Russia-Ukraine war and negotiating in good faith

THE EDITOR: Lennox Ballah astonished me with the very first words that he spoke to our UWI Institute of International Relations diplomacy class in 1972: “In the conduct of diplomacy we are concerned with expediency and not with morality." In other words, diplomacy has its own morality. Basdeo Panday echoed that same dismal moral philosophy when he declared that “politics has a morality of its own.”

The world, which includes the Caribbean, is about to witness in unhurried diplomatic drama the fate which now awaits those who chose to conduct diplomacy with Russia by duplicity rather than in good faith.

Negotiations are about to commence to find a way to end the war in Ukraine, which Russia, since it is already winning, has no urgency in bringing to an end. The Ukrainian dead have been flowing down that river of war in such huge numbers that Ukraine is already running out of men, including boots for hire, willing to fight Russia.

Donald Trump’s upset victory in the US election has brought a bitter moment of truth for those in the West who have kept their proxy war against Russia alive by providing Ukraine with massive financial, military and other aid.

The bitter truth for the West is that the American people have just voted for wars in Ukraine and Gaza to now end. Their votes were more against Joe Biden/Kamala Harris than an embrace of Trump, and hence Trump, who pledged to end those wars, must now find a diplomatic way to do so or his second term in office would be stamped with dramatic failure as soon as it has started. America will turn against him with a speed that would embarrass him.

If Trump, the ultimate conman, seeks to elbow his way with Russia by seeking to negotiate from a position of strength, he would soon find that Russia would refuse to be elbowed or intimidated, and would not submit to threats. There would therefore be no alternative to real negotiations, and that is when the chickens will come home to roost for the West.

Like Iran in 1952, Ukraine had a government in 2014 that was chosen by the people, and had good neighbourly relations with Russia. But after a Western-provoked uprising and armed violence in 2014, the Ukrainian government was replaced with a virulently anti-Russian government that soon became a NATO Trojan Horse that posed an existential threat to Russia.

Those who have been waging colour revolutions to change governments they disliked and replace them, as they did in Iran in 1952 and Ukraine in 2014, with their own client governments, while yet hypocritically proclaiming the gospel of democracy, are about to wake up to a new world in which they will now have to eat humble pie for what they did in Ukraine in 2014. Russia will neither forgive nor forget. NATO’s Trojan Horse in Ukraine may soon have to be dismantled.

But their tragedy is compounded by other sins.

In 2014 and again in 2015, the Minsk agreements were reached for fighting to end between the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the Russian-speaking populations in Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, which resisted being ruled by the new anti-Russian regime that had seized power in Kiev.

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that the West agreed to the Minsk agreement “merely to buy time for Ukraine’s arms build-up;” hence the West did not negotiate in good faith, Rather, they negotiated with duplicity and will now pay the price when negotiations commence.

Russia will display the stern negotiating profile of someone who is dealing with unpenitent, amoral people with PhDs in deception, rather than with those who can be trusted to negotiate in good faith.

The drama is about to start!

IMRAN N HOSEIN

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