What kind of lunatics fire rockets at a nuclear reactor? Answer: Russian lunatics. The extravagant irresponsibility of the Russian army’s attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the largest in Europe, setting it on fire, suggests that speculation concerning Vladimir Putin’s mental stability can be extended to his entire power apparatus. Only by good fortune was Europe spared a nightmarish disaster, the threat of which could be renewed at any time, if the Russians resume their assault.
The discernible change in the tone of NATO’s response to this outrage raises an equally alarming possibility: that, feeling themselves already exposed to the danger of a mass radiation leak or meltdown, NATO leaders may see the prospect of intervening militarily against Russia as more conceivable than it was two days ago, with all the risk of escalation that implies. By exposing Europe to such a reckless act, Putin has made the threat from his missiles seem almost ancillary to an existing menace from a civilian nuclear facility.
This is no ordinary crisis. Even comparisons to the Cuban missile confrontation in 1962 are inadequate. An obvious difference is that, despite the acute peril of the crisis, no one was killed, whereas the fatalities in Ukraine already run into quadruple figures. But the more significant distinction was the intrinsic simplicity of the Cuban issue: all that was needed was for a convoy carrying nuclear missiles towards the island to alter course and avert an attack by the US Navy.
While, at the time, that seemed a major demand, with huge potential for loss of face or even nuclear war on either side, the American position involved bilateral negotiation on a single point of contention, without innumerable ramifications. Its eventual resolution, with the Soviet Union’s climbdown sugared by a secret agreement to remove US missiles from Turkey, reflected that lack of complexity.
Ukraine could not be more different. Its complexity is reflected in Vladimir Putin’s mindset, with his irredentist claims dating back more than a millennium, the Crimea already integrated into Russia and the question of the Donbas region bedevilling any future negotiations, quite apart from Putin’s desire to annex the whole of Ukraine. It is a geopolitical mélange that would have challenged the combined diplomatic skills of Metternich and Talleyrand. Unhappily, we do not have such giants today.
But the complications are not confined to the territory of Ukraine. The elephant in the room is the one power that has sedulously avoided any active involvement in the crisis, even eschewing the imposition of sanctions: China. Europeans may be worried about nuclear contamination or escalation and America about its fast disappearing role of global hegemon, but it is arguable that Xi Jinping, perceived as Russia’s sole ally, is even more dismayed, behind a facade of passive solidarity with Putin.
Xi will have been as startled as everyone else by the unexpected universality and purposefulness of the world’s response to the Russian aggression. The United States, Britain, even the European Union, all acted with remarkable speed and cooperation to punish the aggressor. The sanctioning of Russia’s central bank took everyone, including Putin, by surprise. With unprecedented global unanimity, Putin’s Russia was relegated to the status of pariah within 48 hours. That showed a new, worldwide intolerance of any invasion of another state by an aggressor power.
To Xi, openly threatening the military absorption of Taiwan on the same irredentist pretext as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, this must have come as the worst geopolitical development he has witnessed in his career. The world has educated itself on how to respond to territorial aggression. Even if it feels it has fallen short in its response to the Russian invasion, it will not do so again. Every nation, from the largest to the smallest, now knows the drill. The Ukraine crisis is a template for future responses to unprovoked aggression.
The message for Xi is simple: move against Taiwan and it is your aircraft that will be grounded, your banks that will be crippled or closed, your painfully grown economy, still with significant vulnerabilities, that will be brought crashing down. In a populous, still largely agrarian country such as China, famine is always the skeleton at the feast. Even if Xi has calculated that America would not intervene militarily if he invaded Taiwan — surely now a miscalculation, in the light of recent events — non-military sanctions, imposed on a near-global scale, would be enough to regress his country to the economic state it was in at the death of Mao Zedong.
If Xi is not scoring out the date on the calendar pencilled in for the restoration of Taiwan to the embrace of its benevolent mother country, then he is as deluded and divorced from reality as Vladimir Putin — which he is not. He must privately be cursing his ally for poisoning the well at which he intended to drink. He must also be reconsidering the value of the blatantly opportunist Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that has yoked him, however lightly, to a liability like Putin. With friends like this…
The attack on a nuclear power plant has highlighted the irresponsibility of a regime that revels in destruction for its own sake. The consequence can only be to concentrate the minds of Western leaders more acutely, to focus on how to curb the excesses of a dictator who now poses an existential threat to world civilisation. Knee-jerk reaction is to be avoided at all costs. There is a careful line to be drawn between a cowardly and self-defeating deference to Putin and a gung-ho response that, in the current state of military technology, could be self-annihilating.
There are several lines that could profitably be pursued. Without indulging in any delusions about the moral authority and effectiveness of the United Nations, the General Assembly should be convened again, several times if necessary, to engage the entire world in opposition to the aggressor and to dilute the perceived authority of Russia as a permanent member of the Security Council. A group of powers, including the traditional US, Britain, France and, in the new dispensation, Germany should be assembled, along with Pacific representatives such as Japan and Australia, to draw up contingency plans to interdict Russian aggression beyond the confines of NATO.
The key question is how to respond if Putin resorts to battlefield tactical nuclear weapons. It seems impossible for NATO not to retaliate in kind, though at a proportionately low level. That entails an almost unacceptable risk of escalation, but logic dictates that, if we do not respond to the actual use of nuclear weapons, we do not in reality have a nuclear deterrent. But before that happens, Russia should be invited by the Six Powers (or whatever) grouping to a conference, to make a serious and focused attempt at resolving the crisis, a collective version of Henry Kissinger’s peacemaking in the Middle East in 1973.
In any successful negotiations, Ukraine would have to make some concessions, if only to save the tyrant’s face. The most obvious is to recognise Russia’s tenure of the Crimea, which only belonged to Ukraine from 1954, on a whim of Nikita Khrushchev. Its population wants to be Russian. Tighter negotiations would have to be engaged in regarding the Donbas, the breakaway republics and the wider region around them. At the same time, Russia should be required to pay reparations to Ukraine for damage done on its territory.
If Putin were facing the impossibility of holding Ukraine, even if he successfully occupied it, coupled with mounting unrest inside Russia, such a solution would offer him a lifeline. He will not hesitate to kill thousands in Ukraine, but he cannot forever be insensitive to the near-total isolation of his country and its pariah status. Everything depends on how much Ukrainians can endure and whether they can sustain their resistance, whether conventional or by guerrilla insurgency. They must be provided with arms — modern, effective, state-of-the-art weaponry — to fight the war for which we have no stomach.
What is important to remember is that, for Vladimir Putin, this is above all a “legacy” issue. No matter how much he has marinated himself in mythology about Kievan Rus’ and his mission of destiny to reunite Greater Russia, he cannot be insensible of the reality that a Russia reduced to the economic status of the era of Vladimir the Great or, even worse, a nuclear wasteland is not a celebratory historical legacy — especially if there is no more history.