WASHINGTON — The United States should be piling on the pressure against Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to force him to abandon the occupation of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine by forces created and led by the Kremlin. Instead, said professor David Kramer, a former U.S. assistant secretary and expert on Ukraine, the West appears to be exerting pressure on Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to normalize relations with Moscow so that Western countries can get back to business with Russia.
Kramer said that the U.S. should be rallying around Ukraine and Zelensky, to help him confront the many challenges that Ukraine faces such as Russian aggression and the power of oligarchs such as Igor Kolomoisky. Kramer was speaking on Oct 9 at Johns Hopkins University in Washington for a talk entitled “Trends in Russia-Ukraine Relations and the Role of the West.”
Kramer criticized the way that Ukraine has been dragged into American domestic politics as a result of a whistleblower’s complaint that U.S. President Donald Trump had tried to improperly influence Zelensky to investigate for corruption Joe Biden, the politician that looks likely to be his rival in America’s 2020 presidential election.
Kramer blamed Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, seen as spearheading the attempts to involve Kyiv in besmirching Biden.
Giuliani has tried to construct a narrative that Biden, who as vice president during the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, was the American administration’s principal liaison with Ukraine, engineered the firing of a prosecutor-general to block a corruption investigation into a Ukrainian energy company which had employed his son, Biden, in a lucrative advisory role.
There is no evidence to back Giuliani’s accusations. Past and present Ukrainian authorities said the prosecutor general had not been investigating the company. He was dismissed for obstructing or halting investigations into rampant corruption by Ukrainian oligarchs and politicians and his removal had been demanded not only by Biden but many Ukrainian anti-corruption actors, foreign diplomats and international institutions.
Three committees in the U.S. House of Representatives are now investigating allegations that the American president was withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance, including a military aid package, to Ukraine, until Kyiv began an investigation against Biden.
If the committees in the Democratic Party dominated House gather enough evidence they may vote to impeach Trump, who is also the Republican Party leader.
Kramer, worked at the State Department for eight years until 2009, where among other issues, he dealt with Ukraine.
Since then he has held a variety of high-profile jobs with such organizations as Freedom House and the McCain Institute for International Leadership, where Ukraine figures prominently. He currently teaches at Florida International University’s Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs.
Kramer said that Giuliani was doing “terrible things” to damage Ukrainian-U.S. relations.
He noted that Zelensky had been elected president by a huge margin and his Servant of the People party had an overall majority in parliament – the first time since Ukraine’s independence that any political grouping had enjoyed such overwhelming public support.
He said: “You would think that this would be a time where the West, including the United States, would be embracing Ukraine and helping Zelensky to deal with challenges inside the country ….. but instead Zelensky, and I think many Ukrainians, are feeling abandoned.”
He said that some Western countries were keen to resume business relations with Moscow that had been affected by sanctions imposed against Russia following the 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea and the subsequent start of the Kremlin-initiated and backed war in Ukraine’s Donbas region.
He was concerned that pressure on Ukraine to end the Donbas conflict was aiding Putin’s scheme for elections there that would see the Kremlin-dominated areas re-join the country in a federal-style system where they could wreck Kyiv’s pro-Western course.
Kramer reminded his audience of graduate students, diplomats, and international affairs analysts about the 1994 Budapest Memorandum as one of the reasons the West should remain committed to helping Ukraine fend off Russian aggression.
The document, signed in the Hungarian capital by the U.S., U.K, and Russia, gave Ukraine security assurances in return for Kyiv giving up the huge nuclear arsenal it inherited after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Kramer said the memorandum spoke about never using weapons against Ukraine, unless it was to defend against aggression by Kyiv. Moscow, he said, had violated that agreement, yet some Western powers were “focusing on the wrong party” by pressing Ukraine to normalize relations with Russia.
He said that Putin wants to undermine Ukraine’s sovereign development and alignment with the West because he fears that any Ukrainian example of democratic change would fuel protests for change within Russia that would threaten the Kremlin dictator’s hold on power.
“Putin’s number one goal is staying in power. His number two goal is staying in power. And guess what his number three goal is?…….Ukraine became a victim of Putin’s determination to stay in power,” said Kramer.
He said that Putin had “torn to shreds” the post-Cold War international order and that had his actions in Ukraine in 2014 not been challenged than Russia and perhaps other countries, would have tried to alter national borders by violence elsewhere.
Kramer believed that sanctions were the correct response to Russia’s criminal actions but that to be effective they should be periodically increased unless Moscow complies with demands that it reverse its encroachments on Ukrainian territory.
However, observed Kramer, sanctions had not altered very much since they were imposed in 2014-15 and that diminished their effect as Moscow adapted to them.
He expressed disappointment that Jon Huntsman, U.S. ambassador to Russia between 2017-19, had written an opinion piece on Oct 8 in the influential American newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, where he questioned whether sanctions were achieving their aims.
Kramer asked: “If you think sanctions [against Russia] are a bad thing, what would you do instead?”
West must be ‘creative and imaginative’ in confronting Putin
Replying to a question about Trump’s repeated declarations that “better relations with Russia wouldn’t be a bad thing for America,” Kramer said it was self-evident that everyone wanted better relations.
However, he said that the vast share of the blame for Moscow’s poor relations with the West lay with Putin and, presently, he sees no hope for an improved relationship and strategic partnership with Russia that wouldn’t be bought at the price of compromising American values.
Kramer said that Putin believes Russian military occupation of territory in Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine will prevent those countries being able to join the European Union and NATO.
NATO’s “Article Five,” which treats an attack on a member country as an attack on all members, is seen as preventing a country already in conflict joining the military alliance.
Kramer said: “Putin’s [hostile, military] actions are designed to be a veto on those countries’ ambitions.”
The West’s response should be “creative and imaginative” in overcoming Putin’s attempts to exert such a de facto veto, said Kramer, and ways can be devised for Ukraine and other countries to proceed toward EU and NATO membership irrespective of whether Russia is fomenting conflict on their territory.
He suggested, for instance, that such countries could move to integrate with NATO with Article Five, in their cases, inactive for the moment.
Kramer emphasized that Ukraine is not asking anyone else to fight her battles but that Zelensky needs and deserves Western support to confront Russian aggression.
Referring to stalled talks between the International Monetary Fund and Kyiv on the release of the next tranche of the monetary fund’s loan, Kramer said Ukraine needs help from America “to get across the finish line with the IMF.”
He said that Russia must be punished for its illegal annexation of Crimea and actions in Donbas as well as crimes elsewhere in the world. Tamping down sanctions without any change in Moscow’s behavior would be a victory for Putin entailing dangerous consequences for the West, said Kramer.
He said sanctions against Russia should be ramped up until Moscow complies with demands that it withdraws from Ukrainian territory.
“I want to make life unpleasant for the Kremlin and Putin’s cronies” and said switching Moscow off from the SWIFT system for international financial transfers – something that would rapidly have a devastating effect on Russia’s already-faltering economy – should remain an option for stiffening sanctions.
