There has been a good deal of selective thinking in the entire debate about what has happened in Ukraine since the revolution of almost a year ago, when protestors in Kiev toppled the government of Viktor Yanukovitch. This change in regime came despite a peace deal signed only days before, acceding to nearly all of the opposition’ s demands, including a reinstatement of the parliamentary powers disbanded since the dismissal of the interior minister responsible for much of the violent response to protestors, and the scheduling of new elections (Reuters Feb 21, 2014). Even such respected figure as the financier George Soros, and the French public intellectual Bernard Henry Lévy wrote an opinion piece in last week’s New York Times, hailing the revolution, and asking for more financial support for the present Kiev regime, even as it decries, with horror, the support that Russia has given to militants in the eastern part of the court, fighting what it believes to be an illegitimate revolutionary government in Kiev.
I do not seek to identify any “good guys” in this conflict when both sides are so morally and politically tarnished: The Russian state makes an institution of its corruption, and has no qualms about centralized authoritarianism as a political model; but the new regime at Kiev, itself no stranger to corruption, came to power in a revolution that specifically rejected peaceful alternatives, and has sought the aid and influence of western powers even as it recoils in horror at the prospect of what have been, historically, much more generous offers of aid from Moscow.
The western powers supporting this new regime, furthermore, have, since 2004, brazenly violated assurances, made to Russia in 1990, as apart of negotiations involved in establishing the treaty that reunified Germany, that NATO, an inherently anti-Russian military bloc, would not extend eastwards beyond the German boarder (Der Spiegel Nov 26 2009), and have, since 2005, set in motion the formal process to give Ukraine, essentially Russian territory for more than 300 years, membership in both the EU and NATO. Yet nearly all western leaders, and today’s political commentators, with the odd exception of The Nation magazine, The Mail columnist Peter Hitchens, and French public intellectual Emmanuel Todd, seem to have forgotten the history of this region altogether, and, in so doing, have adapted a provocative attitude that has already resulted in a proxy-war between the U.S. and Russia, the worlds two largest nuclear powers, and risks evolving into something much more dangerous.
In honor of the rediscovery of an old Harper Lee manuscript, let us take the lesson we warmed to as middle-school readers of To Kill a Mockingbird, and try to see this whole situation in somebody else’s shoes. In this case, let it be a hypothetical Russian government, which would only choose to act for the best. Let us then see how an ideally-behaving Russia might differ from the real Russia.
Pretend, then, that you are president of Russia. Though you accept that your country is not the world power it once was, you are naturally very proud of your nation, and slightly wistful of the international influence it once enjoyed. However, facts are facts, and you accept your nation’s defeat in the cold war. Since that defeat, some 15 years ago, you have never for a minute considered trying to re-establish the Soviet empire. In defiance even of your own patriotic sympathies, you have recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine, a country that remains to a large extent Russian-speaking — in the east it is almost entirely Russian-speaking — which has been essentially a part of Russia for more than 300 years. However, you are also very conscious of the horrors that Russians have endured, over the centuries, at the hands of expansionist European powers, from Middle-Age Roman Catholic crusaders, to Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Hitler. You are willing, and indeed have been willing, to make sacrifices, including giving up Ukraine, as the just consequence of having lost the Cold War. But, you remember that your country only did so after the repeated assurances of western leaders, including those of former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker who, in a 1990 speech in Moscow, said that the anti-Russian military alliance called NATO, which for some reason still exists, even though the Warsaw Pact was dissolved after the fall of the USSR, would not expand, “once inch” beyond East Germany (Der Spiegel, Nov 26, 2009). Since 2004, this promise has been violated, as new former Warsaw Pact countries have been allowed to join NATO.
You become even more sore in 2005 when invitations were extended to Ukraine, the “elder sister of Russia — to appropriate the metaphor used to describe France’s relationship to the Roman Church — and a path to EU membership as well. For, being aware of your nation’s bloody history, and in particular the 10 million Russians who died as a result of Hitler’s invasion in World War II, you are always apprehensive of another great European power’s making its way eastwards.
This new power is undoubtedly the European Union. At the close of 2013, great protests erupt in Kiev after the Ukrainian government accepted your monetary aid package, in preference to a much less generous European package, and somehow the Americans are calling fowl. You breath a momentary sigh of relief when a peace settlement is reached, and concessions offered, only to witness, days later, a coup d état of specifically anti-Russian, American-supported protesters. You harbor no illusions about the sanctity of this new regime. You know that Ukrainian governments have always been extremely corrupt, just as your own government is corrupt, and you fear for the vocal pro-Russian, and anti-European communities in Eastern Ukraine, and especially in Crimea. Confronted by all this, what do you do?
All of this would seem to show nothing but honest thinking on the part of Russia. The propriety of their next actual step, however, is a little less clear: Russia decides to deploy military forces in Crimea to allow for a referendum to take place that would enable the un-abashedly pro-Russian people of that peninsula to become part of Russia, instead of having to continue under the authority of an explicitly anti-Russian, revolutionary regime. It was perhaps not the right thing for Russia to have done. But to say, in light of all of this history, that it is a simple question of black and white, sufficient to justify the worldwide demonization of the Russian regime, at the expense of far worse human rights violators, many of whom marched last month in a unity rally with President Holland in Paris, is ludicrous. The West cries foul at Russian support for anti-government forces in Ukraine (you can’t quite call them rebels, when the Kiev government were rebels before they were); and yet, all the while, America and EU have been channeling money into Kiev. At last check, America has proposed directly arming Kiev forces (NY Times Feb 2), and the NATO secretary general has proposed sending 30,000 troops to Ukraine, and setting up 6 new command posts (Guardian, Feb 5). Perhaps this is not all as clear-cut as the West would like the world to think.
The larger point, though, is that, if history is any guide, the more we pressure and antagonize Russia with sanctions, EU and NATO expansion, and this proxy war, the less likely Russia will ever back down, and the less likely the deeply corrupt Moscow regime will begin to reform itself, and adapt basic western notions of political and economic freedom. Is it really possible that Russia will be felled by mere economic sanctions after all it has endured, over the centuries, in conflicts previous to this one? I would not at all be surprised if Russia would allow a quarter of its population to starve or freeze to death, before it should admit to defeat.
Yet, in continuing to prosecute the conflict ourselves, utterly ignorant of Russia’s own history, and its great national pride, we risk provoking a global war between nuclear powers, of catastrophic consequences. We may haply come to some settlement in this war that can provide the foundations of a new, free Ukraine. But it will come at the expense of so greatly antagonizing Moscow, that we would be putting back the prospect of a politically more free, and economically more integrated Russia, for generations to come.
