For more than six months, the world has been living in the shadow of the conflict in Ukraine. It is adversely affecting a great many people on the planet. The conflict, like the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic that preceded it, has once again laid bare the downside of global interdependence.
This session provides a unique opportunity to take stock of the situation. Let us, in a very honest and unbiased manner, answer two questions. The answers to them, like the ensuing necessary action, is what all people around the globe expect from us, the United Nations Member States. The first is: What are the root causes of the conflict in Ukraine? The second is: What needs to be done to stop the conflict and prevent similar events from recurring in the future?
We are convinced that the conflict in Ukraine arises from a wider geopolitical chaos, whose causes must be sought in the events of 30 years ago. History teaches us that epoch-making wars that end in unfair and humiliating peace terms contain the seeds of future conflicts. Let us take a look at what kind of peace was established after the end of the last epochal confrontation — the Cold War.
The so-called winners, apparently influenced by euphoria, did not consider it necessary to draw on examples from the past. After all, they could have followed the path of Alexander I, Metternich and Castlereagh. Those great peacemakers of the early nineteenth century effectively integrated their adversaries into a new security system, thereby bringing lasting peace to Europe that would endure for decades to come. Likewise, they could have drawn inspiration from the model of cooperation established during the Second World War by the “Big Three” — Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill — who forged arrangements that significantly narrowed opportunities for great Powers to wage wars against each other.
Nonetheless, unfortunately, the Western policymakers of the early 1990s chose the most inglorious and unpromising option, namely, the path of the 1919-style Versailles diplomats eager to trample upon their main opponent. To begin with, the Cold War ended not even with an official treaty, but with some kind of gentlemen’s agreements and declarations. As subsequent events revealed, the so-called winning side did not respect those arrangements; in fact, they were nothing more than a Versailles 2.0.
The West revealed its selfishness by offering to the post-Soviet States only one path, that of being its satellites. To cement that status, the West relied on the expansion of one of its key Cold War-era institutions — the NATO military bloc. NATO’s eastward expansion occurred despite the agreements achieved with the West, including those struck with the Soviet leaders. The West overlooked the legitimate security interests of both Russia and Belarus.
In that regard, I recall the outstanding American diplomat George Kennan, whose foreign policy prophecies are so admired by Western policymakers. Why did they fail to heed another of Kennan’s famous warnings when, in 1996, he condemned NATO expansion as “a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions”? With its drive to enlarge NATO, the West trampled upon the indivisibility of security, a vital principle according to which one party must not seek to achieve its own security at the expense of other parties. The peacemakers of 1815 and 1945 grasped that logic very well, whereas the world leaders of 1919 and 1991 refused to embrace it.
NATO’s involvement in the illegal wars against Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and Syria, in addition to the Alliance’s attempts to encroach on some historical Eastern Slavic and adjacent lands made it a foregone conclusion that Versailles 2.0. would suffer the fate of the first Versailles. Therefore, it is the collective West that bears the full responsibility for the ongoing bloodshed in Ukraine. It was precisely the West that made the conflict inevitable, not only through its decision to expand NATO, but also by its refusal to consider the proposals of its opponents. After all, such proposals were made.
The questions arises: What should be done?
Indeed, in 2009 Russia invited all interested parties to sign a new European security treaty that would de jure wrap up the Cold War. The West rejected the proposal. In 2017, it was President of Belarus Alyaksandr Lukashenko who came up with the idea of holding a global security dialogue and proposed Minsk as a venue for negotiations. The opponents ignored that initiative as well. Last December, the Russian Federation made yet another attempt to reach an agreement with the West on the issue of European security. As before, the West remained deaf to the new Russian proposal.
What explains this rejectionist policy and stance of the West? The key problem is the ongoing clash at the global level between two incompatible visions of the world order — one concentric, the other polycentric. The West wants to establish a concentric or unipolar world, ruled from one centre and subordinated to the interests of a Western hegemon. Most other countries wish to create a polycentric or multipolar world with no single centre of control and in which no one imposes its visions, interests or values on anyone else. The West has dominated the world for the past five centuries, and believes that it can continue doing so indefinitely.
As for us, we are deeply convinced that the world has changed and that neocolonialism in any form is no longer an acceptable or viable option. Five centuries ago, when the West was just beginning its global ascent, the world came to witness the Copernican revolution of knowledge. That revolution took place, first and foremost, in the minds of the people of that time, who found it difficult to come to terms with the postulate that it was not the Earth but the Sun that stood at the centre of the solar system.
A similar Copernican paradigm shift must occur today. As was the case half a millennium ago, it too must take place in people’s minds. This time around, it must occur in the minds of the West’s political mainstream. The West must, at last, recognize a number of truths.
First, international relations do not revolve around one single — that is, Western — centre of power. Secondly, the world’s history has no end, because it is not an inexorable movement of all countries towards so-called liberal democracy. Thirdly, the world is too complex a structure to reduce all its problems to a confrontation — as we have also heard from this rostrum — between the so-called democracies and autocracies. That understanding, it would appear, has not yet registered with the West. What we have seen instead is the destruction stubbornly pursued by the West, including self-destruction.
Economic sanctions are almost the only tool in the West’s foreign policy toolkit. One cannot fail to sense that the very fact the sanctions have been imposed serves as an indicator of their effectiveness for Europe and the United States. In that regard, we are witnessing a substitution of concepts. The key objective has not been achieved, but the sanctions keep living a life of their own.
What common sense does the West invest in the unilateral, illegal economic sanctions it imposes against other countries? Without any trace of hesitation, the goal has been stated loud and clear — to achieve a change of power in various countries through food riots provoked by sanctions. This calculation has largely turned out to be a failure. Most countries have not joined the effort to implement the sanctions. Many States under sanctions, such as Belarus and Russia, are to a large extent self- sufficient. Importantly, the sanctions have given us a powerful impetus to develop hidden internal reserves and reinvigorate regional integration.
Undoubtedly, we will weather the storm. We will survive just as freedom-loving Cuba has been surviving illegal sanctions for more than six decades. Nonetheless, the sanctions have had two negative repercussions that their sponsors could hardly have anticipated.
First, they have reduced the supply of fertilizer and food from the countries under sanctions. As a result, those who suffer the most are the poorest people in developing countries. Suffice it to say, prices in those countries have skyrocketed by 300 per cent over the past half a year, while Africa is facing fertilizer shortages to the tune of over 2 million tons.
Secondly, funnily enough, the sanctions have had a boomerang effect, hitting the West itself. No matter how some may swagger today, ordinary people in Europe will, unfortunately, have to freeze through the coming winter. It is high time for Western countries to resort to common sense and return to dialogue and cooperation. Even in the current situation, Belarus stands ready to embrace dialogue and cooperation on equal terms, without preconditions or pressure.
Belarus, like many other countries, has spoken a great deal and everywhere about the conflict in Ukraine. We cannot do otherwise. The conflict is happening at our very doorstep. We are extremely saddened to see the fraternal Ukrainian people fall victim to the collective West’s geopolitical games. We are convinced that the origins of Ukraine’s now specific problems should be sought in 2004, when the West managed to carry out the first colour revolution in that country. The second revolution, a decade later, firmly secured Ukraine’s status as anti-Russian.
Instigated by the United States and its allies, Ukraine has been exterminating the people of Donbas for eight years for no other reason than that the local people want to speak their native language, Russian. But the West does not need Ukraine, neither as a member of NATO nor as a member of the European Union. Its new patrons are simply using it in their own great game against Russia. Today Ukraine is paying the price in blood because its politicians bought into that deception and disregarded the historical brotherhood of the three East Slavic peoples: Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians. But it is never too late to admit and correct one’s mistakes.
For Belarus, which itself endured the genocide of the Belarusian people during the Second World War, when one in three people in our country was killed, it is unbearably painful to see the chaos in our neighbouring country and the suffering of ordinary Ukrainians. Ever since 2014, we have been making every possible effort to bring peace to Ukraine. It was our country in particular that became associated with peace in Donbas when the Minsk agreements were adopted in 2014 and 2015. Right after the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine in February, it was the President of Belarus who managed to get the parties to the conflict to sit down at the negotiating table, once again on Belarusian soil. Belarus hosted three successful rounds of Ukrainian- Russian negotiations that opened real prospects for settling the conflict. Regrettably, that process has since stalled.
We remain deeply convinced that both a ceasefire agreement and a comprehensive strategic peace settlement around Ukraine, in a broad context of regional and global security, can be achieved only at the negotiating table. There is no alternative to talks. Otherwise, we will all get a new third Versailles. As a neighbour and an affected country, Belarus should be an integral part of the negotiation process and of final security guarantees.
We very much hope that the tragic events in Ukraine will compel the collective West to realize rather quickly that changes in international relations are irreversible. The sooner that happens, the sooner peace can come to Ukraine and other hot spots, and the sooner we can lay the foundation of a new, just world order. We believe that one crucial step in that process is a global security dialogue in the true spirit of San Francisco, whose urgency the President of Belarus clearly stated as far back as five years ago.
We have consistently highlighted the key role of the great Powers in this effort. Unfortunately, as we are seeing today, they hear and understand each other poorly. There is not the slightest hint that they are ready to move on from recriminations. Perhaps the time has come for the countries representing the developing world to collectively take the lead in global security with all of the energy and dynamism they displayed with great success nearly half a century ago in advancing the idea of a new international economic order. We believe that it is precisely now that the Non-Aligned Movement and the BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — as well as the regional integration unions, which are on the rise, must be directly and proactively involved in matters of global peace.
It is true that today, unfortunately, we do not have a clear concept for safeguarding the peace and security of our planet insofar because the world has become so complex that a multitude of diverse challenges defy any single framework. What is more, the mechanisms for neutralizing the global challenges that were put in place in the framework of prior geopolitical realities are lagging behind in making the decisions that would fit the times, or stalling altogether.
The task facing humankind today is to ensure that our civilization is not destroyed as we transition to a new multipolar world order. That is exactly what our common priority for action must be, including at the United Nations. It is in this direction, provided we want to survive at all, that we must seek consensus and promptly forge new, adequate response mechanisms.
It is for the sake of that objective that we must immediately silence the mutually destructive rhetoric and put an end to the fatal total confrontation that leaves no room for diplomatic efforts. That can be done only by responsible world leaders who, in the figurative expression of Henry Kissinger, “possess a sense of direction and mission”. Leaders with such qualities are bound to emerge on the world stage.
Our present state of mind was well captured by Martin Luther King Jr. more than half a century ago when he said:
“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow
is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency
of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and
history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late.”
Let us act before it is too late.
Belarus, for its part, stands ready to play the role of a vigorously engaged and responsible stakeholder in security processes at the global and regional levels alike.