The West - the European Union and the United States - has shown no qualms in supporting a coup led by ultranationalists to achieve geopolitical aims in Ukraine. The Russian actions in the semi-autonomous region of Crimea may be illegal de jure, but seem driven by the need to counter the West's infl uence in the country's "near abroad"
. As things stand, the events portend to a far from ideal conclusion to the Ukrainian crisis.
The immediate crisis in Ukraine seems to have been de-escalated. Russian President Vladimir Putin has commanded that the 1,50,000 Russian troops mobilised along the Ukraine-Russia border in early March be pulled back. He said that the use of force to save the Russian-speaking nationalities in southern and eastern Ukraine would only be the “last, very last resort”. Putin claimed that the allegations that the Russian military had seized installations within Crimea were wrong and only the local ethnic Russian Ukrainian nationals were involved. Moreover, Russia has legally signed bilateral agreements with Ukraine that gives it obligations and rights in Crimea and grants it a lease for a naval base in Sevastopol on the Black Sea that is critical for the Russian naval fleet. The presence of Russian soldiers is not new in this region but such aggravated tension certainly is.
Putin’s statements came after US President Barack Obama threatened Russia with “costs” which mean unilateral sanctions and trade barriers. This war of words and Russian actions plummeted the world markets into a brief spin. The European Union (EU) huddled into emergency talks even as Russia said that it would impose counter sanctions on Western countries. Moscow even talked to China and other countries, and the Western media started the rhetoric of a “New Cold War”. More is likely to follow, but what is the reality? What impact will it have on the international political system and what are the available options?
There are multiple reasons for the current crises. The Ukrainian economy is in dire straits. It needs $35 billion to stay afloat. $13 billion are due as debt repayment this year. Besides it has huge gas bills to pay Russia. In these circumstances the Ukrainian regime was faced with two options. One option was provided by the EU-US-International Monetary Fund (IMF) troika. An agreement was initialled between the EU and Ukraine in March 2012. The EU offered a trade deal to Ukraine as a step to eventually incorporate it into the EU. Ukraine’s finance minister was meeting IMF officials for a loan. This loan would have come with conditionalities including the devaluing of the Ukrainian currency, cutting subsidies for gas and energy, besides transparency in governance.
The second option was offered by Russia in December 2013. This included a $15 billion loan, besides concessions on the desperately needed gas supplies to this gas-deficit region. It included a customs union with Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus that will facilitate economic movement but will also integrate Ukraine more with Russia.
Furthering Polarisation
These two choices have divided an already polarised people, where those in the West want to opt for the EU and a liberal form of government, even at the risk of further economic crises, especially at a time when the EU is a phantom of its earlier self where a social welfare system, constructed after the second world war, has broken down. Those in the predominantly industrialised south and east of the country see that their economic interests are heavily integrated with Russia and have preferences for the Russian option. President Viktor Yanukovych rejected the EU plan that would have imposed harsh austerity on an already impoverished Ukraine. He accepted a more generous $15 billion loan from Russia in addition to natural gas on concessional rates. This decision sparked protests in the capital city of Kiev which falls in the western part of Ukraine.
But the economy is not the only reason for such polarisation. The Ukrainian Parliament, some time back, eliminated a law to protect the use of minority languages, particularly the use of Russian as an official language in those sectors of the country where it is spoken. President Yanukovych vetoed this and retained the status of the Russian language. The ultranationalist groups who wanted to change the Constitution to suppress Russian language and minorities led sustained protests in Kiev, in the common space called the Euromaidan. They called for immediate regime change.
Yanukovych, whose regime, like that of many other former Soviet Republics is intolerant of dissent, is not embedded in democratic culture and is corrupt to boot, had lost legitimacy. Weeks of protests and street conflicts led to firing and killing of almost a hundred people, including some policemen. The legally elected President Yanukovych was blamed and forced to flee. A temporary president, representing the protestors, was hastily appointed. Only a few days later, the release of a taped conversation on 26 February between the high representative of foreign affairs of the EU, Catherine Ashton, and Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet confirmed that snipers hired by the new coalition and neo-Nazi gangs were responsible for much of the violence from hurtling firebombs to shootings, and not Yanukovych (Voice of Russia, Tass, 6 March 2014). The narrative dubbing the regime’s overthrow by “democratic forces”, however, has not been fully punctured, even though Ukraine’s most organised neo-fascist group called Svoboda (freedom) which target Ukrainian Russian speakers and other minorities were a critical part of the protestors who overthrew an elected president.
The chaos that followed the violence, the flight of the president, and installation of an acting president, who appeared to represent only the Ukrainian-speaking western-oriented mass, led to increased threat perceptions in the south and east, especially in Crimea. Crimea has a semi-autonomous status, earlier within the Soviet Union, now within Ukraine.
Groups in east Ukraine and in Crimea took over government buildings and the risk of civil war seemed imminent. A referendum had been planned for greater autonomy in Crimea, to be held on 30 March. Moreover, when the pro- and anti-Russia protests broke out, the pro-Russian regional prime minister of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, claimed control of the military and police in Crimea and asked for Russian help for keeping peace and for the conduct of the referendum on 16 March with obvious conclusions.
The Crimean Situation
In these circumstances, Putin took sanction from the Russian Duma to mobilise troops along the Russia-Ukraine border and in Crimea on 1 March, in the belief that the Russian-speaking nationalities in Crimea and eastern Ukraine were under siege. Putin claimed international legal sanction on the grounds that Russian military deployment in Crimea has remained within limits set by bilateral agreements for a Russian military base that entitles it to deploy up to 25,000 troops in Crimea. Ukraine had a 22,000 strong force in Crimea that Putin says is now “dissolved” and its arsenal is under the control of the local Crimean government. Putin has stated that he has no sympathies for Yanukovych, but blames the EU for trying to split the country. He warned that any sanctions would backfire (Associated Press, 5 March 2014).
Any intervention by one country into another is a violation of international law. But in the case of Crimea, several historical factors need to be weighed in. Russia and Ukraine have special treaties on multiple subjects and one of these requires Ukraine to ensure linguistic and other minority rights within Ukraine, particularly in Crimea, and there would be Russian obligations. This obligation is being violated by Ukraine and the population of Crimea is thus asking for protection by Russia, which already has troops there. So it is not sending in troops, but the Base Agreement provides the legal bases for this. Crimea is part of Ukraine through historical accident, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gifted it to Ukraine in 1954, when people hardly had any choice in such matters. At the same time re-carving states can be a gruesome exercise.
From the Russian perspective, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) expansion into former Warsaw Pact nations has gone on unilaterally. Also, at the time of the Soviet break-up, George Bush Sr and James Baker promised Mikhail Gorbachev that the West would never expand to Russia’s borders. But NATO started wooing Ukraine by 1995 and then the EU started considering Ukraine for EU membership. The US has supported regime change and instability in Ukraine for some years. Former Secretary of State Paul Craig Roberts has stated that the US has spent billions in undermining authoritarian but elected regimes in Ukraine. The “Orange Revolution” of 2004 deposed an elected but discredited president and brought in Yulia Tymoshenko as two-time prime minister. She was later jailed, has now been freed, and will add to this melee.
Ukraine itself is a Soviet construction, and there is no single Ukrainian people. The state was made up by putting together different nationalities at different historical periods. This began during the prolonged feudalism under Catherine “the great”, extended to Lenin’s reorganisation in 1922 of the eastern part of the country, with largely Russian speakers. Josef Stalin added Galica, which was part of Poland, as an outcome of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The Ukrainian ultranationalists come from this tradition and region. Later Crimea was added in 1954. So Ukraine’s divergent histories are like many other nation state constructions, like India, Pakistan and most of the African states. Ukraine can have no single identity that matches its boundary, as the ultranationalists project desires and the West is using for its geostrategic agenda.
Geostrategic Competition
The current discourse is focused dominantly on the geostrategic competition between the US and Russia. Putin escalated the crises, but the West has persistently meddled in Ukraine’s domestic politics and actively contributed to Russia’s determination to safeguard its “near abroad”. Secretary of State John Kerry denounced Russia’s intervention in Crimea stating: “It is not appropriate to invade a country and at the barrel of a gun dictate what you are trying to achieve. That is not 21st century, G-8, major-nation behaviour.” This is rich if not deeply ironic. Further, US assistant secretary of state, in charge of the region, Victoria Nuland best known for her comment “Fuck the EU”, has been planning for regime change and encouraging protestors, regardless of the fact that the Ukrainian protestors had hoisted a banner of the second world war Nazi supporter Stepan Bandera, whose militias were part of atrocities against Jews and Poles. Nuland was discussing who should lead the new regime (as seen by intercepted phone calls reported by Robert Parry, Consortium News, 4 March 2014, Readersupportednews.org). For decades, US agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy for political action, whose business it is to promote groups to destabilise governments for “democracy promotion” have viewed Ukraine as a special project (Consortiumnews.com, “A Shadow US Foreign Policy”). This persistent Western intervention in Ukraine has strengthened Russia’s resolve to safeguard its “near abroad”.
Meanwhile the rhetoric that compares the situation as reminiscent of the cold war, showing Russian military power to be similar to the Soviet times, is untrue. This conversation in the West calls US President Obama a “weak president” who needs to talk tough and the US is projected as the “good guy”. The intervention in Georgia in 2008 is being cited, as is Moscow’s support to the Syrian regime. Putin’s self compliance to this macho image on one hand and his opposition to homosexuals, the Russian attacks on dissidents and protestors make him an easy target. Putin offered the prospect of a tripartite agreement with the US and EU on resolving the Ukrainian crisis, which was rebuffed. Vis-à-vis Syria, it is clear that the US is interested in weakening the country’s patron, and Russia is the only country that challenges its geostrategic push in west Asia. But Russia knows it can retaliate by stopping logistic support for US troops in Afghanistan.
If Putin is violating international law by sending Russian troops into Crimea after a violent coup spearheaded by neo-Nazis militias, what about Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) claims by the US and its allies? Or drone attacks in Pakistan led by the US? Putin has recalled the experience of US in Iraq, Libya and others, when the US acted without UN Security Council sanction. If sanctions against Russia over Crimea then why not sanctions on Israel over Palestine, others have asked.
Meanwhile there are signs of increasing militarisation all around. The US defence budget has more than doubled since the terror attacks on 11 September 2001, and is at a higher rate than during the peak of the Vietnam War. The most recent justification for strengthening the military industrial complex is the “New Cold War”. Russia test-fired a new inter-continental ballistic missile the same week, and many EU nations are talking about increasing defence budgets.
Despite tough talk and rhetoric, tensions have cooled as Putin clarified that Russia had no intention “to fight the Ukrainian people”. He accused the US of an unconstitutional coup and installing a new regime in Ukraine that Russia does not recognise. Putin in a press conference on 4 March even compared the US role in Ukraine to an experiment with “lab rats”. Putin said Russia had no intention of annexing Crimea, but insisted that the residents had the right to determine the region’s status in a referendum. He also indicated his agreement to hold a special meeting with NATO to discuss the Ukraine situation in Brussels. The US meanwhile is meeting with representatives of Kiev’s new government with moral support and a new $1 billion aid package.
What Can Be Done?
Clearly aggressive nationalism, vitriolic rhetoric, retaliation, unilateral sanctions and militarisation are not the option that Ukraine, EU and the current intersecting international system can afford. There is a need for reconciliation within Ukraine. This is possible only where the multi-ethnic pluralities of the region are safeguarded by a constitution that ensures equal rights and inclusive citizenship laws. The oligarchic kleptocracy based on neo-liberal agendas has to be changed. One possibility is a reconciliation meeting organised between Ukraine, EU and Russia. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), that focuses on Ukraine, can be the nodal agency for this.
Even though the crisis in Ukraine is by no means over, it is time the EU adopts an independent foreign policy. If this is not followed further polarisation will continue and the people will remain divided. The division of Ukraine is only the first example. Further, unless a genuine secular, plural politics and inclusive economics is followed internally, narrow geopolitics and all kinds of hegemony will take over.
The ideal scenario is that the EU and Russia become partners of Ukraine rather than being opposed to each other. For this both need to keep out of Ukraine. Neither should suggest that it be part of their zone or organisation. Both should help Ukraine end its economic and energy crises. Neither should see Ukraine only as a market or as a geostrategic destination. All those concerned can accept collective security and common public goods for Ukraine. This alone will allow Ukraine and indeed all of Europe to have lasting peace.
