Let me state some facts: wars always have underlying politically defined motives or objectives. A war is therefore much more than the military operations that take place on the battlefields. Nations do not go to war because they possess armed forces and weapons but rather because they have certain national objectives that they judge not to be accomplishable by other means short of war. These objectives have to be vital or core objectives before nations would decide to risk war and its consequences, in which case the decision to go to war is never taken lightly or casually. Pursuing such vital national objective(s), being a holistic activity, also involves adopting a variety of political, socio-economic, military, diplomatic methods, strategies and tactics.
It is in this regard that Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine tagged Special Military Operations should be viewed. The war is not just President Putin’s whimsical discretion, as his Western traducers would make the world believe, but a calculated move to accomplish Russia’s defined national objectives which President Putin as leader of Russia framed in existential terms. Leaders as chief spokespersons for their countries are responsible for making clear the national objectives their countries pursue in the international system.
Since Russia launched the full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in February, the Western world and their news outlets have been controlling the narratives, skewed against Russia as is to be expected. Analysts, commentators and pundits have filled the pages of newspapers, magazines, journals and periodicals, and of course radio and television outlets, with their takes on the ongoing war. Acute display of unadulterated Russophobia, demonizing Vladimir Putin as a crazy bloodthirsty tyrant are most often substituted for objective commentary, while crass propaganda, deliberate obfuscation, accusing Russian soldiers of atrocious conduct and war crimes without proof, have replaced objective news reporting and analyses. This for me makes watching the major Western news outlets especially CNN and BBC so boring these days. Lamentably, some Nigerian television news reportage simply and uncritically ventilate Western propaganda because they lack in-house investigative journalists and researchers.
Rather than objectively examining Russia’s national security concerns, the ubiquitous Western pundits casually dismiss any notion that Russia could be said to have national interests have instead busied themselves psycho-analyzing Vladimir Putin, wearying everybody out through the gratuitous imposition of biased views about why Putin, not Russia, invaded Ukraine. Even when he protested NATO’s provocative eastward expansion as a threat, the analysts simply dismissed it and harped on Ukraine’s sovereign right to join any organization it pleased.
Russia’s core objective is to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, a military alliance established in 1949 for the sole purpose of opposing the defunct Soviet Union, and now Russia! Russia sees Ukraine joining NATO would bring enemy military forces and weapons within a few feet of its national borders as unacceptable existential threat. It is not a question of whether Russia is right or wrong, but of the right of every nation to determine what constitutes its own national security, no matter how ridiculous or absurd they may seem to others. And Russia does not require external acceptance or validation of whatever it calls its national security. That’s just the way international politics works.
As things stand currently, Ukraine has no chance of becoming a NATO member-state in the foreseeable future. I will only proffer four reasons for this.
First, NATO is not ready for a direct war with Russia, for the possibility of it becoming a pan-European conflagration. For instance, Germany and France are not particularly enthusiastic about Ukraine joining the alliance. Since admitting new members requires unanimous consent of existing members, Ukraine’s chances are not about to improve any time soon. Second, the US is not ready to fight a war with Russia except by proxy. Ukraine is the hapless proxy the US is using to achieve the weakening of Russia, even if that involves sacrificing every Ukrainian citizen. American governments love to fight wars, foreign wars that is. They love the glitter and glamour of their own country too much to permit a war on their territory. Remember how the US has ignited and fought scores of destructive foreign wars since the end of WWII. But Russia, a fellow nuclear power with a few thousands nuclear weapons and strategic delivery vehicles to boot, is a bad hombre to contemplate fighting a war with. Based on that reality alone, America may huff and puff but is unlikely to engage Russia frontally.
Third, granting alliance membership to Ukraine is the swiftest invitation to full-scale war with Russia that would seamlessly dovetail into a Third World War and a nuclear holocaust. This is because Ukraine has been at war since 2014 because of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and its support for the Russian-speaking separatists in Donbas. The alliance would then be expected to trigger its Article 5 to defend Ukraine against Russia, because not invoking Article 5 would destroy its credibility. It will involve European nations directly in a war they neither want nor are even remotely prepared for. If you ask the Europeans, they are probably secretly wishing for a quick end to the crisis so that they can resume their normal lives again.
Fourth, Ukraine currently has no definite and registered international borders, as all sovereign states should. Crimea has been forcibly sliced off it by Russia, and the Russian-speaking eastern territory of Donetsk and Luhansk have also declared themselves as independent republics, so Ukraine only claims de jure sovereignty over them. Though these ‘republics’ have yet to be recognized by the rest of the international community, they have nonetheless created gross uncertainties regarding Ukraine’s actual national borders. The question is: will NATO admit a dismembered or fractured Ukraine? I think not, unless it has already decided on a direct war with Russia.
If Ukraine cannot, on account of all these, join NATO any time soon, then it is high time its leaders seriously considered giving negotiation to end the destructive war a serious chance, rather than President Zelensky asking for more lethal weapons that would merely prolong the war and the suffering of Ukrainians and postpone indefinitely the reconstruction of that country. From the situation on the ground, Ukraine will not join the military alliance; Russia would have succeeded in achieving the central objective of its Special Military Operations. I make this assertion against the backdrop of war not being purely military engagements on the battlefield alone. War is primarily a political decision, with set political objectives and targets, and the engagement of armed forces on the battlefields is merely one of the means of accomplishing it. Carl von Clausewitz has put it so eloquently: “war is a continuation of policy by other means.” No country, no matter how powerful, can ever hope to achieve all its objectives for going into a war. Countries always have maximum and minimum objectives. Political victory can be declared once the non-negotiable core objectives have been achieved. What matters therefore is not whether Russia wins on the battlefield but whether it succeeds in frustrating the possibility of Ukraine becoming a NATO member country, its central objective for launching the invasion in the first instance.
- Prof. Fawole writes from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.