Трезвый взгляд на Американо-Русскую войну на украине со стороны.
The Ukrainian Mirror
by Lucio Caracciolo
The test posed by Ukraine has led to a negative result for Moscow, a positive outcome for Washington and a catastrophic one for the EU. What's at stake is the redefinition of the always fickle borders between the Russian Empire and the Euro-Atlantic area.
1. In a crisis one reveals oneself for what one is, not for what one wishes one was, and this also applies to geopolitical players. The test posed by Ukraine to Russians, Americans and Europeans has led to a negative result for Moscow, a positive outcome for Washington and a catastrophic one for the European Union. This is a very provisional analysis that will need to be reassessed in the near future and yet, it is unavoidable if one wishes to make sense of a match in which the most important element at stake is the redefinition of the always fickle borders between the Russian Empire and the Euro-Atlantic area. We shall see.
Russia has taken home Crimea with its glorious Sebastopol, a consolation prize compared to losing its albeit relative control over Kiev, ice-cold relations with the United States and a family crisis with its German partner. Moscow is, above all, paying the price for its brilliant military operation on the shores of the Black Sea with capital flight, a more fragile rouble, uncertainty surrounding development projects linked to interdependence with the European energy market - what will happen to the South Stream? - and scepticism about the Eurasian Union, a soft version of the partial reconquering of former Soviet regions. Supporting Crimea, considering the infrastructures needed to ensure its autonomy from Ukraine and with local Russians expecting to be bankrolled by their old/new homeland - not to mention the restless Muslim Tartar minority exposed to jihadist contagion - will cost the Kremlin at least $20 billion for three years. While co-celebrating the re-annexation of the peninsula, Prime Minister Dmitrij Medvedev warned: “All this is now our headache.” (1)
America halted Putin’s ambition to renew the global calibre of Russian power based on his tactical dexterity, rather than on his country’s strategic resources. After experiencing Russia’s chess skills in Syria and on the Iranian issue, having ascertained with disgust Moscow’s manoeuvring ability in the vast world that is ill at ease with the West’s arrogance to dictate a global agenda (BRICS group) and even with the framework of NATO (in agreement with Berlin, the jewel in the crown of Putin’s geopolitics), Washington has now counterattacked. Riding high on “Europa Square” (Jevromajdan), which for months incarnated the revolt of the Ukrainian people oppressed by a hyper-corrupt regime, Obama has obliged Putin to once again concentrate on his own backyard, to overexpose himself from a propaganda - not his strongest point - and military perspective, a resource Moscow tends to overestimate, at least as much as the minstrels of “civil Europe” underestimate it. All this in order to drive out the nightmare that a “Europa Square” scenario might return to haunt parts of Red Square.
We Europeans have been confirmed as pale and unrealistic bit players. While it is possible that in ‘extra time’ Putin might manage a draw and Obama’s success will be consequently downsized, it seems to me improbable that the partners of the European Union, especially us Italians, will be able to improve their status. The EU “family” is divided between two extremes, those who consider Russia’s stability as a good thing for everyone, worth almost any price also because we buy 29% of our gas from Moscow, half of which comes to us through Ukraine; and the those who in the battle for Kiev would like to see it sucked in by the vortex at its western border, to then disintegrate like the Soviet Union - which would also present those nostalgic of roll-back with the consequences of their wishes. This would not only involve northerners against Mediterranean people, central-easterners against westerners, with Germans unsuccessfully committed to moderating the cacophony of orchestra members unwilling to read off the same score. This partition divides national establishments from within, with the instinctively conservative financial and industrial worlds busy safeguarding their contacts and investments in the Russian market, and causes the increasingly irrelevant political theatre to perform resounding and inane litanies about democracy and peace threatened by the Russian bear, with the single result of persuading the Ukrainians of our hypocrisy and the Russians of Putin’s genius.
And there is more. The Ukrainian affair reminds that we are not masters of the house we live in. On the contrary, we continue to divide it, increasing the disputed regions, inviting in external formal and informal powers. There is a dogma that unites us: we must never assume responsibility for ourselves. We should therefore not be surprised by the elegant synthesis expressed by Obama’s envoy to the Jevromajdan, Victoria Nuland who said: “Fuck the European Union!” (2)
The long-term effect of our inconsistency, all too obvious in the battle for Kiev, is the balkanisation of the Old Continent. The more we sing the reassuring ditty about European integration, the more we count new borders, be they informal or official, cutting out confetti of Europe. The no-man’s lands handed over to the rivalry between groups of criminals dressed up as politicians and marked by autistic nationalisms, are the outcome of our geopolitical season. This continent currently experiencing marked fragmentation is no threat to American interests over the short-term, is tolerable (within certain limits) for the Russians, but increasingly less reassuring for Europeans. The balkanisation shift could become fatal for those in the midst of a clash in which the leading players of the crisis act out their respective scripts calmly (un) aware that it is not they who will suffer the consequences but rather the local guinea pigs. The aspiring revolutionaries of the Jevromajdan, today must acknowledge that the oligarchs are still afloat, ready to inaugurate a new era. In the meantime the country, deprived of Crimea, is on the verge of bankruptcy. Other sub-Ukrainian regions, from Lvov to Donec’k have rediscovered their subjectivity. Throughout the Donbas, pro-Russians swing between super-autonomist claims and separatist temptations, clashing with interim leaders in Kiev, so aware of their own role that they have described themselves as kamikaze.
In the meantime “Europe Square” has resulted in the revival of the fierce heirs to Ukrainian pro-Nazism, the Russophobe, anti-Polish, anti-Semite supporters of a “national genotype.” All this amidst the almost total indifference of the European Union, which, in 2000, condemned Austria because of Haider - a bland conservative compared to the militiamen of the Pravyj Sektor - and that in recent years has contemplated with serene detachment both Orbán’s Greater Hungarian inclinations and revivals of xenophobic particularisms dotted all over maps of the continent, and not only in the East.
More than twenty years after the Yugoslav wars, which were supposed to present to the world the peace-making and orderly virtues of a united Europe, the Ukrainian row relegates us to the rank of a negligible and often ignored quantity., alternatively operated by the Americans or conditioned by the Russians, and in Italy’s case both at once. The result was a revolution started in the name of European values (which ones?) that clashed with the cynicism, indifference and manipulations of members of a club it intended to join, effectively not prepared to even admit the Ukrainians into its living room.
The following five bullet points are a self-portrait of us Europeans seen in the test posed by the Ukraine.
A) The European Union not only is not a geopolitical player, but is less important than the sum of all its member states and even less important than many of them.
B) When weapons are involved, the only weapon we can use is that of rhetoric, and invoke the protection of our American ally, who will never again land in Normandy since it is now concentrated on itself, and, subsequently on the challenge posed by China. Europe’s relinquishing of its right to co-decision-making in what remains of the Atlantic Alliance, allows the main partner to establish what our interests are - or rather, their non-existence.
C) Europe’s perceptions of Russia are varied and often contradictory, depending on distances from Moscow, and pro-Russian sentiment and historical memories are usually directly proportional to this distance. Only those once occupied by Russians believe they truly know them
D) European fondness for America continues to remain linked to fear of Russia.
E) Strategic dependence on an albeit reluctant Mother America means that, should we distance ourselves from Washington, we would have to pay the price; energy interdependence with Russia implies that if sanctions are applied against Moscow, we sanction ourselves.
For those in Italy and Europe still having a degree of curiosity about their immediate future, it will therefore be useless to investigate what Moscow and Washington’s plans for Ukraine are and how they fit in with Europe’s vain ambitions, especially those of Kiev’s neighbours. It is first best to analyse in-depth the epicentre of this confrontation, since it is only taking into account Ukraine’s specific historical-geopolitical conditions, and those of its neighbours, that one will realise how costly - and thus improbable - the ambitions of those intending to influence its destiny are, and how few resources are possessed by the Ukrainian patriots interested in the security and affluence of their country.
2. As set out in the etymology of its name, Ukraine is a frontier land, a significant part of the fluid historical area between the Russian and European empires (specifically the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Hapsburg monarchy, and the German Reichs). The Ukrainian drama must therefore be understood in the context of this area under uncertain geopolitical pressures, where entire nations vanish or reappear due to the effect of conflict between the powers disputing them. It is the central-eastern front of the Old Continent, trapped between the Baltic and Black Seas, where nowadays Moscow, Washington and Berlin’s magnetic spheres of influence intersect. Its geopolitical power varies depending on the observer and the historical period. According to Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the champion of Polish independence between the two wars, this area should have become the cornerstone of the Intermarium, the ambitious project involving the reinvention in a larger version of the Lublin Union, with the Zaporizhian Cossacks personified by modern Ukrainians, to create an anti-Bolshevik alliance.
According to the Russian imperial perspective, this same area is inverted and reduced to an access corridor to the Perednjaja Azija, the European peninsula seen through the eyes of a tsar. For those who lived there in the course of the past century, finally, this is the theatre of bloody conflicts - the Bloodlands narrated by Timothy Snyder, Hitler and Stalin’s abattoirs (3). It is a “geopolitical void”, little more than an ‘intermezzo’, whose lack of real unity has sucked surrounding powers into two world wars. (Andrew Wilson). (4) Still today the pendulum appears to sway between the rehabilitation of euro-oriental borderlands as channels of communication between Russia and the Old Continent, and their return to being the outpost for a “clash of civilisations” between incompatible universes, busy redefining their reciprocal borders in an atmosphere overcharged with once universalistic ideologies (communism versus liberalism) nowadays self-centred on “national characteristics.”
The problem for Ukraine is that the East-West line of separation cuts through the country, slipping a few hundred kilometres depending on the prevailing geopolitical wind. Just like the strategic nebula it belongs to, the Ukrainian constellation can be modulated according to different points of view. Its very existence is at times questioned, as according to those observing from Moscow within classical imperial coordinates, Ukraine does not exist, the region is “Little Russia”, while according to patriots in Kiev, this is their proud independent homeland, foretold almost two centuries ago by the national bard, Taras Ševčenko.
Digging deeper in the interior of the Ukrainian state, partitions concern, for example, the geo-religious environment, where the Christian tradition confronts the agnostic or strictly atheist results of the seventy-year-long Soviet period. Above all, here one crosses the dividing ridge between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Greek-Catholics, based in Galicia, tend to identify with anti-Russian nationalism and/or to portray themselves as the custodians of a Ukrainian Quebec in a prevalently Russian context (Mykola Riabčuk). (5) They distinguish themselves from both the affiliated Orthodox linked with their own rites to the patriarchate of Moscow, and from their cousins belonging to the Patriarchate of Kiev - created when Ukraine became independent and therefore consubstantial to the country - as well as from the autocephalous church created in 1921. The current crisis has marked the ethnic-linguistic differences, exalted as characterising identity by the more extreme forces. The fact remains that the population consists for three-quarters of Ukrainians, for less than a fifth of Russians, although this very particular taxonomy often turns out to be forced. The small Byelorussian, Moldavian, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, Jewish, Greek, Bulgarian and Tartar etc. minorities remind one of the multi-ethnic aspects of this frontier land.
Finally, Kiev is both the cradle of eternal Russia according to consolidated Muscovite mythology, and the cradle of the Ukrainian nation according to recent autochthon pedagogy. Hence, there is a permanent vocation for instability that, since 1991, has characterised independent Ukraine, the first real experiment of a national state those lands have ever known, with the exception of proto-national oleographs aimed at strengthening identity that portrays remote golden eras and the brief republican experiment under fire in the civil war between the “whites” and the “reds.” The absence of statehood traditions results in weak institutional legitimacy. Ukrainian patriots tend to compensate for this through nationalistic hypertrophy. Russians, both inside and at times outside the new Ukraine, instead resort to denying Kiev’s identity, subsumed into their own.
One deduces that this Ukrainian state can only flourish with its many souls sharing the management of power, otherwise the country is divided in half as in the last general election, and according to the Jevromajdan movement, implodes. The solution involving such an agreement has so far been neglected or only briefly mentioned. The alternative path only started with the secession of Crimea. In the absence of compromise between all the internal and external players involved in the current crisis, territorial decomposition threatens to spread like wildfire along and through fault lines distinguishing the pro-Russian regions in the south and the east from the “real Ukraine” of the centre and the west. This would be a simplistic but effective bi-partition also because it is a current one in the international media and is exasperated by Russian propaganda.
The decisive geopolitical stigma that complicates the prognosis for the future of the current Ukrainian state, derives from its Soviet matrix. It became a state on December 1st 1991, defining as international the administrative borders of the Soviet Socialist Ukrainian Republic, designed and amended by Lenin, Stalin and Khruščëv. The Georgian dictator also made the choice in 1945 to annex Catholic Polish and Hapsburg Galicia, never before contained within the Imperial Russian perimeter, rising to become the epicentre of the most anti-Moscow and anti-Polish Ukrainianism of the brief but intense cooperation between Ukrainian nationalist militias and German “liberators” during World War II. In 1954, his successor instead separated Crimea - which at the end of the 18th century Catherine II had converted from Ottoman Tartar province to Russia’s Mediterranean outpost - from the Russian Soviet Socialist Federal Republic to assign it to the homologous Ukrainian section of the Bolshevik area, allegedly under the influence of two glasses of cheap cognac.
Having the culturally and geographically opposed Galician and Crimean elements under the same ‘roof’ complicated the achievement of a shared national identity to support the independent state. Nor was it imaginable that, just recently emancipated from the Soviet empire, Kiev would devote itself to inventing a Ukrainian-Russian mini-empire, or even a mixed-blood variation of its original cultures.
While during the Nineties Ukrainians were involved in setting up the identity agenda for the new republic, balancing patriotism’s requirements and euro-Atlantic suggestions with economic and geopolitical dependency on their cumbersome Russian neighbour, degenerate oligarchic power spread throughout the country. The sudden mutation from being the USSR’s western and Mediterranean outpost to an independent state, provided the communist nomenclature and its astute offspring a chance to become wealthy without running any risks, self-privatising the most important Ukrainian industries. This had three consequences, all still very relevant; the monopoly of key economic sectors held by a few high-flying speculators; the assertion of these oligarchs as the masters not only of the national wealth - one hundred people control 80% of the GDP (6) - but also of politics, a field which they dominate directly (as done in the past by “gas princess” Julija Tymošenko, then by Viktor Janukovič, and tomorrow perhaps by the king of chocolate Petro Porošenko) or through their puppets (the opposite of Putin’s Russia where they are accustomed to taking care of their own business as long as they do not stick their noses into the rooms of the Kremlin).
Jevromajdan is the natural child of daily scandals rather than of a Europeanist vocation or refractoriness to Great Russia’s revanchism. It was intolerance of “the oligarchic democracy” (7) - following the failure of the 2004 “orange revolution” - that inspired the crowds last winter filling dozens of Ukrainian squares, even in mainly Russian-speaking and pro-Russian regions, protesting against the oligarch president Viktor Janukovič. His last minute ‘about turn’ on November 28th when in Vilnius he refused to sign the protocol for European Union membership - more than debatable from an economic perspective - was the fuse that sparked the spontaneous explosion of which we are still experiencing the effects. Janukovič’s yielding to Putin’s pressure was too obvious to take seriously the pragmatic reasons for his refusal, very clear, however, to the head of the current interim government, Arsenij Jacenjuk, who has signed a political agreement with Brussels but not the economic clauses that have little respect for Ukrainian national interests.
The fact remains that almost everyone in Kiev is aware that Brussels is not an alternative to economic dependency on Moscow. At best it is an additive. Without significant subsidies from the Kremlin, granted until Janukovič fled, Ukrainians would have “vanished into thin air” as observed by the director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, obliged by the geopolitical contingency to approve a $14 billion to $18 billion loan in exchange for unlikely structural reforms (8). This will not exempt future Ukrainian leaders from renegotiating economic ties with Russia, which, in the meantime, has doubled the price of gas sold until now at para-Soviet conditions.
3. “Prospects are bad. It appears that divergences between the East and the West have become too profound to be healed. At a certain point it seemed these two worlds could live side by side; but obviously that is no longer the case. Russia has returned to the already tainted idea of security in terms of territory - the more one has the safer one feels (…). Should the West give in to all Russia’s proposals the result would, over the short term, be that it would be faced with a new series of needs.” (9)
The person who spoke those words is not a modern Russophobe Estonian, but the then Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, Maksim Litvinov, on June 18th 1946, while on a suffocating hot summer day he burned a number of secret documents in the fireplace in his office, having heard that Stalin had “dismissed” him due to his excessive readiness to compromise with the Americans. His confession was made to the CBS correspondent in Moscow, who immediately informed the diplomatic network. Hence Litvinov’s geopolitical testament came to Truman’s attention, and he would closely bear it in mind when defining the containment strategy destined to suffocate the rival superpower.
After Russia’s annexation of Crimea, in Washington as in other Atlantic capitals, containment is once again fashionable, to the extent that one would think we had returned to a Cold War status. In this case, the crisis’ truth-effect informs us that in the strategic élites and the western media, the anti-Russian mentality (formerly a synonym for anti-Red) taken with milk for half a century has left behind traces of itself. Will Ukraine really spark a new Cold War, with Putin playing the role of Stalin and Obama/Truman committed to planning his containment?
No. And not only as appears obvious but is not, because history does not repeat itself and diachronic analogies so dear to the media and to political analysts are useful for propaganda or careers rather than for understanding current events. It is for three other reasons.
A) The Cold War never really completely ended, because its roots are geopolitical rather than ideological. For America the issue is protecting itself from the emergence of a rival power in Eurasia, little does it matter whether Buddhist or vegan. For Russia the point is moving its western border as far away from Moscow as possible seeing that the American-led Atlantic Alliance continues to be mistrustful. The Cold War is not a segment of history but a permanent curvature of contemporary geopolitics, with its acute crises and its lethargic periods. Its events did not end with the USSR’s suicide. To end the match with Moscow, the United States would have had to annihilate the empire, not divide it up, humiliating it. However, to do this they would have been called upon to pay an inconceivable price, that of running a ruined Soviet empire, possibly following a nuclear attack. Hence the ashes of the Cold War continue to smoulder. The Ukrainian spark has reignited a few flames to the delight of retired Kremlin experts and the still many who are nostalgic of the Soviet empire. And they are not only Russians.
B) Obama has dedicated his double mandate to extricating America from debilitating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He does not have a global strategy, although the pivot to Asia indicates a priority external to the European scenario, the epicentre of a permanent stand-off with Russia. The United States has not yet decided what to do about China, whether to neutralise it in an inclusive manner or set up a containment system (again!) with supposed Asian partners. America is committed to extremely delicate negotiations with Iran, trying to influence upheaval in the Islamic world without ending up involved, setting up an umpteenth feint on the Israeli-Palestinian front while searching for a modus vivendi with an unreliable Saudi partner and a cantankerous Israeli brother. In the meantime, the United States continues to keep alive the antiterrorist paradigm with covert operations, so imagine if there is time to concentrate on Putin. By establishing that Russia is now only a “regional power,” (10) Obama wished to nip in the bud the temptation to reawaken the ghost of the Russian bear, meandering through Congress and in some corners of his government, as well as in Atlantic arms industries, NATO and “New Europe’s” partners, led by Balkan states.
C) East and West, Moscow and Washington are no longer the alpha and omega of global geopolitics. The world changes quickly and refuses to choose sides. These are no longer the days of alliances, but if anything of temporary alignments. Friends and enemies of the former super-powers have acknowledged Russia’s modest enlargement and America’s post-war on terror repositioning. Hence new aspiring leading players on the international stage, from Brazil to India and South Africa, have avoided taking sides in the Ukraine match. For many Europeans, a very large number of Russians and a few Jevromajdan Americans, this has been perceived as a historical watershed. But the rest of the world thought nothing of the sort. Even China did not share Russia’s line, both because at best it considers Moscow a junior tactical partner, to be activated in order to extract a few advantages in the strategic confrontation with the United States, and because any secession, such as the one Moscow provoked in Crimea, is an anathema for those who must worry about Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang.
However, because since the end of the Cold War, Washington has officially invested $5 billion in Ukraine (plus at least as much informally) in order to prevent it returning under Russian control, Obama took advantage of Jevromajdan to amortise its investment. There was no need for special solicitations by the White House to mobilise its diplomacy, intelligence agencies and domestic and friendly NGOs (George Soros’ Open Society is a perfect example), when it became clear that Putin’s team in Kiev was about to be trashed by the protest. Emergency aid, including 300,000 military rations that ended up on the black market run by local bloodsuckers, political-diplomatic and propaganda support for the opposition, threats and flattery for the pro-regime oligarchs to make them change sides (with success guaranteed by mentions of their foreign bank accounts), infiltration in agreement with secret services friendly and allied with the police forces and militias that intervened in the decisive stages of the uprising to overturn the regime and present the compromise between Janukovič and the Polish, French and German Foreign Minister, would all allow the Russians to get by almost without consequences. In this way, Obama put Putin on the defensive, philosophically accepting the unexpected countermove in Crimea. Merkel too was put on the defensive, having exaggerated her protests about having her mobile phone spied on by U.S. intelligence, and was under the illusion that she could return Germany to play in the global First Division and above all had not given up the relationship of convenience with Russia set up by her predecessors and based on energy interdependence.
There is still the most important question that Obama refuses to answer. Having clarified that Americans do not intend to die for Crimea and not even for Kiev, what is the red line Putin is allowed to advance towards without facing armed resistance from the United States and NATO? Some European leaders theoretically protected by the Atlantic umbrella, are wondering whether this line really exists. Henry Kissinger is right when he summarises the euro-Atlantic approach to the Ukraine test with one of his explicit statements: “For the West the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” (11)
4. Putin has a geopolitical agenda. His objective is the opposite of Obama’s. He does not accept to be relegated to the division for regional powers, like any old Brazil. He demands to be treated as an equal of the United Stated and China, with which he aims to rewrite the rules of the international game. Putin’s vision of the authoritarian, traditionalist, in fact rational world would once have made him a superior emulator of Alexander I, tsar of the Holy Alliance. His inclination to treat diplomacy like a chess match, merged with restrictions introduced with his training as a spy - an obsession with detail to the detriment of an overall perception and an urge to imagine what is hidden while ignoring what is obvious - makes him an alien in the contemporary anomic universe. In the age of savage finance and pseudo-religious fanaticism, of an absence of shared rules and the de-legitimisation of politics, on a planet with no directors but many aspiring improvising matadors, the Russian leader’s talents are not as effective as they would have been in the orderly days of cooperation between powers or during the Cold War. His hyperrealism can at time appear unrealistic. Ukraine docet. Alexander made it all the way to Paris; it is unlikely Putin will retake Kiev.
The Ukrainian test also confirms that the Russian leader does not have resources to match his ambitions. The objective is to retake lands considered Russian, imperial or unable to equip themselves with statehood, in order to place them together with Kazakhstan, Byelorussia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, in a Eurasian Union, thus in Moscow’s new empire. All this with the Russian language as the imperial Esperanto and business idiom. This sphere of super-influence would not be self-serving, but a condition for affirming Russia’s right to rank as a global power. During the first years of his mandate, Putin aimed at achieving this in a direct manner, negotiating it within the context of being part of the Russian Federation as an independent element within the euro-Atlantic framework and joining NATO and the European Union. He found the door firmly locked by both Americans and Europeans. The then president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, told him that Russia was too big to join the EU. The fact is that Russia’s demographic and economic size is insufficient for Americans and Chinese to guarantee the country equal status, not to mention the un-enchanting memories of Bolshevism tarnishing Russia’s post-Soviet brand, not only in the west and resulting in a deficit of soft power. Russia’s formidable mining treasure, its nuclear power as well as its respectable conventional military power currently undergoing rapid modernisation and exhibited with success in Crimean operations, together with its reverence for Russian history, culture and science, induce Putin to not make do with the rank of a continental power to which Obama continues to relegate him.
The president of Russia is the opposite of his American counterpart also in temperament. Putin is emotional and therefore tends towards sincerity also when his position and training forbid it. Listen to him as he proclaims Crimea’s annexation in the Kremlin, attacking the westerners who have humiliated and offended him: “How many times have they lied to us, made decisions behind our backs, and presented us with a fait accompli! It happened with NATO’s expansion to the East, and also when they deployed military infrastructures at our borders. They continued to repeat the same words to us - “well, this is not your business.” Easy for them to say. (…) In brief, we have every reason to assume that the infamous containment policies applied in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, still continue today. They (the westerners, editor’s note) constantly try to put us in a corner because our position is an independent one, because we maintain it and call things by their name and are not hypocrites.” Hence the reclamation of Crimea is nothing but a measured reaction to the “fascist” coup d’état in Kiev - because that is what it was according to Putin who said, “Russia found itself unable to withdraw. If you push matters too far the reaction can be powerful.” (12).
So Putin does have a red line. It is unacceptable to him that Ukraine, and perhaps also Georgia, Byelorussia and other former Soviet subjects should follow in the footsteps of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, crossing over to the Atlantic side.
Putin uses three levers to keep the pressure on Kiev. Firstly an economic and in particular energy-linked one, placing the “new” Ukrainian leaders - a definition hard to apply to the favourites in the presidential election scheduled for May 25th, hence former premier Julija Tymošenko and Petro Porošenko, a minister under Juščenko and Janukovič - faced with the fact that their country has no future if it cuts the umbilical cord binding it to the Russian market and to gas. There is then the military threat. Crimea is a small sample of the Kremlin’s determination to resort to force and of America’s unwillingness to oppose Russia directly on the ground. The geopolitical and economic costs of invading central-southern Ukraine would perhaps be unsustainable. But this cannot be excluded if Moscow wishes to remain credible. Finally there is the mobilisation of Ukrainian Russians against Kiev’s coup, part of the vast army of ethnic Russians spread all over the former Soviet ecumene over which Putin has opened his paternal umbrella. Twenty million “red feet” that Moscow considers integrally part of the national demography, just like its own citizens, whose security must be guaranteed with all means. In this sense Crimea may become a model.
These are all double-edged swords. Energy pressure on Kiev strengthens those in the European Union and above all in America aiming to reduce interdependence between the Russian supplier and the European consumer, even evoking the coming substitution of Gazprom’s methane with the liquid natural gas the United States has said it can sell us. And yet it will take a number of years before the infrastructures needed to bring North American liquid gas to European markets in decent quantities will be available on both shores of the Atlantic. That is on condition that American companies intend to privilege us rather than the more lucrative Asian market. The flexing of Russian muscles, then, is a deterrent against Kiev and other neighbours, but will also be used to legitimise their rearming and, more importantly, to speed up the modernisation of NATO forces. No one can forget that the USSR also disintegrated because it could not keep up in the weapons war launched by Reagan. For Putin, the ethnic card means backing off from the imperial idea of Russian statehood founded on its multinational characteristics. Ethnic nationalism and imperialism are incompatible. While in the case of Ukraine it was perhaps a foregone conclusion for the Kremlin to emphasize its duty to assist its Crimean brothers, the shift from political Russianness (rossijskaja) to having ethnicity (russkaja) as the benchmark for Putin’s geopolitics is an incentive for numerous ultra-nationalist and even racist elements rooted deeply in Russia. Today these elements approve of the president’s Crimean performance, but tomorrow may turn against him due to an alleged recklessness regards to the West.
5. “The collapse of the Soviet Union in the last decades of the 20th century was not only the conclusion of the seventy-year-old history of the multi-national communist empire, it was rather the final act of the over four-century-long history of the Russian multi-ethnic state.” (13) The sentence passed by the Swiss historian Andreas Kappeler, immediately after the extinction of the USSR, deserves being re-addressed in view of the Ukrainian test. The original anti-regime sentiment expressed in “Europa Square,” was overwhelmed by violently anti-Russian rhetoric, with the moskali (a derogatory Ukrainian word for “Muscovites”, meaning Russians) in the not only propagandist sights of gangs of armed activists, admirably organised in paramilitary formations. And, furthermore, Russia’s annexation of Crimea was legitimised by Putin as the protection of ethnic Russians wherever they may be and greeted with emphasis by the paradoxically Hitlerian nostalgics circulating with impunity in the Federation’s public sphere. Moreover, in Crimea, the revived Tatar-Islamic question resulted in the solidarity of blood-related Russian Tatarstan as well as that of neo-Ottoman Turkey and the global jihadists. Much seems to indicate that Kappeler’s thesis may develop in its most extreme sense.
The former Soviet region runs the risk of becoming a training area for “suicide nationalisms” to use the words with which on August 1st 1991, in Kiev, George Bush Sr, quoting Lord Acton, warned Ukrainians celebrating their freedom from Soviet domination, saying, “The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.” Adding, “Yet freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” (14)
Kappeler’s diagnosis and Bush’s recipe form the preconditions for addressing the Ukrainian crisis before it degenerates into a civil war and/or Russian armed intervention. The current outcome is a compromise that will not end the match or tone down the poisonous rhetoric. The general terms of the agreement are evident to Russian and American negotiators who, from the very beginning, protected by the veil of their reciprocal propaganda, are committed to keeping the explosive potential of the crisis under control. This more or less involves:
a) Guaranteeing Ukraine’s independence as a neutral state, with a de facto Russian Crimea not acknowledged as such by the West and almost all the rest of the world, rather like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania during the Cold War;
b) Incorporating Kiev in the European economic area, but not as an alternative to relations with the Russian and Eurasian one, and above all with no geopolitical-military inference (no NATO although no one will want to put this in writing);
c) Open hefty lines of credit to Ukraine, in particular via the International Monetary Fund and European institutions, to prevent a default, re-negotiating at the same time the price and quality of Russian hydrocarbon flows in Ukraine, and from there to Europe, which the government in Kiev will commit to not extract a tribute for as has happened so far, in exchange for Gazprom using a softer approach regarding the mega-credit held;
d) Reforming the constitution in federalist terms, protecting the rights of all minorities, without attributing to regions para-sovereign powers that would permit some of them to follow Crimea’s example; safeguarding the Russian language albeit not raising it at a national level to the same rank as Ukrainian;
e) Banning all armed militias in the hope that the next elections will downsize the desires of ultra-nationalists who are well-represented in the interim government.
The last word goes to the Ukrainian people. Many Jevromajdan protesters are disappointed. They see chaos and poverty rather than liberal order, democracy and longed-for affluence. The oligarchs will not give up; they will change their uniforms. There is still fear of Russian intervention and civil war. Normal post-revolutionary syndrome? Perhaps. But nothing else is normal here.
Endnotes
1 - Quoted in A. MALASHENKO, “Will the Crimean Tatars Become Russia’s Headache?”, Carnegie Moscow Center, 3.4.2014, http://carnegie.ru/eurasiaoutlook/?fa=55220
2- See “Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call”, Bbc News, 7.2.2014.
3 - See T. SNYDER, Bloodlands .
4 - A. WILSON, The Ukrainians. An Unexpected Nation, New Haven-London, 2002, Yale University Press, p. 289.
5 - Ivi, p. 313.
6 - See O. HOLOYDA, “Ukrainian Oligarchs and the “Family”, a New Generation of Czars - or Hope for the Middle Class?”, Irex scholar research brief (August 2013).
7 - Definition by the Polish analyst (now a diplomat) Sławomir Matuszak, in his essay “The Oligarchic Democracy. The Influence of Business Groups on Ukrainian Politics”, Osw paper n. 42, Varsavia (Sept.2012).
8 - Quoted in “Ukraine’s Economy Would Have Collapsed Without Russian Aid - IMF Chief”, Ria-Novosti, 3/4/2013.
9. C. HOTTELET, “Ultimes paroles de Maxim Litvinov”, Bulletin B.e.i.p.i., supplement to no. 78 of 1-15.12.1952. Then see W. BEDELL SMITH’s telegram (Moscow) to J. BYRNES, 21.1.1946, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. VI, pp. 763-5.
10. Citato in S. WILSON, “Obama dismisses Russia as ‘regional power’ acting out of weakness”, The Washington Post, 25.3.2014.
11. H. A. KISSINGER, “How the Ukraine crisis ends”, The Washington Post, 6.3.2014.
12. “Address by President of the Russian Federation”, 18.3.2014, http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/6889
13. A. KAPPELER, La Russia. Storia di un impero multietnico, Roma, Edizioni Lavoro 2009 (second ed.), p. 3.
14. “Chicken Kiev speech. Full text of President George H. Bush’s speech, later dubbed the ‘Chicken Kiev Speech’ by commentator William Safire, to a session of the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine, 1 August 1991”, http.//en.wikisource.org/wiki/Chicken _Kiev_speech
(16 Aprile 2014)
отсельва
by Lucio Caracciolo
The test posed by Ukraine has led to a negative result for Moscow, a positive outcome for Washington and a catastrophic one for the EU. What's at stake is the redefinition of the always fickle borders between the Russian Empire and the Euro-Atlantic area.
1. In a crisis one reveals oneself for what one is, not for what one wishes one was, and this also applies to geopolitical players. The test posed by Ukraine to Russians, Americans and Europeans has led to a negative result for Moscow, a positive outcome for Washington and a catastrophic one for the European Union. This is a very provisional analysis that will need to be reassessed in the near future and yet, it is unavoidable if one wishes to make sense of a match in which the most important element at stake is the redefinition of the always fickle borders between the Russian Empire and the Euro-Atlantic area. We shall see.
Russia has taken home Crimea with its glorious Sebastopol, a consolation prize compared to losing its albeit relative control over Kiev, ice-cold relations with the United States and a family crisis with its German partner. Moscow is, above all, paying the price for its brilliant military operation on the shores of the Black Sea with capital flight, a more fragile rouble, uncertainty surrounding development projects linked to interdependence with the European energy market - what will happen to the South Stream? - and scepticism about the Eurasian Union, a soft version of the partial reconquering of former Soviet regions. Supporting Crimea, considering the infrastructures needed to ensure its autonomy from Ukraine and with local Russians expecting to be bankrolled by their old/new homeland - not to mention the restless Muslim Tartar minority exposed to jihadist contagion - will cost the Kremlin at least $20 billion for three years. While co-celebrating the re-annexation of the peninsula, Prime Minister Dmitrij Medvedev warned: “All this is now our headache.” (1)
America halted Putin’s ambition to renew the global calibre of Russian power based on his tactical dexterity, rather than on his country’s strategic resources. After experiencing Russia’s chess skills in Syria and on the Iranian issue, having ascertained with disgust Moscow’s manoeuvring ability in the vast world that is ill at ease with the West’s arrogance to dictate a global agenda (BRICS group) and even with the framework of NATO (in agreement with Berlin, the jewel in the crown of Putin’s geopolitics), Washington has now counterattacked. Riding high on “Europa Square” (Jevromajdan), which for months incarnated the revolt of the Ukrainian people oppressed by a hyper-corrupt regime, Obama has obliged Putin to once again concentrate on his own backyard, to overexpose himself from a propaganda - not his strongest point - and military perspective, a resource Moscow tends to overestimate, at least as much as the minstrels of “civil Europe” underestimate it. All this in order to drive out the nightmare that a “Europa Square” scenario might return to haunt parts of Red Square.
We Europeans have been confirmed as pale and unrealistic bit players. While it is possible that in ‘extra time’ Putin might manage a draw and Obama’s success will be consequently downsized, it seems to me improbable that the partners of the European Union, especially us Italians, will be able to improve their status. The EU “family” is divided between two extremes, those who consider Russia’s stability as a good thing for everyone, worth almost any price also because we buy 29% of our gas from Moscow, half of which comes to us through Ukraine; and the those who in the battle for Kiev would like to see it sucked in by the vortex at its western border, to then disintegrate like the Soviet Union - which would also present those nostalgic of roll-back with the consequences of their wishes. This would not only involve northerners against Mediterranean people, central-easterners against westerners, with Germans unsuccessfully committed to moderating the cacophony of orchestra members unwilling to read off the same score. This partition divides national establishments from within, with the instinctively conservative financial and industrial worlds busy safeguarding their contacts and investments in the Russian market, and causes the increasingly irrelevant political theatre to perform resounding and inane litanies about democracy and peace threatened by the Russian bear, with the single result of persuading the Ukrainians of our hypocrisy and the Russians of Putin’s genius.
And there is more. The Ukrainian affair reminds that we are not masters of the house we live in. On the contrary, we continue to divide it, increasing the disputed regions, inviting in external formal and informal powers. There is a dogma that unites us: we must never assume responsibility for ourselves. We should therefore not be surprised by the elegant synthesis expressed by Obama’s envoy to the Jevromajdan, Victoria Nuland who said: “Fuck the European Union!” (2)
The long-term effect of our inconsistency, all too obvious in the battle for Kiev, is the balkanisation of the Old Continent. The more we sing the reassuring ditty about European integration, the more we count new borders, be they informal or official, cutting out confetti of Europe. The no-man’s lands handed over to the rivalry between groups of criminals dressed up as politicians and marked by autistic nationalisms, are the outcome of our geopolitical season. This continent currently experiencing marked fragmentation is no threat to American interests over the short-term, is tolerable (within certain limits) for the Russians, but increasingly less reassuring for Europeans. The balkanisation shift could become fatal for those in the midst of a clash in which the leading players of the crisis act out their respective scripts calmly (un) aware that it is not they who will suffer the consequences but rather the local guinea pigs. The aspiring revolutionaries of the Jevromajdan, today must acknowledge that the oligarchs are still afloat, ready to inaugurate a new era. In the meantime the country, deprived of Crimea, is on the verge of bankruptcy. Other sub-Ukrainian regions, from Lvov to Donec’k have rediscovered their subjectivity. Throughout the Donbas, pro-Russians swing between super-autonomist claims and separatist temptations, clashing with interim leaders in Kiev, so aware of their own role that they have described themselves as kamikaze.
In the meantime “Europe Square” has resulted in the revival of the fierce heirs to Ukrainian pro-Nazism, the Russophobe, anti-Polish, anti-Semite supporters of a “national genotype.” All this amidst the almost total indifference of the European Union, which, in 2000, condemned Austria because of Haider - a bland conservative compared to the militiamen of the Pravyj Sektor - and that in recent years has contemplated with serene detachment both Orbán’s Greater Hungarian inclinations and revivals of xenophobic particularisms dotted all over maps of the continent, and not only in the East.
More than twenty years after the Yugoslav wars, which were supposed to present to the world the peace-making and orderly virtues of a united Europe, the Ukrainian row relegates us to the rank of a negligible and often ignored quantity., alternatively operated by the Americans or conditioned by the Russians, and in Italy’s case both at once. The result was a revolution started in the name of European values (which ones?) that clashed with the cynicism, indifference and manipulations of members of a club it intended to join, effectively not prepared to even admit the Ukrainians into its living room.
The following five bullet points are a self-portrait of us Europeans seen in the test posed by the Ukraine.
A) The European Union not only is not a geopolitical player, but is less important than the sum of all its member states and even less important than many of them.
B) When weapons are involved, the only weapon we can use is that of rhetoric, and invoke the protection of our American ally, who will never again land in Normandy since it is now concentrated on itself, and, subsequently on the challenge posed by China. Europe’s relinquishing of its right to co-decision-making in what remains of the Atlantic Alliance, allows the main partner to establish what our interests are - or rather, their non-existence.
C) Europe’s perceptions of Russia are varied and often contradictory, depending on distances from Moscow, and pro-Russian sentiment and historical memories are usually directly proportional to this distance. Only those once occupied by Russians believe they truly know them
D) European fondness for America continues to remain linked to fear of Russia.
E) Strategic dependence on an albeit reluctant Mother America means that, should we distance ourselves from Washington, we would have to pay the price; energy interdependence with Russia implies that if sanctions are applied against Moscow, we sanction ourselves.
For those in Italy and Europe still having a degree of curiosity about their immediate future, it will therefore be useless to investigate what Moscow and Washington’s plans for Ukraine are and how they fit in with Europe’s vain ambitions, especially those of Kiev’s neighbours. It is first best to analyse in-depth the epicentre of this confrontation, since it is only taking into account Ukraine’s specific historical-geopolitical conditions, and those of its neighbours, that one will realise how costly - and thus improbable - the ambitions of those intending to influence its destiny are, and how few resources are possessed by the Ukrainian patriots interested in the security and affluence of their country.
2. As set out in the etymology of its name, Ukraine is a frontier land, a significant part of the fluid historical area between the Russian and European empires (specifically the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Hapsburg monarchy, and the German Reichs). The Ukrainian drama must therefore be understood in the context of this area under uncertain geopolitical pressures, where entire nations vanish or reappear due to the effect of conflict between the powers disputing them. It is the central-eastern front of the Old Continent, trapped between the Baltic and Black Seas, where nowadays Moscow, Washington and Berlin’s magnetic spheres of influence intersect. Its geopolitical power varies depending on the observer and the historical period. According to Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the champion of Polish independence between the two wars, this area should have become the cornerstone of the Intermarium, the ambitious project involving the reinvention in a larger version of the Lublin Union, with the Zaporizhian Cossacks personified by modern Ukrainians, to create an anti-Bolshevik alliance.
According to the Russian imperial perspective, this same area is inverted and reduced to an access corridor to the Perednjaja Azija, the European peninsula seen through the eyes of a tsar. For those who lived there in the course of the past century, finally, this is the theatre of bloody conflicts - the Bloodlands narrated by Timothy Snyder, Hitler and Stalin’s abattoirs (3). It is a “geopolitical void”, little more than an ‘intermezzo’, whose lack of real unity has sucked surrounding powers into two world wars. (Andrew Wilson). (4) Still today the pendulum appears to sway between the rehabilitation of euro-oriental borderlands as channels of communication between Russia and the Old Continent, and their return to being the outpost for a “clash of civilisations” between incompatible universes, busy redefining their reciprocal borders in an atmosphere overcharged with once universalistic ideologies (communism versus liberalism) nowadays self-centred on “national characteristics.”
The problem for Ukraine is that the East-West line of separation cuts through the country, slipping a few hundred kilometres depending on the prevailing geopolitical wind. Just like the strategic nebula it belongs to, the Ukrainian constellation can be modulated according to different points of view. Its very existence is at times questioned, as according to those observing from Moscow within classical imperial coordinates, Ukraine does not exist, the region is “Little Russia”, while according to patriots in Kiev, this is their proud independent homeland, foretold almost two centuries ago by the national bard, Taras Ševčenko.
Digging deeper in the interior of the Ukrainian state, partitions concern, for example, the geo-religious environment, where the Christian tradition confronts the agnostic or strictly atheist results of the seventy-year-long Soviet period. Above all, here one crosses the dividing ridge between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Greek-Catholics, based in Galicia, tend to identify with anti-Russian nationalism and/or to portray themselves as the custodians of a Ukrainian Quebec in a prevalently Russian context (Mykola Riabčuk). (5) They distinguish themselves from both the affiliated Orthodox linked with their own rites to the patriarchate of Moscow, and from their cousins belonging to the Patriarchate of Kiev - created when Ukraine became independent and therefore consubstantial to the country - as well as from the autocephalous church created in 1921. The current crisis has marked the ethnic-linguistic differences, exalted as characterising identity by the more extreme forces. The fact remains that the population consists for three-quarters of Ukrainians, for less than a fifth of Russians, although this very particular taxonomy often turns out to be forced. The small Byelorussian, Moldavian, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, Jewish, Greek, Bulgarian and Tartar etc. minorities remind one of the multi-ethnic aspects of this frontier land.
Finally, Kiev is both the cradle of eternal Russia according to consolidated Muscovite mythology, and the cradle of the Ukrainian nation according to recent autochthon pedagogy. Hence, there is a permanent vocation for instability that, since 1991, has characterised independent Ukraine, the first real experiment of a national state those lands have ever known, with the exception of proto-national oleographs aimed at strengthening identity that portrays remote golden eras and the brief republican experiment under fire in the civil war between the “whites” and the “reds.” The absence of statehood traditions results in weak institutional legitimacy. Ukrainian patriots tend to compensate for this through nationalistic hypertrophy. Russians, both inside and at times outside the new Ukraine, instead resort to denying Kiev’s identity, subsumed into their own.
One deduces that this Ukrainian state can only flourish with its many souls sharing the management of power, otherwise the country is divided in half as in the last general election, and according to the Jevromajdan movement, implodes. The solution involving such an agreement has so far been neglected or only briefly mentioned. The alternative path only started with the secession of Crimea. In the absence of compromise between all the internal and external players involved in the current crisis, territorial decomposition threatens to spread like wildfire along and through fault lines distinguishing the pro-Russian regions in the south and the east from the “real Ukraine” of the centre and the west. This would be a simplistic but effective bi-partition also because it is a current one in the international media and is exasperated by Russian propaganda.
The decisive geopolitical stigma that complicates the prognosis for the future of the current Ukrainian state, derives from its Soviet matrix. It became a state on December 1st 1991, defining as international the administrative borders of the Soviet Socialist Ukrainian Republic, designed and amended by Lenin, Stalin and Khruščëv. The Georgian dictator also made the choice in 1945 to annex Catholic Polish and Hapsburg Galicia, never before contained within the Imperial Russian perimeter, rising to become the epicentre of the most anti-Moscow and anti-Polish Ukrainianism of the brief but intense cooperation between Ukrainian nationalist militias and German “liberators” during World War II. In 1954, his successor instead separated Crimea - which at the end of the 18th century Catherine II had converted from Ottoman Tartar province to Russia’s Mediterranean outpost - from the Russian Soviet Socialist Federal Republic to assign it to the homologous Ukrainian section of the Bolshevik area, allegedly under the influence of two glasses of cheap cognac.
Having the culturally and geographically opposed Galician and Crimean elements under the same ‘roof’ complicated the achievement of a shared national identity to support the independent state. Nor was it imaginable that, just recently emancipated from the Soviet empire, Kiev would devote itself to inventing a Ukrainian-Russian mini-empire, or even a mixed-blood variation of its original cultures.
While during the Nineties Ukrainians were involved in setting up the identity agenda for the new republic, balancing patriotism’s requirements and euro-Atlantic suggestions with economic and geopolitical dependency on their cumbersome Russian neighbour, degenerate oligarchic power spread throughout the country. The sudden mutation from being the USSR’s western and Mediterranean outpost to an independent state, provided the communist nomenclature and its astute offspring a chance to become wealthy without running any risks, self-privatising the most important Ukrainian industries. This had three consequences, all still very relevant; the monopoly of key economic sectors held by a few high-flying speculators; the assertion of these oligarchs as the masters not only of the national wealth - one hundred people control 80% of the GDP (6) - but also of politics, a field which they dominate directly (as done in the past by “gas princess” Julija Tymošenko, then by Viktor Janukovič, and tomorrow perhaps by the king of chocolate Petro Porošenko) or through their puppets (the opposite of Putin’s Russia where they are accustomed to taking care of their own business as long as they do not stick their noses into the rooms of the Kremlin).
Jevromajdan is the natural child of daily scandals rather than of a Europeanist vocation or refractoriness to Great Russia’s revanchism. It was intolerance of “the oligarchic democracy” (7) - following the failure of the 2004 “orange revolution” - that inspired the crowds last winter filling dozens of Ukrainian squares, even in mainly Russian-speaking and pro-Russian regions, protesting against the oligarch president Viktor Janukovič. His last minute ‘about turn’ on November 28th when in Vilnius he refused to sign the protocol for European Union membership - more than debatable from an economic perspective - was the fuse that sparked the spontaneous explosion of which we are still experiencing the effects. Janukovič’s yielding to Putin’s pressure was too obvious to take seriously the pragmatic reasons for his refusal, very clear, however, to the head of the current interim government, Arsenij Jacenjuk, who has signed a political agreement with Brussels but not the economic clauses that have little respect for Ukrainian national interests.
The fact remains that almost everyone in Kiev is aware that Brussels is not an alternative to economic dependency on Moscow. At best it is an additive. Without significant subsidies from the Kremlin, granted until Janukovič fled, Ukrainians would have “vanished into thin air” as observed by the director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, obliged by the geopolitical contingency to approve a $14 billion to $18 billion loan in exchange for unlikely structural reforms (8). This will not exempt future Ukrainian leaders from renegotiating economic ties with Russia, which, in the meantime, has doubled the price of gas sold until now at para-Soviet conditions.
3. “Prospects are bad. It appears that divergences between the East and the West have become too profound to be healed. At a certain point it seemed these two worlds could live side by side; but obviously that is no longer the case. Russia has returned to the already tainted idea of security in terms of territory - the more one has the safer one feels (…). Should the West give in to all Russia’s proposals the result would, over the short term, be that it would be faced with a new series of needs.” (9)
The person who spoke those words is not a modern Russophobe Estonian, but the then Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, Maksim Litvinov, on June 18th 1946, while on a suffocating hot summer day he burned a number of secret documents in the fireplace in his office, having heard that Stalin had “dismissed” him due to his excessive readiness to compromise with the Americans. His confession was made to the CBS correspondent in Moscow, who immediately informed the diplomatic network. Hence Litvinov’s geopolitical testament came to Truman’s attention, and he would closely bear it in mind when defining the containment strategy destined to suffocate the rival superpower.
After Russia’s annexation of Crimea, in Washington as in other Atlantic capitals, containment is once again fashionable, to the extent that one would think we had returned to a Cold War status. In this case, the crisis’ truth-effect informs us that in the strategic élites and the western media, the anti-Russian mentality (formerly a synonym for anti-Red) taken with milk for half a century has left behind traces of itself. Will Ukraine really spark a new Cold War, with Putin playing the role of Stalin and Obama/Truman committed to planning his containment?
No. And not only as appears obvious but is not, because history does not repeat itself and diachronic analogies so dear to the media and to political analysts are useful for propaganda or careers rather than for understanding current events. It is for three other reasons.
A) The Cold War never really completely ended, because its roots are geopolitical rather than ideological. For America the issue is protecting itself from the emergence of a rival power in Eurasia, little does it matter whether Buddhist or vegan. For Russia the point is moving its western border as far away from Moscow as possible seeing that the American-led Atlantic Alliance continues to be mistrustful. The Cold War is not a segment of history but a permanent curvature of contemporary geopolitics, with its acute crises and its lethargic periods. Its events did not end with the USSR’s suicide. To end the match with Moscow, the United States would have had to annihilate the empire, not divide it up, humiliating it. However, to do this they would have been called upon to pay an inconceivable price, that of running a ruined Soviet empire, possibly following a nuclear attack. Hence the ashes of the Cold War continue to smoulder. The Ukrainian spark has reignited a few flames to the delight of retired Kremlin experts and the still many who are nostalgic of the Soviet empire. And they are not only Russians.
B) Obama has dedicated his double mandate to extricating America from debilitating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He does not have a global strategy, although the pivot to Asia indicates a priority external to the European scenario, the epicentre of a permanent stand-off with Russia. The United States has not yet decided what to do about China, whether to neutralise it in an inclusive manner or set up a containment system (again!) with supposed Asian partners. America is committed to extremely delicate negotiations with Iran, trying to influence upheaval in the Islamic world without ending up involved, setting up an umpteenth feint on the Israeli-Palestinian front while searching for a modus vivendi with an unreliable Saudi partner and a cantankerous Israeli brother. In the meantime, the United States continues to keep alive the antiterrorist paradigm with covert operations, so imagine if there is time to concentrate on Putin. By establishing that Russia is now only a “regional power,” (10) Obama wished to nip in the bud the temptation to reawaken the ghost of the Russian bear, meandering through Congress and in some corners of his government, as well as in Atlantic arms industries, NATO and “New Europe’s” partners, led by Balkan states.
C) East and West, Moscow and Washington are no longer the alpha and omega of global geopolitics. The world changes quickly and refuses to choose sides. These are no longer the days of alliances, but if anything of temporary alignments. Friends and enemies of the former super-powers have acknowledged Russia’s modest enlargement and America’s post-war on terror repositioning. Hence new aspiring leading players on the international stage, from Brazil to India and South Africa, have avoided taking sides in the Ukraine match. For many Europeans, a very large number of Russians and a few Jevromajdan Americans, this has been perceived as a historical watershed. But the rest of the world thought nothing of the sort. Even China did not share Russia’s line, both because at best it considers Moscow a junior tactical partner, to be activated in order to extract a few advantages in the strategic confrontation with the United States, and because any secession, such as the one Moscow provoked in Crimea, is an anathema for those who must worry about Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang.
However, because since the end of the Cold War, Washington has officially invested $5 billion in Ukraine (plus at least as much informally) in order to prevent it returning under Russian control, Obama took advantage of Jevromajdan to amortise its investment. There was no need for special solicitations by the White House to mobilise its diplomacy, intelligence agencies and domestic and friendly NGOs (George Soros’ Open Society is a perfect example), when it became clear that Putin’s team in Kiev was about to be trashed by the protest. Emergency aid, including 300,000 military rations that ended up on the black market run by local bloodsuckers, political-diplomatic and propaganda support for the opposition, threats and flattery for the pro-regime oligarchs to make them change sides (with success guaranteed by mentions of their foreign bank accounts), infiltration in agreement with secret services friendly and allied with the police forces and militias that intervened in the decisive stages of the uprising to overturn the regime and present the compromise between Janukovič and the Polish, French and German Foreign Minister, would all allow the Russians to get by almost without consequences. In this way, Obama put Putin on the defensive, philosophically accepting the unexpected countermove in Crimea. Merkel too was put on the defensive, having exaggerated her protests about having her mobile phone spied on by U.S. intelligence, and was under the illusion that she could return Germany to play in the global First Division and above all had not given up the relationship of convenience with Russia set up by her predecessors and based on energy interdependence.
There is still the most important question that Obama refuses to answer. Having clarified that Americans do not intend to die for Crimea and not even for Kiev, what is the red line Putin is allowed to advance towards without facing armed resistance from the United States and NATO? Some European leaders theoretically protected by the Atlantic umbrella, are wondering whether this line really exists. Henry Kissinger is right when he summarises the euro-Atlantic approach to the Ukraine test with one of his explicit statements: “For the West the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” (11)
4. Putin has a geopolitical agenda. His objective is the opposite of Obama’s. He does not accept to be relegated to the division for regional powers, like any old Brazil. He demands to be treated as an equal of the United Stated and China, with which he aims to rewrite the rules of the international game. Putin’s vision of the authoritarian, traditionalist, in fact rational world would once have made him a superior emulator of Alexander I, tsar of the Holy Alliance. His inclination to treat diplomacy like a chess match, merged with restrictions introduced with his training as a spy - an obsession with detail to the detriment of an overall perception and an urge to imagine what is hidden while ignoring what is obvious - makes him an alien in the contemporary anomic universe. In the age of savage finance and pseudo-religious fanaticism, of an absence of shared rules and the de-legitimisation of politics, on a planet with no directors but many aspiring improvising matadors, the Russian leader’s talents are not as effective as they would have been in the orderly days of cooperation between powers or during the Cold War. His hyperrealism can at time appear unrealistic. Ukraine docet. Alexander made it all the way to Paris; it is unlikely Putin will retake Kiev.
The Ukrainian test also confirms that the Russian leader does not have resources to match his ambitions. The objective is to retake lands considered Russian, imperial or unable to equip themselves with statehood, in order to place them together with Kazakhstan, Byelorussia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, in a Eurasian Union, thus in Moscow’s new empire. All this with the Russian language as the imperial Esperanto and business idiom. This sphere of super-influence would not be self-serving, but a condition for affirming Russia’s right to rank as a global power. During the first years of his mandate, Putin aimed at achieving this in a direct manner, negotiating it within the context of being part of the Russian Federation as an independent element within the euro-Atlantic framework and joining NATO and the European Union. He found the door firmly locked by both Americans and Europeans. The then president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, told him that Russia was too big to join the EU. The fact is that Russia’s demographic and economic size is insufficient for Americans and Chinese to guarantee the country equal status, not to mention the un-enchanting memories of Bolshevism tarnishing Russia’s post-Soviet brand, not only in the west and resulting in a deficit of soft power. Russia’s formidable mining treasure, its nuclear power as well as its respectable conventional military power currently undergoing rapid modernisation and exhibited with success in Crimean operations, together with its reverence for Russian history, culture and science, induce Putin to not make do with the rank of a continental power to which Obama continues to relegate him.
The president of Russia is the opposite of his American counterpart also in temperament. Putin is emotional and therefore tends towards sincerity also when his position and training forbid it. Listen to him as he proclaims Crimea’s annexation in the Kremlin, attacking the westerners who have humiliated and offended him: “How many times have they lied to us, made decisions behind our backs, and presented us with a fait accompli! It happened with NATO’s expansion to the East, and also when they deployed military infrastructures at our borders. They continued to repeat the same words to us - “well, this is not your business.” Easy for them to say. (…) In brief, we have every reason to assume that the infamous containment policies applied in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, still continue today. They (the westerners, editor’s note) constantly try to put us in a corner because our position is an independent one, because we maintain it and call things by their name and are not hypocrites.” Hence the reclamation of Crimea is nothing but a measured reaction to the “fascist” coup d’état in Kiev - because that is what it was according to Putin who said, “Russia found itself unable to withdraw. If you push matters too far the reaction can be powerful.” (12).
So Putin does have a red line. It is unacceptable to him that Ukraine, and perhaps also Georgia, Byelorussia and other former Soviet subjects should follow in the footsteps of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, crossing over to the Atlantic side.
Putin uses three levers to keep the pressure on Kiev. Firstly an economic and in particular energy-linked one, placing the “new” Ukrainian leaders - a definition hard to apply to the favourites in the presidential election scheduled for May 25th, hence former premier Julija Tymošenko and Petro Porošenko, a minister under Juščenko and Janukovič - faced with the fact that their country has no future if it cuts the umbilical cord binding it to the Russian market and to gas. There is then the military threat. Crimea is a small sample of the Kremlin’s determination to resort to force and of America’s unwillingness to oppose Russia directly on the ground. The geopolitical and economic costs of invading central-southern Ukraine would perhaps be unsustainable. But this cannot be excluded if Moscow wishes to remain credible. Finally there is the mobilisation of Ukrainian Russians against Kiev’s coup, part of the vast army of ethnic Russians spread all over the former Soviet ecumene over which Putin has opened his paternal umbrella. Twenty million “red feet” that Moscow considers integrally part of the national demography, just like its own citizens, whose security must be guaranteed with all means. In this sense Crimea may become a model.
These are all double-edged swords. Energy pressure on Kiev strengthens those in the European Union and above all in America aiming to reduce interdependence between the Russian supplier and the European consumer, even evoking the coming substitution of Gazprom’s methane with the liquid natural gas the United States has said it can sell us. And yet it will take a number of years before the infrastructures needed to bring North American liquid gas to European markets in decent quantities will be available on both shores of the Atlantic. That is on condition that American companies intend to privilege us rather than the more lucrative Asian market. The flexing of Russian muscles, then, is a deterrent against Kiev and other neighbours, but will also be used to legitimise their rearming and, more importantly, to speed up the modernisation of NATO forces. No one can forget that the USSR also disintegrated because it could not keep up in the weapons war launched by Reagan. For Putin, the ethnic card means backing off from the imperial idea of Russian statehood founded on its multinational characteristics. Ethnic nationalism and imperialism are incompatible. While in the case of Ukraine it was perhaps a foregone conclusion for the Kremlin to emphasize its duty to assist its Crimean brothers, the shift from political Russianness (rossijskaja) to having ethnicity (russkaja) as the benchmark for Putin’s geopolitics is an incentive for numerous ultra-nationalist and even racist elements rooted deeply in Russia. Today these elements approve of the president’s Crimean performance, but tomorrow may turn against him due to an alleged recklessness regards to the West.
5. “The collapse of the Soviet Union in the last decades of the 20th century was not only the conclusion of the seventy-year-old history of the multi-national communist empire, it was rather the final act of the over four-century-long history of the Russian multi-ethnic state.” (13) The sentence passed by the Swiss historian Andreas Kappeler, immediately after the extinction of the USSR, deserves being re-addressed in view of the Ukrainian test. The original anti-regime sentiment expressed in “Europa Square,” was overwhelmed by violently anti-Russian rhetoric, with the moskali (a derogatory Ukrainian word for “Muscovites”, meaning Russians) in the not only propagandist sights of gangs of armed activists, admirably organised in paramilitary formations. And, furthermore, Russia’s annexation of Crimea was legitimised by Putin as the protection of ethnic Russians wherever they may be and greeted with emphasis by the paradoxically Hitlerian nostalgics circulating with impunity in the Federation’s public sphere. Moreover, in Crimea, the revived Tatar-Islamic question resulted in the solidarity of blood-related Russian Tatarstan as well as that of neo-Ottoman Turkey and the global jihadists. Much seems to indicate that Kappeler’s thesis may develop in its most extreme sense.
The former Soviet region runs the risk of becoming a training area for “suicide nationalisms” to use the words with which on August 1st 1991, in Kiev, George Bush Sr, quoting Lord Acton, warned Ukrainians celebrating their freedom from Soviet domination, saying, “The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.” Adding, “Yet freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” (14)
Kappeler’s diagnosis and Bush’s recipe form the preconditions for addressing the Ukrainian crisis before it degenerates into a civil war and/or Russian armed intervention. The current outcome is a compromise that will not end the match or tone down the poisonous rhetoric. The general terms of the agreement are evident to Russian and American negotiators who, from the very beginning, protected by the veil of their reciprocal propaganda, are committed to keeping the explosive potential of the crisis under control. This more or less involves:
a) Guaranteeing Ukraine’s independence as a neutral state, with a de facto Russian Crimea not acknowledged as such by the West and almost all the rest of the world, rather like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania during the Cold War;
b) Incorporating Kiev in the European economic area, but not as an alternative to relations with the Russian and Eurasian one, and above all with no geopolitical-military inference (no NATO although no one will want to put this in writing);
c) Open hefty lines of credit to Ukraine, in particular via the International Monetary Fund and European institutions, to prevent a default, re-negotiating at the same time the price and quality of Russian hydrocarbon flows in Ukraine, and from there to Europe, which the government in Kiev will commit to not extract a tribute for as has happened so far, in exchange for Gazprom using a softer approach regarding the mega-credit held;
d) Reforming the constitution in federalist terms, protecting the rights of all minorities, without attributing to regions para-sovereign powers that would permit some of them to follow Crimea’s example; safeguarding the Russian language albeit not raising it at a national level to the same rank as Ukrainian;
e) Banning all armed militias in the hope that the next elections will downsize the desires of ultra-nationalists who are well-represented in the interim government.
The last word goes to the Ukrainian people. Many Jevromajdan protesters are disappointed. They see chaos and poverty rather than liberal order, democracy and longed-for affluence. The oligarchs will not give up; they will change their uniforms. There is still fear of Russian intervention and civil war. Normal post-revolutionary syndrome? Perhaps. But nothing else is normal here.
Endnotes
1 - Quoted in A. MALASHENKO, “Will the Crimean Tatars Become Russia’s Headache?”, Carnegie Moscow Center, 3.4.2014, http://carnegie.ru/eurasiaoutlook/?fa=55220
2- See “Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call”, Bbc News, 7.2.2014.
3 - See T. SNYDER, Bloodlands .
4 - A. WILSON, The Ukrainians. An Unexpected Nation, New Haven-London, 2002, Yale University Press, p. 289.
5 - Ivi, p. 313.
6 - See O. HOLOYDA, “Ukrainian Oligarchs and the “Family”, a New Generation of Czars - or Hope for the Middle Class?”, Irex scholar research brief (August 2013).
7 - Definition by the Polish analyst (now a diplomat) Sławomir Matuszak, in his essay “The Oligarchic Democracy. The Influence of Business Groups on Ukrainian Politics”, Osw paper n. 42, Varsavia (Sept.2012).
8 - Quoted in “Ukraine’s Economy Would Have Collapsed Without Russian Aid - IMF Chief”, Ria-Novosti, 3/4/2013.
9. C. HOTTELET, “Ultimes paroles de Maxim Litvinov”, Bulletin B.e.i.p.i., supplement to no. 78 of 1-15.12.1952. Then see W. BEDELL SMITH’s telegram (Moscow) to J. BYRNES, 21.1.1946, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. VI, pp. 763-5.
10. Citato in S. WILSON, “Obama dismisses Russia as ‘regional power’ acting out of weakness”, The Washington Post, 25.3.2014.
11. H. A. KISSINGER, “How the Ukraine crisis ends”, The Washington Post, 6.3.2014.
12. “Address by President of the Russian Federation”, 18.3.2014, http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/6889
13. A. KAPPELER, La Russia. Storia di un impero multietnico, Roma, Edizioni Lavoro 2009 (second ed.), p. 3.
14. “Chicken Kiev speech. Full text of President George H. Bush’s speech, later dubbed the ‘Chicken Kiev Speech’ by commentator William Safire, to a session of the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine, 1 August 1991”, http.//en.wikisource.org/wiki/Chicken _Kiev_speech
(16 Aprile 2014)
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