At the end of the second millennium of its Christian history, Europe has changed.

   After a nearly half-century long grim battle, communism abandoned the place, and suddenly vanished like an ugly nightmare at sunrise.

   And capitalism has returned.

   Unable to identify, re-evaluate, and spend time and efforts to promote its National Interest, and without leaders and a qualified political class, after December 1989 Romania needed a new slogan and a new foreign sponsor to replace the old “indestructible friendship” with the ex-Soviet Union. A new and strong ally represented by America’s president Bill Clinton showed up in the University Plaza of Bucharest in July 1997 and Romania’s new slogan, “the U.S. - Romania strategic partnership” was born that day.[1] That slogan ran smooth[2], and proved its validity for 23 years: “Mihail Kogalniceanu” by the Black Sea is the most advanced American air base in Eastern Europe, Deveselu is the closest NATO base to Russia and Iran, equipped with U.S. missile interceptors, and today Romania is the best Eastern European market for U.S. weaponry etc.

   Romania also accepted, without negotiations or comments, the decision of the Madrid NATO summit (1997) and didn’t join Poland, The Czech Republic and Hungary in the first wave of East European NATO members (1999). It lagged behind on the waiting list for another five years (2004). Moreover, in June 1997, one month before president Clinton arrived in Bucharest. The Constantinescu Administration consented to quickly conclude a broad treaty of friendship and cooperation with Ukraine, after several years of disputes and disagreements over the ownership of “Snake Island”, and more importantly over the oil and gas reserves that lie beneath the Black Sea. The treaty also dealt with the issue of the northern border between Romania and Ukraine, which had kept the sides apart. Signed under pressure, at Euro-Atlantic request, that bilateral treaty with Ukraine pretended to solve territorial and ethnic minority issues that had impeded the development of improved relations between the two countries since the end of World War II: 1) the dispute between Romania and Ukraine over the borders near “Snake Island” (approx. 50km East of Sulina) and the continental shelf of the Black Sea beneath which significant gas and oil deposits lie, has been settled after the ruling of the International Court of Justice, in 2009; 2) the dispute between Romania and Ukraine over the construction of the Soviet era old Bystroye Canal. On September 16, 2004 the Romanian side brought a case against Ukraine to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) - a dispute concerning the maritime boundary between the two States in the Black Sea. On February 3, 2009, the ICJ delivered its judgment, which divided the sea area of the Black Sea along a line which was between the claims of each country.[3] 

   Therefore, Romania entered, in 1997, under the “protection” of the global Pax Americana. For the sake of avoiding any local competition and defending the Euro-Atlantic political, economic and military interests and strategies in this sensitive part of Europe, a heavy lid was put on the territorial and ethnic disputes between Romania and Ukraine. Frankly speaking, the so called Romanian-Ukrainian treaty of “friendship” currently keeps under control another „frozen conflict” in the Black Sea area, the 8th one.

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  It is obvious that the absence of the Black Sea into the negotiations, and the regulations devised during and after the World War 2 in Casablanca, Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam etc. by the former allies against Hitler’s Germany, resulted in the current tension and disputes of all sorts between the Euro-Atlantic allies and Russia in that maritime region. When the Cold War ended, Russia and the West failed to either rigorously specify their political interests or to decide on the status of their spheres of influence in the Black Sea region. Are Ukraine, Georgia and the Republic of Moldova within Russia’s security space or not? Can they join NATO and the EU or not? Because of a lack of clear answers to these questions, today the respective region is being highly militarized.

  Given their busy agenda after the fall of communism – the integration and stabilisation of Central and Eastern Europe, an end to the wars in the former Yugoslavia, over 1992-1999, the establishment of post-Cold War relations with Russia etc. – the Euro-Atlantic allies have neither had the time, nor the political will to concern themselves with the Black Sea area. In the 1990s the EU was virtually absent from the area and launched no regional initiative, while its cooperation with the United States or NATO was next to non-existent. Later on, the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001 and the EU enlargement in the Black Sea region – new members and aspirant countries – brought new borders, new neighbours and new issues, such as international terrorism, massive migration from extra-European zones, and the security of resources and energy supplies to Europe etc. A little while later, the United States began to show an interest in the Black Sea, as part of its global strategy to fight terrorism and requested increased access through the straits for its warships. The EU was a slight presence in the Black Sea area – mostly economic and confined to statements of good intention in other areas – which was at odds with the joint Euro-Atlantic strategic planning, rightfully inviting criticism from the U.S. At the same time Russia has regarded the Black Sea and the straits as its outlet to the world for the last three centuries. Russia also perceives this geography as a natural shield protecting its borders from external threats. Furthermore, over the past one and a half decade, the already hectic Black Sea agenda has become even busier, as a result of growing international interest in East-West hydrocarbon transport corridors. At this point, the rivalry between the U.S./NATO/EU and Russia brought out another sign of a new Cold War.

  Today, NATO’s presence in the Black Sea area is tantamount to a strategic, political and military confrontation between two nuclear superpowers – the United States and Russia. NATO’s “show the flag” presence in those places is a sample of the former Cold War, actually the first to occur after the end of that confrontation. Although the West has abandoned the communism vs. capitalism ideological controversy, it has been replaced in the Black Sea region with a unilaterally imposed security system and an attempt at Western-type democratisation, which ignore both Russia’s view on its own national security and its almost millennium long societal experience and management.

   Furthermore, developments in the last years have pointed to serious difficulties in establishing a coherent and consistent Euro-Atlantic strategy at Europe’s both ends – at the Atlantic and at the Western end of the former USSR and its allies. Starting 2005 the Black Sea has been the # 1 priority of NATO’s expansion eastward. However, the subsequent course of events proved that the leaders of the North Atlantic military alliance had relied on a series of inaccurate political calculations. They counted on “Russia’s torpor” of the Yeltsin era but Putin gave his country a loud wake-up call, a redeemed national pride, and a whole bunch of new high-tech weaponry. Americans spoke of a return to the fine Turkish-U.S. relations of the past decades, but Turkey has proven uncooperative and anti-American. They thought democratization and the economic attractiveness of the EU would prevail and that NATO might be the binding agent to join together the littoral member states – Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey – and the aspirant countries – Ukraine and Georgia – but all these have proven to exist only on paper in Brussels and Washington, and were simply figments of the imagination for decision makers who were unaware of Black Sea realities.

  Turkey, far from being the local military mentor and leader for NATO members and aspirant countries in the Black Sea region, has placed its economic and political interests as a littoral country well above its NATO membership and its long-stalled bid to join the EU – a declining Western institution that is suffocating in the grip of the German “anaconda” and of brusselocracy.

  The East-European states’ accession to the European Union was conditional upon their previous admission to NATO, which made sort of sense. It was a well-known fact that the NATO-EU “symbiosis” depended on strong U.S.-EU ties. Twenty years later however, the current trans-Atlantic crisis and the EU’s poor economic performance in the ex-Soviet space has considerably weakened the North Atlantic military alliance in the East, and in the Black Sea region.

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  The Black Sea region is the place of a number of seven so called “frozen conflicts” (three in Ukraine) - historical and ethnic territories part of its littoral states and aftershocks of the fall of former Soviet Union in 1991. The term has been commonly used for post-Soviet conflicts, but it has also been often applied to other territorial disputes.[4]

  Since the ceasefire, which ended the Transnistria War (1990–1992), the Russian-influenced breakaway republic of Transnistria has controlled the easternmost strip of the territory of Republic of Moldova, which continues to claim the territory.

In 2014, Crimea was occupied by the Russian troops, and soon afterwards was admitted into the Russian Federation. Today, this is widely regarded in the West as an annexation of the peninsula by Russia, and is considered likely to result in another post-Soviet frozen conflict.[5] While there are similarities between Transnistria and Donbas, where the unrecognized Donetsk People's Republic and Lugansk People's Republic have taken de facto control of areas in that region in eastern      Ukraine, the conflict in Donbas is not a “frozen conflict”, yet ceasefire violations are keeping the fighting on a low burner.[6] In Simferopol, Crimea in March 18, 2015 was created a „Republic of Crimea” considered part of Russia.

Another “frozen conflict” in the Black Sea area is Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but most of the region is governed by the Republic of Artsakh, a de facto independent state with Armenian ethnic majority. Also the 1991–1992 South Ossetia War and the War in Abkhazia (1992–93), followed by the Russo-Georgian War of August 2008, have left the Russian-backed Republic of South Ossetia and Republic of Abkhazia in control of the South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions in north and northwest Georgia.

  At the beginning of 2020 the countdown for settling Ukraine’s geopolitical position within Europe and Eurasia is entering its final stages. The ultimate outcome will probably occur under President Volodymyr Zelensky. He and his “Servant of the People” political movement won an overwhelming mandate from Ukrainian voters in 2019 by promising to succeed where his predecessors had failed: to settle the conflict with Russia while presiding over Ukraine’s eventual integration into the Euro-Atlantic world.[7]

  Time, however, is not on his side.

 Russia’s longstanding effort to bypass Ukraine as its conduit to Western markets is complete (North Stream 1 and 2 pipelines), while changes in both European and American political priorities and strategic assessments may diminish the importance and relevance of Ukraine as a central component in relations between Russia and the West.

For the last thirty years, U.S. policy towards Ukraine has been guided by former National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s aphorism: a Russia with Ukraine is an empire and a threat to the security of the Euro-Atlantic area, but a Russia without Ukraine has the chance to become a “normal” nation-state. While this created a clear imperative for the United States to oppose Ukraine’s absorption into some sort of greater Russia, it left unclear whether it was necessary - or worth the cost - for Ukraine to be brought fully into the Western security structure, or whether the American strategy for Euro-Atlantic security could be secured by Ukrainian neutrality. For its part, post-Soviet Russia always drew a bright shining red line at Ukraine’s joining NATO.

  As a Euro-Atlantic bridge, post-1991, Kiev could have avoided a security dilemma with Russia but the vicissitudes of Ukrainian domestic politics prevented this from happening. First, there was the geographic division within the country between the South-Eastern regions, which wanted to maintain close economic and political ties with Russia, and the West, which wanted to break Ukraine once and for all out of the Russian embrace. At the same time, the Ukrainian economic oligarchy had promised reforms but was more than happy to become enmeshed in corrupt deals with Russian entities. Ukraine was content to remain addicted to cheap Russian energy and subsidies. Ukraine was hoping to continue its affair with Russian money while seeking a formal marriage with the West.

  By 2004, however, the integration of Central Europe into both the EU and NATO brought the border of the Euro-Atlantic world squarely against Ukraine’s western frontiers. This led to calculations that the inexorable eastward enlargement of the West would continue without imposing any major costs on the United States or Western Europe - and without provoking a major reaction from Moscow, and helped fuel the 2004 Orange Revolution, which brought Viktor Yushchenko to power. Yushchenko and Yuliya Tymoshenko, made it clear that they wished to end Ukraine’s borderland status in favour of Ukraine becoming the eastward redoubt of the Euro-Atlantic world.

The Orange Revolution fundamentally changed the mood of the U.S.-Russia relations and strained Russia’s ties with Europe. After 2004, there was now a government in Kiev demanding that NATO and the EU live up to their claims that any European countries could join them, while changes in both European and American political priorities and strategic assessments may diminish the importance and relevance of Ukraine as a central component in the relations between Russia and the West. Meanwhile, after 2004 Russia adopted new strategies, its longstanding effort to bypass Ukraine as its conduit to Western markets was completed (North Stream 1 and 2 pipelines) and, by involving itself in Ukrainian politics Moscow’s approach shifted to pushing for the decentralization of power in Ukraine, ensuring that pro-Russian regions would be able to exercise veto power over the country’s foreign policy and so forestall Ukraine’s ability to eventually join NATO and the EU.

  Finally, Moscow stepped up its efforts to probe how strong the rhetorical American commitment to countries like Ukraine and Georgia would be in the event of clashes breaking out - both to judge the efficacy of the American response and demonstrate, as far as possible, the hollowness of any American guarantees. All of this culminated in the Russia-Georgia clash in August 2008 - which indeed exposed the limits of Western promises and the nature of their response. Former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma drew the following conclusion after watching the “gap” in the Western response to Georgia: “Is there anyone who really thinks we need to tilt against Russia and someone will take our side? I’m sure that neither the EU, nor the U.S. will lift a finger.”

  In 2014, the Kremlin dusted off its plans to detach Crimea from the rest of Ukraine via a rapid fait accompli that left the provisional Ukrainian government - as well as the United States and the Europeans - no time to react. Moreover, in keeping with Vladimir Putin’s not-so-veiled threat to George W. Bush at the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008, Moscow showed that if it could not persuade Kiev and the West to halt plans for Ukrainian integration into the Euro-Atlantic world, the Kremlin would rely on making Ukraine a non-candidate by instigating separatist uprisings that would lead to unsolvable conflicts. Based on the Kremlin’s read of NATO and EU attitudes, that Ukraine would not be a neutral bridge between Russia and the West.

  At the same time, Russia accelerated its timetable for its bypass strategy so as to no longer be dependent on Ukraine’s economy or the country’s geography. Plans that had been put on hiatus during Yanukovych’s presidency were reactivated, starting with a second North Stream pipeline, and, after the European Union’s regulatory apparatus overruled Russia’s attempt to bypass the country via the Black Sea (the South Stream pipeline), the Russians shifted to a line that would enter Turkey first.

  Another side of the Russian strategy has longer-term implications. Moscow has spent the last five years attempting to recreate on Russian soil the Ukrainian enterprises and industrial concerns that it had previously purchased goods and services from - including by recruiting the necessary human capital from Donbas and other parts of eastern Ukraine. The disconnection of the Russian defence complex from the Ukrainian industry is nearing completion. This will allow the Kremlin to permit the current Ukrainian stalemate to become the norm. Moreover, the Zelensky Administration, which won a good deal of its popular support from its promise to improve living standards, will face the prospect of losing billions of dollars in revenues, which will have to make up for, from other sources.

  Today, Moscow has a stern strategy with regards to Ukraine: make Ukraine non-eligible for EU/NATO membership; prevent a consolidation of the Ukrainian political system; and reroute Russia’s geo-economic connections. The goal is to recreate a failing state and throw responsibility onto the Europeans and the United States. Putin’s gamble is that the West will be disinclined to take upon itself the burden of renovating Ukraine.

Also it is not accidental that increased Russian efforts to influence Western political processes picked up after 2014. It seems that Russian political operations have created problems in Western democracies, which are now facing new forms of left and right-wing populism and manifest dissatisfactions with the structure of the Western alliances, such as Euro-scepticism, Brexit and America First. There are also signs of “Ukraine fatigue” in Western capitals. After the initial burst of enthusiasm in the wake of the Maidan revolution for helping Ukraine, the perception grew that the former government of Petro Poroshenko was not doing enough to push reform. This weakened the willingness of European states to give up their lucrative connections with Russia. Moreover, Europe’s political landscape has changed since 2014. For the most part, European populists tend to prioritize the “Euro bottom line” in relations with Russia over abstract notions of the “international liberal order.”

  The Trump administration has continued to enforce the Obama-era sanctions and even began to supply weapons to the Ukrainian military - a move once seen as a red line by strategists in the Kremlin. At the same time though, Trump’s personal interest in seeing whether some sort of a big bargain “deal” with Putin might be in the cards.

     And for non-European U.S. allies, Ukraine is not the most important issue in the U.S.-Russia relationship. For Saudi Arabia and Israel, Russia’s role in the Middle East trumps the Crimea question. For Japan and Korea, maintaining Russia as part of the Northeast Asian regional balance of power limits their support of the Euro-Atlantic position on Ukraine. Energy consumers like India are far less willing to curtail their relations with Moscow over Ukraine.

The risk for Ukraine, therefore, is that much of the world learns to live with the de facto Russian control of Crimea.

     Does this mean that with Zelensky’s surprise victory in the 2019 presidential polls, Ukraine had been given a third chance - following 2004 and 2014 - to change its destiny? In July 2019, The Washington Post wrote: The United States, which under the Trump administration has been supportive of Ukrainian sovereignty, should do whatever it can to help. But it will be up to Mr. Zelensky and the new political elite he has created to show that Ukraine can succeed.

But, the support given today by the West to Zelensky because he has an opportunity to implement the Minsk agreements might turn one day into a trap. Implementation of the peace plan in Donbas will turn the region into a virtually independent part of Ukraine. Hence, Russia will be able to influence Ukrainian politics through its connections in Donbas. That means Moscow will have gained exactly what it fought for: veto power over Ukraine’s attempts to join the EU and NATO. As for the rest of Ukraine, even though they lost something, they get something else valuable in return: a neutral status between East and West. A federalized Ukraine led by Zelensky, in many ways, makes Ukraine „Finlandised”. That is good for the Ukrainian people. It means they retain their independence, but peacefully accept that Russia controls their foreign policy. That kind of position benefited Finland between 1985 and 1991. Finland is now a peaceful and prosperous country, and it is no longer living under Russian influence. If “Finlandisation” led to happiness for the Finns, it can do the same for the Ukrainians.

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     Zelensky’ Ukraine faces in 2020 an appalling amount of problems. Let’s count some:

- the 30 years old fascination of the West towards Kiev is fading just as the infinite bilateral promises faded on both sides;

- NATO admittance is out of question, as stipulates an official document of the alliance dated September 03, 1995: “Promoting good-neighbourly relations, which would benefit all countries in the Euro-Atlantic area, both members and non-members of NATO” (Chapter 1, A. 3.), and “contribute to the development of peaceful and friendly international relations by strengthening their free institutions” (B.5.), and “States which have ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes, including irredentist claims, or internal jurisdictional disputes must settle those disputes by peaceful means in accordance with OSCE principles. Resolution of such disputes would be a factor in determining whether to invite a state to join the Alliance” (Chapter 1, B.5.)[8]. Zelensky’ Ukraine is not promoting “good neighbourly relations” today, and has “ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes” with its neighbours Hungary and Romania, both members of the EU and NATO;

- Moscow’s stern strategy is to cause ethnic and territorial disputes in Ukraine and thus make the country unstable and non-eligible for EU/NATO membership;

- The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban may have succeeded - during his visit to Washington in May 2019 - in shaping the U.S. President Trump’s negative views on Ukraine [9];

- Russia rapidly becomes free of Ukraine’s industrial economy. Moscow has spent the last five years attempting to recreate, on Russian soil, the Ukrainian enterprises and industrial businesses from where it had previously purchased goods and services - including by recruiting the necessary human capital from Donbas and other parts of eastern Ukraine. The disconnection of the Russian defence complex from Ukrainian industry is nearing completion. This will allow the Kremlin to permit the current Ukrainian stalemate to become the norm. The Zelensky administration, which won a good deal of its popular support losing billions of dollars in revenues;

- Ukraine is not important to the U.S. non-European allies including Israel, and

- probably, the best solution for Mr. Zelensky would be the „finlandization” of his country. If so, Romania will enjoy the opportunity to have next to it a neutral and a lot more peaceful and flexible neighbour.

Under all these circumstances mentioned above it is reasonable to believe that Romania, as an EU and NATO country should give a strong and positive “refresh” to its relations with Ukraine. It might turn out that Bucharest’s strategic stays this time cool and has „no objection”.

NOTE: The article is part of Dan Hazaparu’s research for the thesis entitled “The Black Sea - from Ancient Sovereigns to the Montreux Convention and to NATO Expansion - 2005-2019”.