Dealing with Putin – appeasement or common sense?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/defence-and-security-blog/2015/feb/17/ukraine-putin-europe

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This is truly a key moment for Europe.

The EU is divided over whether to punish Vladimir Putin more over Ukraine. The eurozone is facing a crisis over Greece whose leftwing government has made overtures to Putin, who in turn is cuddling up to Hungary's nationalist government.

The US, meanwhile, is withdrawing forces from western Europe and getting increasingly impatient with the Europeans' failure to invest more in relevant military hardware, and intelligence-gathering capabilities, and cyber defensives.

On Monday, Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, warned against stepping up pressure on Putin over Ukraine and said any change in power in the Kremlin "may well be for the worse".

Last week, experts from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) warned that any US weapons supplied to Ukraine would be more than matched by an increase in Russian arms supplied to the separatists.

In the latest issue of the IISS journal, Survival, the institute's chairman, François Heisbourg, compares the annexation of Crimea to Hitler's annexation of Austria in March 1938. The similarity is striking, he writes – "in each case, armed forces entered without a shot being fired", and in less than month a referendum was held approving the annexation.

But he also says Russia today is not a challenge to global order as it is not a superpower, and it is neither fascist nor ethno-nationalist like Serbia's Milosevic.

Heisbourg echoes Sawers' concerns about the impact of sanctions against Russia. "Many of the west's sanctions are ad hominem", he warns, "they can readily be portrayed as being designed for regime overthrow".

A policy of "dissuasion", he adds, could include a permanent Nato military presence in Poland and the Baltic states, while Ukraine, he suggests, should include lethal weaponry and massive economic aid.

And "a degree of respect" for Russia, would mean Ukraine "out of political and strategic prudence, would elect not to join Nato".

Angela Merkel and François Hollande have both quoted Sleepwalkers, Cambridge historian Christopher Clark's brilliant account of how Europe went to war in August 1914.

In the same issue of Survival, Igor Yurgens , a member of the IISS council suggests transforming sanctions into a "cooperation regime".

He writes: "This is a key moment in European economic history. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the vast economic European space faces a clear choice: an infrastructural bridge linking Lisbon and Vladivostok, or a deep continental rift with inevitable losses of markets, technologies, transport and logistical corridors, freedom of workforce migration and other problems".

Is this former choice, cloud cuckoo land, I wonder, as I also begin to think of the potential for nuclear blackmail. Russia has about 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons; the US is believed to have some 200 in Europe.