌克兰东部的春季入侵提供了一个短暂的冬歇期。莫斯科依旧否认当地有它的军队和现代化重型武器，尽管有无数直接的照片、电子和目击者证据，以及只有受过良好训练的俄罗斯士兵才能完成的针对德巴尔特斯夫精确炮击和火箭弹打击的间接证据。根据联合国提供的数据，自从去年4月战争开始以来，将近5700人死亡，150万人流离失所。

即使在那不存在的停火协议出现之前，德国总理安吉拉•默克尔就已经为欧洲和平撰写了墓志铭。她警告说，她想象不到西方援助给乌克兰的任何武器有彻底改变冲突双方实力对比的可能。俄罗斯比所有其它国家更关心乌克兰的财富，而且它有足够的军事力量、资源和能力来压制乌克兰有可能得到的任何武器。默克尔所能提供的唯一希望，就是采取耐心的战略态度，西方或许会最终取胜，就像它成功结束冷战——她并没有提到苏联政治家米哈伊尔•戈尔巴乔夫的贡献——和1989年兵不血刃地推倒矗立了28年的柏林墙一样。

这种黑暗的预言在最近几个星期得以兑现。整个2014年，欧洲人一直期望他们所熟悉的社会秩序可以得到尽快的恢复。去年三月，俄罗斯特种部队身着没有标记的军装，戴着面具，猛然之间结束了俄罗斯和乌克兰舰队在克里米亚港口长达四分之一个世纪的和平共处状态，并且用武力推翻了半岛当地的政府。美国总统巴拉克•奥巴马说后超级大国时代的俄罗斯只不过是当地的一个讨厌鬼。

默克尔总理非常严肃地看待普京的民族统一主义威胁。她警告美国总统，说这个俄罗斯总理生活在沙皇民族主义的“另一个世界”里，她暗示任何理性的分析和妥协都无法解决问题。一门心思打算从中东和阿富汗撤军的奥巴马用他所谓的亚洲轴心战略理论作借口，把乌克兰这个二等外交事务外包给了柏林。因此，自1945年之后第一次，德国取得了与它的经济实力相匹配的地缘政治领导权。第一次，长久以来遭到排挤的默克尔，站到了最前面。

当普京加紧兼并克里米亚的脚步时，默克尔在2014年3月13日对联邦议院说，以往69年的稳定、和平、自由来自于欧洲的一体化和大西洋两岸的民主联盟，这是一个“可以称作是奇迹的”伟大成就。俄罗斯盗取乌克兰领土的行为在21世纪的欧洲不可以容忍，它代表着弱肉强食主义的回归，也是“强权对抗法治”的复兴。

她斥责俄罗斯违反国际法和莫斯科所签订的一系列具体条约，包括1975年赫尔辛基有关禁止用武力改变欧洲国家边境线的条约，和俄罗斯在1994年签署的协定，其内容是确保乌克兰的独立、主权和领土的完整，条件是基辅把前苏联遗留下来的庞大核武器库交给莫斯科。

在无数次的电话中，她警告半信半疑的普京，说欧洲来之不易的和平造就了巨大的经济成就，这一次，他不要指望德国为了维护俄罗斯的经济利益而试图否决因他的挑衅行为而带来的经济制裁计划。欧洲和美国都宣布他们不会采取军事手段保护非北约成员国乌克兰，但是会寄希望于通过缓慢的经济制裁来遏制俄罗斯。

默克尔是西方与俄罗斯总统交涉的不二人选。她可以算是“普京的知心大姐”，不仅因为这个词曾经被用来描述德国为普京辩护的行为，而且因为她生长在共产主义的东德，会说俄语，在直觉上理解俄罗斯人的感受。

她理解普京担忧被北约围困，即使北约的扩张并不是通过武力手段抢占邻国的土地，而是出于担心俄罗斯复辟苏联时代的霸权主义，而大肆宣扬欧洲中心成员资格的吸引力。她理解普京害怕基辅街头的抗议声会威胁到自己的统治，他在80年代是克格勃在东德的间谍招募官，亲眼看到柏林墙被人民的力量推倒。

默克尔同样了解他对于苏联解体这个所谓的二十世纪“最大的地缘政治灾难”的怨恨，以及从苏联独立的俄罗斯竟然敢蛊惑他的人民。在他看来，拒绝臣服就是对俄罗斯老大哥的被判。他所感受到的俄罗斯对于乌克兰影响力的不断下降，柏林非常清楚。

普京最早失去对乌克兰的控制，是他的门生、时任乌克兰总统的维克多•亚努科维奇在一年前批准警方狙击手谋杀了数十名“亲欧盟”示威者。这样的暴力行为甚至让亚努科维奇在自己的党派内部也遭到孤立，最终没有选择，只好潜逃到俄罗斯，因此乌克兰绝不会让斯拉夫人赞同普京的宠物——“欧亚经济联盟”项目。普京坚持让基辅加入这个新生的、有时被称为“苏联精简版”的联盟，是2013年亲欧盟示威活动的导火索。

普京接下来又失去了“新俄罗斯”，这是他对俄罗斯突然声称拥有主权的乌克兰东部三分之一土地的不合时宜的称呼。（这个名词可以追溯到叶卡捷琳娜二世时代，她在18世纪70年代从奥托曼帝国手中夺取了“新俄罗斯”。）他似乎对自己所宣扬的事情深信不疑，也就是如果俄罗斯特种部队在当地煽动叛乱，不满的俄罗斯族人必然会加入起义行动。

但是民众并没有起义。只是在顿巴斯的“铁锈地带”（译者注：指工业衰退地区），俄罗斯的代理人勉强动员起一些收入微薄的退休人员，通过收买或者胁迫的手段获得了足够的支持，建立起自封的顿涅茨克和卢甘斯克人民共和国。实际上，在无法明确区分俄罗斯种族和乌克兰种族的整个乌克兰东部，民调结果显示大部分人愿意留在乌克兰。

默克尔知道，莫斯科以重振俄罗斯不复存在的伟大帝国为名，不费吹灰之力兼并克里米亚——军事实力与俄罗斯不成比例的乌克兰军队无法抵挡当地的叛乱，俄罗斯没有耗费一兵一卒——的行为，让普京的支持率超过了80％。他已经持续十年的恢复旧秩序、为后苏联时代的俄罗斯新兴中产阶级提供更好生活的方案，在经济低靡的大环境下基本可以宣布无效，因此这更是一个让他在国内得以立足的大好时机。

默克尔因此并没有期望俄罗斯领导人在国际关系零和观点上退步，她也不期望可以让他改变这样的态度：俄罗斯历史上作为受害者的角色，需要一个绝对安全的环境，即使要以周边国家的不安全感作为代价。

她认为普京是一个临时起意的战术家，而不是专心致志的战略家。这让他难以预测，但也有采取行动的机会。

在乌克兰危机的早期，默克尔多次主动帮助普京，确保如果他停止劫掠行为就不会丢面子，包括建议在欧盟内部举行欧亚会谈，试图建立一个共有的经济环境。她希望能给他发言的机会，而不是开枪的机会，只要这可以让他切实地意识到自己正在失去的优势，以及为惩罚乌克兰和西方把俄罗斯当作二等公民的行为所付出的战术成本。

默克尔首先在国内为支持他的外交政策做准备。她与社会民主党外交部长弗兰克•瓦尔特•施泰因迈尔在政策上达成一致意见。他和德意志联邦议会的一些核心成员，由于对维利•勃兰特总理时代的东方政策怀有无限的依恋而退出社会民主党。他们与她自己的保守派联手，让默克尔的俄罗斯制裁政策在联邦议院得到了80％的支持率。

总理接下来联合德国企业支持制裁方案。之后，一家马来西亚客机于去年7月在乌克兰叛军领空被击落，这个是让德国亲俄人士改变心意的主要原因。


乌克兰东部的赫拉谢瓦托，在俄罗斯猛烈攻击下，乌克兰军队遗弃的坦克上被摆放着玫瑰花。

最后，默克尔让德国做出了进出口方面的牺牲（俄罗斯与德国的巨额贸易额在2013年到2014年之间缩水了五分之一），作为对欧盟承诺的姿态。她认为，法国也应该做出一些牺牲，包括不要交付俄罗斯采购的两艘密史托拉级直升机母舰。同时，英国也应该强化反洗钱法律，以对付那些把伦敦当作第二家乡的俄罗斯大亨。

默克尔最终让28个所有欧盟成员国一致投票批准制裁方案，她同时让方案的措辞具有一定的弹性，可以随时加入或减除制裁对象而不需要再一次的全体投票。这的确很了不了。

但是，总理并没有采取的一个行动是说服普遍亲俄的德国民众，让他们认识到普京的行为不可接受。这并没有太大的关系，因为外交政策在德国依然被精英人士所把控。而且，马来西亚客机的悲剧的确影响了民众对俄罗斯的感受，民调显示70％的人支持制裁方案。

去年4月中旬，默克尔发起了一个简要的日内瓦协议，其中列明了基本的目的：停止暴力行为、解除非法武装、把武力夺取的建筑物归还原主人、允许欧洲安全合作阻止的国际观察员在乌克兰东部扮演监控者的角色。俄罗斯外交部长谢尔盖•拉夫罗夫和乌克兰外交部长齐聚谈判桌，日内瓦协议还巧妙地处理了莫斯科对乌克兰临时政府（亚努科维奇逃走之后由议会成立）的默认态度，俄罗斯宣传机构认为这是一场法西斯暴动的非法产物。

讽刺的是，西方因软弱的乌克兰临时政府而受益。从4月到5月的5个星期里，普京发动战争的方式是把8万名俄罗斯士兵驻扎在乌克兰北部、东部和南部边境。但是他不需要真正入侵来彰显他的影响力，当地的雇佣军、黑帮和其它代理人听从俄罗斯特种部队的号令，占领了乌克兰东部一系列中等城镇的政府大楼。普京或许认为，他可以不费一兵一卒地控制基辅出现的任何政客。这是基于谨慎的战术考虑，武装恐吓优先于军事进攻，但风险是会陷入持久战和遭遇游击队的抵抗。

乌克兰第二阶段危机开始于5月底，现任总统彼得•波罗申科以压倒性的优势出人意料地获胜。这位“巧克力国王”寡头政客在苏联解体之后的90年代建立了他的甜品帝国，他还拥有建筑和媒体生意。波罗申科曾经在若干裙带政府中就职，还短暂担任过亚努科维奇政府的贸易部长。但是在2004年因亚努科维奇选举舞弊而引发的橙色革命中，他是积极的支持者。他还从一开始就支持亲欧盟的示威活动。

波罗申科立即派遣乌克兰军队和民兵开始“反恐怖”还击行动，试图收服被叛军和俄罗斯特种部队占领的领土。4月，因装备不足而被人忽略的军队在这次任务中惨败，部分原因是士兵们几乎没有凯夫拉尔防弹背心和夜视镜等简单的防护装备。还因为乌克兰人不敢相信他们竟然要向俄罗斯兄弟开枪，很多人叛逃到俄罗斯军队中。

但是到了夏天，曾经在苏联军队中服役的乌克兰老兵，让鱼龙混杂的乌克兰军队和装备精良的民兵可以步调一致地采取行动。他们逐渐收复了被叛军占据的大部分领土，到7月中，他们在顿涅茨克和卢甘斯克包围了残余叛军。基辅重新燃起了希望，乌克兰人将会阻止国家进一步分崩离析。

在另一边，作为地方代理和雇佣军的俄罗斯军事情报指挥官伊戈尔•斯勒科夫上校，在节节败退的同时不停地抱怨他们已经被莫斯科抛弃，要求得到更多的重型武器。于是俄罗斯的武器辎重向顿巴斯边境源源不断地开进，包括若干火箭发射器、地对空导弹系统、大量弹药和强火力地对空山毛榉导弹，最高射程可达1万米。

8月底，俄罗斯伞兵第一次明目张胆的对乌克兰东部入侵，打破了乌克兰人的围困，同时传达出普京明确的态度——绝不会让他的代理人在顿巴斯遭受失败。一些——也可能是全部——的伞兵在突袭行动之后都返回了国内的军事基地。

波罗申科立即明白了普京“动荡边界线”的概念。9月5日，他通过参加与叛军领导人停战谈判的特使达成一项协议，在叛军控制下的顿涅茨克和卢甘斯克一半地区成为乌克兰军队的禁区。停火协议从未得到过真正的评估，但战争已经降级为低密度的炮击，在4个月里前线局势相对稳定。

德国在休战期间试图完全冻结冲突，把9月份的休战协议和后来的一系列协议转化成永久性的、全面的停火，或者至少双方同意控制战争的升级。所担心的是，如果这个目的不能达成，欧洲或许会进入一个与俄罗斯完全敌对的时代，甚至没有在冷战高峰期两个超级力量那种自我约束的意识。

怀有险恶用心的普京吹嘘，他一声号令，俄罗斯军队两天之内就可以进入基辅，爱沙尼亚、立陶宛、波兰、罗马尼亚和所有北约国家的首都命运都是一样。实际上，他已经用挑衅的姿态测试了北约对波罗的海和大西洋沿岸国家的防御系统，以此来证明他的决心。俄罗斯轰炸机关闭自动应答器驶入民用航线，威胁到客机的安全。2月18日，英国皇家空军紧急起飞，因为在康沃尔海岸发现了两家俄罗斯军用飞机。

这个月休战谈判的失败，熄灭了实现和平的最后一线希望。很明显，新冷战不会与超级大国在四分之一个世纪之前结束旧冷战的方式一致。当时华盛顿在武器和经济发展方面大幅度地超越了莫斯科，导致苏联的经济和社会发展遭遇了死胡同，以至于米哈伊尔•戈尔巴乔夫决定用整个帝国和宿怨换取软实力和社会活力。

安吉拉•默克尔的耐心不会有实质性的作用，《金融时报》的菲利普•史蒂芬斯说她耐心足够，策略不足。弗拉基米尔•普京也不大会主动放弃他的立场，在说服非俄罗斯人效忠伟大的俄罗斯霸权帝国之后放弃武力手段。唯一确定的是俄罗斯与乌克兰的战争将会继续。





原文：

A year since Vladimir Putin shocked Europe by annexing Crimea and fomenting rebellion in Ukraine’s previously quiet Donbas region, his undeclared war on the Russians’ east Slav brothers has become the “new-old normal” on the continent. It has displaced the seven-decade interlude in which Europeans thought they had established a postmodern order of peace in their heartland. It has induced a loss of hope that Europe’s embodiment of the liberal peace first envisioned by Immanuel Kant can be restored within less than one or two generations – if at all. It has confronted the west with a stark choice between appeasement of a regional bully or war with no mutually understood restraints in a nuclear-armed world.

Already the truce hammered out by the Ukrainian, Russian, German and French leaders on 12 February in all-night negotiations held in Minsk, Belarus, has collapsed in reality, if not in name. Separatists in eastern Ukraine and their allied Russian “paid volunteers” never halted their saturation shelling of the town of Debaltseve at one minute past midnight on 15 February, as had been agreed, but kept up the barrage for three and a half more days until the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers surrounded there died, or were captured, or managed to retreat under blistering fire to contiguous Ukrainian territory.

Only a few of the heavy weapons that were supposed to begin being withdrawn from the designated buffer zone on 16 February have been pulled back on either side. The rebels have not allowed international monitors to take up their designated posts in the ceasefire zone and on the Russian-controlled Ukrainian border.

The truce that was patched up again after the destruction of Debaltseve will probably provide no more than a brief winter respite before a spring offensive by rebels and Russian professional soldiers in eastern Ukraine. Moscow still denies that any of its troops and modern heavy weapons are there, despite all the direct photographic, electronic and eyewitness evidence of their presence and the indirect evidence of artillery and multiple-rocket-shell targeting on Debaltseve with a precision that only well-trained Russian crews could provide. Since fighting began last April, nearly 5,700 people have died and 1.5 million have fled their homes, according to the United Nations.

Even before the ceasefire that never was, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, provided the epitaph for European peace by warning that she could see no realistic scenario in which any arms the west might give Ukraine would significantly change the balance of power in the conflict. Russia cares more about the fortunes of Ukraine than any other outside country, and possesses the military strength, resources and capability to counter any new weapons that Ukraine may be gifted. The only hope Merkel could offer was that, with strategic patience, the west might eventually triumph, just as it ended the cold war – in tandem with the unmentioned Soviet statesman Mikhail Gorbachev – with the bloodless fall of the 28-year-old Berlin Wall in 1989.

This dark prognosis has been reached only in recent weeks. Throughout 2014, Europeans still hoped that their accustomed order could be restored soon. As Russian special forces in unmarked uniforms and masks abruptly ended the quarter-century of amicable coexistence of the Russian and Ukrainian fleets in their Crimean port and deposed the peninsula’s regional government at gunpoint last March, the US president, Barack Obama, dismissed post-superpower Russia as little more than a regional nuisance.

Chancellor Merkel took Putin’s irredentist threat far more seriously. She warned the US president that his Russian counterpart was living “in another world” of tsarist-era nationalism that, she implied, precluded any cost-benefit rationality or compromise. Obama, preoccupied with pullback from America’s overstretch in the Middle East and Afghanistan and his so-called pivot to Asia, in effect outsourced second-rank diplomacy about Ukraine to Berlin. For the first time since 1945, Germany had thrust upon it a geopolitical leadership of Europe commensurate with the country’s economic clout. And for the first time Merkel, whose hallmark had been leading from behind, stepped out in front.

As Putin raced towards annexing Crimea, Merkel told the Bundestag on 13 March 2014 that the previous 69 years of reconciliation, peace and freedom that had been created by an integrating Europe and the transatlantic democratic alliance were a feat that “can still be considered a miracle”. Russia’s theft of Ukrainian territory was unacceptable in 21st-century Europe and represented a reversion to the law of the jungle and to “the law of the strong against the strength of the law”, Merkel said.

She reprimanded Russia for violating international law and specific treaties to which Moscow was a party, including the 1975 Helsinki ban on changing European borders by force and Russia’s 1994 assurance of Ukrainian independence, sovereignty and borders in return for Kyiv’s surrender of its huge arsenal of inherited Soviet nuclear weapons to Moscow.

In dozens of phone calls she warned a disbelieving Putin that Europe’s hard-won peace trumped commercial interests and that this time he could not count on Germany’s pro-Russian business lobby to veto economic retaliation for his provocation. Europe and the US announced that they would not intervene militarily to defend Ukraine, a non-member of Nato, but would gamble instead on countering Russia with slow-impact financial sanctions on his entourage.

Roses on an army tank in Hrashevatoe, eastern Ukraine, abandoned by Ukrainian troops fleeing the Russian onslaught.

Merkel was the west’s logical interface with the Russian president. She was the ultimate Putin-Versteher, or “Putin understander”, not in line with the original coinage of this euphemism to describe German apologists for Putin, but in the sense of someone who grew up in Communist East Germany, spoke Russian and sensed the Russian mindset intuitively.

She understood Putin’s paranoia about being encircled by Nato, even if that alliance has expanded not by armed seizure of neighbours’ territory but by responding to the clamour for membership by central Europeans fearing Russian recidivism to Soviet-style forced hegemony. She comprehended the threat to his own rule that Putin feared from street protests in Kyiv; he had served as a KGB recruiter of spies in East Germany in the 1980s and watched the Berlin Wall fall to people power.

Merkel also grasped his resentment at the subsequent Soviet collapse that he calls the 20th century’s “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” – and at the independent Ukraine that emerged from the Soviet Union and illicitly tempted its people, in his view, to betray their elder brother Russians by no longer obeying them as tradition required. The humiliation he felt over the cumulative shrinkage of his influence in Ukraine was well known in Berlin.

Putin first lost all of Ukraine when his protégé Viktor Yanukovych, then president of Ukraine, allowed police snipers to murder scores of pro-European, pro-democracy
“Euromaidan” protesters a year ago. The violence alienated even Yanukovych’s own party and left him no choice but to abscond to exile in Russia, thus ensuring that Ukraine would not add its Slavic weight to Putin’s pet “Eurasian Economic Union” project. Putin’s insistence that Kyiv join the newborn Union, sometimes called “the Soviet Union lite”, was the original spark for the Euromaidan demonstrations in late 2013.

Putin next lost Novorossiya, as he anachronistically called the eastern third of today’s Ukraine that he suddenly claimed for Russia. (The term dates back to the time of Catherine the Great, who seized “New Russia” from the Ottoman empire in the 1780s.) He seemed to believe his own propaganda that discontented Russian speakers in the region would rise up if Russian special forces ignited a rebellion there.

Yet the masses failed to revolt. Only in the rust belt of the Donbas could Russian proxies mobilise ill-paid retirees and buy or coerce enough additional support to set up the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Indeed, in the east of Ukraine as a whole, where many made no clear distinction between Russian and Ukrainian ethnicity, opinion polls showed that most people favoured staying within the Ukrainian state.

Merkel understood that Moscow’s cost-free takeover of Crimea in the name of restoring Russia’s lost greatness – the greatly outgunned Ukrainian army on the peninsula did not resist the regional coup, and no Russian blood was shed – was boosting Putin’s popularity ratings to more than 80 per cent. This gave him renewed domestic legitimation even as his decade-old social contract of restoring order and offering a better life to a new, urban middle class in post-Soviet Russia was becoming ineffectual at a time of economic slowdown.

Merkel therefore did not expect the Russian leader to budge from his zero-sum view of international relations. Nor did she expect to deflect him from his reversion to Russia’s historic sense of victimhood and need for a security so absolute that Moscow required the insecurity of neighbours in its sphere of influence.

She did, however, see Putin as an improvising tactician rather than a single-minded strategist. This made him unpredictable, but it also allowed for movement.

At the first stage of the Ukraine crisis Merkel repeatedly offered to help Putin save face if he would cease his depredations, to the point of suggesting European Union-Eurasian Union talks about creating a common economic space. She hoped to keep him talking rather than shooting for as long as possible and to nudge him towards a more realistic perception of the advantages he was losing and the tactical costs that he was incurring in his drive to punish both the Ukrainians and the west for its treatment of Russia as a second-class power.

Merkel first prepared the domestic foundation to support her diplomacy. She forged a close policy partnership with her Social Democratic foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. He and others in his SPD parliamentary caucus weaned the Social Democrats from their romantic nostalgia for the old Ostpolitik days of Chancellor Willy Brandt. Together, the grand coalition between the SPD and her own conservatives gave Merkel an 80 per cent majority in the Bundestag in support of targeted sanctions against Russia.

The chancellor then rallied German business to the cause of sanctions – well before the shooting down of a Malaysian passenger airliner over rebel Ukrainian territory last July, an event that is commonly credited with causing a change of heart among Germany’s pro-Russian elite.

Finally, Merkel took the sacrifices that German importers and exporters were ready to make (the huge trade between Russia and Germany shrank by one-fifth between 2013 and 2014) to her EU partners. She argued that the French should make their own sacrifices by not delivering two Mistral-class helicopter carriers they had contracted to sell to the Russians, and that the British should enforce their money laundering laws in dealing with the many Russian tycoons who have made a second home in London.

In the end, Merkel delivered the unanimous vote of all 28 EU members that was required to approve sanctions; and she saw to it that the authorisation was written with enough flexibility to add names to the target list and subtract others without making every shift subject to a new vote of unanimity. It was a quiet tour de force.

However, one task the chancellor did not take on was persuading the generally Russophile German public that Putin’s behaviour was unacceptable. That did not matter, because foreign policy remains an elite exercise in Germany – and because the Malaysia Airlines tragedy did alter popular perceptions of the Russians and yield 70 per cent public approval of sanctions.

In mid-April last year, Merkel initiated a brief Geneva agreement that put on paper a basic wish-list: stopping the violence, disarming illegal armed groups, returning seized buildings to their rightful owners and giving international observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe a monitoring role in eastern Ukraine. By bringing the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and his Ukrainian counterpart together at the same table, the Geneva accord also finessed Moscow’s tacit recognition of the legitimacy of the interim Ukrainian government (appointed by parliament after Yanukovych fled), which Russian propaganda was presenting as the illegitimate result of a fascist coup.

Ironically, the west was aided by the weakness of the provisional Ukrainian government. Over five weeks in April and May, Putin mounted menacing war games by placing up to 80,000 Russian troops on high alert on Ukraine’s northern, eastern and southern borders. But he did not need to invade in order to extend his influence. Local mercenaries, criminal gangs and other proxies under the command of special Russian forces were occupying administrative buildings in a string of medium-sized towns in eastern Ukraine. Putin presumably thought he could control whichever leading politicians emerged in Kyiv without having to shed Russian blood. In this decision he displayed tactical caution, preferring the weapon of intimidation to that of military occupation, with its risks of quagmire and even guerrilla resistance.

The next phase of the Ukraine crisis began in late May with the unexpected landslide election as president of Petro Poroshenko, the “chocolate king” oligarch who
built his confectionery empire in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and who also has construction and media businesses. Poroshenko had served in several crony governments and was briefly trade minister under Yanukovych. But he had been a strong backer of the Orange Revolution, which began in 2004, sparked by elections rigged in favour of Yanukovych. He also supported the Euromaidan demonstrations from the beginning.

Poroshenko quickly sent the Ukrainian army and militias on an “anti-terror” counteroffensive to recover territory lost to the rebels and their Russian special forces allies. In April the long-neglected and underfunded army had failed miserably in the same mission, in part because hardly any soldiers had such simple protection as Kevlar vests or night-vision goggles, and also because the Ukrainians couldn’t believe that they must shoot at brother Russians who were shooting at them. There were defections to the pro-Russian side.

By the summer, however, older Ukrainian soldiers who had once served in the Soviet army helped the ragtag Ukrainian forces and the better-equipped militias to get their act together. They gradually recovered most of the territory held by the rebels and by mid-July were besieging the remaining rebel strongholds in the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. In Kyiv, hopes rose that the Ukrainians could prevent further dismemberment of their country.

On the rebel side, Colonel Igor Strelkov, the designated Russian military intelligence commander of the local proxies and mercenaries who were being pushed back, complained bitterly that they were being deserted by the leadership in Moscow and asked for more heavy weapons. The Russians obliged by rolling over the border into the Donbas more multiple rocket launchers, anti-aircraft missile systems, plentiful ammunition and the powerful ground-to-air Buk missile system, which can reach an altitude of 10,000 metres.

In late August the first known direct invasion of eastern Ukraine by Russian paratrooper units followed, rolling back the Ukrainian sieges and delivering Putin’s clear message that he would not let his proxies in the Donbas be defeated. Some, perhaps all, of the Russian airborne troops returned to their home bases after their punitive raid.

Poroshenko understood Putin’s line in the sand instantly and, on 5 September, he agreed through an envoy to a truce with rebel leaders that made the half of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions then under rebel control a no-go zone for Ukrainian troops. The ceasefire was never fully observed but it de-escalated the fighting to low-intensity shelling, and the front line remained relatively stable for four months.

German diplomacy in this interlude consisted of trying to freeze the conflict by converting the September truce and subsequent protocol into a permanent, comprehensive ceasefire, or at least into an acceptance of common constraints on escalation. The fear was that if that could not be agreed on, Europe would enter an era of acute Russian-western hostility without even the mutual restraints that the two superpowers settled on at the height of the cold war.

Menacingly, Putin boasted that his troops could be in Kyiv within two days if he so ordered; and could reach the capitals of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania, all Nato member states, just as fast. Indeed, he has been illustrating the point graphically by aggressively testing Nato defences of the Baltic and Atlantic states daily on the seas and in the air – and endangering passenger flights by sending bombers with their transponders turned off into airspace that civilian liners use. On 18 February, RAF jets were scrambled after two Russian military aircraft were spotted off the coast of Cornwall.

The debacle of this month’s attempt to secure a truce has killed the last residual hope of a swift peace. Clearly, the end of the neo-cold war will not occur the way its superpower original did a quarter-century ago, when Washington ostentatiously outspent and out-innovated Moscow in weapons as well as general prosperity just as the Soviet economy and society reached a dead end, making Mikhail Gorbachev decide to trade in empire and feud in return for soft power and animal spirits.

Nor will it come alone from Angela Merkel’s strategic patience, which Philip Stephens of the Financial Times parses as long on patience but short on strategy. And it is unlikely to stem from Vladimir Putin’s progressive foreclosure of his own options by doubling down militarily after every failure to persuade non-Russians of the splendours of Great Russian hegemony. The only certainty is that the war between Russia and Ukraine will go on.

sailwf

不可理解，西方人为啥认为把乌克兰纳入他们的体系是必要的呢？