Opinion | World has entered a post-Ukraine phase which, like 9/11, will shape global security for years
War has shaken conviction in the stability of Europe and its borders, while Putin’s threat of nuclear force casts doubt on the strength of modern treaties
The reverberations of this conflict will be felt in the coming decades as global security systems are debated and restructured
The crisis in Ukraine has been rendered even more ominous after Russian PresidentVladimir Putin put his country’s nuclear deterrence forces on “special alert” in response to what he described as Nato’s aggression. Belarus has also decided to renounce its non-nuclear status, enabling Russia to locate nuclear weapons in that nation – if required.
Predictably, the global community is bewildered by this threat of weapons of mass destruction. The US has condemned the move as “unacceptable” and accused the Russian president of “fabricating threats” to justify “further aggression”. The US and its allies have exercised another kind of “nuclear” option – the fiscal one – by severely restricting Russia’s access to the global financial system.
The Russian invasion has belied many early assumptions that Putin would seek only to intimidate Kyiv, despite the steady Russian military build-up along the border with Ukraine in early February, and the fact that Putin deems Ukraine’s national autonomy to be historically invalid – Ukraine was a republic of the former Soviet Union and acquired its current political identity after the end of the Cold War.
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‘They’re very scared’: Ukrainian model in Hong Kong fears for family trapped in Russian invasion
‘They’re very scared’: Ukrainian model in Hong Kong fears for family trapped in Russian invasion
Within a larger historical context, the certitude that Europe had reached a postmodern state wherein national borders would not be altered by the use of force, as sanctified in the Helsinki agreement of 1975, is now in tatters. Wars and conflict in the post-Cold War era were expected to take place in the developing world, with the more powerful nations acting through proxy.
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The sanctity of borders has a special resonance for Ukraine, which gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994, along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
At the time, the United States, the United Kingdom and a truncated Russia provided security guarantees to a denuclearised Ukraine. Twenty-eight years later, this question will ricochet in strategic security deliberations for a long time: would Putin have invaded Ukraine with impunity on February 24 if Kyiv had nuclear weapons?
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The strength of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and the assurance embedded therein that nuclear weapon states will not threaten non-nuclear weapon states with the use of nuclear weapons will now be reviewed and debated intensely. Global strategic entropy will be aggravated and the reverberations in relation to weapons of mass destruction will be felt in the years ahead.
In terms of diplomatic response, the United Nations emergency deliberations over Ukraine have been predictable. The UN Security Council was divided among its five permanent members, with the US, UK and France supporting the resolution condemning Russia on February 25. Russia vetoed it and China abstained. Among the non-permanent members, India also chose to abstain.
