A Proxy War in Ukraine?

In Washington, the debate on providing lethal aid to Ukraine is heating up, even though President Obama has staked out a clearly skeptical position.  While the Times was careful to note that the White House has not been asked to render a final decision about the targeting data, a top member of President Obama’s national security team Benjamin Rhodes has publicly acknowledged that the Administration has forged some form of intelligence-sharing relationship with Kyiv.  (This effort has essentially been an open secret since CIA Director John Brennan’s ill-timed visit to Kyiv in mid-April.)  Obviously, providing real-time data that allows Kyiv’s forces to target the separatist more effectively would represent a major escalation of U.S. involvement in the conflict.  The Times’ anonymous source acknowledged as much, noting “The debate is over how much to help Ukraine without provoking Russia.”

For its part, the Russian government has already made its anger about U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis abundantly clear.  But it has consistently left the world of fact-based analysis behind, relying instead on doctored YouTube videos allegedly showing Blackwater mercenaries in Ukraine and, more recently, inflammatory claims in a formal statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that Washington “pushed the regime [in Kyiv] to organize a severe reprisal against the Russian-speaking population.”  

The sad reality is this kind of latter-day proxy war behavior has been visible in a number of conflict zones since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The most serious instance was in Georgia where the Bush administration helped train and equip the country’s military and intelligence services for a variety of peacekeeping and counter-terrorism missions.  In August 2008 at the height of the Russian-Georgian war, the U.S. Department of Defense helped airlift Georgian forces deployed in Iraq so that they could return to Tbilisi after Russian troops moved to seize the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. 

From Washington’s perspective, the most serious incident prior to the Ukraine crisis may have been Russia’s provision of sensitive military equipment and intelligence to Iraq before and during the U.S. invasion in 2003. At the start of the Iraq War, U.S. officials discovered that Saddam Hussein’s troops were using Russian-supplied jamming equipment capable of disrupting U.S. missile guidance systems—and receiving on-the-ground consultations from the manufacturer’s experts.  After the invasion, U.S. officials found documentary evidence that showed Moscow had also provided Iraq night-vision goggles and, according to a March 2006 U.S. Department of Defense study based on captured Iraqi documents, that Russian intelligence on American troop movements had been passed to Saddam Hussein during the early days of the war.

During the Cold War, both Washington and Moscow actively encouraged, financed, and supported proxy wars across Asia, Africa and Latin America.  In the eyes of many influential figures in Moscow, that is precisely what is happening in Ukraine today. To be sure, Washington and many key European allies are quick to reject such characterizations, focusing instead on President Putin’s outrageous behavior in eastern Ukraine and shocking land-grab in Crimea.  But from Putin on down, perception is often reality so it’s worth taking a close look at what the Cold War and post-Cold War period can teach us about the far-reaching and destabilizing effects of proxy wars on the overall east-west relationship.  The provision of intelligence data on separatist missile launch sites to Kyiv may be a sound step for shoring up the Ukrainian military’s position in the East in the short-term. But given the all too present risk of escalation, such a move seems unlikely to go without a serious response.  The Obama administration needs to be prepared.

Alexandra McLees is a junior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Russia and Eurasia Program. Follow her on Twitter: @OlaMcLees.

Matthew Kupfer is a junior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Russia and Eurasia Program. Follow him on Twitter: @Matthew_Kupfer.