Former U.S Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, in Kyiv for the Yalta European Strategy conference, told the Kyiv Post in an interview that he wishes that the West would have taken stronger and swifter action against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I think that we could have done more. I think there could
have been a visit” by U.S. President Barack Obama. “I think that would have
provided some reassurance. I think there could have been more in the way of
defensive weapons. I think we were even slow to providing military training. There
are a number of areas where we could have done more and frankly done it without
provoking a dangerous Russia.”
Obama will leave office on Jan. 20 as the first sitting American
president since Ronald Reagan not to visit Ukraine and, against the advice of
many in Congress, he refused to supply Ukraine with modern defensive weapons to defend
itself against Russia’s war. He also has suggested in interviews that Ukraine
is not part of America’s core interests.
The solution for Ukraine now, Gates said in the Sept. 16 interview, is
for Ukraine to recognize that it needs good relations with both Russia and the
West and also needs to accommodate the interests of Ukrainian citizens in the
disputed eastern Donbas who want closer ties to Moscow.
What the Kremlin is doing in Ukraine is “as old as Russian
history,” he said, in trying to create buffer states on its periphery where Russian
economic and political influence is predominant.
Ukraine is in a better position than most of Russia’s
neighbors, he said, because if its vast size – almost as large as the American
state of Texas. “Putin is not going to launch a military attack” to take over
Ukraine, he said.
“Ukraine needs to play it both ways — look both West and
East and to acknowledge the concerns of the Russian speakers in the eastern
part of the country,” Gates said. If he were defense secretary of Ukraine, “I would be saying: ‘The West is not going to go
to war over me…then how do I pursue a strategy that holds out a hand to each
side, that tells Putin I’m not going to be an enemy and that, at least for the
foreseeable future, says I’m not going to be in NATO?”
Gates said that Ukraine needs the heavy industries of the
Russian-separatist controlled areas of the Donbas – the coal, the steel, the
chemical plants. Without them, Gates said, he thinks it will be “very
difficult” for Ukraine to find economic success.
He also sees no way that Ukraine will ever regain control of
Crimea from Russia. The illegal annexation meant more than just the loss of the peninsula, he said, it meant the loss of control over valuable gas and oil deposits on the
Black Sea coast of the peninsula. Those resources, he said, could have helped Ukraine to become energy independent.
He said that, despite favoring accommodation with Russia,
he believes that Ukraine is an independent nation and should not accept
semi-sovereign or dependency status on Russia. He also blames Putin for the war in eastern
Ukraine, saying that it is not a civil conflict, but rather a war that the Kremlin leader “stoked and has sustained.”
Gates served as U.S. defense secretary under
U.S. President George W. Bush starting in 2006 and continued in the post under Obama until 2011.
Gates visited Ukraine as defense secretary in 2007. At the time, he said, Ukraine was spending only $1 billion on its national defense. Today, the figure is $5 billion. Building a strong military capability is more than just buying weapons, he said. A nation needs to gain the support of its population, get men and women to enlist willingly and spend money effectively, creating transparency and eliminating corruption.
Russia invaded Georgia, another former Soviet
republic, on his watch as defense secretary under Bush in 2008. But Gates said that a tougher Western response then
would not have prevented Russia’s opportunistic invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
When it comes to its neighbors, “Russia has all the advantages in terms of escalation
control. The speed with which Putin moved against Crimea. I just
don’t think there were many options.”
Gates said that he favors tougher sanctions against Russia,
without specifying the measures, partly because he regards Putin as
more of a menace to U.S. interests than a helpful partner.
He said the American government tried to work constructively
with Putin, but that the Russian leader has responded by complicating the war
in Syria, selling Iran sophisticated weapons and adopting other policies that run counter to American interests
However, he sees no point in America going it alone against
Moscow. To do so, he said, would only isolate the United States and not Russia.
He said that the support of China and Russia is the only reason that hard
sanctions against Iran worked.
Gates, also a former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency,
encountered criticism for “exaggerating the Soviet threat” in the 1980s. He doesn’t buy it. “What they were spending money
on didn’t start to change that until 1989, very late in the game. People
hearing what (former Soviet General Secretary Mikhail) Gorbachev was saying led
them to believe things had already changed. But things hadn’t changed.”
As for today’s man in the Kremlin, Gates said: “My view is that we have to go back to what Putin is about: he will continue to push forward until
he meets resistance. I think we need to be more creative in how we push back.”
