In less than two years, the vision of Russians and Ukrainians as one people would lead the Russian president and his army across the Ukrainian border, first into the Crimea and then into eastern Ukraine, creating one of the most acute crises not only in Russo-Ukrainian relations but also in world politics.
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THE RUSSIAN WAR
ON FEBRUARY 23, 2014, WIDELY CELEBRATED IN RUSSIA AS Defender of the Fatherland Day (the former Red Army Day), television viewers all over the world watched a broadcast of the closing ceremonies of the Sochi Olympics. It was a triumph for Russia in more than one way. The Russians had outdone themselves. Not only had they organized very successful winter games in Sochi, known as the capital of the Russian subtropics, but they had also stunningly improved their medal count, rising from eleventh place at the Vancouver Olympics four years earlier to first place, and doing significantly better than their closest competitors, Norway and Canada.
There was much to celebrate and be proud of, and the ceremonies and performances of Russia’s leading choirs, orchestras, and artists manifested that pride to the rest of the world. It began with a children’s choir singing the Russian national anthem. Those who did not speak Russian but had visited or watched the Moscow Summer Olympics of 1980 (and the 2014 performance was full of allusions to the Olympic symbols of 1980) could not detect any difference between the Soviet anthem of 1980 and the Russian one of 2014. That was not essential. The message that Vladimir Putin was eager to send to his country and the world was that Russia had returned to great-power status.
The cost of the message, calculated as the Russian state expenditure on the Winter Olympics, was a staggering $52 billion—four times the original budgeted amount and seven times greater than the budget of the Vancouver Olympics in Canada. According to some estimates, half the amount was stolen by government officials and businessmen close to them, and many projects remained unfinished by the time of the Olympics. But Putin, who had personally overseen the construction projects and preparations, was satisfied to have achieved his goal. Like the Soviet Union of 1980, the Russia of 2014 was able to finance and organize a world-class event.
The games generated tremendous goodwill for Russia and its president throughout the world. In the months leading up to the games, Putin had demonstrated his own goodwill by releasing a number of high-profile prisoners of the former Gulag camps. Among them was the business tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had spent more than ten years in prison, and the members of the feminist punk-rock band Pussy Riot, who had been jailed the previous year for attempting to perform in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Khodorkovsky had been arrested on charges of tax evasion, and the members of Pussy Riot for hooliganism and inciting religious hatred, but few doubted that their real offense had been that of challenging Putin and his grip on political power.
Many hoped that after the Olympics Putin would build upon the goodwill generated by the games and continue with at least symbolic acts of liberalization. The optimists were wrong. Arrests of opposition leaders, including the anticorruption crusader Aleksei Navalny, who claimed that half the money allocated for the Olympics had been stolen, were resumed. The games had been staged to demonstrate that Russia was strong enough to reenter the international scene not as a partner of the West but on its own terms. What those terms were became clear four days after the Olympics ended, when Russia began its military operation to annex the Crimea—a peninsula transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 and recognized by Russia and the international community since 1991 as an integral part of Ukraine. Putin later admitted that he had personally made the decision to “bring back the Crimea” on the early morning of February 23, the last day of the Sochi Olympics.
The annexation triggered an undeclared Russo-Ukrainian war for southeastern Ukraine, producing the worst crisis in East-West relations since the Cold War. It violated international legal norms and treaties, including the 1994 Budapest memorandum, in which Russia, along with the United States and Britain, had assured Ukraine of the indivisibility of its territory in return for the transfer of its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal (the third largest in the world at the time) to Russia. At the core of the crisis was the question of Russian national identity and relations between Russians and Ukrainians, the two nations that Putin has repeatedly called one people.
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE KREMLIN AND RUSSIA IN THE MONTHS and years leading up to the crisis that can explain Vladimir Putin’s agression against Ukraine?
Putin’s geostrategic vision of Russia and its role in the post-Soviet space contributed greatly to the origins and conduct of the war. The Russian president wanted Ukraine to join the Eurasian Union, a Russia-led political, economic, and military bloc whose creation he put forward as one of his principal goals in late 2011, when he was preparing to become president of Russia for the third time. This time the situation in Ukraine looked promising. Not only had Putin’s old protégé Viktor Yanukovych been elected president in 2010, but the Ukrainian gas debt to Russia had ballooned after Russia stopped supplying gas to Ukraine in January 2009, forcing Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to sign a trade deal with Gazprom that was disadvantageous to Ukraine. The Ukrainian government had refused to follow in the footsteps of Belarus, whose government had agreed, after Russia cut off supplies in 2007, to sell a 50 percent stake in its pipeline infrastructure to Russia (Minsk would lose all control over the pipelines in 2011). Instead, in order to obtain a price deduction for new gas, the government of Viktor Yanukovych extended the Russian lease on the Sevastopol navy base for the next twenty-five years.
The Russian president wanted more: his goal was Ukraine’s membership in the Eurasian Union. While in its geostrategic objectives the Eurasian Union was a successor to Yevgenii Primakov’s idea of using the Commonwealth of Independent States to ensure Russia’s special role in the “near abroad,” its intellectual underpinnings went back to the Eurasianist school of Russian émigrés of the 1920s and 1930s. In post-Soviet Russia it fed off the neo-Eurasianist brand of Russian nationalism developed by Aleksandr Dugin, a political philosopher with strong rightist and even fascist intellectual leanings. Dugin, who was shunned by the political elite of the 1990s, gained the ear of Putin’s advisers and, consequently, access to the Russian media in the new millennium. Dugin wanted to build a Eurasian empire on completely new foundations, whereas Putin was trying to reintegrate the old one. Ideology was key for Dugin and secondary for Putin. What was common to their projects, despite their many differences, was the idea of exploiting divisions in Western societies, including those between their liberal cores and far left and far right fringes, in order to position Russia as the beacon of conservative values throughout the world—a country and civilization that would defend traditional European values against their alleged distortion by the decadent liberalism of the postmodern era. That vision of Russia’s new role in the world found a close ally in the vision of the Russian World advanced by Orthodox intellectuals.
In Ukraine, Yanukovych had publicly given up on his country’s aspirations to join either NATO or the European Union, but the Ukrainian government continued its preparations for signing an association agreement with the EU. Putin’s visit to Kyiv in July 2013 and his endorsement of the idea of one Russian nation were part of the strategy to stop that movement. In the following month he added an economic argument to the ideological one, declaring a trade war against some Ukrainian products.
In late November 2013, Yanukovych, pressured by Putin, refused to sign the association agreement with the European Union long promised to his people. This sudden change of course produced mass protests in Kyiv, akin to those that had taken place during the Orange Revolution ten years earlier. After dozens of protesters were killed by police fire on February 20, 2014, parliament rescinded the president’s power to use force. As the riot police left the city, Yanukovych and his advisers followed with a fortune in stolen funds—a few weeks earlier Putin had transferred $3 billion to Ukraine as a bribe not to sign the EU agreem
ent. Yanukovych went to the Crimea and was taken from there to Russia on a Russian naval vessel based in Sevastopol.
With his man in Kyiv forced out of office and a new Ukrainian government professing its commitment to integrating Ukraine into European economic structures, Putin and his advisers decided to partition the country. The plan approved by the Russian president on the last day of the Olympics was put into action in the Crimean capital of Simferopol on February 27, 2014, when a band of heavily armed men with no insignia on their uniforms took control of the Crimean parliament. As the new prime minister of the autonomous republic, they installed a pro-Russian politician who had previously obtained only 4 percent of the popular vote in the Crimea. Backed by Russian military units and mercenaries, the new Crimean government engineered a referendum from which Ukrainian and Western observers were barred.
The results of the referendum that took place on March 16, 2014, were reminiscent of Soviet-era elections: 92 percent of the vote in the Crimea was declared to be in favor of joining Russia. In Sevastopol, 123 percent of the vote was said to be in favor. It was an affront to democracy and common sense. Ethnic Russians constituted a majority on the peninsula, which was overwhelmingly Russian-speaking, but, judging by polls conducted only a month earlier, most of the population preferred to stay in Ukraine. On March 17, 2014, the day after the referendum, the new Crimean authorities declared the peninsula independent of Ukraine. The same day, President Putin signed two documents, one recognizing Crimean independence, the other initiating a treaty between the Russian Federation and the independent state of the Crimea on the annexation of the latter. Contingency plans that included the annexation of the Crimea and the destabilization and possible partition of the rest of Ukraine had been in place at least since the Budapest summit of NATO in 2008, when Putin had told President George W. Bush that Ukraine was not a real country but a conglomerate of regions, and that accession to NATO could produce resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine.
In 2014, however, annexation was triggered not by an expansion of NATO or of the European Union, but by Ukrainian insistence on signing an association agreement with the EU. Putin had clearly been emboldened by his success of 2008, when he had gotten away with the invasion of Georgia and the de facto annexation of part of its territory. The association agreement with the European Union did not come with a promise of EU or NATO membership for Ukraine, but it threatened to derail Putin’s plans for the creation of a viable Eurasian Union, which would be incomplete without Ukraine. Hence Putin’s resort to drastic measures to stop the Ukrainian drift to the West. Many believed that his actions produced the opposite result, pushing Ukraine toward the West to a degree unthinkable before the Crimean annexation.
MARCH 18, 2014, WAS A COLD AND GLOOMY DAY IN MOSCOW. BUT St. George’s Hall in the Large Kremlin Palace, which had been built by Tsar Nicholas I in the mid-nineteenth century, was brightly lit with huge crystal chandeliers and glittering with gold. At the podium the custodians had installed two banners, the tricolor flag of the Russian Federation and the presidential standard decorated with the Russian coat of arms—the double-headed eagle and the image of St. George the Dragon-Slayer defeating the enemies of Russia. The members of the Russian Federation Council (the upper house of the Russian parliament) as well as the deputies of the Russian State Duma (its lower house), government ministers, and representatives of government-controlled civic organizations, were joined by the new leaders of the Crimea, which had recently been occupied by the Russian army.
The members of the Russian political elite and their guests were waiting for the appearance of Vladimir Putin, now in his third term in office and fifteenth year at the helm of the country’s power structure—twice as president, twice as prime minister, and now as president once again. They greeted him as he entered, rising to their feet. Putin asked them to take their seats and began his speech. From the Western viewpoint, he had a difficult task ahead of him, that of providing a rationale for the takeover of the Crimea—the first annexation of territory of a sovereign state by a major European power since the end of World War II. Putin did not seem to mind the difficulty of his task. Most of his argument dealt not with legality but with history and culture.
The Russians, he asserted, had been divided against their will by the fall of the Soviet Union. He recalled the Soviet collapse as a time when gross injustice was done to the Russian people: “The big country was gone. It was only when the Crimea ended up as part of a different country that Russia realized that it had not simply been robbed but plundered.” He continued:
I heard residents of the Crimea say that back in 1991 they were handed over like a sack of potatoes. That is hard to disagree with. And what about the Russian state? What about Russia? It humbly accepted the situation. This country was then going through such hard times that, realistically, it was incapable of protecting its interests. But the people could not reconcile themselves to this outrageous historical injustice. All these years, citizens and many public figures came back to this issue, saying that the Crimea is historically Russian land and Sevastopol is a Russian city.
Russia’s critics began drawing parallels between Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler, noting how both leaders had used the ethnic minority question: Hitler to partition Czechoslovakia and annex Austria in the Anschluss of 1938, Putin to annex the Crimea. The Crimean Anschluss was on everyone’s mind. Putin did not avoid historical parallels. Indeed, he said that he counted on Germany understanding his action by drawing a parallel not with the Anschluss but with the unification of East and West Germany in 1989: in both cases, he maintained, partitioned nations were reunited. But his argument about the need to protect ethnic Russians against potential threats harked back to 1938 rather than 1989.
The Russian president claimed that Russian identity was under threat in Ukraine, but he provided no proof of discrimination. He also claimed to be protecting Russians in Ukraine from Western expansion. “With Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed the line, playing the bear and acting irresponsibly and unprofessionally,” said Putin. “After all, they were fully aware that there are millions of Russians living in Ukraine and in the Crimea. They must really have lacked political instinct and common sense not to foresee all the consequences of their actions. Russia found itself in a position from which it could not retreat.” Thus, Russia had acted to protect Russians beyond its borders against all threats real or imagined, and she was justified in using force and annexing territory if Russians were deemed to be threatened. But it was not only ethnic Russians who needed Russia’s protection: it was also Russian-speakers in the “near abroad.” “Millions of Russians and Russian-speaking people live in Ukraine and will continue to do so,” said Putin. “Russia will always defend their interests using political, diplomatic, and legal means.”
In the months leading up to the Russian annexation of the Crimea, Putin repeatedly went on record asserting that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people. “We are one people,” declared Putin in a TV interview in September 2013.
And however much nationalists on both sides—there are nationalists both among us and in Ukraine—may be offended by what I have just said, that is the actual fact of the matter. Because we have the same Kyivan baptismal font in the Dnieper; we certainly have common historical roots and common fates; we have a common religion, a common faith; we have a very similar culture, languages, traditions, and mentality.… To be sure, we have our own particularities and our own ethnic coloring throughout. By the way, Ukrainian culture, the Ukrainian language, dances, and music—they are wonderful. I, for one, always take delight in that.
Putin’s claim that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people and his branding of those who believed otherwise as nationalists ran counter to a long Soviet and post-Soviet tradition of treating Russians and Ukrainians as historically and culturally close, but still separate peoples. Putin’s statement challenged the foundations not only of Ukrainian national identity but also of modern Russia
n identity. The affirmation that Russians constituted a distinct people had been the legitimizing foundation of Russia’s revolt against the dying Soviet Union in 1991 and of the existence of the Russian Federation ever since.
Putin’s thinking on the issue of Russo-Ukrainian unity harks back to the pre–World War I writings of Petr Struve, the Russian Social Democrat turned liberal. “I start with the conviction that there is an all-Russian culture and its organ, the all-Russian language,” wrote Struve in 1912. “The term ‘Russian,’” he stated in the same article, “is not some kind of abstract ‘average’ of the three ‘terms’ (with the prefixes ‘great,’ ‘little,’ and ‘white’) but a living cultural strength, a grand, developing, and growing national force.” Struve was not opposed to the development of the Ukrainian language or folk culture, but approved of it only on the local, rural level, where there was no access to or influence on high culture, education, and urban life. In 2014, Putin brought about the reincarnation of Struve’s ideas at the highest level of Russian politics.
Following the annexation of the Crimea, Putin’s approval numbers went through the roof, from 66 percent in December 2011, as he prepared to return to the president’s office for the third time, to 89 percent in June 2015. Government control over the principal media outlets, as well as harassment and silencing of the opposition, were largely responsible for the surge. But there is little doubt that Putin’s actions in the Crimea met with the approval of the Russian public. In his speech of March 18, 2014, Putin cited the results of public opinion polls conducted in Russia on the eve of the formal annexation of the Crimea. “Ninety-five percent of the people think that Russia should protect the interests of Russians and members of other ethnic groups living in the Crimea—95 percent of our citizens,” asserted Putin. “More than 83 percent think that Russia should do this even if it will complicate our relations with some other countries. A total of 86 percent of our people see the Crimea as still being Russian territory and part of our country’s lands.”
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