President Putin seems likely to go down in history as the great Russian leader who won back Crimea without any bloodshed sixty years after the Soviet leader Khrushchev gifted it to Ukraine, and the take over has also been a domestic victory for President Putin. The next couple of weeks will be an immense battle as Ukraine prepares to elect a president on May 25th, to agree to a new constitution, and to prevent the Eastern part of Ukraine from splintering away as well. However, the West, NATO, and the United States believe that Russia is ready to advance and will easily take the Eastern part of Ukraine. On the other hand, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who has asked NATO “to deescalate the ‘unreasonable’ warmongering rhetoric,” which includes a rise of anti-Russian sentiment in the region, argues that it will not help Europe, Ukraine, or anyone in the region.
President Putin has said on many occasions that his country would not invade Eastern Ukraine, but that he has a right to protect Russians beyond the country’s borders. Therefore, Ukraine and the West have accused Russia of destabilizing Eastern Ukraine. US Secretary of State John Kerry in a telephone call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged Russia to remove its troop from southeastern Ukraine and warned Russia that it would face more sanctions. A list of Russian officials and businessmen already face travel bans and asset freezes in the U.S, and Russia is excluded from the Group of Eight because of its annexation of Crimea in March.
Putin is a realist politician and knows that the only possible solution for Ukraine has to be worked out with the United States. That is why President Putin called President Obama to try to set up a solution package, which included the possibility of a federalization of Ukraine. Washington knows that the federalization of Ukraine most likely could be the only rational solution to Ukraine’s mess, and that nothing will change Putin’s mind. The weak Russia is long gone, replaced by the new strong Russia under Putin’s intensifying rule; consequently, isolationism and economic sanctions will not force Russian to change its mind.
There is always another card that Putin can play against the West and the United States. Obama does not have any clue what to do with the Ukrainian problem. However, Putin is strengthening Russia’s relation with Iran. The Russians have already terminated a number of Russian and Ukrainian agreements including one that gave Ukraine a discount on gas prices for Russians to lease the port of Sevastopol, where the Russian Fleet is stationed. Now it has increased the price of its gas. According to Russian Prime Minister Medyedev, Ukraine’s gas debt could hit $16.6 billion in April. However, Ukraine’s government called the Russian decision an economic war and refused to pay its debt.
Europe needs the Russian gas, but there is an alternative for Russian gas for Europe, and Iran could be a reliable, secure and long-term supplier of gas to Europe, if Europe solves the Iran nuclear deal peacefully. However, Russia is one of the members of the UN Security Council and will play Iran’s nuclear card against the United States and the West hoping to influence their position toward Russia regarding Ukraine.
Iran surely will play cautiously and will stay away from the dispute over Ukraine. It is for sure that the crisis in Ukraine will have an impact on the Russian– Iranian relations because Russia and Iran are regional players, have geopolitical interests between Moscow and Tehran, and resist Western and American hegemonic power in the Middle East. The strengthened relationship between Russia and Iran results in part from their shared objective of resisting Western powers. A good example of this joint anti-American effort is the case of Syria in which both Russia and Iran reinforced themselves as regional powers and continued to help Assad to remain in power. The Ukraine and South China Sea crises have brought the three oligarchies of Russia, China, and Iran closer to one another to counterbalance America’s hegemony in Asia and the Middle East as it seeks to find footholds for democracy.
The other regional player in the region is Turkey, but the Ukrainian crisis will not have an impact on the Turkish-Russian relations or their natural gas agreements even though Turkey is a member of NATO. Putin warned the EU that those who have purchased Russian natural gas but have not paid their share will have their gas cut off. Pressure from the West and the United States will not have much serious impact on Putin’s policies because the world we live in now is no longer a unipolar one; it is a multipolar world. If the EU and America did not want to continue their friendship with Russia, then Russia has found another friend in the region for its own national interests.
Putin does not have an urgent problem because his ratings have risen in Russia, but the EU and the United States have urgent problems because they will find it much more difficult to attain Russia’s support for the specific terms they want in the final nuclear deal with Iran. As a result, Iran will have less pressure to make concessions, and so the final deal will likely restrict Iran’s nuclear activities less and strengthen the P5+1 Russia, U.S. France, China, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Ukraine’s crisis will cause Russia to become cozier with Iran, and the two states could form a powerful player. This could be a great opportunity for Iran, China, and Russia to have more cooperation in the region and Asia.
For a long time, Russia and Iran have been carefully observing the U.S. and NATO as they pivoted toward the East by creating military bases around the borders of Iran and Russia for NATO to place the Patriot Air and Missile Defense System from Germany in Turkey. Iran strongly objected. It will be much harder for the West to get the Russian support that it had before the Ukrainian crisis in 2013, to deal with the Iranian nuclear program and will weaken the position of the US and the EU in terms of dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. Also, the EU has to look for alternative gas supplies, so that Iran’s gas could be the answer to the West, but it depends on how the West deals with Iran’s nukes.
Dr. Aland Mizell is President of the MCI and a regular contributor to Mindanao Times. You may email the author at:aland_mizell2@hotmail.com