Defence in times of global geopolitical redefinition

Opinion: Chris Graeme; Photos: Fernando Bento

You could have heard a pin drop during the talk given by Portugal’s Minister of National Defence, Nuno Mello at the International Club of Portugal (ICPT) ON Tuesday, February 11.

Mello made it quite clear that Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine was nothing more than an invasion, a colonial land grab of a sovereign country that in 1991 voted for independence – a project it had sought to varying degrees since the 1860s, again in 1918 and in 1941.

And one must not forget that of the 84.1 percent of eligible voters—some 32 million people—voting in the referendum, fully 90.32 percent supported the August 24 1991 declaration of independence. The vote against independence was 7.6 percent, and only 2.1 percent of the ballots cast were invalid.

This was at a price: the new Ukrainian State had to relinquish all of the nuclear weapons that had been on its soil targeted at the West and NATO countries and that had belonged to the former Soviet Union in return for acceptance of its newfound sovereign integrity, guaranteed by several countries, including Russia, as an independent State in its own right, and not a confederated republic tied largely to Moscow despite its autonomous statute.

Two Ukraines, not one

Of course, there is another side to the argument. Ukraine is a badly divided country and what is taking place in Ukraine today is in large measure a civil war because the further east you go in Ukraine there are more ethnic Russians who speak Russian and consider themselves to be Russian in culture and sociological terms.

In the 2004 election, after the Orange Revolution, Ukrainians in the East voted for the Russian leaning Viktor Yanokovich while in western leaning districts the vote went to Viktor Yushenko who was in favour of closer ties with Western Europe and an eventual membership of the European Union.

In the 2010 election, which resulted in Yanukovich being elected president, again the eastern parts of Ukraine were largely responsible for voting him into power, whatever might be said about eventual vote rigging.

In other words, people in the western part wanted to join the EU and the people in the East wanted to join the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The same divide, by the way, goes for joining NATO or staying independent and/or under Russian protection.

A failure to understand Russia’s security concerns

It is arguable that the conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine is partly down to this context and a blindness by the West in not understanding Russia’s security concerns.

But what are the structural factors that lie behind this conflict and why did its beginnings start in 2014? And why did the Russians do what they did in Crimea?

The Russians felt that the aim of the US and its European allies was to encourage Ukraine to move away from Russian influence towards the West.

And there is an argument, from a purely realpolitik point of view, that the West is responsible for the current war that is going on in Ukraine.

Now anyone who has studied Russian history knows that Ukraine, apart from its economic significance in terms of natural resources and grain, both vital to Russia as the world veers away from oil and gas towards a more sustainable and greener future, is paramount to Russia’s survival.

Russia’s great tragedy is that it never really managed after the fall of the Berlin Wall to diversify its economy beyond these staples and faced becoming a poorer and even less economically viable country.

Second, Ukraine has always been seen as a protective bulwark against foreign invasions. Western Russia and Ukraine are flat, with no natural landmark barriers to protect it from future invasions, hence the need for an independent State, not allied to the West geopolitically, to act as a neutral buffer state against possible aggression.

The problem is that many countries in the West too want Ukraine as a similar buffer against Russia which they fear, and let’s not forget the role of NATO since the dawn of the Cold War was to protect Western and Central Europe against father Russian adventurism in Europe.

Third, more and more countries have joined NATO, which is a defensive organization for the protection of Europe, and these new NATO members have taken a military presence right up to Russia’s borders.

One wonders how the US would react to the countries in Latin America creating a defensive alliance and moving troops, air bases, military bases and missiles along the length of the Mexican border and in Cuba?

Does this make Russia’s actions against Ukraine morally correct? Of course, not. Does it go some way to explain it? Unfortunately, yes. So it is what it is.

Of course, I’m playing the Devil’s advocate here and I am well aware what I’m writing will be uncomfortable, if not outrageous to many.

A shift in US geo-strategic policy

Now back to the excellent discourse of Nuno Mello, Portugal’s Minister of National Defence who was speaking on behalf of a NATO country which views things very differently.

As he said, we are living in a very challenging world which after 70 years of peace in Europe is going through a period charged with “dangers and uncertainties”.

“I think Russia is a great nation on a global scale but we’re at a moment when we oppose each other,” he admitted.

“I think that we live in a world full of uncertainties and imbalances because of a concept of Russian revisionism with a war in Ukraine, because of the worsening conflicts in the Middle East, the persistence of terrorist threats, and strategic reorganization where Europe for the current US administration is clearly in the rear view mirror, and focuses instead on the Indo-Pacific and China because of the long systemic challenge that China represents, and the growing deterioration of the established international order.”

The Russian Federation, he said, embarked on “a war of its own choosing”, but it was a war of “conquest”, which from the perspective of the Western world and NATO violated borders, broke international law, has been made worse by the involvement of North Korean troops, the increasing and worrying rhetoric of threatening to use nuclear weapons, and the use of prototype medium range missiles.

“None of this is good news, but what is important are actions and these are disruptive and threatening. If this is the case in Ukraine, and if it is a fact that right now Russia is a direct threat to the Euro-Atlantic countries, then China represents this in a more worrying way as a systematic threat to the international order”, he said.

The minister stressed that the Indo-Pacific had relevance. Representing around 60% of the world population while the Asian economies represent around 40% of the world’s gross product.

Of the top 15 military budgets, six are represented by Indo-Pacific countries with five of these countries in the Top 10.

It explains why the US has undergone a geo-strategic shift to this region which was announced in 2010, and reinforced by various strategic partnerships with countries in the Indo-Pacific area, and which obviously has effects on Europe, European defence policy and NATO members.

In fact, in 2024 a report from the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) underscored the growing decline in US commitment to European security, signalling a potential shift in the long-standing transatlantic relationship.

The report explored how structural changes in the global order and domestic political shifts in the US are increasingly deprioritising Europe in American foreign policy, with profound implications for NATO, the European Union, and the broader European defence strategy. In other words the decline of Atlanticism.

This means a Western (strategic) pivot towards China and the ‘Silk Route’, together with China’s strategic partnership with Russia and the influence of Iran and North Korea with distinct geo-political ambitions resulting a problematic alignment.

These, said the minister, presented significant challenges for Euro-Atlantic security and when added to territorial ambitions, which are “clear, obvious and well-known”, and this desire to flex geopolitical will globally by various countries, one can understand “the potential risk of new conflicts”.

A failure to learn lessons

And back to Russia. It is possible that Russia can likely win this war in Ukraine and reduce it to a rump state.

But, if it does, I believe it will face a guerrilla war of attrition from the Western Ukrainians that will make their adventures in Afghanistan in the 1980s (or the Northern Ireland troubles directed by the IRA at the British government in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond) look like a tea dance at a village fair.

Unfortunately, Russia tends to forget the lessons of what they call the Great Patriotic War when the Germans carried out ethnic cleansing and a scorched earth policy in those parts of Western Russia under the control of the Wehrmacht, and when two-thirds of Kiev, Kharkiv and Minsk were completely destroyed, one-third of their populations starved to death, and the other two-thirds either deported to Germany as slave labour, imprisoned, shot or fled.

Now here the Russians are doing the exact same thing in Ukraine, so who are the Nazis now?

And let us not forget that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. They may conquer and control Ukraine, but they will never really control it and have peace of mind.

I believe they will rue the day that they ever embarked on this costly and quite frankly evil adventure. They deserve everything they get!