VLADIMIR PUTIN USED HIS SPEECH ON THE ANNEXATION OF THE Crimea not only to provide historical and ethnocultural justification for his aggression but also to assure Russia, Ukraine, and the world that the Crimea was a special case, and that the Russian Federation would claim no other region of Ukraine. “I want you to hear me, my dear friends,” he said, addressing the citizens of the country he had just partitioned. “Do not believe those who want you to fear Russia, shouting that other regions will follow the Crimea. We do not want to divide Ukraine; we do not need that.”
In March 2014, Putin believed that he could achieve his goal of keeping Ukraine within the Russian sphere of influence without further annexations of its territory. The shock of losing the Crimea was supposed to win the Ukrainian elites back to Moscow by showing what could happen to other regions of the country as well. Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, demanded the federalization of Ukraine, giving veto power to its individual regions over the country’s foreign policy. Kyiv refused, and in April 2014 Russian intelligence services began destabilizing the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine’s east and south. An anti-Kyiv propaganda campaign was conducted under the banner of defense of the Russian language and Russian identity against Ukrainian nationalism. The idea of creating a buffer state to be called New Russia, after the name of an imperial province that had once existed in the region, was brought to eastern and southern Ukraine by Russian propagandists. They supplemented references to the Russian imperial past with rhetoric that went back to the Great Patriotic War—the founding historical myth of Putin’s regime in Russia. Supporters of the Ukrainian government were portrayed not only as nationalists and agents of the decadent West, but also as fascists.
Fueled by Russian imperial mythology and Soviet nostalgia, the ideological campaign failed to engulf all of the projected New Russia but gained substantial traction in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine—part of the old Soviet rust belt that bordered on the Russian Federation and had the largest percentage of ethnic Russians anywhere in Ukraine outside the Crimea. Its destabilization became a joint project of the Russian intelligence services and Russian nationalists—an alliance personified by Igor Girkin, nom de guerre Strelkov, a retired officer of the Russian intelligence service and an active contributor to Russian nationalist media outlets. Girkin later claimed that it was through his efforts that the conflict in the Donbas had grown violent and turned into a full-blown military confrontation. Indeed, he and his group, who came to the region from the Crimea, were the first to open automatic fire, killing an officer of the Ukrainian security services and provoking a military response from the Ukrainian side.
Girkin and his supporters, who flooded the region in the spring and summer of 2014, brought with them a brand of Russian imperial nationalism that considered not only ethnic Russians but also Russian-speakers of all ethnic backgrounds to be quintessentially Russian. Their views were best formulated by Aleksandr Prokhanov, the editor of the Russian nationalist newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow), which featured Girkin as one of its authors. According to Prokhanov, Russian-speaking citizens of eastern and southern Ukraine were being threatened with genocide and had the right to rebel, while Russia had an obligation to protect them. He saw no future for Russians so defined in a united Ukraine, which could be nothing but an anti-Russian and pro-Western country. The only solution, he maintained, was to partition Ukraine.
These ideas had been brought to Ukraine from Russia in the years leading up to the events of 2014 and had inspired many activists of the “Russian Spring,” as Russian nationalists dubbed the insurrection in the Donbas, which was directed and funded from Moscow. Among their exponents was a thirty-year-old historian turned small-time entrepreneur, Pavel Gubarev. As a youth, he had belonged to an ultra-nationalist and, according to some observers, fascist organization called Russian National Unity. In April 2014, at a gathering of a couple of hundred activists, Gubarev was elected “people’s governor” of Donetsk, the main city of the Donbas. Neither Gubarev nor Girkin thought of the Donbas as a future independent republic: they envisioned it as part of New Russia, and New Russia in turn as a constituent part of the Russian Federation. Gubarev, in particular, saw the conflict as part of a revolution against the Ukrainian oligarchs, who, like their Russian counterparts, had taken control of the most lucrative sectors of their country’s economy, inspiring envy and hatred among the impoverished population of the post-Soviet state. In Gubarev’s view, the revolt was also part of the larger struggle of the Russian World against the corrupt West. “The Russian church has blessed us for the war that we are waging. It is a war for the Russian World, for New Russia,” declared Gubarev in June 2014, addressing members of the Donbas militia at the height of the military conflict in the region.
In the spring of 2014, Russian nationalists, who had often criticized Putin for indecisiveness, threw their support behind him and his policies. Putin, in turn, was glad to make use of their services and sent the most dangerous radicals out of the country, letting them die in the mining towns and on the fields of Ukraine. But the incipient alliance between the government and the radical nationalists under the banners of the Russian World was shaken in the summer of 2014 as the vision of New Russia failed to materialize, and the two self-proclaimed republics of the Donbas region, one centered on the city of Donetsk, the other on the regional center of Luhansk, found themselves on the verge of collapse.
To save the situation, the Russian government increased the flow of mercenaries, volunteers, and arms and ammunition across the Ukrainian border. It also sent anti-aircraft missile complexes into Ukraine. One of them, called Buk (Beech Tree), and reportedly staffed by Russian servicemen, shot down a Malaysian commercial airplane, flight MH 17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 283 passengers, including 80 children and 15 crew members. The Joint Investigation Team, whose members represented Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Ukraine, was able to establish the launch site, type of missile, and route by which the missile complex was brought from Russia to the rebel-held part of Ukraine and returned to the Russian Federation after the plane was shot down.
The covert support provided to the rebels by the Kremlin was insufficient to withstand the pressure of the Ukrainian army. As in the Crimea, a Russian military occupation was required if the “Russian Spring” was to succeed. After some hesitation, the Russian government sent its troops into battle in August and September 2014 to save the rebel enclaves from imminent military defeat. In the first months of 2015, Russian soldiers, allegedly on leave from their units, were again sent into battle to drive Ukrainian forces out of the strategically important railway junction of Debaltseve, which linked key areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The two rebel republics were saved, but what to do with them was by no means clear. They became a continuing problem not only for Russia’s economy and international standing but also for the future of the Russian World project and Russian policy in the “near abroad.”
Disillusionment with the Russian World also engulfed the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, which found themselves on the verge of economic collapse and with no prospect of either joining Russia or surviving on their own. In fact, the New Russia project was effectively abandoned by the Kremlin as too costly. True believers, such as Gubarev, were removed from real power in the Donbas, which shifted from Russian nationalists and their local supporters to people who had no clear ideological agenda but were fully loyal to Moscow. Gubarev was lucky to survive an assassination attempt when he tried to challenge a Kremlin appointee as supreme ruler of the republic.
In 2015 alone, three of the most prominent local warlords who had helped raise the revolt the previous year were assassinated for failing to fall into line with the new policy of the Kremlin, which considered the economic burden of maintaining the Donbas too heavy and sought to push the region back into Ukraine as a federal unit with veto power over the country’s foreign policy. Gubarev rebranded the old slogan by claiming that the Donbas, to which he refe
rred as New Russia, was a torch that would help bring the rest of Ukraine back to the Russian World. It was a tall order.
The annexation of the Crimea and the war in the Donbas—which had taken almost 10,000 lives by the end of 2016, with at least twice as many wounded, hundreds of thousands left homeless, and millions leaving the conflict zone as refugees—killed any appeal that the Russian World project might have had not only in Ukraine but also in neighboring Belarus. “And if there are any here who consider that the Belarusian land is part of, well, as they say nowadays, ‘the Russian World,’ and almost of Russia itself, forget it,” declared the traditionally pro-Russian president of Belarus, Aliaksandr Lukashenka, in January 2015. “There was no [independent Belarus] previously, but now there is, and that has to be reckoned with. And we will not give our land away to anyone.”
The Russian World was now associated not just with Pushkin and the Russian language but with a land grab that had cost thousands of dead and wounded and disrupted millions of lives.
AFTER THE CRIMEAN ANNEXATION AND THE DONBAS DEBACLE, Vladimir Putin continued to speak of Russians and Ukrainians as one and the same people. This rhetoric, however, was rebuked abroad and found less and less support in Russia itself. Between November 2005 and March 2015, the number of Russian citizens who believed that the two peoples were one and the same dropped from 81 to 52 percent. While historically there had been a high level of sympathy between the two peoples, by March 2014, owing to Russian media coverage of the events in Ukraine, most Russians had developed a negative attitude toward Ukrainians.
There was a similar result in Ukraine, where the image of Russia became generally negative by the fall of 2014 as a result of Russian actions in the Crimea and the Donbas. The Donbas conflict also lessened the appetite of average Russians for the use of force abroad. In March 2014, at the peak of the Crimean euphoria, 58 percent were in favor of using force to protect the Russian minorities there, but that share fell to 34 percent one year later. Between 1998 and 2015, the share of Russians who wanted to change the borders of their state by absorbing other territories fell even more precipitously, from 75 percent to 18 percent.
Russia has paid a high price for its invasion of Ukraine in terms of the lives of its citizens who either were sent to eastern Ukraine or volunteered to go there to fight on the side of the rebel republics and never came home. Russia has also spent significant financial and material resources badly needed at home on the war and on support of the flagging Crimean economy, as well as on the devastated separatist republics. Moreover, Moscow has suffered a major blow to its international prestige and has had to deal with the crippling effect of the economic sanctions introduced by the international community since the start of the conflict.
The first wave of sanctions was introduced by the United States on March 17, 2014, the day on which President Putin ordered the preparation of a treaty incorporating the Crimea into the Russian Federation. The sanctions, which originally targeted only individuals in Russia and in the Crimea responsible for the overthrow of the legitimate Ukrainian government and annexation of the peninsula, were extended to include Russian corporations on July 17, 2014, the day on which Malaysian flight MH 17 was shot down. The sanctions were further extended in the days following that incident by a host of countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and members of the European Union. The sanctions have had a profoundly negative effect on the Russian economy, helping to send it into recession: the per-capita GDP fell from $15,553 in 2013 to $9,053 in 2015. Lack of access to international financial markets led to a significant devaluation of the Russian currency and the rise of consumer prices, bringing new hardships to Russian citizens.
There is good reason to regard the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as a milestone not only in Putin’s presidency and Russia’s relations with the West, but also in the formation of the modern Russian nation. One of the answers it has offered to the eternal Russian question is quite clear: it is not only difficult but impossible to step into the same river twice. The imperial construct of a big Russian nation is gone, and no restoration project can bring it back to life, no matter how much blood and treasure may be expended in the effort to revive a conservative utopia.
EPILOGUE
THE QUESTION OF WHERE RUSSIA BEGINS AND ENDS, AND WHO constitutes the Russian people, has preoccupied Russian thinkers for centuries. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 turned these concerns into a big “Russian question” that constitutes a world problem: What should be the relation of the new Russian state to its former imperial possessions—now independent post-Soviet republics—and to the Russian and Russian-speaking enclaves in those republics?
The current Russo-Ukrainian conflict is only the latest turn of Russian policy resulting from the Russian elite’s thinking about itself and its East Slavic neighbors as part of the joint historical and cultural space, and ultimately as the same nation. The conflict reprises many of the themes that had been central to political and cultural relations in the region for the previous five centuries. These included Russia’s great-power status and influence beyond its borders; the continuing relevance of religion, especially Orthodoxy, in defining Russian identity and conducting Russian policy abroad; and, last but not least, the importance of language and culture as tools of state policy in the region. More importantly, the conflict reminded the world that the formation of the modern Russian nation is still far from complete.
The fall of the Soviet Union and Russia’s failure to maintain control of the post-Soviet space, either through the Commonwealth of Independent States or through the more flexible project of forming a Russian “liberal empire”—a sphere of influence controlled through economic power and cultural ties—provided the immediate geopolitical context for the Russian leadership’s decision to use military force to try to maintain its dominance in the region. But why did the Russians decide to fight in Ukraine against those whom Vladimir Putin himself repeatedly called part of the same people as the Russians?
Ukraine today is at the very center of the new “Russian question.” Because of its size, location, and, most importantly, historical and cultural ties to Russia, Ukraine was, is, and probably will remain for some time a key element in the Russian elites’ thinking about their own identity and destiny. Is Russia to become a modern nation-state, or will it remain a truncated empire, driven into ever new conflicts by the phantom pains of lost territories and past glories? The rise of Russia as both nation and empire has been closely associated with Ukraine, not only because of Russian historical mythology but also because of its record of territorial expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, and the reformulation of its identity according to concepts first formulated by European thinkers of the early modern era, and explained to the Muscovite elite by the Kyivan literati.
Ukraine and Ukrainians were central to Muscovy/Russia’s search for identity from the seventeenth century when Kyivan monks advanced the idea of common “Slavo-Rossian” nationhood, and it remained central during the development of the imperial Russian project by St. Petersburg intellectuals in the eighteenth century, as well as during the imperial struggle against nineteenth-century Polish insurgents for political and cultural influence, and, finally, during the formation of the Soviet Union, with Ukraine as its key element, in the twentieth century. Russian visions of empire, great-power status, and nationhood all hinged on a view of Ukraine as a distinct but integral part of Russia. Many in the Kremlin and beyond have regarded the possibility of Ukraine leaving the Russian sphere of influence as an attack on Russia itself.
Ukraine’s departure is destined to spell the end of Moscow’s imperial ambitions in the post-Soviet space. “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire,” wrote Zbigniew Brzezinski in a seminal article in Foreign Affairs in 1994, a few years after the Soviet collapse. Brzezinski raised the stakes for the West in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict even higher
when he suggested that “Russia can be either an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both.” Around the same time, Edward L. Keenan, a leading Harvard expert in Russian history, suggested that if the Soviet collapse indeed marked the disintegration of the Russian Empire, then it would have to lead to a Russo-Ukrainian war. The outbreak of that war twenty years later made the connection between the Soviet demise and Russian imperial collapse apparent to the world at large.
Ukraine’s departure also shatters the imperial model of Russian national identity, in which Ukrainians are still perceived as part of one Russian nation. Post-Soviet Russian identity is probably best imagined as a set of concentric circles. At the center of them is the core of Russian ethnic identity. The first concentric circle surrounding this core deals with Russian political identity based on Russian citizenship. There follows a circle concerning East Slavic identity. The final and outer layer consists of all other participants in Russian culture—the Russian-speakers of the world. The architects of the “Russian World” project, backed by both the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church, define Russians as bearers of Russian language and culture, irrespective of ethnic origin or citizenship. The Ukrainians, as the central element of the East Slavic layer outside the Russian core, are instrumental in making post-Soviet Russian identity work as a transnational phenomenon. That identity, imperial in its main features, threatens the stability of the whole East European region, extending from Moldova, where Moscow backs the separatist republic of Transnistria, to Latvia and Estonia, members of the EU and NATO with sizable Russian-speaking populations.
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