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When the war is over, Ukraine’s defence minister is planning to resign his post and head to Australia and New Zealand as soon as possible.
“I promised to my wife,” Oleksii Reznikov tells me, “after we win this war I am going to sign my resignation to the president, then I’m dreaming to come back to my private life as a lawyer and first serious trip would be in Australia and New Zealand. It’s my plan.”
Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:
Why? “I have never been there. I like diving; I am dreaming to dive the big reef with the sharks. I’m a scuba diver,” he says in between appointments with 14 other nations’ defence ministers at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on the weekend.
And Reznikov would like to reciprocate with an invitation to Australian and NZ divers to what he calls a “new, world-famous dive site in the Black Sea”.
Seeing my bafflement, he elaborates: “You know the Ukrainian Navy sank the flagship cruiser Moskva so it became a very famous dive site.” The Moskva led the Russian Black Sea fleet in the invasion of Ukraine, a potent symbol of Russian power – until Ukraine struck it with two anti-ship missiles in April last year, when it became a showpiece of Russian humiliation, the biggest Russian vessel to be sunk since World War II.
“So,” continues Reznikov, “I invite your divers to visit Ukraine with me and we will make this diving tour to the bottom of the Black Sea and we will see this wreck. It’s not deep, it’s 60 metres deep, so you can do it with oxygen.”
Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov plans to head to Australia when the war is over.Credit: AP
Australia’s Defence Minister, Richard Marles, met Reznikov in person for the first time at the Shangri-La Dialogue. He greeted him with a hug. “He’s inspiring,” Marles tells me after their weekend encounter in Singapore.
Marles’ message to his Ukrainian counterpart: “We are there for as long as it takes, and we recognise it’s going to be a protracted contest. That will be our posture.”
The Australian deputy prime minister says Ukraine’s fight is Australia’s fight: “There’s a degree to which they are doing it for us. From an Australian point of view, this is about the sanctity of the rules-based order – Russia’s flagrant disregard for it cannot be allowed to stand.”
This is Reznikov’s point precisely, and he found a ready audience for it among the Indo-Pacific nations he encountered in Singapore: “If Russia is successful, it will mean also, in this region, territorial threats. The smallest countries are the most nervous, and they are nervous that the biggest country can start the full-scale invasion against them using weaponry, the argument of force.”
Indeed, democracies across the world have come to the sobering realisation that the war with Russia could be just the forerunner to a much bigger crisis in what Reznikov calls “the war of civilisation between democracy and autocracy”.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, left, shakes hands with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a round table meeting at February’s EU summit in Brussels.Credit: AP
The European Union’s top foreign affairs official, Josep Borrell, put it into perspective for the hundreds of ministers and other officials assembled at Shangri-La: “Yes, in Europe we have a war in our borders, but the epicentre – the core of the global competition – is in the Indo-Pacific; it’s here.”
The dominant competition, of course, is between the US and China. The Chinese economy is 10 times the size of Russia’s. In confronting it, the US stands toe to toe with a peer economic competitor for the first time.
The Europeans have realised that the Sino-American struggle for global dominance is one that Europe cannot passively observe but must join. Since 2019, the EU officially has categorised China as a “systemic rival” promoting “an alternative vision of the world order”.
And now, galvanised by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European nations increasingly are committing rhetorically and militarily to defend the “rules-based order” in the Indo-Pacific. Britain, France and Germany have committed to deploying more naval assets to Pacific patrols, and Canada did the same on the weekend by announcing Operation Horizon. The numbers of vessels is token, but they give concrete form to the political rhetoric.
German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius spoke of the great Zeitenwende – a historic turning point – that the Russian war had wrought in Germany: “We must defend the rules-based order wherever it is challenged,” he told the Singapore gathering, “and we must stand up for the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea”, known as UNCLOS.
This was a clear crack at Beijing. An international tribunal at The Hague in 2016 ruled that China had no legal basis for its claim on an expanse of the South China Sea, also claimed by the Philippines, and ruled it in breach of UNCLOS. Beijing ignored the ruling.
Reznikov came to Asia to seek support for defending the rules-based order in Europe, but it turns out that Europe increasingly is engaged in defending the rules-based order in Asia, too. The security of the two continents, as speaker after speaker asserted, is “indivisible”.
Defence Minister Richard Marles met his Chinese counterpart, Li Shangfu, during the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.Credit:
China has noticed the increased European attention. And it’s not happy. “If our European friends, or if our American friends want to help us, you are most welcome,” one of China’s top representatives, Beijing’s former ambassador to Washington, Cui Tiankai, told a forum at Shangri-La. “The best you can do is to refrain from interfering in our regional affairs. Leave it to ourselves. We know how to address it. The best thing you can do for us, is do nothing on that.”
Or, as China’s Defence Minister, General Li Shangfu, told the assembled officials and delegates: “Mind your own business.” But the “business” he was referring to was the right of nations to sail and fly in international waters.
To Beijing’s discomfort, democracies everywhere increasingly are making this everyone’s business: the twin mission is that Russia must be defeated and China deterred.
Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio put it pithily last year: “Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow.”
Marles, like democracies worldwide, would be delighted to help create the conditions for Reznikov’s Australia trip: “The sooner we get to a point where the minister can realise his dream, the better.”
Peter Hartcher is the international editor.
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