This state of affairs came to an abrupt end with Russia’s all-out invasion on 24 February 2022. Not only did the fighting reach deep into Ukraine’s heartland, but life far behind the frontline also became militarised. Russia frequently bombards civilian infrastructure as well as cities in a type of terror warfare intended to break the will of Ukraine’s defenders. There is no longer any hinterland.

How long will this slaughter last? In August last year I warned against overly optimistic expectations, writing that “supporters of Ukraine’s democracy should prepare themselves for long-term, costly support.” Another six months on it is even clearer that patience and endurance will be needed if we want to see Ukraine survive and strive. We have to stop thinking in terms of short and decisive campaigns. This war has become a war of attrition.

Like Vladimir Putin, we need to think in the geographical and historical categories of what historian Timothy Snyder has memorably called the “bloodlands” — the vast territories between Russia in the east and Germany in the west, with Ukraine in the middle. This viewpoint expands the time horizon dramatically. The last three wars fought in this region were far from short campaigns. The first world war’s “eastern front” lasted from August 1914 to March 1918. The wars of the Romanov succession began in Central Asia in 1916 and elsewhere in 1918, only ending, depending on the region, in 1920, 1921, 1922 or even 1923. The German Soviet war — constantly invoked by Putin both in the run-up to the war and during Russia’s continuing cultural mobilisation — extended from the (northern hemisphere) summer of 1941 to the spring of 1945.

Hence, the normal duration a full scale military conflict in this part of the world seems to be three to four years. Ukraine has survived two so far.

But it’s not just the region’s history that suggests a long haul. Once battle lines are fully entrenched, conventional war takes time. The first world war’s western front was bogged down in costly trench warfare, with massive casualties but little territorial gains, for four years.

By the time the second world war rolled around, military specialists in all armies had found the technical means to overcome trenches, barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements. And yet it took the Allies close to a year after the invasion of Normandy in 1944 to defeat Germany, a country under assault from the east by the steamroller of the Red Army, from the south by the United States, British Empire forces and the Free French, and from the air by indiscriminate attack by the combined power of the US and British air forces. Both Ukraine and Russia are in much stronger positions today.

Historical analogies are miserable predictors. But they matter when historical actors think in and through them. Putin is an avid reader of history, constantly pondering where he fits in. He thinks in categories and time-spans informed by Russia’s historical experience.

While he didn’t expect Ukraine to resist so effectively and survive the initial onslaught, he had long prepared his country for a drawn-out conflict with the outside world. One indicator is the effort his regime spent on making Russia’s food system relatively independent of outside supplies. At a time when everybody praised the virtues of globalisation and international networks of trade and mutual dependence, Putin insisted Russia should be able to feed itself.

As a recent study points out, this is the kind of food system you build when you expect a long-term confrontation that might throw your country back on its own resources. Putin embarked on it over decades, at a time when barely anybody in Europe could imagine a war of this magnitude on the continent.

Putin also entrenched his dictatorship, also an anticipation of war. First came the slide towards authoritarianism that began on the first day of his presidency. More recently came its acceleration. The death last week of opposition figure Alexei Navalny is just the latest escalation of a massive crackdown that began in 2021 and quickened with the start of the all-out war in 2022. Russia is now a full-blown dictatorship.

Thus entrenched in the Kremlin, Putin expects the democracies of Europe to have the shorter breath. The way Ukraine has become a political football in US domestic politics might well feed this expectation.

We need to appreciate that this is Putin’s theory of victory: to pound Ukraine with artillery and air attacks; to bleed the defenders white by sacrificing large numbers of his own citizens; and to wait until “the decadent West” loses interest and returns to business as usual, depriving Ukraine of the weapons and economic support it needs to defend itself.

As things stand, he might well be proven right. As I wrote a year ago about the then unlikely prospect of a Russian victory:

Winning the war would require Russia to ramp up its military production and mobilisation of manpower and increase the quality of its training and leadership. It could do that over the long run, just as the Soviet Union did during World War II… It could do so particularly if some of the countries which today are sitting on the fence decide to defy the United States, NATO and the European Union and circumvent or ignore sanctions; the United States reverts to isolationism; NATO disintegrates into squabbles between its members; and the European Union implodes among disagreements between old and new, and rich and less prosperous nations.

This pessimistic scenario has not yet come to pass. Yes, Russia currently has the whip hand. It has massively increased its armaments production, found ways around sanctions and continued to field large numbers of men while avoiding all-out mobilisation. Meanwhile, the United States has shaped up as the weakest link in the chain of democracies supporting Ukraine.

But Russia has not won yet. Ukraine still has “a viable theory of victory,” as two leading military analysts recently wrote. Its military has become expert at war by attrition, which it fights intelligently, minimising its own losses while maximising the enemy’s. Supplied adequately, it will become even better at this terrible art, denying Russia victory and eventually turning the tide.

For this to happen, though, Ukraine needs the continued support of the outside world: from NATO countries, from the Europeans and from friends further afield, such as Australia. But these friends need to appreciate that this war is now a war of attrition. And those wars are not won in a day or a season.

What about negotiations? A strong commitment to long-term support should unite all friends of Ukraine, no matter whether they think that ultimately the war will end in Kyiv’s forces retaking all occupied territories, if necessary by military means (the current official Ukrainian position), or in a negotiated settlement of some sort, with compromises on both sides.

There are indeed models for a negotiated peace which, while painful, might satisfy Ukraine and guarantee its safety rather than simply giving Russia breathing space to rearm for the next assault or the chance to insist on Ukraine’s unconditional capitulation. The much-discussed “West German” solution is one such proposal. It proposes that Ukraine be divided into a democratic west with some of its eastern territories occupied or even annexed by Russia. The west would be integrated into NATO and the European Union and developed with a massive aid program similar to the Marshall Plan. This is certainly not an acceptable solution for either side at the moment, but it might well become one once exhaustion eventually sets in.

The key term here is “eventually.” Negotiating now only aids Russia in its imperialist and anti-democratic goals. Forcing Ukraine to negotiate at a moment when, with delayed and insufficient support from its democratic friends, it is on the defensive amounts to asking a democratic nation to surrender to a dictatorship. Negotiations are best held from a position of strength. If not backed by the ability to resist and indeed to inflict damage, talks with a militarily stronger opponent quickly lead to a loss of territory and sovereignty.

The Ukrainians learned this lesson in 1918 when they signed the first treaty of Brest–Litovsk with the Germans and Austrians, who subsequently occupied the country and squeezed out food reserves to feed their own war effort. The Russian Bolsheviks learned the same lesson shortly thereafter, when, devoid of the fighting force they themselves helped dissolve, they had to sign a punishing peace with the Germans just to get out of a war they could no longer fight. And, in an instance of remarkable historical justice, the Germans learned the same lesson in 1919, when they could do nothing but sign the famously unfriendly Versailles treaty.

Ukraine needs to be helped to avoid such a situation and negotiate from the position of strength, if a negotiated settlement will indeed end this war. •

The post Russia’s war against Ukraine: a longer view appeared first on Inside Story.

Kurkov is right. Reading books about this war can have a soothing effect. Only once we look up from the pages that have captured our imagination are we propelled back to the awful knowledge that Russia’s war against Ukraine continues. Blood keeps flowing. People keep getting injured and killed. A country is being destroyed. There seems no end in sight.

Looking at the pages in front of them, historians have another experience as well. Trained to read for argument and to classify books into schools of thought, they begin to think about the books dealing with this war as part of its “historiography” — a corpus of texts engaged in a discussion with each other attempting to understand the past and its meaning for the present.

To see a historiography forming while the event it describes is still unfolding is unusual. Normally decades, even centuries, pass before historical schools solidify around a particular event. In this respect, the literature on Russia’s war against Ukraine resembles the historiography of Stalinism in its formative stages, but its historiographical schools are developing much faster in our present, pressurised environment.

Somewhat schematically, we can distinguish five schools of thought about the origins of this war. One group of writers sees the West at fault, and particularly NATO. Another blames Russia and the Russians, opponents of peace and democracy. A third group sees Russia’s imperialist past at the core of a war that expresses the legacy of a lost empire and the failure to overcome its culture. A fourth group, the intentionalists, focus on Vladimir Putin and his perhaps irrational, or at least idiosyncratic, motivation for waging war. A final group sees the war as a struggle between dictatorship and democracy reflected in Putin’s attempt to quash any potential challenge to his rule, at home or abroad. The war, on this reading, is part of Putin’s “preventive counter-revolution.”

There are, of course, combinations of these viewpoints. Blaming NATO can go together with a notion of Russia’s ongoing imperialism: given the latter, the argument goes, NATO should have abstained even more emphatically from expanding into Russia’s supposed backyard. Russia’s imperialism and continued quest for a great power status can be linked, in turn, to its hostility to Ukraine’s quest for democracy. Intentionalists, too, can see Putin as drawing on a wider Russian culture of imperialism, which can go hand in glove with a quest for dictatorship and therefore preventive counter-revolution.

Perhaps the most well-defined position in the debate on the war’s origins is the first: blaming NATO for provoking the conflict by expanding into Russia’s “sphere of influence.” This path has been taken most prominently by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer. As critics of this view have pointed out, it has its history backwards. It was not when NATO enlarged into Eastern Europe that Russia became aggressive but when it showed weakness — by failing to agree on a response to the accession hopes of Georgia and Ukraine at the Bucharest Summit in 2008, for example. Moreover, it is difficult to see Putin’s aggression, “riddled” as it is with “irrationalities,” as some kind of logical response to a putative Western threat.

NATO-blaming has recently lost some of its dominance over public discourse. But it continues to be popular on the far left, sometimes amended to an opposition to both Russian and NATO imperialism. Beyond the extremes lingers the view that, whatever bad things happen in the world, “the West” must be to blame.

Historian Philipp Ther is clearly affected by such sensibilities. He feels “comfortable” in the company of “leftists,” he writes in the introduction to his latest book, and he feels that “the West” (whatever that might be) has lost its way. The multiple crises we encounter today, including the war against Ukraine, are part of a “wrong turn” in economic policy after 1989–91. “The West lost the peace” after the end of the cold war, he says, because it became self-satisfied and embraced unfettered capitalism (or “neoliberalism,” defined as the conglomerate of “liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, the reduction of state influence on the economy, and global financial capitalism”).

NATO expansion, then, is not at the centre of Ther’s argument in How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War. A social historian, Ther is much more interested in political economy than international relations. He flags in his introduction that he feels uneasy about NATO expansion, and at one point suggests Russia should have joined the alliance. But he hastens to add that his critique is “absolutely not meant to relativise Russia’s attack on Ukraine.” The latter “deserves the full support of the West and the entire world — otherwise Russia’s pursuit of a multipolar world order with a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe will instead lead to maximum global disorder.”

Elsewhere in his book, Ther declares Russia’s enduring “imperial legacy” to be the core cause of the war. The early 1990s might have been a moment to cast off the legacy, but it passed, first because of Boris Yeltsin’s shelling of a recalcitrant (and imperialist) parliament in 1993 and then because of the rouble crisis in 1998, “when most of the Russian middle class sank into poverty again.” The latter is something of an overstatement, as a middle class continued to exist thereafter, but Ther’s overall point is well taken: “Neither of these traumatic moments had anything to do with the expansion of NATO or the EU; they were domestic problems first and foremost.”

Rather than an outcome of international relations, Russia’s trials and tribulations were part of the global malaise Ther is exploring. His great bugbear is the failed prophet of the “end of history,” Francis Fukuyama, whom he sees as the chief ideologist of Western triumphalism; his intellectual hero is the sociologist Karl Polanyi, analyst of the “great transformation” of the long nineteenth century.

Like Polanyi in the interwar years, Ther argues, we find ourselves at the tail end of another transformative period: the one that ran from 1989 to 2022. This transformation had two aspects — post-Soviet transformation in the former Soviet empire and “late-capitalist transformation in the West” — and they were held together by a shared framework of “neoliberal globalisation.”

Far from being the end of history, this period was one of profound economic, social and political upheaval, with winners and losers dotted around the globe, both between countries and within them. The claim that unfettered capitalism would somehow lift all the boats, making us all more prosperous, happy and democratic, turned out to be a pipedream at best and ideological obfuscation at worst.

Instead came the global financial crisis, followed by the annus horribilis of 2016, with Donald Trump’s victory in the United States and the Brexiteers’ in Britain. Then the “one-two punch of the pandemic and the biggest war in Europe since 1945… brought to an end the era for which historians have not yet found a name.” In line with Polanyi, Ther proposes calling the period from 1989 to 2022 “the age of transformation.”

Transformation to what? We don’t yet know, but it might not be good. Overall, Ther is quite pessimistic, but he does hope that his exploration of the history of our present will help open up “new opportunities for a progressive politics and society,” a political thrust that fits in well with other recent attempts to reconstruct the social democratic project for the twenty-first century.

To Ther, this is an existential quest. Like the unfettered capitalism of the nineteenth century, he fears that the new age of transformation might lead to some kind of fascism. The pendulum, to use his metaphor, having swung all the way towards a neoliberal abandonment of state protection, is now swinging back the other way. But Ther’s pendulum, in a hard-to-visualise twist, can swing in two ways: “left towards democratic socialism, or right towards fascism.”

Does any of this explain the war against Ukraine? Not really. Ther struggles to make Russia and Ukraine fit his explanatory scheme. True, the economic crisis triggered by Gorbachev’s reforms and deepened by the breakdown of the Soviet Union “plunged much of Russia’s population into destitution and misery,” which is never a good foundation for a democratic polity. But the same was true for Ukraine, which became democratic. And while Ukraine’s economy remained sluggish, Russia’s has grown by leaps and bounds since Putin came to power.

Neoliberalism, then, is of little use as a scapegoat for Russia’s aggression. Instead, Ther evokes a combination of the preventive counter-revolution argument and the anti-imperialist paradigm. Putin’s goal, he argues, is “to rewrite the end of history — with the creation of a new Russian empire.” The “larger dimensions of the conflict” also include the confrontation between “an authoritarian system” (Russia) that has evolved into a “hard dictatorship since Putin’s second term,” on the one side, and a country (Ukraine) that “has continually moved in the direction of liberal democracy ever since the Orange Revolution, and especially since 2014.”

Ukraine is far more democratic than Hungary, an EU member. Its governments have repeatedly transitioned smoothly and peacefully after elections, “something that unfortunately cannot be said for the USA since the storming of the Capitol.” Putin’s war on Ukraine is “also a war on democracy,” Ther writes, a “declaration of war against the EU and a free Europe.”

By evoking imperialism, a global transformation of capitalism, and a systemic confrontation between dictatorship and democracy, Ther avoids the position of authors who find the origins of this war in Russia’s national character, its history or its culture. I have argued elsewhere against such views as ahistoric and simplistic. Mikhail Zygar’s recent magnum opus War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance, can serve as evidence of some of their shortcomings: it is the book of a Russian democrat, a Russian anti-imperialist and a Russian enemy of this war. Were the arguments about Russia’s national character as militaristic, imperialist and anti-democratic correct, he should not exist. And yet he wrote a book — a long and eloquent one at that.

Zygar is a Russian intellectual, and he knows it. And he’s an anti-imperialist. His book is framed as a long letter to his Ukrainian friend Nadia, at whose house in Bucha — the scene of one of this war’s massacres — he wrote much of his earlier book, All the Kremlin’s Men. “Nadia no longer speaks to me,” he writes in distress. “Because I am Russian, she considers me an ‘imperialist.’” He hopes his book will change her mind, and the minds of his compatriots: “Nadia, I am not an imperialist, and I am writing this book so that others will not be either.”

War and Punishment is made up of two, very different, parts. In fact, it is two books pressed into one volume. The first is a series of historical essays on major moments in Ukrainian–Russian relations that have been turned into myths in both Russian and Ukrainian historiography. They include Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s ill-fated alliance with Muscovy against Poland in 1654, which Russian historians have used to claim that Ukraine voluntarily subjugated itself under Moscow’s tsars; Ivan Mazepa’s alliance with Sweden against Peter the Great in 1708, which was declared a “betrayal” by Russian imperialists; Catherine the Great’s destruction of the remnants of Cossack Freedom; the life and work of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet of the nineteenth century; the Ukrainian revolution and Ukraine’s independent state at the end of the first world war; the Great Famine, or Holodomor, of the early 1930s; and nationalist resistance against German and Soviet occupation during the second world war.

Zygar provides a fresh and readable account of the historical background of each of these episodes and how they persist as anti-Ukrainian myths in Russian historiography.

Like anti-Russian authors, then, Zygar is well aware of the imperialist mainstream of Russian culture. His book is an attempt both to condemn it and to reconstruct, or strengthen, its anti-imperialist counter-current. Like anti-fascist German intellectuals after 1933, and for similar reasons, he is scathing about the culture in which he grew up:

Many Russian writers and historians are complicit in facilitating this war. It is their words and thoughts over the past 350 years that sowed the seeds of Russian fascism and allowed it to flourish, although many would be horrified today to see the fruits of their labour. We failed to spot just how deadly the very idea of Russia as a “great empire” was… We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, “great Russian culture” belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them.

But his reaction is not to treat Russia as some kind of historical anomaly but to change what it means to be a Russian. “Russia as an empire has been consigned to the past, as a direct and irreversible consequence of the war,” he writes. What remains, however, is imperialism, a mindset, an emotional state, that needs to change, not just because of what it does to others, but also because of how it deforms Russia and the Russians:

Imperial history is our disease; it’s inherently addictive. And the withdrawal symptoms will hurt. But this is inevitable. We have to return to reality and realise what we’ve done.

We have to learn this lesson. To stop believing in our own uniqueness. To stop being proud of our vast territory. To stop thinking we’re special. To stop imagining ourselves as the centre of the world, its conscience, its source of spirituality. It’s all bunk.

Decolonising the Russian mind means democratising the country. Or, put the other way, democratisation can only succeed with the defeat of the imperialist mindset, which legitimises the subjugation of citizens as subjects:

We must strip the state of the right to impose its own view of the past on us. We have to roll up our sleeves and completely reinterpret our history, or rather the history of the peoples who fell victim to the empire…

Looking back, we see a horrific sight; our ancestors, indoctrinated to believe they were victors, were themselves victims. They were forced to kill, to rejoice in the killing, to take pride in the killing. And they were good at it. They were proud; they got high; they wrote beautiful poems, songs, and books glorifying blood and violence, the crunching of bones. And they forgot it was their own blood, their own bones.

This position is a radical departure from Russian liberal thought, both past and present, which often remained deeply imperialist (and racist), while espousing individual autonomy and democratic governance for Russians. At the same time it builds on anti-imperial Russian thinkers and the work of critical historians working, for example, in the now illegal organisation Memorial.

The second part of Zygar’s book is very different. It tells an integrated story, with a huge number of characters, reminiscent of the big Russian novels the title alludes to. This story begins in 1991 and ends in the present. While readers with little background in Russian and Ukrainian history will benefit greatly from the punchy and often inspired historical vignettes of the first part, they will likely get lost in the details of the second. It provides political history in its purest form: a tangled web of personalities and the relations between them; a history of power, corruption, loyalty and betrayal; and a history of powerful men and women: politicians and powerbrokers, oligarchs and gangsters, businesspeople and soldiers. In between, we learn about the unlikely rise of the comedian-turned-politician-turned-wartime-leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

This focus on personalities, their relations and the complex history of events over three decades — the same decades covered by Ther’s great transformation — sits somewhat uneasily with the framing of the book as an exploration of Russian imperialism. Given that many actors in Ukraine also pursued their own interests, connected to Russia as much as to Ukraine, the emergent story of oligarchic politics is much more messy than the subtitle of the book suggests: this is not just a story of Russian oppression and Ukrainian resistance.

When it comes to explaining the outbreak of the all-out war in 2022, Zygar is an intentionalist: the fourth emergent school of the history of this war. Intentionalists focus on the decision-makers and their motives. My own recent book, informed in many ways by Zygar’s earlier work, was intentionalist in this regard: while I saw, again like Zygar, Russian imperialism as one of the underlying structural causes, I also argued that the timing of the invasion becomes intelligible only when we understand that Putin, his seventieth birthday approaching, was looking for a legacy. He had spent the Covid years in splendid isolation, stewing in his own juices and reading Russian imperialist history. He wanted to get into the history books as an empire builder alongside Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Stalin.

Zygar tells a similar story, but he sees Putin driven less by his own historical ambition than by domestic politics. Spooked by the failed Belarusian revolution of 2020–21, the Russian president decided to remove the most prominent opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. Putin’s agents poisoned Navalny on 20 August 2020 but the attempt on his life failed. Evacuated to Germany, Navalny launched a counterattack: a YouTube video with the results of his team’s investigation into the poisoning, which was watched by some twenty million people at the time.

Navalny returned to Russia on 17 January 2021, triggering anti-regime protests and his own arrest. Two days later his team released a video about a private palace owned by Putin on the Black Sea coast. “This revelation,” writes Zygar, “strikes perhaps the most powerful blow to Putin during his entire reign. The video is watched by 120 million people, that is, almost the entire adult population of Russia.” Demonstrations have to be clubbed out of existence “Belarus-style.” The “damage to Putin’s credibility is colossal,” and he fears losing control. It is in this context, Zygar argues, that Putin’s administration is beginning to hatch new war plans: Ukraine can serve as the successful little war that saves Putin’s rule.

This is why Putin returns to history and, with the help of his former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, writes his notorious July 2021 essay on the alleged historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians — the historical treatise that part one of Zygar’s book is trying to counter. It is a historical justification for the coming war, but not its origin. The origin is the attempt to forestall revolution at home.

Here, then, Zygar partakes of the final emerging school of thought on the origins of this war: that it is an attempt at preventive counter-revolution. As the Australian political scientist Robert Horvath has argued, Putin has long attempted to immunise his regime against the “colour revolutions” that seemed to be breaking out periodically both in Russia’s immediate vicinity and further afield.

One way to link this anti-revolutionary quest to aggression against Ukraine is to see Ukraine as a vibrant democracy at Russia’s doorstep and hence an example of what could be for the domestic opposition. The problem with this interpretation is that there was no renewed democratic revolution in Kyiv in 2022, and hence no reason to quash it.

Zygar’s interpretation is closer to Horvath’s original reading: Putin went to war not because Ukraine posed a democratic threat to his rule but because he faced a democratic threat at home. The war was a distraction: an attempt to reignite the imperialist jingoism of the Crimea annexation of 2014 that propelled Putin’s approval ratings upwards.

Two interpretive problems remain. For one, Putin didn’t order the invasion when he needed the distraction but well after the domestic crisis had passed. The 2021 protests were well and truly over by the time he published his Ukraine manifesto in the middle of that year. By early 2022, when he sent in his troops, there was no challenge to his regime.

Second, as Zygar documents himself, the war plans were hatched in secret. If the regime as a whole was under threat and the war was part of an attempt to prevent revolution, it is hardly credible that even Putin’s closest advisers were not aware of the war plans even at the eve of the invasion.

Be that as it may: Putin’s invasion on 24 February 2022 started a new historical epoch. As Ther points out, that might well be true for the globe as a whole but it is certainly true for Russia and Ukraine. At the centre of this new epoch is the war, its history being written as events unfold.

We already have military history in the more narrow sense of the term: an appreciation of unfolding events at the frontline; analyses of the technical aspects of the fighting, the evolution of tactics and weaponry; and a focus on what lessons professional soldiers can learn from this fighting. More readable for non-specialists are initial narrative accounts of this war. Among the steady stream of these, some are penned by historians but more by journalists. The latest addition is Andrew Harding’s A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine, an account of the battle of Voznesensk in March 2022.

Harding’s slim volume is a gem. A masterpiece of journalistic storytelling, it has the qualities of a good novella. It may be the most readable book about this war published to date. Based on interviews with some dozen survivors of the battle — soldiers and civilians, men and women, Russians and Ukrainians — the book tells a tale of survival and resistance on Ukraine’s side as well as aggression and frustration on Russia’s. It also explores the sometimes unclear loyalties, and indeed identities, of both Russians and Ukrainians, and doesn’t shy away from unsentimental depictions of war crimes.

Harding’s book thus explores some of the complexities of the real history of this war without falling into relativism: it is clear that Harding’s sympathies are with the defenders rather than the aggressors and that he doesn’t find it difficult to distinguish between the two. He leaves us with the despondent nightmares of his interviewees. They are haunted, he writes, “by the notion that this conflict may never end, and by the fear that Russia’s capacity to absorb suffering and its unflinching willingness to continue inflicting it will eventually enable it to grind out some kind of victory.”

As Ther warns, such an outcome would be catastrophic. It can be avoided if Ukraine’s friends in what is left of the democratic world stay the course. The biggest threat to Ukraine’s independence today derives from phantasies that this war might be stopped if Russia were to be accommodated by reasonable diplomacy. As Zygar notes, Russia in its current configuration cannot be accommodated. Defeat, not victory, might set Russia on the path Zygar proclaims with grim optimism: “Future generations of Russians will remember with horror and shame the war that Putin unleashed. They will marvel at how archaic hubris came to dominate the minds of twenty-first-century people. And they will not tread the same path if we, their ancestors, bear the punishment today.” •

How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War
By Philipp Ther | Translated by Jessica Spengler | Polity Press | $36.95 | 304 pages

War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance
By Mikhail Zygar | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | $34.95 | 424 pages

A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine
By Andrew Harding | Bonnier | $32.99 | 160 pages

The post Writing the history of the present appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps emboldened by the university’s assent, the embassy responded with a further request. On behalf of the Russian government, it also wished to confer on the university’s chancellor, Australia’s former foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans, “a medal for promoting international cooperation.”

This new offer struck us both as an ingenious ploy to have the university’s most senior figure preside over the unveiling of the bust. The embassy could then inform the foreign affairs ministry in Moscow, and presumably the anonymous philanthropist, that it had pulled off a public relations coup.

The offer of the bust was unremarkable. One of the jobs of an embassy is to build networks of contacts that might prove useful in acquiring and exercising influence in its host country; and one of the assets Russian embassies can draw on is Russian literature — which, as Ernest Hemingway remarked in A Moveable Feast, changes you as you read it.

But the context was important. Relations between Australia and Russia had been tense since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. Since then the Russian president had been directing an “insurgency” by alleged separatists in eastern Ukraine, and Australia had responded with economic sanctions.

Australia strengthened the sanctions after the destruction of flight MH17 in July 2014, which it had concluded was Russia’s doing. Prime minister Tony Abbott had consequently expressed an intention to “shirtfront” Putin when he came to Australia for the looming G20 meeting in Brisbane. (Abbott’s verb captured media attention globally and baffled interpreters in both Russia and Australia.)

With its scope for building networks of influence in government and the public service much reduced by Russia’s actions, the embassy naturally focused its efforts on the media, the arts and academia. It seems a fair assumption that Russian embassies in other countries were also seeking to cultivate academic contacts and generate positive publicity for Russia by proffering busts of Pushkin and/or other Russian luminaries to universities, libraries and the like.

The acting dean asked me to draft some remarks for ANU’s chancellor to deliver at the handover ceremony. I had worked for Gareth Evans twice when he was foreign affairs minister: in 1991, as his interpreter on a visit to the Soviet Union in its last months; and later, in 1992–93, in a junior policy-advice role when he and the Keating government responded to the Soviet Union’s dissolution by Yeltsin and the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine.

This meant I was familiar with Evans’s exacting approach to public speaking, and his views on Russia in general, views influenced by his own circle of well-informed friends in Russia. (In this regard, with the possible exception of Kevin Rudd, Evans is probably unique among Australian politicians.) I drafted the remarks accordingly.

In the event, Evans left my work pretty much intact. But he polished it a little and gave it his own stamp — with, for instance, the following ironic flourish: “I am personally very honoured to receive this commemorative medal for contributions to consolidating international cultural cooperation, though a little embarrassed, because I’m not quite clear what I might have done to deserve it.”

He also strengthened a key paragraph regarding the destruction of flight MH17:

In Australia, the shooting down of MH17 just over four years ago continues to particularly burn in our collective memory. While it seems very likely that the militia member who pressed the button to fire the missile that caused so many Australian and other lives to be tragically lost did not intend to destroy a civilian airliner, unless and until that mistake is frankly acknowledged and redressed it is hard to see how any Australian government can invest our bilateral relationship with more substance.

He later told me that he’d found the ceremony “a very tricky occasion to navigate.”

My only cavil with Evans’s refining of my handiwork was his insertion of the words “the Russian soul” at one point in the speech. I could understand why a consummate diplomat chose to do so, but (as Vladimir Nabokov is said to have quipped) “as if a soul has nationality.” In my view, the expression supports the notion that Russians are somehow emotionally more profound than other peoples.

Exactly that claim was made a year after the ANU ceremony by one Valery Malinovsky, who, his Polish name notwithstanding, was a prominent figure in the pro-Putin claque in Australia. Russians, he said, “have deeper emotions; are more hardworking; stand for traditional values — we believe that a woman’s role is to preserve hearth and home, whereas Australian women are feminists who do not put the family first; and we are more patriotic.”

In the same vein, here is Putin in 2014:

So, what are our particular traits? It seems to me that the Russian person thinks mainly about the highest moral truths. Western values are different, focused on oneself. Personal success is the measure of success in life: the more successful a man is, the better he is. This is not enough for us… we are less pragmatic, less calculating than other peoples, we have bigger hearts. Perhaps this reflects the grandeur of our country, its boundless expanses. Our people have a more generous spirit.

I wasn’t at the ANU ceremony, but was given accounts by some who were. The bust itself, as I later saw, is a hefty bronze affair in the Roman and Russian martial tradition. It looks oddly extravagant in the cramped precinct that contains what remains of the university’s once proud tradition of the study of European languages.

In his own remarks for the occasion, Russian ambassador Grigory Logvinov claimed that “international specialists in literature had established that Pushkin is the most universal and greatest poet of all time in any language.”

This assertion recalls a memorable passage in the unpublished memoirs of Andrzej Walicki, an authority on the history of Russian thought, a friend of Isaiah Berlin and Nobel Prize–winning poet Czesław Miłosz, and for some years a professor at ANU. Walicki relates how, as a student at the University of Warsaw in 1951, he attended a series of lectures given by a visiting Soviet professor, one Fyodor Zhurko, who had set himself the task of demonstrating the impregnability of four postulates: that Pushkin was the world’s greatest poet; Tolstoy the world’s greatest novelist; Alexander Ostrovsky the world’s greatest playwright; and Vissarion Belinsky the world’s greatest literary critic.

At his first lecture Zhurko encountered unexpected resistance: most of the students knew that to engage in debate on this level was pointless, but one Tadzio, from a rural village, asked how it could be that Pushkin “ranked above such poets as Byron.” Somewhat flustered, Zhurko responded that he did not know foreign languages and had not read Byron, but Pushkin’s pre-eminence had been “proven by Soviet science.”

This response prompted Tadzio to retort that he “also does not know foreign languages” (Walicki writes that “the comic effect was unintentional”) but he did know Pushkin’s work, and in his view “Mickiewicz was no less of a poet.” Zhurko retorted that Polish literature undoubtedly was great, indeed possibly the third greatest after Russian and Ukrainian, but that Pushkin’s standing as the greatest poet of all time in any language was for Soviet science “axiomatic.”

Following this exchange, as Walicki relates, Zhurko said to his Polish hosts that he had no wish to proceed with the following lectures in the series, as “у вас национализм очень сильно развитый” (“nationalism is very deeply entrenched here”).

An inscription beneath the bust given to ANU records that it was donated not by a philanthropist but by the “International Charity Fund ‘Dialogue of Cultures — United World.’” A little research reveals that the partners of the “charity fund” include Russia’s foreign affairs and culture ministries. These ties suggest that, while purporting to be some manner of non-government organisation, the outfit is in fact an agency of the Russian state. The following excerpts, with their idiosyncratic English, are from a mission statement on the organisation’s website.

Since its establishment in 2005, «Dialogue of Cultures — United World» Fund has implemented more than 450 projects in different countries. The Fund works closely with international organizations, state authorities of the Russian Federation and Russian non-governmental organizations, educational institutions in the field of international cooperation, culture and education.

Each culture — a combination of unique traditions, customs and holidays, this age-old wisdom, passed on from generation to generation, this galaxy of outstanding writers, artists, musicians and scientists, this particular philosophy, vision and thinking — it’s what makes the beauty of the world around them depth and complexity, then, of which each of us draws inspiration daily. To preserve and develop national culture — the noble task of mankind.

Fund «Dialogue of Cultures — United World» retains and promotes the historical uniqueness of ethnic groups living in the modern world and to create a tool for cultural rapprochement of peoples, through the creation of worldwide sites for a living dialogue of cultures.

More exploration of the website reveals that in 2007 in Brisbane the fund established a monument to one K.E. Tsiolkovskiy, described by the site as “a Russian provincial teacher and scholar, founder of Soviet cosmonautics, who paved the way into space for all the mankind… The scientist was born in Russia, but his discoveries belong to the entire world.”

The website also reports that donated busts of Pushkin have been placed in Ulaanbaatar, Dhaka and Montevideo; and that the Mongolian bust was handed over in 2015 by the then minister counsellor of the Russian embassy, Igor Arzhaev. Arzhaev is currently Russia’s consul general in Sydney, and Russian-language publications in Australia suggest he devotes much time to liaising with those diaspora members in Sydney who support the current Russian leadership’s policies. Prominent among these is the self-styled “Aussie Cossack,” Simeon Boikov, with whom Arzhaev is pictured below in Russian diplomatic uniform.

More important, the fund’s website reveals ties between the fund and prominent members of Putin’s close entourage, including Sergei Naryshkin, a member of the National Security Council and head of SVR, Russia’s foreign espionage service, and Sergei Glaz’ev, “Advisor to the President for Eurasian Cooperation.” Glaz’ev, who is among the most energetic proponents of the forcible reabsorption of Ukraine into the Russian empire, also has ties to the Australian Citizens Party via the LaRouche movement, a longstanding far-right American activist group.

Middle man: Igor Arzhaev (third from right), Russia’s consul general in Sydney, with “Aussie Cossack” Simeon Boikov (in green). Facebook

The tale of the ANU bust contains a dual irony. If any Australian politicians deserve formal recognition for their promotion of international cooperation, surely none is more worthy than Gareth Evans, for none has done more in support of the ideal of a “rules-based order.” Conversely, no one, not even Donald Trump, has been more conspicuous than Vladimir Putin in their efforts to undermine such a mechanism to manage the inevitable conflicts between nation-states and great powers.

But there’s a third irony, more piquant and profound. It’s hard to think of a state that has killed or been complicit in the deaths of more of its poets than Russia. An incomplete but well-verified list compiled by literary scholar Vera Sokolinskaya contains the names of hundreds of Russian writers, journalists and artists executed, imprisoned or forced into exile by Russia’s rulers.

For various reasons, Pushkin is on the list. From the age of twenty he was internally exiled several times for his verses; in 1826 Tsar Nikolai I appointed himself Pushkin’s censor (though in practice the role was carried out by the chief of the tsar’s secret police); and in 1829 his request to travel abroad was denied.

But two other decisions by Tsar Nikolai combined to prove fatal for Pushkin. In 1831 the poet married Natalya Goncharova, a legendary beauty and thereafter an adornment at court. Two years later Nikolai appointed Pushkin to the humiliatingly lowly position of kamer-junker (gentleman of the chamber), which effectively entailed only one duty: his, and Natalya’s, regular appearances at court balls.

Probably sensing danger from would-be seducers among his wife’s jostling admirers, burdened heavily by debts and unable to afford life in St Petersburg, Pushkin sought royal permission to retire to his modest country estate — and was denied. In 1835 a young French officer of the Russian Horse Guards began provocatively wooing Natalya; by January 1837, according to the mores of the time and place, Pushkin felt compelled to provoke a duel. He was wounded fatally and died in extreme pain thirty-six hours later.

Had it not been for the tsar’s whims, Pushkin would probably have lived well beyond his thirty-seven years. (Pushkin’s final years and fate are an epic tragedy: see, among various accounts, Elaine Feinstein’s judicious biography.) Today, though, this victim of Russian autocracy is presented as a demigod whose writings prove the innate superiority of what Putin and his supporters claim is “Russian civilisation.” •

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Its population was ethnically mixed but with a strong dominance of Ukrainians, who made up 73 per cent of the people. Russians constituted a significant minority of 22 per cent, followed by people identifying as Jews, Belarusians and Moldavians, all making up just under one in a hundred. Other nationalities of the Soviet empire, from Bulgarians and Poles to Azeri, Koreans, Germans, Kyrgyz and Lithuanians, made up the remaining 3 per cent.

Regional differences in political outlook were strong. Although all regions voted in favour of separating from the Soviet Union in the December 1991 referendum, some were more enthusiastic than others. In Lviv, in the west of the country, 95 per cent of the people voted and 97 per cent of them approved the declaration of independence, which had been made in late August in response to the coup attempt in Moscow. In Crimea, an ethnically strongly Russian region at the other extreme, only 68 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls, with 54 per cent of them voting in favour.

Donetsk, an industrial region in the east of the country with strong economic ties to Russia, stood somewhat between these extremes. There, 77 per cent registered their vote and 84 per cent of those people voted for independence.

With the partial exception of the three Baltic republics, all post-Soviet nations have struggled with three interrelated crises: a crisis of democracy, an economic crisis and corruption. Outside the three Baltic outliers (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), the relatively well-performing Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are all resource-exporting economies. Everybody else is struggling.

In terms of wealth per person (measured by GDP per capita), Russia is about at the level of China (US$10,500), while even the rich Baltic countries are nowhere near the United States (US$63,500) or Australia (US$51,800).

The comparative poverty of the region is partly a legacy of the Soviet economy’s poor performance, and partly a hangover from the economic catastrophe of the 1990s. In Ukraine, agriculture continued to be run by the disastrously unproductive collective and state farms until 2000. Other economic reforms were also slow in coming.

Meanwhile, the unravelling of the integrated Soviet imperial economy, the economic burden of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, ageing and inefficient equipment, and dependence on Russian oil and gas were problematic legacies.

Moreover, Ukraine’s state apparatus had controlled no more than 5 per cent of Ukraine’s GDP before 1990 (the rest was under the direct control of Moscow). Officials thus “lacked the experience necessary to take quick and effective control” of the economy, as the writer Marco Bojcun puts it. The quick expansion of the share of the economy controlled by Ukraine’s officials — reaching 40 per cent on the eve of independence — only added to the problems.

Together, these issues combined to create a disaster: between 1991 and 1996, Ukraine’s economy contracted every year by at least 10 per cent and as much as 23 per cent. Overall, it had contracted to 43 per cent of its 1990 level by 1996 — a decline worse than the United States experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The main reason nobody starved after 1991 was similar to Russia’s: the existence of private gardening, a legacy of the Soviet period. “The overwhelming majority of workers have out of town kitchen gardens,” wrote a worker from the Dnipro region in 1996. These were “little patches of land given them by the factory management under an agreement with the agricultural authorities… People work five days in the factories and two days on their plots.” According to official statistics, by 1996 some 80–95 per cent of fruit, vegetables and potatoes came from such plots. Even a quarter of all livestock were raised in private gardens.

Ukraine’s economy has not recovered nearly as much as that of resource-rich Russia, and its economic growth has stagnated since 2009. Russia’s war by proxy in Donbas since 2014 again stunted economic growth: between 2013 and 2015, Ukraine’s GDP halved.

The current war will have catastrophic consequences for this overall picture. In early 2022, the World Bank predicted a contraction of the economy by 45 per cent. In the same year, 47 per cent of surveyed Ukrainians reported that they did not have “enough money even for food” or had money sufficient “only for the most basic items.”

Post-Soviet countries are not only poor, they are also among the world’s most corrupt. Among European countries, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are all known as deeply corrupt societies. Of the 336 politicians whose secret offshore financial accounts were leaked in the “Pandora Papers” of 2021, thirty-eight came from Ukraine, among them president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This was the largest number of any country in the world. Russia’s figure was nineteen.

Over time, however, Ukraine has improved its record. In Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a higher score means less corruption. Ukraine initially improved significantly after 2004. While this progress was undone after a few years, improvement has been steady since 2009. Meanwhile, Russia has stagnated since 2012 and is classified today as more corrupt than its neighbour.

Corruption and economic crisis do little to embed democracy. Maybe unsurprisingly, then, the majority of the societies that succeeded the Soviet Union are ruled by authoritarian regimes. (Nine out of fifteen of them, or 60 per cent, according to the 2021 classification by Freedom House, an organisation that measures democratic performance.) Only the three Baltic states, which are members of both NATO and the European Union, are classified as consolidated democracies. Three others, Ukraine among them, are hybrid regimes, where authoritarian elements compete with democratic ones.

Within this general context, Ukraine is doing relatively well. Between 2017 and 2022 it was classified as “partly free” by Freedom House, its score oscillating between 60 and 62 on a scale out of 100, where the higher number indicates a higher level of civic and political liberty. Such numbers do not indicate that Ukraine is a beacon of democracy, however, either in the region (where Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia stand out as the freest countries, with scores of between 89 and 90) or around the world (the troubled United States scored 83 in 2021, while Australia stood at 97).

But Ukraine contrasts positively with Russia, which has been categorised as “not free” with a score of 20, falling to 19 in 2022. And Vladimir Putin’s state, in turn, still compares favourably with other dictatorships in the region, which are even more repressive: Belarus with 11 and Tajikistan with 8. For comparison, China scored 9 in 2021 and North Korea 3.

To a significant extent, the predominance of authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space is a Soviet legacy. “In all parts of the former Soviet empire,” write two legal scholars who studied this problem in detail, “the socialist party-state structure left a shared legacy of an executive-dominated state.” Change depended on whether a postcolonial or neocolonial mindset won the day.

In other words: did people want to stay in the Russian orbit or not? If not, the obvious choice was an orientation towards Europe, which came with mixed constitutions stressing checks and balances, weakening the executive; if yes, the constitution would be modelled much more closely on Russia’s “crown presidentialism,” further entrenching the centrality of the executive. In Ukraine, the former tendency won out, but not without political struggles.

One rather basic aspect of democracy is that governments are changed peacefully by elections. Ukraine is doing quite well in this regard, particularly if compared with its two autocratic neighbours. In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko has been in power since 1994; in Russia, Putin since 1999. Ukraine, meanwhile, has seen seven presidencies since 1991: of Leonid Kravchuk (1991–94), Leonid Kuchma (1994–2005), Viktor Yushchenko (2005–10), Viktor Yanukovych (2010–14), Oleksandr Turchynov (2014), Petro Poroshenko (2014–19) and now Volodymyr Zelenskyy (since 2019).

The majority of these presidents were elected to office and left when they lost elections or decided not to contest them. Two were removed through revolutions, one peaceful (the Orange Revolution of 2004–05), one violent (the Revolution of Dignity, or Euromaidan, of 2013–14). But both revolutions resulted in elected governments again, not the imposition of revolutionary dictatorships.

Ukraine’s presidents ruled in competition with parliament, at first the one elected under Soviet conditions in 1990, then, since 1994, a post-Soviet one. This competition was formalised in the 1996 constitution, which put the directly elected president next to a one-chamber parliament that limited presidential powers to a much larger extent than in Russia.

Its unusually strong parliament became an issue because of the fragmented party system, however. First, there were too many parties; second, the existing parties were not based around major ideological positions or clearly elaborated political philosophies; third, there were many socially influential groups competing for power. As one observer puts it, this system was based “not on ideological factors, but on the competition of financial and industrial groups and regional elites” interested “in dispersing power in order to control at least a small segment of it.” The result was “political instability.”

Ukraine’s political system, then, constituted something of a unique case, both within the post-Soviet space and in the world at large. Its huge number of parties — more than 120 were officially registered in 2002 — were often internally divided as well. In the words of one observer, this fragmentation was “unprecedented for a modern democratic republic.” For another, it “hindered democratisation” by making it “difficult for the population to orient itself politically.” But the diversity also made it more difficult for would-be autocrats and their networks of clients to consolidate power.

The same can be said for the much-quoted regional fragmentation of Ukraine. On the one hand, regionalism has defined voting behaviour and hence fragmented the political system. In both parliamentary and presidential elections until 2019, voters in the more Russian and Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine and Crimea voted for one set of parties, while those in the more Ukrainian-speaking western Ukraine preferred a different set. “No party managed to elect candidates across Ukraine,” writes political scientist Paul D’Anieri. Presidential elections show a similar regional pattern.

At their extreme, regional divisions can define conflict lines within Ukraine, including the threat of secessionism and ethno-political conflict. On the other hand, regional identities and political networks also help balance power within the broader political system and prevent any one group of elites from monopolising power. Ukraine’s regional, cultural, religious and economic diversity can be seen as an asset as much as a liability. For historian Serhii Plokhy, it is “one of the main reasons for Ukraine’s success as a democracy.”

Of the three main regional power groups, one is based in Kharkiv in the northeast; the second in the industrial heartland around Donetsk in the east; and the third in Dnipro in central Ukraine, the heart of the Soviet Union’s defence and space industries. These were already part of the political structure of late Soviet times, and they led to a specific form of “patronal democracy” in which clans competed for political power within a republican set-up.

At the same time, winners often tried to replace this competitive structure with a single hierarchy of power. The first attempt came under Leonid Kuchma, who built a “patronal autocracy,” but the Orange Revolution of 2004 destroyed this system and reverted to dual competition between president and parliament on the one hand and multiple power networks on the other.

Yanukovych then tried again, and successfully neutralised competing clans — until ordinary citizens intervened to stop this usurpation of power. The 2013–14 Revolution of Dignity not only undid Yanukovych’s dictatorial slide but also led to an election labelled by two experts as “probably the fairest one in the country’s history.” This transformation of the political system was one-sided, however: while it did constitute a redemocratisation, it didn’t eliminate regional and patronal politics.

It was only with Zelenskyy’s election in 2019 that things began to change in this regard. Zelenskyy was “no chief patron and [had] no patronal pyramid” but instead gathered strong support from the new middle and creative classes, campaigning on an anti-corruption platform. He mostly spoke Russian during his campaign, which helped overcome regional differences between Russian speakers in the east and Ukrainian speakers in the west. He achieved what many thought impossible: his election was the first in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history where voting did not follow regional patterns. •

This is an edited extract from Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story, published this month by Melbourne University Press.

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The explanations for this attitude tend to focus on these countries’ past connections with Russia and irritation with the West more than their lack of sympathy for Ukraine. The governing African National Congress in South Africa, for example, recalls Soviet support in the long struggle against apartheid. India has found Russia a useful strategic partner in the past and a source of advanced weapons. China and Russia entered into what was described in glowing terms as friendship “without limits” prior to the full-scale invasion.

The West, meanwhile, has been criticised for its focus on Ukraine’s plight compared with its relative indifference to the humanitarian catastrophes of the ongoing wars in Africa and the Middle East. During the war’s early stages the Biden administration framed the conflict as one between democracy and autocracy, which did not impress many of the relatively autocratic governments in the Global South. Lastly, members of the Global South consider the United States and its allies, notably Britain, hypocritical about a “rules-based international order” given their actions in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere.

Yet this narrative has become more nuanced over the course of this year. Partly this is because of efforts by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Biden administration to mend fences with these countries. Partly the shift reflects irritation with Russia over its stubborn and wholly unrealistic stance on what might serve as the basis for a peace settlement. A third factor is the harmful impact of Russia’s actions on food and energy prices.

For all these reasons, countries in the Global South are starting to find an equidistant position harder to sustain and are starting to take diplomatic initiatives of their own. These may be harder for Russia to resist than those sponsored by the West.

The “Global South” is one of those convenient shorthands that can keep conversations on international relations going without the need to list lots of different countries. If taken too seriously — as if it represents a homogeneous group with a shared agenda — the label can soon become misleading. It is the latest in a sequence of attempts to group countries according to what they are not instead of who they are.

During the cold war the countries that deliberately stayed outside the main alliances became part of the Non-Aligned Movement. They eventually combined with states with a policy of neutrality (such as Sweden and Switzerland) to become Neutral and Non-Aligned. Those many developing countries outside the main blocs were lumped together as the Third World because they were part of neither the First capitalist world nor the Second communist world.

Once the cold war was over these labels appeared dated and unhelpful, doing little justice to the variety and agency of these countries. It also became apparent that several of these countries that were behind the West on many key economic indicators were nonetheless showing considerable dynamism. Not only were they catching up but they also had shared interests distinct from those of the West. The most important of these countries were identified as the BRICS, standing for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

As well as the group’s growing economic importance it also included the world’s most populous countries. Although it had started as a convenient shorthand, BRICS eventually became a political entity with its own summits. Each of its members tended to complain about attempted US “hegemony” and argue for more multipolarity. Their dislike of America’s regular resort to economic sanctions was reflected in proposals for the “de-dollarisation” of the world economy.

BRICS excludes countries in similar positions, however, including the populous Indonesia and the oil-rich Saudi Arabia, and is already debating whether to invite more members.

The West has its own institutions, of course, including NATO and the European Union, both of which have grown in size since the end of the cold war and provide a degree of integration that is absent from other regional institutions (such as ASEAN and South America’s Mercosur). A Group of Seven industrialised countries (the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan) meets annually, always with the European Union and usually with other invited friends and relations.

The G7 was the G8 until Russia was expelled after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, with one consequence being there is one less place for diplomatic communications between Russia and the West. The obvious place for that contact, the UN Security Council, has been paralysed by Russia’s veto.

One other grouping is large enough to bring together the main international players more inclusively than either the G7 or BRICS. That is the G20, formed in 1999 in response to an economic crisis but now with a wider agenda. It is made up of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union. Indonesia hosted the latest of the G20’s annual summits; India will host the next.

This is an altogether more complicated picture than simply “the West” versus “the Rest,” or one in which, other than the permanent members of the Security Council, few other states count. The complexity of this evolving international system has become more evident as countries work out their responses to the Russo-Ukraine war.

A common complaint from non-Western countries mirrors that of internal critics of Western support for Ukraine: far too much effort is going into stoking the fires of war by sending arms to Ukraine and not enough into “diplomacy” to end the war. A persistent hope is that “dialogue” might find a commonsense way out of the morass.

This line has appealed to those who wish to sound progressive even while supporting a vicious, nationalist aggressor state, or “realists” who take it for granted that at some point Ukraine will concede territory to Russia. Those taking this view also tend to assume that the United States is in the position to get a deal done because it can lever Kyiv into a compliant position.

This was always a dubious proposition. It would not be a good look for Biden, and certainly would be divisive within the alliance, to attempt to strongarm Ukraine into an unequal treaty that Russia would probably not honour anyway. Most importantly, Putin has not offered any encouragement to those urging active negotiations.

Early in the war the two sides were exploring a possible settlement, looking for language on the Donbas, Crimea and neutrality with which the two sides could live. That proved elusive, and the Ukrainian position hardened once Russian atrocities were revealed as troops abandoned their positions close to Kyiv. Now Putin demands that Ukraine agree to the permanent loss of territory unilaterally claimed for Russia, which is even more than it currently occupies. That is not going to happen.

The peace camp has thus faded in the West. The most serious proponents argue that preparations must be made for when the time is ripe, accepting that this is not yet and must await changing attitudes in Kyiv and Moscow. The agreed Western stance follows Ukraine’s: Russia’s behaviour, along with its claimed objectives, means that there is no basis for negotiations. The only development that is likely to shift Russian views is evidence that it is losing the war, and so the main effort needs to be put into helping Ukraine with its military operations.

This position has created a gap that many non-Western countries have been eager to fill, casting themselves in the role of peacemakers. The process began last February when China stepped forward with its proposals. Because of Xi Jinping’s “no limits” partnership with Putin, and his accompanying anti-NATO rhetoric, these were treated sceptically. Zelenskyy, however, appreciated at once that, taken at face value, they were more favourable to Ukraine than Russia. The core principles — staying in line with the UN Charter and respecting national sovereignty, territorial integrity and international humanitarian law — give no support to seizing the territory of a neighbouring state and bombing its cities. The plan was followed up by a discussion between Xi and Zelenskyy and closer diplomatic relations between the two.

Brazil, African countries, and most recently Saudi Arabia have since taken similar initiatives. The last of these was Brazil’s. Although it condemned the Russian invasion, it has not supported sanctions against Moscow or sending arms to Ukraine. After president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva welcomed Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to Brasilia and objected to Western arms deliveries as prolonging the war, he came under heavy criticism. He then declined an invitation from Putin to visit Russia, but repeated “Brazil’s willingness, together with India, Indonesia, and China, to talk to both sides of the conflict in search of peace.”

Lula da Silva has not spoken directly to Zelenskyy and now seems disillusioned. His initiative made little headway, leading him to conclude that neither Putin nor Zelenskyy were ready. “Brazil’s role is to try to arrive at a peace proposal together with others for when both countries want it,” he has said.

Africa’s initiative was announced by South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa on 16 May. In June, representatives from South Africa, Egypt, Senegal, Congo-Brazzaville, Comoros, Zambia and Uganda visited both Ukraine and Russia. The mission was not a great success. As the delegation arrived in Kyiv it was struck by Russian missiles. Then, when they met with Putin on 17 June, the Russian president showed no interest in a plan that required accepting Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders. One South African academic, Professor William Gumede, observed that the African leaders were humiliated: “Putin didn’t even bother to listen to the delegation, basically interrupting them before they’d even finished speaking, implying there was no point in discussing anything as the war would continue.”

This visit was followed in late July by the Second Russo-Africa Summit in St Petersburg, which had been postponed from October 2022 when it would have taken place in Ethiopia. At one level, Russia might have counted the summit a success, with forty-nine delegations attending, although this only included seventeen heads of state (compared with forty-three at the first summit in 2019). But some of the continent’s most important leaders were present, including Ramaphosa and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.

One of the odder features of the event was that Yevgeny Prigozhin was also in St Petersburg, also meeting with African leaders, apparently not in disgrace after his recent mutiny against the Russian defence ministry. Prigozhin’s Wagner group has a significant presence in the Central African Republic, Libya, Mali and Sudan (and now potentially Niger).

The summit came not long after Russia had decided to abandon the deal that had allowed Ukraine to export grain (some 32.8 million tonnes last year) from its Black Sea ports, on the grounds that Western sanctions restricting the export of Russian grain and fertiliser had not been lifted (though these are actually exempt from sanctions). The end of the deal means that shortages will grow and prices rise.

At the summit Ramaphosa and other African leaders pleaded with Putin to restore the initiative, the lack of which was already causing hardship on the continent, but to no avail. When Putin offered to donate some grain free to the neediest countries, the South African leader thanked him politely and then added that he and his fellow leaders “are not coming here to plead for donations for the African continent… our main input here is not so much focused on giving and donating grain to the African continent.”

Nor did the summit see any progress on peace negotiations. Putin had no objections to the African mission continuing, but he offered no hope that he was changing his position or withdrawing his transparently false claim that the West had really started the war.

Adding further to the chill, Putin acknowledged after the summit that he would not be travelling to Johannesburg for the BRICS summit, which started on 22 August, as this was less “important than me staying in Russia.” The real reason was that the South African government could not guarantee Putin would not be arrested and sent to The Hague.

The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Putin, issued in March, for the war crime of deporting Ukrainian children, is restricting his ability to travel. South Africa, along with 122 other states, has ratified the Rome Statute and is obliged to arrest Putin if he shows up in their jurisdiction.

The South African government did try to find a way out of this predicament, arguing to the ICC that arresting Putin would be tantamount to a declaration of war and would undermine peace efforts. In the end it had to abandon this effort. Without a guarantee of immunity, Putin clearly decided it was too risky to travel. Instead he will join the summit by video while foreign minister Sergey Lavrov will represent Russia in person.

The developing frustration with Russia was reflected in the most important peace initiative thus far — a two-day summit in Jeddah on 6–8 August, hosted by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (normally referred to as “MBS”). Saudi Arabia is another country with which Russia has been trying to improve relations. In particular, the Saudis have cooperated on oil production cuts to raise prices. Although Western nations encourage countries to buy Russian oil only below a US$60 ceiling price, for now it is selling oil at closer to US$65, helping push up revenues.

The Biden administration has also been making moves to improve relations with the Saudis, despite starting in a critical mode because of the kingdom’s human rights records (and especially the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018). It is actively engaged in an effort to get Israel and the Saudis to establish diplomatic relations. MBS’s sympathetic view of Ukraine was evident when Zelenskyy was hosted in May at an Arab summit, also in Jeddah. There the Ukrainian president urged Arab leaders not to turn “a blind eye” to Russian aggression.

Following that summit the Crown Prince called a large international conference and invited Ukraine but not Russia. Even more notable was that the other invitees (some forty states) didn’t appear to find this a turn-off. It was no surprise that the United States and the European Union turned up, but the presence of China, India and South Africa was significant. Had it been the other way round, and Russia had been invited and not Ukraine, this would have been considered an enormous diplomatic defeat for Kyiv and its supporters.

Russia made clear that it was unhappy with its exclusion. Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov grumbled that without his country the talks had not “the slightest added value.” He described the meeting as “a reflection of the West’s attempt to continue futile, doomed efforts” to mobilise the Global South behind Kyiv. At the same time he insisted that Russia remained open to a diplomatic solution to end the war, and would respond to any sincere proposals.

Around the same time, a New York Times journalist asked Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov whether Russia wants to occupy new Ukrainian territories. “No,” he answered. “We just want to control all the land we have now written into our constitution as ours.” Yet that land includes not only Crimea but also the territories of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, not all of which are currently occupied by Russia. “There are currently no grounds for an agreement,” added Peskov. “We will continue the operation for the foreseeable future.”

By contrast, the Ukrainian delegation was pleased with the event. Zelenskyy’s head of staff, Andriy Yermak, spoke of “very productive consultations on the key principles on which a just and lasting peace should be built.” No consensus position had emerged, but the conversation between the different viewpoints was honest and open.

Zelenskyy has said that he hopes that the Jeddah gathering will be a step on the road towards a global peace summit, possibly to be held later in the year. He has framed the talks as following the ten-point peace plan that he presented to the G20 last November. Saudi Arabia’s media ministry emphasised the importance of continuing consultations to pave the way for peace. Working groups are being established to consider some of the specific problems raised by the war.

China’s representative at the Jeddah meeting, Li Hui, was described by an EU source as having “participated actively” in the sessions. He had not attended another informal meeting in Denmark in June.

Also present was India’s national security adviser, who shared the consensus view: “Dialogue and diplomacy is the way forward for a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine conflict. There is a need to uphold territorial integrity and sovereignty without exception by all states… India has regularly engaged both Russia and Ukraine at the highest levels since the beginning of the conflict and New Delhi supports a global order based on principles enshrined in UN Charter and international law.”

India will be hosting the next G20 meeting in Delhi on 9–10 September. Unlike South Africa, it has not signed up to the ICC, so Putin would not be at risk of arrest should be decide to attend. He cannot, however, expect a warm reception, and should it come to talk of peace he will find little sympathy for his insistence on annexing a large chunk of Ukrainian territory. None of the leaders, other than Xi and perhaps Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, the host, will be keen on bilateral meetings with the Russian president.

Russian aggression was condemned at the last G20 meeting in Bali, which Zelenskyy attended. Putin is already seeking to prevent a similar communiqué emerging out of the Delhi summit. A preliminary meeting of G20 finance ministers in July failed to agree to a communiqué because Russia and China objected to a reference to “immense human suffering” and Western states would not sign one that did not condemn the aggression.

Should Putin decide to attend the G20, the event may serve to underline Russia’s isolation as much as its power. He has annoyed countries that now have significant clout in international affairs — countries that make a point of not following an American lead — by insisting on terms for ending the war that contradict the principles of the UN Charter and pursuing strategies that push up energy and food costs for all countries at a time when most are struggling economically. This behaviour has created an opportunity for Zelenskyy to improve relations with these countries and ensure that future peace initiatives are more likely to fit in with his vision than Putin’s.

For that reason we should not expect any early breakthroughs. Much still depends on what happens militarily. But it would be too cynical to dismiss the current diplomatic initiatives as being irrelevant. They reflect the changing character of international relations as Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia and other countries demonstrate their political muscle, and also the continuing importance of the UN Charter as one of the few fixed normative points.

We are moving from the idea of a mediated peace, in which a country able to talk to both Moscow and Kyiv, such as Turkey or Israel, tries to broker an agreement that leaves both sides with honour satisfied, to a process that involves developing global pressure on Putin to back away from his stubborn insistence on Russia’s right to annex Ukrainian territory. •

This article first appeared in Sam and Lawrence Freedman’s Substack newsletter, Comment Is Freed.

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In Russia, what was already an increasingly autocratic regime has ramped up its repression and increasingly shrill propaganda to such an extent that some informed observers are viewing it as fascist. In Ukraine, Kyiv’s second big counteroffensive is under way, but the enemy troops have dug in and are fighting hard to hold on to the territories they managed to occupy in 2022. The counteroffensive is making progress, but it is agonisingly slow.

NATO’s decision to promise membership to Ukraine — but only once the war is over — has perversely increased Russia’s incentive to continue fighting, especially with the possibility of a Trump victory in next year’s American election. The longer Russia maintains its aggression, the longer Ukraine remains outside NATO; a Trump presidency might well herald a fracturing of support for Ukraine among its allies. And as long as Putin remains in power, and as long as his army can sustain the ongoing significant losses, Russia is likely to remain in the war.

Along the way, analysts have got many things wrong. From predicting Russia wouldn’t attack (just before it did), to assuming a quick breakdown of Ukraine’s defences and disintegration of its government, to making optimistic predictions about the instability of Putin’s regime: real developments continued to confound the futurology so prevalent in the commentary.

I mustn’t exclude myself from this critique. A month into the conflict, I published a short piece outlining possible scenarios about how this war would end. Like others, I couldn’t imagine the conflict still raging a year and a half later. Like others, I underestimated Russia’s economic resilience in the face of sanctions (although the full impact of these measures is only being felt now). “Given the sanctions regime,” I wrote, Russia will retain the capacity to resupply its troops for “months at best.” That was way off the mark.

I did better with the scenarios I offered. The first was escalation, by which I meant a tactical nuclear strike or, worse, a nuclear attack on NATO. I didn’t think that was terribly likely, but I wasn’t confident enough to rule it out altogether. Luckily, I was right. While such a course of action remains a possibility, sabre-rattling rather than action has so far prevailed.

The escalations we have seen, however, are significant. The blowing up of the Kakhovka dam caused catastrophic environmental damage and human and material losses for Ukraine. The heavy use of landmines will contaminate the country for years, and maybe decades, to come. And the continual air and artillery attacks on civilian targets are degrading Ukraine’s infrastructure and kill or maim its people in significant numbers.

But Russia’s most consequential escalation has been in the sphere of trade: its continuing attempts to shut down Ukraine’s grain exports are an open attempt to hold the world hostage with the threat of famine.

In effect, what we have seen is my second scenario playing out. “Russia,” I wrote, “will destroy as much of Ukraine’s military and civilian infrastructure as possible, broaden attacks on civilians to increase the costs of this war for the government of Ukraine, and threaten nuclear war against anybody who wants to intervene.”

The point of this brutality was to push Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy “to the limit of what he thinks his people can endure.” Thus far, however, neither Zelenskyy nor Ukraine’s population as a whole has cracked under the pressure. Instead, the defenders have become further embittered and many of their friends abroad increasingly convinced that support for Ukraine is essential.

On the other side of the frontline, too, Putin acted as I feared: he persisted in his war and escalated it considerably.

Back in March 2022, I saw some signs that both sides might be willing to bring the conflict to an end through negotiations. Such optimism has fully evaporated. After the liberation of Bucha in April last year and the detection of appalling war crimes committed by the occupiers, negotiations with Russia before a complete withdrawal is politically impossible. And it is now clear, anyway, that Russia was never really interested in negotiations.

With the battle of Kyiv lost by April 2022, one of Putin’s options was to annex the occupied regions in Ukraine’s east and south, and dig in his troops and declare victory in an attempt to save face at home and blame the ongoing war on Ukraine. He did the former, including in territories his troops don’t control. But he didn’t do the latter. He has clearly no intention of exiting this war.

I ended that piece last year with the least likely scenario: that “Putin’s long-suffering underlings would stage a coup against him.” No such thing happened, of course. Instead, the political elite rallied around Putin, who continued to be the final arbiter of their squabbling. The spectacularly bizarre Wagner uprising was not, as sometimes suggested, an attack on Putin and his system but rather an attempt by one player to elevate his own position, protect himself from competitors and prevent the integration of his lucrative private army into the state’s military. Its resolution reflects a paramilitarised regime in which the state’s monopoly of violence is threatened but not destroyed.

That analysts, journalists, pundits and scholars have often failed to predict the course of this war isn’t surprising. No predictive science exists to be called on, and historical analogies are a poor guide to the complexities of quickly evolving situations. We should therefore be careful not to get ahead of ourselves. Assumptions that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is already doomed, that the Wagner mutiny is a sign that Putin’s grip on power is seriously shaken, or that Russia’s disintegration is just around the corner — all these might well end up on the long list of wrong predictions this war has generated. They might also turn out to be right, of course, but making policy decisions on the basis of such shaky expectations is foolhardy.

At this stage in the conflict, too much is still up in the air. Some time is still left in this year’s fighting season. The extent to which Ukraine’s armed forces have managed to seriously degrade Russia’s military capability at the frontline might not yet be evident. New weapons are still arriving, bolstering Ukraine’s fighting potential. What’s going on inside the Kremlin is opaque, with outside observers having difficulty discerning whether a serious crisis of power is brewing.

Rather than dreaming of some magical diplomatic solution, a sudden victory by Ukraine or a sudden disintegration of Russia to bring this war to a quick end, supporters of Ukraine’s democracy should prepare themselves for long-term, costly support while carefully and probably secretly planning for all contingencies. •

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Similar scenes were repeated across the peninsula on that Kara Gun (black day), as units of the Soviet internal security forces surrounded Crimean Tatar towns and villages. From there, the captives were sent by rail 3000 kilometres to Central Asia, and mostly unloaded in eastern Uzbekistan. Soon, the entire Crimean Tatar population of nearly 200,000 people had been removed from their homeland.

Nearly 8000 Crimean Tatars died on the weeks-long train journey. The rest were forced to live in abysmal conditions in “special settlements” for the next decade. Tens of thousands — almost half of them, according to the Crimean Tatars — died of hunger, cold or disease during the first few years of exile.

To justify this collective punishment, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin falsely accused the Crimean Tatars of mass collaboration with the Nazi occupation, which had just ended. It’s true that some Tatars did collaborate — as others had in many places during the war — but many more fought bravely in the Red Army and partisan units. Six received Hero of the Soviet Union medals, equivalent to a Victoria Cross.

Shevkiye’s father Dzhemil was one of the men still with the Red Army at the front, fighting the same Nazis his people were accused of aiding.

A more likely explanation for the Soviet move is that the paranoid Stalin wanted to clear his country’s borderlands of Turkic or Islamic peoples in advance of a possible war with Turkey (which never happened). The Crimean Tatars were one of many peoples from the country’s periphery considered suspect and transported en masse to Central Asia or Siberia: others included Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Meskhetian Turks, Balkars and Karachai, as well as ethnic Koreans, Volga Germans and Finns.

The Crimean Tatars’ forced exile was but the latest chapter in a poorly known story that is as bleak and tragic as those experienced by many indigenous peoples following conquest and colonisation. It has rightly been described as genocide, not least by the Russian parliament in the heady, democratic days of 1991. The Tatars’ tale forms a crucial backdrop to understanding the current war in Ukraine, and its possible resolution.

That war really began when Russia invaded Crimea in February 2014. Troops in unmarked uniforms, dubbed “little green men,” fanned out from Russia’s Black Sea Naval Base in Sevastopol (leased from Ukraine) and seized key government buildings and installations. A few weeks later, after a sham referendum, Russia annexed the peninsula. It has been under occupation ever since.

Since Ukraine blunted Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, a big question hangs over whether Ukraine can mount a successful counteroffensive and go as far as retaking Crimea. And if it can’t, will it have to give up Crimea as part of a peace deal? The Tatars’ fate, as an indigenous people recognised by Ukraine and internationally, must be considered in such calculations.

Vladimir Putin portrayed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 as the long-awaited and rightful “return” of the peninsula to its proper home. “In the minds of people,” he said, “Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia.” But that was pure fantasy, akin to saying that Australia — or the Irish Republic — always was and will be British.

In fact, Putin’s was the second Russian annexation of Crimea. The first was in 1783, not long before Arthur Phillip’s First Fleet landed on Gadigal country in Sydney Cove. The first Russian annexation followed a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire, whose overlordship was acknowledged by the Tatars’ Crimean Khanate, a state with a rich culture dating back to 1441.

The Crimean Khan’s palace, at Bakhchysarai, circa 1840, as painted by the Swiss-born Italian artist Carlo Bossoli. Wikimedia

Tsar Catherine’s 1783 annexation breached a treaty with the Ottomans that had left Crimea independent, just as the 2014 annexation violated treaties that pledged to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and recognised Crimea as part of Ukraine.

Before the 1783 takeover, the Crimean Tatars formed the vast majority of the peninsula’s population, with hardly a Russian in sight. The core group was made up of Turkic-speaking Kipchaks, who had settled before the Mongol-Tatar conquest in the thirteenth century, which gave them their name. (Crimea comes from a Turkic word Qirim, meaning moat or fortification.) But many descendants of invaders and settlers over nearly two millennia — Scythians, ancient Greeks, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Byzantines, Genoese, Venetians and others — had merged to form the Tatar ethnicity.

After the takeover, the new Russian masters turned Tatar peasants into serfs, confiscated communal lands, and destroyed centuries-old mosques and bazaars. Almost half the Tatar population left after Tsar Alexander II blamed them for Russia’s defeat in the Crimean war and called for their removal from the peninsula in 1857. Their share of the population fell from nearly 80 per cent in 1850 to around a third by 1900, then to less than 20 per cent by the outbreak of the second world war.

A sense of Tatar nationhood nevertheless put down strong roots. Soon after the 1917 October Revolution in Petrograd, an elected Tatar assembly  proclaimed a Crimean People’s Republic with a vision of a multiethnic “Switzerland” for the region. Its national congress, the Qurultay, was elected by universal suffrage, with women able to vote — a first in the Muslim world and ahead of many Western countries. But the Crimean Republic was suppressed by Bolsheviks, who had emerged as the victors after Russia’s three years of bitter civil war.

Soviet Russia’s first leader, Vladimir Lenin, saw the need to gain the loyalty of the diverse nations of the vast Soviet Union by encouraging their cultures and inclusion in government. Under this “indigenisation” policy, Crimea became an autonomous republic subordinate to the Russian Republic, with Tatars taking leading roles. The communists promoted Crimean Tatar schools, theatres and publishing. Stalin’s purges and forced collectivisation of farms took their toll in Crimea as elsewhere, but Tatars’ sense of nationhood was further cemented.

Following the 1944 deportation, however, evidence of the Crimean Tatars’ presence was largely wiped out. Authorities changed upwards of 2000 Tatar names for towns and villages to Russian names. Shevkiye Dzhemileva’s village of Ayserez was renamed Mezhdurechye (“between the rivers”). The influx of Russian and Ukrainian migrants means that more than 90 per cent of all the current Slavic residents of Crimea now come from families who arrived after the Tatars’ expulsion. Stalinist officials explicitly sought to make “a new Crimea with its own Russian form.”

Deported Crimean Tatars working in a logging camp in Siberia in 1952. Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance/Wikimedia

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Crimean Tatars were banned from returning to their homelands, unlike most of the other Soviet “punished peoples,” such as the Chechens and other Tatar populations, who were fully rehabilitated. The Crimean Tatars embarked on a thirty-five-year campaign for the right to return, the most concerted movement of dissent in the history of the Soviet Union.

The Tatars defied the regime’s efforts to make them assimilate with other Turkic and Muslim peoples in Central Asia. Although it was a thoroughly nonviolent movement, jail sentences were handed out to hundreds of activists. Its foremost leader was Shevkiye’s baby brother, Mustafa Dzhemilev, six months old at the time of the deportation. Dzhemilev was a veritable Nelson Mandela of the movement, imprisoned six times and undertaking a 303-day hunger strike.

This struggle forged an even stronger national identity centred on the trauma of the Sürgünlik (exile) and a yearning for the lost homeland. Other displaced peoples have trod a similar path, including the Jews after the Shoah and the Palestinians following the Nakba (Catastrophe).

The Tatars finally won the right to return in 1989, just as the democratic reforms unleashed by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev were taking off. Crimea had long before become part of Ukraine, transferred from the Russian republic to Kyiv by Stalin’s heirs under Nikita Khrushchev in 1954.

When Ukraine became independent in 1991 many Crimean Tatars fulfilled their dream of returning to the peninsula. The 2001 Ukrainian census (the most recent) recorded some 240,000 Tatars, or 12 per cent of its population. Many faced numerous obstacles, however, and ended up in poverty, living in shantytowns and unable to reclaim their families’ former houses.

Yet the Crimean Tatars made progress. In 2001 the Ukrainian parliament enacted a consultative role for their representative body, the Mejlis, giving it a status similar to that proposed for Australia’s Voice to Parliament. They became ardent supporters of the newly independent Ukrainian state.

Fifty-six per cent of Crimean residents had supported leaving the Soviet Union in the 1991 independence referendum. Opinion polls over several years leading up to the 2014 annexation showed well under half in favour of leaving Ukraine and joining Russia.

Russia’s sham referendum just eighteen days before the 2014 annexation claimed that a wildly implausible 96 per cent of voters wanted to join Russia.  But even if there were now a majority preferring Moscow over Kyiv, the real history of Crimea undermines any Russian claims to the peninsula based on population. The Russian majority was created on the blood, bones and tears of the Crimean Tatars.

For the Tatars, Russia’s occupation has brought back the bad old days. The United Nations and other organisations have documented arbitrary detentions, torture, expulsions and harassment of Crimean Tatar (and ethnic Ukrainian) activists and protesters. Many have fled Crimea, and Tatar leaders claim that hundreds of thousands of Russians have moved in, contrary to international law on occupied territories.

Muslim communities have been attacked and religious literature burned. Members of the remaining Crimean Tatar population have been pressured to renounce their Ukrainian citizenship. Tatar-language media outlets have been denied re-registration. Tatars have also been subject to forced mobilisation into the Russian army, a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Russian authorities outlawed the Tatar Mejlis as an “extremist” organisation in 2016. The International Court of Justice upheld a challenge to this ban in 2017, but Russia has ignored the verdict.

Ukraine’s much-anticipated counteroffensive during the northern summer will be crucial to its chances of pushing Russian forces out of all or most of its territory. Even if Ukraine succeeds in the east and south, though, Crimea could be a much harder nut to crack. Some fear that Putin’s prestige is so tied up with his seizure of Crimea that he might resort to nuclear weapons rather than lose it.

With such concerns in mind, some pundits argue that Ukraine should or will be forced to make a deal in which Crimea is handed to Russia. But the permanent cession of Crimea would simply be a reward for aggression, an outcome that 141 countries in the UN have already rejected, affirming that “no territorial acquisition resulting from the use of force can be recognised as legal.”

Were Crimea to stay under Russian occupation, either permanently or in a Cyprus-like frozen conflict, it would be a dagger pointed at Ukraine. Its protected position makes it an ideal launchpad for renewed invasions and threatens Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea.

Practical geography also explains why Crimea’s future outside Ukraine would be difficult, as Khrushchev recognised in 1954. The largely arid peninsula relies on water pumped by North Crimea Canal, 100 kilometres from the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River, which supplied 85 per cent of its fresh water before 2014.

The canal’s flow was cut after the annexation, causing severe shortages, but then restored after the 2022 invasion of southern Ukraine launched from Crimea; along with creating a “land bridge” to Russia, the canal was undoubtedly an objective of the invasion. That link was highlighted again by the recent destruction of the Kakhovka dam, which controls the flow to the canal.

An equally strong argument against Russian control is the fate of the Crimean Tatars. After overcoming dispossession, deportation and genocide to slowly re-establish themselves in their homeland, they fear being left once again under the thumb of a Moscow regime they view as a longstanding oppressor.

Are they to be cast aside again in the interests of realpolitik? Should not indigenous people have a casting vote on the fate of their homeland? In the words of Shevkiye’s granddaughter, Elmaz Asan, “Crimea is no bargaining chip in a geopolitical game; it is my homeland and I will not give it up, just like my ancestors did not.” •

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Wasserstein has poured an extraordinary amount of research into this book. The bibliography lists thirty-four archives in seven countries (Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Israel, Britain and the United States) alongside oral history interviews, written testimonies, websites, unpublished doctoral dissertations, official publications from Austria, Britain, the United States and the Vatican, and a long list of published books and articles. These materials were assembled, read and digested over three decades of “digging ever deeper into what turned out to be an immense historical quarry.”

During his research, the historian built up “vast data banks of official records, newspaper dispatches, census materials, registers of births, marriages and deaths, electoral results, medical reports, maps and photographs, as well as meteorological, geological, ecological, ornithological, architectural, judicial, military, ecclesiastical and every other category of information I could find.”

Wasserstein’s biographical database alone includes information about “over seventeen thousand persons” who once lived in the small Galician town of Krakowiec (pronounced Krah-KOV-yets), the place where his grandparents were born and where, together with their daughter, they were shot at the end of the second world war.

With all this material, he could have produced a turgid multi-volume history of the town of his ancestors. At the very least, he could have written one of those doorstoppers commercial publishers somehow believe “the general public” has time to read. Thankfully, however, he has instead written a short and eminently readable account.

Wasserstein’s readers might recently have encountered Krakowiec — or Krakovets, as it is called today in Ukrainian — just across the border from Poland, in reporting about the refugee crisis created by Russia’s aggression. Founded sometime in the early fourteenth century, the town started life as a frontier settlement of the Kingdom of Poland. When Poland was partitioned in 1772, it became part of the Austrian-ruled Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. As it grew and became more prosperous, it turned from a Polish settlement into an increasingly Jewish town — a shtetl.

The Jewishness of the town was typical. In Galicia, landowners tended to be Polish aristocrats, the peasants were mostly Ruthenians (some of whom, by the nineteenth century, began to call themselves “Ukrainians”), and the town dwellers — tradesmen, tavern keepers, money lenders, and shop owners — were Jews. The division of labour was both functional and conflictual: its violent potential would be enhanced in the age of nationalism, racism and total war.

Wasserstein uses the history of this interaction between Poles, Ruthenians and Jews — and eventually a variety of invading military forces — to situate his own family’s history. He is not the first historian of East European Jewish heritage to embark on such a project. Shimon Redlich, in Together and Apart in Brzezany (2002), was among the earliest; most recently, that celebrated historian of the Holocaust, Omer Bartov, did something similar for another Galician town, Buczacz, in Anatomy of a Genocide (2019).

These accounts belong to a broader but relatively new genre of history writing: the transnational history of Eastern Europe. In books like Sketches from a Secret War (2005) and The Red Prince (2010), Timothy Snyder used the fate of individuals to chart new historical grounds between established national narratives. In A Biography of No Place (2005), Kate Brown presented an intimate portrait of how the borderland between Poland and Russia became a “Soviet heartland.”

At times of war, when national narratives are hardening, such books provide important correctives between and beyond national and nationalist history-telling. In each of them, the first world war plays a pivotal role.

As happened elsewhere in the region, that war came to Krakowiec as “a sudden, direct, and shattering blow.” The “unrelieved terror and carnage” it unleashed lasted not just four but seven years: it prompted the dissolution of both the Austro-Hungarian and the Romanov empires, and transformed seamlessly into a civil war and wars between successor states over real estate and the peoples of the fallen empires.

These years left “a residue of vicious collective suspicions and hatreds,” writes Wasserstein. “Ordinary human relationships collapsed into dog-eat-dog ruthlessness. The people of Krakowiec were plunged overnight into a dark realm. Their world would never be the same again.”

In this maelstrom, all sides distrusted the Jews: the Austrians no less than the Poles (who were soon in charge of their own state); the Russians of the Tsar no less than the Red Cavalry that came later from Soviet Russia to “liberate” the region from the “Polish lords” and the “capitalists” (the Jewish shopkeepers, mill owners and money lenders). Although the revolutionary Ukrainian state, formed in 1917 and declared independent in 1918, was originally committed to multi-ethnicity, the troops of the Ukrainian republic were soon engaged in pogroms just like everybody else.

Only the Germans, despite the harshness of their occupation in 1918, were not known for anti-Jewish excesses — a perverse legacy that convinced some locals two decades later that the stories of Nazi atrocities were Soviet propaganda and there was no reason to flee.

Eventually, the newly established Polish republic won out over its Ukrainian and Soviet Russian competitors. The Treaty of Riga of 1921 divided the Ukrainian state between victorious Poland and defeated Russia, and made Krakowiec Polish yet again. It would remain so until 1939, when Poland was invaded, first (on 1 September) by the Germans from the west and then (on 17 September) by the Soviets from the east. Krakowiec ended up on the Soviet side of the border and was integrated into Soviet Ukraine.

What followed would change the face of Krakowiec even more dramatically than had the first world war and the ensuing civil and inter-state wars. Stalin’s police went after political enemies of the Soviets as well as “class enemies.” Many of them were Polish, of course, but also Jewish: a shopkeeper, a factory owner, even the operator of an export business for Galician eggs (which were shipped to Germany and as far as England) were “capitalists” in Soviet eyes, particularly if they “exploited” (employed) others to do some of the work.

Many Jewish entrepreneurs were arrested and their families deported to the Soviet hinterland. Perversely, this saved many of them: life in Stalin’s concentration camp state was less lethal than being Jewish under the Nazis.

When the Germans invaded in the summer of 1941 they brought with them the genocidal Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that systematically murdered Jews. They had help from Ukrainian nationalists who had become inspired by fascism, like the radical right everywhere. An increasingly bitter four-way struggle developed between these radical Ukrainians, the Polish underground Home Army, German counterinsurgency troops and Soviet partisans, with Jews caught between all fronts. When the Red Army liberated Krakowiec in May 1944, only one Jew emerged from his hiding place. Of the 104,700 Jews who had lived in Krakowiec before the war, only 1689 survived.

Wasserstein’s grandparents, Berl and Czarna, and his aunt Lotte had originally escaped deportation to a ghetto and then the ghetto’s “liquidation.” But the Ukrainian neighbour who had sheltered them for a year eventually gave them up. The Nazis shot them in April 1944, just three months before the Red Army arrived.

Why and how the Wassersteins found themselves in Krakowiec when the war broke out, and why Wasserstein’s father Abraham (“Addi”) escaped their fate, is a history in itself.

A Small Town in Ukraine begins with the deportation of Berl and Addi from Berlin in October 1938, part of a mass expulsion of Ostjuden (“eastern Jews”) from Nazi Germany. Berl had been sixteen when the first world war came to his native Krakowiec. Like many Galician Jews, he and his family fled the advancing Russian army in 1914, eventually moving to Vienna, capital of the Habsburg empire, of which they were loyal subjects.

Perhaps trying to evade military service, Berl kept moving, first to Holland, then to Germany, where he married Czarna Laub, who also hailed from Krakowiec. The couple settled first in Frankfurt and then in Berlin, where Berl built a business producing raincoats. Neither he nor his wife ever became German citizens, but their children grew up speaking German rather than Polish or Yiddish. Nevertheless, for the Nazis after 1933, they were aliens in two senses: Polish refugees and Jews. The deportation of this group in 1938 marked one step in the radicalisation of anti-Jewish policies that would culminate in genocide.

Thus, the Wassersteins were forced back to the provincial Krakowiec they had worked so hard to escape. Berl was allowed a short visit to Berlin to collect the women of the family and liquidate his assets under rules that effectively meant confiscation. Addi, equipped with false papers, managed to travel through Germany, ostensibly en route to Latin America. He arrived in time to say farewell to his sister and parents at the Eastern Railway Station in Berlin. He would never see them again.

Like the family of historian Richard Pipes, who would do so a little later and under somewhat more adventurous conditions, he then moved on to Italy. When Germany went to war with Poland shortly after Addi arrived in Rome, Mussolini’s government suspended tourist visas. Eventually he managed to reach Palestine via Turkey. His survival — the result of quick decisions and chance encounters — was little short of a miracle.

Wasserstein’s book ends with an account of his own travels to Krakowiec after the fall of the Soviet Union and his deeply ambiguous encounter with contemporary Ukraine. The once multi-ethnic Krakowiec, now Krakovets, has been transformed beyond recognition. The Nazis destroyed the Jews, and a postwar, state-led campaign of ethnic cleansing in the border regions moved Ukrainians from Poland to the Soviet Union, and Poles and the few surviving Jews in the other direction. Today, the town is a thoroughly Ukrainian settlement.

Popular memories there diverge sharply from those Wasserstein reconstructs in his book. The town was the birthplace not only of Wasserstein’s grandfather but also of Roman Shukhevych, a controversial Ukrainian national hero. He served under the Germans during the second world war before deserting to fight his own war once it became clear the Nazis would lose. Among other deeds, he commanded a German-controlled unit that “shot all the Jews we encountered” in at least two villages, according to one of his subordinates. In the postwar years he fought a guerilla war against the Soviet occupiers until his death in battle in 1950.

Today’s Krakovets not only has a monument to its questionable hero; the school Berl Wasserstein attended is named after Shukhevych as well, as is a street.

Wasserstein completed A Small Town in Ukraine just as Russia attacked the country early last year. At a time when shades of grey seem to have vanished, when intellectuals are called on to unequivocally condemn “NATO expansion” as the source of the war or throw their lot in behind Ukraine, defender of freedom and democracy, he carves out a third position.

His feelings, he writes, are “mixed.” He shares “the general abhorrence at Russian aggression and brutality” and notes that “Russian claims about ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine are outrageous black propaganda.” Ukraine today, he notes correctly, “is a democracy, albeit a fragile one.” At the same time, he is filled with “unease” at the prospect of a Ukrainian victory parade “past the garlanded statue of Roman Shukhevych” on the square in which the town’s Jews were assembled for deportation.

The glorification of Shukhevych and his comrades from the second world war, Wasserstein warns, is not “harmless exuberance.” Collective identities based on false history “are inherently contaminated and potentially dangerous.” His book is the very opposite of such mythologies: a thoughtful exploration of a painful past that lives on in the present. •

A Small Town in Ukraine: The Place We Came From, the Place We Went Back To
By Bernard Wasserstein | Allen Lane | $35 | 320 pages

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Over the following two years, NATO and the German government stuck to their guns, while the German peace movement kept growing. Even larger demonstrations were held in June 1982 and October 1983, but to no avail. In November 1983 the Bundestag consented to the stationing of additional nuclear missiles on West German soil.

The Greens, who earlier that year had entered federal parliament for the first time, naturally opposed the measure. So did the Social Democrats, even though their own Helmut Schmidt, toppled as chancellor by the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl in October 1982, had defied the mass protests in 1981 and 1982 and was one of the staunchest advocates of the Pershings’ deployment in Germany. After the vote, the peace movement faltered, but the Greens, whom it had nurtured and who identified as its parliamentary wing, have remained in the Bundestag ever since.

The record numbers mobilised by peace activists in the early 1980s were surpassed twenty years later, when more than half a million protesters took to the streets of Berlin in February 2003 to demand a peaceful resolution to the conflict between the United States and Iraq. Again, the protests failed to alter the resolve of the decision-makers. The following month, the United States, supported by some of its allies (but not France and Germany), invaded Iraq. But the widespread sense of outrage soon dissipated.

Another twenty years on, Germany is again said to be witnessing a massive groundswell for peace. A prominent figure in the left-wing Die Linke party, politician Sahra Wagenknecht, called “Uprising for Peace,” the rally in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate she co-organised on 25 February, “the opening salvo of a new, powerful peace movement.”

Hundreds of thousands of people did indeed demonstrate in Berlin for an end of the war in Ukraine, but that was more than a year ago, in late February 2022. According to the police, Wagenknecht’s rally attracted a mere 13,000 protesters. The media nevertheless paid as much attention to it as they had to the February 2022 crowds, perhaps in the expectation that Wagenknecht’s prediction might come true — or maybe in response to her claim that the public broadcasters and mainstream newspapers overwhelmingly supported an escalation of the war and were trying to silence the views of the majority of Germans.

Both Berlin rallies, a year apart, were calling for peace in Ukraine, but they could not have been more different. In 2022, just three days after Russia intensified its undeclared war against its neighbour by launching a large-scale invasion, the demonstrators were demanding that Russia stop its aggression. They were waving yellow-and-blue flags and professing their solidarity with the people of Ukraine. Last month, Wagenknecht and her co-organisers asked participants not to carry national symbols, but while no Ukrainian flags were on view, some of the protesters came armed with the horizontally striped white-blue-red ensign of the Russian Federation.

In 2022, the overwhelming message, directed at Russia’s Vladimir Putin, was “Stop the war!” A year later, demonstrators demanded that Germany and its NATO allies stop supplying arms to Ukraine — in the expectation that once Ukraine was left to its own devices, Volodymyr Zelenskyy would have to sue for peace. Both crowds were a diverse lot — and included veterans of the German peace movement of the 1980s — but last month’s also featured prominent representatives of the extreme right, such as Jörg Urban, the leader of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in Saxony, and the far-right publisher Jürgen Elsässer. Wagenknecht didn’t mind: everybody is welcome at our rally, she said, provided they sincerely “ehrlichen Herzens,” want to call for peace and negotiations.

Last month’s rally was prompted by a change in government policy. In late January, after months of procrastination and debate, Germany agreed to supply fourteen Leopard 2 A6 tanks to Ukraine and allow other countries to export the German-made tank to help Ukrainians repel the Russian invaders. The Leopard is considered one of the world’s best battle tanks, and Ukraine had long demanded that its allies make this particular model available.

Germany had already delivered other military hardware to Ukraine, including thirty Gepard self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, but had shied away from supplying tanks that might enable Kyiv’s forces to go on the counteroffensive and perhaps even carry the war into Russia. And the Scholz government didn’t want to be seen to make available weaponry of a kind that the United States was keeping back.

Because of a widespread wariness about German involvement in armed conflicts, it took a while for the government to supply Ukraine with any weapons at all. Even after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support for the separatists in the Donbas, the Merkel government categorically ruled out arming Ukraine.

Visiting Eastern Ukraine in May 2021, Greens co-leader Robert Habeck suggested that Germany should enable Ukraine to defend itself against the pro-Russian separatists. He didn’t have in mind tanks or heavy artillery; at most, he was referring to weapons that could be used to shoot down drones. He was roundly criticised, not only by the Merkel government but also by prominent members of his own party. With a national poll looming, he backtracked.

After Merkel’s defeat in September 2021 the new government of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats initially maintained its predecessor’s approach to Russia. In spite of American misgivings, Scholz and foreign minister Annalena Baerbock of the Greens pushed ahead with the construction of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline and continued to treat Vladimir Putin as if he could be trusted. In January 2022, when defence minister Christine Lambrecht, a Social Democrat, assured Ukraine that it had Germany’s full support, she proved her point by authorising the delivery of 5000 helmets to the Ukrainian army.

After Russia launched its full invasion, Scholz’s government abandoned the fifty-year-old doctrine that precluded weapons being provided to states outside NATO that are involved, or likely to be involved, in military conflicts. As Germany’s allies began talking about arming Ukraine with artillery, however, Lambrecht agreed only to dispatching bazookas to Kyiv. Much like the 5000 helmets, the offer didn’t seem overly generous: the weapons had been inherited by the Bundeswehr from its East German counterpart, the GDR’s National People’s Army, in 1990.

Over the twelve months since then, Scholz and his defence minister have appeared to be dragged kicking and screaming towards ramping up Germany’s military support, with pressure piled on by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his outspoken ambassador to Berlin, the Polish government, the opposition Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats’ coalition partners, the Greens and the Free Democrats.

Things changed when Lambrecht was replaced by another Social Democrat, Boris Pistorius, in mid January. Once the US agreed to supply M1 Abrams tanks, which American generals consider unsuitable for the conditions in Ukraine, Germany finally decided to deliver a very limited number of battle tanks. Still, the Scholz government is committed to treading as carefully as possible, even if that’s not how its actions were perceived by those attending last month’s rally in Berlin. They were convinced that Scholz had joined the chorus of warmongers and that it might only be a matter of time until Germany crosses another red line and arms Ukraine with fighter planes, making a third world war a realistic prospect.

A couple of weeks before last month’s rally, Wagenknecht and Alice Schwarzer, a faded icon of the German women’s movement, published a manifesto on the petition website Change.org. Its opening paragraph reads:

Today (10 February 2023) is the 352nd day of the war in Ukraine. So far, more than 200,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians have been killed. Women have been raped, children frightened, an entire people traumatised. If the fighting continues unabated, Ukraine will soon be a depopulated, ravaged country. And also in Europe many people are scared of an escalation of the war. They fear for their and their children’s future.

There are two reasons why it might be easy to dismiss the manifesto. One is its language. While the text acknowledges that the “Ukrainian population” — not “Ukraine,” nor the “Ukrainian people” — was “brutally attacked by Russia,” it fails unambiguously to identify victims and perpetrators. The grammatical passive voice in the first paragraph obscures the indisputable fact that women in Ukraine were raped by Russian soldiers. Civilians died in Ukraine rather than in Russia.

Wagenknecht and Schwarzer claim that Ukraine can’t win the war and that it therefore makes little sense to prolong the hostilities. They say that each day the war goes on costs up to a thousand lives and brings the world closer to a third world war, which would be fought with nuclear weapons.

The manifesto calls for immediate negotiations to facilitate a ceasefire — because that’s what half of Germany’s population wants. Such negotiations, Wagenknecht and Schwarzer suggest, would require compromises on both sides. It is hard to imagine what a Russian compromise would look like, or how the government in Kyiv could agree to anything but a withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory (or at least from that part occupied after 24 February 2022).

The other reason why the manifesto lacks credibility has to do with the ulterior motives of one of its authors. It’s no secret that Wagenknecht wants to leave Die Linke (as her husband and closest political ally, former Social Democrats leader Oskar Lafontaine, has already done) and form a new party. She is hoping that enough of those currently voting for either Die Linke or the AfD would support her brand of populism and push a new party over the 5 per cent threshold designed to keep minor players out of the Bundestag.

The slogan “Peace with Russia!” would appeal to many voters, particularly in East Germany, as would two other causes currently championed by the AfD but also close to Wagenknecht’s heart: “Close the Borders!” and “War on Wokeness!” The manifesto and the rally were thinly disguised means of gauging support for a new party.

The Change.org petition was endorsed by sixty-nine prominent Germans, most of them writers, academics or actors. Many of them would have written a very different text but felt strongly enough about the manifesto’s key message to sign it. They include, for example, Margot Käßmann, a former leader of Germany’s Lutheran Church. She doesn’t want Germany to provide any more arms to Ukraine because she is convinced that they would inevitably “escalate, extend and broaden the war, and that fears of a nuclear war are not completely unfounded.” When asked how she imagines negotiations would be initiated and proceed, she said that she wasn’t an expert on diplomacy.

Another signatory is the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, who suspects that the war is the result of a US ploy to shore up its global hegemony at the expense of Europe. Like many others who subscribe to the sentiments of the manifesto, he is convinced that his views have not been sufficiently aired by Germany’s public broadcasters and the press — or worse: “The government is readying the tools to unleash the police and, in particular, the security services on anyone who doubts the wisdom of pledging full-scale support to the ultranationalist government of Ukraine and the Biden administration,” he predicted in a recent interview.

But while Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s “Manifesto for Peace” and some of the arguments put forward by its prominent supporters are unconvincing, the manifesto can’t be readily discounted. That’s not least because around three-quarters of a million people have already signed it. It has in fact attracted more signatures than any other German petition on Change.org.

The support for the manifesto also reflects widely shared views and sentiments. According to a YouGov poll conducted last month, 51 per cent of Germans believe that their country’s supply of arms to Ukraine makes it a belligerent. Another survey, in early March, found that 31 per cent of respondents think that Germany’s support for Ukraine goes too far.

I didn’t sign Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s manifesto, nor do I believe that Germany’s support for Ukraine goes too far. But I sympathise with some of those calling for renewed diplomatic efforts to stop the killing. And I have misgivings about the hawkish rhetoric of Ukraine’s German supporters.

The demands that Germany provide more, and more sophisticated, military hardware to Ukraine is often linked to the mantra that Ukraine must win the war. That aligns with the demand that Russia must lose the war, but is quite different from the suggestion that Ukraine must be put in a position where it won’t lose the war. I cannot see why a defeat of Russia should be a necessary prerequisite for a Russian withdrawal and an acknowledgment that Ukraine’s borders must be respected. Besides, it is hard to imagine Russia, the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, conceding outright defeat.

I am astounded by the uncritical embrace of NATO by erstwhile pacifists, particularly among the Greens, as if the US-led alliance were a peacekeeping force on a humanitarian mission. The idea that its expansion, be it eastwards or northwards, would only be in the interest of global peace or that NATO is an alliance designed to promote democracy strikes me as preposterous. The Kurdish exiles extradited from Sweden to Turkey to facilitate Sweden’s joining of the alliance could testify that NATO doesn’t have a problem with autocratic regimes among its members, let alone dictatorial regimes outside NATO. That is if they live to tell the tale.

The forgetfulness of particularly those hawks who are recent converts baffles me. There have been numerous violations of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter — namely that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations” — since 1945. The US has been a regular culprit. Past American invasions should not serve as excuses for Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity — not just since February 2022 but since 2014 — but a picture that casts the US as a defender of the UN Charter is plainly wrong.

Similarly, while moves to collect evidence in order to eventually charge the Russian leadership with crimes against humanity deserve all the support they can get, it’s worth recalling that the US is among the countries that don’t recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which in an ideal world would try Putin and his generals.

The forgetfulness of Ukraine’s hawkish supporters also extends to other aspects of postwar history. They often imply that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unprecedented. It’s not. Arguably, Russia would not have dared to invade Ukraine if the West had taken a strong stance against its invasion of Georgia, its bombing of Grozny, its occupation of the Crimea and its intervention in Syria (including the bombing of civilian targets in Aleppo).

Nor is Russia the only country that has tried to bomb a European country into submission. The Greens, in particular, ought to recall NATO’s 1999 intervention in the Kosovo war and its bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which then foreign minister Joschka Fischer defended by comparing what was happening in Kosovo to Auschwitz. At the time, many Greens quit the party in protest against the decision to endorse Fischer’s stance.

Incidentally, a closer look at what happened in 1999 might be instructive in more than one sense. At rallies against the NATO bombing, left-wing pacifists marched side by side with Serbian ultranationalists, admirers of the far-right Chetniks who fought against Nazi Germany (but also against Croats, Bosniaks and Tito’s partisans).

The amnesia that characterises the current debate between hawks and doves also extends to other recent conflicts. According to the UN Development Program, the war in Yemen had caused 377,000 deaths by the end of 2021. Last year, the German government authorised arms sales to Saudi Arabia, one of the parties to that war. So much for the claim that the decision to supply arms to Ukraine has been unparalleled.

And what about Scholz’s Zeitenwende, the turning point in German policy that he announced in the Bundestag on 27 February 2022? He used Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a pretext for a €100 billion funding boost for the armed forces.

Finally, I am wary of the expectation that support for Ukraine and its people must be accompanied by an endorsement of Ukrainian nationalism. At rallies in support of Ukraine I am uneasy when the Ukrainian national anthem is sung (which invariably happens during such events), not because I have anything against that anthem in particular, but because occasions when the Australian or German national anthems are sung make me similarly uncomfortable.

Similarly, demands that cultural events involving Russian artists ought to be cancelled or boycotted, or that the reading of Russian literature ought to be discouraged are not just plain stupid but also reek of a nationalism that is at the heart of many of the ills of today’s world, including armed conflict and forced displacement.

Some of those who signed Wagenknecht’s manifesto may have done so because they are critical of NATO, object to US foreign policy past and present, or believe that we eventually ought to overcome an international system based on nation-states. None of these beliefs is incompatible with empathy, and indeed solidarity, with a people attacked by a ruthless invader. Yet in many statements about the war by self-declared pacifists, solidarity is in short supply.

Take, for example, an open letter to Olaf Scholz by the mayor and twenty-one of thirty-four local parliamentarians of Freital, a town of 40,000 in the East German state of Saxony. “As a sovereign state, Germany, the federal government and you as chancellor have to make sovereign decisions for the benefit of the German people,” they tell Scholz, claiming that instead his government’s policies further the interests of “third parties.” Referring twice to “Leid,” meaning pain or suffering, they write that “our painful past” ought to teach Germans that the supply of weapons to Ukraine will simply produce further, indescribable suffering.

A generous interpretation would assume that unlike the historical Leid, “indescribable suffering” refers to the current and future experiences of people in Ukraine. According to a less generous reading, the latter is something likely to be experienced by “us,” once the delivery of tanks and other arms to Ukraine ignites a war fought with nuclear weapons.

Such a reading is supported by another statement in the letter. The authors claim that they are not prepared, as Germans, “to be involved in a third world war or to be made a party to belligerent acts in whatever form, either directly or indirectly.” Already, individuals and businesses are experiencing what they call “unacceptable consequences” — presumably as a result of Germany’s support for Ukraine.

Lacking any explicit reference to Ukrainian victims and Russian perpetrators, and devoid of empathy for the people in Ukraine, the Freital letter captures some of the sentiment fuelling German pacifism. It is not even an extreme example. It doesn’t spell out what many opponents of support for Ukraine are openly saying: that the sanctions against Russia are harming Germany’s economy and have been responsible for energy shortages and rising inflation, and should therefore be withdrawn immediately.

Am I being unfair by quoting a letter written by the members of a local parliament in which the AfD wields a lot of influence? True, regional Saxony is not representative of Germany. Neither is the man I am about to quote, although many Germans would like to think he is. Jürgen Habermas, the nonagenarian philosopher who is arguably Germany’s foremost public intellectual, intervened twice in the public debates about German support for Ukraine, first in May last year, and again after the publication of Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s manifesto, on both occasions by writing an essay for the respected Munich-based broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Habermas names perpetrators and victims. In his first contribution, he endorses Olaf Scholz’s caution rather than arguing against supporting Ukraine. More recently, he has echoed calls for a diplomatic solution and criticised the ramping up of Germany’s military aid for the government in Kyiv. His line of argument is neither simplistic nor rash. But he too seems overly concerned by what the war does to him.

He begins his first article by referring to the representation of the war in the media, which in his view has been influenced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “A Ukrainian president, who knows about the impact of images, is responsible for powerful messages.” He then concedes that notwithstanding this “skilful staging,” “the facts tug at our nerves.” He is concerned about our nerves, rather than about the very real death and destruction represented by such skilfully staged images?

In his second essay, he once more articulates Western sensitivities. “The West has its own legitimate interests and its own obligations,” he writes. Western governments

have legal obligations towards the security concerns of their own citizens and, irrespective of the attitudes of the people in Ukraine, they are morally co-responsible for victims and destruction caused by weapons from the West; therefore, they cannot shift the responsibility for the brutal consequences of an extension of the fighting, which becomes only possible thanks to their military support, to the Ukrainian government.

Although Habermas is ostensibly talking about Western governments, he appears to mean “us.” To use Margot Käßmann’s reading of Habermas’s words: “When we are supplying weapons — that’s something the philosopher Habermas has put very well — we are co-responsible for the dead. That’s not something where we could evade our responsibility.”

Might Käßmann and Habermas feel less strongly about the brutal consequences of a Russian occupation of Ukraine because they wouldn’t be broadcast into their living rooms (with the skilful stager, Zelenskyy, presumably one of the many victims of the Russian “liberators”)?

Habermas might object to Käßmann’s interpretation of his words, and would not want to be associated with either Wagenknecht or the Freital councillors. But he shares with them a call for negotiations and a conviction that such negotiations require the West to scale down, if not halt altogether, its military support for Ukraine. And the clamour for peace, whether in pursuit of cheap Russian gas or out of a desire not to be held morally responsible for the fighting, is informed by egotism.

No obvious middle path exists between abandoning Ukraine and arming the Kyiv government to the extent that its army can inflict a defeat on Russia. That is, if we assume that a solution will depend on what happens on the battlefield.

But the West has two other options. One is to do more to influence countries that have tacitly supported Putin, particularly China and India. The West would have to pay a high price if it wanted China and India to stop buying Russian coal and oil, but until we know the price-tag, it might be worth exploring that option in more detail.

The other option would be to impose meaningful sanctions in the hope that they lead to a coup against Putin. A couple of days ago, the Hamburg state government reported that last year the use of coal in Hamburg’s power stations increased by almost 15 per cent on 2021’s figure. That’s a result of Germany’s attempt to wean itself off Russian gas. But 35 per cent of the coal used in Hamburg last year was imported from Russia. So far, the sanctions are too selective to seriously hurt the Russian economy. In fact Russia’s revenues from selling oil and gas increased by 28 per cent last year.

The global climate might benefit from more wide-ranging sanctions targeting Russian fossil fuels. But any tightening would also hurt those imposing the sanctions, at least initially. Their impact would be grist for the mill for those who claim the price we pay for the war in Ukraine is already too high. The debate would further obscure the fact that whatever inconveniences we experience, and however much our sensitivities are offended, the war’s victims are the people of Ukraine.

German angst, which I discussed in a previous Inside Story essay, is clearly back, and with it the egotism that accompanied it. The current debate would benefit from a less blinkered view of the past, one that is mindful of what happened in Yemen and of Russia’s track record since the early 1990s, of unholy alliances against NATO’s bombing of Belgrade, and of the US’s insistence that its self-appointed role as global sheriff should not be subject to the scrutiny of the International Criminal Court.

It could also be instructive to revisit the peace movement of the 1980s, which is now upheld as exemplary by German pacifists and hawks alike. Then, too, many peace activists took sides in a global conflict pitting the US and its allies against the Soviet Union. Then, too, what mattered most to many of those gathered in Bonn in October 1981 were their own sensitivities, because they imagined themselves as (future) victims. And then, too, the allaying of Germans’ fears did nothing to enhance the safety of people in faraway places. •

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By daylight, the city can feel like its near neighbours, Warsaw and Budapest. Stalinist buildings line the Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main boulevard, and the skyline is punctuated by the golden spires of churches. Dogs wrapped in winter jackets are out for walks, couples stroll hand in hand. But at night, once you realise the street’s illumination comes from the bobbing headlamps of pedestrians and dogs wearing glow-in-the-dark collars, it is impossible to forget the war and how it has transformed this city.

Some of the most visible changes have been to names. Russian places and heroes have been expunged from streets and squares, which have been rebaptised with Ukrainian names that better reflect the national mood. Moskovska Street, named for the Russian capital, has become Kniaziv Ostrozkykh Street, after a branch of Ukrainian medieval nobility; Piterskaya (St Petersburg) Street is now London Street. In their failed attempt to conquer Kyiv, Russia has accelerated the derussification of the city. Globally, news outlets now refer to the Ukrainian-derived “Kyiv” rather than the previously common Russian-language “Kiev.”

While the Russian advance on the capital from the north was repulsed early in the war and the front lines of battle now lie in the east and south of Ukraine, the country remains under indiscriminate attack from the sky. Civilians are at constant risk: reports come in frequently of people killed in their own homes or on streets they have known for decades. Despite a morale-lifting visit this week by US president Joe Biden, residents are tensely awaiting the anticipated anniversary bombardment.

The near-daily alarms have forced mental acrobatics of a variety that I could not previously have envisaged. Each siren that goes off — and activates a flurry of notifications on my phone, this being a truly twenty-first century war — triggers decision-making that feels life-and-death and black-and-white, and yet also very mundane.

When a siren first sounds, it typically indicates that the launch of an offensive airborne attack has been detected. Because Kyiv is in Ukraine’s central heartland, we have a window of opportunity; a heavy pause during which we track the attack’s progress through Twitter feeds and Telegram chats.

There’s usually time for me to finish my shower or brew a thermos of coffee, recognising that these attacks can trigger emergency utility shut-offs. Based on the stream of real-time updates, I decide if I will shelter in my bathroom (the safest place in my apartment, away from external walls) or in the basement shelter across the road.

Some days the attack doesn’t materialise; on others, explosions echo across the city. Later, when our mobile phones buzz to tell us the alert is over, the catch in my throat releases, and everyone moves along with their day.

Resilience is a point of collective pride. The national ballet performs to a full theatre even as the corps is thinned by displacement and enlistment. Weekends see Kyiv’s bars and restaurants packed with patrons toasting to victory (“za peremoga”) before returning home ahead of the curfew. Refusing to be cowed by cuts to electricity, venues are illuminated by candles and fairy lights, and the city hums with generators. People distribute powerbanks among their friends as though sharing cigarettes.

The city’s citizens have fashioned a new normal. Patriotism is in vogue, and Pantone’s freedom blue and energising yellow are the colours of the season. Alongside more conventional military heroes, people honour train conductors and energy workers. One of my favourite cocktail bars shakes a “Ukrainian dream” (rum, baked-apple infused vermouth and bitters) and a “return to the sun” (rum, amaretto, cardamom bitters, vanilla syrup and lemon). They taste of hope, and of supply chains from the West that have not been cut.

No blueprint exists for how best to respond to war; no guidance manual spells out which parts of life one should pause and which continue. I’ve had my hair cut by headtorch swaddled in a blanket in a dark and unheated salon, and attended candlelit concerts with packed audiences. Adaptation is the byword, and a determination that life must go on.

Ukrainians have long known war: their country’s territory has been contested for centuries, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support for breakaway republics in the east have made military offensives and civilian displacement part of the everyday national narrative. But it was the launch of the full-scale invasion on 24 February last year that brought war home. Everyone remembers where they were that day, and in the terrifying weeks afterwards.

Today, Ukrainian colleagues can name the weaponry the country is requesting from its allies as though rattling off a weekly shopping list. They recite casualty statistics and updates on movement in the frontline. They give friendly advice on the nearest bomb shelter when an air-raid siren goes off.

Absorbed in conflict of a scale few imagined, the darkness of Kyiv’s night-time streets goes nearly unmentioned. Between air strikes, the bartenders keep pouring and the musicians keep playing. •

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For NATO, therefore, policy has become risk management. On the one hand, it wants to prevent Ukraine from losing, force Russia to end the attack and deter future aggression in, for instance, the Baltic states. Besides hobbling Moscow with sanctions, this means giving Kyiv the intelligence information and weapons to kill thousands of invading troops and gut the Russian army. On the other hand, it doesn’t want to provoke a catastrophic reaction.

While US, French and British nuclear weapons add to the inherent danger of the crisis, only Russia has been flaunting its arsenal. Its thousands of nuclear warheads, divided between intercontinental range and shorter-range “tactical” weapons, are enough to reduce Europe to ruins, slaughter several million people and shatter civilisation. Even if the Kremlin had remained silent about them, these weapons are an existential menace.

But it has not stayed silent. President Putin, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and the Russian security council’s Dmitry Medvedev allude to the potentially dire nuclear consequences of Western support of Kyiv. Further down the food chain, the state media continues its blood-curdling commentary, in some cases insanely calling for the obliteration of NATO countries.

We don’t know if the Kremlin is bluffing. But three factors seem to give substance to its threats: Putin’s character; the high stakes involved; and Russian military doctrine.

Many say the key to understanding the nuclear risk lies inside Putin’s head. Before he invaded Ukraine a year ago, observers considered him a ruthless but shrewd player of geopolitics; since then, though, he’s simply appeared reckless. And rather than Putin being the leader who has mastered the global chessboard, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US president Joe Biden seem to have Moscow’s measure.

So, we have a frustrated control freak with no conscience and a finger on the nuclear button. Perhaps he’s deploying the “mad man” card, carefully playing his hand to limit Western intervention? Or has he become a rash gambler?

Without a proper psychological assessment and a fly on the wall inside the Kremlin, it’s unclear how far a character assessment can take us. We don’t know how much authority Putin has over Russia’s nuclear forces, with reports saying he shares it with senior officials. And although he licensed the current spate of rabid nationalism, we don’t know how much he now controls it. Still, as far as we can tell, he continues to call the shots.

Another reason the nuclear threat appears credible is the high stakes involved. Russia’s status as a great power and Putin’s survival is said to hinge on victory, or at least avoiding defeat. There’s also an ideological aspect to this, with Putin and nationalist zealots arguing that the war represents a civilisational struggle between righteous Russianness and degenerate Western Satanism. This is just the sort of binary or absolutist framing suited to prepping for an apocalyptic conflict.

Finally, some experts argue Russian military doctrine adds weight to the nuclear threat. In particular, they say the idea of “escalate to de-escalate” gears Russian forces to respond to an imminent decisive defeat of its army, or to conventional air attacks on the Russian homeland, with a limited nuclear strike to compel enemies to back off. (This echoes Washington’s refusal to rule out nuclear first use, and NATO’s cold war strategy of flexible response, which encompassed the concept of nuclear warning shots.)

In other words, the Russian general staff has institutionalised a crossover between large-scale conventional war and scenarios for nuclear strikes. While this doesn’t make it automatic, the potential for escalation is baked into strategy. An extra twist is Moscow’s annexation of about one-fifth of Ukraine, suggesting the conquered regions are now considered part of the homeland and so covered by its nuclear deterrent.

Whatever its end point, the Kremlin’s nuclear threat has so far worked, at least to a degree. Fear of precipitating world war three is the main reason NATO ruled out imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and it helps explain NATO’s initial reluctance to supply long-range artillery and tanks. Today, Western fear of escalation shows in the refusal to supply Kyiv with even longer-range artillery and combat aircraft.

In each case the West has been sensitive to Russia’s supposed “red lines.” NATO has even internalised them as an essential tool for crisis management. The principal red line here separates measures intended to aid Ukraine’s defence from those threatening Russian territory.

As conceptual tools go, red lines appear objective and clear. In practice, though, they have been more subjective and elastic. While there’s still a prohibition on direct NATO combat with Russian forces, everything else has become blurred. This is partly because the distinction between defensive and offensive weapons is largely artificial, depending as much on context as on technical attributes. Even the distinction between defensive and offensive operations can be problematic when the issue is reclaiming lost land.

This matter surfaced in the debate over the supply of tanks. Were the German-manufactured Leopards intended to prevent a Ukraine defeat while the country continued to bleed out, or to aid Ukraine’s victory and put an end to the war? And what would a victory look like?

Eleven months ago, many would have judged fighting the supposedly mighty Russian army to a draw along the current front line as equivalent to a Ukraine win. Today, most Western commentators say victory requires further embarrassing the humbled Russian army and recapturing the territory occupied since February 2022. Kyiv has set the bar higher: pushing the Russian army out of the land seized in 2014.

Hanging over all of this is the future of Crimea. Controversy over the peninsula is set to reshape the debate over red lines, not least in Washington. Kyiv and Moscow are both convinced of their historical and moral right to the place, but Ukraine’s legal claim is far stronger and would provide the basis for Western support of an offensive to expel Russian forces.

A solid legal case is not the same as sensible policy, however. Assuming it could be done, would retaking Crimea be worth a (say) one-in-ten chance of triggering a nuclear holocaust?

The answer is a matter of opinion. It’s interesting that the country most vulnerable to Russian nuclear forces — Ukraine — appears the least concerned. Kyiv is the most hawkish player in the debate about reclaiming Crimea and other lost territories; it seems, on the surface, prepared to pay any price and run any risk.

This is important because, while NATO and Ukrainian interests overlap, they’re not identical. Western commentators often forget to factor in autonomous Ukrainian decision-making, and assume that Kyiv will keep its strategy within guardrails established by outsiders. But while Kyiv has good reasons not to cross its international backers, the war is about Ukraine’s independence, not its subordination to Western interests.

Ukrainians don’t picture the conflict in geopolitical terms. They see what’s right in front of them: Putin’s trashing of their country’s sovereignty and dismissal of its national identity, his willingness to seize as much of their land as he can get away with, the millions of refugees, and the savagery of the Russian army and its mercenary associates. The resulting hatred is not conducive to a restrained response from Kyiv if it identifies an opening for an offensive that sends the occupying force into ignominious retreat. Throwing the Kremlin off balance could well become Kyiv’s aim, even if that disrupts Western ideas of escalation control.

Some people don’t see this as a problem. Social media is full of keyboard warriors wanting to pour weapons into Ukraine as though Russian nuclear weapons don’t exist. Even respected commentators advocate NATO going all-in, paying little regard to the potential nuclear consequences. Some experts advise facing down Putin’s nuclear blustering like we would a schoolyard bully. For these people, Russian huffing and puffing has run into diminishing returns, becoming little more than background noise.

NATO can’t afford to be so cavalier. The consequences of being wrong are too dreadful. So it’s intensely interested in scenarios showing how and when the nuclear threshold might be crossed. Start with a projected Ukrainian counteroffensive that overruns a large part of the Russian army on the border or employs air attacks to strike deep into Russia. This would lift the stakes and speed the pace of events. The resulting strategic adjustments could be hasty and prone to miscalculation, perhaps setting the scene for a limited Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine.

NATO might then respond with direct conventional military intervention. And, almost certainly, once the Kremlin had broken the nuclear taboo, America’s preparations for nuclear war would be ramped up. A different type of escalatory dynamic would pit Moscow against Washington in a starker form of brinkmanship.

Strategists on both sides think deterrence requires convincing the opponent that they won’t back down, that they’re prepared to climb the escalation ladder all the way to large-scale global nuclear war. Adding substance to the idea are elaborate plans matching individual warheads against specific targets. This is a surreal space in which potential casualties are counted in the millions and military officers are drilled in worst-case analysis.

Increased alert levels for Russian and American forces could thus become mutually reinforcing, intensifying fears of surprise attack and inadvertently creating pressure for massive pre-emptive strikes. Misunderstandings and accidents would become more dangerous, perhaps confronting decision-makers in Moscow and Washington with a kill-or-be-killed moment.

This is the apocalyptic picture Putin tries to leverage. But apart from some loose talk, there’s no evidence he actually wants to blow up the world. He probably has serious doubts about “escalate to de-escalate,” not least in terms of cost–benefit calculations. But even if he is, in his private moments, set against radical escalation, the conflict could take on a life of its own. The stresses of responding to pressing events on the ground or in the air above Russia might crowd out yesterday’s assessments. Whatever was in his mind could be altered by unfolding events that can be neither reliably predicted nor easily controlled. He might, at last, have to put up or shut up.

The recognition that the war could turn into a bigger catastrophe has obviously not paralysed the West. Apart from the domestic political price of abandoning Ukraine, NATO is concerned about the harm to global security if it fails to resist territorial expansion underpinned by nuclear threats — harm that includes exposing more countries to Russian, Chinese and North Korean aggression, a rush to proliferation, and the nightmare of normalising nuclear warfare.

During the cold war, Washington refused to intervene in Moscow’s sphere of influence when the Soviet army crushed anti-Russian movements in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). The reason for caution was fear of events spiralling into nuclear annihilation. Today, however, Washington is pushing the envelope by orchestrating military intervention inside the borders of the former Soviet Union, aiming to defeat Russia on its doorstep without tipping it over the edge. Only time will tell if it can master this necessary balancing act. •

The post Pushing the nuclear envelope appeared first on Inside Story.

What attracted less attention was the fact that many of the flag-wavers were members of the Australian chapter of the Night Wolves, a Russian biker gang that combines radical nationalism with paramilitary activities.

In a video of the incident posted by a pro-Putin activist, a prominent member of the Australian Night Wolves wears the gang’s t-shirt emblazoned with a flaming red wolf, a large white “Z” and its motto, “Where We Are, There Is Russia.” He addresses the gang’s leadership in Moscow, shouting “Brother Aleksandr Zaldostanov — greetings from Melbourne!” in Serbian. His next, muffled words, echoed by Srdjan Djokovic, have variously been interpreted as “Long live Russia!” or “Cheers, people!”

It was another small win for the Kremlin’s information warriors. Within a week, the video of this strange performance had notched up 187,000 views on the YouTube channel of the pro-Putin activist, “Aussie Cossack” Simeon Boikov. The content has been widely circulated on the Putin regime’s propaganda platforms, which hailed Srdjan Djokovic as a hero and denounced the Western media for persecuting him for his pro-Russian sympathies.

I have followed the enablers of this incident, the Night Wolves, for many years. My interest was sharpened by my research for a book about the place of a Russian neo-Nazi movement, Russkii Obraz, in the Kremlin’s manipulation of Russian nationalism. For the leader of Russkii Obraz, the Night Wolves were an object lesson in how an extremist movement could win the approval of the regime and carve out a niche in public life.

The Night Wolves represent a minuscule fringe of Australia’s Russian and Serbian communities. But there are sound reasons to be concerned about their activities.

The most obvious is their connection to the Russian state. From their first demonstration alongside neo-Nazi groups outside Sydney’s Russian consulate in 2016, Australia’s Night Wolves have acted as conduits of influence for the Putin regime. They joined Kremlin propagandists in a social media campaign against Aleksei Navalny. They organised screenings of Russian nationalist propaganda at cinemas around the country. And they tried to intimidate an anti-Putin protester outside a Russian consulate.

No less disturbing is the gang’s relationship to their Russian mother organisation, which is connected to the Putin regime on multiple levels. As well as their close links to the security apparatus, the Russian Night Wolves are beneficiaries of extensive state support, ranging from presidential grants to real estate and free advertising. In return for this largesse, they play a major role in the ecosystem of radical nationalist groups that sustains Putin’s regime and its war against Ukraine.

Uniquely among pro-Kremlin nationalists, the Night Wolves have a mass appeal. Their motorbike shows attract large crowds and television audiences with expensively choreographed spectacles combining fireworks, motorcycle stunts and patriotic rock bands. Behind the theatrics, each show presents a narrative about the eternal struggle between Russia’s pure traditions and a demonic monster representing the West.

These warped morality tales reflect the political vision of the gang’s leader, Aleksandr Zaldostanov (“Surgeon”), who makes no secret of his imperialist convictions. He is obsessed with the idea of a “Fifth Empire,” the blueprint for a new totalitarianism proposed by the novelist and neo-Stalinist ideologue Aleksandr Prokhanov. According to Zaldostanov, the Fifth Empire will unite the legacies of four historical Russian empires — from Kievan Rus to Stalin’s USSR — into a new global power under Vladimir Putin.

Underlying this project is the classic fascist dream of a violent, regenerative nationalist revolution. The aim is to save humanity from the moral decadence brought by Western democracy, which Zaldostanov defines as “global Satanism.”

What magnifies the danger of this ideology is the paramilitary force at Zaldostanov’s disposal. The Night Wolves’ business interests include a network of private security companies that employ ex-military and security personnel. The most important is Wolf Holdings of Security Structures, which was sanctioned by the US government in June 2017 for its involvement in the Ukrainian conflict.

These veterans played a conspicuous role in Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, when they operated roadblocks, kidnapped a Ukrainian general, and stormed a naval headquarters.

Later they participated in Putin’s onslaught on southeast Ukraine. They are particularly close to the leadership of the Russian puppet state in Lugansk. A monument to Zaldostanov’s Fifth Empire, titled “A Symbol of the New Russia in the Eyes of the Night Wolves,” stands in front of the Lugansk government headquarters.

The Night Wolves have also helped to project Russian power in Europe and the Balkans. They stage regular “club runs,” long-distance motorcycle rides that serve as rallying points for local nationalists and fuel for Russian propaganda. Their security structures are the backbone of a network of “Volk Systema” martial arts clubs that claim to provide training in special forces combat techniques to police and the armed forces. Investigative reporting in Hungary, a NATO member state, suggested that this poses a real security risk.

One of the Night Wolves’ most audacious interventions was the failed coup in Montenegro on the eve of elections in 2016. A co-founder of the Serbian chapter of the gang testified that Russian intelligence agents arranged for him to visit Moscow, where he was given encrypted telephones and more than US$200,000 for weapons and recruitment.

Today the Night Wolves are deeply implicated in Putin’s war against Ukraine. In April last year, Zaldostanov hailed the invasion as yet another “battle against Satan.” The combatants include the Night Wolves’ own paramilitary unit, Night Wolves Pyatnashka. “These lads came to the Donbass with a clear motivation and an understanding of what is happening here,” writes pro-Kremlin military journalist Pavel Kukushkin. “They didn’t come to take pictures. The boys are fighting like everyone else.”

The Night Wolves’ complicity in Putin’s aggression has not gone unnoticed in the West. As early as December 2014, the US government sanctioned the gang for actions that “threaten the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine.” Canada blacklisted Zaldostanov a few months later. An EU-wide ban was imposed in July last year. It may be time for Australia to open its eyes to the Putinists in our midst. •

The post Putin’s Wolves appeared first on Inside Story.

A couple of days later, a nineteen-year-old from Afghanistan was reported to have badly hurt himself when he tried to climb out of a fifth-floor window of a reception centre for asylum seekers. He had panicked at around 3am when police came to his room to deport him to Croatia, where he had first entered the European Union. His fear may well have originated in experiences he had while passing through that country on the so-called Balkan route from Greece to Germany.

All three people — the two young women from Ukraine and the young man from Afghanistan — have sought refuge in Germany from countries ravaged by war. But while the women are allowed to remain in Germany until at least the end of 2023 without applying for asylum, the nineteen-year-old is prohibited even from seeking protection here. The women are employed and live in private accommodation; the young man was put up, with some 370 others, in a hostel run on behalf of the city of Hamburg.

In both cases, the European Union uses the same term, “solidarity,” to frame its response. Solidarity means that millions of Ukrainians have been allowed to settle temporarily in the twenty-seven EU member countries, and it is also the key concept underlying the EU’s common policy on asylum. But solidarity isn’t the exclusive preserve of the EU: activists campaigning against the deportation of asylum seekers have also assured the young man from Afghanistan of their solidarity.

Over the two centuries since it was first used, the English term solidarity has been “endlessly pliant,” in the words of the Swedish historian of ideas Sven-Eric Liedman. Are we perhaps talking about different kinds of solidarity here that have nothing to do with each other? Not quite. Bear with me, while I take you on a tour of European solidarity.

Solidarity is a buzzword in and around the EU’s headquarters in Brussels. A search of the European Commission’s official website, for instance, yields more than 40,000 hits for the term, and almost 4000 for the more specific “European solidarity.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise, for solidarity has long been deemed a distinguishing attribute of the European project.

The term features more than a dozen times in the Treaty on European Union, which underwrites EU law. In Article 2, the treaty refers to the EU’s foundational values of “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.” “These values,” adds the article, “are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.”

Another key document, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, goes further. In its preamble it lists solidarity as one of four “indivisible, universal values” on which the EU has been founded (the others being human dignity, freedom and equality). The charter helps illuminate the kind of solidarity the drafters of the Treaty on European Union had in mind: the twelve articles in its “Title IV: Solidarity” deal with things like healthcare, workers’ entitlements and social security — that is, with social and economic rather than civil and political rights.

The EU also prides itself on extending its solidarity to other, less fortunate nations. In recent months, Ukraine has been a prominent recipient of European solidarity, and so too have the countries most affected by climate change. At the conclusion of COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen declared the conference to have “opened a new chapter on financing loss and damage” — a reference to Europe’s support for a fund to mitigate the impact of climate change — “and laid the foundations for a new method for solidarity between those in need and those in a position to help.”

Von der Leyen’s rhetoric was echoed by governments that strongly identify with the European project. German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said that “Team Germany” had travelled to Egypt to campaign “for more solidarity with the most vulnerable states.” The EU would like to be seen internationally as a “normative superpower,” a major player whose actions are informed by ethical considerations. Affording solidarity to the weak and poor is as much the result of these considerations as are criticism, censorship and punishment of nation-states whose performance runs counter to the norms and values embraced by the EU.

More important for the EU’s identity than solidarity of, among or for its residents — or solidarity with climate-affected nations or war-torn Ukraine — is the solidarity EU member states extend towards each other. Here the EU’s rhetoric has been more innovative, applying to nation-states a concept that has been more commonly used, as it is in Title V of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, to characterise relationships involving individuals.

References to such intra-EU solidarity appear in foundational texts from the 1950s. One of them — the May 1950 Schuman Declaration, incidentally published on the EU’s website under the heading “70 Years of Solidarity” — is French foreign minister Robert Schuman’s proposal for the EU’s earliest forerunner, a coal and steel community comprising France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Europe, Schumann said, would be “built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.”

Schuman’s idea was picked up the following year in the preamble of the treaty establishing that community, which recognises that “Europe can be built only through practical achievements which will first of all create real solidarity.”

One apparent expression of the solidarity principle is the EU’s system of transfer payments from affluent to poor members. Croatia and Lithuania receive payments amounting to more than 4 per cent of their respective gross domestic products, and Hungary, Greece and Latvia each receive the equivalent of around 3.5 per cent of GDP. Political figures in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and elsewhere might complain that tens of billions of euros are lavished each year on poor cousins in eastern and southeastern Europe — conveniently ignoring the fact that the payments amount to less than half a per cent of the GDP of wealthy member countries — but the system is nevertheless working well.

But those payments don’t prove that the solidarity principle governs relations between member states. To understand how much heed is paid to the principle, we need to look beyond the EU’s routine budget negotiations to what happens in times of crisis.

When Greece was facing national bankruptcy during the eurozone crisis, it expected countries like Germany to cancel its debts (in much the same way as German debts had been cancelled in 1953). But the Tsipras government’s understanding of solidarity couldn’t easily be reconciled with the kind of solidarity promoted by the governments in Berlin, Paris or The Hague. Where the Greeks saw European solidarity as tantamount to debt reduction, the governments of affluent European countries insisted that solidarity involved a corresponding duty — namely, substantial cuts to the Greek budget. German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble famously declared that solidarity was not a one-way street.

When Schäuble’s views eventually prevailed, I wrote in Inside Story that the outcome was “appallingly bad” not just for Greece but also for Europe. I stand by that assessment, not least because the eurozone crisis demonstrated that any aspiration the EU’s leaders may have had for the “real solidarity” envisaged by its founders remained just that: an aspiration. It did not translate into action. Schuman had a valid point when he suggested that inter-state solidarity doesn’t miraculously materialise but rather is created by means of “concrete achievements.”

Solidarity among member states is not just about money. It is also about sharing other resources — medicines and intensive care beds during the Covid pandemic, for example. Here, too, member states’ performance has rarely matched their lofty rhetoric. During the early days of the pandemic, Germany and France were roundly and for good reason condemned for imposing export bans rather than sharing their (admittedly meagre) supplies of masks and ventilators.

Sharing electricity or fossil fuels during the current energy crisis could also be evidence of solidarity among member states. But will they really be prepared to help each other out during winter rather than reserve resources for their own use? In Germany, the Scholz government recently created a national €200 billion rescue shield to protect businesses and households from rising energy costs. It could have pushed instead for a European emergency fund that would have extended benefits much more widely (though not as generously as the German subsidies). Its decision indicates how national governments will react if freezing temperatures stretch Europe’s capacity to avoid power cuts, keep industries running, and heat residential and public buildings.

The most controversial aspect of European solidarity comes in Title V of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, headed “Area of Freedom, Security and Justice.” Article 67(2) stipulates that the EU “shall ensure the absence of internal border controls for persons and shall frame a common policy on asylum, immigration and external border control, based on solidarity between Member States, which is fair towards third-country nationals.” The role of solidarity is further emphasised in Article 80: “The policies of the Union… and their implementation shall be governed by the principle of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility, including its financial implications, between the Member States.”

Burden-sharing of this kind is not a new idea. Back in 1950 France suggested that the UN Refugee Convention should include the following provision: “In a spirit of international solidarity, the High Contracting Parties shall take into consideration the burden assumed by the countries having first admitted or granted temporary asylum to refugees, and facilitate the permanent settlement of the latter, more especially by relaxation of the procedure for admission.” The proposal was rejected not so much because other delegations objected to burden-sharing but because they weren’t convinced that a reference to the spirit of international solidarity was necessary. One delegate argued that the convention’s effectiveness would obviously “depend on the good will and the spirit of solidarity of the signatory States.”

Solidarity eventually appeared in the 1967 UN Declaration on Territorial Asylum (which unfortunately is barely remembered today). Article 2(2) reads: “Where a State finds difficulty in granting or continuing to grant asylum, States… shall consider, in a spirit of international solidarity, appropriate measures to lighten the burden on that State.” Subsequent references to solidarity appear in statements issued by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as well as in the 2018 Global Compacts on Refugees and for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.

UN-level attempts to lighten the burden of countries that host a disproportionately high number of asylum seekers have largely failed, at least in the past forty years. Despite its continuing emphasis on the principle of solidarity, the EU hasn’t done any better. In fact, it could be argued that its common policy on asylum has flown in the face of its rhetorical commitment to that principle.

The cornerstone of the EU’s asylum policy from 2003 to 2013 was the Dublin II Regulation. It provided for protection claims to be assessed in the first EU member state an asylum seeker entered. When the EU adopted the regulation, asylum numbers not only appeared manageable but were also on a downward trajectory. When irregular arrivals picked up again in 2008, EU members that served as entry points for asylum seekers — particularly if they bordered the Mediterranean — began complaining about a system that made them responsible for the majority of new arrivals. The criticism intensified as the number of protection claims skyrocketed in the early 2010s.

The EU tinkered with its asylum policy in 2013, replacing the existing legal framework with the Dublin III Regulation. The principle underlying its predecessor remained untouched. But the regulation became increasingly dysfunctional. Italy and Greece, for example, routinely allowed asylum seekers to pass through without registering their identities. Countries in the north of Europe were compelled to stop transferring asylum seekers back to Greece, even if it could be proven that they had entered the EU via that country, because refugees, particularly children, were not afforded adequate protection there.

During the influx of refugees in 2015–16, some central and northern European members — particularly Germany, Austria, Sweden and Finland — relieved the pressure on Greece and Italy by welcoming asylum seekers who had entered the EU from the Turkish mainland (via Greek islands in the northern Aegean) or from North Africa. Germany probably did so because Angela Merkel’s government naively expected that other countries, impressed by its example, would extend their solidarity in turn to Germany.

At the same time, some countries that had benefited from the Dublin regulations acknowledged that Italy, Malta and Greece were barely able — and couldn’t be expected — to cope with the large number of arrivals from across the sea. They advocated a new mechanism whereby asylum seekers would be distributed across the EU. But the so-called Visegrád group — Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic — supported at times by other EU members in eastern and southeastern Europe, demanded “flexible solidarity” and successfully objected to mandatory relocation.

Even the equitable distribution of relatively small numbers of people from Italy and Greece largely failed. Some member states simply refused to accommodate any asylum seekers who had first entered the EU elsewhere.

Since then the two EU heavyweights, France and Germany, have led a push for a mechanism to share the burden of processing and caring for asylum seekers equitably. This would involve either allocating each country a share of irregular arrivals depending on its capacity and size, or directing compensatory payments from countries unwilling to accommodate asylum seekers to those that are. Schemes that would have enabled relocations from countries of first asylum were welcomed, naturally enough, by the “Med 5” (Italy, Malta, Cyprus, Greece and Spain).

Because the Visegrád 4, among others, wouldn’t budge, France and Germany resorted to promoting voluntary arrangements. Finland brokered an agreement between Malta, Italy, France and Germany in 2019 covering migrants rescued by private search-and-rescue missions in the central Mediterranean. In their joint declaration of intent, the four countries pledged to set up a “more predictable and efficient temporary solidarity mechanism.” But that mechanism has not functioned well: each time migrants are rescued in the Mediterranean, the EU member states still argue over who will take responsibility for them.

In 2020, the European Commission proposed a new Pact on Migration and Asylum designed to effect a “fair sharing of responsibility and solidarity.” Rather than replacing the Dublin Regulation with a bold new scheme, the pact envisages a series of incremental steps. Implementation once again relied on the goodwill of all member states, and when Poland and Hungary, in particular, strongly resisted any moves towards enforced solidarity the French government once more proposed a voluntary mechanism.

In June this year, the end of its presidency approaching, France brokered an agreement signed by eighteen of the twenty-three EU member states, as well as Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, which committed signatories to a “voluntary, simple and predictable solidarity mechanism” that would provide the Med 5 “with needs-based assistance” from other member countries “complementary to European support, by offering relocations (the preferred method of solidarity) and financial contributions.” While some of the signatories accepted asylum seekers who landed in Italy, others simply ignored the pledge they made.

The latest move by the European Commission has been a twenty-point Action Plan for the Central Mediterranean. It is largely the result of lobbying, if not blackmail, by the new Italian government, which would like to prevent any irregularised migrants from making landfall in Italy (and deport many of those already living in Italy). This plan is unlikely, though, to lead to a new common policy on asylum to replace the Dublin Regulation.

In the meantime, irregularised migrants keep breaching the EU’s external borders, with more than 90,000 having arrived in Italy alone so far this year. National immigration authorities keep trying to deport asylum seekers like the nineteen-year-old from Afghanistan to where they first set foot in the EU. According to the Hamburg state government, twenty-nine people were deported from Hamburg to other EU countries in the third quarter of this year, in line with the Dublin Regulation. These deportations tie up scarce resources and cause much anguish.

As more asylum seekers have breached Europe’s southern maritime borders it has become all too obvious that the Dublin Regulation is not “based on solidarity between Member States” but privileges the interests of some EU members over those of others. In other words, it shields central and northern European member states from irregularised migration. Because the likes of Poland and Hungary rejected a mandatory distribution mechanism — advocated by the European Commission, the Med 5 and some EU members in central and northern Europe — the EU’s response has been to try to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Europe in the first place.

In the course of making its external borders increasingly impenetrable, the EU has disregarded the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union’s stipulation that a common asylum policy must be fair towards third-country nationals. Not only has the much-evoked principle of solidarity among member states proven to be little more than a rhetorical gesture, but the violence of its border regime has made a mockery of the EU’s self-declared ambition to stand up for human rights worldwide. There is no greater hypocrite than the winner of the 2012 Nobel peace prize.

In some cases, the EU is paying third parties to keep irregularised migrants away from Europe. Thus Italy and the EU have funded Libyan militias to operate a “coastguard” charged with intercepting migrants and confining them to Libya’s notorious detention centres, which German diplomats once likened to concentration camps.

In other cases, the EU turns a blind eye when its members flout national and EU laws by pushing migrants back across the border, as has been happening in at least half a dozen EU countries. In June, for example, when hundreds of migrants tried to climb over the border fortifications separating the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco, at least twenty-seven died and many of those who had managed to enter Spanish territory were returned to Morocco without being allowed to lodge a protection claim.

Or, to give another example, Latvia declared a state of emergency at its border with Belarus in August, allowing the government to restrict the movement of journalists and NGO representatives. Erik Marquardt, a Greens member of the European parliament, explains why the Latvian authorities don’t welcome monitors:

A typical horror trip in the limbo of the border region looks like this: The asylum seekers try to cross the green border through the forest to Latvian territory to apply for asylum. On Latvian territory they are picked up by border guards and taken to unregistered tent camps somewhere in the forest, far away from civil society, press and NGOs. Here… commandos harass, beat and abuse the detainees. They use batons and stun guns — sometimes even on their genitals. Their cell phones and valuables are taken from them. The shelter seekers have to sleep overnight in a tent in the middle of the forest, sometimes outdoors, at up to –20 degrees. The commandos also take away their lighters, the only way to make a fire to warm themselves against the cold temperatures and to protect themselves against wolves and bears. Often in the early morning hours, the refugees are bussed back to the border with Belarus and have to walk the rest of the way back through the forest.

Similar incidents have taken place at the borders between Croatia and Bosnia, and between Poland and Belarus. In the Turkish–Bulgarian borderlands — the setting of Haider Rashid’s haunting feature film Europa, which premiered to much acclaim last year at Cannes — migrants have to contend not only with zealous border guards but also with vigilantes.

But the Greek coastguard is probably most notorious for violating the rights of irregularised migrants. Over a two-year period from February 2020 until February 2022, a Forensic Architecture research team documented 1018 “drift-backs” in the Aegean Sea involving 27,464 people. Migrants were prevented from landing in Greece and then towed out to sea to a spot from where currents, waves and winds are likely to take them back to Turkish territorial waters. According to the researchers, this sometimes-lethal method is designed to “provide a measure of deniability for those perpetrators, shielding them from accountability.”

The EU has regularly condoned practices that are illegal under international human rights and refugee law. In its defence, it often maintains that it is merely protecting itself against acts of hybrid warfare perpetrated by the likes of the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Try telling that to migrants who are drowning or freezing to death at the European border.

But intra-EU solidarity on asylum is working in one sense: member states cover for each other when they violate the Charter of Fundamental Rights in their “defence” of the EU’s external border. The European Commission, while supposedly still committed to its 2020 Pact on Migration and Asylum, has in some instances been turning a blind eye and in others actively encouraging violators — as happened in March 2020, when von der Leyen praised Greece for “being our European ασπίδα,” or shield.

It should be some consolation that the securitisation of the EU’s external borders, and the violence this entails, is contested by other European institutions. The European parliament — and particularly the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, led by the indomitable Juan Fernando López Aguilar — has frequently spoken out against human rights violations at the borders and often put itself on a collision course with the European Commission and Frontex, the European border agency. But the parliament’s powers are limited.

The European courts have also ruled against the likes of Hungary on many occasions and upheld the rights of asylum seekers. Yet, as a recent study by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee has shown, EU member states often fail to implement judgements by the European Court of Human Rights and other bodies.

In one respect, European solidarity has functioned reasonably well. Since the Russian invasion on 24 February, the EU has provided substantial financial and material assistance to Ukraine. Its response to the war hasn’t been entirely united — Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s support for the government in Kyiv is lukewarm at best — but that hasn’t stopped it from also unanimously imposing sanctions on Russia, Belarus and Iran (which supplies drones to Russia), and on numerous individuals and entities in those countries.

The EU has also welcomed people fleeing Ukraine (though citizens of Ukraine more happily than others caught up in the war). In early March it invoked its Temporary Protection Directive, adopted in 2001 but never used, which gives refugees from Ukraine a residence permit for up to three years without the need to apply for asylum. The permit provides the right to work, gives access to social security payments and healthcare, and allows its holders to move freely between countries.

Because of that free movement, and because citizens of Ukraine can enter the EU for ninety days without a visa, the exact number of refugees in EU countries is anyone’s guess. The figure is probably around 4.5 million, with Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic between them accounting for well over half.

The length of residence permits and other benefits for Ukrainian refugees vary greatly. As of June, Germany paid each Ukrainian refugee living in government-provided accommodation €449 (A$690) per month, France less than half that amount, and Poland, the country that has accommodated by far the most refugees, just over €15. In some countries, Ukrainian refugees have access to free language courses, in others they don’t. Their chances of finding employment and the extent to which Ukrainian qualifications are recognised also vary greatly.

In the early weeks of the war, EU leaders demanded that refugees be spread across the twenty-three member countries. They argued that Portugal and Ireland, for example, although a long way from Ukraine, ought to help relieve the burden placed on Ukraine’s immediate neighbours. Some refugees were indeed relocated — but only from Moldova, which had received more Ukrainian refugees on a per capita basis than any other country.

In practice, relative proximity to Ukraine and existing diasporic networks have proved more important than local assistance in Ukrainians’ decisions about where to stay. Calls for a redistribution of refugees have become much less frequent, not least because countries hosting a large number of refugees receive additional EU funding. Besides, a compulsory mechanism to distribute Ukrainians across the EU would probably be unworkable under the Temporary Protection Directive. It has also proved unnecessary, and is in fact undesirable because it might prevent refugees from living in places where they can rely on diasporic support networks.

What is true for the EU is also true for individual member states. Germany ordinarily places asylum seekers across its sixteen states according to the so-called Königstein formula, which takes account of a state’s economic strength and population. Within states, asylum seekers are then allocated to districts, usually according to a similar formula.

An informed estimate puts the number of Ukrainian refugees in Germany at between 630,000 and 750,000, of which approximately 100,000 are in Berlin, a city of 3.8 million people. If Ukrainian refugees had been distributed according to the Königstein formula, Berlin would have received around a third of that number. Berlin authorities have certainly been complaining loudly about the challenges posed by large numbers, but only about 3000 Ukrainian refugees actually live in government-provided accommodation.

In parts of the country where the Ukrainian diaspora is smaller and Germans are less willing to share their apartments, most refugees allocated according to the Königstein formula would have needed accommodation in hostels, sports halls and container villages. Conflicts with the locals might have ensued, much like during 2015–16.

The situation may change, of course, not just in Germany but also elsewhere in Europe, if Russia succeeds in forcing more Ukrainians to flee. So far, predictions that the bombing of Ukrainian power stations would lead to a mass exodus have proven as wrong as the assumption that Poland would quickly buckle under the influx of refugees.

The reception of Ukrainian refugees suggests that efforts to distribute asylum seekers equitably across EU member states may not be what’s needed. On the contrary: rather than deporting asylum seekers back to the European country where their fingerprints were first taken, the EU may prefer to let them move to wherever they are supported by diasporic communities or civil society networks. The Ukrainian case suggests that one aspect of Article 67(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union is achievable, namely “a common policy on asylum… which is fair towards third-country nationals.”

The Ukrainian case doesn’t prove or disprove the idea that a common system could be “based on solidarity between Member States.” It doesn’t allow any inferences to be drawn about the validity of the claim that nation-states can behave as if they were individuals extending solidarity towards each other.

But the EU’s undeclared war on irregular migrants, including those seeking its protection, has had the unintended consequence of encouraging individual acts of solidarity of the kind referred to in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union. They are not directed towards fellow EU residents, however, as envisaged in that article, but towards people the EU wants to keep out or expel.

As a consequence, activists have repeatedly intervened when authorities across Europe have tried to deport asylum seekers to places of danger or to where they had entered the EU. Even more significant than the anti-deportation campaigns, though, is the work of activists who assist refugees as they cross borders and who document unlawful attempts by the EU and national governments to prevent them from doing so.

In the central Mediterranean, where at least 25,000 irregularised migrants have died over the past eight years, private search-and-rescue operations have saved the lives of thousands of migrants. They enjoy considerable support not just in northern and western Europe but also in Italy and Spain.

In Poland, Grupa Granica has provided life-saving humanitarian assistance to migrants stranded in the forests at the Polish–Belarusian border, and monitored the human rights situation there. In Greece, volunteers have been assisting irregularised migrants who have made it to the islands of the northern Aegean, as well as refugees who have been left to fend for themselves in Athens. Much like the search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean, these volunteers have also tried to hold Frontex and the Greek coastguard accountable.

In all these cases, activism is not just the result of an affective response to suffering, and the sufferers are not regarded only as suppliants. We are indeed seeing solidarity in action.

With member states using the EU’s Facilitation Directive of 2002 to criminalise such acts of solidarity, activists have often paid a high price. Since 2016, according to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands and Spain have between them initiated sixty administrative or criminal proceedings against private organisations involved in search-and-rescue operations.

To make matters worse, the twenty-point action plan recently announced by the European Commission includes the following: “17. Promote discussions in the International Maritime Organization on the need for a specific framework and guidelines for vessels having a particular focus on search and rescue activities, particularly in view of developments in the European context.” These ominous lines suggest the European Commission, goaded by Italy’s racist Meloni government, is intent on further hindering the work of Sea-Watch, SOS Mediterranée and other private search-and-rescue organisations.

Prosecutions of this kind are worrying, and the prospects of further criminalisations dire. But if Robert Schuman was right in observing that solidarity is created by a process of practical achievements, then the solidarity targeted by governments such as Meloni’s and Orbán’s, as well as by the European Commission, has become a force to reckon with. Activists have thwarted attempts to turn Europe into an impenetrable fortress. Compare their efficacy with that of the inter-state solidarity of EU member states, which often exists only in the increasingly hollow appeals of the European Commission.

Acts by the likes of French farmer Cédric Herrou and seafarer Carola Rackete have captured the imagination of Europeans and inspired others to act in solidarity. Herrou was convicted of a délit de solidarité, a “solidarity offence,” for ferrying migrants from Italy to France and inviting them to camp at his property; Rackete, who captained the Sea-Watch 3, defied the Italian government’s order not to disembark irregularised migrants rescued in the Mediterranean.

Such acts have also inspired municipal governments to take action. Some of them have challenged the national authorities to allocate more asylum seekers to them than they are required to accommodate according to the official quota.

There is another reason why I am optimistic regarding the prospects for solidarity à la Herrou — as opposed to the European shield advocated by Ursula von der Leyen and others — and that’s to do with motivation. The intra-EU solidarity so frequently conjured by the European Commission is perhaps too easy a target. Because it isn’t practised (and may in fact not be necessary, at least in the context of a common policy of asylum), the solidarity of Articles 67 and 80 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union remains a weasel word.

The solidarity offered by the EU to others needs to be taken more seriously, not least because climate change will require countries of the global north to reposition themselves in relation to the global south. In her statement at COP27, von der Leyen said that solidarity means those in a position to help should assist those in need. She didn’t say why Tuvalu islanders or Bangladeshi farmers were in dire straits, or why the EU is in a position to help, but talked as if the EU were a charitable organisation that happened to be able to do good. Solidarity, to be successful and sustainable, needs to be grounded in notions of justice. That is something Herrou and Rackete know but von der Leyen, if she knows it, prefers not to acknowledge. •

The post European solidarity appeared first on Inside Story.

All of us on this mission, working to help Ukraine for many years, knew just how precarious the country’s situation was. And then, in February this year, all hell broke loose with Russia’s full-scale invasion.

I’ve spent a lot of time working in Ukraine, which is the only reason I wrote Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine: Invasion Amidst the Ashes of Empires. My book is the outcome of an eighteen-year relationship with travelling, living and working in Ukraine at different times.

Which is why it was galling to see Mark Edele, reviewing my book in this publication, egregiously misrepresenting my motivations and credentials for writing the book, and misrepresenting my overall argument. I have no idea why he chose to do these two things, but I can put the record straight here.

Professor Edele characterises me as an “international relations academic” and suggests I rely on a theorising approach in my book. This is simply untrue: I rely on my personal observations, and my judgement as a former diplomat, to explain the slow decline in contemporary Russia–Ukraine relations. I also look honestly at the inadvertent consequences of some of Ukraine’s foreign policy choices.

Professor Edele inaccurately summarises my argument as attributing the 2022 Russian invasion to a response to NATO expansion. I do nothing of the sort: I clearly argue that Russia’s elites, headed by Putin, have unhealthy dreams of empire. Hence the subtitle of my book, arguing that this is a war of imperial expansion. Another driver is that Putin sits atop a dysfunctional autocratic system that has afforded him a jaundiced view of Ukraine’s independent path.

Yes, NATO expansion — and Ukraine’s enthusiasm to join the alliance — is a third driver of the war. But it is one Russian motivator among several, which is precisely why Professor Edele and the headline of the review article mischaracterise my work. Professor Edele in effect claims that I am arguing that a complex war arises from a single cause. I do not argue for mono-causality, and I make this abundantly clear in my book.

To Professor Edele, I remark, “It’s the empire, stupid!” Russian dreams of Soviet and Tsarist empires have collided with what Putin, Lavrov and the rest of them see as a US-led neo-imperial project.

My book examines precisely why our benign view of NATO expansion, common in my country, Britain, and probably also common in some Australian circles, is not universally held. Any honest accounting of Russian motivations to go to war in 2022 in Ukraine must factor in differing interpretations of NATO. Let’s not bury our heads in the sand over these complexities.

Over many years, I have seen with my own eyes the oscillation in Ukraine’s political identity, and the consequent deterioration of relations with Russia. I have stepped far outside the university classroom and put myself in harm’s way to see what is happening in Ukraine’s remote regions.

My book may not be to everyone’s taste, but at least get the facts right about my professional background, my credentials for writing it, the time it has taken me to accumulate my insights, and the multilayered nature of my argument. •

The post Ashes of empires appeared first on Inside Story.

Samir Puri’s Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine is one of the first kind. “Rapidity was the key to writing this book,” he admits — and it shows. Puri’s opinions, strongly expressed throughout, oscillate between sincere shock at the invasion, empathy with Ukraine and the Ukrainians, and dismissal of Ukraine and Ukrainians as khokhols (a slur he claims is harmless slang) who might be creating “legends” about their heroic self-defence but are ultimately mere “pawns” in “the unforgiving world of geopolitics.”

Orthodox international relations theory, also misleadingly known as “realism,” sees the world as an anarchic place where the strong rule and the weak obey. Russia, a former empire, is strong; Ukraine, a former colony, is weak. The rest follows. That Russia might indeed be in the process of learning that Ukraine is stronger than expected, that Putin might be schooled by “the unforgiving world of geopolitics,” doesn’t compute.

You want to rebuild an empire? A perfectly normal aspiration, according to the theory. Just make sure that you have a functioning military and adequate economic resources before you try to take over neighbouring countries. Such preparation would probably show “realism.” Russia’s current behaviour certainly does not.

Why did Putin go to war? Puri doesn’t really know. An international relations scholar, he suspects that it has to do with another great power — NATO, the European Union, the United States or a coalition of all three — having encroached on Russia’s turf. The overall argument of the book: It’s NATO, stupid!

The problem is that this theory doesn’t fit the observable facts. It is true that neither NATO nor the European Union has covered itself in glory in interacting with post-Soviet Russia. Russia no longer mattered, they seemed to believe, and thus could be ignored, or maybe even bossed around. Among many Europeans, that arrogance was coupled with the utopian notion that the post-1991 world was all about “soft power.” Tanks were no longer needed. Dependency on one source of oil and gas was fine. We’re all civilised, after all. War is a thing of the past.

Writing earlier this year, Britain’s former ambassador to Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a historian of Russia, was scathing. “Western diplomacy,” he wrote, was “by turns arrogant and incompetent.” He was right: to dangle NATO membership in front of Ukraine without a consensus in the alliance, a plan of how to achieve it, or a mechanism to ensure Ukraine’s security while the details were worked through, was “an unserious position.” Not to think about how to manage the Russian reaction was, likewise, negligent.

But Braithwaite also argued that “Putin’s military posturing around Ukraine is several degrees more irresponsible,” a qualification Puri ignores when he quotes the former ambassador.

Did the issue of Ukraine’s putative NATO membership drive Putin to war? Puri tries hard to squeeze recalcitrant facts into this mould. The Russian government has indeed repeatedly expressed its irritation and resentment at NATO enlargement. But NATO didn’t expand into Ukraine in 2021–22. Quite the opposite. Russia’s expressions of discontent convinced enough members — Germany chief among them — to oppose a NATO accession plan nearly a decade and a half before the current escalation. Ukraine was snubbed by NATO in 2008 only to be told repeatedly that the door was open “in principle.”

Anybody who had even the slightest knowledge of NATO’s internal affairs knew that these assurances were gestures towards the never-never. NATO’s approach was, indeed, “unserious.” In 2021–22, as Puri admits in passing, there were “no immediate signs of Ukraine’s admission into the alliance that Russia could say it was retaliating against.” That should have been the end of this theory. But no: Puri spends another seven pages trying to make the case that Putin’s “paranoia” was perfectly understandable.

Historians are used to reading international relations scholarship with sceptical tolerance. This discipline doesn’t rest on detailed knowledge of any one time, place or culture; instead, it tries to construct universalising models to be applied to any case.

But Puri doesn’t just simplify. He also makes mistakes, at time egregious ones. Russia’s provisional government of 1917, in place between the abdication of the Tsar in February and the Bolshevik coup in October, was not, as he claims, anti-imperial. The people in charge might have been liberals but they were also supporters of the empire. Looking askance at Ukraine’s parallel revolution and requests for autonomy, they continued to prosecute a war with imperial aims. That was indeed a major cause of the provisional government’s fall.

The (second) Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which the Bolsheviks were forced to sign in 1918, did not, as Puri believes, afford “Ukraine’s Nationalists a rare opportunity to make a break for freedom.” The Ukrainian People’s Republic’s declaration of independence actually preceded the treaty and Ukraine signed its own treaty with the Germans, the First Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, before the Russian Bolsheviks.

Nor did the “independent Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania” spring from Lenin’s head in 1918 or 1919, as Puri implies. They were independent anti-Bolshevik states until Stalin brought them back into the empire in 1940, and only then did they become Soviet republics. Western Ukraine was invaded by the Red Army on 17 September 1939 and annexed in November of that year rather than “incorporated into the USSR only after 1945,” as Puri believes.

There was indeed a referendum in Ukraine on 17 March 1991, but 71 per cent voted not “for independence,” as Puri writes, but for a reformed union of Soviet republics. It was only on 1 December of that year that a majority voted for independence, but in that case the figure was 92 per cent.

Kazakhs, meanwhile, might more than quibble with the claim that “Ukraine’s suffering was worse than in any other part of the Soviet Union” during the great famine. A larger share of Kazakhs died than of Ukrainians, although in absolute numbers Ukraine — a much larger nation — lost more.

Puri’s account, in other words, is deficient on both empirical and analytical levels. Unless readers are looking for quick soundbites, his book is best left on the shelf.

Journalist Anna Arutunyan’s Hybrid Warriors falls into the second category. Based on her years of reporting since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, it combines a deeply textured knowledge of ground-level politics with a well-theorised sense of how Putin’s regime works.

Arutunyan’s Putin is no master strategist. Nor is he an all-powerful dictator. He’s indecisive and relatively weak, driven along by his more dynamic (and often more radical) underlings. He rules “by signal” rather than by command, issuing “vague directives that could, depending on the recipient, be interpreted as commands or mere opinions.” More often than not, political entrepreneurs, both in Russia and abroad, have “projected onto the Russian president’s cryptic words everything they wanted to hear.” In reality, Russia’s strategy has been “confused, convoluted, unformed.”

The Crimean annexation was the result of improvisation. Contingency plans for the operation had been on the shelf for a while, but when they were activated the exact goal of the operation wasn’t completely clear. What transpired was the interaction of a planned and well-executed special forces operation (the famous “little green men,” unmarked, polite, silent and well equipped), local militias enraged by the revolution in Kyiv, which they saw as a coup, and local politicians.

The staged referendum, in which the vast majority of Crimean residents voted to join Russia, lacked validity in international law. But annexation nevertheless had a significant degree of popular support, with a 1996 Gallup poll showing 59 per cent support among Russians living in Crimea and 41 per cent among Crimean Ukrainians.

In a way, the Russian government caved in to pressures from below, breaking the pledge to respect Ukraine’s borders that it had made in both the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the 1997 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership with Kyiv. But while Moscow was riding a popular wave and interacting with local pro-Russian forces, it was clearly Putin’s regime that took the initiative in Crimea.

Donbas was different. Here, local initiative was key. Yes, a gang of fifty-two military veterans and second world war re-enactors trudged across the border in April 2014 and took the regional city of Slovyansk, which they would hold until the Ukrainian army pushed them out in July. True, they were led by a retired agent with the Federal Security Service, or FSB, Igor Girkin (known as “Strelkov,” or shooter), but Girkin was a freelancer at that stage.

Elsewhere, it was angry locals — a militant minority, but still locals — who were inspired by the Crimean example to take matters into their own hands. “By early May 2014,” writes Arutunyan, “miners, truck drivers, an assortment of local pensioners and shady businessmen, and an army of local and Russian adventure-seekers had set up their own pretend governments with flags, parliaments, defence ministries, militias, declarations of independence and even proto-constitutions with formal elections scheduled for later in the month.”

While their grievances were local and of long standing, these groups didn’t represent the local population. Independent opinion polls showed only 30 per cent support for secession. Also unlike Crimea, they were not guided by the Kremlin. As Arutunyan puts it, they “lacked the main thing… that they had fought for: Russia’s formal recognition and protection.”

Essentially, a militant minority — scared by the revolution that had driven president Viktor Yanukovych from office, saturated by Russian state television propaganda about “fascism” in Kyiv, and inspired by the takeover of Crimea — staged a coup and then appealed to Moscow to bail them out. But the weak dictator in the Kremlin refused. By the end of April 2014, the Kremlin had decided not to send troops to the Ukrainian mainland.

We don’t know why this decision was made, but it’s worth remembering that the European Union had suspended preparations for a G8 summit in Sochi on 3 March 2014, cancelled bilateral talks with Russia on 6 March, and begun imposing sanctions against Russian officials and companies on 17 March, 20 March and 15 April. Europe also threatened “broader economic and trade sanctions” should Russia further escalate its aggression against Ukraine.

These EU measures were synchronised with a set of executive orders by US president Barack Obama on 6, 17 and 20 March, which added sanctions against individuals in Russia’s elite. The timing suggests that the Kremlin retreated from exposed positions because it found the likely cost of escalation prohibitive.

Sanctions were indeed one of three reasons Putin changed his mind, according to Arutunyan. He also recognised that, in contrast to Crimea, Russia would have to contend with military action by Kyiv, which had announced its “anti-terrorist operation” on 15 April. And he understood that, wishful thinking aside, local support for the insurgents in Donbas was nowhere near as widespread as in Crimea.

But the tough EU and US response had a contradictory result:

Putin felt he was in a bind. Crimea had demonstrated that the Kremlin and its army was perfectly capable of decisive action — of securing an entire peninsula and enabling a parliament to vote to join Russia — swiftly and secretly, with the help of the local population. However, in the Donbas the risks were higher, the opposition greater and the support weaker. If he launched a full-blown military intervention, he would trigger a tougher Western response and quite possibly find himself trying to prop up a regime with no real constituency. Yet if he backed away entirely, he would show weakness to the Americans and to his own nationalists. He could neither advance nor abandon the Donbas project.

Thus, Russia continued to be involved in Donbas. By July 2014 the FSB and military intelligence were competing to command the Donbas insurgents in an attempt “to demonstrate their own value to the Kremlin.”

The FSB in particular became deeply embroiled in the Donbas mess. Its assessment that the revolution against Yanukovych was a CIA-inspired plot rather than a popular uprising had contributed to the decision to annex Crimea. Now it had “300 men in Donbas,” as one FSB major told Arutunyan, and was awaiting orders from Moscow. “Putin — give us orders!” they demanded. “We need just one day and Ukraine will be ours.”

The weak dictator was being bum-steered by his most devoted underlings. But he was resisting their push without being in a position to call back the FSB, which he had once led and which was full of his old comrades from KGB times. “His very power as president rested on their loyalty to him — and thus on his loyalty to them,” writes Arutunyan.

The support for the Donbas adventure went far beyond the FSB. To put a stop to it would have required a veritable purge of the power apparatus. Thus, the strange limbo in which the situation remained. Neither willing to escalate nor able to reverse, the Kremlin began imposing control over the separatist movement and its self-proclaimed “governments.”

Eventually, however, Putin did send troops. He had been hitching his political wagon increasingly to the ultra-nationalist right since 2012, when massive demonstrations against his return to the presidency had alienated him decisively from the political middle (to say nothing of the left). His new right-wing constituency supported the political freelancers in Donbas, so when Kyiv launched a successful operation to take Donbas back from the putschists, his new allies convinced him that it was in Russia’s interest to resist.

Russian troops, regular ones this time, were fighting in Ukraine by August 2014. This “covert Russian invasion of mainland Ukraine” halted the Ukrainian army’s attempt to re-establish control of Ukrainian territory. It was regular Russian troops that turned the Donbas insurgency into a frozen conflict; it was regular Russian troops that won the battle of Debaltseve in February 2015. Then the frontlines froze.

Once again, according to Arutunyan, no grand Russian strategy existed. Events were driven not by geopolitics but by the balance of power within the Russian dictatorship.

The right wing of politics, on which Putin’s regime increasingly relied, could only be contained if Ukraine could be stopped from taking back Donbas. This dynamic became self-reinforcing: the support of the nationalists, imperialists, monarchists and fascists at home required support for the Donbas rebels; the continuing existence and, as they saw it, martyrdom of the Donbas proxies propelled the domestic far right further into the mainstream. “For Putin,” writes Arutunyan, “it was paramount that these people continued viewing the West as their true enemy, and not the Kremlin itself.”

How did we get from this impasse to 24/2? Arutunyan doesn’t really know. Her account becomes much less richly textured after 2015, and in particular after 2019. Why negotiations with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president since 2019, were abandoned remains unclear. Why the decision was made to allow all-out war remains mysterious. The logic of her argument would point to some dynamic from below, some initiative by political entrepreneurs. But there is no evidence to that effect. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that the initiative came from Putin, and that it shocked even those closest to him.

Arutunyan’s explanation thus focuses on the Russian president, and his resentments and likely thought processes. The invasion, she writes, was “about one man, and his vendetta.” Earlier in the book she had dismissed such mind-reading, but what is the alternative given Putin’s centrality in Russia’s political system?

This centrality seems to have increased since 2014. The destruction of civil society, which hampered the left, might also have hampered the right. The disaster of the Donbas war, caused by freelancers, might well have made Putin more reluctant to take advice from the same or similar people. Coronavirus isolation in 2020–21 might have done the rest: Putin spent the pandemic reading history books, stewing in his resentments (about NATO expansion, about not being taken seriously), and pondering his legacy (he turned seventy this year).

Then there was Russia’s recent success in Syria, which suggested its army was top-notch. The FSB presented the Ukrainian army’s intensified training and improved equipment as a Western conspiracy to weaken and maybe destroy Russia. Yet the West also seemed weak. Maybe now was the time to solve this problem once and for all? Whatever the reasons, in the end it was Putin who pulled the trigger on 24/2.

What are the implications of Arutunyan’s analysis for policymakers confronting an aggressive Russia? She is unsure herself. “[I] gave up my futile attempts to come up with some sort of possible solution to this mess,” she writes in frustration. And she’s right: if the invasion was the result “of a Kremlin fumbling in the dark, staggering to respond to a multitude of real and perceived threats and opportunities, and proving itself largely incapable of distinguishing one from the other,” and if 24/2 was the result of an increasingly isolated and erratic dictator steaming in his own resentments and historical analogies, then rational outside action is difficult.

Arutunyan’s description of the complexity of the political environment in which Putin functions, moreover, serves to remind outsiders of how little influence their actions have on the Kremlin. This might chasten both the critics of NATO, who overestimate how much Putin was swayed by the perceived aggression of “the West,” and the supporters of sanctions against Russia, which Arutunyan’s account makes clear were just one factor, and mostly marginal, in Putin’s calculus.

What is left? For the time being, all we can do is try to support Ukraine as best as we can to give it a chance to survive and win this war. And when Ukraine is ready to negotiate with Russia, we should support this process with as much humility as we can. A lot of bitterness exists on both sides of the frontlines now, and it won’t go away anytime soon. If we take into account not just the war itself but also the rebuilding effort, we are talking about a long haul indeed.

Stamina will thus be required at a time when inflation and the climate crisis also call for sustained government attention.

Russia, meanwhile, won’t be defeated in the way Germany or Iraq were. Putin’s troops might eventually be pushed out of much or all of Ukraine’s territory, but nobody in their right mind will want to go further and march on Moscow. The regime might thus survive, more resentful than ever. Or it might be replaced by another, probably no less resentful or autocratic. In any case, Russia could require containment for some time to come. Here, too, stamina will be necessary — and a significant amount of humility about what can be achieved.

All things come to an end eventually. And maybe Arutunyan is right when she says that Russia’s younger generation will in time provide more rational leadership for this large, rich and beautiful country. The rising generation is “muzzled” but “watching, in horror” while “learning from the mistakes of this dying regime,” she writes. A “new Russia, with its own, new national identity, will eventually emerge.” Let’s hope she is right. •

Samir Puri responds to Mark Edele’s review

Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine: Invasion Amidst the Ashes of Empires
By Samir Puri | Biteback | $39.99 | 304 pages

Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine
By Anna Arutunyan | Hurst & Company | $44.99 | 352 pages

The post “It’s NATO, stupid!” appeared first on Inside Story.

But if its perspective is accepted as the left’s view, it will be a disaster for progressive democrats and the idea of socialism. The call is profoundly misconceived, with respect to both Ukraine and Taiwan, especially Ukraine, and also in the general political analysis it offers.

I say this with regret. One of the main drafters is American law professor Richard Falk, a comrade from the struggle against the US war in Vietnam. His outstanding work helped lay the basis for the development of modern international law and human rights. I’ve worked with and admire two of the lead signatories.* So far there are thirty-eight of them, including Jeremy Corbyn.

“All Who Care” says wise things, including making a call for “a massive global awakening of human wisdom and energy.” The writers explain: “Important as governments and international institutions are, the initiative for a coherent response to the challenges we face lies largely with the people, with civil society.”

But it is primarily an intervention in conflicts of the moment, and it is in this respect that it needs to be judged.

On Ukraine, a call for peace that sets out to be principled should state that any threat to use nuclear weapons is an outrage. It does not. It must state that invading other countries is wrong. It does not. It was wrong for the United States in Iraq, it is wrong for Israel in Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza, and it must now be reversed in Ukraine.

“All Who Care” demands that Ukraine be “neutral.” If its neutrality were guaranteed by military commitments from outside to safeguard the country’s independence in a way that satisfied the government in Kyiv and did not deprive it of weapons for self-defence, then this would be reasonable. Given the risk of a world war, those outside Ukraine have a right to say that it cannot become a base that might be used to threaten Russia, or any other neighbouring country.

But in any such call, tone and attitude are of vital importance: it has to be said respectfully as a request to the Ukrainian people. It is arrogant, and even a touch imperial, to demand the country’s neutrality without also making clear that this does not take away Ukraine’s democratic right to decide what economic and social trajectory it aspires to. Neutrality should not prevent Ukraine from joining the European Union if it so chooses (something even Putin’s Russia seems to have accepted). This, too, needs to be said.

The approach to Ukraine taken by “All Who Care” demands the “phased withdrawal of Russian military forces” and “an end to the delivery of lethal military aid to Ukraine.” Why should the withdrawal be “phased” but not the end of military aid?

The document suggests that the underlying cause of the conflict is “the cynical use of the Ukraine war by great powers intent on pursuing their geopolitical ambitions.” But it was the uncynical resistance of Ukrainians themselves, much to the surprise of both Washington and the Kremlin, that shaped the war. “All Who Care” disregards Ukrainian agency and the commitment of a huge majority of Ukrainians to their country’s integrity and independence. Instead, it frames Ukraine as being manipulated by the United States. This echoes Vladimir Putin’s perspective.

What is the thinking that leads the authors and signatories to their conclusion? They sum it up in four short paragraphs which need to be quoted in full:

More troubling still is the toxic relationship between the United States on the one hand and China and Russia on the other. Here lies the key to both conflicts.

What we are seeing is the culmination of decades of gross mismanagement of global security. The United States has been unwilling to accept, let alone adapt to, the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. It remains unwilling to break with outdated notions of global dominance — a legacy of the Cold War and the triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A global power shift is taking place. The West-centric world, in which first Europe and then the United States held sway, is giving way to a multi-centric, multi-civilisational world in which other centres of power and influence are demanding to be heard.

Failure to accept this new reality spells immense danger. A new Cold War is now in full swing, which can at any moment mutate into a hot war. In the words of UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”

But it is the authors and signatories who are unwilling to face up to new realities of the nature of the regimes now challenging the United States, the autonomy of the demands for democracy, especially those led by women, and the way these are responses to the fact of America’s irreversibly diminished role, which Washington is certainly aware of.

Historically, they are right: we are caught in the legacy of decades of gross behaviour by the US governing elite. But its ambition failed more than a decade ago. This in turn gave birth to monsters even worse than US hegemony. The problem the world faces is not that the United States has failed to relinquish “outdated notions of global dominance,” it is the struggle over how and by whom its dominance will be replaced.

The United States is not innocent nor a mere bystander in this process. Under Joe Biden it is striving to re-establish global “leadership.” But it is doing it from a position of weakness. A recent example of how emaciated US power has become is the behaviour of what historically was its client state, Saudi Arabia. Despite being courted by a humiliating personal visit from the US president, who wanted their help against high energy prices, the Saudis have cut back production to ensure the opposite.

This is a direct help to Putin as it keeps the price of oil high, as well as being an intervention in the American midterm elections designed to aid Donald Trump and his family by making Biden unpopular.

How did we get to a situation where Washington is so weakened?

A NEW WORLD: MULTI-CENTRED AND MORE UNEQUAL

In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, president George H.W. Bush celebrated US “primacy” and boasted that no other country need “dread” its influence. In fact, the United States exercised its post–cold war supremacy with catastrophic stupidity and greed. Across the Global South, the wealth extraction of colonialism was replaced with the wealth extraction of the “Washington consensus.”

In the West itself, the working and middle classes saw their incomes flatline as the financial system transferred riches upwards, generating unparalleled inequality. Russia, in particular, was treated to the most brutal “shock therapy” and its oligarchs were encouraged to loot the country, with the West providing safe havens for their theft. Ordinary Russians suffered a deep, humiliating loss of income and livelihood.

The rise and nature of Putin are rooted in the rage this engendered. Only China had the sense and political means to ensure its economy was governed rather than handed over to the “freedom” of Wall Street. It grew exponentially, while its low wages were instrumentalised to break and impoverish the working classes in developed countries.

The rise of China and its admission into the World Trade Organization in December 2001 birthed a genuine economic rival to the United States. Meanwhile, the US used the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to occupy Afghanistan and later to invade Iraq, to supervise the world’s second-largest oil deposits and almost encircle Iran. In this way, the world would understand that the United States’ unprecedented economic hegemony would be underwritten by an unparalleled military supremacy.

That was then. Unrivalled hubris led to catastrophic humiliation. Five years after the “shock and awe” of its assault on Baghdad, as it faced strategic defeat in the deserts and mountains on the other side of the globe, the great financial crash of 2008 terminated US primacy. It also put an end to the justification of its “neoliberal” economics — the claim that markets know best. Which in turn undermined the claim that voters are powerless, and the political fatalism essential to its ideological success.

With Washington’s global dominance shattered, the world became irreversibly “multi-centred,” as well as even more unequal. Because the left had been so systematically marginalised, it was the right that tolled the bell. Trump gained the leadership of the Republican Party by denouncing the Iraq invasion as “a big fat mistake” that cost the US$2 trillion and benefited Iran, and excoriated the globalists who had sold out American business and workers. He specifically abjured the ideology, as well as the costs, of US global leadership. He praised Russia, refused to condemn Lukashenko’s crushing of democracy in Belarus and admired China’s Xi Jinping for his strength.

In his last speech to the United Nations (unless he is re-elected, that is) he advocated a gangster’s division of the world. He told his fellow leaders: “I have rejected the failed approaches of the past. I am proudly putting America first, just as you should be putting your countries first. That’s OK. That’s what you should be doing.”

In this way, the US “accepted and adapted” to the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. Only it did so by proclaiming a pluralist modern fascism, built on corruption and surveillance, and expressed in the language of The Godfather. The fact that the Biden administration seeks to reverse this while also terminating US efforts at “regime change” in Afghanistan is welcome.

Today, the most pressing danger that humanity faces is the return to the White House of Trump or a Trump clone, who would rig the US system permanently. This is of world importance because once joined by the economic and military weight of a far-right America, the global network of authoritarian regimes would enjoy irreversible domination for at least a generation. Xi, Putin and Trump, together with India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, Iran’s Ali Khamenei and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, would ensure that more nations joined them in Trump’s mobster international.

REJECTING THE RIGHT: UKRAINE ON THE FRONT LINE

The front line of resistance to such an outcome is, tragically, Ukraine. It did not ask for this role, but it is not just fighting for itself. Our democratic future, too, is at stake in its battle. To defeat Trumpism outside the United States as well as inside, we have to defy and frustrate Putin.

Of course, politically, this is not a clash between socialism and capitalism, but between capitalist democracies with some regard to the rule of law, freedom of speech and an open politics on the one hand, and lawless, oppressive capitalism on the other.

In this situation, the only way forward for the left, after decades of defeat, is through unconditional support for more rule-based democracy based on universal principles. Without this there is no hope for the democracy of feminism, of racial justice, of a sustainable environment, of a fair economy, of human rights, of participation, pluralism, deliberation and national self-determination. Or, to borrow from the inspiring slogan of the protests in Iran, “Women, life and freedom.”

This also means that the people of Crimea have the right to decide for themselves whether to be part of Ukraine or Russia, and the people of Taiwan must be free to decide for themselves if they want to be ruled from Beijing.

Some fear a Western victory in Ukraine would take us back thirty years to 1992, with Francis Fukuyama celebrating the triumph of liberalism over history all over again. But the younger generations are not going to be easily persuaded into passivity or believing that “the market knows best.” The United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan and can be prevented from ever again engaging in “regime change.” China is now its economic equal and this cannot be undone. The process in Ukraine is not one of collapse, as in eastern Europe, but the result of decades of effort to slough off the corruptions of Stalinism. Nor are Ukrainians alone. From Iran to Chile the genie of popular agency has shattered the bottle of neoliberal fatalism.

The authors and signatories of “All Who Care” are right to sound the alarm in one important respect. These are very dangerous times that demand wisdom, not glorification or the triumphalism that feeds arms industries.

Our larger aim should be to welcome the emergence of democracy in Russia — maybe the last thing that the Western security establishment actually desires.

The alternative is rule by a mobsters international, which would ensure that the world will fry. It is as important as that. •

* Of the thirty-eight initial signatories, Victoria Brittain, a pioneering editor of coverage of the Global South, is someone I was proud openDemocracy published. I worked with Yanis Varoufakis when I helped a little with the draft of the original DiEM 25 call for democracy in Europe (which we discussed together with the much-missed Rosemary Bechler).

This article first appeared in openDemocracy.

The post A betrayal of Ukraine and the left appeared first on Inside Story.

The battle for Ukraine is part of a larger conflict over empire and decolonisation that reaches back to the period 1914–22, broke open again in 1989–91, and has simmered since the Soviet Union split into fifteen successor states in 1991. What we are witnessing, in effect, is one battle in one theatre of a potentially much more regional conflict made up of the (civil) wars of the Soviet succession. They have combined domestic and international struggles over independence and empire with contests between dictatorship and democracy.

Ukraine is only one theatre of these conflicts. In Belarus, mass protests against the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in 2020–21 were subdued with utter brutality. Russian support for the Belarusian dictator kept his regime going despite crippling sanctions, effectively turning him into a client of Moscow.

While the violence in Belarus was administered by domestic forces, similar anti-regime protests in Kazakhstan in January prompted the intervention of Russian, Belarusian, Armenian, Tajik and Kyrgyz troops to help prop up the government. Most recently, the conflict over landlocked Nagorno-Karabakh, in the South Caucasus, has turned from a frozen conflict between Russian-backed Armenia and Turkish-supported Azerbaijan into a shooting war after Azerbaijan, exploiting Russia’s distraction elsewhere, attacked Armenian positions on 12 September. Two days later, fighting broke out further east as well, at the volatile central Asian border between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

What all of these conflicts have in common is that they are rooted in unresolved problems stemming from the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1991.

Wars and civil wars are not unusual when empires break apart: boundaries between possible successors are unclear, loyalties fragile, legitimacies tenuous. When the Romanov empire imploded in 1917–18, the horrible fighting lasted until early 1920 in some regions, into early 1921 in others, and until 1923 in central Asia. The result, however, was a re-establishment of a new empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Only Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland remained independent, at least until the second world war. Then the three Baltic states were annexed, Poland made a satellite and Finland forced into neutrality.

What is unique about the current conflicts of the Soviet succession is that they took so long to gestate. The breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1989–91 was largely peaceful. This point can be overstressed: there was violence in Georgia in 1989 and in Lithuania in 1991, wars for and against independence in South Ossetia in 1991–92, Transnistria in 1992 and Abkhazia in 1992–93, a civil war in Tajikistan and a war-turned-frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh from 1992, and two wars to prevent Chechnya’s breaking away from Russia in 1994–96 and 1999–2000. Nevertheless, the Soviet lands were largely spared the horrors of the wars of the Yugoslav succession nearby.

One reason for this relative lack of violence was that the Soviet Union broke apart not through acrimony but from exhaustion. Anti-imperial feelings were rife not only in the non-Russian periphery of the empire, but also in the Russian heartland. Many thought their economic woes were caused by the drain the empire imposed on the state’s coffers. Better to let the non-Russians go and build a Russian national homeland.

Borders, too, were relatively well defined, with the Soviet Union’s republics providing ready-made territories for successor regimes. Again, there were exceptions (South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria) but the boundaries of Soviet times generally held firm, at least until recently.

The imperial centre, Russia, experienced not only decolonisation at the periphery but also state breakdown domestically. The years after 1991 saw economic collapse accompanied by a disintegration of the state’s monopoly over the use of violence on its territory.

This was not a state capable of maintaining empire, and that only began to change with Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power from 1999. At the heart of the current president’s longstanding popularity has been his ability to rebuild the state, coupled with his good luck when rising oil prices allowed economic growth to resume.

What is easily forgotten, however, is that this was an imperial presidency from the get-go. Putin’s first major political success was the brutal victory in the second Chechen war of 1999–2000, which prevented a further decolonisation of Russia and kept a prominent non-Russian region within Moscow’s control.

The victory in Chechnya was popular across the political spectrum. I remember discussions with otherwise thoroughly liberal Russian intellectuals who insisted that this was a necessary war: if Chechnya went, who would be next? Soon, nothing might be left of Russia beyond the heartland around Moscow, from where the old empire had grown since the fourteenth century.

The Chechen war provided a model for how to leverage imperial feelings for political gain. When the petro-dollar-driven economic recovery began to stutter, when internal opposition continued to challenge his regime, however ineffectually, and when neighbouring Ukraine showed that an East Slav nation could mount repeated revolutions against kleptocrats and Russian-aligned would-be dictators, Putin mobilised the imperial undercurrent of his regime.

The proxy war in Donbas and the 2014 annexation of Crimea seemed to provide a model for how this would work: no effective resistance would be encountered; Europe and the United States would wring their hands and impose minor sanctions but do nothing of substance. An alliance of pacifists, Russophiles and “realists” could be counted on to pressure Ukraine to submit to the invader; Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas would mute its response. The government in Kyiv would run away and Russia would annex more of Ukraine and make the rest a vassal state similar to neighbouring Belarus. Putin would enter the history books as saviour of Russia’s greatness.

This strategy failed miserably. The Russian invasion got quickly bogged down by incompetence, lack of training and poorly maintained equipment. Ukraine’s government stood firm and its army fought intelligently and effectively, supported by a surprisingly united NATO and European Union.

After Ukraine had won the battle of Kyiv, Russia focused on Donbas as well as the south of Ukraine, where it could leverage shorter supply lines. Progress was slow and grinding, however, relying largely on massive artillery bombardments of Ukrainian positions. While the battle for Donbas rumbled on, Russia was unable to complete the conquest of Ukraine’s coastline, where success had initially been swiftest.

Now the tide of war has turned. If Europe, the United States, Australia and other democracies continue to support Ukraine, chances are that it will eventually liberate the rest of its territory, quite possibly including Crimea. This outcome is far from guaranteed, but it looks much more realistic now than in the dark days of February and March.

Where does this military setback leave Russia? The wager on empire has clearly failed. With Russia weakened, the other theatres in the wars of the Soviet succession might well flare up again, further threatening Russia’s claim of hegemony over the region. We are already seeing this in the recent fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia as well as the Tajik–Kyrgyz border war. In Belarus, the opposition is subdued but not eliminated. It might rear its head again, threatening one of Russia’s client regimes in the west.

As far as Ukraine is concerned, Putin could finally declare his “special military operation” an actual war, and thus invoke conscription to replenish his by now anaemic forces. This is a course of action that many on the hard right as well as the Communists support. There is a reason, however, why Putin has thus far avoided such a move: it would be deeply unpopular with men of draft age and their families.

Even if it were mobilised, it isn’t clear that an army of poorly trained conscripts could make a difference now that the effects of sanctions are starting to limit Russia’s ability to resupply its army. Short of a desperate move like a nuclear strike, Putin has few good options at present. He has missed his opportunity to pull out of Ukraine in a face-saving manner. The military setbacks have weakened him both domestically and internationally.

What is far from clear is whether this weakening will translate into regime change. A popular revolution following the Ukrainian examples of 2004–05 and 2013–14 seems unlikely, although not altogether impossible. Belarus in 2020–21 has shown that even mass protests can be repressed if army and police remain loyal. And Putin’s dictatorship has toughened up dramatically since the invasion of Ukraine in February.

If the agents of organised violence remain behind him, Putin can politically survive the military catastrophe. But whether he will pull his troops out now he has clearly lost is another matter. He is more likely to try to stay the course and defend the territory he still controls. Thus Ukraine will continue to need outside support — including supplies of heavy weapons — to win this crucial part of the delayed wars of the Soviet succession. •

The post The long war of Soviet succession appeared first on Inside Story.

Commentators generally agree a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would involve the following elements, alone or in combination:

• a decapitation strike, using special forces to kill or capture the Taiwanese leadership and install a Beijing-aligned government

• a seaborne invasion, with a large force crossing the Taiwan Strait

• an extensive bombing campaign using aircraft and missiles

• a blockade of the Strait to cut off Taiwan’s imports and exports.

All of these approaches have been tried by Russia, under highly favourable conditions, since it attacked Ukraine. All have failed.

In the lead-up to the 24 February invasion, the Russians were able to assemble large forces on Ukraine’s borders while maintaining ambiguity about their intentions. For fear of inflaming the situation, Ukraine could do little to prepare, and its allies provided little or nothing in the way of lethal military aid.

These conditions were ideal for Russia’s opening move. A rapid assault on Kyiv was planned to begin with the takeover of Hostomel Airport by elite airborne troops, who would be followed in by a much larger airborne force. Things didn’t go to plan: the assault force was driven off with heavy casualties and the main force turned back. By the time Russian land forces reached Hostomel, the chance of a surprise attack was lost.

Even if the strike had not been a military failure, the political calculation on which it was based turned out to be absolutely wrong. Far from welcoming Russian invaders as liberators, Ukrainians fought back furiously. Even in Russian-speaking cities like Kharkiv, Putin found little or no support.

A decapitation strike against Taiwan would face immensely greater difficulties. There would be no possibility of surprise. Taiwan’s air defences have been built up over decades. Reunification has essentially zero support among Taiwanese. And even if the current leadership could somehow be eliminated, local replacements would be equally or more hostile.

The most commonly discussed scenario for forcible reunification is a seaborne invasion. Even before the Ukraine war this idea seemed far-fetched, as a comparison with the Normandy landings in 1944 shows. The Allies had complete air superiority, the narrow English Channel to cross, a wide choice of poorly defended landing sites and a numerical superiority of five to one. The Germans didn’t detect the attack until landing craft were within reach of shore. Even so, the Allies fell far short of their Day 1 objectives.

A Chinese invasion fleet, by contrast, would have to cross the 170 kilometre Taiwan Strait with no chance of avoiding detection, then land on one of a handful of well-protected beaches and face numerically superior defenders.

The Ukraine war drives the lesson home. Before the invasion, Russia’s Black Sea fleet was widely seen as a major strategic asset. When the initial attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv failed, a seaborne attack on Odessa was generally anticipated. Ukraine had only a handful of domestically produced anti-ship missiles, and its own navy had been wiped out on the first day of the war. Russia was in complete command of the sea.

Yet the attack never took place. The sinking of the Moskva in April by a Ukrainian Neptune missile proved that the Russians had been right to hold back. Russian naval forces were inadequate even to defend the famous Snake Island, kilometres from Ukrainian mainland. With Ukraine’s acquisition of increasing numbers of modern missiles, most of the fleet has been withdrawn entirely to the relative safety of Novorossiysk on the eastern shore of the Black Sea.

Ukraine repelled the Black Sea fleet with a handful of missiles. Taiwan has hundreds, including American-made Harpoons and domestically produced missiles easily capable of hitting Chinese ships before they leave port. Many are truck-mounted and effectively impossible to destroy even with an intensive air campaign.

All the evidence suggests that China understands this. While it is politically necessary for the government in Beijing to maintain that it has the capacity to reunify China by force, the announced plan for doing so is outlandish. It involves securing landing sites with a handful of craft then sending in the main force on lightly modified civilian ferries. No sensible person could take such a plan seriously.

Much the same points can be made about the idea of an extended bombing campaign. Bombing an enemy into submission has been tried many times since its initial success at Guernica in 1937 and has almost invariably failed.

Moreover, Russia’s massive air force has proved incapable of overcoming Ukrainian air defences, or even driving the much smaller Ukraine air force from the skies. With the exception of the mythical “ghost of Kyiv,” air-to-air combat has been almost non-existent, and crewed aircraft have played at most a marginal role. It is highly unlikely that the Chinese air force, operating under far less favourable conditions, could do any better against Taiwan.

Finally, there is the possibility of a blockade. Like the other options for an assault on Taiwan, this idea has always been problematic. It would be easy enough to close the South China Sea to shipping, but that would be more damaging to China than Taiwan, which could use air transport or develop ports on its eastern coast.

By contrast, Russia’s strategy of blocking Ukrainian exports through the Black Sea looked relatively easy, and for a while it seemed to work. But a combination of military failures (notably the loss of Snake Island) and global condemnation forced it to abandon the idea. The resumption of Ukrainian grain exports (billed as a “goodwill gesture”) has reversed one of the few successes of Russia’s war.

Taiwan is clearly aware of this, and has shifted its focus  from traditional air and naval warfare to a defensive “hedgehog” strategy based primarily on anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile warfare. (Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute has suggested a similar “echidna” strategy for Australia.)

If an invasion of Taiwan is militarily impossible, why is it continually discussed? The answer is that it is in the interests of all the major parties to pretend that an invasion is a real possibility. The Chinese government can’t concede that it lacks the capacity to unify the country by force. The Taiwanese government has every reason to present itself as being threatened by China. And the US military, particularly the navy, has no incentive to downplay threats that demand high levels of defence expenditure.

This continued focus on conflict over Taiwan, and more generally in the South China Sea, increases the risk of accidental escalation, possibly even involving nuclear weapons. Moreover, it distracts attention from arguably more serious threats, most notably the rise of North Korea as a rogue nuclear power under effective Chinese protection. It also undermines possibilities for cooperation, particularly in relation to climate change.

A realistic Western approach to China would accept that it is a powerful adversary in a number of strategic dimensions but a necessary partner in others. The same realism is needed on the Chinese side. Focusing on the chimerical idea of an invasion of Taiwan is counterproductive on both sides.

The post Why an invasion of Taiwan would fail appeared first on Inside Story.

The polls suggest that Zelenskiy will then comfortably defeat either the sitting president, Petro Poroshenko, or the charismatic populist and former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, in the 21 April run-off. Anatoliy Hrytsenko, a pro-Western former defence minister, is the only other candidate with a shadow of a chance of getting through the first round.

Zelenskiy is a one-off, his political success the product of his television popularity. He enjoys support — including heavy television exposure — from the prominent oligarch and TV mogul Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who has also given some backing to Tymoshenko, herself a wealthy businesswoman. Prime minister Poroshenko is an oligarch in his own right, and an enemy of Kolomoyskyi. In the latest sensation, he has initiated a lawsuit against Kolomoyskyi alleging that Zelenskiy’s program is being used to spread lies damaging to the honour and dignity of the president. This manoeuvre might yet get him over the line, despite his recent reverses.

With parliamentary elections due in October, the new president will need to find a way of exercising some control over parliament’s deliberations. Poroshenko will be represented by his own party, the Poroshenko Bloc, which, like many Ukrainian parties past and present, is largely an extension of his political persona. Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) is a well-developed party by Ukrainian standards, and has engaged in significant policy development; it tends to lapse into Tymoshenko’s characteristic populist excesses, though, for which it then suffers in the opinion polls. Zelenskiy would come to the job without any existing parliamentary vehicle, but he has formed a party of his own that could expect to gain at least some seats in October.

Although Poroshenko may still find a way to win, a Zelenskiy victory looks likely, with all the uncertainty that such an outcome would bring. He has said, and recently repeated, that he would like to meet as soon as possible with the Russian president Vladimir Putin to discuss bringing the war in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine to an end. Though Zelenskiy is a Russophone from the east of Ukraine, he presents as a pro-Western democrat, and has recruited some able pro-Western and reformist advisers. Putin would no doubt relish the opportunity to bring his dirty tricks department to bear on such a naive novice.

Putin’s central objective is to defeat or destroy Poroshenko. The Russian president’s preferred Ukrainian politicians have been pushed towards the perimeter of public life since Russia seized Crimea and launched its proxy war in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014, and any overtly pro-Russian candidate would have no hope of victory in present circumstances. Much of Russophone southeastern Ukraine is under Russian occupation, meanwhile, and its residents are unable to vote.

Poroshenko has proven to be a formidable military, diplomatic and political opponent. Both Kremlin-preferred alternatives, especially Tymoshenko but also Zelenskiy, have Russian connections that Putin would hope to exploit. Left without a serious horse in the race, he will do whatever he can to eject Poroshenko while taking advantage of any opportunities for further low-risk aggression the election might engender.

Though only days remain before the first round of voting, sudden game-changing developments are still possible, particularly affecting the sitting president. Poroshenko has been damaged recently by a corruption scandal involving a close ally and senior defence official whose son allegedly acquired Russian weapons and sold them to the Ukrainian army at grossly inflated prices. The details of this affair are complex and perhaps less scandalous than they appear, but the alleged actions would be judged a particularly heinous offence in a country where the army had to be largely crowdfunded by the public, at considerable sacrifice, after Russia’s sudden attacks on Crimea and Donbas in 2014–15.

Ukraine’s armed forces were suffering from gross neglect and rampant corruption, a post-Soviet legacy accentuated by the dismal performance of the pro-Russian regime of previous president Viktor Yanukovych. While the neglect has been overcome, corruption in the armed forces, as in other spheres of Ukrainian life, remains a serious problem.

Two dubious court decisions by Ukraine’s notoriously unreconstructed judiciary have also acutely embarrassed the president. One effectively dismissed the respected reformist health minister, Ulana Suprun, thereby clearing the way for the return of corrupt practices the minister had successfully nobbled. The second, by Ukraine’s Constitutional Court no less, struck down a law that required public officials who had mysteriously become wealthy during their terms of office to explain their newfound wealth or risk a custodial sentence.

Both seemingly corrupt decisions were severely criticised by domestic reformers, as well as by foreign diplomats and representatives of organisations that provide crucial financial support to Ukraine. Three leading reformers left Poroshenko’s party in disgust to join Anatoliy Hrytsenko’s presidential campaign, and three reformist presidential candidates closed down their candidacies and subsumed them under Hrytsenko’s campaign.

To make matters worse, Poroshenko (like Tymoshenko) has been accused of vote buying involving government funds. Such practices among well-placed politicians, using what are known euphemistically as “administrative resources,” are still endemic in many post-Soviet countries, including Ukraine and Russia. In Ukraine they are resisted by reformers, voters and media; in Russia they can’t be challenged.

Poroshenko responded vigorously to these setbacks, but some damage had been done. His failure to curb corrupt practices and his growing opposition to reform, and to reformists generally, had already dented his popularity ratings. Within days, new opinion polls pointed to a big swing to Hrytsenko, who lacks charisma but has a reputation for honesty, lifting him into a respectable fourth place. Till then he had seemed too far astern of the leading three candidates to challenge them. Poroshenko, meanwhile, fell behind Tymoshenko, and Zelenskiy maintained his clear lead. After a pause, Poroshenko will probably recover lost ground and be able to use those administrative resources to overtake Tymoshenko and qualify for the run-off.

These events, along with a win in the run-off for Zelenskiy, might seem to point to the strength of pro-Western reform forces and foreshadow the prospect at last for an attack on the scourge of corruption, the main factor impeding Ukraine’s Western integration. But a defeat for Poroshenko will ring alarm bells in Western capitals and delight Moscow; and it is not clear that Zelenskiy or any other candidate can fill his shoes.

Poroshenko has done a very good job in keeping his fragile coalition in place, doubtless making some unedifying but pragmatically useful deals along the way. He has achieved remarkable success in building up the armed forces from less than modest beginnings to become the third-strongest fighting force in Europe, capable of blocking the constant probing of Russia and its proxy militias. He has also been successful on the international stage, acquiring much invaluable experience at the highest levels and maintaining good relations with key Western counterparts, even including the difficult Donald Trump.

And he has almost single-handedly achieved autocephaly (in effect, independence) for the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, by dint of concentrated effort with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul, adroit diplomacy with foreign leaders, notably Erdoğan in Turkey, and effective liaison with the Ukrainian diaspora. Autocephaly has enraged the Kremlin almost as much as Ukraine’s military defiance, because it threatens Russia’s traditionally dominant position in the Orthodox Church in Ukraine and potentially other Orthodox communities in what the Kremlin calls “the Russian World” (Russkii Mir) — any part of the Tsarist–Soviet empire where Russian is spoken by some of the inhabitants.

More generally, autocephaly weakens the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church internationally. After 1917, the Bolsheviks killed priests by the tens of thousands and converted the church into the tame, secret police–dominated instrument of Kremlin policy that it has remained ever since. Like much about Russia, this is a reality poorly understood by the outside world, allowing the church to enjoy more respect in the world than its steeply declining parishioner numbers in Russia proper would justify.

Poroshenko has declared autocephaly a second independence for his country, a far from extravagant boast, particularly seen in a longer-term perspective. But the outlook for the new church remains clouded by the prospect of clashes in parishes disputed between the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine, most of whose administrative structures remain. Russia has threatened to stimulate such unrest. Kiev’s security organs are focused on forestalling any such violence, but doing so over the long haul will not be easy. By one estimate, over a thousand parishes have made the transition to the new Ukrainian church, and the rate of change has been increasing, but that is still less than 10 per cent of the total.

Less judiciously, Poroshenko has also further strengthened the role of the Ukrainian language in education and public life, pushing through an overhaul of language laws to favour Ukrainian over Russian and other minority languages. In the process, he has angered several neighbours whose support Ukraine needs, and made a particular enemy of Hungary, which has repeatedly used its veto in NATO deliberations to block Ukraine’s otherwise increasing cooperation with the alliance. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s policy has been warmly welcomed by his partners in the Kremlin.

Poroshenko has adopted as his central campaign slogan the phrase Armiya, Mova, Vira (armed forces, language, faith) to encapsulate his main achievements. But his failures on corruption and reform have cost him dearly. In November, 80 per cent of respondents to one poll said Ukraine was heading in the wrong direction; another poll found only 10 per cent of respondents had trust in their government.

Despite the fact that he has reportedly put tens of thousands of dollars into supporting national and charitable projects, the mounting success of Poroshenko’s numerous business ventures while in office is clearly galling. Most people in Ukraine have been doing it tough through the years of enforced economic austerity since the Euromaidan, and the sight of their leading politician enjoying ever-increasing wealth is political poison. This alienation makes it harder for the government to lift energy prices, privatise land and make other reforms required in return for financial support from the International Monetary Fund and other Western lenders. Adding to the pressure is the fact that 2019 is a year in which Kiev faces record debt repayments.

But Poroshenko has presided over some very significant national achievements. And they have been carried out without any attempt to convert the country into an autocracy. Since independence, Ukraine has been a rough-and-ready democracy, with regular elections and changes of government. Under Poroshenko it has become much more democratic, despite conspicuous imperfections, including oligarch-controlled television channels that grossly favour the interests of their owners or their business partners. The three presidential frontrunners and pro-Kremlin interests are among the conspicuous beneficiaries of this system.

Poroshenko’s Ukraine is also more democratic than any other former republic of the Soviet Union outside the Baltic states. And on many criteria it may also be more democratic, if much less prosperous and more chaotic, than Hungary or Poland under their present leaderships. The fact that it’s still unclear who will win the presidential election speaks for itself. The contrast with Russia’s stagnant and increasingly repressive regime is eloquent.

The Poroshenko ascendancy has been widely and justly criticised in recent times for one other worrying development: the intrusion into public life of unruly militia formations that are inclined to take matters of civil order into their own hands. They have been implicated in vigilante actions against minorities, notably Roma settlements, sometimes seemingly without any response from the forces of law and order. In the case of units from the notorious Azov Battalion, part of the problem for the government is that this formation played a valiant and crucial role in defending the country against Russian attacks at the outset of the war in Donbas.

During the election campaign, the Ukrainian interior ministry gave two of the more irresponsible Azov units carte blanche to supervise election processes, including vote counting, and to use force at their own discretion, which they did recently in Kiev and Cherkasy, injuring fifteen police officers. Alarmed, the G7 Ambassadors’ Support Group for Ukraine privately told the Ukrainian authorities to put a stop to these scandalous developments. Unfortunately perhaps, that intervention has now become public property, which will give a huge fillip to several of Russia’s standard propaganda themes: that Ukraine is a failed state; that it is run by fascists; and that its presidential elections will be so deeply flawed as to be illegitimate.

Despite their regrettable prominence, hard-right formations have gained very little traction in Ukrainian electoral politics. The political parties closest to them have failed to trouble the scorers in presidential elections or to gain significant representation in parliament. The G7 group has been urging its interlocutors in Kiev to curb the activities of these formations in the short term and consider outlawing them altogether soon after the elections. It has conveyed the message that if the Ukrainian government does not overcome these sorts of problems it will lose Western support.

Such irregularities are not unique to post-Soviet republics. The difference in Ukraine is that they are not stage-managed by an authoritarian regime. Yet much Western commentary on Ukraine overstates the prevalence of hard-right formations and the grip of “nationalism,” the latter being a strange reproach to level at a country that has been under attack for five years, militarily and in every other possible domain, by a neighbour armed to the teeth. Between blows, that neighbour, Russia, has told Ukraine that it is an errant branch of the great Russian nation, and that the Ukrainian nation is a myth. Nationalism, even “hypernationalism,” would seem to be the only healthy response in such circumstances.

Though Ukraine and its largely Moscow-administered travails have rather faded from Australian news coverage, and are less well-covered elsewhere than they used to be, what coverage there is often focuses on the country’s negatives. It is characterised by a marked tendency to naivety and moral equivalence (“Ukraine says that Russia is driving the conflict in Donbas, but Russia denies any involvement”). Often missing is reporting of the corresponding phenomena in Russia itself, where official hypernationalism — whether one terms it far-right or far-left — flourishes and is imposed on the whole nation, and where Neo-Nazi militias are not uncommon.

Five years on from the armed seizure of Crimea, Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine continues, with more than 13,000 dead, 30,000 wounded, well over a million displaced, tens of billions of dollars of losses and damage sustained by the victim nation, and the prospect of further Kremlin-initiated escalation always looming. Last November’s brazenly illegal attack on Ukrainian vessels exercising a legitimate freedom of passage near the Kerch Strait in the Sea of Azov came after many months of systematic trade strangulation carried out by Russia in the region.

While Russian vessels had been harassing Ukrainian cargo ships for months, the sudden use of outright military force on 25 November was unexpected. The attack caused casualties and damage to the vessels, and saw the cavalier confiscation of three more Ukrainian ships (during the Crimean operation in 2014, the Russians had already appropriated at least twelve of Kiev’s seventeen naval vessels). Twenty-four sailors were arrested and taken to Moscow, where they have been imprisoned for an indeterminate period. It was the first time that Russia had overtly deployed military force against Ukraine without any pseudo-justification; nor, of course, was there any prior declaration of hostilities.

This sequence of events was another explicit challenge to the international liberal order, a challenge to which the West has largely failed to react. Both Europe and the United States have responded tepidly. Although Donald Trump has removed several of the key “adults in the room” from his administration, it still contains people who are officially responsible for easing Ukraine’s predicament but feel increasingly constrained. The most senior State Department official in this area, Wess Mitchell, has resigned. Those remaining in the military sphere continue to discuss the prospect of further military assistance to Ukraine (more has been provided under Trump than under Obama), but little has yet been done since Kerch, and time is passing. More serious sanctions, which would have concerned and possibly constrained Moscow, were reportedly under discussion within the administration. But the package finally announced on 15 March was so trivial that the Russian stock market rose in response.

Putin may therefore infer that the time is ripe for a further decisive move against Ukraine and/or possibly elsewhere. His constant boasting about his new doomsday weapons and big build-up of combat-ready conventional forces suggest potential moves. Moscow is attentive to signals and non-signals; and it still has hopes that its man in the White House will be able to deliver a big deal that opens up prospects for better bilateral relations, an easing of sanctions, and perhaps even a strengthening of Russia’s sphere of influence in Eurasia.

The chances of that occurring were less while the shadow of Mueller still hung over President Trump. But now that shadow is apparently dispersing, Trump might see a grand deal with his Kremlin counterpart as feasible, in which case Ukrainian interests could perhaps be traded away for some greater objective. •

The post Ukraine’s four-cornered contest draws to a close appeared first on Inside Story.

Even if the gunfire has fallen silent or become merely intermittent, Western policy-makers need to remind themselves that a Leninist kto-kogo struggle (who is defeating or dominating whom) is still being fought by the other side, and in a variety of ways. Putin wants to win, not to settle for an honourable draw, and his attention span is much longer even than German chancellor Angela Merkel’s, and certainly than French president François Hollande’s.

As von Clausewitz told us, war is the continuation of politics by other means. But for the Leninists and their modern legatees, the Putinists, politics (and information, culture, trade and the like) is the continuation of war by other means. They see many different paths to victory, and so it is with Ukraine.

In recent years, Moscow has essentially been replicating in countries to its west the sort of operation it undertook at the end of, and just after, the second world war to communise Central and Eastern Europe. This time the target countries are former Soviet republics rather than what were once Warsaw Pact countries-to-be, though Ukraine fits into both camps. The ideological bait and the mix of preferred instruments are also slightly modified to suit the times, and happily the use of military conquest and the violent repression of ungrateful new subjects are so far much less massive in scale.

But the pattern is broadly similar: outright invasion and seizure of territory; deployment of freshly minted partisan militias under Kremlin auspices; creation of pseudo-state structures, often with tell-tale Stalinist monikers like “people’s republic”; police state methods against whole categories of dissenters; negotiations on the basis of these faits accomplis; intensive propaganda to discredit the victims (“fascists”), legitimise the proxies (“rebels,” “separatists”), and reduce the outside world’s readiness to resist the new dispensation; and trade wars, using arbitrary and crippling sanctions for no legitimate reason to undermine the target country’s economy or generate coercive pressure (by cutting off sources of heating in winter, for example).

Also in the mix are exported corruption, especially bought or hired politicians; subverting and destabilising target states by organising violent takeovers of media outlets, administrative buildings and so on; bankrolling receptive parties; setting up pseudo-independence movements in areas where a military incursion might lend wings to a “national liberation movement” otherwise incapable of independent flight; and recruiting neighbouring states or peoples who may wish to cooperate in a possible carve-up of territory. (On the postwar events and present-day similarities, see respectively Anne Applebaum’s book Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956 and her article “Russia and the Great Forgetting.”)

Though skirmishes have resumed in Eastern Ukraine in recent weeks, the outright military phase seemed to plateau at a lower level several months ago. Negotiations, manoeuvres and contacts have continued in various formats, but they seem to match Moscow’s plans and desiderata less closely than before. Reinforced by the slump in oil and gas prices and Russia’s overall economic malaise, sanctions are holding Moscow back from attempting to create further “facts on the ground” in Ukraine. And Putin’s costly insertion of his armed forces into Syria has yielded added complications that threaten further conflicts on multiple fronts and reduce his room for manoeuvre.

The Ukrainian armed forces and associated militias have continued to display unexpected resilience in maintaining the line of contact with Russian-dominated proxy forces. Even more surprisingly, the West’s unity on the sanctions has proved greater than Russia, or indeed many Western observers, were expecting. But that unity is still precarious, and much of what Russia has been saying lately about the need for a new grand alliance against terrorism, in the spirit of the second world war, points to the Kremlin’s reasonable calculation that EU sanctions could be rolled back in the relatively near future.

The West has agreed that sanctions relief should be linked to implementation of the Minsk ceasefire agreements, which sought to end the fighting in Ukraine. But those agreements are less than fully clear, and appear to place much more definite obligations on Kiev than on Moscow or its proxies. Russia hopes that it will be able to persuade a few European friends and potential veto-wielders that it has more or less met the terms of Minsk. But it has not met the requirement to withdraw its forces and weaponry (indeed it still pretends it has not deployed either), much less to concede control of its “border” with the “people’s republics.” Few people really believe it ever will.

The last few months have seen renewed signs of pressure from the pro-Moscow camp in the European Union, notably via statements from EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and various senior national figures. But despite the growing agitation for a return to business as usual with Moscow, it is clear that sanctions will nonetheless be extended for another six months when they expire at the end of January.

Because a unanimous decision is required to extend sanctions, a determined veto by even one EU member state would be enough, in theory, to revoke them. In practice, it doesn’t seem to work that way. But if a stronger wave of sentiment were to develop with one or two senior and influential EU leaders behind it, the outcome may be different. In the second week of December, Italian premier Matteo Renzi caused a brief sensation by twice appearing to demand a reconsideration of the sanctions issue at the EU summit on 17–18 December, taking more adequate account of Russia’s “help” in the Middle East.

As of 14 December, however, his foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, was “clarifying” that Italy would not block extension of the sanctions. But Gentiloni did emphasise that EU states are increasingly keen to come to terms with Russia over Ukraine. So, if not now, perhaps sanctions will be lifted in six months. And Luxembourg foreign minister Jean Asselborn has reminded everyone that sanctions could end earlier if the situation in Ukraine improves. This is clearly a space to keep watching.

From the outset, the Minsk agreements had a number of disadvantages for Ukraine and the West. As the distinguished Chatham House expert on Russia and Ukraine, James Sherr, has commented, “If Poroshenko, Merkel and Hollande received military advice when negotiating, there is no sign of it.” To be fair, Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko might well have known that the deal had grave flaws from Kiev’s point of view, but he had limited influence over the negotiating tactics and objectives of his Western supporters.

The central problem was that the agreements recognised the invaders and fifth columnists in Eastern Ukraine as legitimate representatives of a domestic constituency rather than the placemen of a foreign power that had annexed by force a large part of Ukraine and was manifestly intent on doing more of the same. Russia was treated not as a guilty participant but as an honest broker with “legitimate interests” in the outcome of the “conflict.” (Ukraine has experienced tensions during its twenty-four years of independence, but never violent subversion of the kind that conveniently “broke out” across eastern Ukraine in the weeks immediately after the invasion of Crimea.)

Under the Minsk agreements, Ukraine was required to change its constitution to guarantee autonomy to “certain regions” in the Donbass – and to do this in a way that met with the approval of the Moscow-controlled cliques in charge of the nascent police states of Donetsk and Luhansk. (For a recent depiction of life there by a Russian reporter who has been on the ground throughout, see Pavel Kanygin’s article, “The Donbass War: Assessing the Aftermath.”)

Most Ukrainians don’t see why being attacked by Russians and their Trojan horses in the Donbass should mean that they must make constitutional changes that will shore up the position of the aggressors. Meeting this Minsk provision therefore requires Kiev to take an extremely unpopular decision at a time when the governing parties’ public standing is in steep decline. One of the key reasons for the decline is that they had to impose painful economic reforms on the population to clean up the fiscal mess left by predecessors, notably the deposed president Viktor Yanukovych, and meet the prerequisites for a desperately needed IMF bailout. While this has been going on, the Ukrainian economy has contracted by 7 per cent and a projected 12 per cent in 2014 and 2015, respectively, and incomes and living standards have slumped even more sharply. GDP seems likely to register a small increase in the current quarter, but any turnaround will be slow, and much damage has been done.

Given their own desperate situation, most Ukrainians have no desire to pay for the despoliation of the east of their country by Moscow and its proxies. Some even argue for cutting the people’s republics loose and allowing them to secede de facto to Russia, forcing Moscow to pay for the damage it has caused, and leaving Ukraine reduced but more united. The Minsk agreements, however, gave Kiev responsibility for the social security of the Donbass inhabitants and the rehabilitation of the war zone, presumably including the cost of mopping up after the looting and gratuitous damage the proxies inflicted on Ukrainian and foreign businesses, above and beyond the armed conflict.

For reasons of its own, Russia wants the Donbass people’s republics to be reintegrated into Ukrainian state structures but given such far-reaching autonomy that they can block any westward moves by the Kiev government. And for any national government to acquiesce legally to any further excisions from Ukraine’s sovereign territory after Russia’s military surgery in Crimea would be political suicide.

In fact, Kiev has curtailed much of its support for the population still living in the people’s republics. (Current estimates, almost certainly on the low side, put war fatalities at more than 9000, with at least three million displaced, many of them to Kiev-controlled Ukraine.) It is thereby pressuring a reluctant Moscow to come to the aid of the Donbass population. Some humane Ukrainian commentators deplore Kiev’s policy in this matter, saying it will lead to the permanent estrangement of the Donbass population, and reporting from the region suggests they are probably right. But the state’s coffers are bare.

Two years on from the Euromaidan uprising, the population in Kiev-dominated regions is growing impatient with the government’s weak performance in tackling Ukraine’s endemic corruption (a common feature of most of post-communist Europe, apart from the Baltic states and Georgia). Sympathetic Western leaders, notably from the United States, take a similar view and have been expressing it forcefully. Other major sources of public resentment include the notorious influence of powerful oligarchs and the failure to find and prosecute those responsible for the violent repression of protesters during the Maidan demonstrations.

Supporters of President Poroshenko and the prime minister, Arseny Yatsenyuk, argue that fighting a war, keeping a stricken economy afloat and implementing painful measures to restore the fiscal balance is exhausting their political capital, and that they cannot afford to alienate the powerful oligarchs and other influential figures they need to keep in the tent. As for prosecuting those responsible for the violent attacks on Maidan demonstrators, they claim nearly all of them have fled to Russia after destroying the evidence, making prosecutions hard to mount.

A corruption scandal has recently engulfed the self-styled “kamikaze” prime minister himself, whose popularity had already sunk through the floor. One of his close allies is being pursued for accepting bribes by Swiss prosecutors, and has been forced to resign his seat in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament).

Earlier it was revealed that President Poroshenko’s own wealth, despite punitive Russian measures in Russia and Ukraine, has surged above the billion mark since he took office, a point eagerly picked up by Russian propaganda outlets. He is also justly criticised for having failed to divest himself of much of his wealth, as he promised to do before assuming office. But while no clear evidence of corruption by the president or prime minister has emerged, the public is not convinced by the government’s explanations for its failures, and impatience is growing.

Meanwhile, populist and nationalist solutions to complex economic and political issues are starting to gain traction in the Verkhovna Rada and more widely. A battle is being fought in the Rada and beyond over a populist counterproposal to the radical tax and budgetary package proposed by the highly competent American-Ukrainian finance minister Natalie Jaresko, in consultation with the International Monetary Fund. The rival bill, which would bust Ukraine’s precarious fiscal position, has elicited an IMF warning that its further support (without which the country may face default) could be withheld.

There is a serious risk that ambitious and irresponsible political groups could use or somehow precipitate violence in their efforts to exploit the current volatile political situation. The issue of the special autonomy to be bestowed upon the people’s republics under the Minsk agreements has done so already, and could again be a trigger. Extreme turbulence accompanied the first stage of the relevant legislation’s passage through the parliament on 31 August, despite the measures falling far short of the expectations of Moscow and its proxies. A violent hand-grenade attack outside the parliament, staged by one of the militant nationalist parties, resulted in police casualties. Fisticuffs inside the parliament are not unknown, but violence of this kind is a most unusual and ominous development.

Given all this, the passage of legislation necessary even to meet Ukraine’s Western supporters’ expectations may yet prove beyond the Poroshenko administration’s capacity. For their part, Russia and its proxies will almost certainly say that whatever legislation is passed is insufficient. They have been demanding not just decentralisation or autonomy, but effectively “federalisation.” Cobbling together a parliamentary majority to pass the unpopular legislation will be very difficult, and possibly contribute to the Kiev government’s collapse.

Whatever their flaws, the Minsk agreements were presumably as much as Merkel and Hollande felt they could get from Moscow. With the total absence of the United States from the negotiating process, President Poroshenko had no real alternative way of gaining the reduction in fighting he desperately needed to rescue the gravely ill Ukrainian economy. Apart from the few weeks of calm after 1 September 2015, though, there never really has been a genuine ceasefire in place. And Russia has continued to supply heavy weaponry and infiltrate personnel through the over 300 km of border it jointly controls with its Donbass proxies.

Throughout the occupation, with Russian connivance, the proxies have denied monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or OSCE, access to the border and most other areas they hold. In recent months they have even been blocking charitable organisations seeking to bring relief to the suffering civilian population in the Donbas; these charities are acting as hostile “foreign agents,” the proxies allege, in another loyal echo of one of the worst xenophobic features of Putinism. The Donetsk and Luhansk regimes, on the other hand, have been very welcoming towards selected Western journalists, enabling them to see, record and display to the world the damage and suffering the civilian population has suffered. Often the news reports uncritically present the devastation as being essentially Kiev’s fault, without saying much if anything about the real causes of the conflict or the thuggish behaviour of the journalists’ hosts.

Russia has sent forty-five “humanitarian convoys” to proxy-held territory since the Donbass regions were seized, none of which they have allowed Ukrainian or OSCE officials to inspect. Many reports suggest that weaponry and other non-humanitarian cargo have been transported in this way. Russia has also provided financial support, but with its own economy under stress it doesn’t seem to see repairing its damage in Ukraine as a high priority. It does maintain close political control of the regions, however.

As it currently stands, the Minsk outcome only meets the Kremlin’s minimal requirements – to devastate the Ukrainian economy by means of arbitrary trade boycotts, and to seize enough territory to prevent the country from integrating with Western institutions. Even with the additional land the proxies grabbed after the Minsk II ceasefire supposedly came into effect last February, they occupy only about half of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Putin would like ideally at some point to take over both in their entirety, and more besides. Efforts continue aimed at destabilising the two largest and most Russified regions of Kharkiv and Odessa, the scene of repeated, mysterious bombings that were never typical of Ukraine before the Russian aggression began. The Transcarpathian region of western Ukraine, bordering Slovakia, has also been subject to transparently Kremlin-inspired attempts to create a separatist movement.

Where does this leave Putin’s Novorossiya project – the idea of seizing the entire eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, creating a land bridge to Crimea, and linking up with the Russian-sponsored breakaway territory of Transnistria in Moldova? This seems to have been the Kremlin’s preferred option at one stage, but Ukrainian resistance, Western reactions and the slump in energy prices and the rouble forced a reappraisal. Putin has not publicly mentioned it for well over a year, and he seems to have settled, for now anyway, on another “frozen conflict” in the Donbas.

As the Georgian precedent indicates, the Kremlin could easily decide to “unfreeze” the conflict at some opportune moment, but for the time being that seems unlikely. In recent months it has restrained some of the domestic hypernationalists, once tacitly encouraged, who have been calling for outright invasion of Ukraine and condemning Putin for failing to do so. Keeping Ukraine a failed state and out of Western institutions is the minimal requirement. But what the Putin regime would like ultimately is a Ukraine subordinate to Moscow, with a compliant government in Kiev, its economy integrated in the Eurasian Economic Union, its military industries closely linked to the Russian military-industrial complex, and Russian as an official, and effectively the dominant, language.

If the Ukrainians don’t oblige, the Donbass front could always be reactivated and the destabilisation of other regions renewed. But there are other ways of exerting severe pressure. Trade boycotts, “energy diplomacy” and manipulating prices have all been used frequently.

It is true that such measures may be exhausting their potential. As Moscow has intensified its trade boycotts, Ukraine has been tearing itself away from its dependence on Russian imports and exports. Quite recently, Russian and EU trade with Ukraine were each roughly a third of the total, but Ukraine’s trade with the European Union is now more than double that with Russia.

In an ideal world this would not be the optimal trade pattern between the two countries, but as Putin has turned trade – like culture and broadcasting – into a coercive weapon, Kiev feels that it has no choice but to greatly reduce contact with Russia in all fields. If Putin’s methods ultimately fail in the struggle to dominate Ukraine, he will have done severe and gratuitous damage to Russia as well as to his victim along the way.

But while the economic weapons are starting to lose effectiveness because of gross overuse, they are still potent. Moscow has foreshadowed yet another cut-off of gas supplies during the coming winter; it has abruptly curtailed all agricultural imports from Ukraine; and when Ukraine banned civilian Russian flights into Ukraine on ostensibly national security grounds, Moscow quickly responded in kind. These recent measures build on nearly two years of severe and punitive trade war waged by the Kremlin.

The gas is less potent than it once was thanks to efforts by Ukraine to build up reserves and acquire much more of its gas imports from other sources. But it has other vulnerabilities and Moscow will exploit them. As well as cutting off gas supplies, it has curtailed coal and nuclear fuel supplies. Kiev is partly to blame for this: it failed to contain the blockade of Crimea, mounted by mainly Crimean Tatar activists and aimed at preventing essential supplies being delivered from Ukraine to the peninsula. The Crimean Tatars have suffered heavily from Russian imperialism in various forms, including genocide at the hands of Stalin and systematic persecution by the new regime installed since the Russian annexation last year. But the activists went from obstructing land exports to sabotaging electricity supplies and then preventing Ukrainian services from carrying out repairs. In failing to block the blockaders, however understandable given Moscow’s behaviour in Crimea, Kiev gave Putin an excellent excuse to retaliate painfully. The ban on coal supplies in particular could be very damaging to Ukraine during the winter.

After blandly lying that he would not impose further sanctions on Ukraine, Putin has now ordered the imposition of tariffs on Ukrainian exports when Kiev’s free trade deal comes into force on 1 January 2016, on the grounds that without them, cheap EU goods would flood into Russia. EU officials and independent observers regard these Russian claims as specious, and an excuse for measures aimed at preventing Kiev from proceeding with its Association Agreement with the European Union. It has been estimated that this measure will cost Ukraine $1.5 billion annually.

Moscow is trying hard to damage the battered Ukrainian economy in other ways too. Not widely reported in the Australian press has been Russia’s unremitting campaign to use a $3 billion debt owed it by Ukraine to tip its unruly little brother over the economic precipice. The money, provided by Moscow to president Viktor Yanukovych just before he was deposed, has been described (not unfairly) by prime minister Yatsenyuk as a bribe to induce Yanukovych to abandon any thought of integration with the European Union.

As a condition for approval of a US$40 billion bailout package from the IMF, the Poroshenko administration was required to secure a negotiated restructuring of $18 billion owed to private creditors. After long and arduous negotiations, the creditors agreed to a 20 per cent haircut and some easing of the terms of repayment, which financial observers saw as a fairly favourable outcome for the creditors in the circumstances. Russia refused to negotiate on its $3 billion and maintained that the debt was state-to-state, not private. IMF policy has been not to disburse loans to states in arrears to other states.

In this case, though, the IMF let it be known that it would continue to disburse tranches of the bailout even if Ukraine remained in arrears to Russia. No doubt it was also taking into account the fact that, as the IMF’s president Christine Lagarde emphasised publicly, Kiev had taken some heroic decisions to meet the Fund’s tough conditions. Perhaps it also saw as relevant the fact that Russia had invaded Crimea after making the loan, seizing land and resources worth many tens of billions of dollars, and had also implicated itself heavily in the tens of billions of dollars’ damage done by the armed subversion of eastern Ukraine. All this suggested that Russia’s bonds might ultimately be judged to be odious debt in the technical legal sense.

As the IMF mood seemed to be hardening against him, Putin attempted to step round this obstacle by declaring a readiness to accept the $3 billion over three years, plus interest, starting with an upfront $75 million and subject to guarantees of repayment by Western institutions. Although the “offer” was conspicuously less generous than the deal accepted by the private creditors, it was widely hailed at first as a sign of Russia’s flexibility. Ukraine argued that it could not offer more generous terms to Russia than it had done to the other non-official creditors.

Last week the IMF announced that in Ukraine’s case it was prepared to set aside its usual rule of not extending support to countries in arrears to another sovereign. (“IMF Backstabs Russia by Lifting Loan Ban vs. Debt-Dodging Ukraine” is a sample of Western Putinist propaganda on this topic.) But shortly afterwards it announced that it upheld Russia’s contention that the $3 billion lent to Yanukovych by Putin was an official not a commercial debt, and called on Kiev to negotiate with Moscow on repayment of the debt. This is very unfavourable for Kiev, which will refuse to pay; and the issue will become another expensive matter between the two countries that will end up in court.

Another good example of Putin’s methods is Gazprom’s latest pipeline project, Nord Stream II, to be built in collaboration with big German and other West European companies. Like Nord Stream I, it will cost at least $10 billion but has no economic justification. (Existing pipelines through eastern and central Europe could do the same job.) The purpose is geopolitical: to bypass the East European countries, depriving them of transit fees and any leverage in price negotiations, and making it easy for Gazprom (Putin, that is) to cut off their gas supplies for punitive effect at any time without inconveniencing favoured customers further west, and charge them higher fees than those favoured customers. Western energy companies are apparently being drawn into a cosy deal with Gazprom to blackmail Russia’s eastern neighbours and profitably monopolise gas supplies to much of Europe.

After a lengthy period of considerable controversy, the European Union seems to be about to decide whether it should disallow this project as contrary to its Third Energy Package and anti-trust policies. In a more amenable age, Nord Stream I slipped through the net quite smoothly, aided and abetted by former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. His influence is still detectable. When Merkel’s deputy chancellor, Social Democrat leader Sigmar Gabriel, made a “personal” trip to Moscow, he spent two hours with Putin and Gazprom head Aleksei Miller, during which the visitor expressed the hope that the project would go through with as little “outside interference” as possible. For her part, Chancellor Merkel seems also to be a supporter, if more cautious, of Nord Stream II, while still envisaging some residual role for Ukraine as a transit state. Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland and other affected states have protested loudly against Nord Stream II, and EU energy commissioner Maroš Ševčovič (a Slovak) has also expressed deep scepticism. At the EU summit on 17–18 December, strong opposition was expressed by a number of countries against allowing Nord Stream II to go ahead.

If, however, Nord Stream II were to proceed, Ukraine will suffer a further loss of more than$2 billion in transit fees annually on top of what it lost earlier from the effects of Nord Stream I.

Given the desperate state of Ukraine’s economy and public finances, and even with the IMF support that has raised its reserves to a princely $13 billion, sums like $2 billion here and $3 billion there may be enough to bankrupt the country. Russia, by contrast, still has $375 billion in its reserves, despite the steady and damaging drain by Putin’s various geopolitical projects.

While it has noted progress by Ukraine in its regular reports, the IMF usually adds the caveat that the country’s already clouded outlook for economic recovery depends on no further worsening of the military situation in eastern Ukraine. For the moment, Moscow is constrained in that respect by its desire to observe Minsk sufficiently to get sanctions relief. But another “outbreak” of fighting in eastern Ukraine at some point could be economically ruinous for Ukraine; and it would not be too difficult for Moscow to devise other, more economic punishments that would bring Ukraine financially undone.

Moscow’s recent military restraint is thus not any sign of a newly felt moderation on the part of Putin and his siloviki colleagues, but rather a result of the pressure he is under because of low energy prices and Western sanctions on Russia’s economy. GDP growth had dwindled to close to nothing even before the sanctions were applied; a decline of some 4 per cent is expected this year, and if sanctions are not lifted, a further decline is likely next year. But with his heavy military commitment in Syria, and now his extensive economic sanctions against his latest enemy, Erdogan’s Turkey, Putin has demonstrated yet again that no economic price is too great for his adoring subjects to pay when his geopolitical projects demand it.

He would much prefer that sanctions be removed, of course, and he is working to that end with his numerous EU allies and sympathisers along the political spectrum – people like Sigmar Gabriel; Viktor Orban, the authoritarian right-wing prime minister of Hungary; Greece’s present leadership and Cyprus regardless of leadership; Miloš Zeman and Václav Klaus, president and former president of the Czech Republic; Slovak prime minister Robert Fico on some issues, though not on Nord Stream II; European Commission president Juncker; and EU “foreign minister” Federica Mogherini (though her sympathy for Russia may be fading) and her patron, Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi. More broadly, there is a widespread and apparently growing desire among many European elites to get back to “business as usual” with Russia, a sentiment Juncker embodies, together with a palpable distaste for US influence on European affairs. But these currents have been held in check with great determination by Angela Merkel.

Now, however, the chancellor’s capacity to maintain support for sanctions against such widespread scepticism is coming under greater pressure from various quarters, both domestically and in the European Union more generally. Moreover, her own political position has been weakened by her quixotically generous response to the huge influx of would-be migrants into Europe, which, like many in the humanitarian German intelligentsia, she seems to see as a chance for Germany to put the seal on its European leadership role and to atone finally and decisively for sins past. This has damaged her domestic standing both in her party and the population.

The migration issue has also preoccupied many EU members desperate to find a short-term fix, and has created severe tensions and divisions between member states. While still trying to defend her initial position, Merkel is now championing the idea, most clearly enunciated by European Council President Donald Tusk, that preserving Schengen and beginning to repair the whole desperate situation requires adequate protection of Europe’s external borders, a radical diminution of the inflow and the safe return of those not found to be refugees.

Along the way, and via the serious further preoccupations of Putin in Syria, the Paris atrocities, and President Hollande’s sudden lunge towards Moscow, the chancellor’s capacity and will to ensure that the European Union holds the line on sanctions may have been damaged. Rolling back sanctions while Russia is still ensconced in Ukraine would be a severe blow to EU and transatlantic unity and a huge boost for Putin’s fortunes both domestically and ly. Merkel, the pacifist and nuanced supporter of Putin’s Nord Stream II operation, is arguably at this point a more crucial pillar of Western resistance to Russian aggression in Europe than NATO itself. •

The post Ukraine, out of sight appeared first on Inside Story.

Having achieved that key objective, the proxies did indeed become more compliant and some diminution of the fighting ensued. But on 6 March the Ukrainian envoy told the United Nations that Ukraine had registered 750 attacks by the “separatists” since 12 February, killing 64 Ukrainian soldiers and wounding 341 people. The West has now largely accepted the Debaltseve fait accompli despite the obvious and serious violation of Minsk Two. Nor does it seem over-concerned by other violations – near the large and strategic southern city of Mariupol, for example – or the continuing terrorist bombings in Kharkov and Odessa. And while Minsk Two was supposedly intended to confirm and reinforce the ceasefire provisions of the armistice agreements of 5 and 19 September last year (Minsk One), the German and French leaders accepted the territorial gains the pro-Russian side had made by serial violations of that ceasefire in the intervening months, and presumably felt they had to persuade the Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko that this was the best deal they could get for him.

The agreement itself uses lots of soothing words like Ukrainian sovereignty and “in accordance with Ukrainian law.” But tucked away in the text and an accompanying declaration are some significant concessions to both the proxies and their Russian sponsors. To mention a few:

• A blanket amnesty has been extended to all the pro-Russian forces, and by implication to the often-thuggish local regimes they’ve set up in Donetsk and Luhansk. The amnesty seems to extend even to those who shot down MH17.

• Ukraine is required to reach agreement with the “representatives” of Russia’s proxies in eastern Ukraine (legitimating them as negotiating partners for Kiev’s elected government) on constitutional changes that would decentralise government. This is thus a condition of its regaining access to that part of its eastern border now controlled, in tandem, by the proxy forces and the Russian army.

• The proxies are given the freedom to form cross-border cooperative arrangements with Russian authorities.

• The proxy “authorities” will be involved in all policing, judicial and other legal appointments within their “people’s republics,” an apparent legitimation of their clear intention to consolidate the police state regimes they already have in place.

• Kiev is required to undertake “full resumption of socio-economic ties, including social transfers such as pension payments” and “timely payments of all utility bills… within the legal framework of Ukraine.” The point at issue here is that Russia’s actions have resulted in huge damage, for which Ukraine is now expected to pay, while Moscow pockets the geopolitical advantages. Kiev had suspended a range of transfer payments, basically because it was broke. But it also took the not unreasonable position that as Russia had now introduced sixteen “humanitarian convoys,” of whose contents no one but Moscow and its proxies have any knowledge, it should accept responsibility for supporting the living expenses of the local residents whose lives and livelihoods it had severely disrupted or worse.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president François Hollande – who initiated the negotiations with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, apparently on Ukraine’s behalf, as “the last chance to end the fighting in Ukraine” – also persuaded Poroshenko to sign an accompanying political declaration that seems to call on Ukraine to make additional concessions to Russia. This document aligns Poroshenko with the Merkelist doctrine that “there is no alternative to an exclusively peaceful settlement” to the Ukraine situation, despite the fact that for a year, Moscow has been imposing military solutions on a daily basis. The declaration also states that “the Normandy Format” of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine should be responsible for oversight of this latest “ceasefire,” thus providing for the continued non-participation of the United States, Britain and Poland (neighbour to both Russia and Ukraine and prominent earlier in EU deliberations on Ukraine).

Trade war morphs to hybrid war

Perhaps most worryingly from Kiev’s point of view, the declaration says that the group endorses trilateral EU–Ukraine–Russia talks to achieve “practical solutions to concerns raised by Russia” in relation to the free trade agreement Ukraine signed with the European Union last June. The Maidan was sparked by Yanukovych’s retreat, after years of laborious negotiations, from signing essentially the same agreement. The post-Maidan government was hoping that its signature on the package (comprising an Association Agreement and a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement) would at last launch it on a process of EU-supported reform and integration with Europe.

In response to further Russian pressure and threats, the European Union had already postponed implementation of the agreement for twelve months. Now, it seems, Russia can use that period to seek to veto any parts of the DCFTA that it doesn’t like – and Moscow has made clear it would like to rewrite large slabs. Independent observers have analysed the Russian objections and find them largely specious. What Russia really doesn’t like about the Association Agreement, and the free trade deal embedded in it, is that Ukraine signed it at all, rather than joining Putin’s Eurasian Union.

Why would Kiev have agreed to such an unbalanced pair of documents? The answer, basically, is because it had no choice. It could see that it would not receive much military support from its Western friends, despite again having been defeated on the battlefield by a further injection of high-tech weaponry and skilled manpower from Moscow. And its economy, blighted by decades of mismanagement, especially in the Yanukovych years, was and continues to be on the brink of collapse. It is also acutely conscious that fighting “separatists” entrenched in residential areas in the Donbass can only deepen the alienation of Ukrainian citizens literally caught in the crossfire. But not to return fire with their inaccurate and obsolescent weapons would concede the terrain to Russia. This has been one of Kiev’s worst dilemmas from the outset.

Even without Russian trade wars and military aggression, the new government had much to do to repair and reform the economy. But the disruption and destruction in eastern Ukraine – a rust belt area that is also the location of much of Ukraine’s industrial and export capacity – have all but tipped the economy over the edge. Ukraine’s economy has normally relied on its foreign trade for 50 per cent of its GDP, and that trade collapsed abruptly in the second half of the 2014 – by 32 per cent in December alone. This was almost entirely due to the war in the Donbass and Russia’s punitive trade restrictions. The IMF has assessed that Ukraine’s GDP had declined by 6.9 per cent in 2014, and expected a further decline of 5.5 per cent in 2015. But the Kyiv government’s own prognosis for 2015 had worsened from minus 5.5 per cent (as assessed at the end of 2014) to minus 11.9 per cent by March of this year, with inflation expected to be somewhere between 27 per cent and 43 per cent. And those trends could worsen further.

Russia’s economy has also been sliding badly in response to the fall in the oil price, the consequential slump in the rouble, and Western sanctions. Estimates of Russia’s likely GDP decline in 2015 usually range between minus 3 and minus 5 per cent. But despite Putin’s irresponsible stewardship, Russia’s financial reserves are – though falling fast – still among the highest in the world, at $356 billion, whereas before Ukraine received the first tranche of its recent $17.5 billion IMF bailout, its reserves had slumped to some $6 billion, scarcely enough to cover one month of imports. And, in February, Ukraine’s economic freefall had become markedly more precipitate and damaging than Russia’s.

Whatever financial respite Kyiv had been hoping for, Minsk Two didn’t provide immediate relief. Russia’s stock market went up at the news of the agreement; Ukraine’s fell further. Despite the announcement of the IMF package having been timed to coincide with (and seemingly conditional on Kiev’s acceptance of) the conclusion of Minsk Two, the Ukrainian hryvnia collapsed spectacularly, causing panic in the population. Desperate measures by the National Bank of Ukraine, a flurry of economic reform legislation and the arrival of the first IMF tranche recouped the position somewhat in early March, but the hryvnia has only been shakily stabilised at twenty-three to the US dollar, roughly one third of its value a year ago. The extreme fragility of the Ukrainian economy was exposed, and with it its vulnerability to further Russian geopolitical vandalism.

All of this means that Kiev’s prospects for financial stabilisation, foreign investment and continued disbursement of IMF funds all depend on whether Russia chooses to refrain from further military or economic attacks on Ukraine. A gas war, a wider-ranging trade boycott, or major further military offensives against eastern Ukraine would possibly be enough to push the national economy over the cliff, despite what has been achieved. Even with the IMF bail-out secured and without any further Russian coercion, there would be serious doubts as to whether Kiev will be able to secure enough financial support to stave off default and disaster. Western support outside the IMF framework has been modest, and the Ukrainian government has been forced to try plugging an imminent $15 billion funding gap by seeking a “haircut” and extensions from the creditors in question. That includes $3 billion owed to Russia and due for repayment next December. Under its terms, Russia has the right to call the loan in early and has repeatedly threatened to do so. It may choose its moment to good effect.

Back to Yalta

Moscow clearly has further plans for strengthening its position in Ukraine; and its proxies have launched numerous attacks in the region of the southern port city of Mariupol, for instance, as well as conducting destabilising terrorist bombing operations in Kharkov and Odessa. With Minsk Two’s legitimisation of its pseudo-statelets of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, it has already achieved its minimal objective of establishing a frozen conflict in East Ukraine. (And it should always be remembered that frozen conflicts can quickly be unfrozen or otherwise transformed at times of Russia’s choosing. Moscow has recently been converting its protectorates of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia into virtually annexed territories.) Its ultimate objective is a compliant government in Kiev, but just for the moment, itself troubled by serious economic decline, the Kremlin may content itself with a client statelet in eastern Ukraine. This it can use to veto any European integration by Kiev while it continues working to undermine the very fragile EU consensus on sanctions.

It was reported earlier this month that despite the successful proxy advances in Debaltseve and Donetsk Airport, the European Union would not impose any further sanctions at this point because they might upset the delicate Minsk Two ceasefire. Though the EU Summit on 18 March was a little more robust on Russiathan expected, that prediction was confirmed. For his part, to strengthen the chances of Minsk Two succeeding, Barack Obama has cancelled an innocuous US training program for the Ukrainian military.

Moscow has learnt from such reactions that ceasefires can often be abused quite seriously without further penalties. Different views are evident within the broader Russian leadership elite about how far and how fast Russia can and should go in Ukraine, and some of those views are quite radical. So any sudden opening of another front in Ukraine – for example an all-out attack on Mariupol to establish a land corridor to the Crimea – should not surprise us. Putin thinks that with current Western leaderships in place, he need not fear pushback that would cost Russian lives. He does worry that Russian military losses would affect his popularity, and partly for that reason has gone to absurd lengths to pretend that Russia is not involved militarily in East Ukraine. But he probably calculates that if the divided Obama administration again seemed to be tilting towards arming Ukraine, an emphatic threat of marked further escalation, followed by the offer of talks on a Minsk Three, would be enough to see off the threat.

Putin’s broader plans clearly include a restoration of a sphere of influence over most of the territory of the former Soviet Union. But he seems to want to go beyond that, if he can, to restore a sphere of influence within Europe as well, including in NATO and EU member states. What he probably wants most after some more Minsk Ones and Twos would be the creation of a new European security architecture modelled on the Yalta settlement of February 1945, where Roosevelt and Churchill conceded to Stalin control over much of Central and Eastern Europe). Russian media and some senior officials have been warmly praising Yalta recently.

By February 1945, Stalin had a dominant military grip on most of what he was claiming in central-eastern Europe, and there was not very much that the Anglo allies, despite their formidable military, could do to wrest it from him or prevent him from communising it. Despite his huge military build-up in progress this decade, Putin is unlikely ever to cast the shadow that Stalin’s conventional forces once did over the Eurasian continent. But the Western alliance he is facing is also relatively much less formidable. Though boasting a larger number of members than the Western alliance of the cold war era, the Europeans are disunited, lack adequate security leadership, and are disinclined to pay much for their own defence. In many cases, they would be very happy to return to business as usual with Moscow, as long as it restricts itself to bullying and grabbing land from other countries and not from them.

Chancellor Merkel, Europe’s most energetic and capable leader, works the EU system very well, and has achievements also in the security domain. She has succeeded in keeping sanctions in place despite the objections of the more pro-Russian EU members and the at times egregiously Russophile sentiments prevalent among influential elites within her own country, including two of her predecessor chancellors. Even though Germans generally are starting to lose their enthusiasm for the Putin regime, the foreign country they often seem most worried about is the United States. Der Spiegel recently ran a major article about the extreme anxiety and hostility evoked in the German foreign and defence policy elite by NATO’s European Commander, General Philip Breedlove, for his supposedly provocative bellicosity towards Russia. The article seems to suggest that official Germany sees Breedlove as a bigger threat to peace than Putin.

While Merkel has spent many difficult hours trying to persuade Putin to modify his behaviour, she’s had very little success so far. She tirelessly repeats her favourite mantra about Ukraine – that there can be no military solutions to this crisis – while her principal interlocutor, Putin, continues to freely deploy military solutions in Ukraine, including right under her nose last month before the ink on Minsk Two was dry.

Merkel’s second-in-command in the Minsk negotiations, President Hollande, appeared not to be playing a major role. And perhaps that was just as well. Hollande has occasionally been forceful on African and Middle Eastern issues and commands one of the two strongest armed forces in Europe. But on Ukraine, to put it charitably, he has been wobbly. He was, for example, the first Western leader to visit Putin in the Kremlin after the annexation of Crimea. France often seems very hopeful that sanctions can be rolled back, and that it can at last sell its Mistral amphibious attack vessels to the Russians, despite the fears of Russia’s neighbours bordering the Baltic and Black Seas. On 13 February, immediately after signing Minsk Two, Hollande told journalists that while it was not yet time to do so, he hoped that France would be able to deliver the Mistrals to Russia.

Perhaps as significant as who was involved on the Western side at Minsk are the absentees ensured by the Normandy Format, a constraint that Putin clearly relishes. With President Obama having apparently outsourced the management of Western security interests in Ukraine to Chancellor Merkel and the European Union, the United States has been consistently missing from Ukrainian negotiations over the last year.

A second noteworthy absentee has been Britain, the other major military power in Europe. The Cameron government began by seeking its own reset with Russia, and has sharply lowered Britain’s defence budget. But latterly it has become more forceful in response to Russia’s aggressive policies, instigating a public enquiry into the Litvinienko case, identifying Russia as its key security threat, and talking of providing defensive weapons and training to Ukraine. Britain might have been able to strengthen the EU response to Russia’s growing belligerence, but with domestic euroscepticism growing in strength and Cameron not doing a great deal to contain it, along with the distraction of the Scottish independence movement, London’s influence in EU counsels has greatly diminished.

Likewise, Poland and former PM Donald Tusk have seemed to play a less prominent role in the EU response to Russia’s activities in Ukraine than used to be the case, despite Poland’s close knowledge of the Russian target, its size and common borders with Russia and Ukraine, and Tusk’s having recently ascended to the role of president of the European Council.

Since the fading of his reset policy, Obama has been publicly contemptuous of Putin at times. But he seems to wish to cling to whatever remains of the policy to pursue supposedly shared multilateral objectives, like curbing Iran, North Korea and Islamic State as well as pursuing the fata morgana of nuclear disarmament. Whether Russia has a strong and disinterested commitment to all or even any of these objectives may seem questionable, especially nuclear disarmament, but for Obama they all appear to have precedence over Ukraine, the Budapest Memorandum or the security of the European side of the Trans-Atlantic alliance. To its credit, the Obama administration has taken a strong and leading role on sanctions, seeking to keep pressure on the European Union to match it step for step. But it should be remembered that for the United States, a single country with a single decision-making process (however complex) and limited trade with Russia, sanctions are a much easier option than for the Europeans.

Though he recently approved a $75 million package of non-lethal aid for Ukraine, Obama has not shown much appetite for supporting Kiev’s armed forces, and has repeatedly ruled out providing defensive arms. Recently, many senior figures in the Obama administration have publicly mooted supplying lethal aid to Ukraine, and there is strong and growing support for such a step in Congress. Nonetheless, Obama still seems unconvinced. One reason for Obama’s hesitation is a perceived need to keep in step with the EU leadership’s doveish policy in this respect. Merkel’s sense of urgency about again engaging Putin in the Minsk Two negotiations was widely understood to stem from her concern that Washington might provide defensive weapons to Ukraine, with what Berlin is convinced would be disastrous consequences.

Even without any such “provocation,” Putin escalated again anyway. After more than a year of Russia’s serial aggressions, it remains unclear whether the Obama administration will do anything to arm Ukraine, but it seems unlikely. As mentioned, Washington recently cancelled a modest training program for the Ukrainian military in order not to provoke Putin or give Moscow a chance for propaganda about American interference. The training, far from the front line, involved such provocative activities as battlefield first aid, combating enemy radio-jamming and surviving heavy artillery fire from the “separatists.”

The question of whether defensive weapons should be provided to Ukraine has been discussed heatedly and at length in Western countries since early in the Russian intervention. It is not an easy issue, and one of the key arguments adduced against doing so is that doing so would lead supposedly to immediate Russian escalation and more death and destruction in Ukraine. But at present one side is being handsomely supported – with repeatedly decisive and escalatory effects – by its generous Russian backers. This has taken the form of high-tech weaponry, substantial numbers of “volunteers” and highly skilled special forces, intelligence, massive propaganda and diplomatic threats and persuasion. Meanwhile the other side is receiving some economic and diplomatic support, though not enough to safeguard it or its economy, but only very modest material support for its armed forces – blankets rather than anti-tank weapons.

As the strategic analyst Phillip Karber of Georgetown University has commented in a study of Russia’s so-called hybrid warfare in Ukraine:

While Russia has introduced thousands of weapons into the conflict, European and American political hesitation in helping Ukraine acquire replacements for its losses (and the political message it sends to others who would like to help) serves as a virtual military embargo on Ukraine. Ironically the most successful Western sanction has been in preventing a friendly country from defending itself.

Despite the undertakings given in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 to ensure Ukraine would be free from military or economic coercion in exchange for relinquishing its nuclear weapons, the signatories have failed to deliver. Signatory Russia has attacked Ukraine for attempting to reach a non-military bilateral agreement with the European Union, while the leaders of the Western world, the United States, Britain and France (also signatories) have failed to protect it.

So if Putin is less powerful than Stalin was at Yalta, he must feel increasingly confident that a little determination and guile on his part will be enough to brush aside Western opposition to his plans for perestroika of the post-1990 European security architecture. It is apparent that he has a certain amused contempt for Europe, its complicated decision-making structures, its unreadiness to pay for its own defence, and its “decadent” social fashions. He sees it as increasingly divided and lacking authoritative leadership, and is fully aware that several EU members are either sympathetic to his strategic objectives or at least afraid to contest them for fear of reprisals.

While Russia’s own economy was on a steady downward slide well before the imposition of sanctions, he also takes great heart from the sustained malaise in many EU economies, and the social distress and political volatility that malaise has engendered. Sanctions and the sharp drop in oil prices and the rouble are a constraint on his freedom of manoeuvre for the moment, but he feels confident that the increasingly compliant Russian population will endure the necessary belt-tightening until Ukraine is at least satisfactorily hamstrung. As soon as the economy starts to recover, if not before, he will probably feel ready to pursue further strategic gains.

If Ukraine, the largest country in continental Europe, is finally brought undone economically, politically or militarily by the battering it has suffered, that will also sound a potent message to any neighbouring country unwise enough to attempt to resist Russia’s designs for it. Already Ukraine’s economy is undermined, and not surprisingly, the government’s high popularity is starting to rapidly ebb.

Appeasement springs eternal

Appeasement is a rhetorical rather than an analytical term. One man’s appeasement is another’s judicious pragmatism. Western countries are often reproached by critics for their alleged hypocrisy in criticising Russia where they would not criticise, say, Saudi Arabia for similar offences. There is often some abstract justice in the criticism, although it seems to imply that Western countries have an absolute obligation to lead with their chins in policing the world without any regard to their own interests. Decisions whether to criticise, impose sanctions or intervene militarily are always the product of some combination of geopolitical interests, moral outrage, fear of retaliation, alliance or treaty obligations, domestic political pressures and other factors. But usually when the term is invoked in Western countries, it is because the invoker claims to see some point of comparison with the classic appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s.

Russian patriots and Western Russlandversteher become particularly enraged when any parallel between contemporary Russia and Nazi Germany is suggested. Nazi collaborators and alleged collaborators are denounced by Moscow as “fascists,” but so too are almost any other classes of humanity that the Kremlin wishes to discredit. To turn that longstanding weapon of hybrid warfare on its head against its inventors strikes Putinists and their sympathisers as particularly perfidious.

But the parallels are striking nonetheless: domestic xenophobia and revanchist irredentism, a charismatic autocrat whose constantly trumpeted superhuman qualities make him immensely popular among the masses, militarisation of society and the budget, relentless, mendacious propaganda, elephantiasis of the security organs, mass invigilation of the population and widespread repression of human rights, extensive regulation and uniformity of views in nearly all media outlets, a mobilised population that hates as it is told, a foreign policy that asserts the right to protect people of the same ethnicity, or even the same language by interfering with force in their countries of residence, a seemingly expanding appetite for further territorial conquest even after irredentist claims are satisfied… The list goes on.

Even Putin’s latest version of the Russian invasion of Crimea – to protect Russians supposedly in danger in Crimea and save the life of Yanukovych, all of which necessitated urgent military intervention and nuclear threats – starts to bear a resemblance to the 1939 Gleiwitz Incident, stage-managed by the high-ranking Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich to justify Germany’s attack on Poland.

To draw attention to such features is not to imply that Putin’s Russia will necessarily commit crimes of even remotely comparable magnitude to those of Nazi Germany. In addition to using the parallels to critique Putinism, such critics usually have one overriding objective in mind, namely to suggest that if Putin is not stopped, he will attack all neighbours who were ever part of Moscow’s empire, and quite possibly other countries as well. Attempts to conciliate him at other people’s expense are not only naive or unworthy and in breach of the appeasers’ obligations; they are also self-destructive, in that an appeased autocrat will simply pocket whatever he is given, and pursue further conquests.

A quote from Churchill is usually called for at this point. In a joint appeal to Europe to not betray the ideals on which the European Union is based, a former Czech ambassador to Moscow and a senior Slovak Green politician quoted Churchill: “You were given a choice between dishonour and war. You have chosen dishonour and will get war.” Cameron, Hollande, Merkel and Obama, they said, have chosen dishonour. “But now it is Ukraine that is getting the war, while Europe stands aside, even as its security is undermined and its values mocked.”

The proportions here have to be measured carefully, and an EU advocate would be quick to argue, among other things, that Ukraine is not a member of the European Union or NATO and therefore no duty is owed it. But Putin’s behaviour to date is certainly not inconsistent with the above line of analysis, and much of the public patriotic rhetoric in Russia goes further. In the face of Russia’s trashing of the post-1990 security architecture, its repeated brandishing of its nuclear weapons and its huge preponderance in tactical nuclear weapons over the Western alliance in the Eurasian theatre, Western Europe should at least be worrying about the risk of further whetting Putin’s appetite.

If it is unprepared to supply defensive weapons to countries that are under Russian attack, it should be ready to deploy sanctions with vigour and determination, and escalate in response to any escalation. So far it is not obviously doing so. The sanctions have been deployed slowly and reluctantly. Without the downing of Flight MH17, EU sanctions that really bite may not have materialised. Having materialised, the European Union collectively, and many EU member states individually, are continually undermining them by broaching the issue of their early release, or even denouncing them as own-goals. Any prospect of their early withdrawal should be removed from the table for the time being.

Putin will always be encouraged by the sight of EU seniors again absorbed in intensive discussions about whether to strengthen sanctions (they did not) or to extend or not to extend the most important ones due for renewal next July. As to the latter, they finally declared that those would be extended till the end of 2015, and moreover that their lifting would be made conditional on fulfilment by Russia of its obligations under Minsk Two. Passing the necessary legal instruments for doing so, we are assured, will occur nearer the time. The Russian propaganda outlet, RT, is claiming that extension of the sanctions due to expire in July to the end of the year is not yet a done deal. And a German Deutsche Welle commentator has suggested that a single pro-Russian member country could block the extension by a determined veto. While theoretically possible, this seems very unlikely, but there are a number of dissenting member states who are being eagerly courted by Moscow, so some doubt must remain.
 
Naturally, the Ukrainians find all these deliberations unsettling.Another to find them so is evidently Donald Tusk. After returning from a visit to Washington, he declared to Western media on his return, while the issue was still evidently moot, that Europe must maintain broad economic sanctions against Russia until Ukrainian control of its border with Russia is restored or risk a crisis with the White House. “Putin’s policy,” he said, “is much simpler than our sophisticated discussions. The only effective answer to Putin’s clear and simple policy is pressure.” He added that Putin’s policy is “simply to have enemies, to be stronger than them, to destroy them and to be in conflict.”

According to Tusk, Obama was not expecting the Europeans to step up sanctions (that issue was evidently already decided), just to maintain those already in place. “The comparison with appeasement applies…,” he said, “about the approach of some politicians who say Ukraine is too far from us, not our business… You know the melody.”

Whatever these comments may lack in subtlety in relation to the various categories of Russian sympathisers or appeasers in the European Union, whose views Tusk has the remit of endeavouring to bring into alignment with a broad EU consensus, they certainly lack nothing in clarity. In the event, at the EU Summit last week, Tusk and his close colleague Merkel seem to have carried the day. But more such deliberations will surely arise in response to Russia’s studiedly ambiguous hybrid warfare against its largest Western neighbour. There will remain in the approaches of both the Obama administration and the European Union much that will continue to unsettle the Ukrainians. •

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A sharp rise in military expenditure has been accompanied by ever-greater missile rattling and threatening “exercises.” Aggressive and frequent overflights near or even occasionally into Western countries’ airspace have become a threat to civilian aircraft and indeed to peace itself. Those policies are backed by blanket anti-Western propaganda at home, and skilfully crafted and targeted disinformation abroad, all of it at levels of expenditure, reach, toxicity and effectiveness far greater than any later Soviet equivalents. To say that we have a return to the cold war is an understatement.

Putin’s primary objective is to re-establish a version of the Soviet sphere of influence. In the first instance, that means not just halting NATO expansion, which he’s already achieved, but also blocking the European Union from integrating any more former dependencies of the USSR. It seems unlikely that he will stop there of his own volition without attempting to roll back some of his earlier “losses.” He views his Western adversaries as weaklings who can be set against one another and intimidated. An enthusiastic if ungifted student of history, he sees himself as the successor to Catherine and Peter the Greats as well as Stalin, destined to gather together all the Russian lands, very broadly understood. His actions suggest he certainly has designs on the Baltic States, for example, and may have ambitions beyond them.

He also seems to be working towards systematic weakening of the European Union as an institution. Moscow’s traditional support of the hard left in the West, as well as Russophiles of all stripes, has now been extended to diligent courtship of the hard right, especially the Eurosceptic hard right. This has been going on for some time with minimal attention from Western publics, but the West is at last starting to notice. The recent scandal involving a €40 million loan from a Moscow bank to Marine Le Pen’s National Front war chest for the French presidential and parliamentary elections, due in 2017, has focused greater attention on this aspect of Moscow’s Western policy. That handsome gesture, part of a wider pattern that includes official visits to Russia by Le Pen herself, tends to confirm that the intention is to destabilise the European Union as a whole by promoting all forms of Euroscepticism, of whatever provenance, provided they are sufficiently malign.

The Kremlin hasn’t always been so hostile to the European Union. In fact, it was long thought that Russia objected only to its former satellites having any connection with NATO. By contrast, EU integration was viewed quite calmly in the Kremlin, and Putin once said as much. But by 2008 his hostility to NATO expansion had become so emphatic that European members of the alliance were reluctant to test him further. At the April 2008 Bucharest summit of NATO, the pleas of the pro-Western leaderships of Georgia and Ukraine to secure a Membership Action Plan for NATO were rebuffed. After the summit, and after the weak Western response to the Russian invasion and annexation of parts of Georgia that followed soon after, it was generally accepted that there would be no further eastward expansion of NATO within the foreseeable future.

The European Union’s Eastern Partnership scheme, proposed by Poland and Sweden in May 2008 and formally launched by the European Union a year later, was an attempt to offer former Soviet republics a softcore alternative to NATO membership, together with a form of EU integration, in both cases well short of full membership. Though light on explicit security content, it envisaged wide-ranging sociopolitical and economic dialogue, leading prospectively to an Association Agreement, in which the main attractions for the European Union’s partners would be a free-trade deal and visa facilitation. Some new EU members hoped that this process would be a stepping-stone to full EU membership for their eastern neighbours, but older EU members opposed any such connection being made.

The Eastern Partnership scheme seemed well designed to assuage Russia’s sensitive nature. But as all the former western republics of the Soviet Union became involved, to varying degrees, in the scheme, Moscow’s hostility became apparent. The European Union has tried to draw Russia itself into a similar process of progressive “modernisation” through partnerships of various kinds. But Russia has been proof against any such inducements, preferring to revert increasingly to its own highly successful sociopolitical models.

In 2010, in response to the Eastern Partnership scheme, Russia set up its own nascent version of the European Union in the form of the Eurasian Customs Union, which from the beginning of next year is to morph into the Eurasian Economic Union, aka the Eurasian Union. So far Putin’s Eurasian project has attracted Kazakhstan and Belarus, with Armenia and Kyrgyzstan actively preparing for membership. But the Kremlin has always seen Ukraine as the jewel in its Eurasian crown, hence the intense interest in coercing it into abandoning its European integration plans. Putin has said in the past that he plans to draw all the former republics into membership, including the Baltic States. His actions to date, and the example of the statelets set up in the various “frozen conflicts,” tend to suggest that Russia would prefer all its former vassals not only to join the Eurasian Customs Union but also to follow its own neo-Soviet, kleptocratic sociopolitical model.

The Eurasian Customs Union and the Eurasian Union have not exerted much genuine attraction on the six Western republics, apart from Belarus. But all six displayed some interest in cooperating with the Eastern Partnership scheme, though for various reasons Belarus and Azerbaijan never pursued an Association Agreement, and Armenia reversed its decision to do so. The other three, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, have now all negotiated and recently signed Association Agreements. For all three it has been a tortuous process, with Russia employing every means it can, including military force, to block any progress. Even post-signature, full and sustained implementation promises to be very difficult.

As happened with NATO and its would-be members at an earlier stage, the European Union and its Eastern partners are now the targets of concentrated pressure from Moscow to desist from any further courtship. So far, the European Union’s response to that pressure has been a strange mixture of polite persistence and indecisiveness. Putin seems to think he can stare down the Association Agreement candidates by a mixture of violence, propaganda, trade boycotts and intermittent invitations to Brussels to seek a “political solution” to the “problems” in Ukraine, Moldova or wherever else. We may soon see whether he’s right.

Despite some wobbles caused by Brussels’ objections to their highly undemocratic systems, Belarus and Azerbaijan continue to be low-grade participants in the Eastern Partnership scheme and both use the connection as a hedge against Russia and a means to pursue mutually advantageous trading and other links with the European Union. While Azerbaijan has leaned more to the West, Belarus is Russia’s closest ally, despite president Alexander Lukashenko’s tiffs with Moscow and fear of Russian domination. There is no interest in either case or from either side in an Association Agreement. Nonetheless, Moscow is constantly working to draw both countries into closer communion with itself and to dilute the Brussels connection.

Belarus joined Putin’s Customs Union, and will be a founding member of the Eurasian Union. Although Lukashenko wriggles at times as he observes the increasingly dictatorial behaviour of the Putinist regime towards its neighbours, he does not want to meet the European Union’s minimal requirements on governance or most other things. So Belarus is probably destined to be dragged further into Moscow’s embrace.

Azerbaijan’s dictator Ilham Aliyev is the son and dynastic heir of Heydar Aliyev, a former head of the republican KGB, who was Azerbaijan’s communist and then post-communist boss. The younger Aliyev has continued his father’s pragmatic autocracy, vying strongly with Russia in domestic oppression, but seeking links with the European Union as far as his own domestic imperatives permit, and particularly in trade and investment. The European Union, for its part, has a strong interest in Azerbaijani energy exports as an offset for its dependency on Russia, a policy direction that Moscow has been trying, with some success, to block. But during 2014 Aliyev has shifted ground. Sensing European Union weakness and Russia’s growing resort to hard power, he has tilted markedly back towards Moscow.

Armenia, though not a model of democracy, is more prepossessing in that respect than Belarus or Azerbaijan. It is heavily dependent on Moscow for security against Turkic Azerbaijan (from which it seized by military force the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s) and against the Turks, the authors of its greatest historical disaster, the Armenian genocide of 1916. Nonetheless, Armenia, which has one of the most ancient Christian churches still in existence, sees itself as belonging to the West in some general sense. It also has a large Western diaspora (including up to an estimated 50,000 Australian residents claiming Armenian ethnicity). For an extended period Armenia was active in the Eastern Partnership and seemed to be working steadily towards an Association Agreement.

Then, in a single day, Armenia abruptly and radically changed course. Putin had earlier applied heavy pressure, flirting publicly with Azerbaijan and agreeing to sell the Aliyev regime weaponry to the value of US$4 billion. The Azeris have been spending much of their energy wealth on what for Armenia is an ominously lavish armaments program. Putin was in effect threatening to cut the Armenians loose from their security ties to Moscow. Without prior announcements, on 3 September 2013, Putin received Armenian President Sargisian in Moscow, where they jointly announced to their respective publics, Brussels and the world, that Armenia was withdrawing from negotiations for an Association Agreement and seeking to join Putin’s Customs Union instead. Russia’s threats and inducements were not made public, but they were clearly persuasive.

Putin sees the Eurasian Union as becoming a fully fledged equivalent of the European Union, part of a multipolar world system in which the poles will be the United States, the European Union, the Eurasian Union, China and India. Not only will it be a rival organisation able to pre-empt integration into EU structures by any former Soviet republics, it may even, in the Kremlin’s eyes, be capable of attracting into its orbit other prospective members. (Syria and some forces in Serbia have, for example, given hints that they may seek some such relationship.) At this stage the Eurasian Economic Union, which has been hastily cobbled together, has done very little to enhance the dwindling trade among its members and is still generating disputes, even conflicts, about basic trading provisions yet to be agreed. It’s hard to avoid the impression that its whole rationale is much more imperial–political than economic.

While the other three Eastern Partnership members, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, have all now signed Association Agreements with Brussels, Putin is not giving up on any of them. In 2013, both before and after his Armenian triumph, he was progressively stepping up pressure on president Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine to withdraw from the laborious but well-advanced Association Agreement negotiations with Brussels. Although he is the most pro-Russian president of independent Ukraine’s five to date, Yanukovych was also seeking a hedge against Moscow. At the same time he needed to respond to strong opinion within the country’s elite, including in the more pro-Russian east, favouring a free-trade deal with the much larger EU market, with which Ukraine now has more trade than with Russia.

Yanukovych was hoping he could somehow gain advantage from both sides without fully committing to either. Putin was not going to give him that chance, however, hitting Ukraine with successive and severe trade sanctions on the usual bogus grounds and threatening worse. On 21 November last year, Yanukovych suddenly followed Sargisian’s lead, performing a 180-degree turn without any prior attempt to prepare the Ukrainian public for such a turn of events.

Ukraine’s civil society proved less submissive than Armenia’s. In response to Yanukovych’s abrupt change of course, several months of demonstrations in Kiev – the so-called Maidan or Euromaidan – began that night. In the weeks that followed, as the protests persisted, the regime began to resort to “disappearances,” arrests and forceful crowd control tactics against demonstrators. All this was quite a shock for public opinion, as hitherto there had been relatively little lethal violence of that sort in Ukrainian politics. But the shock only served to radicalise and strengthen the protest movement, which maintained its rage through successive waves of violent repression until Yanukovych finally fled the capital on 21 February. As his ruling Party of Regions began to crumble, a reformist and pro-European successor government was quickly formed. Despite Russian propaganda that this was a “fascist coup,” the legitimacy of the transition has never been seriously challenged and has been fully confirmed since by early and orderly elections to the presidency and parliament.

Putin’s response was so quick, it clearly had been well rehearsed and prepared. Within a week of Yanukovych’s departure. Russian special forces in unmarked combat fatigues had deployed across Crimea in conjunction with local irregular militias probably recruited by Russian military and FSB operatives well in advance. Together with Russian forces stationed in Crimea by bilateral agreement, they quickly subdued the bewildered Ukrainian units on the peninsula. And within three weeks, Crimea had been “annexed” by Putin at a glittering ceremony in the Kremlin. Moscow claimed implausibly that Russian special forces were not involved, but a few weeks later, Putin casually acknowledged that they had been, perhaps thinking that after annexation the lie was superfluous, and that the glory of his achievement deserved full public recognition.

The story in Crimea since the annexation, however, has been less glittering: steep economic decline, loss of most links to the Ukrainian hinterland, forced and disruptive adoption of detailed Russian administrative routines, corruption and criminality, petty tyranny, and persecution of non-Russians, notably the Crimean Tatars, deported by Stalin with mass casualties at the end of the second world war. Appropriately, the new “prime minister” gifted to Crimea by Moscow was Sergei Aksyonov, a Russian patriot from Moldova who originally came to Crimea hoping to join the Soviet military, but transited into criminal activity and then politics, where he led a minor party with 4 per cent support at the last free Crimean elections.

Having subdued Crimea, Moscow instituted similar operations in much of southeastern Ukraine. But there, unlike in Crimea, Russia had no regular forces stationed, and the ratio of local zealots and cross-border volunteers to Russian professionals in anonymous uniforms was greater. This often led to administrative chaos and crude abuses and criminality by the Russian and proxy forces, probably even greater than in Crimea, stiffening local resistance as well as military pushback from the new Ukrainian government, which had been initially at a loss how to respond. Moscow, meanwhile, continued its threatening deployment of massive forces on the border, which had helped ensure that for many weeks there had been virtually no armed Ukrainian response at all.

Over time, the grossly underfunded and ill-equipped Ukrainian forces managed to mobilise their resources, and with the support of a lot of volunteer detachments and much help from the public, began to gain the upper hand over the so-called “separatists.” By August, they had pushed the Russians out of most regions in the east, and were even making big inroads into the two most pro-Russian provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk. Faced with the possible defeat of their proxy forces (led by Russian citizens infiltrated into Ukraine, and staffed up to 40 per cent by ex-Russian military personnel), Moscow decided on another large injection of perhaps 6000 crack troops with high-tech weaponry. Within a few days, this further cross-border incursion had completely changed the course of the conflict, inflicting very heavy casualties and causing huge destruction of Ukraine’s antiquated military equipment.

Under growing pressure from Western sanctions, which had sharpened appreciably after the downing of Malaysian flight MH17, and having recouped the situation of his proxy forces, Putin was now disposed to agree to a ceasefire. For his part, Poroshenko had realised that Moscow would not allow him to restore Kiev’s authority in the east by force, and that given the dire state of Ukraine’s economy, he could no long afford the casualties or the destruction the conflict was generating.

Hence, the ceasefire that never really was, brought about by the so-called Minsk Protocol of 5 September. In fact there have been over 1000 fatal casualties since, with armed clashes occurring on a daily basis. The proxies have been particularly active, attacking strategic points in Ukrainian hands, especially Donetsk airport and the major port city of Mariupol. The pattern of their attacks suggests Moscow wants at least to establish a secure land corridor to Crimea, and could be contemplating a further major incursion into Ukrainian territory. During November, Russian forces and high-tech weaponry were again infiltrated across the porous border. Various Moscow voices, meanwhile, continued to speak threateningly of “Novorossiya,” a historical term for a large part of southern and eastern Ukraine, the seizure of which Moscow has occasionally hinted at broadly as an objective. If Russia were to do this, it could leave Ukraine landlocked, with Russia taking over its entire Black Sea littoral. This would also enable Moscow to link up with its protectorate of Transnistria in Moldova, further threatening Moldova’s fragile existence as a sovereign state and surrounding a rump Ukraine from three sides.

But the Ukrainians have managed to hold firm to their positions through the phoney peace, and Putin seems again disposed to settle for at least a temporary lull in military proceedings. Poroshenko has already reached an accommodation with the Donetsk and Luhansk leaders, and on 9 December Russian foreign minister Lavrov even spoke of a “postwar phase.” Since that date, for the first time since the September ceasefire, there has been an unambiguous reduction in clashes.

With the Ukrainian economy teetering ever closer to the abyss, and sensing he may never get adequate military or economic support from the West, Poroshenko has no choice but to grasp any ceasefire. Putin, by contrast, has plenty of options. But though it is much stronger than Ukraine’s, Russia’s economy is also heading precipitately south. While sanctions have made some contribution, the plummeting oil price and rouble have been a great deal more important. Russia’s finance minister, Anton Siluanov, recently estimated the cost to the Russian economy of the oil price slump at up to US$100 billion, compared with US$40 billion for the current sanctions. While Putin likes to declare that his loyal subjects will suffer as heroically as their forebears have often done, he seems reluctant to push them too hard.

Putin is also able to exert other, non-military pressure on Kiev that will not invoke fresh sanctions or prevent him from adroitly lobbying susceptible Europeans to veto their extension. All Moscow really needs at this stage in pursuit of its objectives is a secure “frozen conflict” in eastern Ukraine, like the ones it established in the early 1990s in Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and in Moldova. These structures enable Moscow to exert great influence on the involuntary host country, deploying “peacekeeping forces” there to support the “rebels,” and blocking national governments from joining the European Union or NATO, neither of which want as new members countries in which there is an ongoing civil conflict or standoff. And as in Georgia in 2008, such a bridgehead can easily be used at short notice in any all-out assault on the host country if the opportunity either presents itself or can be manufactured, a branch of statecraft in which Moscow is particularly accomplished.

Ukraine is in a dire state, weakened by the incompetence and venality of past governments, and devastated and polarised by Putin’s geopolitical vandalism. Its efforts to defend itself largely unaided against an infinitely stronger enemy have had a surprising degree of political and military success, as well as strengthening national identity and morale in much of the country. But they have also added to the damage and polarisation. At least it now has a fully legitimate and reasonably coherent administration to address these challenges: the new parliament elected on 26 October is dominated by pro-Western reformers, the great majority of them moderates, who have now formed a governing coalition, and published a draft program. Some critics find the program imperfect, and it will certainly be difficult to implement in Ukraine’s dire economic and military circumstances. But it represents a giant step forward from where the country’s governance was under Yanukovych.

Moldova’s circumstances are complicated in a very different way. This small, impoverished state – despite high growth in recent years, it is still commonly described as the poorest in Europe – has an intricate ethnolinguistic makeup and eventful history. In modern times, its population has been predominantly Romanian, but with a substantial Russian-speaking minority enhanced since tsarist times by Moscow’s encouragement for people from elsewhere in the empire to migrate there. Part of Romania between the wars, it was occupied by Moscow again in 1940 on the basis of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, whereby Hitler and Stalin divided Eastern Europe between them. Russia’s control of the territory was brutally reimposed by the Soviet Army and NKVD secret police at the end of the second world war, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moldova became an independent state. Putin clearly wants it back, like other Molotov–Ribbentrop acquisitions. He is not too embarrassed by the defects in his deed of title, recently telling an audience of young Russian historians that he couldn’t see anything bad about the Pact. Indeed, he appears to feel nostalgia for it.

He has extensive material to work with in Moldova: a large Russian-speaking imperial minority; a heavy economic dependence on Russian trade and energy supplies; a high degree of dependence on remittances from an estimated 400,000 Moldovan migrant-workers in Russia; a large communist party (still so-called) that tries to balance between the European Union and Russia but leans increasingly towards the latter; other large political parties financed or sponsored by Russia, one of which, the Socialists, unexpectedly topped the polls in the 28 November parliamentary elections; and Transnistria, an enclave between the Dniester River and the western border of Ukraine, where Russia has supported a corrupt breakaway regime of pro-Russian patriots and maintains a “peacekeeping” force that acts, in fact, as an agent for Moscow.

The politics of Moldova are also complex, but since 2009 there has been a coalition government of ethnically Romanian parties that has charted a consistent course towards the European Union and has now signed and ratified an Association Agreement with Brussels. In the run-up to national elections last month, there were huge pressures from Russia aimed at convincing the public to support parties that favour joining Putin’s Customs Union. Moscow has successively blocked Moldova’s key agricultural exports on bogus sanitary grounds, issued Russian passports to its local supporters, and threatened both to expel Moldovan guest-workers from Russia and to arbitrarily curtail vital gas exports to Moldova in winter. Putin designated his extremist deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, as his point man on Moldova. On one of his trips to the country, the former envoy to NATO declared to Moldovans, “I hope you won’t freeze this winter.”

Not content with the nuanced support of the Communist Party, till the November elections by far the largest in the country, Moscow recently sponsored the emergence of two fully subservient pro-Moscow parties, the Socialists and Patria (Fatherland). Both were red-carpeted in Moscow, received generous subventions, and were authorised to promise that they could secure the lifting of Moscow’s damaging trade boycotts and ensure the well-being of Moldovan guest-workers. Their electoral bottom line was that joining the Customs Union would solve all the country’s problems. Crucially, they were supported by heavy Russian TV propaganda coverage, beamed throughout Moldova.

Not to be outdone, the government responded by banning Patria from competing in the elections on the grounds that it had received illegal financial support from abroad. Patria does indeed look very much like a Kremlin project, even more so than the Socialists. But most of the Patria votes seem then to have been simply transferred to the Socialists. Using a “political technology” worthy of the Kremlin, the government also stacked the voting arrangements in the Moldovan guest-worker diaspora so that it would be much harder for Moldovans in Russia to vote than their compatriots in Italy and elsewhere. Thus, while international observers gave the actual election procedures in country the thumbs-up, neither side played fair. But Russia’s involvement was much greater, more menacing and unscrupulous, and also more effective.

The 30 November elections gave the three main pro-EU parties fewer votes than last time, but they did scrape through to a narrow majority of seats in the parliament. If the very pro-Russian Socialists can combine effectively with the merely pro-Russian Communists, they may be able to defeat some key parliamentary votes, including for the presidency in 2016. Both sides of politics are fractious, but the pro-Europe bloc perhaps more so, and Russia is much better than Brussels at wielding carrots and sticks. With the Socialists already agitating for votes on rescinding the Association Agreement with Brussels and joining the Customs Union instead, implementing the agreement could prove difficult or even impossible.

Moldovans have had rich experience of brutal imperial and military occupation. The election results suggest Moscow’s blunt messages about cutting off gas supplies and deporting Moldovan guest-workers gained traction. Either manoeuvre could inflict great damage on the economy, and many Moldovans have obviously decided that supporting the Customs Union may be the better part of valour. The latest opinion polls suggest that support for the Customs Union may have edged slightly ahead of support for the Association Agreement, despite the European Union’s efforts to frontload the trading and visa benefits of the latter. From Moldova, Brussels looks much further away than Moscow.

In case Moldovans haven’t yet got the message sufficiently, Russia is apparently preparing similar actions to the ones it has taken in Ukraine. It has been reliably reported that Moscow has recruited groups of pro-Russian enthusiasts in Moldova to travel to Russia for special paramilitary training in the civic arts of destabilisation, urban guerilla warfare and the seizing of public buildings. As in Ukraine, Russia could artificially stimulate conflict in Moldova by paramilitary intervention, then deploy its forces stationed in Transnistria or infiltrated into the country to act as a force-multiplier for its preferred partisans, and present its proxies later to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe as legitimate combatants.

The elections may not have decided the issue one way or the other. Formation of a pro-EU government based on a parliamentary majority may only lead to the outbreak of disturbances and demands for secession from Transnistria and other pro-Russian enclaves in the country. We could see further and more decisive action in and against Moldova quite soon.

To many Westerners, Moldova and Transnistria sound like places from a musical comedy, a kind of Ruritania suddenly come bizarrely to life. But a successful hybrid war in Moldova could be seriously bad news not just for Moldova, but also for Ukraine, which would then be much more vulnerable to a full-on Russian attack at some propitious future moment. And the European Union’s credibility, soft power and capacity for spreading peace and stability on the continent, already seriously damaged, would be dealt a further heavy blow.

Georgia has also signed an Association Agreement with Brussels, despite or perhaps because of its intensely sobering recent experiences with Russia. After Georgia regained its independence in 1991, Russia quickly stepped in to foster the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, encouraging and actively supporting the violent expulsion of ethnic Georgians from both regions (in Abkhazia, ethnic Georgians had actually been a majority). In 2008, after failing to win any real prospect of NATO membership, the pro-Western reforming president Mikheil Saakashvili unwisely tried to use armed force to put an end to the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages in South Ossetia, perhaps mistakenly thinking the West would support him. Moscow quickly seized on this pretext to invade the whole country, destroying much of its modest military capability and inflicting heavy damage on its infrastructure.

Russia increased its military presence in Abkhazia too, even though the Georgians had not taken any action in Abkhazia to restore to their homes over 200,000 ethnic Georgian refugees from Abkhazia. The two enclaves were then encouraged to declare their independence, which Moscow actively urged close allies and the international community to recognise, but with almost no success. Only one or two old Latin American friends of Moscow and a couple of Pacific Island states extended recognition to the newly cobbled entities. Even Belarus, seeing a dangerous precedent for itself, failed to oblige, despite heavy pressure from Moscow.

Saakashvili limped on for a few years beyond his 2008 fiasco, but in October 2012, he and his United National Movement party were defeated in what were, by post-Soviet standards, unusually free and fair elections. The victor was an ad hoc coalition of forces called Georgian Dream, led by a (then) Russian citizen and billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who had devoted his vast wealth earned in Russia to the campaign to bring down the Saakashvili administration. Since taking office, the Georgian Dream–led coalition has pursued a sustained campaign of repression against members of the former administration, despite their remarkable achievements in economic reform and suppression of corruption. At the same time, Ivanishvili has continued his predecessors’ pro-Western external policies, and retained some strongly pro-Western groups in his governing coalition. Some observers nonetheless suspect him of being a Kremlin project, and the defeat of Saakashvili had certainly been cause for celebration in Moscow.

The pursuit of Saakashvili and his United National Movement colleagues has continued to the present, and sometimes looks like selective justice aimed against anyone pushing a strongly Atlanticist line. In early November 2012, the very popular and pro-Western defence minister Irakli Alasania was dismissed after several of his senior officials were purged against his wishes. Foreign minister Maia Panjikidze, together with four deputy foreign ministers and the minister responsible for relations with Europe, resigned in response, claiming that the country’s Western orientation was under threat. Though strongly pro-Western, neither Alasania nor Panjikidze belonged to Saakashvili’s party, suggesting their main offence may have been to be too pro-Western.

President Giorgi Margvelashvili appears to share some of their concerns, whereas the current prime minister, Irakli Garibashvili, a close confidant of Ivanishvili, has dismissed the resignations and complaints as a political stunt. Ivanishvili, who left the prime ministership last year, has retired from formal political office, but is widely believed to still control Georgia’s political life from behind the scenes, acting mainly through his business protégé and right-hand man, Garibashvili. Georgia’s Western interlocutors were dismayed by the loss of the key officials who lent credibility to the Tbilisi government, and have repeatedly urged Ivanishvili and his allies not to continue their campaign of selective justice, but clearly to no avail.

It seems likely that Georgia, a strongly independent country very conscious of its European identity, will continue its path towards an Association Agreement with Brussels, if with less commitment than some in Georgia and Europe would like. But regardless of any contingency plans the secretive Ivanishvili may have (he once told an interviewer that he might join the Customs Union if that seemed the right decision for Georgia), Russia has many assets at its disposal in Georgia, including client politicians, the conservative Georgian Orthodox Church and military bases in both enclaves. And it is further strengthening its presence in Abkhazia after a Moscow-facilitated coup last May, which led to a more independent Abkhazian leader being replaced by a former KGB officer, Raul Khajimba, who is seen very much as Moscow’s man. On 24 November, Putin and Khajimba signed a far-reaching “bilateral” agreement that provides for close integration of defence, border control, customs policy, social policy and law and order.

All but the last vestiges of Abkhazia’s separate existence are removed by this “treaty.” It is likely a similar arrangement will soon be concluded with the smaller and more subservient South Ossetia. Russian forces are already in close proximity to Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, and could be easily and quickly reinforced, if that were judged expedient. So when the time is right, Russia could easily complete the job begun in 2008. There has been some semi-muffled debate within the Moscow establishment in the past about whether it should have gone the last few dozen kilometres to Tbilisi in the first place.

Russia’s threat to its Western periphery is primarily focused on preventing any further defections by former vassals to Western institutions. But it is also increasingly aggressive towards the entire global West, even including Japan, despite a mini-thaw with the Shinzo Abe administration.

This aggressive behaviour is not new, though it has sharply increased in the last year or so. In 2009 and 2013, Russia conducted very large military exercises entitled Zapad 2009 and Zapad 2013 (or West 2009 and West 2013), with aggressive scenarios. The 2009 scenario, for example, assumed Polish support for “terrorism” in Belarus and concluded with a nuclear strike on Warsaw. Overflights necessitating defensive reactions have also been increasing for some time, but during recent months have escalated towards a crescendo. Many have been directed at vulnerable NATO members, especially the Baltic States, and at the Nordic non-NATO members, Sweden and Finland. And Putin has recently made repeated threatening references to Russia’s nuclear capabilities, continuing a trend of nuclear intimidation that was always present in Soviet times, if usually sotto voce, but has become more explicit during his presidency.

This aggression has run in tandem with constantly expanding attacks on human rights and freedoms within Russia itself. Russia is becoming a police state domestically and a rogue state externally; and there is a clear link between the two. Putin has also enunciated a very unattractive new principle for the conduct of foreign policy: that Russia has a right, even an obligation, to protect the rights of supposedly ill-treated Russian populations in neighbouring states, or indeed anywhere in the world. This doctrine seems to echo Hitler’s assertion of a similar right in pursuing the Anschluss of Austria and coming to the rescue of supposedly oppressed Germans in Czechoslovakia and then Poland. It is in pursuit of this principle that Russia has been adopting the practice of distributing Russian passports to its “fellow-countrymen” (sootechestvenniki), for whose protection they might be later justified in interfering in the internal affairs of their country of residence.

Russian nationalists argue that because the break-up left over twenty million ethnic Russians in the former republics which then became independent countries, such policies are entirely natural. This was undoubtedly a misfortune for many of them, though not necessarily the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century. It should be remembered, however, that over the centuries many more non-Russians had become involuntary citizens of the Russian, then the Soviet empire, often in severely traumatic circumstances and with massive loss of life at the hands of Russian military and political police formations.

Russian nationalists seem unable to absorb the broader context of this issue, which can in any case scarcely justify comprehensive aggression towards the new states of the kind that is now unfolding. Moscow has been happy in the past to encourage the return of ethnic Russians to the homeland, where severe demographic problems are judged to have rendered the existing population less than sufficient. But for now, the policy of using the diaspora as a political asset in creating some lesser version of the Soviet Union under Moscow’s direction seems firmly on the agenda, with alarming implications for the new post-Soviet states and European security more generally.

Until recently it had been assumed in the West that the Baltic States, by becoming successful members of the European Union and NATO, were quite safe. But since the almost certainly Russian-inspired cyberwar against Estonia in 2007, and the accompanying campaigns of destabilisation by ethnic Russians in Estonia, their position has seemed less secure. Russian economic coercion and outright aggression against Ukraine over the last year or so has reinforced Baltic anxiety. Lithuania has substantial Russian and pro-Russian minorities, while Latvia and Estonia have very big Russian diasporas, about a quarter of the population in each case, and more if Russophone minority groups are included.

Most of the current Baltic Russian population is a result of immigration and border changes imposed by Moscow decision-makers in Soviet times. Many are military and KGB retirees and their descendants. They often have attitudes to the war on Ukraine similar to those of Russians in Russia itself. There are areas of local majority Russian settlement near the borders of both countries with Russia, in which there have been signs of unwelcome activity, including recruitment of Russians to fight in the Ukrainian conflict. And the increasingly chauvinist propaganda of Russian TV stations has been beaming into all three countries in recent years, though since the invasion of Ukraine, the Baltic states have been developing counter-measures.

What worries the Baltic peoples most is that though they are NATO members, the techniques used by Russia to subvert Ukraine could easily be employed against them: recruitment and covert training of co-ethnics and any other sympathisers to take subversive action in the country on signal from their controllers; export of corruption to the country with political strings attached; encouragement of ethnic Russian organisations to make increasingly radical and politicised demands on national or regional authorities; intense espionage facilitated by the presence of large pools of bilingual talent; creation of “provocations” or artificial incidents that Moscow could use as evidence of damage to legitimate Russian interests or mistreatment of Russian co-ethnics; infiltration of crack Russian forces ostensibly to protect the threatened Russians, but in fact to lead and mobilise local collaborators; unleashing propaganda campaigns against the victim country, complete with grains of truth and half-truth and larger dollops of outright lies, all to suggest that the victims were in reality the “fascist aggressors”; and deploying large and intimidatory Russian forces near the border, aggressive overflights of contiguous space, nuclear sabre-rattling, and so on.

These tactics might be more difficult to deploy in the Baltic States than over the long and porous Russian/Ukrainian border, and more difficult against countries with stronger allies, better organised defence and intelligence agencies, and a clearer understanding of the lessons of “hybrid warfare.” As against that, the Baltic countries have virtually no strategic depth. And while they have powerful allies, quite large sections of the publics in those allies, including in Germany, have very little stomach for coming to the aid of the Baltic states. As economist Paul Roderick Gregory asked, setting out an all-too-plausible scenario: if Russia does make a carefully crafted move against a Baltic state, which is less than a conventional military assault, and NATO does not rise adequately to the occasion, what will remain of NATO’s credibility?

Russia’s largely successful aggression against Ukraine has had other bad effects on the security environment in Eurasia. In Ukraine Russia has undermined, with Western connivance, a number of international agreements, perhaps most relevantly the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. Under this instrument, Ukraine surrendered the Soviet nuclear weapons stock located on its territory in exchange for assurances that its sovereignty and integrity would be respected and protected by the signatory powers, which included the United States, Britain and France, as well as Russia. The example effect for other would-be nuclear countries may be difficult to assess, but can hardly be positive.

It has made Russia, whose economy is less than one-fifteenth the size of the Western economies, look the strategic equal of any or all of them together in an arm-wrestle on or near its home turf. Several Western European countries have appeared to place business-as-usual with Russia ahead of the security of fellow members and not just victim countries beyond the European Union’s borders. Despite the skill and patient determination of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, many in the elites of the European Union’s leading country continue to suffer from an anachronistic devotion to Russophilia, heedless of Russia’s actions.

Russia’s successful trashing of “a Europe whole and free” has also led new democracies in post-communist Eastern Europe to reconsider their commitment to the Western strategic community and its values. Hungary (a right-wing autocracy with crypto-fascist tendencies) and Slovakia (a centre-left populist government) have both wobbled on Ukraine, and there are strong pro-Russian constituencies in many other new member states. Czech president Miloš Zeman, for example, supports Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has told Kazakh interlocutors that support for Russia’s stance on Ukraine is building in Europe (not what his hosts would have wanted to hear) and has called on his Western allies to curtail sanctions and recognise Crimea’s annexation. The Washington Post has described Zeman as a “virtual mouthpiece” for Putin. Serbia, a prospective member of the European Union, supports Russia on Ukraine, opposes sanctions, and in general seems to calculate that it can have excellent relations with Russia while continuing on a path towards EU membership. Serbian President Tomislav Nikolić seems to see Serbia’s relationship with Russia almost as a love affair.

More broadly, the events in Ukraine have demonstrated the weakness and divisions within the European Union and the Western alliance. The sanctions have been difficult for Brussels to coordinate, and have been contentious at every point. Without the wake-up call of MH17, it’s unlikely that the European Union would have mobilised even as much consensus as it has done. Despite Russia’s renewed incursions into Ukraine in November, the European Union could only manage to come up with a few Ukrainian “separatists” to add to its sanctions list. Moscow is now intent on finding sympathetic or self-interested EU members ready to veto further extension of the sanctions packages as they reach their expiry dates in 2015.

Even the MH17 seems to evoke embarrassment rather than plain speaking. No one close to the events in the West is in any doubt about what happened, and yet the tone is often hyper-cautious, “balanced” and euphemistic. The Dutch are saying any report elucidating the causes is still far off and the Kremlin’s various counter-narratives are treated with more respect than they deserve, even after the recent exposure of Russian TV’s fake footage purporting to demonstrate that a Ukrainian plane was responsible.

Putin’s 2014 has been a little less miraculous than his serial triumphs in 2013. He has had some triumphs, but also some serious reverses, including some – like his growing embrace of China and his disciplining of Ukraine – that he no doubt sees as at the very least qualified successes. Western push-back remains weak, but if the sanctions, at least, can be maintained until the point where, as Timothy Snyder remarked, they “start a conversation” in Russia, that could lead to some restoration of sanity, if not an open society in Russia. •

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Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has wielded its “political technology” very effectively. (Roughly translated, this technique involves liberal doses of disinformation and outright lies to achieve a particular political objective.) Perhaps its crowning achievement has been what has become known as “hybrid warfare,” which has been on display in Ukraine, particularly since the lightning operation in Crimea over three weeks in February and March this year. In this kind of war, violence is relatively limited, and is cloaked behind a thick veil of information warfare (propaganda) to conceal not only its real perpetrators but also its purpose and objectives. (For an early and apt description and analysis of “hybrid warfare,” see Janis Berzins’s paper, “Russia’s New Generation Warfare in Ukraine: Implications for Latvian Defense Policy.”)

In the Crimean case, masked “little green men,” in fatigues without insignia, conducted highly skilled surgical strikes on key enemy targets with no warning or declaration. This was implausibly presented to a gullible international audience as a spontaneous outburst of resentment by mistreated ethnic Russians suffering under the heel of a “fascist” dictatorship set up by an illegal coup in Kiev.

The Kremlin has been labelling its enemies and victims as fascists for decades, seldom accurately but often with a high degree of success. Western media, with their ethic of “balance” (“the West says this, the X says that; we’re not sure which to believe, we’re just reporting the established facts”) always run the risk of blurring or even suppressing the real story that should be obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with the region and the situation. What we get is along the lines of “Armed men in unmarked battle fatigues have seized key buildings and installations on the Crimean peninsula. Western governments are accusing Moscow of being behind the raids, a charge which Moscow strenuously denies.” Six months later, the same convention continues to be followed.

Western publics are becoming increasingly familiar with and irritated by “spin” from their own governments, for which they are developing much more sensitive antennae. They find it much more difficult to handle outright lies and deliberate disinformation (a semi-truthful narrative, with large currants of lies embedded in it) from sources far less scrupulous than governments of open democracies.

The same sometimes goes for Western officials, particularly of the post–cold war generation. Most EU officials and politicians, for example, have become used to tough and complex bargaining and the lengthy hammering out of difficult compromises. But this all takes place within a peaceful atmosphere, following clearly set rules, with limited corruption or outright dishonesty. They can be tough on trading issues, but they are typically much less confident and effective in dealing with seriously unscrupulous purveyors of security challenges. Theirs is a fine civilisation, configured for peace, but suddenly confronted with war. As in the 1990s with the Yugoslav wars, they seem a bit lost. It must be seriously doubted that they are equal to the task of dealing with Putin’s Russia.

There are two key reasons why Russian aggression and mendacity have worked so well thus far. First, there was the shock factor. Western leaders, officials and commentators were taken by surprise by the Crimean invasion, and only after further surprises are they starting to realise what they’re up against.

Second, there’s the ignorance factor. The global West has by and large always had a poor understanding of Russia. Putin’s neo-Soviet yet postmodern modus operandi has reinforced that longstanding state of affairs. Since declaring victory in the cold war, which was largely won for them by brave Russian reformers and their East European counterparts, the West has been content to relegate Russia and its neighbourhood to the easy basket.

When conflict between Russia and Ukraine first entered the Western public awareness earlier this year, and Australian media were looking to bone up quickly, I noticed that a lot of the questions directed to me reflected very serious, even crippling misunderstandings. I was frequently asked not to discuss the overall situation or some important development, but rather the threat posed by the neo-Nazis known to be dominant in Kiev. Or could I please comment on and explain the reasons why Russians were in fear of their lives in Eastern Ukraine, where most people were Russian or pro-Russian and were in despair because use of the Russian language had been banned? Was it not the case that we’d been given fair warning of all this because the Maidan had after all been dominated by violent, far-right anti-Semites? The questions were often so wide of the mark it was hard to know where to begin.

Sometimes the questions carried the unstated implication that these alleged social pathologies not only existed, but also were peculiar to the west of Ukraine and therefore presumably absent from Eastern Ukraine or Russia itself. Moscow was assumed to be looking on from a distance with understandable dismay – suggesting that we should be supporting the Kremlin in its stalwart opposition to “the fascists.”

Some reporters rightly grasped that corruption was a massive problem in Ukraine. But they did not seem to have picked up the fact that resentment of corruption was probably the biggest factor in the Maidan protests in Kiev, that disgraced president Viktor Yanukovych had been responsible for a huge increase in the problem in Ukraine, or that corruption was an equally great or greater problem in Russia.

Many were also understandably sharply focused on Ukraine’s economic fragility, and wanted to draw an inference that any Western involvement would be a waste of money and effort. Let the Russians take over the problem and bear the costs of it; why should the West get involved? They seemed unaware that Yanukovych had sharply accentuated Ukraine’s economic debacle, not least by his own entourage’s theft of mega-billions; or that the seizure of Crimea would make things much worse; or that “giving Ukraine to the Russians” might amount to the trashing of the entire post–cold war security system in Eurasia.

From the early media coverage it became apparent, in short, that some interlocutors had swallowed whole some of the cruder falsifications of Russian propaganda. Little of the commentary seemed to betray any awareness of the degree to which, since Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, Russia was rapidly becoming a police state with increasingly fascist as well as neo-Soviet characteristics. Putin has become even more the Mussolini strongman with slightly flabby but much-exposed pectorals, heading what is essentially a one-party state; the rubber-stamp parliament, with grotesque stooge parties on the sidelines, has passed reams of repressive legislation while chorusing anti-Western slogans; all the human rights gains of the 1990s have been eliminated; Stalin and Stalinism have been restored to a place of public respect; and a uniform view of history and the world has been imposed on the media and the education system.

Since the fall of communism, Russia has of course become a society with gross inequality and increasingly run-down health and educational infrastructure. Under Putin, together with the Soviet flourishes, there has emerged a supplementary hard-right official ideology, sometimes misleadingly touted as “conservatism.” This comes complete with siren calls directed at the extreme right currently blossoming in many Western countries. This bizarre Putinist embellishment of the last few years, still scarcely noticed by many Western commentators, has featured, for example, visits from the French National Front’s Marine Le Pen to Moscow, where she was feted by senior members of the regime including deputy premier Dmitry Rogozin; xenophobic treatment of Russia’s own internal “immigrants”; gay-bashing, both literal and metaphorical, by tolerated vigilante groups and senior regime spokesmen respectively; elevation of the unreconstructed and KGB-penetrated Russian Orthodox Church to the role of joint arbiter with the state of public and international morals; and so on.

These persistent misconceptions of what Russia currently represents owe a lot to what the late Arthur Burns once memorably called “culpable innocence” – in other words, wilful ignorance by those presuming to instruct the vox populi – but also to Moscow’s skilful injection of huge amounts of well-crafted and adroitly directed propaganda. Russian propaganda now has a Goebbelsian supremo, Dmitry Kiselyov, who once proclaimed exultantly to his prime-time television audience, “Russia is the only country in the world that can reduce the United States to radioactive cinders.” In fact, nuclear intimidation has become a staple of Putinist propaganda, and not just at dog-whistle pitch. The buffoonish Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the Liberal Democratic Party (which is neither liberal nor democratic and scarcely a party, rather an officially cosseted Greek chorus), recently spoke publicly of a forthcoming major war in which Poland and other countries would be wiped off the map. Putin himself has declared publicly that Russia is a well-armed nuclear power and that no one should “mess with it.”

Crude as it often is, Russian propaganda is nonetheless highly skilful, much more so than its late-Soviet equivalent. It has acquired a mass international following through their external propaganda television network, Russia Today, a fact of which many Western officials remain unaware. There are, for example, eighty-six million subscribers to Russia Today in the United States alone. With a very large and expanding budget, Russia Today employs as presenters many Western native speakers who are enthusiastic critics of their own societies and enjoy the opportunity to go global, something they mostly would not have achieved on their home turf. Some of them are problematical, like a German “expert” who is editor of a neo-Nazi publication and one Karen Hudes, presented as a World Bank whistleblower, but who specialises in off-the-planet urban myths.

But Russia Today has also recruited more resounding names, including Julian Assange and Larry King. The formula is not to sing paeans of praise to Russia so much as to denigrate the alternatives. As the distinguished English Russia-watcher Oliver Bullough wrote in an excellent article on Russia Today for the New Statesman, “Deep into his fourteenth year in power, the president seems to have given up on reforming Russia. Instead he funds RT to persuade everyone else that their own countries are no better.”

Domestic Russian propaganda follows a similar strategy, with a strong and often xenophobic emphasis on the sins of other countries, especially in the West. As befits a KGB-run state, spymania is everywhere, and recently there has been a dismaying enthusiasm for finding and denouncing internal enemies (usually liberals and intellectual critics) and asserting they are in league with foreign enemies. Many Russians are becoming deeply anxious about what they see as a reversion to the atmosphere of the 1930s.

It has now been reported that a new series on predateli (traitors) has been launched on Russian television (where 85 per cent get their news), hosted by one Andrei Lugovoi, who is thought by British police to have been responsible for the polonium poisoning of the Kremlin critic Aleksandr Litvinienko. Moscow refused to extradite Lugovoi for questioning, then turned him into a national hero and arranged for him to become a member of the Duma (parliament) with immunity from prosecution. In keeping with his valiant service to Russia, host Lugovoi is introduced to his TV audience as chelovek-legenda (a living legend). Two days after reporting that news, the BBC reporter and his team were beaten up and detained for four hours in a provincial town in Russia.

For its part, the West has sharply downsized its own information outreach to Russian speakers over the past two-and-a-half decades. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the BBC World Service, which once beamed effective alternative versions to Soviet bloc propaganda, have lost much of their erstwhile coverage and prestige, and even if they were to be restored, might struggle for at least some time to gain any traction.

The lies and half-truths that Moscow launched to justify its invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine have faded somewhat, but retain a tenacious half-life. Some journalists and commentators seem to have ideological or programmatic reasons for sticking with parts of the Russian narrative. Others may simply feel the need to observe “balance,” and while Russia is still cranking up parallel narratives to put into circulation, they will go to pains to remain agnostic about which version of reality is the truth.

There are some interesting sub-categories of observers who advance the Kremlin’s cause. A distressingly large number of academics and former officials, including retired diplomats suffering from what is known in the trade as localitis (a tendency to become an advocate for the country in which they serve rather than their own), seem to be conscious advocates of the Russian narrative. In some cases they appear to have picked up a secondary complication from what Gareth Evans once luminously described as “relevance deprivation syndrome,” or RDS.

Moscow liberals, for example, tend to see Henry Kissinger as having fallen victim to RDS. He has continued to visit Moscow regularly, where he is reputed to be given elaborate red carpet treatment. His comments on Russian matters always seem to display warm empathy for the dilemmas of his Kremlin friends. For example, he has been undertaking to do all he can to ensure that Ukraine does not choose any Westward orientation even though that is what a majority of its population emphatically wants. Kissinger and former US ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock came in for some sarcasm from the prominent Moscow political scientist Lilia Shevtsova for such pronouncements, which, as she points out, closely parallel the Kremlin’s own declarations.

Some academic strategists follow similar lines of reasoning and activism, seeking to explain why certain victims have to be victims and certain bullies have to be bullies. They deploy their acumen rather like the RDS diplomat by setting out their very close understanding of the mindset of the adversary: Mr Putin’s objectives are quite understandable, they argue, and surely should be accommodated. No similar understanding or empathy is apparent for the victims.

The intentions of these strategists may be good, and it is certainly important to understand the enemy in order to respond to him more effectively. But at a certain point, perhaps, the important thing becomes not how to understand Putin, but how to stop him before he destroys all the agreements and understandings on which the international security system rests.

Otherwise the strategist may fall prey to one of the Kremlin’s most tried and true negotiating principles: “what’s ours is ours, and what’s yours is negotiable.” In the Ukrainian case, this becomes “what’s now already yours is clearly yours (Crimea and perhaps much else besides) and you and we can negotiate between ourselves about what should be left for (in this case) the Ukrainians, over their heads and in their absence.”

Recently a group of empathetic US luminaries arranged to meet with some of their old Russian colleagues to discuss a peace plan for Ukraine. Without going into the merits of their plan, the idea that a group of Americans should presume to launch such an initiative, at a time when Russian aggression had ratcheted up further, and without seeking the participation of a single Ukrainian representative, was emblematic of their appeasement mind-set.

The line of argument of the Russlandversteher (those who understand Russia) is typically that Putin is the ruler of a very large nuclear-armed country, which they like to affectionately call “the bear,” whose concerns about Western policy are entirely reasonable. In any case, they argue, irrespective of how reasonable they are, we should be very wary of “poking the bear.” NATO’s expansion to the east was an intolerable threat to Russia, and Moscow is attacking its neighbours not because it has a revanchist program to reinstitute a Soviet Union–lite, but because of its understandable hostility to Western intrusions into its “backyard.”

The sensitivities of 140 million Russians are paramount in this train of thought, not the interests of the 160 or so million East Europeans who live between Russia and core Europe. That NATO expanded not because of NATO’s desire to threaten Moscow but in response to the desperate desire of many East Europeans to be freed from would-be autocrats-for-life like Lukashenko or Yanukovych, or from renewed Russian aggression, is not seen as relevant.

The expansion of NATO was, they assert, a breach of solemn promises to Moscow. Oral reassurances about NATO’s future intentions were certainly made in cautious language at a certain point, but in the very different context of prospective German unification, and before the peoples of the region had fully had their say. Once they had, new states emerged whose sovereignty and integrity Moscow duly agreed to respect. For wholly natural reasons, many such states have chosen to pursue some sort of Western vector. Outraged by these sovereign choices, Moscow has breached its undertakings to respect their sovereignty repeatedly. (The issue of the West’s supposed undertakings to help sustain Russia’s East European sphere of influence is discussed by Mary Elise Sarotte in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs and by Ira Straus at Atlantic-community.org.)

On the other hand, Ukraine did actually receive some written assurances, which are on the public record. In 1994, under pressure from Moscow and the Western powers, Kiev agreed to divest itself of its nuclear weapons in exchange for written assurances that it should never become the subject of economic or military coercion and that Russia, the United States, Britain and France would stand ready to defend it in any such event. Those assurances have proven worthless.

The argument that NATO’s expansion to the east is an intolerable provocation to Moscow is in any case inherently unpersuasive. If Moscow was indeed so afraid of NATO expansion, why was it not reassured by the fact that for many years NATO has observed the self-denying ordinance, inscribed in the NATO–Russia Founding Act of 1997, not to deploy any significant military hardware or personnel in the new member states. It is quite clear that the new members are the ones threatened by Russia’s aggressive revanchism under Putin, not the reverse. On 18 August, during a visit to Riga, Angela Merkel reaffirmed that the Act meant that even now, despite Moscow’s multiple aggressions and transgressions, there would be no permanent bases in the Baltic states regardless of their desperate pleas.

Russia, meanwhile, has continued its aggressive overflights in and near the air space of its western neighbours, NATO and non-NATO members alike, particularly though not only in the Baltic/Nordic region. It conducted a cyberwar with backup action by the Russian minority against Estonia in 2007, and this month it abducted an Estonian security official from Estonian sovereign territory just two days after President Obama visited Tallin to reassure Estonia that it would not be left to stand alone if it were subjected to attack. The invasion of Georgia by Russia in 2008 – after a long history of aggressive provocation by Moscow and its proxies in Abkhazia and South Ossetia – and the huge military exercises up against western neighbours’ borders in 2009 and 2013 – one of which concluded with a simulated nuclear strike on Warsaw – all have a similar resonance. So too, of course, do the frequent trade wars Russia has unleashed against erring former vassals.

The confidence with which it pursues these aggressive policies strongly suggests that while Russia may be angry about NATO’s expansion, it is not afraid of it. Moscow regards the territory it gained under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, whereby Hitler and Stalin divided up the East European countries between them, as still valid. Its stridently aggressive behaviour suggests that it wants to restore them to its patrimony, and that it regards NATO as not much more than a paper tiger in the region. Yet despite this sustained aggression, the compassion of the Russlandversteher for Russia’s imperial phantom limb syndrome knows no bounds.

Another frequent line of justification by Western commentators for Russia’s pursuit of its neo-imperial objectives is that we must be more sympathetic towards Russian policies, because if we’re not, they’ll gravitate even closer to China. Official Russian spokesmen and patriotic scholars have deployed this argument for decades through all kind of vicissitudes in Russo-Chinese relations. On one legendary occasion, a Soviet official in Canberra, enraged by what he perceived to be an attempt by local interlocutors to exploit the then Sino-Soviet divide to threaten Moscow with bad outcomes in Afghanistan, responded, “Just you wait – one day we’ll get back into bed with our Chinese comrades and screw you from both ends.” More cerebral versions of this argument have been heard increasingly from Moscow propagandists in recent months, adjusted to fit the circumstances of the time. And predictably, some Western commentators have adopted it.

A common Western counterstrike has latterly been to hint that Russia’s growing strategic partnership with China will lead to its becoming China’s junior partner or even its neo-colonial vassal loyally supplying raw materials. Russian polemicists are even beginning to deploy this argument in attack mode to argue that if Moscow does indeed become junior partner to Beijing, that will be the West’s fault, and to its detriment above all.

Western experts on the region are likely to have a better grasp of Russian than of Georgian, Moldovan, Estonian or even Ukrainian affairs. As a result they often acquire a bad case of secondary Russian chauvinism, taking on unconsciously something of the dismissive attitude of the vast majority of Russians, both the highly educated and the bovver-boys on the street, towards smaller ethnic groups within Russia and on its borders. This makes them vulnerable to Russian propaganda, even though they are of course aware of that phenomenon in general terms and would believe that they were making adequate allowance for it. It also makes them more receptive to the thought that any troublesome smaller neighbour should, if necessary, be put back in its box to keep the bear contented and friendly.

That doing so might not only undermine the post-1990 security system but also help to recreate an aggressive, confident, anti-Western and expansionary Russia does not seem to trouble them. Likewise, that it might lead to an unravelling of the Western strategic community, with countries betwixt and between Russia and the European Union increasingly choosing to accommodate Moscow’s aggressive or seductive overtures because they can see no prospect of its being resisted by anyone. Some East European NATO members, including Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria, seem to be already flirting with just such a fundamental reorientation.

Working journalists are less likely to be involved in working creatively towards peace in our time by launching hands-across-the-Bering-Strait initiatives. After a scramble to catch up at the outset of the Crimean invasion, for the most part they are doing a pretty good job. But the language used to describe the unfolding events in Ukraine continues to be impregnated with assumptions and misconceptions stemming ultimately from Russian disinformation, and above all from its remarkably successful efforts to conceal its direct involvement in the conflict in Ukraine.

“The civil war in Ukraine,” “the Ukrainian crisis,” “separatists,” “pro-Russians,” “rebels” – terms like these are loaded with semantic baggage that helps Moscow to maintain, even now, that it is only a concerned bystander, worried about the tragic fate of its sootechestvenniki (“fellow-countrymen”) and seeking to find an honourable way out for all concerned. Even before the attack on Crimea, Russia had been working hard through trade boycotts, manipulation of energy pricing and heavy pressure on its wayward protégé Yanukovych to force Kiev to abandon its arduously negotiated Association Agreement with the European Union.

When Yanukovych finally complied, and huge demonstrations broke out in response on what came to be known as the Euromaidan, Putin pushed him to introduce police state legislation modelled closely on Russia’s own. When that in turn failed, Yanukovych resorted to mass shootings in an effort to suppress the protests. Such actions had not previously been part of his repertoire, so this was probably also a response to pressure from Moscow. And when that too failed, he fled, leaving Kiev to the Maidan coalition

The Crimea operation bore even more of Moscow’s fingerprints. Despite the unmarked uniforms and heavy weaponry, it was clear that Russian special forces were heavily involved, as well as the armed Russian units stationed on the peninsula (obviously all a crass violation of the Black Sea Fleet Agreement with Kiev). There was also an admixture of local Russian patriots and compliant politicians and administrators, some local and some spirited in from across the border. Russia’s Federal Security Service, the domestic successor organisation to the KGB, quickly established its presence by calling on the population to denounce any of their neighbours who had supported the Maidan revolt. In the months since the annexation, Crimea has descended into an economically depressed police state, complete with aggressive homophobia and all the other hallmarks of loyal, provincial Putinism.

Leaflet distributed in Crimea by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. It reads, “Citizens of Russia!!!/ PATRIOTS!!!/ Though peace has been established on our land, there are still scum who want chaos, disorder, war…/ And they are living among us, go with us to the same shops, travel with us in the same public transport…/ It’s possible you know people who were against the return of Crimea to Russia/ Or/ Who took part in local Maidan activities/ You must inform the FSB immediately about such individuals at the following address:/ Franko Boulevard 13, Simferopol/ Or telephone 37-42-76 (you can remain anonymous)/ WE MUST STOP FASCISM!”

A fortnight after the annexation, a very similar pattern of events began to be enacted in the Donbass and other regions in Ukraine’s southeast. Here again Russians from Russia were conspicuous in the leadership, and the military professionalism of most of the attacks made it clear that Russia was directly implicated in precipitating, staffing and managing the takeovers. The proportion of local zealots participating in the events, however, was greater than in Crimea, which contributed to the indiscipline of the proxy forces and perhaps also to their penchant for common criminality and gross human rights abuses (abductions, beatings, disappearances, arrests) against local residents.

As Kiev recovered its composure and managed to improvise an effective military response, the polarisation of the population between east- and west-oriented naturally increased. But that does not make the conflict that resulted a civil war. Before Yanukovych began shooting protesters, and before Putin launched his hybrid war against Ukraine, there had been very little loss of life through politics in the quarter-century of Ukraine’s independence. There were certainly political differences between many in the west and east, but they had essentially been regulated through the ballot box.

Insofar as the conflict has or may become something more like a civil war, if with decisive interference and involvement from Russia, it will be a civil war conceived by artificial insemination. Nor can it properly be called a “Ukraine crisis.” Perhaps the later and violent phases of the Maidan could be so described, but once Yanukovych chose to flee, the crisis was over. What followed was not a crisis, and certainly not a Ukrainian crisis, but an invasion of Ukraine by Russia coupled with active and violent destabilisation, in which local recruits, stiffened and led by Russian troops and administrators, were carefully steered towards Moscow’s objectives.

Nor can the combatants of Russian persuasion accurately or properly be referred to as “separatists” or “rebels.” While the exact proportions are difficult to determine, it is Russians from Russia who have been calling the shots, while cross-border reinforcements of weapons, supplies and personnel have been maintained throughout. To be a separatist you have to be in your own country and trying to detach part of it to form an independent entity. The so-called “separatists” in Eastern Ukraine may be irredentists, but their movement cannot be considered as genuinely separatist. For similar reasons, a foreign soldier cannot be classed as a rebel.

There is a genuine terminological difficulty here, but the solutions in common use are tendentious and serve to conceal Moscow’s decisive involvement. In other such cases, the fighters might well be described as “fifth columnists” or even simply as traitors. There is, moreover, evidence that quite a number of the combatants are not “volunteers” but paid mercenaries, originating often from the Russian north Caucasus and shipped in across the border.

Such terms as “fifth columnists” (now commonly used by Russian officials to describe liberal dissidents, by the way) might seem harsh or not fully accurate given the authentic strength of local pro-Moscow sentiment in southeast Ukraine, and past vicissitudes and disputes relating to state boundaries. But “rebels” and “separatists” are not appropriate, and nor should a militiaman who has allowed himself to be recruited to fight for a foreign imperial power be entitled to any other semantic fig leaves. It is striking that Kiev’s preferred term “terrorists” is studiously avoided by the Western press, even though a much better case can be made for that than for most of the locutions actually used (violence against legitimate institutions and civilians, mass abuse of human rights, avoidance of identifying insignia, deployment of weapons in residential areas, and so on).

The terminological difficulty has led to the widespread use of the term “pro-Russian,” usually as an adjective, but sometimes even as a noun to describe those fighting against the Ukrainian armed forces and their volunteer militia supporters. But that too is inadequate. Many of them are quite simply Russians, for starters. Why not “pro-invaders”? I personally would favour “proxies” or even simply “Russians,” which is what most would identify as, and which describes exactly where they stand. The only difficulty with “Russians” is that many ethnic Russians in Ukraine do not want to betray their country or see their home region attached to Russia.

The most recent turn of events in the fighting has unleashed a further avalanche of misleading descriptions which again have the effect of concealing Russia’s real role in events. As will be recalled, there was a time in the early months when the proxies seemed to be sweeping all before them, the Ukrainian armed forces seemed demoralised as well as hopelessly ill-equipped, and the local populations in the east seemed not to be fighting back against the proxies, despite opinion polling which showed that even in Crimea a majority of the population did not want to become part of Russia.

Then the Ukrainian armed forces began to find their feet, supported by volunteer militias and the financial contributions of many ordinary Ukrainians, as well as some key oligarchs. From May to mid August, the Kiev forces gradually took control of the situation, forcing the proxies back, and even recapturing most of the lost ground in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.

They faced difficult dilemmas in doing so. With the Russian forces well dug in, winkling them out in urban areas would inevitably require aerial and artillery bombardment to reduce the need for bloody street fighting. In addition Kiev would need to solicit and maintain the support of the oligarchs where possible, and also the enthusiastic but sometimes problematical volunteer detachments.

All such steps could increase the suffering and bitterness of both fighters and civilians in the disputed east. The pro-Kiev militias, like those on the other side, were in some cases led and/or manned by militant nationalists with hardline political views. Over the longer term, this could create a security problem for the Kiev government and reactivate the familiar Russian propaganda trope of “the fascists and Banderovtsy in the Kiev junta and Western Ukraine.”

A particularly worrying formation for Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has been the force led by the populist nationalist Oleh Lyashko. Lyashko has been using his militia not only against the enemy but also as a tool in his campaigns for the presidency (where he did dismayingly well, finishing a distant third behind Poroshenko, but third nonetheless) and in the parliamentary elections scheduled for 26 October, where polling suggests his Radical Party will do well. He and his militiamen have been involved in kangaroo courts, direct actions of dubious legality and other abuses of human rights.

Though not a fascist in the ideological sense, Lyashko is certainly an extremely dubious asset for Poroshenko. With a shady past, including a criminal record and onetime connections with Yanukovych’s party, his prominence in the war has enabled him to throw out very aggressive political challenges to the Poroshenko bloc. Fortunately, his popularity seems to be declining, but it remains uncomfortably high.

Another very mixed blessing for Poroshenko is the Azov Battalion, which has fought bravely but really does display neo-fascist insignia and has members given to hard-right pronouncements. Lyashko himself is from Luhansk, and interestingly quite a lot of the recruits to such hardline pro-Kiev detachments are ethnic Russians from the east of the country. (For a balanced appraisal of hard-right militias generally in Ukraine, see Alina Polyakova’s recent article for the Carnegie Moscow Centre, “The Far-Right in Ukraine’s Far-East.”)

Armed conflicts have a tendency to generate irregular forces like these, particularly at critical junctures in immature semi-democracies like Ukraine’s. Ukraine is fighting for its independence, perhaps even ultimately for its existence, with no reliable allies and an enemy much stronger and better-equipped than itself. There are many more such militant and extremist formations in Russia and on the Russian side of the fight in Ukraine, but while Moscow doesn’t choose to rein them in for the most part, it undoubtedly can do so when it judges it expedient. Poroshenko, despite his strong presidential mandate, doesn’t enjoy a similar capacity and has many other extremely urgent and difficult problems with which to deal.

So why do Western commentators focus so disproportionately on the pro-Kiev bad guys? They may represent some sort of threat to their local Russian enemies, but not to the Russian regular army, which can and has inflicted devastating damage on them. Even less do they threaten the Western countries, whose commentators focus on them with such keen attention. The hardline nationalist militias and their political allies remain a country mile behind Poroshenko in public opinion ratings. The only thing that might make them serious contenders would be if Russia continues to inflict defeat, destruction and yet more trade wars on the elected Kiev authorities while the West looks on disapprovingly, but does nothing effective to save them.

With some observers, it’s difficult to avoid the impression that for whatever reasons they want to exculpate the aggressor by blaming the victim. The blame-the-victim commentators are not much interested in the fact that the victor by an overwhelming margin in the recent presidential election was a moderate nationalist ready for compromises to preserve peace – perhaps even too ready in the view of some; or that the Ukrainian prime minister Arseny Yatseniuk, for example, is a pro-Western liberal economist and democrat, of partly Jewish heritage; or that the man who for a time took over as acting prime minister from Yatseniuk was a senior regional administrator called Volodymyr Groysman, also a Jew; or that at a time when the European Union is in considerable economic and political difficulty and losing much of its erstwhile allure, virtually the entire Kiev political class in its present configuration is desperate to join it.

By contrast with such groups as the Azov Battalion, the spectacularly bad guys among the Russian military colonists and their local supporters attract little enough media scrutiny. Take, for example, Igor Girkin (aka Strelkov), a Russian from Russia, former supremo of the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic, the very name of which reeks of Stalinism. In his long career as a soldier of fortune pursuing Russian imperial causes in the most expansive sense, Strelkov has been reported to have involved himself with Bosnian Serb forces in ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims during the Yugoslav wars. He is undoubtedly a Russian fascist, but also a nostalgic Stalinist, which makes him one of a hybrid type widespread in Russia at the moment.

Then there is the former Russian criminal Sergei Aksyonov, who is presiding over the communising of Crimea, also ignored by most of the West. Or take Alexander Borodai, another Russian from Russia, who miraculously emerged as the supremo in Donetsk and remained there till Moscow found it expedient to replace him with a local called Aleksandr Zakharchenko, a true-red loyalist to Moscow, but with a usefully Ukrainian-sounding surname. And probably most importantly, there is Vladimir Antyufeyev, the grey KGB eminence of Transnistria, and now, as of recently, of eastern Ukraine. Why is no one particularly aghast at their prominence?

Antyufeyev in particular gets minimal attention in the West. Yet his role as Moscow’s de facto viceroy in southeast Ukraine is obvious. It is clearly reflected in a recent picture of Strelkov holding court with his uber-imperial followers back in Russia where he is “on leave,” a photograph displaying the attractive features of Antyufeyev on the wall in the background, where Stalin might once have been.

Despite the country’s overwhelming burdens, for months the Kiev forces continued to make steady progress towards their objective of encircling Donetsk and Luhansk cities with a view to cutting them off from resupply across the Russian border. Moscow responded by changing their proxies’ leaders and providing more high-tech weaponry. This led to some spectacular victories in local skirmishes by the Russians as well as to rapidly growing downings of Ukrainian aircraft. But it also led to the MH17 disaster, which was obviously not a triumph for Moscow. Until well into August and despite the successive waves of Russian intervention, Kiev’s steady counterinsurgency progress seemed to be maintained.

Then suddenly came a 180-degree shift in the fortunes of war. Russia introduced into Ukraine a large number of its regular troops, probably some 6000 or so all up, including crack special forces, and with more high-tech weaponry. Abruptly, wholly against the flow of play, the beleaguered “rebel” forces turned their increasingly dire situation around. The siege of Donetsk was broken, and a large concentration of mainly volunteer pro-Kiev units near the strategic town of Ilovaisk was forced to retreat. As they retreated, responding apparently to an invitation to exit via a “humanitarian” corridor, they were ambushed by Russian forces with greatly superior weaponry, resulting in a massacre of hundreds of men and total destruction of their weapons and military transport.

The survivors of the Ilovaisk massacre feel bitter that they did not receive more back-up from Ukrainian forces, a resentment that may create strains as volunteer militias come to be reintegrated in the armed forces or civilian society of any post-conflict Ukraine. It was an attack well-executed and well-directed in every sense by highly professional Russian troops, part of a broader intervention that forced Poroshenko to sue for a ceasefire. He has been on the back foot ever since, offering concessions to the “separatists” and desperately pleading, largely in vain, for more help from the European Union and NATO.

Western countries, Amnesty International and other authorities have all said that this turnaround was the result of a clandestine but large cross-border deployment of Russian troops and armour. Russian internet sources and surviving independent Russian media and blogs accept the sharply increased Russian involvement as the cause of the sudden “rebel” triumph. The Russian Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, one of the few politically engaged NGOs still working effectively, has claimed that some 200 soldiers from regular Russian formations have now perished in the fighting in Ukraine. For making such a damaging claim, the St Petersburg branch of the NGO has already been denounced by the regime as a “foreign agent” (translated from the 1930s Stalinese, “spy” or “traitor”).

Among the Russian casualties have been members of the crack Pskov Paratrooper Division. A (legal) opposition politician in Pskov who attempted to view the graves of anonymously buried special forces soldiers there was beaten up by “unknown assailants” – a trademark of the Federal Security Service – and left unconscious with a fractured skull. The war is increasingly unpopular in Russia, and Putin is continuing to keep it hush-hush, both for that reason, and to maintain the threadbare fiction of Russia’s non-involvement.

The current shaky armistice, which the Russian side in particular has been breaking in an attempt to regain control of Donetsk airport and other strategic targets, is unlikely to be sustained. Poroshenko’s effort to shore it up by offering further concessions to the “separatists” may give Kiev some further respite, but that too is unlikely to remain stable for long. The only thing that will ensure stability is for him to further surrender Ukrainian sovereignty, recognising the “rebels” as a legitimate Ukrainian force representative of the local populations (which they never have been – their referenda were a farce), and accepting Russia as the paramount guarantor of stability in the region; in other words, in addition to the loss of Crimea, accepting that Ukraine would now have a large frozen conflict in its industrial heartland.

Even that would almost certainly not be the end of it, judging by the experience of frozen conflicts elsewhere in the post-Soviet area. The corresponding parts of Moldova and Georgia have been used as tools to try to block any Westward movement by those countries. A frozen conflict can also, if and/or when the need or opportunity presents, be rapidly unfrozen to form a Piedmont in a wider irredentist push. Georgia presented a classic case and Moldova may soon provide another.

Russia’s diplomatic choice to establish a frozen conflict is the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or OSCE, where, in recent times, US influence in relation to events in Russia’s western borderlands seems to have been relatively weaker, and where Russia has made good use of its veto power to make the OSCE’s work more difficult. The recent peace discussions brokered by the OSCE are unlikely to deliver either a permanent settlement or a just one. The OSCE is not in the business, for example, of suggesting that Russia was not a legitimate player in the “peace process” to begin with.

The OSCE format was publicly launched by Putin in May, when he welcomed in Moscow a visit by the Swiss president and chairman of the OSCE for 2014, Didier Burkhalter, and an OSCE blueprint for a settlement which Burkhalter brought with him. At that time, the Kiev forces had started to turn the tide against the Russian proxies, and Putin clearly was looking to hit the pause button before things got any worse for his proxies. The OSCE format keeps the United States out of the front line of the Ukraine issue, and the formation of an OSCE Contact Group consisting of a Swiss OSCE chair, Russia, the Donetsk and Luhansk so-called People’s Republics and Ukraine has enabled Putin to shape negotiations with Poroshenko in what is for Moscow a very favourable context.

Russia’s frequent use of its veto to pressure the OSCE and the lack, over time, of any effective US or Western push-back on OSCE involvement in frozen conflicts have ensured that the OSCE is now very sensitive to Russia’s priorities. Germany and France, who happen to be two of the EU/NATO countries most understanding of Russia’s security requirements, have had a modest involvement in the Contact Group process, mainly in pressing Ukraine to become engaged. But Britain, like the United States, is not involved. Thus Berlin’s Russlandversteher approach is virtually the only Western game in town. The Contact Group is headed by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, who produced a report on the Georgian war of 2008 which, in the view of some observers, tended to whitewash much of Russia’s responsibility for that event and for the extensive destruction it visited on Georgia.

In this unpromising OSCE format, not being comfortable in situations where force has been or may be deployed, Germany is looking for a peaceful solution and is happy to entrust the task of mediation between aggressor and victim to the OSCE. Kiev, however, is clearly outnumbered. At one point, the Group even brought into the talks as a separate participant one Viktor Medvedchuk, a close friend of Putin’s and the most pro-Moscow politician in Ukraine, where he has almost no popular support.

For Putin, the latest purpose, as in May, is to present Russia again as a concerned, peace-loving observer while this time locking in his sudden gains on the battlefield. The timing of his back-of-the-envelope peace proposal, reportedly sketched out on a flight to Mongolia, was also meant to weaken and further divide the leaderless and irresolute Western leadership just as NATO was holding a crucial summit on 4–5 September in Wales and the European Union was struggling to reach agreement on another round of sanctions.

In this, Putin was highly successful. Again the huge advantages of a single, autocratic leadership over broad coalitions of poll-ridden democracies were in evidence. After protracted agonies about whether to impose further sanctions on Russia for again invading Ukraine, the European Union finally approved a package, but in the same breath said that the sanctions might be reviewed within weeks if the ceasefire holds. That the “ceasefire” followed another damaging Russian military expedition was, like the Crimean annexation, seemingly forgotten or forgiven.

Brussels also mysteriously suspended till the end of 2015 the implementation of the DCFTA (Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement) with Ukraine, to which it had previously accorded accelerated passage. The reason for this unexpected additional reward for Russia’s bad behaviour was seemingly to enable further exhaustive discussions aimed at accommodating the Russians’ objections to the free trade deal. Moscow has demanded a virtual rewrite of roughly a quarter of the huge and exhaustively negotiated agreement.

The European Union has previously maintained that the agreement would not damage Russia’s trade and, more generally, that it could not, as a matter of principle, allow third parties to interfere in its negotiations with other countries. The Poroshenko government agreed to the postponement, reportedly because it feared that otherwise Moscow was planning to hit it with a crippling all-out trade war. The European Union has cushioned the blow of the postponement by extending trade concessions to Ukraine over the intervening months.

Nonetheless, the postponement sends yet another discouraging signal to Ukrainians and other countries under Russian pressure. A deputy Ukrainian foreign minister resigned over the issue, which is not reassuring on the question of what backroom deals were struck to secure Poroshenko’s agreement. The postponement also offers further encouragement to Russia to maintain its present aggressive stance towards the countries to its west, and their Western friends.

NATO, for its part, stalwartly reaffirmed that it would not deploy any boots permanently on the ground on the territory of the new members, but that it would provide “reassurance” in other ways. It also confirmed that it would continue not to supply any weapons to the beleaguered Kiev administration. It undertook, on the other hand, to provide non-lethal aid worth US$20 million. Subsequently, the Ukrainian defence minister asserted that some individual NATO countries were undertaking to supply weapons to Ukraine, but the countries he mentioned have denied it.

Last week Poroshenko visited the United States where he renewed his appeal to the Obama administration for lethal aid to resist Russian aggression on his country. He was well received, particularly in Congress, but his appeal was unsuccessful, though he did receive a further US$53 million in non-lethal aid. As he said when he addressed Congress, “Please understand me correctly. Blankets, night-vision goggles are also important. But one cannot win the war with blankets… Even more, we cannot keep the peace with a blanket.”

Short of another muscular intervention from Moscow, a trade war alternative is always near to hand. Recently Russia sharply reduced its gas exports to Poland, putting a stop to reverse-flow imports by Ukraine through Poland and Slovakia to replace the flows through Ukrainian pipelines that Russia blocked last June. If Poroshenko does not give satisfaction in the peace talks, the economic stranglehold on Ukraine can be strengthened at will, a far more immediate and deadly weapon than any Western sanctions that have yet been devised against Russia.

Conscious of his weak hand internationally and the forthcoming elections domestically, Poroshenko is bending over backwards to stay out of trouble. Following up on the Minsk ceasefire agreement of 5 September, he managed to push through legislation on 16 September offering a guarantee of autonomy for three years to local government in areas of Donetsk and Luhansk controlled by the proxies. The law is carefully drafted to avoid legitimising the authority of the “people’s republics,” but is domestically costly for Poroshenko even so, and will increase the criticism of him from radical rivals in the run-up to the vital parliamentary elections on 26 October. It is also very unlikely to satisfy Moscow or most of its proxies, which are continuing military actions to seize more territory beyond the ceasefire lines.

Meanwhile, Russia is at work in the Baltic states. Despite Barack Obama’s visit to Tallin, where he delivered a ringing address – a genre in which he excels – Moscow has launched a concerted series of provocations, beginning two days later with the abduction from Estonian territory of an Estonian anti-corruption official, and his almost immediate parading before Russian TV cameras as a spy.

Soon after, a senior Moscow official responsible for “human rights,” Konstantin Dolgov, visited Riga where he delivered an aggressive speech denouncing Latvian “fascism” and alleged mistreatment of the Russian minority, and calling on the Latvian Russians to show their “martial spirit.” (In fact they are already doing so; a high proportion of Latvian Russians support the annexation of Crimea, and there have been reports that some are being recruited to fight in Ukraine.) Given the atrocities committed by Moscow against the Baltic peoples after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, these are remarkably brazen and threatening claims.

Russia has recently revived and is pursuing through Interpol arrest warrants against Lithuanian citizens who refused to serve in the Soviet/Russian army at the time of Lithuanian independence. And it has in the last few days seized a Lithuanian fishing vessel, which the Lithuanians allege was in international waters at the time, and tugged it off to Murmansk with twenty-eight people on board.

So, a Baltic trifecta. Regardless of how these events develop further, their common purpose appears to be at the very least to suggest to the Baltic governments that their distinguished visitors and supporters live far away and can’t or won’t do much to help them.

With Western attention again becoming absorbed in very difficult Middle Eastern issues, it is hard to be optimistic about the further outlook for Ukraine – or for the future of European values in the post-Soviet space. •

The post Russian disinformation and Western misconceptions appeared first on Inside Story.

On 7 May, after months of unrelenting economic, military and propaganda campaigns against his fraternal neighbour, Ukraine, President Putin suddenly signalled what appeared to be a change in direction. He called on the “pro-Russian” separatists in the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk to postpone their referendums on independence, and declared that the presidential elections scheduled by Kiev for 25 May were a “step in the right direction.”

Earlier, on 28 April, Russian defence minister Sergey Shoigu had claimed that the Russian forces deployed on the Ukraine border for months had returned to their bases, a claim Putin repeated on 7 May. As became clear in each case, no such withdrawals were observed by anyone able to do so, which seemed to suggest that any softening of the Kremlin’s line on Ukraine was an optical illusion.

Seemingly in defiance of Putin’s calls for a postponement, the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk held their hastily scheduled “referenda” on 11 May, with slightly farcical claims of huge turnouts and Soviet-style electoral margins in their favour. But their appeal for Moscow to annex them, as it had earlier annexed Crimea, elicited no response. Putin has since declared again his readiness to accept the results of the Ukrainian presidential poll and repeated his assurance that the troops would be withdrawn; and this time there are indications that the troops may indeed be embarking on a draw-back (though many of the units could be redeployed within a couple of days).

Despite the more conciliatory tone, Putin has continued to make some ominous pronouncements: renewed threats of another gas-price war to force Ukraine to pay the abrupt increase Gazprom is demanding; claims that Ukraine is in the grip of a civil war; and the polite suggestion that his close friend Viktor Medvedchuk (Putin is godfather of one of Medvedchuk’s children), the most pro-Kremlin politician in the Ukrainian political class, should become the mediator between the Kiev government and the “rebels” in the eastern provinces. But to Western capitals, desperately eager to find a solution to the problem that would relieve them of any need for sterner measures, any change of tone will be grasped as a sign that Putin is finally ready to “de-escalate.”

Putin is not known for any propensity to take a backward step, much less sudden about-turns. In the matter of Ukraine, he has shown a particular determination to prevail from well before the military operation against Crimea. So what are we to make of Putin’s unexpected amiability? What may have brought it about, how genuine is it, and how long may it last? Have his objectives changed, or is this merely a tactical shift?

The heavy media coverage of the Ukrainian issue recently has probably made its fundamental grammar and vocabulary more familiar to the general reader. But to judge by commonly recurring omissions and misconceptions in public discussions some salient facts might be worth recalling.

While Russians and Ukrainians are ethnically, linguistically, religiously and culturally close, there are important differences between them, only partly flattened out by tsarist and Soviet conditioning. And those differences are apparent within Ukraine itself. For historical reasons, central and western Ukraine have come under the influence over centuries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Poland. A substantial minority concentrated in the west are Uniate Catholics by belief or tradition, whose homelands had never formed part of Russia before the end of the second world war. Though Orthodoxy is the religion, at least nominally, of the overwhelming majority, there is an important difference between the followers of the Moscow and Kiev Patriarchates of the Orthodox Church. The Moscow Patriarchate has always been favoured by Moscow and its Ukrainian loyalists, but the more nationalist Kiev Patriarchate may actually have a slightly larger following within Ukraine. Their relationship is troubled. There is also a much smaller Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Moscow rulers have often sought to suppress Ukrainian language and culture. The Soviet leadership in its early years was more liberal in such matters, but for much of its subsequent history it was very oppressive. Even since Ukraine became an independent state, Russia has refused to tolerate more than the most minimal cultural facilities for the millions of Ukrainians living in Russia. In Moscow-ruled Ukraine, by contrast, Russian enjoyed a privileged status and the use of Ukrainian was informally or formally tabooed. Independent Ukraine has taken modest steps to improve the relative position of Ukrainian within the state, which has tended to anger some Russian speakers.

But the use of Russian is under no serious threat, and repeated suggestions in the media that the government that emerged after the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) protests wants to ban Russian are misinformed. The bill in question, though politically foolish given its timing, was aimed not at “banning” Russian, a totally impossible objective, but rather at restoring greater official status to Ukrainian in an attempt to rebalance very partially the wrongs of the past. It was, anyway, very quickly vetoed by provisional president Oleksandr Turchynov and withdrawn.

The Soviet period was a series of demographic disasters for most of the country. But it was worst of all for the “bloodlands” of Ukrainian, Belarusian, Baltic and Polish settlement. Per capita, Jews, but also Ukrainians and Belarusians, suffered far more than Russians. Slips of the tongue equating Soviet citizens with “Russians” and referring to the twenty-five or thirty million Russian dead in the second world war serve to erase a universe of suffering sustained in the west of the country, in which Stalin’s regime was partly complicit as a perpetrator. Similarly, in the 1930s Ukrainians were among those national groups, together with Jews and Poles, who suffered disproportionately in the purges.

The early Bolshevik leadership had encouraged strong development of the languages and culture of the national minorities, partly to ensure victory over the Whites in the civil war of 1917–22. The Ukrainian communist leadership of the 1920s was active in this respect. From the late 1920s, however, Stalin brutally reversed this policy to favour Russian, and the whole emergent generation of Ukrainian national communist leaders and cultural activists was decimated.

Worst of all, in the process of brutally collectivising agriculture in Ukraine (which had been the breadbasket of the empire), and then extracting grain from it for export, Stalin inflicted terrible casualties. The culmination was the artificial famine of 1932–33, which led to mass starvation and innumerable acts of cruelty aimed at preventing the victims from receiving any relief. Historians debate both the numbers of dead and the Kremlin’s precise intent in manufacturing this holocaust (known in Ukrainian as holodomor), but whether it was genocide by some definition or not, at least three million Ukrainians perished (and some estimates go higher).

The Soviet regime suppressed discussion of these monstrous events and succeeded in largely obliterating them not only from the public domain, but also to a considerable degree from popular awareness. The Russians who were encouraged to migrate into depopulated parts of Ukraine have even less awareness of the past. Through discreet and indeed hazardous family communication, Ukrainians have retained at least a fragmented folk memory of the great famine, which naturally doesn’t always dispose them positively to Moscow. For its part, the Putin regime greatly resented pro-Western president Viktor Yushchenko’s attempts to restore a basic historical understanding among Ukrainian citizens of the holodomor, which was at odds with Putin’s policy of progressively rehabilitating Stalin and his works. When Viktor Yanukovych succeeded Yushchenko in 2010, he moved quickly to de-emphasise the issue and de-fang it of any anti-Russian accents, a difficult exercise in the circumstances.

Until recently, despite the burden of history, Ukrainians and Russians have continued to get on reasonably well with one another in Ukraine. Ukrainians living side by side with Russians in other parts of the post-Soviet sphere mingle easily, intermarry with Russians, and often adopt Russian ethnicity and the Russian language. The same has been largely true of Ukraine itself. It was not the case, Kremlin propaganda notwithstanding, that ethnic Russians faced any threats of persecution from Ukrainian fellow-citizens in the east of Ukraine before the invasion of Crimea. At most they might experience irritation at the public use of what they regarded as an inferior but basically comprehensible rustic dialect in public places or on street signs.

The main resentments of Russians in eastern Ukraine centred on the fact that the central government in Kiev, controlled by the Donetsk-based Yanukovych clan, had done nothing to improve their standard of living, rather the reverse. Meanwhile, as they were keenly aware, he and his notorious familia were dipping into the public purse right up to their armpits. Because of the cultural and historical differences between the east and west of the country, some political polarisation also existed, reflected in differing regional levels of support for the main political parties.

But the differences were less than virulent, and in the twenty-odd years since independence they had been successfully managed by elections that tended to produce regular alternation between eastern-oriented and western-oriented presidents. Eastern Ukrainians were mostly unenthusiastic about the pro-Western Orange revolution of 2004–05 and the Maidan protests of 2013–14, though a substantial minority in the east, including Russians and Russian-speakers, supported them as movements that might improve their standards of living and increase probity in public life.

In fact, there was a degree of structural pluralism in Ukrainian society, which contributed to the retention of more democratic freedoms in the country than in neighbouring Russia or Belarus, for example. In that sense, Ukraine was a more democratic polity than any other part of the former Soviet Union, apart from the Baltic states and Georgia, and remains so despite the current artificially induced turbulence.

But if it is a little more democratic than the others, it is certainly not more economically functional than they are. Russia, with its huge resource endowment, has done better than Ukraine economically, and so too have Belarus (with its huge Russian subsidies) and Kazakhstan, for example. For many Ukrainians, however, the most telling comparison was with its western neighbour Poland, which was on the same level as Ukraine in 1990 but has since leapt far ahead, particularly after it joined the European Union in 2004. Its per capita GDP is now well over twice as big as Ukraine’s, and Ukrainians who travel to Poland in search of short-term work can see and feel the difference and want to follow Poland’s example.

The European Union therefore had strong appeal in Ukraine, reinforcing the Western orientation of those already so inclined but also attracting many others. The idea of seeking some degree of economic integration with Europe came to enjoy significant support both in the population as a whole (though only a minority in the east), and in the political and other elites. As a result, Ukrainian leaders mostly tried to couple good relations with Russia with some degree of rapprochement with Europe. Opinion polling in recent years has regularly shown a strong plurality in the country favouring an Association Agreement, or AA, with Brussels, well ahead of the numbers supporting Putin’s geopolitically motivated Customs Union.

Yanukovych disappointed some of his eastern followers by working towards an AA, and Russian propaganda was able to capitalise on the issue effectively. Russian TV, heavily favoured by Russians in the eastern provinces, pushed the line that the AA would be the road to ruin for those provinces whose trade was more directed towards the Russian market. Moscow repeatedly threatened to penalise Ukraine’s trade with Russia in retaliation for Kiev’s concluding any deal with Brussels. And in 2013, it did indeed conduct a trade war against Ukraine, closing off its border to Ukrainian exports for more than a week in summer, and selecting as one of its key targets the chocolates produced by Roshen, the large confectionery concern owned by the “Chocolate King” (and, since last weekend, the Ukrainian president), Petro Poroshenko, whose TV station was strongly advocating adoption of the Western vector.

Kiev’s negotiations with Brussels were undoubtedly a blow to Putin’s hope of restoring a Soviet Union–lite, dominated from Moscow. Once he realised that there was a serious danger the AA might happen, his hostility became quite explicit. Some Western observers, lobbyists and officials – of the kind widespread in Germany, where they are known as Russlandversteher (those who understand Russia) – suggest that the European Union should have conciliated Russia by involving it closely in all the tortuous negotiations that took place with Kiev over the AA. This would, they argued, have reassured Russia and dealt with any objections it might have had.

Unlike Putin’s negotiations with Kiev, however, the European Union’s dealings with Ukraine were largely transparent, and conducted according to well-enunciated principles. There was no compelling reason to suppose that increased trade with Europe would make Ukraine a worse partner for Russia. Poland, for example, had greatly increased its trade with Russia after joining the European Union, and in general developed much better relations with Moscow.

The reason why Moscow did not like the idea of Ukraine joining was that it wanted Kiev to remain a subordinate partner contributing to Moscow’s geopolitical objectives and responding cooperatively to its decisions and initiatives. Any attempt to involve Moscow in the negotiations would have been abortive, leading swiftly to a Russian demand for a de facto right of veto on anything that might ever be agreed. Putin’s attitude to all this has been eloquently expressed by the measures he took against Ukraine once it did attempt to fly the coop.

Nonetheless, eastern Ukrainians anxious about their economic prospects had good reason to fear EU integration. But the real danger to them was that, as they had been warned, Moscow would launch punitive countermeasures to any Ukrainian decision for EU integration, based not on economic but on geopolitical considerations. They could sense that failing to accept the offer that couldn’t be refused would lead to trouble first and foremost for their rustbelt industries. Not surprisingly, a majority of respondents in the eastern provinces regularly told opinion pollsters that they favoured Moscow’s Customs Union, not the AA with Brussels. This gave Moscow valuable material to work with.

It was never the case, however, that the Russians and Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine wanted to become part of Russia. Opinion polling over the years has shown that a great majority of eastern Ukrainians – including many who speak Russian by preference or, indeed, identify themselves as Russians – want their region to remain part of Ukraine. There is a regional national identity, as well as an ethnic one. And even in Crimea, a majority of the inhabitants up to the invasion declared to opinion pollsters that they wished to remain in Ukraine. Despite this, the phony referendum that the new post-invasion bosses conducted showed an implausible turnout with a huge majority supporting annexation.

Western commentators are used to spin in their own political systems and are growing increasingly fed up with it. They are not, however, used to dealing with what the Russians call vranyo (roughly, lies of a particularly brazen and shameless kind). Vranyo was one of the basic pillars of the Soviet regime, and it continues to play a major and indeed an increasing role in the Putinist system. When someone reports electoral results affected by vranyo to Western listeners, however, they are inclined to assume that those results must be somewhere near the mark, spun a bit perhaps, but otherwise okay, and certainly indicative of something. In this case they were wrong, yet we all heard and read phrases in our media implicitly accepting that the results of the fraudulent referenda had some meaning. They did of course have a meaning, but it was not as a test of public opinion.

Events since the invasion and annexation of Crimea, up to and including Putin’s recent shift of tack, need to be considered in the light of the above. Western reporting and comment have sometimes fallen victim to their practitioners’ sincerely held principles – the belief, for example, that the truth must be somewhere in the middle, or that the object of widespread criticism, in this case Russia, is some kind of underdog, so let’s try to understand it. Russians are very talented people, and one of their traditional strengths, in which they are again excelling, is propaganda. They have run a crudely mendacious but highly effective and skilfully differentiated information war against Ukraine and its Western supporters over the past few months, which has done a great deal to reduce the fallout from their seizure of Crimea and destabilisation of Ukraine’s eastern provinces.

How, then, do recent events in and around Ukraine look if they’re summarised with considerably less vranyo? Russia’s conquest of Crimea was indeed a masterly operation displaying a great deal of ingenuity and originality, and making adroit use of some historical precedents. Following the trade war skirmishes and with assurances that it had no aggressive intentions, Moscow conducted very large military exercises in the west of Russia deploying up to 150,000 troops. These provided cover for the preparation of a detailed invasion plan for Crimea, which was then implemented with considerable strategic surprise. The invasion saw deployed a modest number of highly trained Russian spetsnaz (special forces) and units based in Crimea in accordance with, but violating the terms of, the Black Sea Fleet agreement with Kiev. Putin initially denied that any Russian forces were involved, but later, after the triumph, acknowledged that there had been.

The weak and somewhat demoralised Ukrainian forces on the peninsula, like the new Kiev government, were taken unawares. Any serious response was beyond their immediate capacity, and in any case they feared that any armed resistance they attempted might have provoked Moscow to stage a wider incursion. The invading forces wore masks and no military insignia (another of many breaches of law) and liaised flawlessly not just with other Russian units, but also with local militias and politicians who had clearly, under cover of the Russian presence on the peninsula, been thoroughly prepared to perform their roles.

One of Yanukovych’s first acts in 2010 had been to extend the Russian Fleet’s tenure in Crimea and resume the traditional military and security cooperation with Russia that his pro-Western predecessor Yushchenko had been trying to minimise. Moscow had used the cooperation of the Yanukovych years to good effect. Sergey Aksyonov, a marginal Crimean politician with 4 per cent support, Kremlin links, a criminal record (like Yanukovych), and money and connections to lend to the task, was parachuted into the role of “premier” of the new entity. His “government” then proclaimed its desire to join Russia and conducted a rushed and fraudulent “referendum” which produced an allegedly large turnout and huge majority ratifying this new reality. Monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and other Western observers were bullied, harassed and excluded, though exceptions were made for some Kremlin-friendly right-wing European extremist groups to observe and enthuse about the referendum.

After hinting he would not quickly accede to the Aksyonov government’s request, Putin then abruptly staged a huge annexation ceremony in the Kremlin to mark this momentous development. There, he made a stirring patriotic speech reaffirming the new Russian doctrine that any people anywhere who spoke Russian would be regarded by Moscow as people it had a responsibility to regard as its own citizens and to protect against any harm that might come their way. This doctrine is one of the key items that induced a wide variety of Western observers, including Hillary Clinton and the Prince of Wales, to comment on the parallels with Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. The entire Crimean operation was accomplished within no more than three weeks.

Whereas Western experts had been critical of Russia’s military performance in their crushing of Georgia in 2008, this time, after getting over its initial surprise, they acknowledged that technically this was a classy performance, and one that indicated that Putin’s big military build-up – to which EU and NATO countries have basically failed to respond – is yielding impressive results.

Western countries appeared to be as much taken by surprise as the Ukrainians themselves. They spoke of costs and consequences for Russia, but were unable to agree on imposing any severe enough to worry Putin greatly. While Western countries have said they would never recognise the annexation as legal, there is a strong sense that most of the Europeans at least have accepted it as a fait accompli. There seems to be an unstated but widespread acceptance of Putin’s argument that Khrushchev’s decision to allocate Crimea to Ukraine was a silly misunderstanding that should be put aside. Crimea is Russian, end of story.

It should be remembered that reputable opinion polls had shown right up to the invasion that despite the fact that some 58 per cent of Crimeans identified themselves as Russians, there had never been a majority that favoured Crimea’s joining Russia. The Crimean Tatars (some 12 per cent of the population), who had been deported by Stalin towards the end of the second world war with 50 per cent fatalities, were particularly emphatic in their opposition. After making one or two conciliatory gestures in their direction, the Kremlin seemed to abandon the attempt and thousands have now chosen exile in central and western Ukraine. The Crimean Tatar leader has been banned from entering “Russia,” and their main political organ has been threatened with closure as an “extremist organisation.”

These events recall much that was done in the Stalinist era by way of territorial acquisition and the erection of totalitarian structures. The human casualties, it should be noted, have been much fewer; although it was carried out by highly armed and menacing troops, the Crimean operation was not gratuitously violent. But the parallels with the 1940s are nonetheless striking.

Meanwhile, Moscow and its fifth column in Ukraine have continued their work destabilising the provinces of eastern Ukraine where pro-Russian sentiment is strongest. At first glance, the modus operandi seemed to mirror the Crimean operation: heavily armed men in anonymous military fatigues with full face-masks and no insignia; strong evidence of a controlling Russian presence; and detachments of local sympathisers helping out, including civilian and babushka groups to provide a human shield for the operations and a local legitimation.

Again there was a high degree of coordination between assaults on public buildings of strategic importance in various major eastern centres, as the violence “spread” to different targeted cities, which formed a neat and strategic band running through eastern Ukraine down to the Black Sea. As Putin and others spoke ominously of Novorossiya (the tsarist name for much of present-day Ukraine), attempts were made to extend the insurgency into the Black Sea provinces stretching across the south of Ukraine.

Armed groups of militiamen and toughs roamed the towns looking for useful work for themselves. They particularly concentrated their violence and intimidation on locals who spoke Ukrainian, flew Ukrainian flags or took part in pro-Maidan demonstrations. They were helped in their activities by the passivity or even collusion of the police and security forces in the east, which had become wholly dominated in recent years by Yanukovych’s Party of Regions machine, and appeared to be quite happy for the pro-Russian militias to take over control of the region. The object of all this activity seemed to be to weaken resistance to the new order that was about to be instituted, as in Crimea.

But differences between the two campaigns became more apparent as time went on. Some targeted cities resisted, and effectively, even where there seemed to be a strong pro-Russian element in the population. Recovering from their initial shock, the Kiev authorities began to resist with armed force, using such loyal military and security units as they could muster to take the fight back to that new ethnic category, the “pro-Russians” in the east. Casualties began to mount. Local residents sometimes became angry with the militiamen who were undermining their way of life and behaving in an increasingly unpredictable way.

Key oligarchs, who had mostly been playing a waiting game or even colluding with the trouble-makers, joined the resistance. Some of them, who had been recruited as local governors by Kiev, used their economic power against the separatists. When Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, who had initially been virtually invisible, suddenly deployed some of his vast workforce to challenge the thugs and police the streets, there was a sense that the tide was turning.

The morale and discipline of the attackers seemed to slacken, and they seemed increasingly to involve themselves in common criminal activity, often directed against minority groups, especially Roma. As with Yanukovych’s crowd-dispersal operations on the Maidan, groups of titushki (hired thugs) appeared to be involved in the action, some of them reportedly admitting they were being paid to inflict violence on pro-Ukrainians. Media reporting began to focus on the criminal element in the east, as did the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission, whose second report on the situation laid the burden of responsibility heavily on the pro-Russian camp for the killings, abductions, beatings and harassment that they were observing.

Clearly, if Putin’s intention had been to overrun some of the eastern provinces as a preliminary to annexation, things were no longer running smoothly. Destabilisation was relatively easy; pacifying and then holding new territories in the east would be more difficult, even in Yanukovych’s home territory of Donetsk and Luhansk, where the “pro-Russians” were much stronger than elsewhere. It needs to be emphasised again that while there are more Russians and more pro-Russian sentiment in the eastern provinces, strong majorities there, including in Donetsk and Luhansk, favour remaining part of Ukraine.

This was no doubt one of the reasons why Putin reacted as he did when the Donetsk and Luhansk leaders organised referendums and declared themselves sovereign “people’s republics” (another bizarrely nostalgic formulation from the Stalinist past). He decided first to advocate that the votes be abandoned, and then to decline their request to be annexed. As well as distancing himself from his own agents and their zealot followers, he began to reach out to what looked increasingly likely to be a new leadership group in Kiev after the presidential elections on 25 May. While the sanctions to date had not seemingly made a huge impression on him, he was painfully aware that the Russian economy, stagnant already for some time, was heading into recession, and the possibility of more resolute sanctions being imposed, as had been threatened if he tried to disrupt those elections, was a serious potential danger.

As it became increasingly evident that the new president, with a huge and convincing majority, would be Petro Poroshenko, maintaining the fiction that Yanukovych was still the legitimate leader was becoming more difficult. Putin has recently repeated the claim that Yanukovych was still the rightful leader, but he has also said several times that he is prepared to engage with Poroshenko. He may well see in Poroshenko an opportunity as well as a challenge.

Poroshenko has emphasised his pro-Maidan credentials recently and declared his full commitment to European integration and the recovery of Crimea. But he is an oligarch who has become a billionaire mainly through his Russian trade links and investments, and has in the past been associated with Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, as well as with more pro-Western political formations. He mingles easily with Russians, has a Russian daughter-in-law and has emphasised his readiness to negotiate with Moscow – and with Putin personally, of whom he has spoken publicly with diplomatic respect. In a word, Putin may have felt that Poroshenko is more his kind of Ukrainian than any of the other post-Yanukovych leaders, like prime minister Arseniy Yatseniuk or the former provisional president, Turchynov.

If so, he may be heading for something of a disappointment. Poroshenko is a tough and experienced politician with a huge majority behind him, including wins in the eastern provinces. And he has begun very forcefully. Responding to a heavily armed ambush on a Ukrainian army checkpoint south of Donetsk, where the well-trained raiders’ objective was clearly to kill as many as possible (sixteen died and many more were injured), and the armed seizure of Donetsk airport several days later, Poroshenko ordered a major armed assault to recapture the airport, resulting in the deaths of nearly fifty separatists. And he repeated that EU integration and Crimea were for him not negotiable.

Russia’s sustained pressure on Ukraine – the manipulative gas pricing; the trade boycotts; the collusion with pro-Russian elements in Ukraine; even the carrots offered to Kiev for compliance; and certainly the seizure of Crimea, including Ukraine’s crucial offshore hydrocarbon assets, and the destabilisation of eastern Ukraine – looks very much like neo-imperial aggression. And it is neo-imperial aggression by a country with a very bad record in that respect. At a time when other European imperial powers have long since withdrawn from their imperial possessions, whether in Europe or beyond it, such behaviour seems anachronistic as well as unconscionable, and inimical to any decent security system for Eurasia or the world. Hence Obama’s lectures about Russia being on the wrong side of history – not terribly effective as a way of influencing Moscow’s behaviour, but an understandable sentiment.

Quite apart from the poor Ukrainians, who’ve been invaded and had a vicious civil war artificially inseminated in their eastern provinces, can any of this be good for security more broadly? The Russians were in breach of numerous instruments, including the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, whereby Ukraine agreed to divest itself of its nuclear weapons in exchange for assurances offered to it by the United States, Britain, Russia and, later, France that it would not be subjected to any military or economic coercion by anyone. Yet it has been subjected to both and multiple times.

Can that do anything positive for the nuclear non-proliferation regime? And what are other countries with large Russian imperial minorities to make of Ukraine’s remaining effectively undefended? What of Moldova, Kazakhstan or even Belarus’s surviving sovereignty? And what of the Baltic states, especially Estonia (which has already been subjected to a cyberwar backed up by organised turbulence within its Russian minority) and Latvia (where a high proportion of its big Russian minority has told opinion pollsters that they support Russia’s invasion of Crimea)?

Yet Russia’s view of the whole saga, especially the last few months of it, has been taken up by numerous Western commentators eager to set out what they obviously believe to be the deeper reality of the seemingly blindingly obvious: that Russia’s behaviour is reprehensible and needs to be restrained. There are some who blame the victim, pointing to the poor management of successive Ukrainian governments and suggesting that they are so irredeemably incompetent and corrupt that nothing better can ever be expected from them. The valiant efforts of the Maidan protesters notwithstanding, Kiev has exhausted all reasonable patience. In any case they are in Russia’s sphere of influence, so let them beg Moscow for mercy, while we wash our hands of them. This line of thinking seldom sees any security downsides for any country worth shedding a tear for.

Another school of thought sees this as yet another case for which the United States must take the blame, with its endless malevolent interference in other people’s affairs. It failed to give the new Russian democracy of the early 1990s any support and brazenly expanded NATO practically up to Moscow’s door. Any Russian leader would have reacted badly to that, justifiably fearing that Washington was trying to destroy it. Some of these thinkers seem to be guided by the principle that wherever the United States takes a stand, they can immediately sense where decent or insightful people should be, and that is on the other side.

Then there are the economists who argue that Russia has actually given its neighbours generous discounts and yet they have thrown the money away. Saving Ukraine from itself would be ruinously expensive for the West, so it’s fortunate that Russia wants to take it over. If we agree to their doing so, we will save ourselves billions of dollars, and how good is that? This line of thought is a subset of the blame-the-victim thinkers, and it shares their lack of interest in any possible security downsides of a Russian takeover.

Yet another prominent group are the perpetual friends of Russia. Often these are durable lefties who’ve retained a sympathy for Russia through all the purges, Hungaries, Czech Springs, Cubas, North Koreas and Venezuelas, all the way to the collapse of communism and beyond, and who still see Russia as a country to be protected from its enemies. They will sometimes be found on the pages of the Guardian or the Nation, and they are typically a subset of the blame-the-Americans school, despite Washington currently having its most liberal administration since Jimmy Carter’s, and possibly beyond.

Let us not forget the realists, who also see what Putin has done as what any Russian leader would have done. For them, there’s no point in being indignant; nature has taken its course and resistance would be dangerous folly. Despite their “realism,” these thinkers seem to be strangely insouciant about any possible strategic downsides of Russia being thus encouraged to make further land-grabs from other of its neighbours, till it finally reaches the next circumference of hostile encircling states which also need to be dealt with. The explanation for this paradox is probably that the morbid realists haven’t, for one reason or another, any affection for the current victims of the bear (a furry image they like to deploy to make Russian aggression seem more cuddly). If we give some of them to the Russians, the bear will be sated and we’ll all be able to enjoy some realistic peace in our time.

Both of the preceding two categories overlap with the left, particularly of course the friends of Russia, and sometimes the hard left. They are often particularly susceptible to the Kremlin propaganda line, which has stated from the outset of its aggression that Ukraine is mortally threatened by vicious Ukrainian anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. This line has actually been running since Moscow took over much of Eastern Europe at the end of the second world war, has thus given gallant service and still earns the Kremlin handsome rewards. People with a weak understanding of recent Ukrainian developments (and Russian for that matter) are particularly susceptible to it, and responding to it makes them feel both hard-headedly realist, and deeply virtuous.

It is not a matter of debate that Ukraine, like many other European countries, has seen in the past a great deal of anti-Semitism, a lot of it violent and nasty. And it is true that the Svoboda party and other smaller groups in the Maidan coalition were not free of it. But it was a weak component, given great prominence only by the fact that as Yanukovych increasingly resorted to violence the hard men at its fringes who were prepared to use physical violence gained greater prominence. But the overwrought commentators could not be consoled. The issue was grotesquely overestimated, while there was an equally grotesque underestimation of the presence of very similar forces in the east (which have since come to undeniable prominence). In fact, Jews were quite strongly represented in the Maidan coalition, and senior rabbis repeatedly emphasised that they did not feel seriously threatened in Ukraine either east or west.

Given Ukraine’s history, the amount of anti-Semitism, as opposed to militant nationalism (not the same thing, and not necessarily always “far right”), is at present modest. And as for the political representation of such forces in the country, the best measure is provided by the European parliamentary elections on 22–25 May: in France, Denmark and Austria, the far right got 20 per cent or more of the vote; in Ukraine it received only 2.2 per cent, despite the fact that Russia’s actions were the ideal catalyst for more of it to have developed.

Finally, in this incomplete list of Russlandversteher, we have the hard-right extremists. Recently the director of Sydney’s Lowy Institute, Michael Fullilove, deplored the relative absence of the left from the ranks of those deeply concerned about the events in Ukraine. He made a good point, and could perhaps with due qualifications have extended it beyond Australia, which was his primary concern. But some excellent pieces have also appeared in left-wing publications (see, for example, Brendan Simms in the New Statesman).

But it is the hard right’s enthusiasm for Putin and all his works that is perhaps even more dismaying, particularly in the light of their stellar performance in last weekend’s elections to the European parliament. It takes one to know one of course. While Putin has many Soviet characteristics, he has increasingly been selling himself and his regime as exemplars of traditional conservative values, while continuing to clutch the gullible old left to his bosom.

Putin’s conservative values include suppressing democracy, empowering the reactionary and KGB-subservient Russian Orthodox hierarchy, encouraging people calling themselves Cossacks to undertake bully-boy roles in public (including whipping Pussy Riot performers), denouncing and oppressing gays, and pursuing territorial aggrandisement. The European hard right reciprocates warmly. Marine Le Pen, for example, has twice visited Moscow recently and seemed to get on famously with that relentlessly aggressive nationalist with KGB connections, deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin. Representatives from such parties were invited to observe the Crimean referendum to attest to its strict conformity with best democratic practice. I was always taught that hard left and hard right have more in common than either would wish to acknowledge. In this case, it would certainly seem so.

But Putin and his foreign minister Sergey Lavrov are now sounding more reasonable. Is this a good thing? Well it’s an improvement on Putin’s annexation Sabbath in the Kremlin. And perhaps some good will come of it. But one would hope that Western leaders can show a little more resolution and unity than has been evident thus far.

It has always seemed that Moscow’s minimal demand beyond seizing Crimea is that Ukraine be constitutionally restructured to create a federal or even a confederal state in which the eastern provinces, and through them Moscow, would have an effective veto on major decisions, especially regarding the country’s external orientation. Alternatively, perhaps, Moscow might wish to see immutable constitutional provisions directly inserted that precluded Ukraine from seeking membership of NATO or the European Union or any equivalent arrangement (an AA through the Eastern Partnership program for example). Moscow also urges that the Russian language must have guaranteed status as a state language. It is evident, moreover, that its aspires to have these sorts of constitutional provisions guaranteed by some instrument.

Finlandisation is also being proffered by generous Western cheerleaders, free with other people’s favours, as the ideal solution for Ukraine, just at the time when Ukrainian events have led to another wave of anxious discussion in neutral Finland and Sweden as to whether their security arrangements are adequate for present circumstances. Ukraine’s post-Yanukovych leadership has repeatedly indicated a readiness to discuss greater devolution of powers to the provinces, but within the bounds of a unitary state.

Federalisation of the kind Moscow would like does not seem to be popular outside the separatist movements in eastern Ukraine. It’s hard therefore to see it being accepted by any credible domestic democratic process in Ukraine. Just how Moscow would be able to get what it wants is therefore unclear. Presumably it would respond to its disappointment with the outcome of any domestic or process in such matters in the usual way, by renewing its destabilisation of the eastern provinces or by inflicting another gas war or heavy-handed trade boycott on Ukraine. Similarly if Poroshenko proves to be less amenable to pressure than Moscow is hoping (he says he is going to divest himself of much of his business empire), it may regret having agreed to engage with him in the first place. Russia has a wide range of punitive measures to draw on in any such situation.

By their invasion and destabilisation campaigns, the Russians have in large measure discredited themselves with the Ukrainian mainstream for the immediate future at least. If they can’t annex part of eastern Ukraine, or secure special constitutional prerogatives for their proxies there, they would be facing a poor outlook. This leaves one with the suspicion that if the current tone of sweet reason does not yield adequate rewards, some incident may occur that will overturn the chessboard and confront Kiev with a renewal of violence or economic blackmail. •

The post Ukraine: time to cut a deal? appeared first on Inside Story.

RUSSIAN soldiers have sown a minefield to mark the new border between Crimea and the Ukrainian mainland, but it is unclear how long this monument to Vladimir Putin’s ambitions will stand. The future of Ukraine still hangs in the balance. As Russia celebrates the annexation of Crimea, there are disturbing signs that the Kremlin’s campaign to reverse the Ukrainian revolution has only just begun.

One glimpse of the geopolitical ambitions of Putin’s inner circle came from the well-connected Valerii Solovei, a distinguished historian and a professor at Moscow’s Institute of International Relations, the training school for Russian diplomats. On 3 March, Solovei revealed that he had discussed the current crisis with several highly-placed Kremlin “insiders.” They told him that the decision to invade Crimea had been made by Putin and a handful of top officials. If the community puts up no serious resistance, Russia would annex eastern Ukraine.

Such a move would deprive Ukraine of major cities like Donetsk, Kharkov, Odessa, and Dnepropetrovsk. It would tear away its industrial heartland, its shipyards, its coalfields and its agricultural breadbasket. For a country already brought to its knees by economic collapse and political upheaval, such a partition would be nothing short of a cataclysm.

That the Kremlin reserves the right to extend its conquests in Ukraine is suggested by its attitude towards the new Ukrainian government. When asked about Russia’s solemn commitment in the 1994 Budapest treaty to uphold Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, Putin endorsed the views of those “experts” who have argued that the uprising in Kiev caused an institutional rupture comparable to the Bolshevik revolution. The result was a new state, “and with this state and in relation to this state we have not signed any binding documents.”

The Kremlin’s spin doctors are unperturbed by the fact that Ukraine’s democratically elected parliament has restored constitutional continuity by announcing elections and voting for a new government. They have repeatedly likened Ukrainian MPs to hostages, incapable of rational judgement because of the neo-Nazi terror that is supposedly raging on the streets of Kiev.

No less ominous is the Russian state’s attachment to the ousted and disgraced president, Viktor Yanukovych. Even as they treat Yanukovych as a political pariah, Russian officials continue to recognise him as the legitimate head of state. In the process, they are buttressing their legal case for full-scale intervention. The letter from Yanukovych waved before the Security Council by Russia’s UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, was a call not merely to amputate the Crimean peninsula but also to invade the entire country.

The idea that Russian troops will be welcomed as liberators is being fostered by the so-called Russian Spring in the cities of southeast Ukraine. For several days after Yanukovych’s flight, conditions there appeared to stabilise with the news that a transitional government had been formed. In response, local politicians began to reintegrate into the Ukrainian political system by starting preparations for the May elections. But on the weekend of 1–2 March, groups of pro-Russian youths staged almost identical actions in cities across the southeast, marching under the Russian tricolour, attacking local supporters of the Euromaidan uprising, and attempting to storm local government buildings.

This tumult is far from a spontaneous uprising of the persecuted and the disenfranchised. There are clear signs that its radical core consists of ultranationalists. The ringleader in Donetsk was Pavel Gubarev, a charismatic local businessman, who emerged from obscurity to become leader of the People’s Militia of Donbass and then the self-proclaimed “people’s governor.” On 6 March, he was arrested by Ukrainian security forces and transferred to Kiev. His supporters have cast doubt on the authenticity of photographs, now circulating on the internet, of a younger Gubarev wearing the swastika-like symbol of Russian National Unity, an organisation overtly modelled on Hitler’s Nazi Party. But it is clear from Gubarev’s blog that he belongs to the ultranationalist subculture.

Other heroes of the agitation in southeast Ukraine have come from Russia, where social networking sites have coordinated an influx of volunteers to fight for the reunification of the motherland. The Russian flag was raised over the regional government building in Kharkov not by an oppressed resident but by one of these newcomers, who then tarnished the authenticity of his feat by boasting about it on the internet.

Perhaps the most exemplary “tourist” is Aleksei Khudyakov, a twenty-seven-year-old Muscovite who was at the centre of the agitation in Donetsk. Khudyakov was a prominent activist of Young Russia, a Kremlin-backed youth organisation that for nearly a decade has harassed Putin’s opponents and collaborated closely with extreme nationalists. Most recently, he headed Shield of Moscow, a gang of vigilantes who dressed in balaclavas and wielded baseball bats to hunt down illegal immigrants and hand them over to police. In September last year, he was arrested for his role in a raid on a migrant hostel that provoked a riot.

The presence of interlopers like Khudyakov may explain the extraordinary insensitivity of the “separatists” who disturbed the peace of Nikolaev, a regional capital near the Black Sea. Although the city was a hotbed of protest against police abuses, they chanted, “Glory to Berkut!,” the notorious interior ministry forces responsible for the brutal treatment of protesters on Kiev’s Maidan. The slogan was enough to inspire ten thousand locals to demonstrate the following day for peace and against the infiltration of provocateurs.

EXTERNAL subversion is undeniable, but it would be misleading to ignore the role of domestic factors in the destabilisation of southeast Ukraine. Local power structures were dominated by the corrupt elite of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, who are now weakened by the breakdown of his regime. On the one hand, this old guard is threatened by the efforts of the victorious democrats in Kiev to purge its most odious representatives. The mayors of both Kharkov and Donbass have been arrested on criminal charges. On the other, there is mass discontent over corruption and falling living standards. Understandably, some functionaries and law-enforcement officers have provided support to the secessionist agitation. Others have been grudging and inept defenders of Ukrainian statehood.

The most vociferous Russian advocates of the dismemberment of Ukraine are a phalanx of pro-Kremlin nationalists. Their standard-bearer is Egor Kholmogorov, a ubiquitous media commentator and one of the most influential and erudite ideologues of the post-Soviet generation of Russian nationalists. In his “Crimean Theses,” a forty-point manifesto released on 2 March, Kholmogorov set out a plan for the subjugation of Ukraine. His starting point was that “every people has the right to reunification within the boundaries of one state,” and that only expediency can limit the Russian people’s exercise of this right.

Kholmogorov took the Kremlin’s dogma about the non-existence of the Ukrainian state to its logical conclusion. “Russia has no reason,” he declared, “to recognise the rule of the illegitimate regime in Kiev over the southeast.” Any attempt by the Ukrainian military to use force should be regarded as the actions of “illegal armed formations” that must be disbanded. Russia’s task is not merely to absorb the Crimean peninsula but also to partition mainland Ukraine. Russian soldiers will guarantee the security of the “illegally severed territories and the Russian population of Ukraine” while referendums take place on reunification with Russia. In the western rump of the country, they will wage an “anti-terrorist operation” to secure nuclear power stations and detain those involved in anti-Russian acts of terrorism.

Kholmogorov’s belligerence is echoed by some of the Kremlin’s most trusted propagandists. Sergei Markov, a semi-institutional figure who sits in Russia’s Public Chamber, argued on 8 March in an op-ed piece that there would be war because the “extremists” who seized power in Kiev “want to see a bloodbath.” Russia did not need Crimea, but it would not leave the people of southeast Ukraine at the mercy of “Russophobic and neo-Nazi gangs.”

The “Russian Spring” in southeast Ukraine was supposed to legitimise Russian intervention, but it has disappointed the expectations of many of its Russian admirers. Nowhere has it become a mass uprising. Nowhere has it produced crowds large enough to establish a stranglehold over public space and paralyse state institutions. Nowhere have its leaders acquired the authority to speak in the name of the population when requesting Russian assistance against the “neo-Nazi junta” in Kiev. A week after fantasising about Russian soldiers guaranteeing plebiscites for self-determination in southeast Ukraine, Kholmogorov lamented on his blog that Putin had been ready to go beyond Crimea if the conditions were favourable, but it was only “enthusiasts” who rose up in support of reunification.

“People power” is not, however, the only available pretext for a Russian invasion of the Ukrainian mainland. Although its diplomats are intransigent opponents of intervention to protect civilians in Syria, the Russian state uses the jargon of the “Responsibility to Protect” when it suits its purposes. In 2008 the Kremlin justified the invasion of Georgia as a humanitarian measure to stop a genocidal massacre. Now warnings about imminent atrocities have become a leitmotif of Russian official statements about Ukraine. During his press conference on 3 March, Putin was asked about the risk of war. In his response, he struck a pose as a defender of all Ukrainians, not just the Russians of Crimea:

Listen carefully. I want you to understand me clearly: if we make that decision, it will only be to protect Ukrainian citizens. And let’s see those troops try to shoot their own people, with us behind them – not in the front, but behind. Let them just try to shoot at women and children! I would like to see those who would give that order in Ukraine.

This warning clearly made an impression on the ringleaders of the “Russian Spring.” Secessionist militants appear to have shifted their energies from civil disobedience to acts of mob violence that are likely to provoke bloodshed. On 14 March, they besieged the Kharkov headquarters of Right Sector, the alliance of radical nationalists and skinheads that had supported the Euromaidan. In an exchange of gunfire, two of the attackers were killed. The Russian foreign ministry promptly seized on the incident as proof that Right Sector was running amok. In its press-release, the skirmish between two groups of violent men became a provocation against “peaceful demonstrators, who had come to express their attitude to the so-called new regime.”

IN HIS ADDRESS to Russia’s Federal Assembly on 18 March, Putin appeared to step back from the brink. He cautioned Ukrainians against listening to the scaremongering of those who claimed that other regions of their country would follow Crimea’s path to secession. “We don’t want the partition of Ukraine,” he protested, “We don’t need it.” But he offered no olive branch to the new Ukrainian government. In Putin’s words, the revolution that toppled Yanukovych was nothing less than a “coup” led by “nationalists, Russophobes and anti-Semites” who used “terror, murder and pogroms” to seize power and who now dominate public life in Ukraine. He repeated his mantra that “there is no legitimate executive authority in Ukraine now, nobody to talk to.” Those who inhabit the corridors of power in Kiev were “impostors,” puppets of militant mobs, and “ideological heirs of Bandera, Hitler’s accomplice during World War II.”

There is nothing new about Putin’s efforts to brand an anti-authoritarian revolution as a fascist attack on Russia. For years after Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004, Kremlin propagandists used identical language to smear both the “orangists” and their democratic sympathisers in Russia. But it is a dangerous ploy. Ukraine is a fragile and complex multiethnic society, where bilingualism is a norm and where identities rarely fit into the rigid categories of nationalist ideologues. By attempting to transform a political struggle into an ethnic one, the Kremlin is fanning the very extremism that it pretends to oppose. By refusing to recognise the new regime in Kiev and by raising the possibility of further military intervention, it is forcing ordinary people in southeast Ukraine to choose sides. By using ultranationalists and paramilitary groups as proxies, it is helping to mobilise the potential combatants of a civil war.

Countless Russian intellectuals and opposition activists have raised the alarm about the dangers of the Kremlin’s confrontation with Ukraine. Many fear an irreparable rupture with a nation to which they are bound by history, by culture and by family ties. Putin shows no sign of listening to these voices of caution. Instead, he is silencing them. The cable television station Dozhd, the news website lenta.ru, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and four leading opposition websites, are only the most conspicuous targets of a crackdown on dissent that is inexorably narrowing Russia’s public sphere.

The effect has been to widen the gulf between Russians and Ukrainians. As Russia’s moderates become less audible, the Kremlin’s propagandists are defining Ukrainian perceptions of what Russia represents: an aggressive, mendacious power bent on crushing a popular uprising and restoring dictatorship. In the words of Anton Dmitriev, an ethnic Russian blogger based in Kiev: “One should not think that the Ukrainians hate Russians – they do not. But Russian propaganda is doing everything to kindle xenophobia and chauvinism.” For Dmitriev, the ultimate paradox is that the Kremlin and its ferocious media boss, Dmitry Kiselyov, “have done much more for the development of Ukrainian nationalism than the Soviet regime during its entire existence.”

The fracturing of a common cultural space is a tragedy both for Ukrainians and for Russians. But it may be dwarfed by what is to come. As they sow minefields, the invaders of Crimea are also sowing the seeds of ethnic hatred. We know from the history of the Balkans that it is the ordinary people of the region, inhabitants of a meeting place of cultures, faiths and languages, who will reap the whirlwind. •

The post Putin on the edge of an abyss appeared first on Inside Story.

SINCE announcing his intention to reclaim the Russian presidency, and especially since the outbreak of public demonstrations late last year, Vladimir Putin has been pursuing a hard line both domestically and externally. At home he is strengthening his “power vertical” by reinforcing his instruments of control and repression at all political levels and doing away with the wishy-washy liberal rhetoric of his placeholder predecessor as president, Dmitry Medvedev. Externally he is pursuing the anti-American and anti-Western line he adopted in his second term as president (2004–08), also stripped of the more emollient accents of Medvedev.

The urban revolt against Putin and his system has largely run out of steam for the time being. Discouraged by the failure to win any concessions from Putin, and probably deterred by the recent spate of repressive legislation, dwindling numbers are turning out for street demonstrations. In his last months as president, Medvedev tried to respond to the unrest with liberal reforms to the electoral system, but his successor has gutted virtually all of them.

But Putin and his system are no longer sacrosanct, and dissidence continues to spread on the internet and in local communities fed up with the Kremlin’s incompetence and venality. A further crackdown on the internet is likely (a move to ban YouTube from Russia is mooted, for example). But despite the growing repression, unrest could be reignited by a sharp economic downturn, some spectacular scandal, or disunity within the elite (an outbreak of overt conflict between Putin and Medvedev’s more liberal government, for example). If that occurs Putin could respond harshly.

A particularly important, if not the most important, foreign policy objective for Putin is to build up the existing rather feeble post-Soviet multilateral institutions into something he has called – by misleading analogy with the European Union – the Eurasian Union. Within this proposed bloc, Putin wants Moscow (led by his St Petersburg coterie) to play the role of both Brussels and Berlin. His aim is to bring in as many former republics as he can muster by using a mixture of persuasion and coercion (mainly economic, but he is also embarking on a very ambitious military build-up).

Kazakhstan, with its large Slavonic minorities, has joined the Customs Union and has maintained productive relations with Russia, but is also strengthening its ties with China and the West. Russia continues to have hopes of greatly expanding its influence in other former republics: in elections due next month in Lithuania and Georgia, for example, the strongly pro-Western and anti-Russian governments currently in place could face defeat.

A struggle for influence is taking place in Moldova, where the pro-Western government is making a determined effort to seek integration with Europe. On 11 September, Moscow delivered a public warning to the visiting Moldovan prime minister, Vlad Filat, that if Moldova wanted to pay less than the current US$392 per thousand cubic metres for its gas, his government would, in effect, have to renounce its Western orientation. Moscow is also holding Moldova responsible for the US$3.5 billion gas debt of Transnistria, a breakaway pro-Moscow province, which Russia has been cosseting and supporting for the last two decades. The European Commission president José-Manuel Barroso quickly responded to Moscow’s ultimatum with a declaration that an association agreement between the European Union and Moldova could be signed by 2013. Meanwhile, Moldova’s opposition pro-Moscow Communist Party is pressing for a referendum on joining the Eurasian Union.

Moscow is fighting a long-term positional battle for influence in most of the other former republics, with mixed and fluctuating fortunes. But the possibility that it will consider applicants to the Eurasian Union from countries further afield cannot be entirely ruled out. There is some sentiment in both Russia and Serbia in favour of Serbia’s becoming a member. The new president and government that came to power there earlier this year are markedly more pro-Russian than their predecessors. While for economic and electoral reasons they continue to emphasise their desire for European integration, this project could come unstuck over Kosovo or some other issues.

Both president Tomislav Nikolić and prime minister Ivica Dačić have interesting pasts – Dacic as Milosevic’s party spokesman and Nikolic as deputy leader of an extreme nationalist party – but both emphasise they are now pro-European. Nonetheless, during his two visits already to Moscow since becoming president last May, Nikolic has embarrassed some of his compatriots with his expressions of love for Russia. “The only thing I love more than Russia is Serbia,” he announced at one point. This and other Nikolic statements – including his apparent denial of the Srebrenica genocide – could yet cause serious trouble in Brussels, potentially opening the way for increased Russian influence.

But within Putin’s plans, a crucial role is accorded to the two Slavonic former republics of the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Belarus, which have many ethnic, political and cultural links with Russia. If they formed a stable alliance, or better still from Putin’s point of view, confederation with Russia, Moscow would be at the head of just under 200 million people, with much of the industrial capacity of the old Soviet Union again under its leadership. Individually and as a group, these three countries pose thorny dilemmas for Western policy-makers.

And none more so than Russia. Even when Moscow doesn’t deliver on such important issues as Iran and Syria, the United States still sees the need to struggle for its support in the UN Security Council. Because of its difficult relationship with Pakistan, Washington’s forces in Afghanistan rely on logistic support both from Russia and from former Soviet republics Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – where any American presence evokes strong objections in Moscow. And Obama’s nuclear disarmament agenda, a high priority for the president, depends crucially on Moscow’s cooperation.

The US administration has played down the differences over Russia’s incursion into Georgia in 2008 and the role of human rights in the bilateral relationship, and has modified its missile defence plans for Eastern Europe in deference to Russian sensitivities. But Moscow continues to argue that the missile plans are a deadly threat that is forcing it to rearm comprehensively, at the same time declaring that it could easily dispose of the installations and will target them pre-emptively in any future conflict.

The Kremlin has also threatened former vassal states that make decisions about their own defence of which Russia disapproves. And both the chief of the general staff, Nikolai Makarov, and (less bluntly) Putin recently threatened Finland with retaliation in the event of its pursuing any military cooperation with NATO. Makarov even queried why Finland should have military exercises on its territory at all, demanding to know against whom such exercises were directed and asserting that Finland should instead cooperate militarily with Russia.

Finland and the other Nordic states have been disturbed by the increased regional deployments and exercises Russia has undertaken under Putin’s ascendancy, as well as by its frequently threatening language. They were also unfavourably impressed by the heavy pressure unleashed against Estonia in April 2007 – including an apparent (but unprovable) cyberattack – when the government in Tallinn had the temerity to relocate a statue commemorating the Soviet “liberators” of Estonia from a central square in the capital to a military cemetery.

Washington has responded to pressure of this kind by acceding to East European requests for a more visible NATO military presence. Again in deference to Russian sensitivities, Washington and NATO long refrained from placing any significant hardware or conducting any military exercises in the region, but that policy has now been modified. The Obama administration has also been reluctant to export arms to Georgia since the conflict with Russia, despite the fact that Moscow has been militarising the territories it detached from Georgia after its invasion.

Back home, the Obama administration has done its best to persuade Congress to repeal the Jackson–Vanik Amendment – a restrictive trade provision routinely waived by the president – in accordance with World Trade Organization rules, now that Russia has finally joined the organisation. (US support and assistance, including helping to short-circuit a threatened Georgian veto, helped facilitate Russia’s membership.) And it has sought to head off the pressures in Congress for sanctions against Russia over a spectacular case of alleged high-level official corruption against a foreign-owned company in Moscow and the imprisonment and suspected murder of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer employed by the company, who blew the whistle on the affair.

While he was still in the presidency, Medvedev made a typically ineffectual attempt to look into the Magnitsky case. But that led nowhere, and the Kremlin has responded to complaints with bluster and threats of counter-sanctions. Not wisely, though also not surprisingly, Congress has dug in its heels and still not repealed Jackson–Vanik. For his part, Mitt Romney has come out in favour of introducing Magnitsky sanctions as a precondition for repealing the Amendment. More bilateral turbulence on this and other issues can be expected.

On 19 September, Moscow announced that it was expelling the US Agency for International Development from Russia, demanding that it close its doors by 1 October. USAID supports some fifty-seven Russian NGOs concerned with human rights, election monitoring, AIDS prevention, disability support, governance and environmental issues. Golos (Voice), the Russian volunteer election monitoring group that earned Putin’s rage and indignation during the electoral season, is among the organisations, and will find its work much more difficult. Russian oligarchs will not be risking their fortunes to support them or any of the others. USAID activities and outlays in Russia have been declining under the Obama administration and the administration’s response to this development was characteristically mild and forbearing. But this looks like yet another Putinist punch in the eye for the “reset” in relations between the two countries.

In Europe’s relations with Russia, the central underlying geopolitical issue is probably the fact that, to a greater or lesser degree, Russia has still not accepted the sovereignty of the countries that it used to dominate in Eastern Europe. Given their historical experience of Moscow’s attentions, those countries feel understandably anxious, and have very often sought reassurance in EU and/or NATO membership and support. To the extent that they are successful, Russia declares itself threatened and takes counter-measures; and so the cycle continues.

Russia wants to re-establish influence, if not control, over as much as it can of the territory it once dominated; and it is prepared to do so by political infiltration, using its energy exports as a geopolitical tool, exploiting Russian minorities or applying military pressure, at times including nuclear intimidation. It is an awkward neighbour.

Moscow’s energy diplomacy is best exemplified by the operations of its national gas corporation, Gazprom. Gazprom’s primary role is not to make a profit, though it has often done that, but rather to set prices, build or dismantle pipelines, and satisfy or not satisfy customers, all in such a way as to further the president’s geopolitical objectives. It is a subject close to Putin’s heart: in a remarkably short time in the mid 1990s, he wrote a thesis on the optimal management of national resources. Energy diplomacy has brought both Belarus and Ukraine to heel in the recent past, and Moscow is doing all it can to ensure that it remains an effective weapon.

But now it has begun to encounter some pushback. The European Union and individual EU countries cooperated with Gazprom projects for many years, and some still do. But in 2004, with the acceptance into the European Union of former Soviet-bloc countries heavily dependent on Russian energy imports, the tide began to turn. Moscow’s subsequent “gas wars,” especially those against Ukraine in 2006 and 2009 with their collateral damage for West European consumers, increased Europe’s disquiet about Gazprom’s hardball tactics.

On 27 September last year, European Commission officials raided a series of Gazprom-connected firms in ten EU countries, seeking evidence that Gazprom was in breach of anti-trust laws. A sensational sequel came when Brussels announced on 4 September that it was launching an anti-trust case against the Russian giant. Gas is not the only commodity that Russia uses as a geopolitical weapon, but it is the main one; so this is a significant volley across its bows. The prima facie case seems strong: Gazprom’s prices in Europe vary wildly, reflecting Moscow’s view of the country in question. The prices are often discreetly held, but Belarus is understood to be paying around $165 per thousand cubic metres while Poland is paying well over $500.

Putin has responded to the announcement with characteristic pugnacity, declaring that Russia would not subsidise East European countries on behalf of Brussels, and issuing a hasty decree forbidding Gazprom or other “strategic” Russian enterprises from providing information to EU authorities on any such matters without the regime’s explicit approval. He also announced, with heavily implied menace, “In Asia they are waiting for us.”

Putin has deployed threats to redirect Europe’s gas to Asia many times before, but of course Russia’s pipelines (Gazprom has been very slow to embrace LNG) are not easily diverted. And Putin knows all too well that his “strategic partner,” China, has been wary of allowing itself to become too dependent on Russian energy, and also drives a much tougher bargain than any European country. It is clear, however, that Russia’s relations with the European Union on this and other topics could be in for another torrid time.

WHERE do Ukraine and Belarus fit into this pattern? Russia’s attitude can be summed up very briefly: it wants them back. Putin once said, very quotably, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” Many ethnic Russians living both inside and outside Russia would agree with him. Though large numbers of them migrated to Russia from the former Soviet republics after 1991, there is still a heavy concentration of Russians and Russian speakers in several former republics, including Ukraine and Belarus.

In Ukraine, a little over eight million of the country’s forty-five million (or 18 per cent) identify as ethnic Russians. But a larger proportion (around 30 per cent) give Russian as their native language to census-takers, something approaching half tell researchers that they use Russian at home, and a much larger percentage again are fluent in Russian. Of Belarus’s 9.6 million, about 8 per cent identify as ethnic Russians and fully 70 per cent acknowledge Russian as the language they speak at home. In both countries Orthodoxy is clearly the strongest religion. Despite the turbulent history of relations, public attitudes towards Russia remain positive, reflecting much common experience and shared culture. Putin has enjoyed very high popularity ratings in both countries, higher at times than any local politicians.

But there are important differences between the two countries. In Ukraine there is a much stronger attachment to the native language and to the country’s distinct cultural traditions. Most Ukrainians tell enquirers that they are not religious or do not clearly identify with a particular group. Those who identify as Orthodox are divided among the Moscow Patriarchate (about 30 per cent), the more nationalist Kiev Patriarchate (formed in the early 1990s after independence – 40 per cent) and the Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church (about 3 per cent). Greek Catholic or Uniate Christians (15 per cent) are concentrated in the west of the country, where historical connections to Russia are weakest and attitudes broadly hostile.

A strong majority of Ukrainians tell pollsters that they favour Ukrainian independence (which they voted for resoundingly in 1991). But Ukraine is also the country Russians most regret losing, with Kiev widely regarded as the historic heartland of their state and of national culture. As Russian president, Boris Yeltsin found it politically expedient to agree to the secession of Ukraine and Belarus in December 1991, but Russians still find it absurd that Ukraine has somehow become a separate country, complete with the Crimean peninsula and access to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. As Zbigniew Brzezinski once said, also very quotably: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.”

Putin has been at pains to draw Ukraine back into close communion with Mother Russia. In 2004, he overtly interfered in the presidential election, strongly supporting Viktor Yanukovych who, he rightly judged, was much more pro-Russian than his Western-leaning rival Viktor Yushchenko. But Yanukovych’s rorted victory was overturned by popular resistance, with some involvement from the judiciary and – mediated by the Polish and Lithuanian presidents – from the European Union. This treacherous involvement of former vassals enraged Putin, who always sees a political reverse anywhere in the former Soviet Union as the product of Western plotting. He had nonetheless learnt a lesson: during the 2010 presidential election in Ukraine he kept his distance, and Yanukovych won with full acceptance.

In the current election cycle in Ukraine, both Moscow and Putin personally have been discreet, though their sympathies are obvious. Yanukovych awarded Russia a series of major unilateral concessions early in his term as president, most notably striking a deal on allowing Russia unfettered access to its naval facilities on the Black Sea coast. But Putin does have mixed feelings about Yanukovych because, when it became apparent that Russia was not planning to reciprocate with more than a temporary cut in the price of its gas, he became stubborn and started playing his Western–EU card more frequently, something Ukrainian leaders often do to ward off Russian pressure or strengthen their leverage.

As the price of gas resumed climbing, reflecting the rising cost of oil (the two typically being linked in Gazprom contracts), Ukraine desperately sought further price relief. Innumerable meetings have been held to discuss the subject, but each time Russia has insisted that concessions would only come if Kiev agreed to sell its gas pipelines to Russia and join Moscow’s Customs Union. (Apart from Russia itself, only Belarus and Kazakhstan have signed up so far.) Putin continues strongly encouraging Kiev to consider how much it is paying as a non-member of the union ($425 per thousand cubic metres) and how much Belarus pays ($165).

Meanwhile, Moscow continues to push its South Stream gas pipeline project, which, like the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic, is designed to bypass Ukraine and Belarus (and Poland and other unfavoured states). Moscow’s purpose is to deprive these governments of their transit fees and negotiating leverage, and to ensure that Russia is able to cut off their vital gas supplies to enforce its will while still servicing important customers like Germany and Italy further afield.

I recall a prominent Russian economist recounting how he and others like him had sought to remonstrate with Russian policy-makers about the huge and, as they saw it, unnecessary costs of the bypass gas pipelines to north and south. They were told emphatically to back off; this was “strategic.” The total costs are undoubtedly much greater than the alternative, an upgrading of Ukraine’s and Belarus’s ageing pipelines. But the Russians have turned a deaf ear to Yanukovych’s pleas that they desist from constructing the new pipeline and invest instead in upgrading a friendly pro-Russian neighbour’s infrastructure.

As the elections and South Stream’s construction draw nearer, Yanukovych has shown signs of capitulating to Russian pressure. In August, he introduced a major change to Ukraine’s language policy that greatly strengthens the position of Russian (something Moscow has long demanded, but which is extremely divisive within Ukraine). And on 25 August, on the margins of a meeting with Putin, he hinted broadly at his readiness to make unspecified concessions in exchange for cheaper gas.

One of Yanukovych’s biggest problems is that he has all but burnt his bridges with the European Union, which further undermines his bargaining position with Moscow. Determined to rig the forthcoming parliamentary elections more effectively than he did during his presidential bid in 2004, he has used his manufactured majority in parliament to change the electoral act to disadvantage the opposition and has restricted freedom of the media, particularly television.

To make doubly sure, he has prosecuted several of the previous government’s ministers, including, above all, the former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko (whom he only narrowly defeated for the presidency in 2010) and the former interior minister, Yury Lutsenko. After lengthy periods in pre-trial detention quite disproportionate to the flimsy charges against them, both were duly convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. After both then appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, further charges were laid to ensure there would be a legal pretext for keeping them out of circulation beyond the elections if the court demanded their exoneration on the earlier charges.

The jailings are a misstep by Yanukovych on two grounds. While they have kept a formidable campaigner, Tymoshenko, off the hustings, they have also restored some of her erstwhile popularity and stimulated the opposition to work harder and cooperate better. And they are the single clearest red line for the European Union and its member states. Brussels has repeated over and over again that the association and free-trade agreements laboriously negotiated and initialled with Kiev will not be signed while Tymoshenko and Lutsenko remain behind bars.

But winning the election by whatever means was clearly more important to Yanukovych and his party than EU integration, despite his repeated claims that this was Ukraine’s primary objective. He may be calculating that once his Party of Regions gets over the line he can make some magnanimous gestures to bring the deals with the European Union back to life. But if he does win the election by one means or another, he may decide his next objective should be to ensure that the opposition is disabled more permanently, which would attract a further reaction from Brussels.

Ukraine’s difficult economic position means that it desperately needs financial support from somewhere. It was granted a US$15 billion credit by the IMF in 2010, to be dispensed in several tranches, but the agreement was suspended after disbursement of the second tranche and has not been renewed. Kiev continues to try to extract further credits from the IMF, but without meeting the fund’s tough conditions. Doing so would have affected the government’s domestic popularity in the run-up to the elections. Again, this may be a matter that Yanukovych plans to come back to after the elections.

In the meantime Ukraine is developing a number of credit arrangements with China that may, if all come to fruition, serve as a partial substitute for the IMF, as well as a warning to Moscow that Kiev has other and worrying options. Russian banks (no doubt in consultation with the Kremlin) have also been more forthcoming than the IMF, providing Ukraine with credit facilities to help pay for its expensive gas imports from Russia. But clearly such loans have the effect of helping secure Ukraine’s head in Gazprom’s noose. Yanukovych knows he could get more from Russia if he were prepared to sell more sovereignty. While so far he is holding out, he seems to be weakening.

BELARUS’s president Alexander Lukashenko has also tried repeatedly, and with some success, to strengthen his freedom of manoeuvre by playing the European Union off against Russia. But despite intermittent family quarrels with Moscow, he has always been closer to Russia than any of his Ukrainian counterparts. And now he has backed himself into a corner. During the economic crisis into which his mismanagement plunged the country in 2011, he finally agreed to sell Gazprom the rest of Belarus’s gas pipelines, and he also appears to have agreed in principle to further privatisations of big Belarusian companies in favour of Russian purchasers. And he has not returned to the testy, even hostile relations with Russia that prevailed in the period leading up to the December 2010 presidential elections.

Since Yeltsin’s time in the later 1990s, Belarus and Russia have ostensibly been working towards some kind of unification. The Union State of Russia and Belarus, created under a different name in 1996, has passed through several mutations, but it has never amounted to much. Russia has always expected subordination, whereas Lukashenko, for all his Russophilia and intermittent enthusiasm for the project, was clearly only prepared to agree to unity if it involved a very senior position for him, perhaps even as president of the new entity. There is activity and enthusiasm from Lukashenko again on this front, however, and it can’t be ruled out that progress might be made.

Lukashenko’s flirting with the European Union has probably always been entirely cynical, intended only to gain ad hoc goodies and greater leverage in his dealings with Russia. Periodically, Brussels has held out inducements for him to embrace democracy, rule of law, human rights and so on, but with little success. Lukashenko’s domestic regime has been so retrogressively Soviet that even Putin, himself something of a Soviet nostalgic, views both the president and his regime as slightly pathetic. Ideally, Lukashenko would like to see the return of some Soviet world in which he was the leader and the resources of the entire country were available for import into Belarus at bargain prices.

In their bilateral dealings, however, Putin has usually tried to pursue Russia’s pragmatic national interests, especially its economic interests. His recent resumption of generous subsidies for Belarus’s unreformed economy, which extracted it from its 2011 slump, was well timed to pull Lukashenko back onto the reservation. But in the near future, Minsk will be under great pressure to sell its crown jewels to Russia and embrace some Russian-led economic reform. At that point, Lukashenko will revert to holding out his cap to Brussels; but it may be very hard for him to play that game again.

During the first half of 2012, Belarus’s export performance and balance of payments position underwent a somewhat mysterious improvement. Lukashenko also chose again to distribute wage increases to voters to sweeten the pre-electoral atmosphere. It seems that this further apparent economic uptick on what Moscow’s tactical generosity had already given him had resulted from a scam Lukashenko had employed against his Russian benefactors. Having access to Russian oil imports free of export duties at preferential prices for domestic consumption, Belarus had been processing and refining a substantial proportion of the oil and re-exporting it at a big mark-up, disguising it as solvents and diluting agents. When it became apparent that Moscow was onto this scam, Lukashenko appears to have attempted a similar manoeuvre in exports to Ukraine.

But the game is up. As the relatively independent Nezavisimaya Gazeta commented (“Minsk prikidyvayet kak obmanut soyuznika,” 5 September 2012), “Moscow is dealing with this problem quietly… but is not intending to let Lukashenko off the energy hook. His dependency will be long-term, and he must settle accounts for the subsidies he has received either by selling property in a best-case scenario, or in a worse one by surrendering his own grasp on power and the independence of his country.”

The scam taps into the rich strain of farce, sometimes dark, that runs through public life in Lukashenko’s Belarus. Speaking of farce, the parliamentary elections on 23 September have predictably resulted in yet another resounding win for Lukashenko’s regime. Opposition representatives who have been excluded from parliament since 2004 were again prevented from taking any effective part in the contest. Some of Belarus’s brutalised oppositon parties decided to boycott the election from the outset; others did so demonstratively in the last days before the poll.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s observer mission severely criticised all aspects of the conduct of the election. A rival Moscow-led observer mission pronounced it fully kosher. It would be tedious to enumerate even the main abuses, but by way of example, over one quarter of all registered voters cast their votes before election day in voting precincts where there was often no supervision. Opposition groups said the turnout was overstated by about 20 per cent.

But for Lukashenko the splendid victory demonstrates that the deep economic and social malaise and the political unrest of 2010–11 have been overcome. And in a sense they have been – thanks to a mixture of Russian economic subsidies, relentless repression and society’s own relapse into passive resignation. The only threat to Lukashenko’s power at this point comes from Moscow. But that is a real one, with which no doubt he will now be forced to come to terms.

LUKASHENKO’s regime is far more dictatorial than either Yanukovych’s or Putin’s, though Putin’s current course suggests Russia may be taking more and more leaves from the Belarusian book. What is clear is that all three regimes are moving progressively further away from the democratic and national promise of the early 1990s towards deepening autocracy, marked by high levels of corruption and repression, muffled public discourse, increasing estrangement from their European neighbours, and a regrouping – if at times acrimonious or reluctant – around Moscow as their shared cultural capital.

Neither Lukashenko nor Yanukovych wants to be a provincial administrator in a Russian-dominated Eurasian Union. But that is the unavoidable logic of Lukashenko’s attitudes, political system and unreformed economy. Yanukovych still tolerates greater pluralism at home, defends his independence more stubbornly and displays more interest in achieving some sort of European orientation. But that interest does not extend to European values. For him, as for Lukashenko, the most precious thing that Moscow offers is an external guarantee for his autocracy. Both of them also look with interest to China’s potential as another munificent patron, whom they could hope to play off against Moscow without having to endure any hectoring about human rights and the like. China is displaying interest in these and other post-Soviet states and building up its trading links with them quite significantly. But that may still be a hedge too far.

Over the past two decades the European Union has managed, with a remarkable degree of success, to use the attraction of its model to integrate most of post-communist Eastern Europe. And despite deepening “enlargement fatigue,” it is continuing to work with the tougher cases of the former Yugoslavia and the non-Baltic Western republics of the former Soviet Union. It does not want – and its most eastern members emphatically do not want – to share a border with prickly autocracies falling in behind a rearming and increasingly nationalist Russian Federation.

Brussels has consistently left the door open for erratic wannabe members to turn over enough of a new leaf to qualify for some level of integration, and even potentially membership. It is prepared to reward those who show some commitment to taking on EU values and the acquis communautaire. It also reproves and sometimes sanctions those who flout those principles. But as the new cases get harder and the European Union continues to struggle with its long-running internal crisis, its power to attract and the force of its sanctions become weaker, and Ukraine and Belarus seem to slip further away from its outstretched hand.

Some would argue that the European Union should try to reduce the two countries’ dependency on Russia by bending its rules as far as it takes to draw them into some kind of integration, in the hope that the values might start to filter in at a later date. But given the behaviour of the two regimes, it’s highly unlikely that any such hard-nosed agreements, even if they could be reached, would be ratified by all EU members. For the moment a weakened Brussels seems to have no good options.

Conditions for Putin to pursue his ultimate goal of a Eurasian Union are currently about as favourable as they are ever likely to be; and they are particularly favourable in the Slavonic core. The European Union is in crisis and Putin has pro-Russian autocrats in place in Kiev and Minsk who need his support and for whom Russian is a native language and Russia a second homeland. Gas prices are under some economic and political pressure ly, but gas blackmail is still a strong weapon for the time being. Oil prices, though always volatile, have so far been holding up well. And all three regimes seem headed very much in the same direction.

But since 1991 the non-Russian former Soviet republics have become used to being their own masters, and drawing them firmly into the post-Soviet orbit and keeping them there has been like herding cats. In that respect the culturally and linguistically close Ukrainians and Belarusians have not been very much more amenable than the others. Keeping them all in the tent will probably involve long-term retention of expensive subsidies, which Putin’s successors may find unattractive.

For their part, Russian generals, diplomats, intellectuals and political leaders seem to have been unable to restrain themselves from being all-too-nakedly imperious and imperial. And the urban populations of all three countries have a growing desire for dignity, democracy and respect. It’s not yet an overwhelming majority taste, but there’s enough of it around to make any structures Putin succeeds in launching more than a little unstable. •

The post The Slavonic Autocrats’ Club appeared first on Inside Story.

THE months between early December last year and late October this year may come to be seen as a time when the Slavonic core of the former Soviet Union took a further, and perhaps decisive, turn away from European democracy. In December 2011 and March 2012 Russia held parliamentary and presidential elections that seem, after a season of excitement, to have confirmed Vladimir Putin’s grip on power for at least another six years and initiated a trend towards a police state. Parliamentary elections are scheduled in Belarus for 23 September and in Ukraine for 28 October, and although Belarus’s are a formality, Ukraine’s are much less so. Both are likely to confirm autocratic continuity with distinct downside risks.

Outside the Baltics and one or two other former Soviet republics, elections in the successor states of the Soviet Union don’t normally count for a great deal. The results are usually predictable, and the events themselves elaborately stage-managed. Nonetheless they can at times cause a boilover of sorts, as occurred in December 2011 when Russia’s parliamentaries, despite all the rigging on a sloping deck, saw a shockingly bad result for Putin’s ruling United Russia party, which lost seventy-seven of its parliamentary seats. While United Russia failed to get an absolute majority of votes, it did manage still to win a slim absolute majority of seats over the largely docile opposition parties permitted representation in the legislature. It has used that majority to pass a series of repressive laws aimed at neutralising the opposition and minimising their activities on the street and the internet.

At 64 per cent, Putin’s winning vote in the presidential poll last March was more convincing. Despite the considerable unrest, mainly affecting the urban middle classes, this comfortable margin was not surprising given his near-complete control of television (where most Russians get their information) and of who might be allowed to run against him. Observers saw evidence of extensive fraud on the day, but nearly all felt that, regardless, Putin would have scraped over the line in that first round.

Belarus’s last elections – the presidential contest in December 2010 – produced a similar surprise to the recent Russian electoral cycle – a phoney outcome leading to an outburst of popular anger, then a crackdown. The preordained winner, Alexander Lukashenko, was duly declared to have secured a fourth straight victory with a totally implausible 80 per cent of the vote. Nine candidates had been permitted to run against him and were given slightly less restrictive conditions than usual as part of an effort to mollify the European Union as a hedge against the pressure Belarus was under from Moscow.

A few days before the poll, Moscow ironed out its bilateral dispute with Minsk by renewing subsidies for Belarus’s energy sector worth, according to Putin, over US$4 billion per annum. Seeing no further need to hold out an olive branch to the European Union, Lukashenko unleashed a ferocious crackdown on the peaceful crowd that had gathered to protest the results on election night. Many were manhandled, 639 were arrested, including several of his fellow presidential candidates, and dozens of people were ultimately sentenced to lengthy jail terms. Conditions for political prisoners in Lukashenko’s jails are particularly harsh: they are often, for example, put together with murderers and other difficult inmates.

Despite the regime’s brutality, opposition on the streets continued for many months afterwards. In response, Lukashenko progressively sharpened his legislative provisions to the point where people could be arrested for applauding in a public place, or even for being silent in a public place. The regime has essentially maintained the crackdown ever since. In 2011 the national economy fell into a severe slump largely caused by Lukashenko’s reckless pre-election spending. As a consequence, opinion polling shows the president’s real support falling to around 30 per cent.

Like Putin, Lukashenko had enjoyed a considerable degree of real popularity in earlier years, and like Putin he had now been given a clear signal by popular unrest that he would need to take sterner measures to maintain himself in power. With the opposition cowed by the regime’s unrelenting repression, and the economy picking up considerably thanks to further increases in Russian subsidies, the parliamentary elections on 23 September will almost certainly result in a win for the regime.

When it comes to repression, Lukashenko leaves little to chance. In July a group of Swedish activists managed to get a light aircraft into Belarus and drop a few hundred teddy bears holding a freedom of speech message in their paws. Lukashenko was so incensed that he expelled the Swedish ambassador, closed the Swedish embassy, sacked his foreign minister and the head of his airforce, sacked another general for good measure, and had arrested a young man who placed an image of the bears on his own website.

Judged by neighbourhood standards, Ukrainian elections are less predictable and its politics a little more pluralist. Governments and policy directions have changed more than once since the fall of the Soviet Union. In November–December 2004, when Ukraine’s current president, Viktor Yanukovych, was implausibly declared the winner of the presidential election despite widespread reports of gross irregularities, public indignation was so great that the result was overturned. Yanukovych was defeated in the rerun by Orange Revolution leader Viktor Yushchenko.

The coalition of Yushchenko and firebrand orator Yulia Tymoshenko, who became prime minister, soon fell apart. After a giddying series of political changes and a severe slump in 2009 because of the global financial crisis, popular support for the Orange forces fell away. At the next presidentials in early 2010, Yanukovych made a comeback, narrowly defeating Tymoshenko in the run-off. The Orange leadership, with its endless internal feuds and failure to implement promised reforms, had been a great disappointment to its supporters at home and abroad. But it had at least established and maintained a large degree of democratic freedom and propriety, as Yanukovych’s victory itself demonstrated.

On taking power in March 2010, Yanukovych and his Party of Regions quickly converted a narrow victory into a near stranglehold on power by highly dubious means. Democratic freedoms were whittled away and opposition politicians were bribed into joining the government, enabling it to control the parliament. The powers of the presidency have been expanded with the compliance of the judiciary, whose independence has been systematically undermined. Key opposition leaders have been jailed on trumped-up charges to prevent them from presenting any kind of threat at future elections.

Yanukovych, who above all represents the Russified east and southeast of the country, has taken several big steps towards closer alignment with Moscow. At the same time, he has continued to assert that membership of the European Union is his prime objective, and that he will not accede to the various post-Soviet multilateral organisations that Putin is pressing him to join. But the constant abuses of democratic principles have effectively put any progress towards Europe out of the question, despite the technical negotiations for an association and free-trade agreement having been successfully concluded. The imprisonment of Yulia Tymoshenko, who is now being threatened with a further series of implausible charges, including one for alleged conspiracy to murder, is only the best-known of these abuses.

Despite Yanukovych’s consolidation of autocratic control and his free use of administrative resources and legal chicaneries to neutralise the battered Orange forces, it still seems possible that the elections on 28 October could produce another changeover in parliament. Opinion polls show the Party of Regions and the united opposition party list, led by Tymoshenko and former foreign minister Arseny Yatsenyuk, running neck-and-neck. Much will depend on how successfully the regime can use its access to the machinery of government to massage the vote, and whether other parties that win seats choose to ally with Regions or the opposition.

Money often buys support in Ukrainian politics, and Regions has more of it at its disposal. One smaller party, Forward Ukraine, which broke away from Tymoshenko’s Bloc, has been running an intellectually vacuous campaign (“new people for a new country”) backed by extremely expensive advertising. It has latterly recruited as a candidate Andriy Shevchenko, Ukraine’s world-beating soccer star, who joined the party soon after an audience with President Yanukovych. The party leader, Natalia Korolevska, claims that they are a true opposition party, but it is far from clear where their money is coming from, and most expect them to do a deal with the Party of Regions as soon as the elections are over.

Another sporting hero, world heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, is also leading a party that seems destined to win quite a few seats. Klitschko sounds more oppositionist than Korolevska, but he has maintained some ambiguity about his future intentions.

If Yanukovych does prove able to cobble together a clear win in the elections, or assemble a financially lubricated coalition after them, it seems likely that what remains of Ukraine’s democracy will be under serious threat.

IN MOSCOW, after the humiliations and anxieties of the parliamentary and presidential elections, during which he was booed in public and street demonstrations became almost commonplace, the old Putin has re-emerged with most of his customary swagger and self-confidence restored.

The recovery in his demeanour was slower than we might have expected. His formal inauguration was held during a quiet time in early May, with his motorcade’s route to the Kremlin sealed off from ordinary Moscow residents and protesters. The televised event made the city of some thirteen million look eerily like a ghost town. Elsewhere in the city, scuffles broke out between smallish groups of opposition supporters and police, as had happened on the day preceding the ceremony.

Since then, though, the Kremlin has undertaken a consistent campaign to cow the opposition and get its members permanently off the streets. Prosecutions, house searches and confiscations of property relating to the May street clashes are continuing. Despite its own embarrassments, the ruling United Russia party has regained its vigour and resumed doing what it does best, guaranteeing that legislation required by the Kremlin is passed in quick time with scant regard for procedural niceties. Some members of the tame parties allowed into the Duma have put up a bit of a fight but have been swept aside.

Draconian penalties (US$9000 – roughly equivalent to the average Russian’s yearly income) were legislated for anyone participating in an unauthorised public demonstration, or breaching the conditions of authorisation. The new penalties for organisers are even more severe, rising to US$30,000 for any groups involved.

Libel and slander have been recriminalised, a rebuff for Dmitry Medvedev – former president, now prime minister – on whose watch such offences had been decriminalised only a few months earlier. Like many Russian laws, this is likely to be an instrument of “selective justice,” wielded against those identified as enemies of the regime.

Another new law subjects the internet to close invigilation and sanctions, including the summary closing of websites, ostensibly to protect the young and vulnerable from pornography and the like, but with ample scope to be used against websites critical of the regime. And any NGO that receives money from abroad must register and declare all such sources, and identify themselves publicly as “foreign agents.” With its strong Stalinist redolences, this tag should suffice to make many Russians wary of having anything to do with them. Other such measures are reportedly under consideration in United Russia’s suddenly hyperactive law-making circles.

Putin’s determination to stamp out opposition was also reflected in the recent trial of three members of Pussy Riot. The arts and entertainment communities have turned against him in recent years, and the Kremlin clearly judged that the group was a suitable target to be made an example of. Putin’s faithful allies in the Orthodox hierarchy (Patriarch Kirill is widely believed to have been a collaborator of the KGB since Soviet times) called for the young women to be punished appropriately, and most of Russian society also strongly disapproved of their antics in the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. In fact, the three young women disported themselves there for only forty seconds before cathedral officials removed them; most of the impertinence was spliced in later.

As time went on, the public, including Orthodox believers (not actually a huge group within the Russian population – many identify as Orthodox, but only a small minority are devout or observant) began to feel that the accused should not be punished too severely. The legal basis for the trial was manifestly shonky and condemnation became intense. Even Putin himself, who was undoubtedly angered by their call on the Virgin Mary to “drive him away,” seems to have had second thoughts – or at least affected to have second thoughts as he observed reactions – and expressed the disingenuous hope that they might not be punished too severely. Whatever the propaganda value domestically, the trial was clearly becoming severely damaging ly. As Stephen Sestanovich, the distinguished Russian expert and former senior official in the Clinton administration remarked in commentary on the trial, “Russia has not seemed as unattractive or unappealing as an player in a long time.”

Another target of Putin’s wrath has been Ksenia Sobchak, the daughter of his former boss and close friend, Anatoly Sobchak, the Yeltsin-era mayor of St Petersburg. Putin, not known for his tender emotions, was seen to cry at Sobchak’s funeral, and Ksenia is widely rumoured to be his god-daughter (though she has denied it). A glamorous and successful media personality and socialite, she has in recent months emerged as an oppositionist. As a reward for this public-spirited makeover she has been removed from her roles in the state-controlled media, but she has become a star on the internet, gradually overcoming the initial mistrust of opposition activists.

Along with other leading opposition personalities, she was subjected to a sudden house search by police early on the morning of 11 June. The police, who were obviously expecting to find her current live-in boyfriend present, read aloud love letters they found in her flat and confiscated over a million dollars in cash.

The purpose of this operation was to show the Russian public that oppositionists are very wealthy, probably thanks to their treacherous contacts with Western organisations, and that they lead enviably dissolute lives. There is an old Russian saying: a peasant is happy to be poor as long as his neighbour doesn’t prosper; envy has been one of the emotions Putin’s election campaign and recent policies have used to excite popular resentment against his middle-class opposition.

The longstanding family friendship makes it likely that Sobchak’s selection as a victim of this operation was cleared with Putin; so too does the fact that Ksenia’s mother, Lyudmila Narusova, is the widow of Putin’s guru, at whose funeral he publicly wept. Narusova is a member of the upper house of the Russian parliament, where she too is under official fire for opposing recent authoritarian legislation.

Repressive action has also been launched against two other leading oppositionists: Alexei Navalny, the very popular anti-corruption blogger and author of the politically effective phrase “party of swindlers and thieves” to describe United Russia; and Gennady Gudkov, a Duma deputy from the tolerated opposition Just Russia party. Navalny has been charged with stealing a large amount of timber in a period when he was working as an adviser to a liberal and ex-dissident provincial governor. The charges have been used against him in the past but collapsed even in Russia’s accommodating judicial system. This time they may be forced to succeed, leaving Navalny facing a possible ten years’ imprisonment.

Gudkov, who has been the most active oppositionist in the Duma, has been charged with owning a private business – suddenly an offence for public officials – even though he divested himself of any managerial responsibility. Many United Russia deputies are known to be in the same position, but no charges have been laid against them. Gudkov, curiously, is an ex-KGB colonel like Putin, but his recent activities would have struck the president as a case of inexcusable treachery to his former service.

INTERNATIONALLY, a major contributor to Russia’s image problem has of course been the Kremlin’s determination to protect the Assad regime in Syria as it continues to slaughter its domestic adversaries in a sectarian cause. More generally, Putin has continued much of the anti-American and anti-Western animus of his election campaign pronouncements. Disregarding the fiscal objections of his old comrade, self-exiled former finance minister Alexei Kudrin, Putin has returned to his election theme of a huge arms build-up with a new twist: as in the Stalin years, to which he often looks back with nostalgia, he argues that a build-up would catalyse a new flowering of industry and technology in the country.

Even with oil prices as high as they currently are, Russia’s public finances are vulnerable; in the absence of any plausible enemy, the build-up makes little financial or strategic sense. Yet Putin is planning to sink an additional US$970 billion into defence equipment by 2020, with an increase of overall defence expenditure of about one third by 2014.

Western leaders enjoyed the four-year holiday from Putin while the more emollient and liberal-sounding Medvedev was supposedly the custodian of Russian foreign policy. Some even appeared to genuinely believe that this was the case, or at least to behave as though it were, in the hope that this would somehow help Medvedev to grow into the job. But he either could not or chose not to.

Following on from his humiliation last September, when he had to announce publicly that he would vacate his post in favour of Putin because of Putin’s superior merits, Medvedev has now had to endure attacks on his courage and competence in handling the outbreak of hostilities with Georgia in August 2008. In an internet documentary marking the fourth anniversary of the war, a group of retired generals blame him for his allegedly slow and hesitant response, which they claim cost lives. They take the opportunity to praise Putin for having administered a kick to those in Moscow who were holding the high command back from getting on with the task. Putin has also made public statements implying that, though he was away at the Beijing Olympics at the time, he nonetheless stayed in touch with (read: in control of) events by telephone.

Though he is still prime minister, Medvedev’s position looks weaker than ever, as Putin builds his Presidential Administration into a dominant force able to second-guess or overrule ministers and ministries as required. Some economic liberals still remain in the upper reaches of the elite, and many in governing circles are thought to be unhappy about Putin’s repressive course domestically and his belligerence on the scene. But for now they don’t seem to be exerting much influence.

So Western leaders are stuck with Putin, possibly even for twelve years, and while there is not a great deal they can do about it, they clearly are not enjoying the prospect. Even Germany, where Putin spent his only foreign posting with the KGB and where his interpersonal skills and strong command of the language won him a good deal of initial sympathy, seems to be tiring of him. The economic links will undoubtedly remain very strong, but Chancellor Merkel and President Gauck, both East Germans, clearly find him distasteful. And the German press has become sharply critical. Der Spiegel reported that on his last trip to Germany, Putin forced Merkel to wait for an hour for a meeting with him. This curious form of discourtesy towards foreign interlocutors seems to have become more frequent – he recently infuriated the Ukrainian leadership by keeping Yanukovych waiting for five hours for a bilateral meeting while he met with a group of Russian bikies.

US ambassador Mike McFaul, a key architect of Obama’s “reset” policy towards Russia, was subjected to months of crass harassment earlier this year, clearly officially inspired and publicly endorsed by the Russian foreign minister. If Obama is returned to office, and Putin’s belligerence towards the United States persists, Washington’s approach to Russia may become cooler, particularly once the US drawdown of forces from Afghanistan (for which Russian cooperation is very important) is well advanced. If he is not, a Republican administration’s approach could be rather different, as the Romney team has already signalled.

Having embarrassed their reset partner Obama with sustained public anti-Americanism through the Russian election season and since, Putin and his spokesmen have now joyfully grasped Romney’s tough campaign pronouncements about Russia, which were made in response, as proof that they were right to see the United States as a dangerous enemy in the first place.

MOSCOW was recently buzzing with excitement about a new report produced by the Minchenko Consulting Group, based on interviews with experts and well-placed figures in the elite, which sought to analyse how Putin’s inner leadership circle operates. According to the report, this “politburo,” as it is described, contains key oligarchs and others who are hardly household names in the Western media. Putin is described as a primus inter pares – first among equals – an arbiter who settles all disputes that arise between the various competing clans and factions but does not enjoy a position of complete dominance. Surprisingly, the consensus seems to be that Medvedev remains a significant player with some prospects for regaining greater influence.

The biggest sensation in the report, perhaps, was that the inner circle allegedly envisages the possibility of a crisis arising in which it might become necessary to change the leadership. Depending on the circumstances, the decision might be to entrust the country and the elite’s joint fortunes either to former finance minister Kudrin, an economic dry and political moderate, or to the belligerently anti-Western deputy premier responsible for defence industry matters, Dmitry Rogozin, a talented populist with KGB connections and strong support from Soviet nostalgics and hardline nationalists. On the face of it, Kudrin is still out in political no-man’s land, running a think-tank that produces statements and reports critical of the regime and calls for dialogue with the opposition. Rogozin’s likely approach as leader would be the diametrical opposite of Kudrin’s.

Some might think that the report underestimates Putin’s position, while overestimating Medvedev’s. Putin is more than an arbiter deriving his power from his role in keeping powerful warring clans apart. Russia has a history of powerful supreme leaders into which Putin fits quite nicely. Capo di tutti capi, or boss of bosses, would probably be a more accurate term than primus inter pares, with its prime ministerial connotations. One also wonders whether a change of leadership could really be brought about coolly and rationally in quite the way suggested by Minchenko. But the report is probably indicative of a certain turbulence close to the surface of Putin’s third term.

Will the move against the opposition result in mass repression, or only the imprisonment of some on trumped-up criminal rather than explicitly political charges? Outside Chechnya and its neighbours in the mainly Muslim-populated region of the North Caucasus, where there is a slow-burn insurgency, Putin has largely sought to avoid bloodshed in dealing with domestic opponents. Inconvenient individuals have frequently been killed by “unknown assailants” and the crimes never satisfactorily explained or resolved. And at the very beginning of Putin’s ascendancy in Moscow, just after his period at the head of the FSB, the main successor to the KGB, a series of mysterious bombings of apartment buildings in Russia, officially attributed to Chechen terrorists, caused heavy loss of life. These events remain murky. Many observers suspect they were a provocation staged by the FSB, whose fingerprints were clearly visible on the last of the series.

Generally, though, Putin’s rule has been a soft or consensual autocracy resting on his authentic popularity as well as on manipulation and coercion. Now that his popularity seems to be fluctuating downwards, a greater degree of force may be deemed necessary to strengthen the “power vertical.” My sense is that Putin will try to make telling examples of particular individuals who have earned his wrath but will avoid mass repression. It is hard to feel confident, though. There are anxious rumours circulating, for example, that recent steps taken or threatened against officials with private businesses or property abroad could morph into a wider purge of the bureaucracy.

Putin’s recent political travails have left him eager, at the very least, to reinforce his power and end the indignities that he’s been forced to suffer in the past year or so. As his legislation moves from autocracy towards the police state paradigm, the leader too may transition from autocrat towards dictator. Fear is never too far away in Russia, and many once-venturesome public commentators can now be seen hedging their bets with respectful references to Mr Putin as a very intelligent man, who may, they hope, decide to become another Stolypin, and so on. (Stolypin was the Tsarist prime minister, 1906–11, who ruthlessly suppressed disorder but pursued small “l” liberal reforms. Putin seems to like this comparison, so those seeking his favour probably see it as the way to his heart.) But on his record, one would have to say that just as Dan Quayle was no John F. Kennedy, Putin does not appear to be a Stolypin.

Commenting recently on Putin’s latest macho stunt (assisting a group of threatened Siberian cranes to return to the wild), Gleb Pavlovsky, a one-time insider, asserted that the optics of this operation were less than optimal. Bloggers had been unkind, one insider even claiming that some of the cranes had died or been injured during preparations for the hang-glider flight, though this item was quickly removed. In Pavlovsky’s view, Putin should have been advised against making this mistake. But “now there is no one who would tell him ‘Nie nado Vladimir Vladimirovich’ [‘Best not, Vladimir Vladimirovich’].”

Pavlovsky’s comment about the absence of any effective opposition to Putin’s political impulses within the regime is probably applicable to all issues, not just endangered cranes. His use of the respectful first name and patronymic is telling: the former finance minister and deputy prime minister Alexei Kudrin, who was one of the very few people reputed to have addressed Putin using this more intimate form, was renowned for defending fiscal rectitude against heavy pressure from above. Indeed, he resigned his post on just such an issue, Putin’s proposed massive arms build-up.

Putin is clearly increasingly exercised by the growing tensions in society. One matter of particular concern to him is Islamic militancy. In recent weeks the once-nationalist, but now increasingly Islamist, violence that is endemic to the North Caucasus region has suddenly manifested itself in violence against moderate clerics in Tatarstan, a mixed but mainly Muslim-populated republic on the Volga in the Russian heartland. Tatarstan has always been regarded till recently as a multicultural success story, where Russians and Tatars lived together in harmony.

This is an ominous development for Putin and for Russia. If pressed, Putin might well argue privately to a European critic of his domestic regime that Russia, with its 15 per cent Muslim population and other potential ethnic stresses, faces a much more serious problem of social cohesion than any West European states. The presence of Muslim immigrant communities in Western Europe that are much smaller than Russia’s, he might argue, has nonetheless led to the emergence of virulent anti-immigrant movements and parties which have sometimes entered governments. Should Russia proceed along that path, he might ask rhetorically.

But the radicalisation of Muslim ethnic minorities in Russia has been greatly facilitated by the brutal war in Chechnya and indiscriminate use of force in the North Caucasus region generally during Putin’s ascendancy. Moreover, in the past Putin has often flirted with Russian nationalism in various forms. Lately it has become clear that he recognises the dangers in that phenomenon. Nationalism, however, remains a pillar of his domestic support and one that could be exploited by potential rivals like Rogozin if Putin seemed to be renouncing or downplaying it. While continuing to push Russian “patriotism,” he is trying to soften its edges, and increasingly inveighing against nationalist extremism of any sort. The country’s burgeoning right-wing Russian extremist movements have at last been encountering more pushback from the security services. But the genie seems to be out of that bottle.

Domestic developments in Russia do not seem particularly propitious at present for a smooth transition to a more open, pluralist and tolerant society, despite the growing pressure for such an evolution coming from the urban middle classes. Similarly, a more authentic “Europeanisation” of Russia, despite the greatly increased people-to-people contacts of the last twenty-five years, does not seem to be imminent. As well as his domestic policies, Putin’s foreign policy seems to stand in the way. And the unending euro crisis has done much to reduce Europe’s attraction as a role model. Europe’s declining influence is evident not only in Putin’s periodic slighting public references – for example, to the “hamsters” of Europe – but also in the attitudes of his counterpart autocrats in Ukraine and Belarus. •

John Besemeres is an Adjunct Fellow at the Centre for European Studies at ANU.

Next week: Can Russia draw Belarus and Ukraine into the nucleus of a new Russian Empire?

The post Towards a Greater Putistan? appeared first on Inside Story.

VLADIMIR PUTIN will be viewing his date with the Russian voters on 4 March 2012 with some apprehension. The presidency seemed his for the taking, and it still seems most unlikely that anyone will be allowed to defeat him. But what should have been another victory lap before a grateful public is starting to look more like an ordeal, in which he is on a hiding to nothing. The first round victory that he took for granted may slip beyond his reach unless Vladimir Churov, the “magician” (Dmitri Medvedev’s term) of the Central Electoral Commission, can pull off another miracle. Opinion polls are suggesting that Putin’s percentage of the votes in the first round will be only in the forties. Veteran Communist boss Gennadi Zyuganov, who is again standing for the presidency, may well pick up some of the anti-Putin protest vote, making him a likely second-round opponent. A run-off against Zyuganov more than twenty years after the fall of communism could prove uncomfortable from various points of view.

But the candidates of the officially tolerated “establishment” parties, which have the resources (and the privileged access to the media) to run a presidential campaign, are unlikely to go all out against Putin. Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov is offering himself ostensibly as a non-establishment candidate, but many have their doubts about how genuine an oppositionist he is. The Just Russia party has put forward its leader, Sergei Mironov, who has made conciliatory noises to the Kremlin since the ruling United Russia’s reverse at the parliamentary polls on 4 December. Many in and outside the party would have preferred to see the much more popular Oksana Dmitriyeva from Just Russia’s Petersburg machine stand for the top job.

The growing numbers of voters sceptical about Putin do not have any obvious alternative in view. For its part, the Kremlin will do whatever is necessary to keep potentially dangerous wild cards like the charismatic anti-corruption blogger Aleksei Navalny out of the contest. One way or another, Putin should get over the line in the second round even if Churov is unable to award him victory in the first.

After he was publicly booed at a martial arts event on 21 November, Putin postponed his annual televised Q&A session until after the elections. When it was finally held on 15 December, he appeared less assured than usual. He was certainly very angry, however, especially with Hillary Clinton for her criticism of the conduct of the elections. While he made a show of accepting that the protesters on the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg were moved by honest democratic emotion, he also asserted that many of them were working for or inspired by Western governments, and made his usual suggestion that such people were traitors.

Putin expressed particular passion, and compassion, about the tragic fate of Gaddafi, for whose death he blamed US drones. And he returned to his obsession about “colour revolutions” (the Orange revolution in Ukraine, for instance) instigated by sinister forces abroad. In other words, he seems unable to accept that many of his own constituents might simply be getting sick of him. None of this bodes well for a peaceful resolution of the situation if the unrest and dissatisfaction with Putin’s re-election plans persist.

Since the severe crackdown on the first post-election demonstrations, the regime has pursued a more moderate approach. It avoided repressive measures against the big Moscow protest on 10 December, and permitted some more honest media reporting. But there is no sign of any serious move towards reconciliation or reform. It appears, rather, that the regime wants to avoid provoking public opinion while it waits for the protest momentum to subside.

On 20 December, a website owned by one of Putin’s extremely wealthy friends published transcripts of one of the leading opposition figures, Boris Nemtsov, making derogatory remarks about another one in a private phone call obviously tapped by the security organs. Nemtsov apologised, his apology was accepted and the two made an amicable joint appearance. While the opposition is notoriously divided, this incident was hardly helpful, although the restive urban intelligentsia may not be impressed by the regime’s nakedly dirty pool.

If the opposition cannot get substantial numbers out on the street at the next big demonstration on 24 December, however, the regime will start to breathe more easily. For the moment they are comparing the demonstrators with the Occupy movements, which may prefigure the kind of endgame they are planning.

On 22 December, two days before another planned demonstration in Moscow, Medvedev unveiled a package of electoral reforms that would make it easier to form a new party, restore elections for the position of regional governor, and so on. This looks very much like dangling a few carrots to weaken the protesters’ resolve, especially as the reforms are not to take effect until after the presidential election on 4 March and Putin has said that candidates for the governors’ positions will still need to be approved by the president (that is, him). And above all, these proposal come not just from a lame-duck president, but from one who has repeatedly called for reforms that have never eventuated. Medvedev’s undertakings have had no credibility since he declared publicly that he had only served as a placeholder while Putin took leave from the job. Medvedev also said that that there must be no threats to stability – that trouble-makers and “extremists” would not be tolerated, particularly those who have foreign connections. The intention is transparent, but if it gets a few people off the streets then it will have served its purpose.

IN THE two months between his 23 September announcement of his intention to resume the presidency and the booing incident on 21 November, Putin had seemed brimming with self-confidence and eager to pursue his key foreign policy objectives, notably restoring strong Russian influence over the former Soviet republics. His trademark truculence towards the West, perceptibly distinct from Medvedev’s more emollient approach, was again in evidence. He took great pleasure in making allusions to the West’s economic difficulties, particularly the euro crisis. And recently he has been able to chalk up quite a few successes.

Putin has always deeply regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union and did so again in his Q&A session. He has always tried to do whatever he can to create and advance multilateral structures that bring as many as possible of the former republics together under Moscow’s leadership. His “energy diplomacy” involves manipulating the supply and pricing of Russia’s abundant oil and gas exports to favour the cooperative and punish the others. Similar trade practices involving commodities like wine and even mineral water, exploiting sometimes imperial monopsony rather than monopoly, have been routinely deployed against recalcitrants like Georgia and Moldova. Nor have these tactics been confined to the former republics or non–European Union members. Poland and the Baltic states, for example, have been on the receiving end at times.

Fearing that Moscow’s leadership will mean domination, some former vassals have sought safety in the European Union, where possible, or have at least avoided joining the various trading or security acronyms that Russia has established. In consequence, progress for Moscow has been slow. But now, with the European Union less able to attract and less willing to accept new members, and with Washington under Obama pursuing more pressing priorities elsewhere, Moscow’s opportunities have expanded.

The most recent of the multilateral bodies Moscow is pressing on its neighbours are the Customs Union and the newly minted Eurasian Union, a concept Putin set out soon after announcing his intention of resuming the presidency. Very roughly, he envisages the Eurasian Union as a kind of European Union to the Customs Union’s Common Market. In addition to former republics of the Soviet Union, Moscow has spoken about the desirability of attracting countries traditionally sympathetic to Russia and its culture – Venezuela and Cuba, for example, Serbia and Montenegro and even Finland and Hungary.

Putin is also declaring that the Eurasian Union, as the final step in the process, would seek collegial relations, trade agreements and so on with China on the one hand and the European Union on the other, subject only to the ostensible proviso that all must be treated equally. There is, however, a clear expectation that Russia will be more equal than others, dominating its union far more than Germany, for instance, dominates the European Union. And it will undoubtedly continue the policy, extending back to Soviet times, of seeking to divide EU members the better to influence them and weaken trans-Atlantic ties. Presumably, too, Putin would wish to establish arrangements precluding any contacts between these friendly blocs in the new multi-polar world that might lead to greater electoral transparency or even more coloured revolutions.

To date, Belarus and Kazakhstan have signed up to the Customs Union and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have expressed interest. Moscow is working on other republics to join, but is focusing particularly on Ukraine, potentially the jewel in the crown. The biggest country in Europe (if Russia and France’s overseas territories are excluded), it has large Russian, Russian-speaking and Russophile communities, and is seen by most Russians as the historic core of Russia and quite simply “ours.” Together with the largely Russian-speaking Belarus, and Kazakhstan, which is the most Russified of the “Stans,” this would give Russia a kind of Slavonic Union, the dream of many Russian nationalists, a unit with well over 200 million inhabitants, and most of the resources and industrial capacity of the old Soviet Union.

But even the Yanukovych administration, the most pro-Russian in Kiev since the Soviet era, has been very reluctant to join the Customs Union, preferring instead to continue its predecessors’ quest for an Association Agreement with the European Union, which would incorporate a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement. Negotiations for such an agreement were finalised in the last days before the Ukraine–EU summit in Kiev on 19 December. Some months ago it seemed very likely that the Association Agreement would be initialled at the December summit and possibly come into force in 2012. The European Union was keen for this to happen, though some lingering scepticism remained about Ukraine’s suitability. But it was not to be, at least not yet, and not perhaps for quite some time to come.

YANUKOVYCH has long been under fire for eroding the democratic gains of the Orange revolution of 2004. But what comprehensively undermined his standing with the European Union was his decision to launch a criminal prosecution against Yulia Tymoshenko, the Orange leader and ex–prime minister, whom he had narrowly beaten for the presidency in 2010. Tymoshenko was charged with exceeding her powers as prime minister in concluding an allegedly unfavourable deal on gas prices with Moscow in early 2009, a deal designed to end a punishing “gas war” that was threatening to freeze much of Western Europe. On 11 October, she was sentenced to seven years’ jail, disqualified from public life for a further three years beyond that, and fined $186,000,000. Innumerable representations were made to Yanukovych by senior EU figures making clear that this decision could block his EU aspirations. Kiev’s response was to prepare a further nine (sic) criminal cases against Tymoshenko and to subject her to various other chicaneries.

The Tymoshenko/gas deal saga is part of a very complex story. Much has been made of the argument that Kiev was convicting Tymoshenko to show Moscow that the current gas deal was “illegal” and should therefore be renegotiated. Some were impressed by an alleged Putin preference for Tymoshenko over Yanukovych as an opposite number, despite her strong Western sympathies. Others have claimed that the poor president is powerless in the face of an overwhelmingly strong pro-Moscow lobby in his ruling Party of Regions. Much of that seems increasingly implausible as the persecution of Tymoshenko continues.

Concurrently with its EU bid, Ukraine has been pursuing sometimes acrimonious negotiations with the Russian gas giant Gazprom (essentially an instrument of Kremlin policy), seeking lower prices for its vital gas imports. The current prices for Ukraine are higher than for most western European customers, some of whom have succeeded in getting price concessions from Gazprom in recent months.

It does seem, however, that Yanukovych was not using the EU bid simply as a bargaining chip in its negotiations with Moscow. Ukraine’s trade with Russia and the European Union is roughly equal, and a majority of Ukrainians and many heavyweight local oligarchs want EU integration. But his pursuit of Tymoshenko in the face of all the warnings does make one wonder how serious Yanukovych’s commitment really is. To compound matters, in the last weeks before the summit he began to demand that the Association Agreement provide a clear “perspective” of EU membership down the track. Had it not been for the Tymoshenko case and some others like it, this might conceivably have been doable. As things stood, it was just the kind of negotiating gambit to raise EU hackles even higher. In the end, a drafting fudge was devised to get past that problem. But while the agreement was ready, it was not even initialled at the summit, though another fudge was deployed to hold out the prospect of that happening in the early months of 2012.

And so the long-running story of Ukraine’s two-faced relations with Russia and the European Union remains open. But the balance has swung markedly towards Moscow. There have been hints lately that a deal on gas prices is imminent. Some expect this will be paid for by the surrender of more sovereignty by Kiev, perhaps in the form of conceding Gazprom a controlling interest in Ukraine’s gas pipelines, a key objective of Putin’s energy diplomacy. Russia is also eager to take over Ukraine’s struggling and much smaller Gazprom equivalent, Naftohaz. But despite both inducements and threats from Moscow, whatever else he concedes, Yanukovych is likely to continue holding out against the Customs Union, aware that joining would preclude integration with Europe.

UKRAINE’s northern neighbour, Belarus, provides some oblique insights into Yanukovych’s dilemma. Since last December’s brutal crackdown on the unusually large demonstrations in Minsk against falsified election results, Belarus has experienced spectacular economic decline, thanks partly to irresponsible election promises by the incumbent, with average purchasing power declining by about 50 per cent. President Alexander Lukashenko, once hopefully styled by Condoleezza Rice as the last dictator of Europe, has responded to the resulting discontent by thorough-going neo-Stalinist repression, proscribing even “silent protests” by tiny groups of people. This has worked quite well for him, and his loyal security organs, headed by the local KGB, ensured that only small numbers of people turned out on the anniversary of the crackdown, 19 December, to renew the protest.

But Lukashenko has decided that his own stalwart defence of Belarusian sovereignty (which translates essentially into defence of his own power and importance) should not be taken to pedantic extremes. The European Union had offered him generous inducements to repent, but they also demanded some democracy and human rights in return, which Lukashenko decided he would prefer to do without. Having failed also to win unconditional sympathy from the IMF, which had demanded the quid pro quo of serious economic reforms, he decided to throw in his lot with Moscow. As a reward he was given a much reduced gas price of US$165 per 1000 cubic metres, a long way below market rates. A US$10 million loan and other goods were also proffered. In exchange, Lukashenko sold off to Gazprom the rest of Belarus’s gas pipelines, hitherto rightly regarded as a vital strategic asset, and became much more cooperative and respectful towards Moscow on other issues.

This reward was also intended as bait for Ukraine, which is currently paying US$400 per 1000 cubic metres for gas, with the prospect of further hikes ahead. In that perspective, membership in the Customs Union must look much more attractive to the leadership in wintry Kiev.

Moscow’s pacts hold other attractions for distressed autocrats. At its August summit this year, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation – a weaker version of the Warsaw Pact (Ukraine for example, is not a member) – discussed proposals to use the organisation to strengthen the defences of all member states against colour revolutions or any spillover of the Arab Spring. President Lukashenko seemed particularly interested in this idea, which he and others saw as an invaluable security guarantee for any member leader under domestic threat.

Another leader keenly interested in this issue was reportedly President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, immediate past chairman of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In power for over twenty years, Nazarbayev has in recent days put down a workers’ uprising in a town in the west of his country by dint of armed force and a total blockade of telecommunications in the region. Initial reports spoke of at least ten fatalities, but the information blackout has effectively reduced the flow of reliable news. How far the ideas under consideration in the Collective Security Treaty Organisation will go towards becoming a new Brezhnev doctrine remains to be seen. If so, it could be very attractive to some potential new members as well as veterans like Lukashenko and Nazarbayev.

Moscow has had some successes on other fronts. In Kyrgyzstan, for example, a strongly pro-Russian president, Almazbek Atambayev, came to power last October. One of his first public statements was to foreshadow that he would terminate US access to the Manas Air base, a vital supply link with Afghanistan, when the lease runs out in 2014. Observers take differing views about how serious a threat this is. But should Moscow wish to apply pressure to their “reset” partners in Washington at some point, having such a president as a warm and cooperative Eurasian Union colleague in Bishkek would clearly be advantageous. Atambayev’s predecessors were much less accommodating in that respect.

Putin’s energy diplomacy received a big public boost with the 8 November opening of the Nord Stream gas pipeline to Germany. The pipeline, in which Putin’s key collaborator has been his close friend, the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, bypasses Belarus, Poland and Ukraine and gives Russia a capacity to cut off gas supplies to those countries temporarily without incommoding their more important customers further west. It also serves as a warning to Ukraine and Belarus that they can expect to earn much less for transit fees in future.

Despite desperate assurances from President Yanukovych of his readiness to cooperate in delivering gas exports for Gazprom, Moscow has also persisted with its plans to develop a southern equivalent called South Stream which would further deprive Kiev of income and energy security. The objective of South Stream, which would be much more expensive than any purely economic alternatives, is to draw countries of southeastern Europe into closer energy links with Russia, and at the same time to kneecap Nabucco.

Nabucco is a strategic pipeline project intended by the United States and the European Union to weaken the Kremlin’s strong grip not only on gas exports to southern Europe, but also on potentially competitive gas supplies originating in Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. Nabucco has had a chequered career thus far, with many EU members and would-be members quite happy to conclude bilateral deals with South Stream that ignore Brussels’ endorsement of Nabucco as vital for EU energy security. Nabucco has suffered quite a few defeats in recent months and Moscow will certainly see all these as important victories in their long-running South Stream campaign.

VLADIMIR PUTIN might well have felt satisfied with the way his domestic and foreign priorities were shaping up in the weeks before the booing. As another noted Russian leader once said, life had become better, life was becoming more cheerful. But then came the domestic setbacks, which revealed again Putin’s very strong anti-Western instincts. With his overt takeover of Medvedev’s supposed bailiwick, foreign policy, we have seen a growing inflexibility and sharpness of tone in relations with the West, reminiscent of pre-Gorbachev times.

Putin is worried about China, but he tries to keep it well hidden, He never uses the belligerent, mocking or contemptuous accents with Beijing that have become almost routine in his public comments about the West. After eleven years it is perhaps time to say that this is the real Putin standing up. Strong rumour has it that he will appoint the obsessively anti-Western ultra-nationalist ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, as defence minister. With a resentful Putin – convinced his domestic troubles are all a Western conspiracy – in the presidency for at least another six years, expect strains in East–West relations to increase further. •

The post Setbacks at home, successes abroad: the mixed fortunes of Vladimir Putin appeared first on Inside Story.

RUSSIA’s relationships with Belarus, Ukraine and Poland are all delicately poised just at present, as indeed is the domestic situation within Russia itself. How these relationships and Russia’s internal politics play out in the near future will go far towards determining whether Russia pursues a path towards democratic normality, or reaffirms its recent trajectory towards corrupt, anti-Western autocracy, taking Belarus and Ukraine with it.

For a few years before his deeply flawed re-election on 19 December last year, President Lukashenko of Belarus, dubbed the “last dictator of Europe” by Condoleezza Rice, had been flirting with the European Union in search of financial backing and a hedge against Russia. In an attempt to meet EU expectations, he had even allowed a presidential election campaign to proceed that bore some faint resemblance to the real thing. Then suddenly on election night, in response to a large opposition demonstration against the implausible result announced by the regime, his security forces unleashed a brutal crackdown, arresting hundreds, beating up many (including most opposition presidential candidates) and charging over forty opponents with crimes against the state. Some have already been sentenced, others remain incarcerated. In this way, despite his burgeoning economic problems, Lukashenko opted to cut himself off from any further support from the West.

Belarus’s economic crisis is now galloping downhill. Lukashenko continues to perform a dance of economic death to stave off devaluation, inflation and mass panic-buying, but a denouement cannot be far off. Moscow is offering Lukashenko a short-term bail-out, but on conditions which could threaten his sovereignty. The sinister terrorist strike in Minsk during peak-hour traffic on 11 April, which resulted in thirteen deaths and over 200 injured, has no logical explanation; but it will give Lukashenko a further opportunity to brutalise his already cowed opposition. He seems bent on attributing the attack both to them and to their putative paymasters in “Strasbourg,” by which he presumably means the European Union. Doing so will further deepen his alienation from the West but won’t necessarily shore up his position against a Russia that wants to buy his strategic economic assets in exchange for keeping him afloat a while longer.

Ukraine, meanwhile, seemed to gravitate rapidly towards Moscow after Viktor Yanukovych’s election as president in February 2010. But now, having quickly conceded nearly all of what Russia wanted on security, national identity, religious matters and “historical policy”, Yanukovych is digging his heels in and trying to defend his economic independence against pressure and economic inducements from Moscow. Russia is competing with the European Union for influence in Kiev, seeking to draw Ukraine into the Customs Union it has created with Belarus and Kazakhstan. The European Union is offering negotiations on a free-trade agreement as a stage towards possible membership in the future. Ukraine is trailing its coat in both directions, hoping to get the economic benefits of each without having to choose between them.

Yanukovych has erected a system of autocracy strikingly similar to the system Putin established in Russia after succeeding Yeltsin as president. But he has repeatedly emphasised that economic integration with Europe rather than the Russian-sponsored Customs Union remains his priority. Now Russia is raising the stakes, playing on Ukraine’s economic vulnerability after the global financial crisis. (In 2009 alone, it suffered a 15 per cent slump in GDP.) On 12 April, Putin visited Kiev seemingly at short notice. During the visit, he promised his Ukrainian counterpart that joining the Customs Union would entail savings of between US$6 billion and US$9 billion a year on Ukraine’s gas bill. He also warned that not choosing the Customs Union would mean that Russia (Ukraine’s main trading partner) would have to impose heavy duties on Ukrainian exports. Moscow will maintain its pressure in an attempt to drag Ukraine fully into its sphere of influence

Poland’s Western choice is probably accepted by Moscow. But it would like to strengthen bilateral ties to avoid Poland’s using its growing influence in the European Union against Russian interests. The plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski and many other members of the Polish elite near Smolensk on 11 April last year seemed to greatly strengthen an incipient warming of relations between Poland and Russia. But the strongly anti-Russian main opposition party, led by the dead president’s brother, Jaroslaw, refused to accept the rapprochement. With little evidence, he blamed the Polish government and Russian officialdom for the crash; he has since maintained a barrage of criticism, hinting at conspiratorial links to conceal the “true” causes of the disaster.

Now, one year after the event, the issue of the Smolensk disaster and its real and purported links with the Katyn massacre – the subject of last year’s apology by Moscow – has risen to the surface again. Just days before the Polish president was due to pay an anniversary visit to the site of the crash, Russian officials decided to remove a commemorative plaque placed there a few months ago by a Polish opposition delegation, on the grounds that the wording on the plaque was offensive to Russia. Buoyed by this fresh affront, the anti-Russian camp of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has returned to the offensive with renewed vigour.

Russia: De-Stalinisation?

Russia’s “tandemocracy” – President Medvedev making the pronouncements, Prime Minister Putin calling the shots – is showing serious strains. Recently Medvedev has increasingly been challenging his mentor, even appearing at times to dress him down.

The most widely noticed challenge was Medvedev’s rebuke to Putin on Libya. Putin had declared that any attempt by outside powers to interfere in Gaddafi’s military onslaught against his own population would be illegitimate and reminiscent of the medieval crusades against Islam. Putin made this typically neo-Soviet statement, repeating arguments deployed by Gaddafi himself, in a missile factory where he was talking up the need for Russia to rapidly expand its strategic arsenal to deal with external threats. Expressing what he called a personal opinion, Putin denounced UN Security Council Resolution 1973 which provided the legal basis for the French-led intervention to create a No Fly Zone in Libya, an objective endorsed by the Arab League.

Russia chose not to use its veto in the Security Council, allowing the resolution to pass with five abstentions, including China, Russia itself and Moscow’s preferred EU interlocutor, Germany. Foreign policy is ostensibly the prerogative of the president, as Putin acknowledged, and within hours Medvedev responded. He reaffirmed his view that the abstention was appropriate and reproved those who referred to “crusades” for risking a “clash of civilisations,” which he characterised as “unacceptable.” A spokesman for Putin then repeated publicly that the president was responsible for foreign policy matters. Even more remarkably, Putin’s earlier statement, initially given wide coverage, abruptly disappeared from the media.

Putin and Medvedev’s public declarations have long diverged in spirit and at times their spokesmen have exchanged sharp words. But between the tandemocrats themselves, a certain decorum has always been maintained. Typically, Medvedev would make a speech or place a text on one of his websites full of liberal phrases and calls for reform and “modernisation.” Either there would be no policy response or Putin would issue an oblique rebuttal. Over the three years of Medvedev’s presidency, observers hoping for democratic reform had become accustomed to this choreography, and disappointment and cynicism had set in.

But recently the challenges from the junior tandem partner have become more overt, even strident, and the liberals are daring to hope for another thaw along the lines of Gorbachev’s or Khrushchev’s. There is even a feeling in certain quarters that the Putin era may be approaching some kind of crisis, though the price of oil and related encouraging economic data, and declining but still very high public approval ratings for Putin (and Medvedev for that matter), seem to suggest otherwise.

Still, the policy skirmishes between the two camps continue thick and fast. The Medvedev camp’s hopes of burying Stalinism once and for all and the Federal Security Service’s (FSB – the KGB’s domestic successor) proposal to ban the use of foreign-based internet services like Skype, Gmail and Hotmail are two recent examples. In both cases Medvedev’s view is clear: he has been at the rhetorical forefront of the anti-Stalin drive and he uses some of the internet services in question himself. Although the presidential administration has only mildly opposed the internet plan, Medvedev is unlikely to favour major restrictions.

By and large Putin has hitherto tolerated blogging dissent. Computer attacks on foreign enemies like Estonia and Georgia have been plausibly attributed to pro-Putin Russian youth groups in the past, but lately some domestic bloggers have been getting close to the bone with corruption stories aimed at Putin. There have been reports this week of extensive hacking attacks on opposition blogs, suggesting another reverse for “modernisation.”

On Stalin, the proposals emanating from the Medvedev camp are essentially that Stalin should be removed from any honourable place in the public domain, that memorials to his many victims should be erected across the length and breadth of the country (there are remarkably few at present) and that officials who deny his crimes should be dismissed. The tentative steps towards de-Stalinisation were accelerated after Moscow re-acknowledged last year that Soviet forces were responsible for the Katyn massacres in 1940.

Stalin’s standing in Russia is particularly relevant to the relationship with Poland, but it also affects relations with the Belarus and Ukrainian leaderships, both of which hold the late dictator in rather higher esteem than does Medvedev.

Another long-running and increasingly obvious difference between the two Russian leaders concerns Medvedev’s campaign against official corruption. Putin has made occasional populist gestures in the same direction, but during his presidency corruption greatly increased, and Putin himself is believed by many to be an extremely wealthy man. At first, Medvedev’s moves against corruption seemed no more serious than Putin’s. He instituted, for example, an ultimately absurd ritual of requiring all officials, including himself and the prime minister, to make annual income declarations, though the published results have lacked all credibility.

But recently he has announced sharper measures aimed at creating a better investment climate and has set out a series of goals for the government to achieve by an early deadline. Most strikingly, he has demanded that senior government officials withdraw from the high-ranking positions they often have in large state-run or ostensibly private companies.

Among other things, these measures involve removing Putin’s key ex-KGB ally, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, from the position of president of Rosneft, the Russian oil giant. Rosneft was directly involved in, and benefited from, the stripping of the assets of jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Yukos empire. Sechin, often seen as the de facto number two in the regime after Putin, has obediently withdrawn from his position in Rosneft. Whether this will reduce corruption or the politicisation of the most important commercial decisions of big Russian companies remains to be seen. But on the face of it, this was a remarkable intervention by President Medvedev, especially when compared with his earlier efforts.

What are we to make of this belated search for relevance by Medvedev? While most observers have long agreed that Putin was the dominant partner in the tandem, interpretations of the relationship have varied significantly. Some saw no serious political differences between the two and believed that the different shadings of emphasis that sometimes seemed to emerge were minor nuances in a wholly harmonious and functional political partnership. Others maintained that the differences were completely phoney, all part of an elaborate charade intended to deceive and manipulate observers and interlocutors, especially naïve foreigners ready to be duped by a good-cop, bad-cop routine.

Others again held that the differences were psychologically real and potentially even important politically, but that Medvedev had no hope of making his writ run on any of the disputed issues. He had always been in Putin’s shadow and would remain so unless the global financial crisis or some other external shock reshaped the political chess-board. When the crisis failed to deliver any perceptible destabilisation or liberalisation, these observers concluded that that Medvedev would never challenge his mentor.

It seems unlikely that Medvedev does expect to overcome Putin and his governing United Russia Party, which is overtly sceptical of the president’s recent moves. Nor would he expect to tame the security establishment, of which Putin is the paramount leader. Medvedev has never belonged to either of these key structures in the power elite. In fact, his assertiveness of late might be the boldness of desperation. But hope springs eternal, especially in the minds of politicians, so it should not be ruled out that he really believes he can convince enough of the elite and the public to be given a second term as president.

Even if he is resigned to being nudged out of the top job, it seems clear that at a minimum, whatever the views of Putin and his camp, he wants to set out clearly where he thinks the country should head. He may calculate that if he is rejected for a second term he will at least be awarded a worthy post from which he could keep his career alive while waiting for some game-changing shock. When the oil price slumps again or something else crystallises latent public discontent, he might hope to return as the man whose time has come.

Belarus: Re-Stalinisation?

While the situation in Ukraine, which has more than four times the population, is probably of greater strategic significance, events in Belarus have certainly been much more newsworthy. Since the mass detentions after 19 December, there has been a steady stream of reports of further repression: new detentions, use of torture, suppression of media, denunciations of the West and threats against the opposition. Then on 28 March, the Central Bank in effect devalued the currency by 10 per cent, amid reports that Belarus was lurching towards disaster. On April 19, the bank further liberalized the exchange rate.

Lukashenko has maintained much of the old Soviet command economy and, thanks to generous Russian subsidies on oil and gas inputs, till recently the system worked quite nicely. By avoiding reform, he also avoided some of the pain encountered elsewhere in post-communist economies. But Lukashenko, despite his loyalty to Soviet Russian traditions, did not wish to subordinate himself to the Kremlin. He is popular in Russia itself, especially with die-hard Stalinists and Soviet nostalgics of whom there are many. Indeed he has sometimes seen himself as the natural leader of Russia as well as Belarus. His vanity and insubordination irritate Putin, who may even feel threatened by him. And Moscow became tired of subsidising him. So in recent years they have been forcing him to pay something nearer to market prices for his energy inputs.

Instead of adapting to his new station in life, Lukashenko essentially continued with a Soviet-style economy and sought to stave off the need for reform by obtaining loans, whilst hiking public sector wages extravagantly in preparation for last year’s elections. The trade deficit deteriorated sharply, nearly all of it down to trade with Russia, with foreign debt increasing by 30 per cent last year. Foreign currency reserves are naturally slumping rapidly towards zero, declining by 20 per cent in January/February this year to $4 billion and still under pressure. Goods shortages and inflation have set in and Belarusians have become afraid that if a large devaluation occurs their savings and assets will be dissipated. Naturally they have sought to obtain foreign currency as a hedge, increasing the drain on reserves. Bizarrely, amidst all this, GDP is supposedly continuing to grow by over 7 per cent a year, but much of what is produced is unsalable and simply consigned to warehouses, another traditional Soviet practice.

The economy was beginning to show the strain last year, but this year all these processes have accelerated. Economists are expecting a 40 per cent devaluation, whether acknowledged or de facto. The government meanwhile is thrashing around with ad hoc bans and prohibitions. Having slammed the door on the IMF, Lukashenko’s best chance of relief, probably his only one, is to secure the $3 billion in loans being offered by Russia. But Moscow too is insisting on conditionality. It wants to see some economic reform measures adopted in Minsk. And it also wants its own state and crony capitalists to be able to buy up some of Belarus’s best and most strategic industries. Even if the $3 billion is forthcoming, without sharp reductions in state expenditure – and hence in wages – a hefty devaluation and other painful reforms, it won’t postpone a severe crisis for long.

In this deepening economic gloom, the terrorist attack in the double subway station in Minsk during peak-hour traffic at 6 pm on 11 April, which resulted in thirteen deaths and over 200 injured, looks like a bright ray of light for Lukashenko. The president summoned together his security forces, headed by the sentimentally-named KGB, and exhorted them to seek the support of their Russian counterparts and find the culprits without delay. The KGB, in keeping with its best traditions, had cracked the case inside thirty-six hours. “At 5 am this morning,” reported the president proudly on 13 April, “the crime was solved.” Having earlier hinted that the first detainee was of swarthy appearance, the authorities later corrected themselves to say that the five arrested terrorists were all Belarusians from the same provincial town. So efficient was the KGB that, within these same thirty-six hours, the malefactors had also confessed to two earlier bomb incidents in 2005 and 2008 in which there were no fatalities, though some 50 people were injured in each.

Those two earlier incidents had been most unusual in a country with no tradition of terrorism and, unlike Russia, no Islamic insurgency or significant Islamic minority or other well-documented violent groups. Apart from announcing comprehensive success in the investigation, Lukashenko and his security chiefs were very sparing with details. The event seems incomprehensible. There is no evidence that has been made public that adequately explains it, though it has been suggested by an anonymous source in the investigation that the main perpetrator is a psychopathic sadist. But the timing, adroit execution, and use of explosives claimed by the regime to be unique in the world all suggest a degree of planning, even professionalism, scarcely credible in Belarus.

Moreover, the fact that the bomb was stuffed with lethal metal shrapnel suggests a malign violence totally uncharacteristic of the opposition and indeed of any group in Belarus society, with the possible exception of Lukashenko and his security forces. He and his administration are the only people who stand in any sense to gain from the disaster. But at this stage there is little evidence to point to anyone other than the detainees, one of whom was reportedly identified on a security camera.

Lack of evidence is not, however, constraining the president from suggesting that a vast conspiracy of all his enemies is involved. He has demanded an exhaustive enquiry into “all statements by activists and politicians… Question them all, regardless of democracy and the cries and groans of their foreign sympathisers.” And he has darkly hinted that the domestic criminals have employers beyond the country’s borders.

Almost before the noise of the explosion had abated, opposition spokesmen were gloomily predicting a fresh wave of arrests, interrogations and repression. And already there are reports of security forces zealously carrying out the president’s requirement that all “politicians” (that is, oppositionists) be called in for questioning.

Coming on top of the rorted elections and the sudden economic freefall, this latest dismaying event has reportedly shaken the population in the capital and probably further afield as well. But for Lukashenko, the bomb blast is a splendid way of changing the subject. Clearly people must now forget about petty economic tribulations or political disputes and prepare for the iron discipline that the president is promising them. Any contacts with the evildoers to the west should be eschewed forthwith. Backsliders and panic-merchants will deserve any punishment they get. In a word, the scene seems set for repression and rigid controls in all spheres of life.

Some speculative explanations turning on machinations within the Belarusian security apparatus with possible Russian involvement have been launched. The cui bono test and the location of the metro station next to the presidential compound may be consistent with theories of Belarusian KGB involvement. But though terrorists active in Russia may conceivably have passed on some of their skills and modus operandi to the perpetrators, it seems unlikely that Russian officials or agents would have been involved. Moscow now has plenty of other more conventional means at its disposal to influence events.

More liberal-minded figures in the Moscow leadership will deplore Lukashenko’s resort to further repression. But most, regardless of whether or not they feel that the president is a primitive throwback to an earlier era, will feel strong satisfaction that Belarus’s flirt with the West has been decisively curtailed and that the task of bringing him to heel as his economy sinks begins to look much more manageable.

Ukraine: Leaning east, but keeping a European option open

After coming to the presidency in February 2010 by a narrow margin, Viktor Yanukovych quickly re-established autocratic rule in a country that had seen five years of turbulent but democratic rule by the leaders of the 2004-05 Orange Revolution, ex-President Viktor Yushchenko and ex-PM Yulia Tymoshenko. It had, moreover, been devastated by the global financial crisis, sustaining a 15 per cent drop in GDP in 2009 alone. By dubious constitutional means and with some alleged bribery of backsliders from other parties, Yanukovych set up something similar to Putin’s “power vertical” in Ukraine, centred on his own Russophone and Russophile home province of Donetsk. In the year since he has further consolidated his domestic control, though as he has sought to grapple with Ukraine’s continuing economic problems, his initial relative popularity has declined sharply.

His domestic regime is now widely seen as becoming progressively more undemocratic. Judicial independence has become a mockery and selective prosecutions, typically on trivial or dubious charges, have been pursued against many senior members of the former Orange governments, including in particular Tymoshenko. This has resulted in many cases in the accused being held in pre-trial detention, that is, jailed, for months at a time. One of the former ministers so treated has successfully sought political asylum in the Czech Republic. Pressure has been exerted against the media, particularly non-print media, to toe the line. Television now almost exclusivelydepicts the doings of the government, with little coverage of other views. Freedom of assembly has also been subjected to significant restrictions.

These trends have not passed unnoticed by monitoring agencies like Freedom House. The US State Department and the European Union have both expressed official concern and Ukraine has been warned by senior EU representatives that backsliding on democratic norms would not assist its progress towards EU integration.

In foreign policy, Yanukovych moved quickly to restore warm relations with Russia. Moscow had felt uncomfortable about the free-wheeling democracy in Orange Ukraine (many Russian journalists, for example, moved to Kyiv to ply their trade, including hard-hitting commentary on Russia). And the Kremlin hated the Orange leadership’s nationalist policies, in particular its desire to join not just the European Union but also NATO as quickly as possible. This latter prospect Moscow had been particularly determined to prevent. Yanukovych was quick to oblige them by explicitly ruling out NATO membership, something none of his post-communist predecessors had done. In many other ways he quickly showed himself to be a loyal Russophile ex-Soviet citizen, like most of the rest of the population in the Russified eastern and southern provinces of Ukraine.

Yanukovych promptly cancelled Yushchenko’s efforts to secure recognition of the deliberate starvation of over 3 million Ukrainians by Stalin in the 1930s as an act of genocide. He appointed an extremely Russophile Education Minister, celebrated for his public contempt for Ukrainian-speakers, who set about reversing all the Orange policies aimed at removing the Russian and Soviet bias from the educational system. He also cultivated close relations with the Moscow Patriarch Kirill, a deeply divisive figure in Orthodox Ukraine, where the Kiev Patriarch has a larger flock than his Moscow counterpart. Kirill has since made a special personal project of trying to Russify the Ukraine Orthodox Church. And there was much more of the same. Ukraine seemed to be heading rapidly back into Moscow’s orbit.

After an initial flurry of economic agreements and numerous bilateral visits in both directions, however, Moscow began to push too hard on the economic front, proposing to take over many of Ukraine’s most significant enterprises. In particular, in keeping with Putin’s “energy diplomacy” (using energy supplies and acquisition of neighbours’ energy infrastructure to establish a potentially coercive control over their key decision-making options), they proposed that Russian gas giant Gazprom should “merge” with (that is,. take over) its much smaller Ukrainian counterpart, Naftohaz. This would have obviated the need for any more “gas wars” of the type that created havoc, for example, in Ukraine and many countries further west in January 2009.

For Yanukovych and his governing Party of Regions, in which many of Ukraine’s biggest oligarchs have a strong involvement, this was a step too far. The bilateral ardour suddenly cooled, and in recent months contacts have dropped off somewhat. Relatively few new cooperative agreements have been concluded lately, though Russia has continued trying to achieve a decisive break-through in drawn-out negotiations on the gas sector.

In parallel with its dealings with Russia, Kyiv has also been working on negotiating an Association Agreement (AA) and within that framework a deep and comprehensive free-trade agreement (DCFTA) with the European Union. The DCFTA is particularly important for Yanukovych and his oligarch supporters, as the European Union is, after Russia, Ukraine’s largest trading partner. The European Union, for its own strategic reasons, is eager to encourage Ukraine’s waning Western orientation and, while it has been critical of Ukraine’s progressive slide away from democratic norms, it has tried to be flexible in advancing the negotiations. Moscow seems to have become aware recently that there was a serious danger the free-trade deal might materialise before the end of the year and has unleashed a threat-and-charm offensive to stave it off.

Russia has been pushing its own counterblast to the European Union, the Customs Union, to which so far only Belarus and Kazakhstan have signed on (though Kyrgyzstan has just announced it will join the group next year). Moscow is particularly keen to inveigle Ukraine into the arrangement, partly as a way of kneecapping the DCFTA. The European Union has declared and recently again confirmed that Ukraine could not proceed further with the free-trade agreement if it joins the Customs Union.
Ukraine has been officially cool on the Customs Union, but it still has serious economic problems and associated domestic discontent, and Moscow’s short-term threats and promises are potentially persuasive to both political and business leaders. However, the fact that the gas pricing formula is in itself highly contentious, and that Ukraine has been charged by Moscow more for its gas than nearly all other customers, cannot be reassuring for the Ukrainians who might accept the bribe and then find that it is again confronted with an unpalatable pricing ultimatum some time in the future.

Moreover, Moscow is vigorously pushing a project to build another bypass route for its gas exports to Europe (called South Stream, mirroring the one already well advanced in the north, known as Nord Stream). Both projects are intended to avoid Ukraine and thereby cost it valuable transit income. They will also make it possible for Moscow to cut off gas supplies to Ukraine to enforce its will on any disputed bilateral issue without completely cutting off its customers further west in the process. Yanukovych probably assumed that Ukraine’s highly cooperative approach to Moscow should have led to the abandonment of the scheme, which was originally devised as a weapon against the Orange leadership. He has protested against South Stream repeatedly, but in vain. Some observers believe that South Stream will prove unviable, but Kyiv can’t be sure of that. In the meantime, the Nord Stream/South Stream pincer movement is another weapon that Moscow can hold to its fraternal neighbour’s head and it is therefore probably another, if concealed, element in the negotiations.

Despite its coolness towards the Customs Union and its frequently reaffirmed preference for the free-trade agreement with the European Union, Ukraine’s final decision cannot yet be confidently predicted. The benefits of doing a deal with Russia are short-term, whereas the European Union is promising some initial pain and only then larger mid-term benefits. Politicians in volatile domestic circumstances are always seized of short-term advantage, and so it may yet prove in this case. Moreover, the Ukrainian leadership is divided on the issue and there are some out-and-out Moscow sympathisers in their midst, as well as those, seemingly including Yanukovych, who want to keep a door open in both directions.

The Yanukovych government’s expressed preference for the EU option is not a choice of the heart. In most ways Yanukovych feels more naturally at home with Russia. His interest in the EU is purely pragmatic. Kyiv does not relish criticism of its democratic shortcomings from Brussels and, though it does throw up propaganda smokescreens and claim to be committed to democratic norms, one suspects that despite the protestations of an intention to ultimately join the European Union, it would be happy to settle for the DCFTA and an agreement on visa-free bilateral travel, without the lectures on democracy.

Recently the Ukrainian Prosecutor-General, a self-confessed old crony of the president, initiated proceedings against the former president Leonid Kuchma in connection with the murder of a prominent independent journalist Hryhorii Gongadze, whose headless body was found in a forest near Kyiv in 2000. One of Kuchma’s bodyguards had secretly taped and then leaked some of the president’s intimate political conversations, in one of which he appeared to be calling in colourful language for Gongadze to be somehow removed from the scene.

Yanukovych had been Kuchma’s anointed successor in the fraudulent presidential election of 2004 which was ultimately overturned. Their relations have since frayed somewhat, but after years in which for whatever reason even the Orange leadership did not pursue the Gongadze case effectively, it was startling that Kuchma should now apparently be prosecuted at the behest of his former close ally. There are various theories about this enigma, but the most plausible explanation seems to be that Yanukovych wanted to give the lie to the widespread conviction in the West that he was practising at best selective justice against his Orange enemies. Going after or even pretending to go after a big fish from the same side of politics like Kuchma might get EU critics of his democratic credentials off his back.

On balance, the heart says Russia and the Customs Union, while the head says the European Union and the Association Agreement. Having thus come to a fork in the road, Yanukovych might simply wish, as was once said of Bill Clinton, to take it. While reaffirming his commitment to the EU negotiations, Yanukovych has also been pitching for 3 + 1 trade negotiations with the three Customs Union members, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Deputy Premier Sergiy Tigipko, one of the relatively few committed liberal reformers in Yanukovych’s team, has made the obvious point (though not universally obvious in Ukraine) that the European Union’s huge market would be a decisive advantage over the longer term, and that eastern countries who’ve joined the European Union have usually done very well economically as a result. Tigipko advocates integration with the European Union and “friendship” with the Customs Union, another version of 3 + 1.

This difficult choice is about much more than trade. As Oleksiy Kolomiyets, an independent Kyiv think-tanker has said: “The Customs Union is a camp of authoritarian regimes, and our political system would follow the economic logic if we became part of it.” Acknowledging that Yanukovych has publicly rejected the customs union, he added: “There is intense political struggle over this issue, and it’s only just beginning. Ukraine’s economy is very fragile and extremely vulnerable to Russian blackmail.”

Moscow remains keen to re-establish some latter-day incarnation of the Soviet Union, and the Putinist version of that would be likely to be pretty much as Kolomiyets described – unless, that is, Russia again reverses course and pursues the more reformist path that Medvedev and his followers are trying to lay out. But on form to date, that looks a long shot.

Poland: An uneasy rapprochement

The sudden warming of Polish-Russian relations at governmental level that followed the Smolensk air disaster of 11 April 2010 has more or less survived the following year, though with occasional discord, mainly relating to official investigations into the causes of the accident. The Russian enquiry, which suddenly announced its findings without having previously offered them to their Polish colleagues for comment or proposed amendments, placed all the blame for the accident entirely on the Polish side. Polish officials accepted that the blame lay more on the Polish side (for which view a good deal of evidence has emerged from both the Russian and the Polish enquiries), but emphasised with some heat that there was contributory negligence on the Russian side as well and submitted a long list of objections to the Russian report. As the months went on, Warsaw also increasingly blamed Russian authorities for being slow to respond to requests for information from the Polish enquiry.

But at the level of public opinion, particularly on the Polish side, relations have been more torrid. The main Polish opposition party, the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice (LaJ), headed by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has maintained a tireless campaign against the Polish government for having allegedly been complicit in covering up malfeasance both by themselves and the Russian authorities. Over the last year Kaczynski and his followers have fought elections and the daily political battle largely on this issue, hinting darkly at alleged conspiracies by Polish and Russian authorities to somehow cause the accident, then conceal their traces.

As evidence has accumulated pointing not surprisingly to some typical Russian disorder at the provincial Smolensk airport on the day, and as the Russian side has increasingly sought to play down or deny any fault of it own (partly in response to the endless accusations of murder from some Polish press and politicians), LaJ have seized every opportunity to renew their accusations or devise fresh ones. The anniversary last week produced a fresh crescendo. In the absence of any solid evidence to substantiate the more extravagant conspiracies, senior LaJ politicians have become carefully vague: “President Lech Kaczynski had to die because he was a true Pole” and similar.

LaJ sympathisers, including some of the bereaved, had laid the memorial plaque the Russians removed at the crash site last November, without seeking the agreement of local Russian authorities. The plaque, which was only in Polish, linked the crash to Katyn by saying that President Kaczynski and the other passengers had been on their way to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the “Soviet genocidal war crime” committed against Polish officers in 1940. The Russians were reportedly unhappy about the word “genocidal.” They now acknowledge that the massacre was a crime, but maintain that Stalinism committed similar and worse crimes against people of all ethnic groups, including above all Russians, and that therefore this was not a case of genocide.

The argument is unpersuasive to a Western ear, but there is a further aspect to the case. Medvedev’s campaign for de-Stalinisation has acquired some of its current momentum from the decision to restore the Yeltsin position of apologising for Katyn, a decision taken in the first instance primarily for foreign policy reasons. For Medvedev to meet President Komorowski of Poland on the anniversary, as was planned, and lay flowers on a plaque in Polish, of unofficial Polish composition and including the words “Soviet genocidal war crime” would be severely embarrassing for him at a delicate time in the ongoing struggle over Stalin’s place in Russian history. In the event, the two sides agreed that the presidents would instead jointly lay wreaths under a birch tree at the site of the crash, not on the Russians’ new, bilingual plaque, hopefully thereby postponing the issue until a better moment.

None of this satisfied LaJ which denounced it as yet another sign of Polish official servility towards Moscow. While the governing Civil Platform party of Prime Minister Tusk and President Komorowski has maintained a clear lead over LaJ over the last year, with LaJ sometimes looking electorally marginalised by its own anti-Russian obsessions, recent events seem to have contributed to a revival in LaJ support and a lessening in that of Civic Platform. The national elections expected in October this year could yet prove difficult for Civic Platform and, in the run-up to them, Kaczynski will not be holding back from his denunciations of the government’s “eastern policy.”

Though they overstate the case and are given to implausible conspiracy theories, there is justice in some of LaJ’s reproaches, The Polish government has, for example, concluded in the last year a long-term agreement on gas supplies from Gazprom which seems disadvantageous to Poland, placing it in a state of high dependence on the one problematical supplier, at high cost ($336 per thousand cubic metres) and for a seemingly unnecessarily long period. Warsaw has been working towards creating LNG import infrastructure as a partial alternative to Russian gas. Moreover, while this was not fully apparent in the earlier stages of the negotiations, Poland is on the cusp of developing its own very extensive shale gas deposits. So the pressing need for such a deal was not obvious.

The Gazprom agreement was also at odds with Warsaw’s own campaign within the European Union in recent years for diversification of gas imports away from Russia as a politically-motivated, often expensive and unreliable supplier. Ironically, Poland was only rescued from reaching an even worse deal with Gazprom by the intervention of the EU Energy Commissioner who insisted on becoming involved in the negotiations at the eleventh hour to ensure that Poland complied with the European Union’s new legal requirements. The so-called EU third energy package insists inter alia on competitive market access of other suppliers to energy infrastructure, like, in this case, Gazprom’s gas pipelines to and through Poland, which the final draft of the deal had not ensured. In the last stages of the negotiations, various improvements were introduced, including scaling back the date of termination of the agreement from 2037 to 2022.

The Polish government did its best to keep key details of the negotiations out of the public domain, but they have recently been exposed in the leading conservative newspaper Rzeczpospolita. The government’s reticence on this matter is understandable. The deal was disputed within the government, and it is difficult to believe it would have gone ahead with it, were it not for the rapprochement it had reached with Moscow. The late President Lech Kaczynski opposed the deal and, as prime minister before 2007, Jaroslaw Kaczynski would hardly have negotiated one like it.

In retrospect, given the bilateral difficulties that have arisen, LaJ’s criticism that Poland was not sufficiently energetic about seeking a greater direct involvement in the enquiry into the Smolensk disaster also seems persuasive, and their explanation that the Warsaw government did not want to ruffle Russian feathers may not be far off the mark.

But in general, the endless harping of LaJ politicians on the subject and the extreme polarisation of political life that they have thus engendered may be a double-edged sword for them electorally. Opinion polling indicates a majority of Poles disapprove of LaJ’s partisan exploitation of the tragedy. However, for as long as the issue remains alive, there is great potential for the Polish-Russian détente to run aground. Other bilateral disputes could well arise and there are plenty of long-standing differences between the two countries that will continue to generate tensions of their own. If at the parliamentary elections in October, through a strong performance at the polls and adroit coalition manoeuvring, LaJ were to regain a place in government, the bilateral relationship would come under great strain.

Putin was clearly involved in and supportive of the warming Polish-Russian ties, and to that extent the specific case of Katyn is less likely to become one of the growing number of issues that divide his camp from Medvedev’s. But his support came before LaJ decided to use the Smolensk issue in a way that in most Russian eyes tends to discredit the rapprochement and would do so much more if Kaczynski manages to regain aplace in government.

SUMMING up, there is some chance of liberal and more pro-Western policies gaining greater traction in Russia, but their chances of doing so are tied closely to the weak-looking reed of Medvedev’s aspirations for a second presidential term.

Belarus is heading from provincial neo-Stalinism to something much worse in the short term, after which it is likely to fall under stronger influence from Moscow. This, however, depending on how things play out in Russian politics, could conceivably be a moderating factor and might, together with Lukashenko’s declining popularity and the economic meltdown, lead to a change in the Belarus leadership. But in such an event, any new leader would have to be to Moscow’s taste.

Ukraine is at a crossroads, torn between its current leadership’s strong preference for the ethno-political comfort zone of Russia and its recognition that its future economic health can probably be best assured if it keeps some essential links with Europe alive.

Poland is likely to see the moderate Civic Platform party returned to power later this year. This will help to maintain Poland’s increased status in Europe as it undertakes its first rotational presidency of the European Union in the second half of this year. It will also shore up the fragile rapprochement with Russia, which should in turn reassure the Russian governing elite that its apologies for Katyn were not a misplaced political investment. Such an outcome would be a positive, though not decisive, factor favouring continuation of the latest de-Stalinisation tendency in Russia itself and a more constructive course in Russian external policies generally. •

John Besemeres is a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for European Studies at the Australian National University.

The post Russia and its western neighbours: a watershed moment appeared first on Inside Story.

EVEN before the polls closed in Belarus’s presidential election on 19 December, supporters of opposition candidates were planning their protests. Although the conduct of the campaign was remarkably liberal by recent standards, opponents of Alexander Lukashenko’s regime confidently expected another rorted result, so no one was surprised when the president claimed an implausibly huge victory late on polling day. His return to authoritarian form was dramatically displayed when the government’s security force – the nostalgically named KGB – beat up protesters rallying in the centre of the national capital, Minsk. At least 640 people were arrested, including seven of the nine opposition candidates.

The leading opposition candidate, Vladimir Neklyayev, was seized and bashed on his way to the demonstration, suffering severe concussion. He was taken to hospital, where a group of plain-clothes thugs burst into the ward, dragging him off to jail. Neklyayev, who has serious vascular problems, has been denied treatment and there are fears for his life. Another leading opposition candidate, Andrei Sannikov, also injured, was stopped by traffic police and pulled out of a car on his way to hospital. His wife tried to hold on to him, for which she was also assaulted. Beatings in jail are reported to be widespread, and some protesters have been forced to recant, Iranian-style, on television.

Just over a week later, in Moscow, came the conviction of Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and a fellow Yukos Oil executive for allegedly stealing and laundering the proceeds of most of the oil produced by their own company. A few days earlier, well before the verdict, the Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin had met a handpicked audience to respond to pre-approved questions. Asked about Khodorkovsky, he said that “a thief should stay in prison,” putting paid to any idea that calls by President Dmitry Medvedev and his entourage for respect for the rule of law would be heeded. Khodorkovsky’s real offence before his first show trial in 2003 had been to try to play a role in politics and even contemplate standing for the presidency against Putin. He has now been convicted a second time, in effect, for that same offence.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the regime of President Viktor Yanukovych, who narrowly defeated the former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, in the presidential elections in early 2010, has recently charged his rival with various criminal offences, warning her she may not leave the country. On 26 December one of her former ministers, Yury Lutsenko, was arrested while walking his dog, taken to jail and charged with embezzlement. Lutsenko, a man with an unusually clean reputation in a country in which corruption is widespread, was the latest in a long list of former Orange government ministers and senior officials jailed or indicted for such offences.

The contrast with the way the Orange leadership treated Yanukovych and his allies, who blatantly rorted the presidential election in 2004 then lost on the rerun forced by the Orange revolution, couldn’t be greater. The Orange president, Viktor Yushchenko, even appointed Yanukovych to the prime ministership for a time. Yanukovych and his Party of Regions were able to regroup and successfully contest the 2010 presidential elections, which were widely accepted by observers as free and fair. But since his election, Yanukovych has not reciprocated his own generous treatment, having systematically abused the Ukrainian constitution to set up a centralised autocracy while persecuting his former opponents through a corrupted court system.

In other words, the authorities in each of the Slav-dominated former republics of the Soviet Union – Russia, Belarus and Ukraine – are displaying overt contempt for democratic norms. The curious thing is that they are doing this precisely at the time when each of them is seeking closer relations with the European Union. In Russia’s case, the declared motivation is to pursue a “partnership for modernisation.” In Ukraine’s case it is a pitch for trade concessions and visa-free travel, but ostensibly with an ultimate aspiration to join the European Union. For Belarus, the “last true dictatorship of Europe” as Condoleezza Rice once said, it has been a flirtation with Brussels to hedge against growing pressure from Moscow.

For Brussels, the primary motivation is to use “engagement” to improve relations with each of these three difficult neighbours, encouraging transparency, good governance, financial probity and democratic norms. With Ukraine and Belarus there is the additional objective of succouring their independence against attempts by Moscow to resubordinate its smaller Slavic neighbours in some kind of Russian-led quasi-federation or close alliance.

After years of frustration in pursuing this objective, Moscow has latterly been making progress. Yanukovych’s victory last February more than restored the close relations between Russia and Ukraine that existed before the Orange revolution of 2004. Political, security, ethno-linguistic and economic ties have all been greatly strengthened. When Putin began to press forcefully for a takeover of the commanding heights of the Ukrainian economy, Yanukovych’s key Ukrainian oligarch supporters felt their vital interests were threatened, and Kiev’s resistance stiffened. But the two governments remain very much closer than they were a year ago.

As with the Ukrainian presidential elections, Moscow looks the biggest winner from the recent spectacle in Belarus, which suggests that the friction between the two countries has begun to lift. And in the last year or two there have been encouraging developments elsewhere in the “near abroad” for Moscow, notably in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. In various ways Russia is bringing some of its wayward former provinces back home.

BUT Belarus has never been regarded as one of the more wayward former republics. So how did the recent conflict between Lukashenko and Moscow come about?

Despite a brief flowering of national independence on either side of the fall of communism, Belarus once again became virtually a Russian province in the years after Lukashenko won the presidency in 1994. He set about creating a neo-Soviet autocracy at the same time that the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was starting to retreat from his earlier westward tilt. The neo-Soviet trends in the two countries strengthened after Putin came to power in 2000. For a time, it even seemed likely that the “union-state” of Russia and Belarus, proclaimed in 2000, might become a reality.

But in recent years, as Russia reduced its energy subsidies for Belarus as for other former republics while pushing to secure control of their key economic assets, Lukashenko became anxious. He might have gone along with a Russo-Belarus confederation, but only if it guaranteed a very prominent role – even the presidency – for him. As Russia’s intentions and Putin’s distaste for him became more evident, however, he began to seek and welcome EU overtures.

Under courtship but also pressure from Brussels, Lukashenko looked to improve his image and the country’s foreign investment climate, which now sits well above that of Russia or Ukraine on rankings. More surprisingly, he eased his notoriously repressive regime, presenting himself almost as a born-again liberal reformer and allowing opposition politicians to gain official acceptance as presidential candidates for the December 2010 poll. In early November 2010, the German and Polish foreign ministers promised Lukashenko support for a large IMF-led loan package on behalf of the European Union, as well as progress towards free trade and visa-free entry for Belarusians if he agreed to democratise his country.

Relations with the United States also improved. In pursuing its “reset” policy with Russia, the Obama administration has placed less emphasis than its predecessor on promoting democracy in the former republics of the Soviet Union, though it continues to welcome any moves in that direction. For his part, like Yanukovych earlier in 2010, Lukashenko has also courted American approval by offering to eliminate his stocks of highly enriched uranium, a key priority for President Obama. He was still sending out some positive messages to the United States in meetings with visitors from Washington think tanks just a few days before the crackdown.

While this opening towards the West was taking place in the months before the elections, Russia had been increasing its pressure on Belarus. Moscow was angered by Lukashenko’s efforts to resist increases in energy prices and even more by his failure to support key Russian projects. In particular, Lukashenko was refusing to join the customs union Putin had launched with Kazakhstan, into which Moscow was keen to inveigle other former republics, especially the fraternal Slav states of Belarus and Ukraine. Nor would he recognise the “independence” of breakaway territories South Ossetia and Abkhazia, after Russian forces “liberated” them during the 2008 war with Georgia. When Russia applied its usual tactic of manipulating energy trade to enforce compliance – suddenly and sharply reducing gas deliveries to Belarus in June 2010, for instance – Lukashenko responded by seeking further credits and subsidised energy elsewhere, including from China, Venezuela and Iran.

Responding in July 2010, state-controlled Russian television ran a series of denunciatory documentary programs about Lukashenko, depicting him as an autocrat with a contempt for human rights, referring to the violent deaths and disappearances among his opponents, and highlighting a comment he had allegedly made in praise of Hitler. Much of the material was not far off the mark, though it was also eerily applicable to Putin’s Russia.

But with the violent crackdown on 19 December, both the pro-Western and anti-Moscow trends in Belarus policy seemed to have been abruptly reversed. The leopard’s familiar spots were again fully in evidence. Having blitzkrieged the domestic opposition he had been tolerating for months, Lukashenko belligerently dismissed Western concerns, saying he would put an end to “senseless democracy.” The president’s swashbuckling, bully-boy style at a news conference after the violence recalled Putin at his most colourful. It also recalled Lukashenko himself after the previous presidential elections, when he’d threatened to wring oppositionists’ necks “as one would a duck.”

Such language and behaviour are typical for Lukashenko. It has been reported that when the openly gay German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle and his Polish counterpart Radoslaw Sikorski were visiting Minsk in November to offer aid in return for democratisation, they enquired about Belarus’s treatment of sexual minorities. “We don’t have people like that here,” the president allegedly responded, “but if we did, we’d put them in cattle wagons and ship them off to camps.” Nonetheless, despite his well-known track record, both the brutality of the crackdown and the aggressive rhetoric seemed deliberately intended to alienate his erstwhile Western interlocutors.

What brought about the change? Essentially, it was the sustained Russian pressure. While he had remained defiant in response to Moscow’s campaign against him during the course of the year, Lukashenko was keenly aware that Belarus’s economy depends heavily on Russia, with which about half of its foreign trade is still conducted, including some 70 per cent of its machinery exports and 90 per cent of its exports of food products. In particular, Belarus’s relatively steady growth under Lukashenko has owed a great deal to the continued inflow of heavily subsidised Russian oil and gas. Even with that support, the economy was heading for trouble under the stress of the global financial crisis. Belarus has a serious and dramatically worsening balance of payments deficit, by one estimate likely to reach US$7 billion for 2010. This has led, in turn, to a sharp increase in its foreign indebtedness. Belarus’s debt repayment obligations are set to worsen in the next few years, threatening an uncontrollable spiral.

Lukashenko probably always knew that Moscow could ultimately draw the noose as tight as it chose, until finally he would be left with little recourse. The European Union was offering him less, and with the price-tag of a democratisation agenda that might ultimately have cost him power. By contrast, Russia was “only” seeking to reduce his country’s national sovereignty and might well accept his continued grip on power if he were more cooperative. In similar circumstances earlier in the year – facing growing energy bills and debts to Russia as the financial crisis bit deeper – Ukraine’s Yanukovych had opted to sell off some surplus sovereignty by reaching a deal to extend Russia’s lease on its Crimean naval facilities to 2042 in exchange for a reduction in the price of gas imports. Lukashenko has apparently now made a similar choice.

At the height of Moscow’s anti- Lukashenko campaign some observers were beginning to speculate that Russia was seeking regime change in Minsk, but it was probably always more likely that Russia would be happy to reach a compromise on energy if Belarus toed the line on its neo-imperial agenda. On 9 December, ten days before the election, Lukashenko met with the Russian leadership in Moscow and agreed to enter the Common Economic Space with Russia and Kazakhstan. At the same time he reached an agreement for an effective reduction in the price of imported Russian oil that will save Belarus an estimated US$4 billion a year, more than the one-off IMF credit that the EU emissaries had been talking about.

By election day, with the bilateral deal with Moscow more or less settled, Lukashenko no doubt felt that he could afford to treat his domestic opponents and the West with contempt. For its part, though it was mildly irritated by the fact that some Russian journalists had been caught up in the wave of detentions and weren’t immediately released, Moscow was quick to express its satisfaction with the conduct of the election.

WHILE the reasons for Lukashenko’s volte-face are not too mysterious, it is curious that he struck out against his opponents with such venom, even though this was bound to damage his relations with his Western interlocutors. It may be that he was responding to the fact that the elections went rather worse for him than he was prepared to acknowledge. Independent polling in the relatively free atmosphere before the ballot showed his support slipping and suggested that in a fair fight he might only get somewhere between 30 and 50 per cent of the vote, and would need to go to a second round to win.

Applying his usual tactics – stacking the voting booths with trusties (excluding all but a few token opposition representatives), abusing the bizarre system of “preliminary voting” by people employed in government institutions who are ferried en masse to cast early votes, and common-or-garden ballot stuffing – would probably have given him a comfortable victory anyway. But he could well have faced the embarrassment of the solid opposition support becoming visible and contrasting sharply with his sweeping majorities on previous occasions. The Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, has suggested this as an explanation for the fury of his attack on the protesters, citing information that he had attracted no more than 40 per cent of the vote rather than the nearly 80 per cent officially claimed.

But thuggery is Lukashenko’s style and always has been. He is a deeply Soviet figure, more devoted to the less edifying aspects of the Soviet tradition than is Putin himself, who tends to view him as a naive provincial bumpkin. So perhaps his response reflected, above all, exuberant relief that the pretence of a mini-democracy could be flung aside once concessions had been wrung from Moscow, and that smarming up to the West was no longer necessary. After the people power revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, all post-Soviet autocrats, including Putin, feel a slightly irrational fear that despite their popularity (in some cases) and their elaborate security/propaganda empires (in all cases) they could suddenly be pitchforked out of office by an angry mob. They see such events not as largely spontaneous domestic revolts but as sinister plots orchestrated in the West.

This mindset may help explain Lukashenko’s violent reaction and anti-Western rhetoric, but there is also evidence that the crackdown last month was carefully choreographed. Provocateurs reportedly encouraged protesters to ignore their leaders’ calls for restraint, and broke windows in government buildings to provide the pretext for the crackdown. This line of interpretation sometimes goes further, arguing that from the beginning Lukashenko’s contacts with the West were an elaborate feint meant to extract a better deal from Russia, which, once it was in his pocket, meant that “stupid democracy” and his tiresome opponents could at last be dispensed with.

Whatever his thinking or instincts in discarding the Western card, Lukashenko may have done himself a mischief. Moscow can, if it so desires, retract its concessions or find other ways of pressuring him whenever it likes. Lukashenko might be calculating, probably correctly, that Western governments will eventually swallow their pride and lift any sanctions against him, allowing him to resume tactical manoeuvres on both the eastern and western fronts. But in the meantime, he may need to reach an accommodation with Moscow, without the benefit of other options.

He could probably live with that. He detests democracy and impertinent challenges to his autocratic supremacy. In a close embrace with Putin’s Russia, he can be sure of one thing: that he will be under no pressure to introduce democratic reforms. And for Moscow, a stable “power vertical” (Putin’s term for concentrated top-down power) in Belarus to match Russia’s own would not cause any great distress, except in some liberal circles still cleaving to the fading hope of a Medvedev-led perestroika.

The two regimes will continue to have their differences. But for the time being they will be reconciled, and Moscow will feel it is making progress towards Putin’s objective of at least partially repairing what he regards as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” the break-up of the Soviet Union. Putin will also be pleased that in Ukraine and Belarus there are no longer any democratic experiments that might conceivably turn the heads of his own constituents.

After a period of perhaps one or two years of indignation and some sort of sanctions against Belarus, many or most Western countries will probably conclude that sanctions are only isolating Lukashenko unproductively, and will again look for ways of engaging the dictator. And having made his point, Lukashenko may well again display interest in any fresh inducements. Western policy does not seem to have many viable alternatives in these situations. Despite Russia’s seizure of parts of Georgia in 2008 and its contemptuous dismissal of Western objections, its breach of Sarkozy’s ceasefire agreement and so on, within a few months the reset button had been pressed in Washington, and the European Union and NATO were both offering their own peace overtures to Moscow.

The main drivers of the current conciliatory trend in Western policy are the United States and Germany. For the Obama administration, the new policies relate not so much to Russia or Europe as to other concerns, especially nuclear disarmament, Iran and Afghanistan. WikiLeaks revelations have confirmed that official Washington has no illusions about Moscow, but President Obama is still eager to establish the best possible bilateral relationship to advance other priorities.

Germany’s conciliatory policy towards Russia has a long history, but the main factors at the moment are probably its huge and profitable economic relationship with Russia (including an element of energy dependency); Germany’s memory of its Ostpolitik towards the Soviet Union in the 1970s, which it feels led to détente, perestroika and reunification; fear of provoking Russia by adopting too forceful a policy in relation to former Soviet and Soviet bloc territories; and probably an element of historic guilt for the barbarous Nazi occupation of Soviet lands during the second world war. Berlin still feels grateful for reunification in particular, and believes that other Western countries pushed Moscow too far after Gorbachev had conceded so much. Germany is the main conciliator, but there are others, notably France under Chirac and increasingly also Sarkozy, Italy under Berlusconi, and Spain and Greece.

Between them, the United States, Germany and France have done much to pursue engagement with Russia. At the recent Lisbon summit of NATO, to which President Medvedev was invited as an honoured guest, the rhetoric of both sides was extremely positive, despite the important differences that continue to divide them. Before the summit there was a tripartite summit involving Germany, France and Russia – but not the United States – at Deauville in France, at which security issues were discussed in a positive atmosphere. France has now confirmed it will sell Mistral amphibious assault vessels to Russia despite the objections of Baltic NATO member-states and desperate would-be member Georgia. Paris has justified this unprecedented sale with the surprising reasoning that if NATO wishes to engage Russia on security and other issues it should be prepared to display trust towards it.

Given these determinedly positive atmospherics, it would be surprising if the developments in Belarus were to derail East–West rapprochement for long. Yet for all the talk of engagement, modernisation, renewed security architecture and so on, the current situation is rather different from the détente of the 1980s. In Gorbachev, the West had a leader with whom it could indeed do business, a leader seeking to meet Western expectations at least halfway and to achieve domestic reforms that would make the Soviet Union a more democratic, transparent and normal society.

In Putin they have someone who bitterly regrets most of what happened under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and who is heading to a large extent in an anti-Western, even xenophobic direction – certainly domestically, and usually externally as well. Medvedev represents a different strain of thought within the elite, but though it might suit the Putin leadership that Medvedev presents a smiling face to the world, he seems unable to make his writ run on virtually any important issues.

The easy passage of New START through the US Senate will give the overall East–West dynamic some momentum. Sooner or later, however, the key US–Russian relationship will keep snagging on issues like Belarus, as Moscow continues its determined pursuit of restoring Russian great power status and recapturing former dominions.

WHAT of Belarus itself? Will its society be content to accept Lukashenko’s latest diktat without demur? If there is resistance, will it seriously threaten the ex-collective farm chairman?

Generally speaking the degree of resistance by vassal states to Moscow’s domination during the Soviet period, and the development of stable and prosperous democracies since then, have depended on the strength of national sentiment and the maturity of civil society in each country or region. Despite some revival of civil society in the last couple of years, Belarus has not been one of the stronger post-Soviet states in either respect. The national language – close to Russian – has not had a secure hold in most of its territory in recent times. Russian is dominant in most of Belarus in the same way that it dominates some parts of Ukraine. A small minority speaks Belarusian by preference, but Russian is overwhelmingly the language of public discourse. (In this respect it is unlike Ukraine, where in the west and much of the central regions Ukrainian is dominant or holds its own.)

Although it had its own representation at the United Nations when it was part of the Soviet Union, Belarus was essentially a loyal Soviet province rather than a recognisable nation or centre of nationalist resistance like the Baltic states, for example, or even Ukraine. Despite rediscovering Belarusian nationalism when it suited his interests, Lukashenko is probably still a typical Soviet Russian as much as he is a Belarusian. Though he recently startled an audience by speaking fluent Belarusian in public, he does so seldom and appears to care little about its status or future. Nationalists and some oppositionists try to keep the language alive, but they are up against not only the Russifying policy of the authorities but also the apathy of most of the population.

Belarus suffered far greater casualties and devastation than Russia during the second world war. The once large and culturally influential Jewish and Polish minorities were largely destroyed as a result of war, genocide, Stalinism and discriminatory policies in the later Soviet period. Eighty per cent of Belarusians are now Orthodox, like the Russians, and the Jews and Catholic Poles have been replaced by a large (12 per cent) Russian, mainly immigrant, population fostered by Moscow. So the population is now ethnically and religiously largely homogeneous and increasingly Russified.

Moreover, most of the country fared relatively well in the later Soviet period, receiving a disproportionate share of industrial investment. And conservative economic policies and Russian subsidies since 1990 have helped Belarus avoid some of the disruption in living standards seen elsewhere in former republics. All these factors have meant that the population is broadly pro-Russian in outlook. Indeed, some of the leading opposition candidates in the presidential elections were rumoured to be accepting support from Moscow, and they certainly explicitly favoured better relations with Russia, as well as with the West.

Discontent with Lukashenko’s rule had already been growing in recent years, as became evident during the last two presidential election campaigns. And even if some Russian support is reinstated for now, Belarus is heading for a difficult period. As harder economic times set in, Lukashenko’s stocks could sink further. But neither democratisation nor a colour revolution by the spirited but divided opposition seem likely any time soon.

SINCE the crackdown, Lukashenko has purged his leadership, appointed a new prime minister and issued a decree ordering further liberalisation of the economy, suggesting he is looking to Chinese rather than European economic models. Furthering links with new friends like China and Venezuela will also help him to hedge against overbearing behaviour by Russia. They have the additional advantage that they won’t be asking tiresome questions about human rights and democracy. •

The post In Belarus, the leopard flaunts his spots appeared first on Inside Story.

IN OCTOBER 2008, nineteen years after my family left the not-yet-former Soviet Union for Australia, my twelve-year-old daughter Billie and I travelled to Russia and Ukraine. I knew before we got on the plane that I was going to write a non-fiction book, if not explicitly about this trip then directly linked to it. And just in case I was tempted to forget about it, I had a contract and an advance from the publisher (spent on airfares and visas) to remind me. Yet to most of my friends in Russia and Ukraine, many of them easily in the category of people I would die for, I said close to nothing. At most, I muttered something vague about maybe doing some writing connected to this trip… You know us writers, we cannot help ourselves. Give us a spoon and a bowl of pea and ham soup and we’ll write about it. If asked what kind of book it was, what it was about, in what way connected to this place and this moment, I would get desperately ironic: the definitive post–Cold War tearjerker of course, the hitchhiker’s guide to the mysterious Russian soul, Putin’s Russia for dummies… If irony was inappropriate when, say, talking to a dear friend’s grandmother who was in her late eighties, I would become deathly serious and, with my vagueness acquiring a distinctly sombre tone, I would point to the twentieth century – revolution, gulags, two world wars, you know the kind of stuff… Big bad stuff that needs to be written about. Big bad stuff I could hide behind.

I cringe as I recall my inability to say a single straight word about the book, which was burning a hole in my pocket like a shoplifted Cherry Ripe. Don’t rush to excuse me – if such is indeed your first impulse – because I must tell you that to some of my friends I said nothing. Not a word. I remind you that I had a contract to write this book. So my omissions or non-disclosures, whatever you want to call them, were pretty alarming, perhaps even inexcusable. Morally I was elbows-deep in the grey zone.

Now I must tell you that it is not my style to withhold. I have written about my unexpected pregnancies and failed marriages and my disastrous delusions as a parent – not exclusively, and not at the expense of other things, but nonetheless fairly frankly. I don’t withhold much in real life either (see the previous point about pregnancies and marriages), yet on our trip to Russia and Ukraine I felt distressed, sometimes overwhelmingly so, about not disclosing my writerly intentions. This distress consisted of many elusive kinds of debilitating unease, all contributing to a growing conviction that this hypothetical book of mine was a dangerously foreign substance in the alchemy of our trip.

It was not like I was planning to write a nasty exposé, though I did intend to go into all manner of deeply intimate stuff – friendships battered by geopolitics (when we left in 1989, we thought we would never see our friends and family again), grief and love, doubts, silences in the no man’s land between those who stayed and those who left. I was uneasy that the book would not simply report our experiences on this trip after a respectable period of time, but was, to some degree at least, a catalyst for these experiences. I had not seen my childhood friends in Ukraine for almost two decades; to them, and especially to my best friend who turned sixteen on the day my family emigrated, our leaving was nothing short of a tragedy (as it was for me). It took nineteen years for me to come back and I was coming back so I could write a book – now that smelt. I imagined my friends questioning my every motive on discovering that the book was about this trip. I was, after all, a double agent on a mission, my loyalties ambivalent and fickle. Who knew what I was really after? Was I looking around ever so intently so I could pepper my stirring prose with some telling details? Was I asking questions about prices and jobs so I could write about “Russia’s tired and poor, the huddled masses”? And, perhaps most importantly, who were my friends to me? What did I see when I looked at them through my thick writer’s glasses: losers, characters, caricatures, ghosts? Was I not, for all intents and purposes, coming into their world, into their lives, not as their friend but as a journalist or a literary tourist on the prowl?

WHEN I told my second cousin in Dnepropetrovsk about the book – she was one of the very few people I did not conceal it from, knowing that I would not write about her – she retorted, “So you are going to write about how everything is dirty and falling apart.” But no matter how much I jumped up and down, no matter how many times I uttered, “God, No!” I could see that my cousin still didn’t believe me. “I can only imagine what you must be thinking,” was all she said after I’d finished my emphatic protestations. Oh the debilitating, trust-eroding second-guessing! Caution and self-consciousness muffling conversations, the spectre of the book hanging over the flow of love and grief between us. I could not bear the thought of any of this happening so I made a pact with myself – I hope it was with myself, not with some kind of devil – and I kept my mouth shut for much of the trip.

And because I equally could not bear the thought of bullshitting my friends, I made myself forget about the book. I did not go to see colourful characters from my past in search of the picaresque and quirky. I did not stage any poignant encounters. I lived day to day, thrown around by emotions and experiences, in accordance with the implicit logic of my journey and my relationships with others. I had managed to dissociate from my writerly persona, almost completely. The book dictated nothing and made me do nothing. It became a vague apparition belonging to my life in distant Australia; the only thing I did in its name was to keep a diary and to make sure Billie kept one too. This was how I got through the trip without feeling like a cheat and a backstabber.

It is quite possible, of course, that I have imagined much of this and that my friends could have dealt quickly with the initial weirdness of this book and trusted me not to slip and slide too much between my dual identities and purposes. For all I know, it could have become a running joke (as benign as they come) or it could easily have been forgotten altogether. Perhaps the heaviness of my heart primarily reflected my own ambivalence about the simultaneity of writing and living, my own sense of how intrusive and distancing literary ambitions and sensibilities can be, my sneaking suspicion that being a writer and being a friend often do not flow neatly into each other. At various points in the trip, I told myself that I simply wouldn’t write this book (to hell with the contract and my future as a writer!) or that I would write such a glorious book that so brilliantly and truthfully honoured my friends and our shared experiences that my friends would forgive me and it would be obvious to them why saying close to nothing was the only right thing to do.

It occurs to me that till this day I have not been able to let go of my unease – first hiding the book, then hiding behind it, as if standing next to it in full view has proven quite beyond me. Since Otherland came out in April, I have posted it to all my friends who appear in it. Surprisingly, despite the Russian and Ukrainian postal services’ casual attitude towards delivering mail – if it happens, it happens, but don’t get too hung up about it – all of my friends have received a copy of the book by now. Armed with dictionaries, they are pushing through my prose in the language some of them know well and others remember only vaguely from rock music or sub-standard school and university courses. I am finally out of the closet. I have handed myself over to the people’s court. But whether my friends forgive me or condemn me, whether they laugh at the ridiculousness of my fears or feel wounded by my evasions, I still won’t know whether I had any right to keep this book from them or, equally, whether I could have written Otherland if I were a braver soul with absolutely nothing to hide. •

The post Up to my elbows in the grey zone appeared first on Inside Story.

EARLY in the summer of 1941 my great-aunt Tamara, a young doctor recently graduated from Kharkov Medical Institute, was sent to work in the Ukrainian village of Dubovyazovka, not far from Kiev. She went with a child in tow. Tamara’s husband (the first of several) had died in the Finnish War of 1939–40, and so it was just the two of them now – the self-assured, outgoing, remarkably well-dressed young “specialist” and her two-year-old daughter, Vera. My grandmother, Faina, joined her sister in the country soon after. Faina was pregnant with the child who would turn out to be my mother, and tailed by her own toddler, three-year-old Lina. Summer at Dubovyazovka meant fresh air, sun, coveted cow’s milk, and fruit and veg on tap – and as everyone knew, these things, so wanting in the city, made for much healthier kids.

Faina was older than Tamara by four years, and not like her at all. My grandmother was much less inclined to hold court than her sister; she dressed modestly and was skilled at deflecting the spotlight. She was attentive and kind, and took care of things when no one was looking. There was not one showy bone in her body. Both Faina’s daughters would inherit her attentiveness to others, and her distaste for publicising their own good deeds, even though they would belong to a much more emancipated generation of young women. (The drama queens only started appearing in my family when my sister and I came along.)

While Faina and Tamara, with two and a half kids between them, were in Dubovyazovka, my grandfather Iosif, who was senior assistant to Kiev’s public prosecutor, remained at work. Between my grandmother and grandfather existed an unspoken but unambiguous marital contract. Just as there were criminals and prosecutors, whose worlds only overlapped when the former were caught and prosecuted by the latter, so the clearly defined domains of men’s and women’s work were only meant to intersect in extraordinary circumstances. Ninety-nine per cent of the time child-rearing fell under women’s jurisdiction, together with cooking, cleaning and laundry (all the good stuff!). Men’s work was, as you would expect, to ensure the wellbeing and security of the family. The irony was that, just like most of the young women around her, my grandmother did all the women’s work as well as “work” work – she was an economist by training – which meant that most of the time she was preoccupied and exhausted.

It was in sun-filled Dubovyazovka that Tamara and Faina learned about the start of the war, from the round mouth of a radio perched in the middle of the square near the office of the obligatory village council:

“Today at 4 am… without a declaration of war, German troops attacked our country, attacked our borders at many points and their aeroplanes bombed our cities – Zhitomir, Kiev, Sevastopol, Kaunas and some others – killing and wounding over two hundred persons… This unprecedented attack upon our country is treachery unparalleled in the history of civilised nations.”

The announcement, made at noon on 22 June by the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, came as a total shock, not only to the two women but to the entire community. Today it may be hard to understand why, especially if you are looking at history from the other side. By that stage the war had been raging in Europe for close to two years. But the Iron Curtain that Winston Churchill would famously draw attention to in 1946 had in fact already descended, blocking or distorting most of the news from the western front. All most Soviet citizens knew was that in August 1939 Molotov had signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany, and the fact of this pact, coupled with people’s belief in the all-seeing and all-knowing Stalin, meant that most of them were utterly unprepared for Molotov’s announcement of Germany’s treacherous attack on our “sleeping nation.”

As to the secret protocol within the Non-Aggression Pact, the Soviet Union only officially admitted its existence in December 1989 (just as we were leaving). The West learned about it during the Nuremberg Trials, but my grandmother and others of her generation died without the slightest idea of all the political machinations that helped produce the defining experience of their lives. No one but a handful of people at the very top knew about the secret agreement, which gave the Soviet Union control over parts of Poland as well as Romania, Finland and the Baltic States, while allowing Germany to have a free hand in the rest of Europe. Certainly, the war in which the Soviet Union invaded neighbouring Finland (and in which Tamara’s husband died) was completely dissociated from the larger European conflict. It was widely believed – in the public mind, anyway – to be a conflict between two parties, provoked by Finnish reactionaries in turn backed by British and French imperialists, and in no way a reflection of the larger forces at play. The ordinary Soviet population did not have a clue what was going on, not in 1941, and not for decades to come.

AND SO it was on that June afternoon in the middle of Dubovyazovka square, surrounded by others in a similar state of shock (adults mainly; many kids were said to be initially excited by the news of the war), that Tamara and Faina had to take in all this indigestible news in one massive gulp. Their country was at war. Their hometown was bombed. All connection with it was lost. There was no way back to Kiev, and that meant they would have to join the massive exodus of war refugees across the European part of the Soviet Union, all moving east to parts of Russia around the River Ural (the traditional border between Europe and Asia), or to the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. It also meant that my grandmother and grandfather would be separated for years.

In those first few months of the war everything happened very quickly. The Luftwaffe’s bombs exploded in Kiev in the opening hours of the conflict. (Residents at first took them to be Soviet military exercises.) Within months the defence of Kiev ended in one of the most disastrous defeats the Soviet Army would experience. In military textbooks – not the Soviet ones, of course – the campaign would be immortalised as one of the biggest, if not the biggest, encirclements of troops in the whole of history, leading to the capture of more than half a million Soviet troops. The Soviet Army was in total disarray. In his memoirs, We Are from 1941, Dmitry Levinsky, a twenty-year-old soldier at the start of the war, recounted the bloody chaos of the retreating Soviet Army – no food, no bullets, no medical aid, no connection to the headquarters, no clearly defined frontline and no common strategy. Add to that the three million Soviet soldiers who became POWs at the very start of the conflict. It is simply not legitimate to apply the word “army” to the Soviet troops of 1941, Levinsky says. While he himself did not take part in the Battle of Kiev, what he remembers of the first few months of the war – how soldiers were given two-metre puttees instead of boots, how machine-gun operators had to carry weapons in excess of thirty kilos, and how news of the war was delivered to various army regiments by messengers on foot – helps us understand why the first stages of the war resulted in such catastrophic losses for the Soviet Union.

Lest we forget, the military was under Stalin’s absolute control; by the start of the war the majority of the most experienced and talented high-ranking officers were part of a different army altogether – the army of the repressed. The catastrophic conclusion to the Battle of Kiev had as much to do with politics as with the sorry state of the military. The implications of surrendering a major capital were dire (What next? Moscow?), so the troops were given orders to hold on to the city at any cost. My grandfather, in his memoirs written in Australia in the final years of his life, remembered the heightened rhetoric around Kiev’s defence. He recalled an article in Pravda, the nation’s central newspaper, declaring on 13 September 1941 that “Kiev was, is and will be Soviet.” But Kiev was about to stop being Soviet – in less than a week’s time – and would not be liberated until two years and two months had passed. The price paid for not surrendering Kiev until the last possible moment was enormous military losses and the severe weakening of other parts of the front, but it was symptomatic of Stalin’s “die but do not retreat” approach to war. In the chronic confrontation between political and military considerations, politics usually triumphed. Human life never counted for much in the Soviet Union, but during the war soldiers and civilians alike were sacrificed by the million with determined and heartbreaking ease.

As the recipients of tragically mixed messages, many of Kiev’s civilians did not use the tiny but nonetheless real window of opportunity they had to flee. By the time they were ready to go, it was in most cases too late. For his part, my grandfather was under orders to remain in Kiev until the last possible moment. Together with the military prosecutor N.D. Vinogradov and Vinogradov’s senior secretary, they managed to cross the frontline on 18 September, when German troops were already on the outskirts of town. The three of them headed for the forests of the Chernigov region in northern Ukraine, where they went underground and joined the large partisan regiment active in the area.

My grandmother, of course, had no way of knowing whether her husband had managed to escape Kiev before it was occupied. But many residents who remained there as Nazi troops marched into the city believed in their heart of hearts that Germany was a civilised and cultured nation, and that nothing too terrible was going to happen to them. Some remembered the “reasonable” conduct of Germans during World War I and had no way of realising that they were about to contend with something altogether different. Their wishful thinking was not entirely delusional. After all, the worst had not yet occurred: it would be on the eastern front that the German army, specifically the SS, would demonstrate how far it was prepared to go. It is also not entirely unfathomable why a significant minority of Kiev’s 160,000 Jews did not run for their lives while they still could. In September of 1941, the extermination camps were not yet built, and Himmler’s policy of the “Final Solution” was still some months off. The fate of Kiev’s Jews, along with the mass extermination of Lithuanian Jewry at roughly the same time, was the awakening, the moment when it became apparent how “the Jewish question” was going to be solved from then on.

Within days of the occupation, the city’s remaining Jewish residents, mainly women, children and the elderly, were ordered to assemble in one spot with their belongings:

“All kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity must appear by 8.00 a.m. on Monday, September 29 1941, at the corner of Melnikovskaya and Dohturovskaya Streets (near the cemeteries).

“You must bring with you documents, money, valuables as well as warm clothing, underwear, etc. Those kikes who do not comply with the order and are found elsewhere will be shot on the spot.”

These notices, printed in Russian, Ukrainian and German (with the street names misspelt), appeared across the city. The same sort of orders had been given at other European cities, big and small, before Kiev. But this time those assembled were not taken to ghettos or put into cattle trains bound for concentration camps. Instead, they were all indiscriminately executed at a local ravine named Babi Yar. The massacre was the first terrible milestone in what has subsequently been called “industrialised mass slaughter of Jews.” It is a true miracle that no member of our family ended up there.

Anti-semitism was not brought to Ukraine by the Nazi SS units and death squads. The republic had a tradition of Jewish oppression dating back to the seventeenth century. Ukrainian pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were notorious for their barbarity, even though at the time persecution of European Jewry was commonplace. The truth is that the relationship between Ukrainian Jews and ethnic Ukrainians, especially during World War II, is as painful and complex a human story as you are likely to find. Ukraine’s anti-semitism, never quite dormant, was reignited by events of the first half of the twentieth century – the Russian Revolution, the Soviet oppression of the Ukrainian people, and the fall of the Weimar Republic in Germany. Hitler’s poisonous vision of Jewish Bolshevism (in Nazi propaganda the two phenomena were inseparably fused) fell on fertile ground among ethnic Ukrainians who, within a decade of their country’s becoming part of the Soviet Union in 1922, were forced to endure not only famine but also large-scale dekulakisation and waves of repressions against the republic’s leaders and intelligentsia.

When the war came, a sizable minority of ethnic Ukrainians welcomed the arrival of the German troops – at least initially. In parts of western Ukraine annexed by the Soviet Union shortly before the start of the war (in line with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) the Germans were seen as liberators. There is no question that the Ukrainian nationalist movement collaborated with the German invaders, and large numbers of those who did not actively collaborate were still deeply ambivalent about Ukraine’s position. In the words of historian Vladislav Grinevich, the war was seen by many as “the sacrificial struggle of the Ukrainian people against two imperial powers – Soviet and German – for the independent Ukrainian nation.”

In Nazi propaganda campaigns, the invading German army was presented as the powerful ally of ethnic Ukrainians and their fight for independence, and as the mortal enemy of both Jews and Bolsheviks. Ukrainian collaborators, of which the Polizei, the dreaded “Auxiliary Police,” were the worst, persecuted and harassed Ukraine’s Jewish population with impunity.

My great-grandmother on my dad’s side was shot by the Polizei in a small Ukrainian town called Lubni. Sometimes collaborators were coerced, but others volunteered their services. They were there at Babi Yar too. But there were countless Ukrainians who would not collaborate. And though the actions of those who risked their lives to help their Jewish neighbours, friends and total strangers could not undo the crimes of the Polizei, to remember the war is to remember these Ukrainians alongside the collaborators. Rudolf Boretsky, now a professor of journalism at Moscow State University, was eleven when Kiev was occupied. When the Jews of his city were ordered to assemble with their belongings and no one quite knew what awaited them, his mother, together with young Rudolf, visited the families of all her Jewish friends, pleading with them not to follow the German orders but to hide instead. For the most part, her pleas fell on deaf ears. Rudolf remembers that she did not think twice about hiding a Jewish acquaintance in the corner of their room behind the wardrobe, keeping this hiding place secret even from the neighbours. His mother was a woman of admirable inner strength, but she was hardly an exception. This too is part of our history.

AT THE TIME, my family did not share the terrible knowledge of what was happening to their people in Kiev. As the city’s Jewish population was rounded up, my grandfather was fighting in the forests of Ukraine and my grandmother, together with her sister and the kids, was on her way to Uzbekistan. There was, it seems, no clear and systematic plan of evacuation: the bulk of it was carried out through people’s places of employment. As a doctor, Tamara was assigned to Uzbekistan, and this is where my grandmother and all the kids, born and unborn, headed in the summer of 1941. Most of those evacuated were women and children. The majority of men stayed on to fight (although not just men; around a million Soviet women also became combatants in the course of the war).

From Dubovyazovka, Tamara, Faina and the kids got to the train station by horse-drawn cart. My grandmother had almost no belongings, just one small suitcase containing the light clothing she had brought on her summer vacation. At the station, train after train was leaving, taking a continuous stream of people away from the front. The evacuees faced round-the-clock bombardments of both the trains and the railway tracks. If the rails were damaged and needed to be repaired, people simply waited at the side of the tracks until they could reboard. Thank God it was summer. Sometimes German planes flew low to the ground and a machine gun would methodically hunt down those who had escaped the larger artillery. Writer Evgenia Frolova was a schoolgirl evacuated from Leningrad. She remembers being inside a train that was bombed: “Everything drowns in the hissing sound, in roar and smoke… The whole train is shaking and rocking. Clothing, blankets, bags and bodies are thrown off the plank beds, from all sides something whizzes by over our heads and plunges into walls and the floor. There is a scorched smell as if from milk burnt on the stove.” It was not only the bombardments the evacuees had to endure, but hunger and disease as well. To eat and to feed their children, people sold whatever they had so they could buy the produce that peasants from nearby villages brought to the stations along the way. This was how Tamara, Faina and the kids just made it to Uzbekistan. By the time they reached Samarkand, the largest city in Uzbekistan after Tashkent, my grandmother, great-aunt and the two little girls were barely alive. Not only were they on the brink of starvation; their heads were overrun by lice, even Tamara’s formerly well-coiffed one.

Samarkand is an ancient and famed city, part of the Silk Road and once one of the main centres of Persian civilisation, yet nothing in its history could have prepared its residents for the arrival of hordes of refugees from Russia, Ukraine and other “European” republics of the Soviet Union. Uzbekistan was sunny, abundant, harvest-rich, a world away from the death, destruction and hunger of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Among the endless stream of wartime refugees it sheltered was the cream of the nation’s creative elites, from major cinema studios, which continued to make films during the war, to the Moscow State Jewish Theatre under the direction of the legendary Solomon Mikhoels. Tashkent became a refuge for some of the country’s most famous writers, including Anna Akhmatova, who was evacuated there from Leningrad. Despite the major culture shock Akhmatova experienced on arriving in Central Asia, she also discovered true human kindness.

“In those cruel years in Uzbekistan,” she wrote, “you could meet people of just about every nationality of our country. Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Ukrainians, Poles and Uzbeks, Lithuanians and Greeks, Kurds and Bulgarians worked side by side at factories and on film sets. And how many orphaned children from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union found new families in Central Asia.”

Uzbekistan had not been incorporated in the Soviet Union until 1924, after considerable local resistance; the European components of the USSR were alien and unimaginable to Uzbeks as their own country must have been for the majority of refugees. Still, large Uzbek families with many children of their own took in kids and refugees of all nationalities, sharing with them last pieces of bread. There were all kinds of Uzbeks of course, just like there were all kinds of Ukrainians, but there were a great many good, decent people. The inevitable clash of cultures with all its resulting misunderstandings and friction did not kill off the human impulse to take care of others in dire and obvious need.

My grandmother and great-aunt arrived in Samarkand to find an Asian city caught up in the vortex of the vast and distant war. Writer Dina Rubina, who was born in Tashkent, reconstructs the wartime scene there in a way that honours the mythical proportions of the refugees’ arrival – something much more akin to a plague than the orderly relocation of people and organisations that the word “evacuation” might imply. “Imagine that on some Asian city descends a million lice-ridden, ragged fugitives… Echelon after echelon come to the station but the city cannot take any more… And still the hapless crowds fall out of trains and set themselves up at the square near the station. [In that square, under the direct sun, whole families spread their blankets in the dust on the ground.] There is nowhere to set your foot, you have to look very attentively not to step on anyone. But the new ragamuffins continue arriving.”

When I read this, I can imagine the square in Samarkand where Tamara, Faina and the kids disembarked. As I try to picture other families encamped there on that summer night I know that my grandmother and great-aunt were in a better position than most. Tamara was obliged to report her arrival; she was guaranteed a medical assignment and thus stood a decent chance of keeping her pregnant sister and their kids afloat. It was, however, too late to report anywhere when they first arrived, so Tamara, Faina, Vera, Lina and my mum (in my grandmother’s womb) had no choice but to spend the night in the Samarkand square. It was not that bad. Someone gave Lina and Vera a slice of bread. At least they were safe now, away from the bombs.

When they woke in the morning, the bag with all the valuables and documents was gone, and with it Tamara’s degree certificate confirming her medical qualifications. Devastated by this theft but determined to get her assignment nonetheless, Tamara went to register with the authorities. Whatever she said to them, however vigorously she argued her case, it was not enough. They sent her away. There were too many impostors out there claiming to have qualifications. Forgery was rampant. Certificates, degrees – everything was being forged. “No documents,” Tamara was told, “no proof.” As she walked back to the square towards her anxious family, Tamara ran into a professor from the medical institute who had marked her graduation exams not long before. It was common for people from all parts of the country to bump into acquaintances near those central squares in Samarkand and Tashkent, but Tamara’s chance encounter with the examiner, who immediately vouched for her identity with the authorities, was a particularly blessed event.

On this day that had started so ominously, Tamara was assigned to the Station Malyutinskaya, a tiny kishlak deep in Uzbekistan, where the residents had never seen a doctor and where official medicine of the kind my great-aunt practised was as alien as they came. The word kishlak comes from Turkish for “winter hut” or “wintering place,” and describes rural settlements built by the semi-nomadic people of Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan – an idea entirely unfamiliar to urban women like Tamara and my grandma. Tamara’s job was to organise a medical outpost. The family was given a room in the same building where Tamara ran her clinic. While Tamara worked, Faina looked after the two toddlers and, soon enough, the newborn who arrived in these strange and most unexpected circumstances. When the war first descended on them, my grandmother had asked her sister to terminate this pregnancy. Carrying a child at such a time was an act of pure insanity: what chance would they all stand, the infant included? Tamara was a determined pragmatist who would have had no objections in principle to abortion, but she surprised her sister by refusing point-blank to oblige. “No, this child will bring light,” she said, and that was that. When Tamara delivered my mother at Station Malyutinskaya in the early days of January 1942, the baby was named Svetlana; svet means “light” in Russian.

All through the ordeal of the evacuation from Ukraine and their remote posting in Uzbekistan, my grandmother continued to search for Iosif. Though her efforts were unsuccessful, she managed to locate her husband’s birth family. Iosif’s brother was fighting at the front, and the rest of them – Iosif’s mother and sister, Sarah, with her two young boys – had also been evacuated, not to Central Asia but to Chkalov, an industrial city near the River Ural. Eventually, Faina received a notice that Iosif was “missing in action.” She knew all too well what the vague sentence stood for: “missing in action” was code for a combatant whose gravesite could not be identified. In her mind, she buried him.

Who knows how my grandmother managed to get through her time in Uzbekistan with two toddlers and a newborn in her care round the clock. It was the war, says my mother when I ask her this question. Grown-ups routinely did incredible things to keep kids alive. As Tamara worked, Faina cooked for the family on a brazier using bricks of dry dung as fuel. The baby, my fiercely independent mother, refused to be put down on the mattress and had to be carried at all times. Once my grandmother spilt boiling water on herself and had to continue performing all of her chores with only one useful arm. The worst was the abundance of poisonous spiders, malarial mosquitoes and even scorpions. (My auntie, four years old at the time, remembers a huge one on the white wall of their room.) Such pests were notorious for spreading deadly disease. (A cousin of Tamara and Faina who was also evacuated to Uzbekistan died from a blood infection following a spider bite.) In 1943 Tamara, Faina and the kids were all bedridden with epidemic typhus. It was a miracle that they got through it without losing anyone. When malaria came, it looked like the end. Tamara, the family’s doctor, was completely delirious. Everyone else was sick. Despite being terribly ill, Faina had no choice but to continue looking after the kids. It was at this moment that she wrote a letter to her husband’s family in distant Chkalov. “Save us,” it said.

How they managed to get through the malaria no one can now say. It must have been sheer luck because you can be as brave and as determined as you like but malaria does not give a toss. Tamara was not allowed to leave her medical post, so at the end of 1943 Faina travelled to the Ural region alone with the three kids. In Chkalov, Iosif’s family lived in one room of a two-room apartment. With my grandmother’s arrival, there were eight members of the family living on top of each other in this small space – three women and five children. At night my mother slept in the hall in a washing tub just big enough for a baby. Faina slept in the hall too, on top of a chest. In the other room lived the family of a former local ballerina Galina Valeryanovna, who before the war had had the apartment completely to itself. Contrary to stereotypes about artistic personalities in general and divas in particular, Galina Valeryanovna seemed neither bitter nor resentful towards her involuntarily acquired neighbours. She fancied herself as a fortune teller, using beans for the purpose as was then the Russian fashion, but when she offered her services to my grandmother, Faina was not interested.

Galina Valeryanovna insisted. “Let me do it,” she said.

“I am sorry, but I do not believe in this kind of stuff,” Faina replied.

“Just let me. I can tell you that your husband is alive.”

“Why are you being so cruel?”

“Listen to me. Your husband is alive and you will see him soon.”

When my grandfather and his colleagues left Kiev in 1941 and joined the partisans in the forests, they were ordered to move into the occupied village of Nosovka, in the guise of ordinary residents, to set up an underground cell. The three of them spent six months in the village running an anti-fascist group responsible for supplying the partisan forces with food and medical provisions. My grandfather’s very first job in life had been as a wood-turner, and he had been a skilled, successful craftsman. Thanks to this, Iosif had been able to move to Kiev from the small Ukrainian shtetl where he lived and, in time, to bring his parents to Kiev as well, taking full responsibility for their wellbeing. Now my grandfather’s woodworking skills came in handy not only because they provided a credible cover, but also because many farmers in nearby villages were in desperate need of a woodworker of his class; and so the trio never went hungry.

When they discovered that their cover had been blown, the trio quickly left Nosovka and headed into the forest. The next day their house and workshop were completely demolished. Before leaving Nosovka, my grandfather accidentally became a witness to a scene that he could not expunge from his mind: two Ukrainian Polizei shooting point-blank a Jewish couple discovered hiding with a local blacksmith. Determined to avenge the couple’s death, one night my grandfather took a platoon of partisans and set the houses of the two Polizei on fire. When the policemen ran out of the burning buildings, both of them were shot. Iosif was, by all accounts, a formidable leader. During his time in the partisans, he went from platoon leader to company commander and then head of the special division; after the war he was made lieutenant-colonel in recognition of his service.

At the end of 1943 Kiev was liberated, and the German forces were driven out of Ukraine. Early the following year, my grandfather started looking for his family. Told that his wife and sister-in-law were evacuated to Uzbekistan, he set out to make his way there. He knew neither their exact location nor the number of train journeys required to reach them nor, in fact, whether Faina, Tamara and the kids would still be in Uzbekistan years later. And, of course, their survival was anything but guaranteed wherever they were. Yet, just like Tamara’s chance encounter with her university lecturer in Samarkand’s central square, fate – or chance, although to me it does smell like fate – made Iosif fall casually into a conversation with a fellow passenger on the very first train he boarded.

It turned out that the man knew Iosif’s brother and his family. What is more, he was pretty certain that Iosif’s oldest nephew, Arkady, was working somewhere in the city of Chkalov, so my grandfather decided to get off the train there and try to locate his nephew before continuing his journey to Uzbekistan. My grandfather’s inexplicable fortune continued in Chkalov. Perhaps this is the kind of stuff that only happens in wartime. At the moment he disembarked, Iosif’s mother was heading home from the market where she had exchanged tobacco and vodka for some bread and lard to eat. Iosif wrote in his memoirs: “Only twenty to thirty metres from the house, I saw my mother who turned around and ran into the house – ‘Fanya, I have a son, you have a husband, your kids have a father.’ No words can describe what happened when we all reunited, how many tears were shed. Even now, when I am writing these words, and more than fifty years have passed since then, I am crying.” Needless to say, Chkalov’s former prima ballerina, Galina Valeryanovna, was vindicated, big-time. •

Maria Tumarkin is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology. This is an extract from her new book Otherland, published by Vintage.

The post My mother’s story appeared first on Inside Story.

THE VICTORY of the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, in February’s Ukrainian presidential elections evoked curiously little concern in the West. Senior Western figures from President Obama down were quick to offer congratulations. Representatives of NATO and the European Union expressed confidence they would work with the new president to build on the strong cooperation that already exists.

In Moscow the reaction was euphoric, but discreetly so. After President Putin’s counter-productive intervention in the 2004 election, which helped trigger the Orange Revolution, the Russians were especially careful not to call the race till others had done so. The Kremlin had been studiedly neutral before the first round, except towards the outgoing president, Viktor Yushchenko, who was unrealistically seeking a second term but was so low in the opinion polls as to present little danger. During the run-off campaign between Yanukovych and then prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, Moscow maintained decorum. Tymoshenko had been conciliatory towards Russia in the months leading up to the poll, and from Moscow’s point of view, either she or Yanukovych would represent improvement. But it was clear that Yanukovych’s ultimate success was very welcome.

Some commentators suggest the outcome will not greatly affect Russian–Ukrainian relations one way or the other, and Western leaders seem to be implying that this is their judgement too. The fact that the new president travelled to Brussels ahead of his first trip to Moscow has been widely cited as confirmation of his declarations that he will seek to have good relations equally with Russia, the European Union and the United States. On 12–13 April, reinforcing the point, he will visit Washington. But he has said rather different things to his East Ukrainian constituents and Moscow interlocutors. And in fact his first significant meeting after the election, a fortnight before the Brussels visit, might well have been a long session one on one with Sergei Naryshkin, a senior emissary from Moscow.

All of which raises three important questions. Why did the Orange Revolution fail? Why has that failure evoked so little dismay in the West? And is it true that Yanukovych will not change Ukraine’s strategic direction?

“Ukraine fatigue”

The Orange forces did themselves few favours after they came to power in early 2005. Within months their leaders were at loggerheads. Having appointed Yulia Tymoshenko, the charismatic braided heroine of the Orange events, as prime minister, President Yushchenko sacked her before the year was out. Tymoshenko had adopted populist economic policies that former central banker Yushchenko rightly feared would be damaging. But there was also a jealous rivalry between them that grew as time passed, and by the time of this year’s election Yushchenko seemed mainly preoccupied with ensuring that their erstwhile common adversary Yanukovych would beat Tymoshenko for the presidency.

When Yanukovych used a coalition he had cobbled together in the fractious Ukrainian parliament to revise the electoral laws in his favour three days before the 2010 poll, Yushchenko signed the new legislation with indecent alacrity. In the run-off campaign Yushchenko called on all his supporters to vote against both the presidential candidates (which the voting forms permitted). Over a million did so, more than Yanukovych’s winning margin. And many voters in Orange strongholds stayed at home. It’s plausible to argue that Yushchenko’s campaign against Tymoshenko made the crucial difference.

Yushchenko’s actions can be explained partly by his reservations about Tymoshenko’s policies as prime minister. But in his last period in office, seeking to secure his western base in a forlorn campaign for a second term, Yushchenko pursued some populist issues of his own. It was perfectly legitimate for him to pursue the question of Stalin’s role in the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s that killed millions (the order of magnitude as well as the precise motives remain disputed); to try to advance the cause of Ukrainian, long suppressed, as the national language; and perhaps also to push for some re-evaluation of the role of Ukrainian nationalist groups involved in the bloody events of the 1930s and 40s in western Ukraine (and pre-war Eastern Poland). But the way he went about it was divisive within Ukraine and at times damaged Ukraine’s interests ly.

While Yushchenko may have done more to launch their feud, Tymoshenko responded in kind, at times cooperating with Yanukovych to frustrate the president. Her populism reached its apogee in her second stint as prime minister when her failure during 2009 to meet the terms of an International Monetary Fund bailout led to its suspension. Tymoshenko can certainly claim extenuating circumstances. Ukraine was in diabolical trouble as a result of the global financial crisis (its economy shrank by 15 per cent in 2009) and any leader in her place – particularly one with presidential ambitions – would have been desperate to get financial support and keep voters happy by maintaining unaffordable handouts. But during all this she sorely tested the patience of her Western partners and creditors.

The Orange forces have been justly blamed for the dismal state of the economy. But despite its relatively modest resource endowment, Ukraine’s economic growth was actually outstripping that of its larger neighbour, Russia, throughout the noughties. Its nosedive in 2009 was an extreme product of the global crisis, but not without parallels elsewhere, both West and East (Ireland, Latvia). Ukraine was particularly at risk because of Moscow’s abrupt price hikes of its oil and gas imports, and the deep slump in the price of steel, its staple export. Even accepting Russia’s argument that its gas prices were merely being raised to market levels (though other customers were paying much less), the hikes were particularly hard on Ukraine, whose economy was heavily gas-dependent. In brief, the Orange forces were a bit unlucky to be caught when the music stopped.

EU governments and creditors are hoping that if Yanukovych decisively pursues the stability he has proclaimed as his prime objective then the basket case may start to recover, requiring less external attention and largesse. And they hope that gas deliveries to Western Europe might continue undisturbed by the gas wars that had become almost an annual mid-winter event during the Orange ascendancy. Yanukovych’s makeover as a Europe-friendly democrat (partly the work of his American PR advisers) encourages them to see him as a safe pair of hands.

Enlargement fatigue

More broadly, much of Western Europe now feels that the reasonable limits of EU and NATO expansion have been reached. The poor performance of some countries involved in the most recent large expansion of the European Union, in particular Romania and Bulgaria, has led to impatience and cynicism in Brussels. That these two are both Orthodox (rather than Catholic or Protestant) countries, which in Eastern Europe seem more prone to corruption and other problems of concern to potential EU paymasters, is a factor that counts against the largely Orthodox Ukraine.

Hostility towards enlargement has seeped into many EU electorates as well, and core EU governments have become much more assertive about expressing it. Exceptions may ultimately be made for some small Western Balkan countries, largely for security reasons, but not quickly. The disruptions caused by the global financial crisis in core Europe have reinforced the mood and the recent sharp economic downturns in the Baltic states and Hungary have added to it. The fact that the troubles have now affected a long-term EU member like Greece, and are threatening to spread to other existing members, does nothing to help supplicants further east. Not the least of Yanukovych’s advantages is that while he says he wants to join the European Union at some point, he may be less committed to it than he says he is. As for NATO, he makes it quite clear he won’t be applying.

The broader scepticism about enlargement contributed to the souring of attitudes towards the pro-Western Orange forces. Similar considerations apply to the pro-Western governments in Moldova and Georgia. Many Western Europeans saw the Georgian war as a warning against further eastern entanglements. In that respect, Ukraine raised even more worrying possibilities than Georgia. Yanukovych’s victory will offer reassurance that no alarming crises over the Russian Black Sea Fleet or similar Crimean issues are now likely to arise.

In fact, since the Georgian war, a feeling has been strengthening in some key European governments that flirting with Kiev or Tbilisi about possible NATO membership will damage relations with Russia, which must have priority. This kind of thinking, together with domestic economic factors, has led the French government to negotiate to sell four advanced Mistral amphibious assault vessels to Russia. Given that a senior Russian military commander has said that having these vessels in its armoury would have enabled Russia to deal with Georgia much more expeditiously, it’s not surprising that this prospective sale is causing acute alarm not only in Georgia but also in new NATO members whose territories are located on the Baltic Sea. Meanwhile, a group of former senior German officials (including a defence minister) have called for Russia to be invited to join NATO.

The United States, for its part, is keen to secure the support of Russia on issues of prior concern to the Obama administration, including Iran, Afghanistan and nuclear disarmament, and does not wish to antagonise it unnecessarily. So pressure from that quarter for enlargement of Euro-Atlantic structures is much diminished. The West’s growing reserve did not help the Orange forces domestically. And Ukrainian public opinion seems to be reciprocating. Support for NATO membership was always in the minority, something which Yushchenko’s ineffective and divisive leadership may have accentuated. But EU membership has also become a minority preference.

Yanukovych’s mandate

Some commentary about a stunning victory notwithstanding, Yanukovych’s starting position looked weak. He is actually the first Ukrainian president to have been elected with less than 50 per cent of the votes cast. His total vote was down on the last presidential elections by hundreds of thousands and his majority of 3.5 per cent over Tymoshenko much less than once seemed likely. Moreover, the powers of the presidency had been reduced by the constitutional deal that accompanied the Orange victory and played a big role in the unproductive stalemates of the past five years.

In any case, Yanukovych’s win is the proverbial poisoned chalice. While the economy is showing signs of stabilising after its free fall, there is a long way to go, and he will have to meet tough demands from the financial institutions and/or Moscow if he is to get the help he needs to overcome the crisis. Some necessary austerity measures will be hard to get through parliament and politically damaging to the leader attempting to do so.

More generally, any Ukrainian leader has to reckon with the tribal divisions in Ukrainian society and politics. Voting patterns in this election were as regionally divided as ever, with Yanukovych winning big in the Russophone east and south, and Tymoshenko easily carrying all the Ukrainian-speaking west and centre, thereby winning seventeen of Ukraine’s twenty-seven electoral districts.

What can we expect?

Whether the new president will seek to consolidate his authority to meet these challenges by using what in Moscow is called “political technology” remains to be seen. But some of his first steps do suggest it. After changing the electoral laws just before the run-off in his own favour, he then had himself and his chosen government confirmed by that same majority in a way widely regarded as unconstitutional. That majority – achieved by seducing defectors away from other parties by alleged bribery – was also used to postpone inconvenient local elections scheduled for May. The opposition has appealed the government’s formation to the Constitutional Court, but it seems unlikely that they would wish to overturn everything that has happened. Yanukovych has said that if the Court rules against him, he will call a snap election, a dismaying prospect for many. Tymoshenko has claimed that Yanukovych is exerting heavy pressure against the Court; he would not be the first Ukrainian president to do so.

Many are comparing Yanukovych with Leonid Kuchma (president from 1994 to 2004), who won the presidency by campaigning “from the east” but then sought to rule from the centre, including by improving his Ukrainian. Curiously, all of the three recent key protagonists are actually easterners by birth and upbringing. Yushchenko came from the east but was bitten by the nationalist bug while studying in western Ukraine, adopting Ukrainian as his preferred language and advancing it officially wherever possible. Tymoshenko comes from Russophone and Russophile Dnepropetrovsk (the home of Brezhnev’s push), but she too earnestly enhanced her Ukrainian and uses it widely. This was a winning card for her in the Orange events, and has helped moor her main base in the centre and west.

By contrast, Yanukovych is an easterner in sentiment, style and language. Many Ukrainians of Russian heritage in the east see themselves as both Russian and Ukrainian and perceive no difficulty in doing so. A minority identify simply as Russians. It would not be politically wise for Ukrainian politicians of national ambitions to present themselves as Russian in this latter sense and Yanukovych does not. He has made some efforts to improve his Ukrainian but, orally challenged in general, he seems not to relish speaking it. He has little rapport with the twenty million who prefer Ukrainian, especially the militant nationalists in the west. He will be more at home in Moscow than Brussels or Washington, and probably feels more comfortable in his native Donetsk than in Kiev, where Western sentiment and the Ukrainian language have made inroads since Soviet times, when Russian was dominant.

In his inauguration speech on 25 February, Yanukovych lamented the present state of the nation and the economy. He promised reform of governance with a cabinet of professionals, working transparently in tandem with the president. On foreign policy he pledged neutrality, and said he would seek the best possible relationships with Russia, the European Union and the United States.

Consistent with this even-handed pitch his first foreign trip was to Brussels on 1 March – four days before his first visit to Moscow, a fact widely commented on with satisfaction in the West. But according to the liberal Moscow paper, Kommersant, the head of the Russian Presidential Administration (and reportedly a former KGB official), Sergei Naryshkin, visited Yanukovych in Kiev on 13 February and spent six hours with him, one on one, discussing matters of mutual and evidently urgent interest. Naryshkin is a longstanding ally of Prime Minister Putin and seen by some as Putin’s man in President Medvedev’s entourage.

During his Brussels visit, Yanukovych certainly talked the EU talk (though he did not visit NATO). But some of his actions and pronouncements on the campaign trail and since have been less reassuring. He has said he will renegotiate the gas contract with Russia in a way that would appear to restore murky middlemen to the transactions, one of the murkiest of whom, Dmytro Firtash is a key Yanukovych backer, with close allies now elevated to high office. He has also said he will seek to create a three-way consortium, including one-third shares for Russia’s Gazprom and EU interests, to run Ukraine’s gas transit system. (It is a basic principle of Putin’s “energy diplomacy” that Gazprom – in other words, the Kremlin – should gain control where possible of other countries’ oil and gas infrastructure.) Tymoshenko, to her credit, had opposed both of these policies.

Yanukovych is obviously hoping these concessions to Russia would give Ukraine’s desperately cash-strapped gas importer, Naftohaz, some pricing relief and make it easier for the national economy to stay afloat. He also hopes they would dissuade Russia from diverting much of its gas exports from the Ukrainian pipelines (through which 80 per cent of Russia’s exports to Europe are currently channelled) to the controversial Nordstream and South Stream pipeline projects meant to bypass Ukraine. These projects represent a serious economic and strategic threat to Kiev, and advance Russia’s agenda of seeking a stronger hold over energy supplies to Europe and greater leverage over former vassal states to its West. It therefore seems very unlikely that Russia would agree to forgo them.

Yanukovych has also indicated he would consider favourably an extension of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s lease in Crimea, due to expire in 2017, which Yushchenko strongly opposed. The Crimea is strongly Russophone and Russophile, and the issue has been a source of great tension. There will also be European countries that would receive such a move with discreet relief. But some observers worry that Yanukovych might be prepared to accept a deal that would threaten Ukraine’s sovereignty.

On NATO, he has envisaged continuing existing cooperation in the near term, while ruling out accession. But despite the frequent comparisons, he seems to have rather less enthusiasm for NATO than did President Kuchma. His attitude towards the European Union has been more positive, and he clearly hopes to benefit as much as possible from economic co-operation with it. The European Union and the European Parliament, for their part, are holding out the prospect of future membership, and in the meantime a deep free-trade deal and visa-free travel for Ukrainians, both big attractions. Indeed they are more welcoming towards Yanukovych than they ever were towards the Orange leadership.

Whether Yanukovych is seriously intent on becoming a member is less clear. His earlier indications of readiness to consider joining Putin’s rival Russia–Belarus–Kazakhstan customs union (for which Putin suddenly last year demanded the right to negotiate entry into the World Trade Organization as a unit, thereby setting back Russia’s long-running WTO negotiations) cast some doubt on his personal commitment to either Europe or even to the WTO, of which Ukraine is already a member. Some influential oligarch supporters of Yushchenko’s Party of Regions want the deep free-trade deal with the European Union, which would rule out the customs union. But Yanukovych’s new prime minister is known to be a strong supporter.

On the campaign trail, Yanukovych held out the prospect of making Russian the second official state language. Reversing some of Yushchenko’s vigorous boosting of Ukrainian, including in areas where Russian is strongly dominant, would ease tensions and not be unreasonable. Elevating it to the status of second language would be more controversial and, like an extension of the Crimean lease, politically and constitutionally difficult. Since becoming president, Yanukovych has distanced himself from any such formal proposal, while trying to reassure his Russophone supporters. But that is probably a change of tactic rather than a change of heart. Certainly the opposition expects that Russian will become the de facto official language in government circles.

On the day of his inauguration, Yanukovych accepted a blessing from the Moscow Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a provocative gesture towards Ukraine’s Greek Catholics and followers of the two Ukrainian Orthodox churches. Kirill has proven to be a very active and skilled supporter of the Russian imperial interest in Ukraine, which he is promising to visit again soon. He has a large following in the Russophone regions, but his visits to the country have not been uncontroversial. Symbols like these may point to Yanukovych’s likely choices over the longer term. They may also be damaging to the country’s fragile internal balance.

Very controversially, Yanukovych has in the past intimated his government might recognise the “independence” of Georgia’s breakaway territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. If it did so, Ukraine would join a select group of countries made up of Russia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Nauru. Even the Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko has so far resisted Moscow’s blandishments to recognise Russia’s two client statelets. Such a move would certainly damage Kiev’s relations with Western countries from whom it needs financial and other support. So recognition by Kiev seems unlikely, but if it did happen, it would be a very clear indication of Ukraine’s trajectory.

Yanukovych will offer Russia other opportunities. Russian businesses and investors will be favoured more than at present, provided that they do not walk all over Yanukovych’s Ukrainian oligarch backers, who are increasingly interested in Western markets. Purveyors of Russian language and culture will be made very welcome in the media and elsewhere. Efforts to check Russian espionage and penetration are likely to become a thing of the past. Military access in the Crimea and elsewhere, despite Yanukovych’s professions of neutrality, may be extended. Ukraine’s links with Georgia and other Russian bêtes noires will be phased down or out. Security cooperation with NATO will be scrutinised far more critically than under Yushchenko. And so on.

Finally and more broadly, there is the question of the extent to which Yanukovych will preserve the gains of the Orange Revolution. Notwithstanding some recent commentary, these are actually considerable. While Ukraine has not been improving on corruption and investment climate ratings, on a range of indices of socio-political progress it has strengthened its position since 2004, whereas Russia has declined. On the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (examining a wide range of socio-economic and governance issues) Ukraine went from forty-fourth place in 2003 to thirty-seventh in 2010 (Russia from forty-first to sixty-fifth). On Freedom House’s freedom of the press index, Ukraine went from sixty-eighth in 2004 to fifty-fifth in 2009 (Russia from sixty-seventh to eightieth), and other related indices – civil rights, for example – recorded a similar pattern. Reporters without Borders indices gave Ukraine a score of 51 in 2004 (zero would be ideal), and 22 in 2009 (while Russia declined from 51 to 61). Even on one index of corruption, for which it is acquiring proverbial status, Ukraine comes out ahead of Russia, with Georgia incidentally markedly better again.

Whatever their limitations, these findings clearly depict a pattern, the same pattern that many less systematic observers broadly agree on. Ukraine is corrupt and chaotic (though not uniquely so) but it has made good progress in the last few years towards democracy. It is for this reason that a number of prominent journalists frozen out of the public space in Russia have departed to Ukraine to practise their craft. And it is also for this reason that Putin seems chronically worried that Russian politics may become “Ukrainianised.”

Will Yanukovych maintain this progress? Despite some of his recent pronouncements, he is not one of nature’s democrats. And he will be facing very difficult problems and a strong, unrelenting opposition. The temptation to cut corners will be great. This was, after all, the man who sought to steal the 2004 presidential election and has never acknowledged or publicly regretted doing so. At the very least, it seems a safe bet the next presidential elections will be less democratic than the ones just past.

Yanukovych’s people

Where the new president goes will depend substantially on his key advisers. Yanukovych is often presented as being the creature of his patrons and handlers. And he is routinely mocked for his gaffes and inarticulate presentation, not only in his laboured Ukrainian, but also in Russian. He once referred to Russian playwright Anton Chekhov as a Ukrainian poet, and identified the celebrated Russian poet Anna Akhmatova publicly as Anna Akhmetova (the tasty irony in this being that his biggest backer is Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov). All the gibes about Yanukovych overstate the case. He is clearly a capable politician who has successfully maintained the cohesion of his diverse party. But given that diversity, where Russophile zealots mingle with pragmatic moderates, his personnel choices are important pointers both to his intentions and to likely outcomes.

Yanukovych’s first appointments were to his presidential administration. The choice of Serhiy Lyovochkin as head of the administration was not encouraging. Lyovochkin has links to some intermediary companies in the gas trade from Russia through Ukraine to Europe, involving murky arrangements widely seen as facilitating corruption and damaging Ukrainian national interests. Yanukovych, however, has said he wants to return to those old arrangements, which Tymoshenko had finally succeeded in dismantling.

Lyovochkin’s deputies are a mixed bunch. Most are veterans of the later, more autocratic and Russia-leaning phase of Kuchma’s government or are old mates of the president (or both), one of them having worked in Yanukovych’s electoral headquarters when and where the fraudulent results were manufactured in 2004. Two senior women in the presidential administration, noted economist Irina Akimova and Hanna Herman, are more centrist and pro-European. But the new prime minister (a very close ally of Yanukovych and of whom more in a moment) has declared that economic reform is not women’s business, to the outrage of women’s groups. He has no women in his cabinet of twenty-nine.

After winning the run-off Yanukovych named his three preferred front-runners for the premiership: Serhiy Tyhypko, Nikolai Azarov and Arseny Yatseniuk. Tyhypko and Yatseniuk are both political technocrats with past exposure at the top, who performed strongly in the first round of the presidential elections, presenting themselves as a “third force” between the opposing sides. As premier, either would have been a sign that Yanukovych indeed wished to rule from the centre.

But his choice fell on Azarov, a partisan Regions Party politician, regarded by many as a Soviet-style statist in his approach to financial management. He came to Ukraine from his native Russia only in his thirties, does not speak Ukrainian and, as a deeply pro-Russian figure, will be alienating for the Orange constituencies.

The cabinet appointed to serve under Azarov is even more discouraging in its composition. Few appointees are remarkable for their competence. Thirteen of the twenty-nine ministers are from just two Eastern provinces: Donetsk (Yanukovych’s home province) and Luhansk. Eastern oligarchs are particularly heavily represented, including the Gazprom-friendly Firtash group, to which the gas sector has been substantially entrusted. Bizarrely, the gas lobby has also been given charge of the State Security Service. The new security chief has denounced his Orange predecessor for having opened too many Soviet-era files, and has said that under his control the agency will concentrate on guarding secrets rather than exposing them. He has also called for radical extension of his right to tap phones without court approval.

The new minister for education is a well-known pro-Moscow figure who has declared in the past that western Ukrainians are not really Ukrainians at all. His appointment has predictably outraged the Ukrainian-speaking western provinces. To their further outrage, several diehard Russophiles have been appointed to internal security positions in those provinces. The new defence minister is a former naval commander in which capacity he had excellent relations with Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. And the deputy premier for humanitarian affairs (language, culture and matters pertaining to identity politics) has recently called for “discussion” of a union of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. That was not a good look just before Yanukovych’s forthcoming trip to Washington, and his office has reportedly rejected the proposal. But it was Yanukovych who gave the deputy premier his job.

None of this looks like ruling from the centre. In fact Yanukovych’s appointments and his government’s first steps and pronouncements look more like a sharp turn towards both Moscow and winner-takes-all, despite his precarious majority. The Orange opposition, meanwhile, true to form, is continuing to fragment and squabble.

Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven

Yanukovych’s native Donbas was a loyal region of the Soviet Union, and Yanukovych one of its typical products. His instincts, behaviour and, so far, most of his policy declarations all point to that fact. And Russia will be bending all its efforts to draw him into a close, cooperative and preferably subordinate relationship. Few Russians can accept the idea of Ukraine as a separate country. With an eastern-led Ukraine more or less obediently at its side, nationalists in Russia, who include many in the present regime, could again aspire to empire. Theirs would be an entity of nearly 200 million, with much of its old Soviet-era military potential again fully under its control. Belarus, and other fragments of Moscow’s former domains – and not just South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria – might then feel more impelled to embrace its leadership. The geopolitics of the region could be transformed in Moscow’s favour.

There can be no doubt that many in Russia and a smallish but active minority in Ukraine feel drawn to this vision. But even if he nurtured such impulses himself, Yanukovych would understand that to set off down that path could lead to serious turbulence within his domain that could threaten his own undoing. Cordial fraternal ties with Russia would be as much as the market could comfortably bear.

In any case, few in positions of power wish to embrace a diminution of their own role. Even Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus (who calls his KGB the KGB, who for most of his tenure has run his country like a Soviet theme park, and whose population is much more Russified than Ukraine’s), has been increasingly defiant of late.

Nonetheless, Ukraine’s weakness and Yanukovych’s ethno-political inclinations present Russia with some serious possibilities for future gains if their man can consolidate his grip on power. Russia knows its target far more intimately than its Western rivals ever will. Provided it can restrain its customary impulse to treat its prodigal little brothers with imperial arrogance, it should be able to make some solid headway over the next few years. One thing it will not be doing is encouraging the new Ukrainian leadership to lovingly preserve the fragile democratic achievements of the Orange Revolution.

A sharp turnaround?

Yanukovych’s first official visit to Moscow on 5 March produced few visible results. But he naturally struck a very different tone to the one he had adopted in Brussels a few days before, foreshadowing a “sharp turnaround” (krutoi povorot) in bilateral relations. He made clear again that joining NATO was off the agenda, that he looked forward to strategic partnership with Russia, and that the question of the Black Sea Fleet could be resolved to the mutual satisfaction of both countries. He also promised to rescind Yushchenko’s decrees declaring prominent anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalists of the 1930s and 40s to be Heroes of Ukraine. Rather ominously he praised Russia’s political stability and spoke disparagingly of Ukrainian politics and politicians. And he issued an invitation for President Medvedev to visit Ukraine before mid-year. The sides agreed to set up a joint commission to examine bilateral issues in the meantime.

Both Yanukovych and Azarov, on a separate visit later in March, sought a substantial reduction in gas prices for Ukraine, which is currently paying more than most other European customers, east or west. Recently Gazprom has felt obliged to relax its tough contractual terms to meet the needs of key Western clients, in recognition of the fact that the spot price has declined markedly because of falling demand and greater and more diversified supply in Europe. But while Kiev has again dangled the possible consortium to manage Ukraine’s gas infrastructure as an inducement, Russian statements seemed to offer little encouragement, emphasising rather that existing agreements would have to be carried out. Putin suggested Ukraine should join his customs union if it wanted cheaper gas.

In early March Kommersant reported that the Ukrainian side is already under pressure to move on a number of “delicate” questions. There is the matter of an agent of the Russian Federal Security Service detained under Yushchenko in a special security prison. And Russia was seeking the removal of US personnel from Ukraine. At the same time it was said to be demanding that the Russian Federal Security Service be able to resume its work in the Black Sea Fleet (it was required to leave late last year), and made clear to the Ukrainians that it expected all military cooperation with Georgia to cease.

Medvedev’s visit to Kiev, scheduled for 20 May, should tell us something, but it is too early to say how the relationship will develop. Reporting on the spate of bilateral meetings that have occurred so far would seem to suggest that Russia is playing hardball. On 5 April, a week ahead of his trip to Washington, Yanukovych made another, supposedly “private” visit to Moscow (during which he met his counterpart Medvedev), but nothing has yet emerged from it into the public domain. He seems prepared to meet Moscow more than halfway on matters relating to language, culture, hard-core security, sentimental ties and what might be loosely termed identity politics. On economic issues though conciliatory, he will not be a pushover, not least because in Ukraine’s present straitened circumstances he cannot afford to be, but also because some of his oligarch supporters want that free-trade deal with the European Union. His Washington visit will be intended, among other things, to send a message to Moscow that it should not take him too much for granted. The West’s best option at this stage for retaining a solid foothold in Kiev may be to talk nicely, offer incentives, and hope Putin oversteps again, as he did in 2004. •

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