The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  If Ukraine refused to follow the Russian “federalization” scenario, there was another option: the partition of the country by turning eastern and southern Ukraine into a new buffer state. A Russian-controlled polity called New Russia was supposed to include Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv, Kherson, and Odesa oblasts, allowing Russia overland access to the newly annexed Crimea and the Russian-controlled Transnistria region of Moldova. It did not look plausible, as in April 2014 only 15 percent of the population of the projected New Russia supported unification with Russia, while 70 percent were opposed. But the southeast was not homogenous. Pro-Russian sentiment was quite high in the industrial Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where 30 percent of those polled supported unification with Russia, and low in Dnipropetrovsk oblast, where supporters of Russia accounted for less than 7 percent of the population.

  Russian intelligence agencies initiated the destabilization of Ukraine from the Donbas in the spring of 2014. The Donbas stood out as one of the most economically and socially troubled regions of Ukraine. Part of the rust belt of the Soviet Union and then of Ukraine, it had received huge subsidies from the center to support the dying coal-mining industry. Donetsk, the main regional center, was the only major Ukrainian city where ethnic Russians constituted a plurality—48 percent of the population. Many citizens of the Donbas were attached to Soviet ideology and symbols, with monuments to Lenin (largely demolished in central Ukraine in the course of the Revolution of Dignity) emblematizing the region’s Soviet identity. The government of President Yanukovych came to power and held it by mobilizing its eastern Ukrainian electorate, stressing its linguistic, cultural, and historical differences from central and especially western Ukraine. It claimed that the regionally dominant Russian language was under threat from Kyiv, as was the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War, allegedly in jeopardy from proponents of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in western Ukraine. While the linguistic divide and opposing historical memories indeed drove a wedge between Ukraine’s east and west, politicians exaggerated the differences far beyond their actual importance in order to win elections. Such political opportunism created fertile ground for Russian intervention in Ukraine.

  Paramilitary units often trained and financed by the Russian government and close to the Kremlin oligarchs showed up in the Donbas in April 2014. By May, they had taken control of most of the region’s urban centers. The ousted President Yanukovych used his remaining political ties and substantial financial resources to help destabilize his home region. Gangs in the pay of the exiled president attacked supporters of the new government in Kyiv, while corrupt policemen helped them by supplying names and addresses of potential victims. The local elites, led by Rinat Akhmetov, a business partner of the ousted Yanukovych and Ukraine’s richest oligarch, played along, hoping to shield themselves from the revolutionary changes coming from Kyiv by turning the Donbas into something of an appanage principality under the flag of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics, which corresponded to the two oblasts that constituted the industrial region of Donbas. They miscalculated and by the end of May had lost control of the region to Russian nationalists and local activists, who launched an antioligarchic revolution. As in Kyiv, people in Donetsk were fed up with corruption, but many in the Donbas oriented themselves on Russia, not Europe, and hoped not for a corruption-free market economy but for a Soviet-era state-run economy and social guarantees. If the protesters on the Maidan saw their country as part of European civilization, the pro-Russian insurgents imagined themselves as participants in a broader “Russian World” and their war as a defense of Orthodox values against the advance of the corrupt European West.

  The loss of the Crimea and the turmoil in the Donbas, as well as Russian efforts to destabilize the situation in Kharkiv and Odesa, led to a new mobilization of Ukrainian civil society. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians, many of them participants in the Maidan protests, joined army units as well as new volunteer formations and went to fight the Russia-led insurgency in the east. Since the government was able to supply the soldiers only with weapons, volunteer organizations sprang up all over Ukraine, collecting donations, buying supplies, and delivering them to the front lines. Ukrainian society was taking up the task that the Ukrainian state was not in a position to perform. Between January and March 2014, according to data from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, the share of those who supported Ukrainian independence jumped from 84 percent to 90 percent of the adult population. The share of those who wanted Ukraine to join Russia fell from 10 percent in January 2014 to 5 percent in September. Even most of those polled in the Donbas saw their region as part of the Ukrainian state. The percentage of “separatists” wanting either independence or union with Russia grew from under 30 percent to more than 40 percent of those polled in Donbas between April and September 2014 but never reached a majority, giving most pro-European Ukrainians hope of retaining those territories but also pointing to future problems in forming a common national identity.

  In the presidential election of May 2014, in a show of political unity, Ukrainian voters gave a first-round victory to one of Ukraine’s most prominent businessmen and an active participant in the Maidan protests, forty-nine-year-old Petro Poroshenko. With the end of the legitimacy crisis generated by the ouster of Yanukovych, Ukraine was ready to stand up to both open and covert aggression. In early July, the Ukrainian army achieved its first major success—the liberation of the city of Sloviansk, which had served as the headquarters of the best-known Russian commander, a former lieutenant colonel of military intelligence, Igor Girkin (Strelkov). In a desperate attempt to stop the Ukrainian advance, Russia began to supply the insurgents with new armaments, including antiaircraft missiles. According to Ukrainian and American officials, one such missile shot down a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 with 298 people on board on July 17, 2014. The victims came from the Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia, Britain, and a number of other countries, giving the Ukrainian conflict a truly global character.

  The tragedy of the Malaysian airliner mobilized Western leaders in support of Ukraine, leading them to impose economic sanctions on Russian officials and businesses directly responsible for the aggression. It turned out to be too little, too late. In mid-August, as the two Russian-backed separatist people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk found themselves on the verge of defeat, Moscow stepped up the offensive and sent regular troops into battle along with mercenaries. The Kremlin saved the self-proclaimed republics from collapse but failed to realize its original plan of creating a New Russia—a Russian-controlled polity extending from Donetsk in the east to Odesa in the west that would provide a land bridge from Russia to the Crimea. Russia also failed to stop Ukraine from enhancing its political and economic ties with the West. With Ukraine refusing to accept any loss of its territory or give up its goal of political, economic, and cultural integration with the West, with Russia refusing to let Ukraine leave its sphere of influence, and with the West concerned about the threat to international order but divided over the best strategy to check growing Russian ambitions, the war in eastern Ukraine turned into a prolonged conflict with no end in sight.

  By the end of spring 2015, the war in the Donbas had claimed close to 7,000 lives; more than 15,000 people had been wounded, and close to 2 million had had to flee their homes. About 4 million people found themselves trapped in no-man’s-land as the unrecognized Donbas republics began their descent into the political, economic, and social abyss of a frozen conflict. Is this not too high a price to pay for the prospect of European integration? Perhaps so. But at stake for Ukraine and most of its people in the current conflict are the values that they associate with the European Union—democracy, human rights, and the rule of law—and not just potential membership in the union per se. Also at stake is the independence of their country and the right of its citizens to make their own choices regarding domestic and foreign policy. For centuries, such va
lues and ideas have inspired people all over the world to pursue freedom for themselves and their nations.

  Ukraine faces the enormously difficult task of reforming its economic, political, and legal systems while defending its integrity and sovereignty, but there is growing hope that it can succeed. That hope is based above all on the ingenuity and determination of the Ukrainian people. In the summer of 2015, the Ministry of Economic Development released a video promoting Ukraine to foreign investors. It emphasizes the country’s traditional strength: agriculture. Ukraine, which possesses 33 percent of the world’s rich black soil, is also the world’s second-largest exporter of grain. But even more impressive is its intellectual potential. Ukraine’s literacy rate now stands at a staggering 99.7 percent. It is arguably the fourth best-educated nation in the world. Every year, its universities and colleges produce 640,000 graduates. Of these, 130,000 major in engineering, 16,000 in IT, and 5,000 in aerospace, making Ukraine the software engineering capital of eastern and central Europe.

  For Ukraine, Russian aggression raised fundamental questions about its continuing existence as a unified state, its independence as a nation, and the democratic foundations of its political institutions. No less important are questions about the nature of Ukraine’s nation-building project, including the role of history, ethnicity, language, and culture in the forging of Ukraine’s political nation. Could a country whose citizens represented different ethnicities, spoke (often interchangeably) more than one language, belonged to more than one church, and inhabited a number of diverse historical regions withstand not only the onslaught of a more militarily powerful imperial master but also its claim to the loyalty of everyone who spoke Russian or worshipped at an Orthodox church?

  Russian aggression sought to divide Ukrainians along linguistic, regional, and ethnic lines. While that tactic succeeded in some places, most of Ukrainian society united around the idea of a multilingual and multicultural nation joined in administrative and political terms. That idea, born of lessons drawn from Ukraine’s difficult and often tragic history of internal divisions, rests on a tradition of coexistence of different languages, cultures, and religions over the centuries.

  Epilogue

  The Meanings of History

  March 18, 2014, was a day of triumph for Vladimir Putin, the sixty-one-year-old president of Russia, who was then serving his third term in that office. In the speech he delivered that day in the tsarist-era St. George’s Hall of the Kremlin, a venue for meeting foreign delegations and holding the most solemn ceremonies of state, the Russian president asked the gathered members of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation to pass a law annexing the Crimea. The reaction of the audience, which greeted the speech more than once with explosive applause, left no doubt that the law would be passed without delay. Only three days later, the Federal Assembly declared the Crimea part of Russia.

  In his speech, Vladimir Putin hailed the annexation of the Crimea—an act undertaken in violation of the sovereignty of Ukraine, which Russo-Ukrainian treaties guaranteed and the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 ensured—as a triumph of historical justice. Much of Putin’s argument was historical and cultural in nature. He referred to the disintegration of the Soviet Union as an expropriation of Russia, repeatedly called the Crimea a Russian land and Sevastopol a Russian city, and attacked the Ukrainian authorities for neglecting the interests of the people of the Crimea and, most recently, seeking to violate their linguistic and cultural rights. He claimed that the Crimea had as much right to secede from Ukraine as Ukraine had to secede from the Soviet Union.

  History has been used and abused more than once in the Ukraine Crisis, informing and inspiring its participants but also justifying violations of international law, human rights, and the right to life itself. The Russo-Ukrainian conflict, while arising unexpectedly and taking many of those involved by surprise, has deep historical roots and is replete with historical references and allusions. Leaving aside the propagandistic use of historical arguments, at least three parallel processes rooted in the past are now going on in Ukraine: Russia’s attempts to reestablish political, economic, and military control in the former imperial space acquired by Moscow since the mid-seventeenth century; the formation of modern national identities, which concerns both Russians and Ukrainians (the latter often divided along regional lines); and the struggle over historical and cultural fault lines that allow the participants in the conflict to imagine it as a contest between East and West, Europe and the Russian World.

  The Ukraine Crisis reminded the world of the Russian annexation of the Crimea in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the creation in southern Ukraine of the short-lived imperial province of New Russia. This memory of Russian imperial expansion into the area was brought to the fore not by outside observers trying to portray current Russian behavior as imperial but by ideologues of the Russian hybrid war in Ukraine, who came up with the New Russia project. They sought to develop their historical ideology on the foundations of imperial conquest and Russian dominance in lands originally inhabited by the Crimean and Noghay Tatars and Zaporozhian Cossacks. This pertains especially to the trope of Sevastopol as a city of Russian glory—a historical myth rooted in the 1853–1856 Crimean War (a disaster for the Russian Empire) that attributes the heroism of the multiethnic imperial army defending the city to Russians alone.

  The formation of the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” along with the attempts to proclaim Odesa and Kharkiv republics—building blocks of a future New Russia—also had its roots in historical memory. It went back to Bolshevik attempts to maintain control over Ukraine’s east and south soon after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany (March 1918), which assigned those regions to Ukraine. At that time the Bolsheviks were creating puppet states, including the Crimean and Donetsk–Kryvyi Rih Soviet republics, which were allegedly independent of Moscow and not covered by the treaty. The founders of the new Donetsk republic used some symbols of the Donetsk–Kryvyi Rih republic of 1918, as, like the old one, theirs would not have arisen or survived without Moscow’s sponsorship and support.

  While allusions to the Russian imperial and revolutionary past became part of the historical discourse justifying the Russian aggression against Ukraine, its historical motivation is more recent. The rapid and unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union, recalled by President Vladimir Putin in his speech on the annexation of the Crimea, provides the most immediate historical background to the crisis. The current Russian government keeps claiming that Ukraine is an artificial formation whose eastern territories were allegedly a gift to the country from the Bolsheviks, as was the Crimea after World War II. According to this narrative, the only genuine and thus historically legitimate polity is the empire—first the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. The Russian government actively combats and suppresses any historical traditions and memories that undermine the legitimacy of the empire, such as commemoration of the 1932–1933 Great Ukrainian Famine or the Soviet government’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars; such was the case with the ban on public commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the Crimean Tatar deportation imposed by the Russian authorities in the Crimea in May 2014.

  Russia today seems to be following in the footsteps of some of its imperial predecessors who continued to harbor nostalgia for their empires long after they were lost. The collapse of the Soviet Union left Russian elites bitter about their loss of imperial and superpower status, nourishing illusions that what had happened was an accident brought about by the ill will of the West or by politicians like Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin foolishly bickering for power. Such a view of the end of the Soviet Union makes it hard to resist the temptation to rewrite history.

  The Russo-Ukrainian conflict also brought to the fore another important issue with historical roots and ramifications: the unfinished process of building the modern Russian and Ukrainian nations. The Russian annexation of the Crimea and t
he propaganda intended to justify Russian aggression in the Donbas have proceeded under the slogan of defending the rights of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in general. The equation of the Russian language not only with Russian culture but also with Russian nationality has been an important aspect of the worldview of many Russian volunteers who have come to Donbas. One problem with that interpretation of Russianness is that while ethnic Russians indeed make up a majority of the population in the Crimea and large minorities in parts of the Donbas, most of the population of the projected New Russia consists of ethnic Ukrainians. While Russian and separatist propaganda has had an appeal for many ethnic Ukrainians, most have refused to identify themselves with Russia or with Russian ethnicity even as they continue to use the Russian language. That was one of the main reasons for the failure of the New Russia project, which came as a complete surprise to its authors.

  The view of Ukrainians as constituents of the Russian nation goes back to the founding myth of modern Russia as a nation conceived and born in Kyiv, the “mother of Russian [rather than Rus’] cities.” The Synopsis of 1674, the first printed “textbook” of Russian history, compiled by Kyivan monks seeking the protection of the Muscovite tsars, first formulated and widely disseminated this myth in Russia. Throughout most of the imperial period, Ukrainians were regarded as Little Russians—a vision that allowed for the existence of Ukrainian folk culture and spoken vernacular but not a high culture or a modern literature. Recognition of Ukrainians as a distinct nation in cultural but not political terms in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1917 challenged that vision. The aggression of 2014, backed by the ideology of the “Russian World,” offers Ukrainians today a throwback in comparison with Soviet practices. Nation building as conceived in a future New Russia makes no provision for a separate Ukrainian ethnicity within a broader Russian nation. This is hardly an oversight or excess born of the heat of battle. Less than a year before the annexation of the Crimea, Vladimir Putin himself went on record claiming that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people. He repeated that statement in a speech delivered on March 18, 2015, to mark the first anniversary of the annexation of the Crimea.