Lessons small countries can learn from the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Biased? Ukrainian refugees getting sandwiches at Poland’s Krakow Airport before boarding a plane to Zurich chartered by Swiss millionaire Guido Fluri on March 22. European governments and people have been a lot more welcoming towards Ukrainian refugees compared with how they have greeted refugees from other places in the past. — AFP

THE invasion of Ukraine, which Russia chooses to euphemistically call “special operations”, has produced several lessons for Bangladesh and other small nations, as much as it has, once again, exposed various negative facets of the existing world order, the fault lines in international relationships, and the skewed international system hogged by the rich and the powerful.

This conflict has also brought to light the partisan nature of Western media, which flaunts its so-called objectivity and hypes its impartiality, now ever so consumed by selective amnesia of the United States and its allies’ bombardment of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, so much so that they cannot but betray their racist proclivities. This racial bias is also evident in European governments’ policies towards Ukrainian refugees compared with their attitude and policies towards other refugees whose skin colour happens to be a few shades darker than theirs.

Unfortunately, all wars are launched on the pretext of justice – and all wars result in deaths. But while all murderers face retribution and punishment since it is forbidden to kill, those who wage wars and kill people go free because, according to French philosopher Voltaire, “they kill in large numbers to the sounds of trumpets”, as have modern-day mass killers like many US presidents. Now Putin has been added to that list.

What is particularly noticeable, and heartening, is the overdrive of certain international bodies and institutions that have moved very quickly to hold Russia to account, like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the latter calling up Russia for alleged genocide and war crimes.

It is encouraging to see the ICJ move with such celerity as never seen before under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The hearing started in The Hague on March 7; an interim order was delivered on March 16.

These are appropriate measures that must be taken against a blatant aggressor, and one would like to believe that the international institutions are not totally neutered yet. But if only these bodies had moved with equal promptness in similar circumstances in the past, when international order was equally blatantly trampled under the feet of a superpower, when the UN was bypassed, and when indiscriminate carpet bombing tried to blow a civilisation off the face of the Earth, Russia would have perhaps thought twice before attacking Ukraine.

And what about civilian deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya caused by US operations? I quote a very conservative estimate, by the Watson Institute of Brown University in the United States, that 387,072 civilians died violent deaths as a direct result of America’s post-9/11 “war against terror”. The deaths from malnutrition and a damaged healthcare system and environment likely far outnumber deaths from combat. Should they not merit recognition by the ICJ?

Let’s see now the strategic and security lessons the Russia-Ukraine war has for the world – particularly for a geographically small country like Bangladesh, whose main diplomatic preoccupation since its inception has been to craft policies and chart courses that would enable it to exist peacefully with its preponderantly large neighbour.

What has come out very starkly in the latest Russia-Ukraine war is that a country’s geopolitical importance, stemming from its geopolitical location, can be more of a bane than a boon – unless one plays one’s diplomatic cards deftly. Sandwiched between two big and powerful entities – ie, the Russian Federation and the conglomerate of Nato (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) allies with historical animosity for the former – the situation for Ukraine was always extremely delicate. Ukraine became a buffer for the Russians after the break-up of the Soviet Union and Nato borders moved further eastwards with Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia joining the Western alliance.

Ukraine fell victim to the large-single-powerful-neighbour syndrome, with the Russian Federation dominating its entire eastern flank and most of its big western neighbours allied to one or the other of the big powers. Ukraine’s intention to join Nato and make a big case of it are the immediate reasons behind its current woes.

And more than anything, Russia’s aggression demonstrates the need for a small country to have a credible deterrence that would make amply clear to any potential aggressor that the cost of aggression would be highly disproportionate to the assessed gains.

Ukrainian leadership must be ruing the fact that they gave up the nuclear warheads stationed in its territory in exchange for a security guarantee: At the time of independence following the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine had the third largest nuclear stockpile in the world, which it surrendered in 1994 after joining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in exchange for economic and territorial guarantee. One wonders whether Russia would have attacked Ukraine if it still possessed those weapons.

And this is another lesson for a small country like Bangladesh: Do not depend on the security guarantees of others, not even that which is in black and white. Look at the fate of the Budapest Memorandum signed between Ukraine (and also Belarus and Kazakhstan) with the United States, the United Kingdom and the Russian Federation in 1994, which stipulated economic and territorial security guarantees for the signatories in return for giving up nuclear weapons.

The memorandum was honoured in its violation, regrettably. Ukraine has learnt the hard way that, while the United States and its allies are willing to put boots on the ground while invading a third country, they dither in doing so in defence of a country outside their alliance.

And neither should small countries fall for the oft-repeated cliché that diplomacy is the best defence. In this instance, the United States and the West’s defence and diplomacy both failed miserably.

Last but not least is the very important lesson that one must learn not only from the recent invasion of Ukraine but also the Russian annexation of Crimea and its war against Georgia. In all three instances, the ethnic affinity of the people living in areas bordering Russia was exploited by the latter to create grounds for invasion and annexation, as was done in Crimea, or carving a separate state from the mainland as with Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and with the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine.

I call it “the quisling factor” for want of a better phrase, and we must be wary of it too. – The Daily Star/Asia News Network

Brigadier General Shahedul Anam Khan is a retired Bangladesh army officer and defence analyst. He is an associate editor of The Daily Star.