Ukraine is developing an image problem, here’s why that’s a bigger problem than it sounds.
National interests aren’t always aligned with national rhetoric. Rhetoric and interests can diverge for a while but sooner or later they will have to be reconciled. And interests trump stated values every time. Large parts of the EU say that they want to help Ukraine, but they have no strong national interest in making sure Kyiv wins. Recently there have been more stories in the news about a complicated Ukraine, one where real people live with real problems, rather than an idealised Ukraine, one where paragons of all things good and true fight an evil empire. How will the inherent conflict between geopolitical interests and professed values turn out? And does it matter?
Recently there have been press stories which highlight some of the structural problems Ukraine has had since its independence from the Soviet Union in the early nineties. The premier example is the ongoing corruption scandal where the Ukrainian defence department is accused of overpaying for their soldiers’ rations in a scheme to enrich both the minister and the company supplying rations. Another example is a minister allegedly getting kickbacks for generators. At the same time, Human Rights Watch has published allegations that the Ukrainian military has been using anti-personnel mines despite being a party to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. Ukraine has real problems beside the war, and it remains to be seen how Ukraine’s backers in the West react to these scandals.
It would seem these scandals open the door for ambivalent or doubting Ukraine supporters to have a pretext to change course. For example, I don’t think Italy feels particularly threatened by Russia’s invasion. They find it appalling I’m sure, but Italy’s territorial sovereignty or strategic interests are not impacted or threated by Russia occupying Luhansk and Donetsk. At the very start of the war there was a strong consensus and a strong sense of outrage over the invasion and that atmosphere I think created a peer pressure for Western and EU states to unequivocally support Ukraine; so several states which have no real stakes in the conflict found themselves on the pro-Zelensky team before having time to really consider what their interests were.
There is a risk for Ukraine then, that the war dragging on for more than a year coupled with its failure to live up to the impossible idealised version Westerners was picturing creates an opportunity for ambivalent supporters to decrease or stop their support for Ukraine without losing too much face. If you have no security interest in Ukraine’s territorial integrity then it at least made sense to support the struggling but budding democracy against the quasi-fascist revanchist empire. If the reality is that the war is between two corrupt oligarchies over faraway fields in Eastern Europe it might be harder to sell to your voters and your security establishment as a worthy conflict to intervene in.
All of this is to say that there is a real risk that Ukraine will begin bleeding foreign good will. I’ve argued from the start of the war that Russia has always had the upper hand; even when taking into account how many strategic, tactical, and logistical errors it has made. The cold hard facts is that Russia is more populous with a larger economy and a larger arms industry. Ukraine needs foreign aid to stay competitive, and I fear that support will wane in 2023, especially if corruption scandals continue. The inherent conflict between values and interests isn’t a hypothetical problem, it is an ongoing conflict which could decide Ukraine’s fate.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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Cover photo by MART PRODUCTION from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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