The list of countries targeted by the U.S. military includes the vast majority of the nations on Earth, including almost every single county in Latin America and the Caribbean and most of the African continent.
From the beginning of 1991 to the beginning of 2004, the U.S. military launched 100 interventions, according to CRS.
That number grew to 200 military interventions between 1991 and 2018.
The report shows that, since the end of the first cold war in 1991, at the moment of U.S. unipolar hegemony, the number of Washington’s military interventions abroad substantially increased.
Of the total 469 documented foreign military interventions, the Congressional Research Service noted that the U.S. government only formally declared war 11 times, in just five separate wars.
The data exclude the independence war been U.S. settlers and the British empire, any military deployments between 1776 and 1798, and the U.S. Civil War.
It is important to stress that all of these numbers are conservative estimates, because they do not include U.S. special operations, covert actions, or domestic deployments.
The CRS report clarified:
The list does not include covert actions or numerous occurrences in which U.S. forces have been stationed abroad since World War II in occupation forces or for participation in mutual security organizations, base agreements, or routine military assistance or training operations.
The report likewise excludes the deployment of the U.S. military forces against Indigenous peoples, when they were systematically ethnically cleansed in the violent process of westward settler-colonial expansion.
CRS acknowledged that it left out the “continual use of U.S. military units in the exploration, settlement, and pacification of the western part of the United States.”
“The U.S. has undertaken over 500 international military interventions since 1776, with nearly 60 percent undertaken between 1950 and 2017,” the project wrote. “What’s more, over one-third of these missions occurred after 1999.”
The Military Intervention Project added: “With the end of the Cold War era, we would expect the U.S. to decrease its military interventions abroad, assuming lower threats and interests at stake. But these patterns reveal the opposite—the U.S. has increased its military involvements abroad.”
Afro-Colombians from northern Cauca during the May 2021 national strike (Twitter/Renacientes)
Mobilizations took to the streets of Colombia on April 28 in a national strike to protest social injustice and aggressive tax reforms proposed by the Iván Duque government. Student movements, trade unions, young peoples’ organizations, feminist groups, and indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples’ movements marched, blocked roads and held cultural activities in urban centers and rural territories throughout the country, exercising their right to peaceful protest. But the state wasted no time in responding with violent repression, especially in major cities such as Calí, Bogotá, Palmira and Popayán.
Although the vast majority of protests have been peaceful, isolated incidents of looting and violence have been used as an excuse for using excessive force against protesters. Media discourses around “good protesters” and “bad protesters” legitimize this response. Widespread reports of infiltrators are being used to provoke violence and looting, as has been the case in previous strikes in the country. Armed forces reportedly have stood by and allowed looting to take place, only to later respond to such incidents with violent repression.
Rather than heeding the demands of the citizens against the tax reform and social injustice, the state has responded with militarization, turning peaceful demonstrations into scenes of war. Helicopters circle above protest points and communities, while tanks thunder through narrow city streets.
Several cities are occupied by four armed state actors:
armed police,
Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios (ESMAD, or Mobile Anti-Riot Squads of the National Police),
military forces and
Grupo Operativo Especial de Seguridad del Cuerpo Nacional de Policía (GOES, or Special Security Task Force of the National Police Force).
Instead of seeking to pacify the situation and protect citizens, these forces have increasingly threatened security, peace and human rights.
Flagrant Human Rights Abuses
Countless videos recorded by protesters and onlookers circulate daily on social media, showing cases of police brutality, indiscriminate shootings, and the use of tear gas inside barrios that contain children and elderly people. Over the past few days, the violence has taken on a new face in Calí, with the presence of plainclothes police officers and reports of unmarked cars carrying out drive-by shootings against protesters.
Bogotá-based non-governmental organization Indepaz reports the following occurred between April 28 and May 8:
47 murders (the majority of whom have been young adults and 4 of whom were minors),
12 cases of sexual violence,
28 eye injuries,
1,876 acts of violence,
963 arbitrary detentions and
548 forced disappearances.
Reports are circulating of people being arrested and denied information of their destination, violating their rights to due process and exposing them to the risk of arbitrary detention, cruel and inhumane treatment, and forced disappearance.
Armed police have threatened lawyers and human-rights defenders when inquiring about missing people at police stations. The international community woke up to the seriousness of the situation when, on May 3, members of a humanitarian mission including UN and state representatives were attacked by armed police while waiting to enter a police station in search of missing people. On April 7, as a humanitarian mission was taking place north of Calí with the presence of Senator Alexander Lopez, a drive-by shooting took place, injuring one person and killing three.
The Racialization of State Repression
The violence and repression has a disproportionate impact on Black communities, only mirroring Colombia’s ongoing internal armed conflict. For example, 35 of the 47 murders Indepaz reported took place in Calí, home to South America’s second-largest Afro-descendant population. No surprise that structural and systemic racism are deeply ingrained in Calí. Many of the most aggressive cases of state violence have been carried out in neighborhoods with majority or significant Afro-descendant populations, treating communities as enemies of war. Historically, these barrios have suffered socio-economic exclusion, further entrenched by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism and state violence. Many barrio residents already were victims of forced displacement, having fled the armed conflict in the majority Afro-descendant regions of the northern Cauca Department, in which Calí is located, and the Pacific coast.
While official statistics do not reveal the proportion of Black victims in this current wave of police brutality due to a lack of disaggregated data, photos of victims clearly show the disproportionate impact on young Afro-descendant men.
Racial profiling not only underpins state violence, but is central in the denial of state responsibility and impunity. Already, discussions around existing gang violence and urban conflicts are being used to question whether many of these young men participated in the protests or were delinquents killed in the context of the everyday violence in their communities. This discourse no doubt seeks to reduce the numbers of protest-related deaths, simultaneously justifying the deaths of young Black men. The first death registered in Calí took place in the majority Black barrio, Marroquin II, where a 22-year-old man was killed. But the military later denied his death was related to the protests.
Militarization, Imperialism and the Protests
The current situation in Colombia cannot be understood in isolation from the wider armed conflict and the ever-deepening neoliberal agenda supported and sustained by the United States and multinationals that feed off Colombia’s natural resources. U.S. imperialist interests in the region have been clear since the late 19th century, with the attempted invasion of Colombia’s neighbor, Panama, in 1885 and the start of the Panama Canal project in 1904. In 1948, the Organization of American States was created during a meeting in Colombia.
Colombia has been the strategic point for Washington’s political, economic and military operations in recent decades. Thanks to U.S. technical and logistical support, Colombia is now one of the greatest military powers in the region. With the 1999 signing of Plan Colombia and the 2002 Patriot Plan, U.S. military presence and influence has only deepened.
Further, U.S. military support has always depended on state policies that benefited U.S. imperial interests. For example, in 2009 the United States signed an agreement with the Uribe Government to be able to operate from seven Colombian military bases. Although this agreement was blocked by the Constitutional Court, the Santos government later arrived at alternative bilateral agreements. These enabled access and use of the bases in practice, and further facilitated the fruitless and dangerous strategy of spraying the herbicide, glyphosate, on illicit crops. All of this sustains the ideology of the “internal enemy” and the terrorist threat that underpinned the original emergence and expansion of paramilitarism in the 1980s.
It is precisely this paramilitarism model the Colombian state is using in the context of the current protests, particularly in Calí, where state agents, often without proper identification, collaborate with civilians to shoot and kill protesters from high-end cars. The Indigenous Guard, accompanying the protests in Calí, have suffered several attacks of this kind, most recently on May 9, when eight people were wounded.
This violent state repression is yet another consequence of imperialist intervention and the extractivist neoliberal project that uses militarism to eliminate a historically racialized population it considers residual as well as a threat to the capitalist, white-supremacist order.
Esther Ojulari is a human-rights and racial-justice activist and sociologist. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of London, writing on transitional justice and reparations for the Afro-descendant people in Colombia. She worked for eight years as a consultant in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on Afro-descendant rights. Esther is currently Regional Coordinator in Buenaventura, Calí and Northern Cauca for the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES). She is a member of several Afro-descendant and African-led international networks and coalitions.
Harrinson Cuero Campaz is a Afro-Colombian rights activist. He is a Ph.D. candidate writing on sustainability in urban and regional planning for biologically and culturally diverse territories. He is a social activist and member of the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN, or Black Communities Process). Harrinson currently works as regional representative of Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES) and as a coordinator for the formulation of the Special Territorial Plan of the District of Buenaventura 2021-40.
Tigray People’s Liberation Front fighters arrive June 29, 2021, in Mekele, the capital of Ethiopia’s Tigray region. On left: TPLF Chairman Debretsion Gebremichael. On right: Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed winning the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2019 / photo illustration: Toward Freedom
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by People’s Dispatch.
Young people from Ethiopia’s northernmost State of Tigray, conscripted under threat by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), continue the attack on the Raya Kobo district of the neighboring Amhara State, six days after TPLF resumed the civil war.
In a bid to avoid mass-civilian casualties in urban fighting, the federal troops have withdrawn from Kobo city and taken defensive positions on its outskirts, the Government Communication Service said on Saturday, August 27. While leaving the door open for negotiations under the African Union (AU), the Ethiopian federal government has however stated that it will be “forced to fulfill its legal, moral and historical duty,” if the TPLF does not stop.
The five-month long humanitarian truce in the civil war, which the TPLF started in November 2020 by attacking a federal army base in Tigray’s capital Mekele, effectively collapsed on August 24 after the TPLF launched this attack on Raya Kobo.
Ethiopia’s Tigray region highlighted in red and Ethiopia in beige / credit: Wikipedia
A2—a critical highway between Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa and Mekele—passes through this strategic Amharan district in the northeast of North Wollo Zone, sitting on the border with Tigray to the north and Afar to the east.
Civilians in Amhara and Afar have already suffered mass-killings, rapes, hunger and disease with the looting and destruction of food warehouses and medical facilities, when the TPLF had invaded from Tigray mid-last year.
The southward invasion of the TPLF last year had begun soon after the government declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdrew the federal troops from Tigray on June 29, 2021, to prevent disruption of the agricultural season with fighting. Food insecurity in the region had already reached emergency levels.
Stealing hundreds of UN World Food Program (WFP) trucks that were carrying food aid to Tigray over the following months, the TPLF, using conscripted forces, made rapid advances into Amhara and Afar. By August that year, Raya Kobo had fallen to TPLF. In and around Kobo city alone, the TPLF is reported to have killed over 600 civilians in September.
Advancing further south along the A2, the TPLF had captured several other Amharan cities and reached within 200 kilometers of capital Addis Ababa by the year’s end. To the east, in Afar, the TPLF had pushed south all the way to Chifra, only 50 kilometer (31 miles) from Mille district where it intended to seize the critical highway connecting land-locked Ethiopia’s capital to the port in neighboring Djibouti. However, the use of human waves to attack, which had enabled its rapid advance, had also depleted its forces, having taken heavy casualties by then.
The reversal began in December, when the combined forces of federal troops and regional militias from Afar and Amhara pushed back the TPLF. The TPLF had by then stretched far south from its base in Tigray. All along the way, it had turned the civilian population against itself by its mass-killings, looting and rapes. By the start of this year, the TPLF had been pushed back into Tigray, and encircled there.
However, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government, under enormous international pressure, ordered the troops to stand guard at Tigray’s border and not enter the state. In March 2022, the government unilaterally declared a humanitarian truce to allow for peaceful flow of much needed aid into Tigray. The TPLF reciprocated. Despite occasional clashes, the truce largely held out on the ground for the last five months. During this period, the African Union (AU) High-Representative for the Horn of Africa, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, shuffled back and forth between Addis Ababa and Mekele in preparations for peace negotiations.
Then, on August 2, the U.S. special envoy to the Horn of Africa Mike Hammer, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in Ethiopia Tracey Jacobson and the European Union (EU) envoy Annette Weber, along with other Western diplomats, paid a visit to Mekelle and met TPLF leaders. Soon after this visit, which was criticized by the Ethiopian government, the TPLF began mobilization for war.
‘A Proxy of the U.S. and the EU’
Two days before it resumed the war by launching the attack on Raya Kobo on August 24, the TPLF had dismissed AU’s credibility and essentially called for Western intervention in an article published in the African Report on August 22. Originally published under the by-line of TPLF chairman Debretsion Gebremichael and then changed to spokesperson Getachew Reda, this article first condemned the AU for claiming “that there is hope for an imminent diplomatic breakthrough with respect to peace talks.”
After further condemning it for welcoming “the Abiy regime’s embrace of an AU-led peace process” and for calling on “the ‘TPLF’ to do the same,” the article went on to say that “the Abiy regime has made it clear that it is willing to partake only in an AU-led peace initiative… Abiy regime recoils at the possibility of the democratic West taking direct or indirect part in the mediation process.”
Criticizing the federal government’s “persistent blockage” of the U.S. and EU envoys’ visit to Tigray “until recently,” the article argued that it “reflects [the Ethiopian government’s] fear of being compelled to give peace a chance.” By not allowing the U.S. and its allies to mediate the peace process, the “Abiy regime has taken no practical steps to demonstrate a sincere commitment to peace,” it argued.
“Despite the AU Commission’s… ineffectiveness in moving the peace process forward, the rest of the international community remains reluctant to intervene on account of a well-intentioned but misplaced commitment to the idea of “African solutions for African problems,” TPLF said.
The Ethiopian government “has exploited this understandable sensitivity… by disingenuously dismissing non-African proposals for peace as a form of “neocolonialism,” the article argued. It also cautioned “the international community” against what it deemed as “Pan-African subterfuge.”
By calling for the West’s intervention, the TPLF has “finally declared the truth about itself—that it is a protégé of external forces, mainly the U.S. and the EU,” former Ethiopian diplomat and historian Mohamed Hassan told Peoples Dispatch.
With the backing of the United States, the TPLF had ruled Ethiopia as an authoritarian state for nearly three decades from 1991, when all political parties outside the ruling coalition led by itself were banned. There was no space for free press. Ethiopia during this period was disintegrated into a loose federation of ethnically organized regional states, each with militias of their own.
In 2018, mass pro-democracy protests forced the TPLF out of power at the center and reduced it to a regional force, in power in Tigray alone. Abiy Ahmed came to the fore at this time as a progressive prime minister with a vision of inclusive Ethiopian nationalism that transcends ethnic divisions.
Apart from opening up the political space within the country and allowing free-press, Ahmed’s reforms also extended to foreign policy. Signing a peace deal with Eritrea soon after becoming the prime minister, he ended the decades-long conflict with the northern neighbor the TPLF had declared, and continues to regard, as an enemy nation. Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize for this deal.
He also followed it up with a Tripartite Agreement in which Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia declared that the conflict between the three states had been resolved and their relations had entered a new phase based on cooperation.
Such a “resolution of the antagonism between African states and people is not appreciated by the United States and the European Union. They find this is a very bad example because, in the long term, it might weaken and eventually collapse Africa’s NATO, namely the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM),” Hassan argued in an interview with Peoples Dispatch in November last year.
At the time of these developments, the Donald Trump government in the United States, in an aberration from the norm, was disengaging from Africa, and hence ignored these threats to its imperialistic interests. However, with the Biden administration, the old foreign policy establishment returned. While waiting to take the White House after winning the election, Biden’s incoming establishment instigated the TPLF to start this war in November 2020, Hassan accused.
All diplomatic maneuvers of the Biden administration have since aimed at depicting the Ethiopian federal government, which is fighting a defensive war, as the aggressor. The United States has also announced several sanctions against Ethiopia.
Tigrayan Youth Increasingly Unwilling to Fight the TPLF’s War On Ethiopia
Despite external support, the TPLF is increasingly losing authority in Tigray itself, Hassan claims. “There are protests against TPLF everywhere in Tigray—especially in the northern parts. There are now political parties in Tigray that are opposing TPLF’s hegemony,” he said.
In a speech addressing the residents of Mekele in mid-August, barely two weeks after the visit by Western envoys, TPLF chairman Debretsion Gebremichael reflected neither political nor military confidence when he threatened: “Tigray will only be for those who are armed and fighting. Those who are capable of fighting but do not want to fight will not have a place in Tigray. In the future, they will lack something. They will not have equal rights as those who joined the fighting. We are working on regulation.”
Such a threat, coming when the practice of conscription including of child soldiers has already been in place, reflects an increasing refusal of the Tigrayan youth to fight the TPLF’s war.
After interviewing 15,000 surrendered and captured Tigrayan fighters at a camp in Chifra, Afar, in March and April this year, Ann Fitz-Gerald, the director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs, wrote in her research paper:
“The only alternatives to recruitment.. were to be fined, ‘see bad come to their family,’ and have their family members, no matter what age, be imprisoned. One female fighter justified her decision to put herself forward based on her desire to protect her brother, who required medical treatment; another respondent who had young children described how the special forces waited for him at his workplace the next day after having expressed his preference not to join the force due to his young children and his ill wife. When he tried to run from the paramilitary members, he was shot at and had no option but to hand himself over and join the force.”
The surrendered fighters reported receiving medical attention and decent treatment after putting down their arms and “confirmed that the [Ethiopian National Defense Force] ENDF soldiers who staff the Awash Basin center eat the same food as the captured/surrendered fighters and in the same dining area.”
Nevertheless, the TPLF managed to force considerable conscriptions, as evident in the waves of youth attacking Raya Kobo. Kobo’s main police station was the center where most of the TPLF fighters interviewed by Fitz-Gerald had surrendered after its attack last year was beaten back.
“The TPLF is not a rational organization. They are using human waves as cannon fodder, sending tens of thousands of Tigrayan youth to death with nothing to be gained. They have no regard for the right to life of the people in Tigray,” Hassan said.
TPLF Depriving Tigrayans of Food
As much as 83 percent of the population in Tigray is food insecure, according to a report by the WFP in January this year. Over 60 percent of pregnant or lactating women in the state are malnourished and most people are dependent on food aid for survival.
Under these grave circumstances, soon after the TPLF resumed war on August 24, “World Food Program warehouse in Mekelle, capital of the Tigray region, was forcibly entered by Tigray forces, who took 12 full fuel trucks and tankers with 570,000 liters of fuel,” said Stephane Dujarric, chief spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
“Millions will starve if we do not have fuel to deliver food. This is OUTRAGEOUS and DISGRACEFUL. We demand return of this fuel NOW,” tweeted WFP’s Executive Director David Beasley.
“These storages of food stuff and fuel are supposed to be used to help humanitarian assistance for the peaceful population of Tigray, which is suffering from different man-made and natural calamities,” said Russian Ambassador to Ethiopia Evgeny Terekhin on August 25.
“I cannot imagine anybody in his senses in the international community supporting such deeds… Of course, I understand that certain sides will try to refrain from condemning, but… everybody will understand… what is happening,” he added.
“The U.S. joins the UN in expressing concern about 12 fuel trucks that have been seized by the TPLF,” the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs said in a tweet. “The fuel is intended for the delivery of essential life-saving humanitarian assistance & we condemn any actions that deprive humanitarian assistance from reaching Ethiopians in need.”
Donetsk People’s Republic military parade on May 9, 2018 / credit: Andrew Butko
Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s analysis.
While Russia and the United States continue to act as geopolitical rivals during what is now dubbed the “new Cold War,” they often agree to deals on political crises and conflicts around the globe.
Territory in Donetsk Oblast under the control of the Donetsk People’s Republic (in yellow) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (in pink), as of 2015 / credit: ZomBear/Marktaff
Recently, the two countries discussed the Donbass War between two Moscow-backed self-proclaimed republics—the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic in Ukraine’s Donbass region—and the Washington-sponsored Ukraine. But will that finally end the bloodshed that erupted in the energy-rich region of eastern Ukraine after more than 89 percent of voters in the Donbass voted in May 2014 for independence from Kiev?
Every conflict has its epilogue around the negotiating table. In 2015, the self-proclaimed Donbass republics, as well as Ukraine, Russia and European mediators signed the Minsk Agreement, which effectively ended offensive military operations in the war-torn region. But it did not end the war itself. To this day, sporadic shelling and gunfire remain part of everyday life for the local population.
On October 13, Ukrainian Armed Forces captured Andrey Kosyak, the officer of the Luhansk People’s Republic Office at the Joint Center for Control and Coordination. Kosyak is one of about 600,000 Donbass residents who hold Russian citizenship in a region of 2.5 million people. In response to the arrest, local activists blocked the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)’s headquarters in Donetsk, demanding Kosyak’s release. The mission then suspended its operations in the Donbass. The Kremlin’s reaction to this incident appeared weak. It took a week for the Russian foreign ministry to demand Ukraine grant access to the Russian citizen. Kiev, backed by the West since the neo-Nazi rampage the Obama-Biden administration fueled, is unlikely to rush to allow Russian diplomats to meet with the captured officer. That means the Kremlin has no option. However, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev wrote on October 11, “Russia knows how to wait. We are patient people.”
Indeed, endless waiting along with a few weak actions seem to be the Russian strategy. After the Ukrainian Army on October 26 captured the village of Staromaryevka in the Donbass, Russia did not take any steps to defend its proxies in the region. More importantly, Ukraine has destroyed the artillery of pro-Russian forces in its first combat deployment of the Turkish-made Bayraktar drones, and the Kremlin’s reaction was yet again soft. Even though Kiev confirmed its army has used the sophisticated weapon, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, “It is very hard to figure out what is true and what is false.” It is not a secret Ukraine purchased Bayraktar drones from Turkey after the unmanned combat aerial vehicle proved to be a game changer in the 44-day war in Nagorno-Karabakh between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Given the Kremlin hesitates to engage in a direct military confrontation with Ukraine, Kiev is expected to continue its limited military operations in the Donbass, quite aware Moscow will turn a blind eye to Ukrainian actions. Russia is still waiting for Ukraine to implement the Minsk agreements and grant the Donbass a special self-governing status after it holds elections under Ukrainian legislation. In return, the Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk’s People’s Republic would allow Ukraine to reinstate full control over its border with Russia. Neither side, however, seems determined to implement the deal.
From the Ukrainian perspective, a special self-governing status for both Donbass region republics would mean a second Crimea has been created. Another pro-Russia entity potentially creates obstacles in Ukrainian political life, which has been heavily linked with the West since late 2013’s Euromaidan. From the Russian perspective, returning the Donbass region to Kiev’s control would mean Moscow has de facto betrayed its proxies in the region and has lost control over the Donbass coal mines at the time when coal prices in the global market have hit a record high.
U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland / U.S. State Department
Still, the Kremlin has appeared to have signaled it is ready to compromise over the energy-rich region. On October 11, U.S. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland met in Moscow with Dmitry Kozak, who serves as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s deputy chief of staff. According to reports, the two officials had a “productive discussion about the full implementation of the Minsk Agreements and the restoration of peace, stability, and Ukrainian sovereignty in the Donbass.” That Nuland, who was on Russia’s sanctions list, was allowed to visit the Russian capital is a sign Washington has the upper hand in its relations with Moscow. The Kremlin had lifted targeted sanctions on the U.S. diplomat in exchange for a lift in U.S. sanctions on a few Russian officials and foreign-policy experts. As the U.S. dollar still controls transactions throughout the world, U.S. sanctions have had devastating consequences for 39 countries. Plus, the United States had requested Nuland’s visit to Russia. In other words, Russia had to make a concession to the United States. Moreover, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed his country would not object to U.S. participation in talks on the Donbass if Washington supports the Minsk Agreement.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his team sit across from Petro Poroshenko of the Euromaidan Movement, Vitali Klychko of the UDAR Party, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk of the Fatherland Party at the outset of a meeting with the Ukrainian opposition leaders on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, on February 1, 2014. Victoria Nuland can be seen to Kerry’s right (fourth from the right) / credit: U.S. State Department
Given Washington is the major foreign actor operating in Ukraine, any peace process that excludes the United States is unlikely to have major success. So far, Moscow and Kiev have been attempting to resolve the Donbass conflict through Normandy-format talks that have included Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France. But no progress has been made. Lavrov recently suggested inviting the United States to these talks, but Germany reportedly refused the Kremlin’s proposal, which means warfare in the Donbass likely will continue for the foreseeable future.
Alexander Borodai, prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic / credit: Mark Nakoykher
This means the region will be stuck in a state that can be described as neither war nor peace, although forces on both sides will try to change the status quo. Alexander Borodai, who was prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic in 2014 and is now a member of the Russian Parliament, said Russia should abolish the border with the Donbass republics. However, customs points between the republics already have been abolished and both entities have been integrated into the Russian economy. As Borodai pointed out, the Donbass already is a de facto part of Russia. However, unless the conflict in the region escalates into a large-scale confrontation, the Kremlin unlikely will incorporate the coal-rich territory into the Russian Federation.
Ukraine, for its part, is not expected to start any significant military operations until it gets the green light from Washington. On October 18, during U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s visit to Kiev, a fresh allotment of U.S.-made arms and other military equipment was delivered, part of a $60 million package the Biden administration had approved.
Since 2014, the United States has committed more than $2.5 billion to support Ukraine’s forces so that they can preserve their country’s territorial integrity and secure its borders and territorial waters. pic.twitter.com/MqKupUaQSo
— Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) October 19, 2021
According to Austin, the United States has committed more than $2.5 billion since 2014 to support Ukraine’s Armed Forces, and Turkish defense company Baykar is expected to build a maintenance and modernization center for Bayraktar drones in Ukraine, which means the former Soviet republic is seriously preparing for a potential war against Russia.
At this point, a major escalation of the Donbass conflict does not seem probable. But, in the long term, such an option will almost certainly be on the table.
Nikola Mikovic is a Serbia-based contributor to CGTN, Global Comment, Byline Times, Informed Comment, and World Geostrategic Insights, among other publications. He is a geopolitical analyst for KJ Reports and Enquire.
