Even the most difficult and protracted negotiations are preferable to the spectre of further armed conflict.
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Even the most difficult and protracted negotiations are preferable to the spectre of further armed conflict.
The current escalation between Russia and Ukraine is the latest chapter in a saga of deteriorating relations dating back almost two decades.
Ukraine’s domestic resilience is as important a contribution to European and global security in the long term as the immediate imperative of deterring Russian aggression.
Like the West’s, Russia’s Ukraine policy is part of a larger geopolitical game over influence in a strategic region contested by an emerging great power (the EU) and a rival who has been in decline for two decades and unable to reverse this trend to date.
Given the local, regional and global political dynamics of the Ukrainian crisis, Crimea is unlikely to experience a “velvet divorce”, but could trigger wider violence that Simferopol, Kiev, Moscow, Brussels and Washington should be keen to avoid.
Given the depth of these problems, Ukraine’s crisis is certain to continue. Any effort to resolve it in a sustainable way will require a more comprehensive agreement and the breathing space to negotiate it–neither of which will be possible without highly responsible and strategic leadership in Kiev, Moscow, Brussels and Washington.
The EU has a clear opportunity to contribute to the settlement of the Transnistrian conflict and prove itself an effective conflict manager and actor for stability and security in its own neighbourhood. This is a task that is not without challenges, but these challenges are of such a nature that the EU can, and must, confront them.
The dilemma for the EU is that it has put itself in a position in which it cannot side with the people of South Ossetia who, in their majority, have endorsed a female candidate in a presidential election deemed free and fair.
At the end of 2011, it will be twenty years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union but so-called “frozen conflicts” in Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan stubbornly persist. Why, despite significant international efforts, has no settlement been achieved for these conflicts over the past two decades?