IN NOVEMBER 1782, WHEN CATHERINE THE GREAT was hesitating over whether to press ahead with the annexation of the Crimean peninsula, Prince Grigory Potemkin urged her on. ‘There is no power in Europe that has not participated in the carving up of Asia, Africa, America,’ her lover and favourite general wrote to her. ‘Believe me that doing this will give you immortal glory greater than any other Russian sovereign ever . . . With the Crimea, dominance over the Black Sea will be achieved. Russia needs paradise.’
Catherine heeded Potemkin’s words. The following year she declared Crimea to be Russia’s forever, adding eighteen thousand square miles to her empire, extending its borders to the Black Sea and paving the way for her country’s rise as a naval power. In order to secure the peninsula’s borders, she ordered the building of the fortress of Sevastopol and the creation of the Black Sea Fleet. Russia had claimed its piece of paradise.
On 19 February 1954, at the stroke of a pen, Crimea was part of Russia no longer. At a meeting of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union’s supreme lawmaking body, it was agreed that the peninsula should be transferred from Russia to Ukraine: Nikita Khrushchev needed the support of the leadership of the powerful Ukrainian Communist Party to confirm him as Stalin’s successor and saw the gift as a way of ensuring they backed him. The people of Crimea were overwhelmingly Russian rather than Ukrainian. But from that moment on they found themselves ruled from Kiev.
The impact of the change was limited as long as the Soviet Union existed and the borders between Russia and Ukraine were internal and administrative. This changed after 1991, when Crimea became part of a newly independent Ukraine. The people of Crimea had voted narrowly in favour of independence in that December’s referendum, but their vote was inspired more by dissatisfaction with the Soviet Union than with a desire for a future with Ukraine. In the years that followed, relations between Crimean authorities and the rulers of the new Ukrainian state were tense; attempts by the peninsula to achieve more autonomy were resisted by Kiev. Many of the ethnic Russians who lived in Crimea dreamt of becoming part of Russia, a sentiment that was reinforced over the years by the latter’s growing affluence relative to Ukraine.
Matters were complicated by the continued presence of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol. Ukraine tried to claim the fleet as its own, but with the majority of officers loyal to Russia, the government knew it faced a potential mutiny if it pressed ahead. As a compromise, the two countries initially agreed to run the fleet jointly, but then in 1997 it was divided into two parts. Russia was allowed to continue to use the port for another twenty years and to keep up to twenty-five thousand troops there, as well as artillery, armoured vehicles and planes. The military foothold on the peninsula that this gave Russia was crucial in the days that followed the fall of Yanukovych.
Many in Crimea had watched the events unfolding in faraway Kiev with concern and were ready to believe a propaganda offensive by Russian media – widely watched in Ukraine – that portrayed those now in charge of Ukraine as dreaded modern-day neo-fascist Banderovtsi. Putin, meanwhile, was ready to pounce. On 18 February 2014, after violence flared in Kiev, Moscow had put Russian special forces on alert in Sevastopol and in the nearby southern Russian port city of Novorossiysk. Two days later, Russian troops were ordered to blockade Ukrainian military installations in Crimea, ostensibly to prevent bloodshed between the pro- and anti-Kiev groups. Early on 23 February, at the end of an all-night meeting with his security chiefs, Putin reportedly took the most momentous decision of his presidency: to annexe Crimea.
‘I told my colleagues that the situation in Ukraine was developing in such a way that we had to start working on returning Crimea to Russia,’ Putin told an officially sanctioned documentary, broadcast a year later on Russian television. ‘We could not abandon this territory and the people who lived there to the mercy of fate, under the steamroller of nationalism.’
Events moved fast: on 26 February, thousands of ethnic Russians chanting ‘Crimea is Russian’ and waving Russian flags gathered outside the regional parliament in Simferopol, the capital, to demand autonomy and independence. They clashed with several thousand Crimean Tatars, the indigenous Muslim population, who were holding a counterdemonstration. A decision by the Ukrainian parliament to repeal the 2012 language law in one of its first acts after Yanukovych’s departure added to tensions. Roadblocks flying the Russian tricolour appeared on the main roads running to Sevastopol. Putin, meanwhile, ordered an unplanned military exercise involving tens of thousands of members of Russian ground and air forces on the border with Ukraine.
At 4:20a.m. the next day, heavily armed pro-Russian gunmen seized Crimea’s parliament and government building. During an emergency session, the parliament dismissed the government and appointed a new prime minister, Sergey Aksyonov, a local pro-Russian businessman and former boxer known locally by his underworld nickname of ‘Goblin’. They also agreed to hold a referendum on 25 May on greater autonomy. The votes that led to both decisions were said to be overwhelming, but it was impossible to be sure: the mysterious gunmen cut off all the building’s communications and took away MPs’ phones as they went in.
‘Provocateurs are on the march,’ declared Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s acting interior minister. ‘It’s a time for cool heads, the healthy consolidation of forces and careful action.’ But police and other local officials in Crimea were reluctant to obey orders from the new government in Kiev, which they considered illegitimate, and there was little the latter could do to enforce its will. Meanwhile, crowds chanting ‘Rossiya, Rossiya [Russia, Russia]’ began to build up outside the parliament building in Simferopol and barricaded its entrance with wooden boxes and metal bins.
Men wearing what looked suspiciously like green Russian military camouflage uniforms began to appear: they popped up first at Simferopol airport in the early hours of 28 February and took control. Later that day, they seized Sevastopol airport too. By the following evening they were guarding key government buildings, had blockaded Ukrainian border troops at Balaklava Bay and set up checkpoints on roads across Crimea. The next day they surrounded a Ukrainian marine infantry detachment stationed around Feodosia in the south-east of the peninsula and ordered it to surrender. Many similar takeovers followed. Russia kept up its relentless propaganda campaign, citing undefined threats to its citizens and proclaimed ‘massive defections’ of Ukrainian forces in Crimea. The mysterious uniformed men had no insignia, but were thought to be from the 810th Marine Infantry Brigade, which had guarded the base in Sevastopol for decades. Unlike the mobs occupying parliament, they were calm and in control. On their Twitter feed they called themselves Vezhliviye Lyudi (‘polite people’). They were immediately dubbed ‘little green men’, and they were rapidly taking over Crimea.
America watched developments with alarm, warning Russia that there would be unspecified ‘costs’ if it violated Ukraine’s sovereignty. In a ninety-minute phone call with Putin, Obama urged him to withdraw his forces to their bases in Crimea and stop ‘any interference’ in other parts of Ukraine. In a statement afterwards, the White House said the United States would suspend participation in preparatory meetings for the G8 economic conference to be held in Sochi in June, and warned of ‘greater political and economic isolation’ for Russia. The Kremlin, in a somewhat different account of the same call, said Putin had spoken of ‘a real threat to the lives and health of Russian citizens in Ukraine’, and warned that it retained the right to protect them and its own interests if the violence spread to the east of the country or to Crimea. Putin knew he could call Obama’s bluff: it was clear that Russia had more at stake than America.
Putin had until now made no public comment on the events in Ukraine. On 4 March he finally broke his silence to denounce the takeover in Kiev as an unconstitutional coup d’état. The soldiers occupying military bases were not Russian soldiers, but local self-defence forces, he insisted. Although there was no need to send forces into Ukraine for the time being, Russia reserved the right to use ‘all means’ as a last resort to prevent anarchy.
Two days later, the Crimean parliament voted to join Russia; on 16 March the decision was put to a referendum. According to official results, the independence vote was backed by 96.77% on a turnout of 83.1%. Allegations of abuse were rife, and although Russian media claimed that as many as 135 international observers had monitored the election, they were drawn from far-right, anti-American and pro-Russian parties in Europe and beyond. Yet there seemed little doubt that a majority of Crimea’s residents was in favour of the break with Ukraine.
On 18 March 2014, more than two hundred years after Catherine had first acquired her slice of paradise – and sixty years after it was signed away by Khrushchev – the peninsula was formally brought back under Russian control. Ukraine was neither able nor willing to fight to keep Crimea. Outgunned and with morale low, its forces had little choice but to give up. Some returned to Ukraine proper; others crossed to the other side. An international border had been redrawn at the point of a gun.
PUTIN’S ACTIONS PLUNGED RUSSIA’S RELATIONS WITH the West into their most serious crisis since the Cold War. Yet Putin seemed undaunted by the opprobrium that rained down on him, not least because of the enormous propaganda benefits at home: bringing Crimea back under Russian control was sold to the Russian public as the long-overdue righting of a historical wrong. The addition of the peninsula’s 1.5 million ethnic Russians to the motherland also fitted well with Putin’s attempt to portray himself as the leader of the Russkiy Mir – a Russian world that included compatriots left outside the borders of the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Nor should the West have been surprised by Putin’s action: the prospect of annexing Crimea had been raised as far back as the 2008 Bucharest summit, when Ukrainian membership of NATO was being discussed, according to Mikhail Zygar, founder of the independent Dozhd television channel. At the time, Putin had warned that if Ukraine joined the Alliance, it risked doing so without Crimea and its eastern provinces. A number of Western analysts also pointed to Crimea as the next possible target for assertive Russian action – among them Roderic Lyne, British ambassador to Moscow from 2000 to 2004. ‘The generals have the bit between their teeth, and the “Crimea next” party will be in full cry,’ Lyne warned in an article published in October 2008 in which he drew on the lessons of the crisis that summer over Georgia.1 Chief among those lessons was the hostile reaction expected from Russia to any attempt to turn Ukraine towards the West, especially if it involved the prospect of NATO membership. ‘We must assume that Russia would exert itself mightily, risk a great deal and pay a high price to prevent Ukraine from becoming, as Russians would see it, a platform for American power,’ Lyne added presciently.
Crimea as an issue faded in importance after Yanukovych did a deal with Russia after coming to power in 2010 – to extend the lease for the Black Sea Fleet. But when the protests began on the Maidan, senior members of Russia’s military and security services, as well as ‘patriotic businessmen’, began to start talking again about the idea of taking back ‘Krym Nash [Our Crimea]’. Furthermore, such an operation looked achievable at minimal cost: Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council, and Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB, assured Putin that their private polling showed that the majority of Crimeans would look positively towards the idea of joining Russia, while the Ukrainian military was so underfunded and badly disorganised it looked unlikely to mount any resistance – especially since many of its officers stationed on the peninsula were loyal to Moscow rather than Kiev.
It was the ousting of Yanukovych that provided a catalyst for action. Putin may have been motivated in part by the desire to get his hands on the vast unexploited oil and gas reserves that lie off the Crimean coast. Possession of the peninsula would also allow a more direct route for the planned South Stream pipeline running under the Black Sea from Russia to Bulgaria and then on to Southern Europe. But while this was undoubtedly a bonus, the improvised nature of the operation suggests that the main reason Putin acted was fear that Ukraine’s new pro-Western leaders might attempt to evict Russia’s Black Sea Fleet from its Sevastopol base, which was strategically crucial. Worse, they might then invite in NATO forces in its place. ‘Putin’s seizure of Crimea appears to have been an improvised gambit, developed under pressure, that was triggered by the fear of losing Russia’s strategically important naval base in Sevastopol,’ concluded Daniel Treisman, who pieced together details of the operation in an account for Foreign Affairs.2
This version was confirmed to me by Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, who claimed that the Kremlin leader ordered the seizure of Crimea after being shown what he believed to be American plans to establish a naval base on the peninsula. ‘Strategically Crimea is very important,’ Peskov said.3 ‘If NATO anti-missile systems or offensive missiles had been deployed there, it would have been very dangerous for Russia and could have changed the balance of power in the region. It was one of the reasons Putin acted. But this question would never have been on the agenda if it had not been for the take-over in Kiev.’
Regardless of when and why the decision to annexe Crimea was taken, there is no doubt that it reflected Putin’s growing assertiveness at home and abroad since his return to the presidency in 2012. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia had considered the former Soviet space as part of its legitimate sphere of influence, even though in the early years it could do little more than meddle. Putin did not try to stop the Baltic states joining NATO in March 2004, nor did he interfere when Ukraine turned towards the West after the Orange Revolution a few months later; his patience was rewarded when Yushchenko’s government fell apart and the more pro-Russian Yanukovych eventually took his place.
Yet Russia – and Putin – had changed, and in his Munich speech of 2007 the Kremlin leader had signalled a new determination to pursue Russia’s national interests. This determination was helped by buoyant oil prices, which remained at well over $90 a barrel, keeping the Russian state’s finances strong and living standards high. Experience had also taught Putin that the West would do nothing to stop him. For all Bush’s determined pursuit of his ‘freedom agenda’, he had let Russia get away with its intervention in Georgia with little more than a mild reprimand. Obama had followed up after coming to office by offering Moscow a ‘reset’. Obama’s performance since – in particular his reluctance to enforce his ‘red line’ on Syria – would have further emboldened Putin as he contemplated action.
But was the seizure of Crimea a one-off event, or the beginning of a broader push by Putin to redraw Russia’s borders? The events of the next few weeks were to provide an alarming foretaste of what was to come.
THE ANNEXATION OF CRIMEA PROMPTED PREDICTABLE outrage from the West: the same day that the peninsula’s parliament voted to join Russia, Obama ordered sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against individuals who had ‘asserted governmental authority in the Crimean region without the authorisation of the Government of Ukraine’. On 17 March, the day after the referendum, Obama extended the sanctions, taking in, among others, three members of Putin’s inner circle. The EU responded with slightly more limited sanctions of its own, despite the reluctance of some member states, such as Italy, Spain and Cyprus, which were worried about the impact on their own financial and trade links with Russia. Other countries followed. Merkel said Europe was looking for Russia to provide concrete evidence ‘in the next few days’ that it was trying to calm the situation.
Yet that was as far as it went. The new government in Kiev had neither the will nor the military forces to attempt to take back Crimea. Nor was the West going to do so on its behalf. Ukraine was not a member of NATO, and the Alliance was under no obligation to defend it. The Budapest Declaration of 1994 in which America, Russia and Britain had agreed to respect Ukraine’s borders appeared forgotten. Far from backing down, on 20 March Russia announced sanctions of its own against certain American citizens, among them Senator McCain. Putin justified the annexation of Crimea as an act of self-determination in favour of its Russian majority, drawing on the precedent set by Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008. Merkel dismissed the comparison as ‘shameful’.
In the meantime, trouble was also brewing elsewhere in Ukraine. The Maidan had been dominated by people from the capital and the west of the country. What they – and the West – a popular uprising against a corrupt ruler looked very different to many in the south and east of Ukraine who, like the people of Crimea, had consistently voted for Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions. They, too, were ready to believe the worst of the country’s new rulers – an impression that had been strengthened by the speed with which the new Ukrainian parliament repealed the 2012 language law. Oleksandr Turchynov, the interim president, vetoed the move, but it was seen by Russian speakers as an attack on their rights and a harbinger of trouble to come.
Within a few days, ‘self-defence’ groups sprang up in a dozen or so cities in the east, inflamed by an intensification of the Russia-language media’s propaganda campaign against Ukraine’s new ‘fascist’ leaders. The degree of organisation exhibited by these groups, coupled with the arrival of ‘activists’ from across the border, suggested this was a far from spontaneous uprising: the protests were clearly being inspired and to some extent directed from Russia. On 7 April, separatists proclaimed the Donetsk People’s Republic; on 27 April, their counterparts in Luhansk, 150 kilometres to the north-east, proclaimed their own republic. Defiance of Kiev soon turned to violence.
So where would the separatists – and their backers in the Kremlin – go next? Putin offered a clue during a televised question-and-answer session on 17 April when he repeatedly spoke of ‘Novorossiya’. The term was coined in the eighteenth century to refer to a swathe of territory north of the Black Sea, from the Russian border all the way across to the frontier with modern-day Moldova, west of Ukraine, which was conquered by Catherine the Great and given to Potemkin to administer. It included not just Donetsk and Luhansk, but also the port city of Odessa in the south-west and the industrial centre of Dnipropetrovsk in the north. Such lands were ‘not part of Ukraine in Tsarist times; they were transferred [from Russia] in 1920’, Putin noted. ‘Why? God knows.’
At first the rebels faced little resistance: the Ukrainian army was in a parlous state after more than two decades of independence during which time it had been starved of funding – with much of its meagre budget lost to corruption. But amid the chaos, dozens of militias began to spring up, drawing in those who had manned the barricades in the Maidan. Ihor Kolomoisky, one of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs, was among those who helped finance them.
The process of creating a military force loyal to the new government was stepped up after the presidential election on 25 May, which was won by another oligarch, Petro Poroshenko, with an impressive fifty-four per cent of the vote. Poroshenko was best known as the owner of Roshen, a confectionery maker, which earned him the nickname ‘the Chocolate King’. He also owned Channel 5, an all-news television channel that had been sympathetic to the Maidan uprising. Typically for Ukraine, where business and politics are closely intertwined, he had also had several stints in government, including a spell as foreign minister. Poroshenko vowed to make stopping the war his priority. But attempts to start a peace process failed and he resorted to military means instead. A summer offensive began well: the Ukrainian army and militias made considerable gains, recapturing dozens of towns and villages held by the rebels. On 5 July the triumphant president ordered his military to raise the Ukrainian flag over Sloviansk, an impoverished industrial town of 100,000 that his forces had been shelling for weeks. When Ukrainian forces moved in, they found 250 prisoners who had been held in a basement under the town hall.
Then on 17 July came a dramatic and tragic twist: a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777-200ER with 298 passengers and crew on board crashed near Torez in Donetsk oblast, an area twenty-five miles from the Russian border controlled by the Donbass People’s Militia. The cause of the disaster quickly became clear: Flight MH17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, had been shot down by a Buk 9M38 surface-to-air missile fired by pro-Russian insurgents who had apparently mistaken it for a Ukrainian military aircraft. As was to be confirmed by an exhaustive Dutch-led international investigation that reported in September 2016, the missile had been brought across the border from Russia in the early hours of that morning aboard a flatbed trailer and fired from a field four miles south of the town of Snizhne, an area under the control of the rebels. It exploded close to the cockpit of the plane. After those responsible realised to their horror what they had done, the system was reloaded onto the trailer and towed back to Russia.
The rebels – and their backers in the Kremlin – tried to ride out the crisis with their usual mixture of evasion, bluster and conspiracy theories: Russian media initially reported that the airliner had been shot down by Ukraine in a failed attempt to assassinate Putin; it was also variously claimed that Ukrainian air traffic controllers had deliberately redirected it to fly over a war zone and that it had been brought down by Kiev’s forces to discredit the rebels, using a Ukrainian rather than a Russian missile. A few months later, Russia’s Channel One television produced what it claimed was a leaked spy satellite photograph showing the plane being hit from behind by a Ukrainian fighter jet. Even more bizarre was the claim circulating on the internet that MH17 had been loaded with corpses – perhaps from MH370, another Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777-200ER that disappeared without trace while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing four months earlier – and then flown by remote control.*
The tragedy might have been expected to have shamed the Kremlin into a change of policy. Far from it: given the fervour with which the Russian media continued to denounce the illegitimacy of the Ukrainian government, and to highlight atrocities carried out by its forces, Putin could not allow the separatists to be defeated. Help was sent across the border: just as had been the case in Crimea, heavily armed outsiders with Russian accents began to appear in villages in eastern Ukraine and set up roadblocks. They did not have any insignia on their uniforms and the identifying marks on their vehicles had been painted over in white. Yet there were other more subtle indications of their origins: the writing on the ration packs they traded with locals for fruit and vegetables was in Russian rather than Ukrainian. Their lack of knowledge of local geography made it clear that they were from elsewhere. The little green men were back.
In the meantime, Western countries were stepping up their sanctions against Russia. Putin responded on 6 August by imposing a one-year ban on the import of food products from countries that had imposed sanctions. With EU food exports to Russia worth almost €12 billion a year, Putin’s move was a major blow to Europe’s farmers. It also hit Russian middle-class shoppers, who had become used to picking up French wine and Italian Parmesan and prosciutto at their local supermarkets.
To Russia’s dismay, a leading role in building the coalition against Putin was played by Germany. This was all the more surprising since Germany had hitherto been one of Russia’s leading champions in Europe, in part because of the estimated $84 billion a year in trade between the two countries and in part out of a sense of gratitude to the Kremlin for having allowed unification with the former communist east. Merkel had three face-to-face meetings and forty telephone conversations with Putin over the course of 2014 – more than David Cameron, François Hollande and Barack Obama put together – in the search for a solution. Having grown up in the former East Germany and travelled widely in the Soviet Union, Merkel understood Putin and his mentality. Yet according to aides, she was outraged by the ‘blatant untruths’ he told her and became convinced that the only language he understood was force. Asserting the primacy of politics over economics, she then proceeded to take on the Putinversteher (Putin apologists) in her own coalition and in industry before turning her attentions to the rest of the EU, which gradually swung behind her – in some cases reluctantly.
The moment Merkel finally became convinced that there could be no reconciliation with the Russian leader was when he began to rail against the decadence of the West and the ‘decay of values’ exemplified by its promotion of gay rights, one source close to Putin told the Sunday Times.4 ‘The chancellor has come to believe that Putin is driven by an ultra-conservative mindset that is shared by his inner circle and is based on a belief that Russia’s values are superior and irreconcilable to those of the West,’ the source said; Merkel understood ‘there will be no deals with Putin, unless they are on his own terms, and that is neither acceptable nor possible’.
In the meantime, Russian reinforcements sent to Ukraine were quickly making their mark. On 25 August the separatists mounted a counteroffensive that stalled the Ukrainian government’s advance against Donetsk and Luhansk. After a three-week battle, they had thwarted an attempt by Kiev’s forces to take Ilovaysk, massacring them as they retreated. Up to one thousand soldiers died. The battle produced one of the most horrible images of the war: the body of a soldier hanging from a power cable onto which he had been flung when his armoured personnel carrier was hit. Russia, predictably, denied it had sent forces to help the separatists, but satellite images suggested that vast amounts of troops and military equipment had crossed the border from Russia. NATO commander Brigadier General Nico Tak claimed on 28 August that ‘well over’ one thousand Russian soldiers were operating in the Donbass conflict zone. The real figure was probably several times higher.
With the war now going against it, Kiev had little alternative but to negotiate. ‘We cannot win the war in Donbass with military means; Russia won’t allow us to do that,’ Poroshenko admitted. The more Ukrainian soldiers deployed, ‘the more Russian soldiers will show up’.5 On 5 September a ceasefire was signed in Minsk and two weeks later a deal was agreed between Ukraine, Russia, the rebels and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe: military formations would be frozen and heavy weapons pulled back fifteen kilometres. As part of the deal, a law was passed that granted significant autonomy to the separatist regions for three years and provided for the election of local councils there on 7 December.
The deal quickly started to unravel, however. Fighting began to break out again. Then on 2 November, authorities in the two self-proclaimed republics of Luhansk and Donetsk held elections – one month earlier than they should have done under the Minsk agreement. Poroshenko replied by demanding that parliament revoke the ‘special status’ that the pair had been given. Russian forces, meanwhile, continued to pour across the border. On 13 January, the separatists started a winter offensive with a fresh assault on Donetsk airport. They took it eight days later. The gleaming new terminal built for the Euro 2012 football championship had already been largely destroyed, but it was the last part of the city held by government forces, and its capture was an important symbolic victory for the separatists. It was their aim to seize enough territory to create a viable state and to force the authorities in Kiev to sign a new settlement more favourable to them than the Minsk agreement.
The Ukrainians again faced a dilemma. They could either continue to fight, risk losing more land and divert attention away from the much-needed rebuilding of their country or else go back to the negotiating table and accept less favourable terms. They chose the latter option. Minsk II was signed on 12 February 2015; a ceasefire came into force three days later. Although the deal largely held elsewhere, this was not the case in Debaltseve, an important road and rail junction sandwiched between the two rebel republics, which Ukrainian government forces had seized from the separatists the previous July. The rebels needed Debaltseve to create their state and encircled it. On 18 February, a column of about two thousand Ukrainian men retreated, but they were ambushed by the rebels and suffered serious casualties. In a major humiliation for Poroshenko, the flag of Novorossiya was raised over Debaltseve later that day.
Fighting continued in the months that followed, albeit at a lower level. There was also an apparent change of tactics by Moscow. On 20 May, a few weeks ahead of a decision by the European Union on whether to renew sanctions against Ukraine, supporters of the two rebel republics announced the freezing of the ‘Novorossiya’ project on the grounds that it did not comply with Minsk II. Western sanctions were renewed nonetheless; Putin reciprocated. Following months of ceasefire violations, the Ukrainian government and the leaders of Donetsk and Luhansk jointly agreed to halt all fighting, starting on 1 September. Despite some breaches, the ceasefire largely held. Stepan Poltorak, the Ukrainian defence minister, reported shortly afterwards that violence in the Donbass had reached its lowest level since the start of the war.
Yet Ukraine was now a divided country. The three million people who lived in the east had been ‘plunged into the strange vortex of former Soviet politics known as a frozen zone’, similar to South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia or Transnistria in Moldova, wrote Andrew Kramer of the New York Times in a poignant report from Donetsk that November.6 ‘In each case, the Kremlin intervened or provided arms on the pretext of protecting ethnic Russians or local allies, then it installed pro-Russian governments that it has used to manipulate events in the host countries.’ In eastern Ukraine, as in the other areas, the atmosphere was reminiscent of the distant Soviet past. In government offices, portraits of Stalin ‘looking avuncular and kind’ gazed down on visitors. The secret police in Donetsk was called the MGB, the same name that was used in the Soviet dictator’s last years. No opportunity was lost to celebrate the Second World War victory over the Nazis. The authorities in Kiev were denounced in the local media as neo-fascists. This state of affairs continued into 2016, with minor outbreaks of fighting along the line of contact, but without any territorial changes. Eastern Ukraine had become Europe’s forgotten war.
THE HUMAN COST OF THE CONFLICT in eastern Ukraine was enormous: an estimate published in June 2016 put the death toll at ten thousand; many more people had been injured and at least 2.5 million civilians displaced. The dead were thought to include at least two thousand Russian soldiers, though this was never confirmed by the Kremlin.7 From Putin’s point of view, however, his intervention, like that in Georgia six years earlier, had achieved the desired effect. Not only had he secured control of the peninsula, righting what he depicted as a historical wrong, he had also scuppered any chance of NATO membership for Ukraine, since the Alliance’s rules preclude granting admission to a country that is not in full control of its territory. He had also dramatically illustrated the limits of Western power by showing his ability to redraw borders within the former Soviet space.
Regardless of its strategic benefits, though, Crimea was to prove a severe economic drain on the Russian economy. The cost to the state budget of keeping it afloat was estimated at about $4.5 billion a year; a planned bridge linking the peninsula to the Russian mainland was expected to cost $4 billion. Russia would eventually reap the benefits of the oil and gas off the coast, but the revenue would take years to come through.
Yet all this was ignored amid the outburst of patriotic fervour. The Kremlin’s control of the media ensured that Putin’s popularity grew rather than declined: Russia’s economic woes, caused by a combination of fundamental structural problems and falling oil prices, could now be blamed on Western sanctions. Imaginative businesspeople found ways around the ban on food imports: mussels purportedly from Belarus, which has a customs-free zone with Russia, began to appear on restaurant menus – particularly surprising given that the country is landlocked. Domestic producers learnt to make their own versions of mozzarella and Parma ham. Russians found themselves cast in a familiar role: encircled by enemies bent on the destruction of their country.
As Leonid Gozman, a liberal Russian political commentator, put it in April 2015: ‘It may astonish my friends in the West, but the attitude of Russians today towards the United States and Americans is worse than it was for most of the Cold War, when Americans were viewed as “good guys” living in a bad, imperialist state. Now, many Russians view not only US leaders but US citizens as “bad guys”.’ One poll showed that the proportion of Russians who described relations with the US as ‘hostile’ surged from four per cent in January 2014 to forty-two per cent a year later.
Obama, by contrast, faced criticism over his apparent inability – or unwillingness – to deter Russian aggression. In its National Security Strategy published in February 2015, the White House stated that Russian aggression should be resisted and that the Ukrainian people should be supported ‘as they choose their own future and develop their democracy and economy’. Yet such support did not extend to providing Ukraine with anything beyond ‘non-lethal aid’. The administration argued that if America armed the Ukrainians, then, as Poroshenko had publicly acknowledged at the time of the first Minsk agreement, the Russians would respond by stepping up assistance for the rebels. The result would be a continuation of the stalemate – but with more casualties. Given how much more was at stake for Russia than for America, this was an arms race that Washington could never realistically expect to win.
The French and German governments agreed with Obama, but there was dissent at home – most notably from Senator McCain. Although not going so far as to advocate putting American boots on the ground, he argued that Washington should at least supply Ukraine with the advanced weaponry it needed to defeat the rebels. ‘It is shameful that we will not provide [the Ukrainians] with weapons to defend themselves,’ the hawkish senator declared during a visit to Kiev that June. ‘They are fighting with twentieth-century weapons against Russia’s twenty-first-century weapons. That’s not a fair fight.’
It was nevertheless clear that, unlike the aftermath of the Georgian crisis, there could be no return to business as usual. The annexation of Crimea had fundamentally transformed Russia’s relations with the West for the worse. Despite the souring of the mood that followed Putin’s re-election in 2012, there had still seemed a chance that the two countries could cooperate on certain issues. Now Obama’s reset seemed well and truly over; indeed, in retrospect it looked dangerously naive.
Nor was it easy to foresee a way out of the dead end. Western policymakers continued to insist that the only solution was to revert to the status quo ante-bellum: the return of the contested peninsula to Ukraine and a total withdrawal of Russian forces. Anything else would smack of appeasement. But the Kremlin showed no signs of buckling under the pressure. Returning Crimea to Ukraine would have meant an enormous loss of face for Putin who, despite his control of Russia’s state media, would have found it difficult to portray it as anything other than a bitter defeat. And what of Crimea’s predominantly ethnic Russian population? Would they happily return to being ruled from Kiev?
An end to the meddling in eastern Ukraine should have been easier to bring about, given the Kremlin’s repeated, if unconvincing, denial of involvement. Russia seemed to hope for an eventual ‘compromise’ under which it would be allowed to keep Crimea in return for pulling the plug on the rebels and withdrawal from eastern Ukraine. Yet this would not necessarily bring peace. The separatist uprising had undoubtedly been incited by Moscow, but it had gone on to acquire a momentum of its own. Months of military bombardment had divided communities and created such bitterness towards Kiev that it was difficult to imagine the self-styled leaders of the breakaway eastern republics putting down their weapons. Indeed, thanks to their links with organised crime, many were doing well financially from the continuing crisis.
In a wide-ranging interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, published in The Atlantic magazine in April 2016, Obama gave a characteristically frank admission of the limitations of US policy towards Ukraine. ‘The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,’ he said. ‘Putin acted in Ukraine in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp. And he improvised in a way to hang on to his control there.’ But just because Russia would always dominate Ukraine, this did not mean that Putin had won. ‘Russia was much more powerful when Ukraine looked like an independent country but was a kleptocracy that he could pull the strings on,’ Obama added. ‘Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence.’
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* The Kremlin was to continue to try to deny any responsibility for the disaster even after publication of the September 2016 report, for which the Dutch-led investigation examined thousands of pieces of debris from the crash scene, listened to 150,000 intercepted telephone calls and studied half a million photographs. Key testimony came from an unnamed rebel soldier who had guarded the missile convoy on its return to Russia after the launch. One of the most convincing pieces of evidence found by the investigators was traces of shrapnel in the bodies of the pilots that came from a warhead from a Buk missile of a type in Russia’s arsenal but not Ukraine’s. Plastered onto the shard were microscopic traces of the glass used by Boeing in the cockpit of the 777. Russia anticipated the investigation’s conclusion by releasing new radar images two days earlier that it claimed disproved the theory. They were not convincing and contradicted the earlier Russian explanations of the disaster.