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Sweden’s Right of Passage: A Game Changer In Global Politics 

Sweden’s NATO Process 

Sweden’s official entrance marks a historic step as it became the 32nd member of The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on March 7, 2024. The country’s flag will be raised alongside those of the other 31 Allies in a ceremony at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium on March 11 and at NATO commands across Europe and North America.  

The ratification process was finally completed in Washington D.C. as Sweden and Hungary, the only two countries left to ratify Sweden’s membership, submitted the necessary documents after an 18-month  process. Turkey was reportedly withholding in approving Sweden’s bid, accusing the country of being too lenient toward groups that Ankara regarded as security threats as well as a series of demonstrations by supporters of the outlaws Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), located in Sweden. During the official vote, the ruling party emphasized that Sweden’s “tougher stance” on Kurdish militants will play a pivotal role in securing voting approval. Senior legislator of the Turkish ruling party, Fuat Oktay, highlighted that Sweden’s modification to its anti-terrorism legislation curbed the PKK’s financial activities, convicted a terrorist suspect and extradited another, and lifted restrictions on arms sales to Turkey. As Turkey finalizes its approval, Hungary remains the last hurdle on Sweden’s road toward NATO.

 Following Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kirstersson’s reluctant visit to Budapest, Hungary back on Feb 20, and a deal through which Hungary is set to acquire four more Gripen C fighter aircraft and another 10 years of support and logistics for its existing fleet, Hungary’s parliament ratified Sweden’s membership status after a 2-year process last month. 

At a press conference in Stockholm on Thursday, Sweden’s Minister for Employment and Integration Johan Pehrson labeled the accession “ a new security policy era for Sweden”, adding that he had personally been waiting for such a decision for 20 years.”

Its History of Neutrality

When the battle against Norway fell silent, the once-battled power would not take up arms again as its last war ended in 1814. For the next two centuries, Sweden embraced a policy of neutrality, refusing to take sides in wars or join any military alliance. It was a stance that contributed to the country’s ability to become a prosperous welfare state and humanitarian superpower. 

Speculation follows that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, pushed Sweden along with Finland to abandon its traditional position of military nonalignment to seek protection under NATO’s security umbrella. Finland joined the alliance in April, becoming NATO’s 31st member after Turkey’s parliament ratified the Nordic country’s bid.

The invasion “had a shock effect on Swedish political life,” said Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg. He analyzed polling data showing that support for NATO membership surged from 35% in 2021 to 64% after the invasion.

Global Political Implications

Sweden’s membership is a monumental geopolitical boost for NATO as alliance members now encircle the Baltic Sea (with the exception of the narrow entry to St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland and Russian exclave of Kaliningrad). Not only does this allow the alliance to monitor physical pipelines and cables beneath the surface, but it also gives the alliance access to a pocket of military power. Despite having a population of a little more than 10 million and an annual 1.54 percent of its GDP gross on defense last year, the country’s centuries of neutrality have forced it to develop a world-class military-industrial complex.

When selected equipment stocks are compared across NATO countries, Sweden’s supply numbers tend to place them in the upper middle of the inference graph. In some cases, the country punches well above its weight as Sweden possesses the fifth most armored personnel carriers in NATO, more than much larger countries such as Germany, Spain, and the U.K.

The Russian reaction to Sweden’s decision to join NATO has focused more on its implications for the Arctic region. The Arctic North is an area of deep strategic concern for Russia as it is where the Russian nuclear-armed submarine fleet is based. While Sweden and Finland do not directly touch the Arctic Ocean, their membership in NATO does potentially significantly strengthen the military power of the alliance in that vital region.

The Future of Sweden

According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Sweden’s 2023 defense budget amounted to $9.2 billion and 1.54 percent of GDP. In anticipation of NATO membership, last year Sweden announced investments in military defense and estimated that this increased spending, combined with additional budget items that fall under NATO’s definition of defense expenditures, will ensure Sweden meets the 2% target in 2024. Beyond the defense equipment that Sweden currently has at its disposal, its export defense industry can meet most domestic equipment needs.

 Additionally, “In NATO, they will have access to far more conversations/tenders/info sharing particularly with regards to very sensitive tech that they previously weren’t admitted to, even if their study was NATO standard in design,” says Tom Waldwyn, Research Associate for Defense Procurement at IISS. 

Written by Community Outreach Intern, Tammy Gia Han Nguyen

Photo Credentials: 

KENDALL WARNER / AP

References:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/7/sweden-officially-becomes-32nd-member-of-nato-military-alliance

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/07/sweden-joins-nato-after-ratification-hungary-drops-opposition

https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-nato-membership-military-power/

https://apnews.com/article/turkey-sweden-nato-ratification-expansion-3686af974e7f9238ee9698451e649ea9

https://globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/sweden-tells-citizens-prepare-war-russian-aggression-nato-membership#:~:text=Micael%20Byd%C3%A9n%20said%20all%20Swedes,have%20joined%20the%20military%20alliance.

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Why the West Gets Russia Wrong: Historical Impasses to Achieving Peace in Ukraine

Why the West Gets Russia Wrong: Historical Impasses to Achieving Peace in Ukraine

As the Russo-Ukrainian War enters its third year of full-scale kinetic conflict, the majority of Western politicians, media, and defense analysts contend that continued Western military aid to Ukraine is imperative in order to effectively wage a war of attrition against Russia. Much of this analysis of Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 is predicated on a typology of Russian neo-imperial revanchism, and subsequently maintains that Russia, operating from fundamentally nationalist motives, seeks to conquer the portions of former Soviet states where large populations of ethnic Russians reside. While Russia’s February 2022 invasion undoubtedly violates both Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty and international law, the commonplace depiction of Russia as endeavoring to overturn the existing world order is misplaced, in that it largely fails to examine the specific historical grievances that frame the Russian perspective. The purpose of this article is not to condone Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – which is wholly condemnable – but rather to investigate why the United States and its NATO allies’ framing of the Russian strategic objective suffers from a miscalculation of Russia’s security interests that risks escalating the present conflict rather than diminishing it. 

The first factor that merits consideration is Russia’s claims to eastern Ukraine on the grounds that it has a historical right to them. Setting aside arguments espousing that Ukraine has been a part of Russia since the medieval period in favor of more recent history (where the concept of statehood can be more justifiably applied), one facet that has been largely neglected by most Western analysts is the fact that the Donbas and Crimea were indeed recognized as Russian territory under international law up until 1922 and 1954, when Lenin and Khrushchev, respectively, transferred them from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR). 

These transfers were not seen by Soviet authorities as the granting of sovereignty over these regions to any independent Ukrainian state, seeing as the UkSSR was itself a union state of the Soviet Union. Indeed, in the case of Crimea, the decision to transfer it from the RSFSR to the UkSSR originates in a remarkably mundane manner: the arrangement of funding for a construction project, the Kakhovka Reservoir and North Crimea Canal. Seeing as the construction site sat astride the RSFSR and UkSSR, Gosplan, the Soviet central economic planning committee, advised that Crimea be transferred from the former to the latter in order to simplify the funding process, since it was then standard practice for large infrastructure projects to be funded by only a single union state. Thus the reason for the transfer of a region with a predominantly ethnic Russian population to what, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, became the sovereign state of Ukraine rests on a procedural decision whose considerations were not only principally financial rather than political, but which were also framed in regard to a single site rather than the entire region. 

The second factor worth consideration is the role that NATO expansion has played in stoking existential fears of encirclement in Russia. While European states have every right to accede to NATO, provided that they meet the organization’s provisional requirements and are unanimously accepted, nonetheless, it would have behooved NATO to consider how these decisions would be perceived by Russia. Scholars have rightly observed that the prerequisite spread of democracy to potential NATO member-states threatens Russia’s authoritarian model. Such a situation is in part exemplified by the 2004 Orange Revolution, poignantly described by Ian Traynor, the late esteemed journalist of The Guardian, as “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing.” The leak of the Nuland-Pyatt phone call, in which Victoria Nuland, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, discussed ways to manage the outcome of the political upheaval that emerged during the 2014 Maidan Revolution further heightened Russia’s concerns that not only was the United States seeking to spread democracy to Russia’s periphery, but that it was also, ostensibly, interfering in Ukrainian politics. Such interference would, so Moscow maintained, violate the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the United States, Russia, and United Kingdom all agreed to respect the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine. Efforts to foster democracy abroad are commendable, but when they risk being perceived as covert meddling, short-term tactical gains might best be set aside out of consideration of greater strategic objectives, of which avoiding accusations of hypocrisy, whatever the merit of such accusations, ought to be one. 

These events, when coupled with others such as the United States’ earlier withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s signing in 2019 of a constitutional amendment that committed Ukraine to joining NATO, and the establishment of a U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Defense Framework in 2021 can thus be seen as having progressively exacerbated Moscow’s fears of encirclement. President Zelenskyy’s remarks on February 19, 2022 at the Munich Security Conference that “I hope no one thinks of Ukraine as a convenient and eternal buffer zone between the West and Russia. This will never happen” as well as “Ukraine has received security guarantees for abandoning the world’s third nuclear capability. We don’t have that weapon. We also have no security” certainly did nothing to allay Moscow’s concerns. Indeed, Russia interpreted the latter remark as an insinuation that Ukraine would, provided that it became admitted to NATO, endeavor to obtain nuclear weapons, something that would also violate the Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine acceded to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The idea of Ukraine, especially a Ukraine including the Donbas and Crimea, possessing NATO nuclear weapons was anathema to Moscow. 

For those Western analysts hoping that a war of attrition will lead to a strategic defeat of the Russian armed forces, it would be prudent to keep in mind that, regardless of whatever degradation that the Russian military has incurred over the past two years, the fundamental problems remain unaddressed. Consequently, as the conflict grows increasingly protracted, the risk increases that Russia will resort to further extremism and violence in order to inculcate its point. Conversely, those in the West who worry that Russia will invade Poland or the Baltic states might do well to recognize the great improbability of such campaigns on logistic and economic grounds. Only through totally mobilizing Russian society into a wartime economy could Russia stand to expand its military operations abroad into any NATO state, and Moscow is unlikely to hazard making such a move owing to the substantial risks and instability that such a transformation would entail. 

Unless the West is able to at least acknowledge the Russian perspective, the present conflict only stands to escalate. This does not mean that the West should accept Russia’s narrative or acquiesce to the spread of authoritarianism. What this does suggest, however, is that democracy might be better fostered abroad through patient engagement – even if it requires uncomfortable short-term compromises – rather than through more overt contestation. As such, considering a negotiated settlement that allows Russia to continue to possess Crimea and parts of the Donbas might, however unpalatable such a proposition may appear, be the only course that spares Ukraine protracted bloodshed and further destruction: if achieving a strategic military defeat of the Russian armed forces comes at the cost of transforming eastern Ukraine into a wrecked crucible, than the West must consider whether the minimization of noncombatant casualties is truly the priority that it so espouses this principle to be. 

After all the destruction that the Russian armed forces have wrought upon Ukraine, engaging with Russia to find an offramp no doubt appears as a most distasteful course of action. Once again, however, such engagement with Russia should not be viewed as an acquiescence or acknowledgement of defeat. Rather, it should be seen as a pragmatic and realistically achievable course of action that can actually deescalate the conflict without humiliating Russia. Western advocates for achieving a strategic military defeat of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine as essential to deterring alleged Russian neo-imperialism would be wise to recall the effects that such humiliation had on Germany following World War I. Those Western advocates who see any form of negotiated settlement as catering to authoritarian domination might very well then be setting the stage for a much worse conflict with Russia in the future. Ending the war in Ukraine might involve the negotiation of an imperfect peace, but such a result is far preferable to a perfect world war. 

Written by: Mason W. Krusch, a master’s candidate in Northeastern University’s Global Studies and International Relations program. 

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What Is The Significance of Navalny’s Death?

February 16th, 2024 signified the loss of another hope for the reconstruction of law and order in modern Russian society. Alexei Navalny was an active opposition to Putin. Navalny started his career back in 2007 and forcefully ended his anti-Putin movement in 2024 due to his unexpected death at the Arctic Circle prison. This event carries greater significance to world affairs and identifies Russian power.

Alexei Navalny was known for his actions, specifically anti-corruption campaigns in Russia, appeals to the nation to rise for revolution, presidential election boycott, and other anti-current government movements that are not welcomed in the non-democratic state. Predictably, his actions were strictly controlled by elites in Russia and were not warmly met by the government.

Specifically, in August 2020, Alexei Navalny was poisoned by the famously known nerve agent, Novichok. This chemical is the deadliest chemical currently known to humanity. Novichok was invented by Russian scientists during the Cold War. Luckily, after the poisoning, Alexei Navalny was able to get to Germany in time to receive medical support and have a successful recovery. The most observable Putin’s opponent stayed in the German hospital and acquired all needed help until January 2021. Navalny then decided it was time for him to fly back to his homeland and facilitate anti-Putin views to the nation. He initiated his campaign by urging people to stand up against current elites and topple Russian governance. While landing Navalny’s airplane at the wrong airport within Moscow, the demonstrations was not deterred; however, not exactly in the way that Alexei was anticipating. Soon enough, he was arrested for the violation of parole and sentenced to prison for 19 years. While the protests continued in Russia, soon after Navalny’s disappearance from the public eye, the Russian government successfully stopped the rebellions. Thereafter, in 2023, Navalny was moved to the Arctic Circle, where he spent his last days and ultimately encountered his death.

The statements relevant to the recent death of the opposition are continuously altering their interpretation by pro-Putin executives. The original justification for death being “blood clot” was later changed to “sudden death syndrome,” as well as the date of his death shifting from February 15th to February 16th.

Navalny was the hope of the Western World to change the authoritarian regime within Russia. Now that Putin is not facing Navalny’s opposition, is there anything else providing hope for a potential freedom of Russia from Putin’s authority? However, with the rise of anti-Putin desires of the Russian nations, new opposition will be found in the country. As of right now, it is possible to predict that the widow of Alexei will be the one shouldering this role. Altogether, it will be ultimately up to the Russian nation to identify the future of their country. If the population is willing and ready for the regime change, the leader will be able to start the process. If the nation has still not gained enough basis to promote an anti-Putin perspective, then there are almost no outside factors that can shake and decrown Russian elites.

At the same time, Putin’s time might end without Navalny’s counterplay. The current president is 71 years old, and his era might be ending in the short future. It is important to note that in Russia, the system is mainly based on Putin’s authority; it is yet stable enough to survive the shift of power without significant institutional changes within the country.

Overall, the death of Navalny again highlighted to the rest of the world the absence of law and order in the Russian Federation, as well as the emphasis on the presence of a stable authoritarian regime within the state.

Written by Events Intern, Sofiia Lobas.

References:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/alexei-navalnys-death-what-do-we-know-2024-02-18/

https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/91665

Photo credit: Rom T

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Ukraine: What is Currently Happening?

Soon, another year is coming to an end and the holidays are arriving but Ukraine and Russia are still at war. We are entering a time in the Russo-Ukrainian War where there is little to no coverage of major updates. The Russo-Ukrainian War started on February 20, 2014, with Russia invading Ukraine in early 2022, and from then on attacks and the number of casualties have escalated. 

UPDATES:

During the recent virtual G20 meeting, Vladimir Putin stated that Russia has always been ready to talk with Ukraine to bring an end to the “tragedy” of war in Ukraine. In this meeting, Putin gave the most pacifistic comments yet since invading Ukraine. Although his comments were peaceful, the Russian president proceeded with blaming Kyiv for having no intention of a peace talk about the Russo-Ukrainian War. 

In other recent developments, the Russian foreign ministry has said that relations with the United States of America have become extremely thin and are at risk of being torn at any moment. This is due to the U.S.A.’s involvement in supporting Ukraine in the Russo-Ukrainian War by providing $44.2 billion in security assistance. Russian foreign ministry’s spokesperson Maria Zakharova informed reporters that the actions taken by Washington can lead to “unpredictable consequences” which were not specified. 

Recent data collection from the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Office reported that more than 10,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion. More than 560 children have been killed, and more than 18,500 people have been injured since the start of the conflict on February 24, 2022. About half of the deaths in the past three months have taken place far behind the front lines. The UN Human Rights Office expects that the real toll is significantly higher than what was collected. 

The U.S. National Security Council spokesperson, John Kirby, presented the U.S.’s concern on November 21, 2023, that Iran may provide Russia with ballistic missiles for use in the war against Ukraine. He stated that this development would be disastrous for civilians in Ukraine. Iran already has been providing Russia with unmanned drones, guided aerial bombs, and many more weapons, and announced that Iran might be taking a step further into supporting Russia in the Russo-Ukrainian War. In return, Russia might be providing Iran with unprecedented defense cooperation and has been helping Iran develop and maintain its satellite collection capabilities and other space-based programs. Kirby mentioned how this burgeoning military partnership between Iran and Russia is harmful to Ukraine, Iran’s neighbors in the Middle East, and most importantly to the international community. 

Written by: Events Intern, Anahi Aguirre

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Russian-Ukrainian War: Zelensky Calls for ‘Open Diplomacy’

As the Russian-Ukrainian War continues to stretch on into its ninth month, negotiations between each sides’ respective leaders have continued to struggle. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has been issuing daily updates to his citizens as the war continues on, and in his November 7th address, recently stated his terms for open diplomacy which included respect for the UN Charter, territorial integrity of Ukraine, and prosecution of war criminals. This has been a change from his previous stance that peace talks with Russia were an “impossibility” if done under Russian president Vladimir Putin. Ukraine’s current situation is complicated by its reliance on assistance from the United States, which recently underwent its midterm elections.The potential shift in political climate may alter the level of aid provided.

November marks an important time globally, with meetings such as the G20 summit and the ASEAN summit both taking place this month. Russian forces have retreated from the Kherson region, Though it appears the conflict will continue at this time, the recent turn of events have raised hopes that Russia is losing steam in its campaign. The Biden administration has not established a strong position on how Ukraine should proceed, but expresses hope that more fruitful peace talks can occur now that the winter months are closing in, posing a danger for troops and civilians still caught in the conflict.

Program Management Intern, Cindy Tse

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