Hamish Price on Russia
An excellent article by Hamish Price on Russia is here. Some extracts:
Russia has overwhelming military superiority. Yet they will still suffer devastating losses. Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Ukraine has doubled its army, and modernised its equipment. Ukraine has 250,000 armed personnel, and 7 million men of fighting age.
Russia has captured the port of Odessa to block Ukraine’s access to shipping. It is now carrying out shock-and-awe air-strikes on Ukrainian cities with relative impunity.
But to force the removal of the government in Kiev and install a puppet regime, Russia needs to engage in urban warfare and land troops on the ground in the capital. As Russian forces descend on Kiev from multiple fronts, there are already signs that they are making less progress than they had planned. Russia’s losses are mounting.
Ukrainian losses will be martyrs in defence of the motherland. Russian casualties will diminish morale. The ground invasion of a country with a land mass almost twice the size of Germany will only lead to bloodshed that will eclipse all other conflicts in Europe in the last eight decades. And the blood will flow for years.
The invasion of Ukraine is now in its fourth day and progress is slow. By comparison the ground war in the first gulf war was over in 100 hours.
But New Zealand is now an outlier among modern liberal democracies in not having an autonomous sanctions regime. When our closest like-minded friends are prepared to make such huge personal sacrifices to stand up for Ukraine’s sovereignty–in the case of much of Europe, this means literally going cold in winter; then it is no longer tenable to rely on travel bans or an antiquated commitment to a compromised UN system to send a message to Ukraine.
It is hand-wringing weakness to opine that New Zealand wants reform of the permanent membership veto on the Security Council. That reform will not happen. We need autonomous sanctions to take action against the most egregious violations of international law.
Although foreign affairs is occasionally a balance between our values and our interests, in the case of Russia, New Zealand needs to allow our values to prevail. We must align ourselves with Europe, the UK, the US, Japan and others on Russia. We need to be prepared to cut off trade with Russia, cease dealings with all Russian financial institutions, and freeze all Russian assets. We need to expel all of Russia’s diplomats and close our embassy in Moscow.
We need to make it clear to Russia that as long as they attempt to tear up the United Nations Charter, attack other sovereign states, and undermine our values, we can have no relationship with them.
We must commit to defeating Russia’s information war against our values, and play our part in advancing the cause of democracy and human rights, and combating authoritarianism. Some of those discussions will be hard.
I like the line if placing our values ahead of our interests. I agree.
The reputational risk to New Zealand is not simply whether we stand up with like-minded countries for the values that we have extolled in New York, Geneva and Vienna over nearly eight decades. The doors are closing on Russian finance. But finance is mobile. Even if there is agreement to lock Russia out of the SWIFT transaction system, New Zealand is still vulnerable. We have the tenth most-traded currency in the world. Our investment and business regime is among the most liberal. Two years into a comprehensive Western embargo on Russian finance, we will become an outcast if we have become an easy safe-haven for it.
Brownlee has attempted to table his Bill again this week. Mahuta responded loftily that the Bill is not “fit for purpose”. Yet they have made no attempt to replace it. The events in the last 24 hours have now made autonomous sanctions an urgent priority for New Zealand foreign policy. Brownlee’s legislation may not be perfect, but the critical need is to provide a mechanism to sanction Russia immediately. National leader Chris Luxon has offered National’s support to fast-track such a regime.
Ardern is due to travel to Europe shortly to press New Zealand’s case for the long-awaited FTA with the EU. When she visits European leaders, she will claim that we are like-minded modern liberal democracies with shared values. Each of them will then ask her what New Zealand is doing to show our commitment to those values. If all we have done is berated a Russian Ambassador and imposed a travel ban on Vladimir Putin, then they will laugh her out of the room.
Australia is not doing nothing. Australia is sending weapons from their military to Ukraine. Almost every liberal democratic country is doing something, except (so far) New Zealand.