Power cut for power couple

Putin paralyses Franco-German axis

Ukraine will negotiate terms with Russia, said President Volodymyr Zelensky in a televised address to celebrate his country’s independence this week.

These negotiations will start once Ukrainian forces have retaken Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea – the peninsula seized by the Russians not six months, but eight years ago. "What, for us, is the end of the war?" he asked Ukrainians. "We used to say: peace. Now we say: victory".

In the pre-24/2 era, this would have triggered aneurysms in Berlin and Paris. Who does buff Churchill think he is, they’d have asked. If Zelensky genuinely aspires to bring his country into NATO and the EU – a cheque-in-the-post promise before Russia’s invasion – he’s got to accept Crimea has gone forever and Donetsk and Luhansk for a long, long time.

This was the European way. For decades, geopolitical settlements were reached by a combination of German economic clout, the promise of French and British peacekeeping, and the threat of US hard power in reserve. If absolutely necessary, surgical force would be applied to uphold a principle – in Kosovo or Bosnia, for instance – but only in pursuit of a compromise based on the victims holding their noses and recognising new borders in return for reconstruction cash.

France and Germany played precisely this role in Ukraine in 2014-15 as brokers of the Minsk agreements to end Russia’s disguised assault on the Donbas. Without formally recognising the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk “republics” or Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Berlin and Paris mediated a ceasefire plus pledges to remove heavy weapons from the front, release prisoners, and devolve administrative powers to territory seized by Russian irregulars. Using the Balkan playbook, the two continental powers warned the Russians and their Ukrainian puppets that failure to agree would result in US arms shipments to Kyiv.

This would have worked with Slobodan Milošević, the late Serb president, or even with a first- or second-term Vladimir Putin. But the 2015-20 Model-Z Vlad had no incentive to stand down his arms-length militias or stop providing them with training and weapons. He and his entourage had long ago decided that western Europe was too decadent – too dependent on Siberian gas and divorced from its martial past – to do anything more than grudgingly facilitate creeping Russian imperialism. By early 2022, Putin’s bid to place an outright apologist in the Élysée had failed and his useful idiot had been escorted from the White House but the EU’s diplomatic tradition was intact. Incredibly, as recently as June – four months after the invasion – French president Emmanuel Macron was still of the opinion that: “Russia must not be humiliated so that, when the fighting stops, we can build an exit route through diplomatic channels. I’m convinced that it is France's role to be a mediating power”.

That world had ended in the early hours of 24 February but it took the backlash to Macron’s interview to make the French and German foreign-policy establishments internalise it. For the EU’s two great powers, the invasion was kryptonite to their diplomatic cultures and strategy. Berlin’s bipartisan pacifism and Wandel durch Handel (change through trade) doctrine are now history. Macron will stick to the script that the EU should wean itself off the US security guarantee but all the events of February to June did was persuade Russia’s near-neighbours of its absolute necessity. Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia are keener than ever to join the EU while the six Nordic/Baltic states could not be more relieved they already did. But, as a bulwark against Russian revanchism, nothing beats NATO. The US-led alliance prioritises the security of its members over any concern for Russia’s humiliation.

Border lobby

For a quarter-century, the EU’s smaller, northern, liberal states have sought to build a lobby to counter the overwhelming power of the Franco-German axis. The most recent incarnation is the Hansa – a Dutch-led caucus of Nordic, Baltic and Irish finance ministers lobbying for budgetary conservatism. Before that, in the middle of the 2012 debt crisis, there was a glimpse of an alternative pole in the form of the Northern Future Forum and a 12-leader joint letter advocating a new economic policy.

But it was only ever a glimpse. The French expected nothing better of the letter’s eastern and northern signatories but reacted with fury at Italian and Spanish betrayal in joining a UK-led liberal initiative. As they always did – whether Conservative or Labour – the British soon lost interest. There was no sustained diplomatic effort at alliance-building inside the EU. Rome and Madrid quickly returned to the fold and the smaller states learned once again that they could agree with but never rely on London whereas they always had to transact with Paris and Berlin.

Ten years on and, in the space of just six months, Putin has overseen the formation of a single-minded new lobby of EU frontier states. Poland, reinforced by the Baltic three, has emerged as the vanguard power in the east, the main conduit for refugees and weaponry, and the key interlocutor with Washington. Germany’s remaining Ostpolitiker are silenced or ridiculed and its Green militant democrats rewarded, while Italy and Spain are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in this epochal drama. Macron’s abandonment of France’s mediating role and calls for sacrifice in support of Ukraine reflect his powerlessness. His plea to the French people to “pay the price for our freedom and of our values" inevitably worried the nationalist right but this appeal to the “flame of French resistance” was more prosaic. Macron is readying the population for prohibitively high gas and electricity prices and even energy rationing; not war.

This is what has Ukrainian officials worried and the Kremlin hopeful. As winter bites and the cost of Ukrainian resistance appears in red on energy bills, the Minsk mediators – supported by a Russophile Italian government – will lean on Zelensky to tone down his victory-or-death strategy and settle for a shrunken, neutral and demilitarised state. But this is to misread the tipped balance of power in Europe and even public opinion. The French, Germans and Italians are in no position to impose a settlement on Zelensky and aren’t even strong or united enough to resist the imposition of the staggered oil embargo. As for public sentiment, it’s just not that sophisticated. The blame for energy inflation won’t go to the plucky Ukrainians but to greedy utility companies, incompetent national governments and Putin. In that order.

Pressure on Zelensky won’t come from the EU powers. It will come from Washington if Congress reverts to Republican control after November’s midterm elections and especially if there is any chance that Donald Trump will return to office in 2025. Kyiv needs to maximise reconquest and negotiate from a position of relative strength before its nemesis returns to the White House.

PS: I’m taking a holiday next week so the next article will be posted on 10-11 September.