Ukraine: Putin's War for Russia's "Near Abroad"

Retired US Ambassador John J. Maresca draws on his personal papers to offer a first-hand account of his role in negotiating the end of the Cold War with the USSR.

Autorentext
Ida Manton is a scholar and lecturer in international relations and diplomacy, with focus on negotiations, mediation and conflict resolution. She has worked for IGOs, NGOs, Universities, Diplomatic Academies and Think tanks. She has trained diplomats, business people, military staff and students in topics connected to international negotiation processes, OSCE, cross-cultural communication and storytelling. She has published articles and book chapters on these topics and has been coordinating the OSCE Oral History project Living Memories, through which CSCE negotiators share their recollections of how milestone documents and commitments were created.

Zusammenfassung

"As a diplomat, ambassador and senior aide to two Secretaries General of NATO, Jack spent much of his life immersed in the long struggle for a lasting peace with Moscow. He was a key member of the delegation at the meetings of the 1970s of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which produced the Helsinki Accords, in turn setting the stage for multilateral agreements in Paris in 1990 that, in Jack's words, constituted the official and practical end of the Cold War. A bit later, at the behest of Secretary of State Jim Baker, Jack visited all the old (and newly freed) satellite states, including Ukraine. Now, says Jack, Vladimir Putin would upend all that. Hell-bent on reviving Russia's territorial reach, Putin wants these countries back, in one way or another. Hence Ukraine. As I write, President-elect Trump is floating the idea of a negotiated settlement. Jack Maresca's warning, as I understand it, is simply this: the West cannot cave in, and indeed should pursue a collective, strategic response that counters both the immediate challenges in Ukraine and also Putin's broader ambition to take back as much as possible the full territory of the old USSR. And the US, he makes clear, can't go it alone."

-Robert B. Semple Jr., senior editor at the New York Times; Yale Alumni Magazine, March/April 2025.