In the late evening of 23 February 2014 Putin attended the closing ceremony of the Sochi Olympics. There was a smile on his face. He was beaming with pleasure at the magnificent display in the stadium and at the facilities for the competitions.
The presidential plane had brought him just in time from Moscow, where that morning he had laid a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Warrior.1 Nobody looking at him had any inkling of the ominous decision about the Ukrainian crisis he had taken in the early hours, a decision reached with his closest confidants – Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov and Presidential Chief of Staff Sergei Ivanov2 – at his Novo-Ogarëvo residence, after the news that Yanukovych had fled Kyiv. Talks had lasted deep into the night. Putin later recounted:
We finished around seven o’clock in the morning and I let everyone go and I went to bed . . . And on parting – I won’t make any secret of this – on parting before everyone left, I told all my colleagues, and there were four of them, that the situation in Ukraine had unfolded in such a way that we were obliged to begin work for the restoration of Crimea to Russia. Because we can’t abandon this territory and the people who live there to the vagaries of fate and fling them under the wheels of the nationalists.3
The decision was nothing less than to order Russian forces to overturn the Crimean regional government and expel Ukraine’s forces from the peninsula.
All those present in Novo-Ogarëvo had links to the various security agencies. (Even Ivanov had served as Defence Minister before joining the Presidential Administration.) Prime Minister Medvedev, Foreign Affairs Minister Lavrov and Finance Minister Siluanov had not been invited, even though the significance of the situation stretched far beyond the military. If Putin chose to occupy the Crimean peninsula, he would be putting Russia’s entire future onto a new, visible and dangerous track.
The consultations at Novo-Ogarëvo were eerily reminiscent of those at Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev’s side in December 1979 when they considered the proposal to send the Soviet army into Afghanistan. Brezhnev was no longer well enough to oversee policy, but an inner group of the Party Politburo group, including Defence Minister Dmitri Ustinov, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, Foreign Affairs Minister Andrei Gromyko and Politburo veteran Mikhail Suslov, discussed with him the possibility of military intervention. The decision was then finalized without the holding of a full Politburo. The Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Alexei Kosygin, who had primary responsibility for the civilian sector of the economy, was not present. The main difference from 2014 was that the Foreign Affairs Ministry was represented in the person of Gromyko. It was a decision that led to appalling carnage terminated only ten years later when the Soviet army began its ignominious retreat.
Unlike the sickly Brezhnev, Putin was in full possession of his faculties. He still had to be sure that if he sent troops into Ukraine, he would be acting with due prudence. Patrushev had no doubts: the Russian army must be deployed without delay. Shoigu is said to have been cautious, perhaps because he recalled the disaster of Afghanistan. Another consideration may have been that it was he and not Patrushev who would be accountable for the Russian forces’ performance.4
But Putin and the rest of the group also knew that Russia had not suffered unduly as a result of the Russian invasion of Georgia. George W. Bush had huffed and puffed but done little beyond suspending the activity of the NATO–Russia Council. No sanctions on travel or business were applied to any Russian politician, official or corporation. Nothing was done to assure the Georgians that they would eventually be able to acquire NATO membership.5 But if Putin had gained confidence from this, he would have been sensible to reflect on one big difference between Georgia and Ukraine. Whereas Saakashvili had knowingly annoyed the Russians and ignored the cautionary advice of the Americans, the new authorities in Kyiv had already received encouragement from the European Union and America. Whereas in 2008 South Ossetia and Abkhazia had been turned into Russian protectorates, Putin now planned to annex the peninsula to Russia. The Americans were likely to resort to non-military measures that would wreak harm on Russia. The Magnitsky Act of 2012 showed that an angered America was willing and able to retaliate. Putin was about to dive over a cliff with no assurance of calm and deep waters below.
Throughout 2013 the American intelligence services had picked up no signs of imminent invasion, though on 23 February 2014 Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice told NBC News that it would be ‘a grave mistake’ for Russia to invade Ukraine: a strange remark, unless she had heard that such a move was a possibility.6 But if the Americans did know something, they did nothing about it. Yanukovych’s overthrow and the new direction of politics in Kyiv anyway transformed the international situation. Whoever took power in the Ukrainian capital would hug close not only to the European Union but also to NATO. This would – or at least could – put the Sevastopol naval base in jeopardy, and with it national security. No Russian leader could survive the national shame of that. Ukrainian nationalists, prominent in the Maidan protests, would inevitably gain in influence. Russian speakers in Ukraine feared discrimination. Russia regarded its moves as being of existential importance.
Unless he had been dissembling (which cannot be discounted), Putin had had no long-matured plan to seize Crimea, but undoubtedly the disarray in Kyiv offered an unprecedented and possibly unrepeatable opportunity to secure Sevastopol, the great port city that had been the cause of recurrent wrangling and expense since the fall of the USSR. The Russian navy had its own base in Sevastopol, and a crack contingent from the army and air force was ready for deployment from Russian territory. Russian armed forces had tanks and aircraft in numbers the Ukrainians lacked and which the NATO countries had put out of service in east-central Europe. Ukraine had insufficient conventional forces to stop Putin from overrunning as much of Ukraine as he wanted. An armed response from the Americans could be discounted. In the highly improbable case that Obama might consider firing missiles from American warships in the Black Sea, Putin was ready to put his nuclear forces on alert.7 Crimea lay there for the taking. Putin decided to act.
On 27 February Russian troops, in disguise and wearing masks, occupied the Supreme Council of Crimea in Simferopol, before seizing strategic buildings across the peninsula. Sergei Aksënov, who led the Russian Unity Party and had often called for Crimea’s incorporation in Russia, was elected prime minister by pro-Russian parliamentarians, who were admitted into the Supreme Council building by a cordon of heavily armed Russian troops. The vote was announced in violation of the Ukrainian constitution, which requires prior permission from Ukraine’s president. One of Aksënov’s first acts was to organize a referendum on joining the Russian Federation. With the police and television under control, he intimidated his political opponents. Tatars and Ukrainian speakers were wary about protesting. Meanwhile the government in Moscow affected to be uninvolved. The referendum result was a foregone conclusion. On 16 March, by a large majority, voters in Crimea opted to switch allegiance from Kyiv to Moscow.
Two days later, Putin came before the Federal Assembly in the Russian capital to propose approval of Crimea’s accession. Red Square was ringed by troops reinforced by an OMON contingent brought in from Novosibirsk two thousand miles away. It was a frosty Moscow day. Inside the Kremlin precinct, politicians and other dignitaries queued to enter the Great Kremlin Palace. There was a mood of bright expectancy. A single parliamentarian, the maverick communist Ilya Ponomarëv, voted against Putin’s proposal; his Duma status was quickly suspended and he took refuge in Ukraine.8
In Kyiv the mood turned decisively against Russia, even among citizens previously neutral or even pro-Russian. Putin could not have done more to enrage Ukrainian opinion. Ukrainian political leaders vowed to defend the country against further attack. Acting President Turchynov thought this might best be achieved by adopting a ‘non-bloc’ status for Ukraine: keeping itself free from alignment with either Russia or the European Union. The Secretariat of the Supreme Rada took the opposite position, drafting a law for Ukraine to seek full NATO membership.9 The Rada repealed the 2012 language law allowing the provinces to embed Russian as one of the state languages.10
In the West there was horror at what Putin was doing. If he had counted on a repetition of Bush’s limp reaction to the Russian war in Georgia, Obama quickly disillusioned him. Though the Magnitsky Act had initially been aimed only at the kind of low-level officials responsible for the torments that killed Bill Browder’s lawyer, it set a precedent, and now President Obama imposed economic sanctions. On 15 March 2014 the UN Security Council condemned the Crimean referendum. China abstained, and Russia vetoed the decision anyway.
The Russian case never varied: that Crimea had been unfairly transferred to Ukraine in 1954, and that the persecution of Russian-speaking Crimean residents had compelled Russia to intervene so that a proper referendum could be held. Lavrov rushed back from a visit to Japan to take charge of Russian diplomatic efforts to justify the action in Crimea – having to quickly put aside his resentment at being left out of the original decision. The entire leadership united round official policy. When foreigners argued that the annexation breached the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Lavrov would reply that Russia had merely agreed not to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, blatantly overlooking the guarantee not to infringe territorial integrity.11
On 27 March 2014 the United States presented a motion to the UN General Assembly calling for respect for Ukrainian territorial integrity and denouncing the Crimean peninsula’s annexation. The vote was carried by a huge majority.12 China, Brazil, India, South Korea and Turkey and several other countries with large economies also refused to cooperate with American-led sanctions. Iran, too, rejected the Western line – Tehran was itself being sanctioned by the United States and saw no advantage in annoying the Russians, who as a result were not as comprehensively isolated as the Americans wanted. Nevertheless, American and other Western sanctions delivered a blow to Russian finances, and companies round the world with banking and commercial interests in the United States could not afford to ignore Washington’s list of prohibited contacts, regardless of their own government’s policy.
The only cheer for the Kremlin leadership was the patchiness of foreign condemnation. In November 2016 the United Nations General Assembly accepted Ukraine’s resolution denouncing Russia as an occupying power, but seventy-six abstained, with both India and China voting against.13 At the General Assembly in March 2017 Russia was again assailed by criticism, but this time eighty-two countries either abstained or declined to vote.14
By seizing hold of the tiny Black Sea peninsula, Putin had added less than 2 per cent to Russia’s land mass, which already comprised a whole ninth of the world’s earth surface. Crimea is a speck on the map of Eurasia, cheap to conquer but extremely expensive to annex and sustain. A more modern naval dock and base already existed at Novorossiisk on Russian territory to the east of the Kerch Strait.15 Russia’s strategic interests on the Black Sea did not depend exclusively on retaining Sevastopol, though Putin apparently thought they did. He now learned the price he was going to have to pay, as Ukraine cut off water, gas, oil, transport, salaries and welfare payments to the peninsula, compelling Russian ministries to plug the gaps. Putin vowed to complete the bridge across the Kerch Strait, the construction of which had been agreed between Presidents Medvedev and Yanukovych in 2010. Now Russia alone would undertake the project, despite the difficulty of raising foreign loans.
At a stroke, Putin had thrown away his recent gains in ‘soft power’. He had forfeited the benefits of a normal partnership with the advanced Western economies. Inside the American political establishment, his action transformed those Democratic Party leaders who had been urging restraint in policy towards Russia into impassioned advocates of increasing the pressure on Putin. If Putin had not anticipated this reaction, he and his advisers were poorly informed.
Obama now provided equipment for the Ukrainian forces to defend themselves. But he stopped short of supplying advanced lethal weapons, to prevent the emergency turning into the Third World War. NATO policy in the Cold War had been the same: though America and its allies refused to accept the legitimacy of the USSR’s annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, they never did anything militarily to restore the independence of the Baltic States. The rest of eastern Europe lay under Soviet political control from soon after the end of the Second World War through to 1989. When Berlin workers rose in protest in 1953, NATO refrained from intervening; also when the Hungarians revolted in 1956, and when Czechoslovakia asserted its freedom in 1968. Usually the West complained and condemned communist repression, but then stood aside while it took place. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger went so far as to indicate Washington’s willingness to share with Moscow a condominium over Europe.
This attitude faded during the years of Gorbachëv’s rule and in the 1990s disappeared entirely after the USSR’s collapse, but former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and others resuscitated it after the turn of the millennium when the Russian Federation began to assert itself, fearing the consequences of not allowing the Russians to stand up for their perceived interests. The Crimean events confirmed Kissinger in his opinion that Western policy had failed to achieve a due understanding of Russia’s regional considerations. He criticized the European Union for its part in provoking the political emergency in Ukraine: in his opinion, Merkel and others had tried to turn Kyiv into a Brussels satellite. On 5 March 2014 he wrote in the Washington Post that they had underestimated the danger of restarting the Cold War by forgetting that for Russia Ukraine ‘could never be just a foreign country’.16 Even Robert Gates, the former CIA director and Defense Secretary as well as a veteran foreign-policy hawk, came to believe that America and its allies had for too long ignored Russia’s interests.17
Putin, of course, was of the same mind and, as he laid out his self-justification in subsequent months before world opinion, he argued that Russia had simply followed the precedent set by America in the former Yugoslavia, but without the shedding of blood:
There was no war in Crimea. There were no bombing strikes, no military operations and no casualties. Not a single person perished. The only thing we did was to ensure the right of the people to obtain what they wanted, which by the way was in strict compliance with the UN Charter. We did literally almost the same as you did in Kosovo, only a little more.18
Speaking to an audience of invited foreign guests, Putin was running little risk of anyone pointing out to him the sharp contrast between Crimea and Kosovo. Whereas the Americans bombed Serbia into giving the Kosovars their freedom after Milošević had systematically brutalized them, the Russians ‘liberated’ Crimea in time of peace – no soldiers from Kyiv had been maltreating Russian people on the peninsula. Furthermore, America did not go on to colonize Kosovo or turn it into its fifty-first state. Russia reduced the Crimean peninsula to the status of an administrative entity, subject to rule from Moscow.
Putin’s Crimean campaign had also put paid to his old argument that America was the single nation to infringe international law. Previously he had been fond of declaring that Russia stood for fixed borders, national sovereignty and peaceful resolution of disputes between states. The Crimean annexation showed otherwise: Russia was revealed as an expansionist bully. But Putin did not care about foreign criticism: he had put an end to months of uncertainty in the Kremlin. Crimea would return to Russia.
On 17 April 2014 Putin hinted that Russia’s desires might not have been sated by the annexation of Crimea:
The question is . . . how to ensure the legitimate rights and interests of ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking citizens in the south-east of Ukraine. I would remind you, using the terminology of tsarist times, that this is Novorossiya (New Russia): Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev and Odessa were not part of Ukraine in tsarist times. These were all territories handed to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet government. God knows, why did they do this?19
He was indicating a new threat to eastern Ukraine. The Donbass region was now in his sights. He was testing Obama’s will, and probing to see how much he could get away with.
Fighting broke out in Ukraine’s eastern region on 7 April, when hundreds of troops in green apparel burst into the Ukrainian security service buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk (Lugansk). The Donetsk People’s Republic was proclaimed. Moscow affirmed that the fighters were local Russian-speaking volunteers, when in reality they were part of the Russian army, and their ultimate purpose was to bring about the incorporation of eastern Ukraine in the Russian Federation. Anti-Kyiv protesters swarmed onto the streets to support the military action. Guns found their way from Russia. The Ukrainian authorities deployed their army against the rebels. Town after town became a battleground.
Presidential elections in Ukraine produced a clean first-round victory for the businessman and politician Petro Poroshenko, on a platform of national pride and defence, and he issued a plea to Western powers for assistance. Ukrainian nationalism intensified, moderated only by the realization that Ukraine’s armed forces were outgunned by the Russians. Obama withheld his support beyond the financial and diplomatic, but repeated his demand for Russia to withdraw its forces from both Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
On 17 July international opinion, already agitated, became apoplectic when the rebel forces near Shakhtarsk shot down a Malaysian Airlines passenger plane flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. While Moscow blamed Ukrainian artillery, the evidence already pointed towards Russian responsibility. Western governments were unanimous in calling on the Kremlin to bring the war to a halt. As the investigation in eastern Ukraine proceeded and it became more and more difficult to brush away international criticism, Putin reacted carefully. While some of his spokesmen pinned the blame for the atrocity on Kyiv, Putin limited himself to querying the sense in sending a non-combatant plane over a war zone. He had learned from the mistake made in April 1983 by Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov in denying that his forces had brought down a South Korean airliner in Siberian airspace. Soon afterwards the truth had become irrefutable, and Andropov came to be seen abroad as a liar. As someone who cultivates the image of a hard but plain-speaking leader, Putin prefers others to do the lying.20
Such troops as Putin dispatched to fight proved capable of turning eastern Ukraine into a charnel house but never looked likely to defeat the Ukrainian army. Having realized that only a full-scale invasion would bring victory – something certain Russian public intellectuals, notably Alexander Dugin, were urging him to undertake to achieve the permanent annexation of Ukraine’s entire south-east21 – he endorsed a proposal for peace talks in Minsk. After the downing of the Malaysian airliner, Putin wanted a respite from the bad publicity, and negotiations would give the impression that the Kremlin was not being intransigent.
On 5 September a ceasefire was signed in Minsk between the Ukrainian government and rebel forces. This, was a long way, however, from a permanent settlement. The European Union’s patience was exhausted: a week later it imposed a further set of economic sanctions against Russia. The aim was to hit the Russian economy at its rawest points, so the oil companies Rosneft, Transneft and Gazprom Neft were among those prohibited from raising capital in European markets. Measures were also reinforced to stop Russian banks from obtaining loans in the European Union. The list of individuals banned from travelling to Europe and accessing their assets was increased.22 So severe was the harm to Russia’s economy that Standard and Poor’s, the credit ratings agency, downgraded the country’s sovereign debt to near junk status.23
Fighting continued sporadically in breach of the ceasefire. President Poroshenko refused to buckle. On 14 November 2014 he drew a distinction between the Donbass and the rest of Ukraine:
We will have work, they won’t. We will have pensions – they won’t. We will care for our children and pensioners – they won’t. Our children will go to school, to kindergartens – their children will sit in cellars. They don’t know how to organize or do anything. This, ultimately, is how we will win this war.24
His optimism was accompanied by defiance of Russia’s attempt to reduce the country to splintered fragments. ‘Ukraine must remain a unitary state,’ he explained on 22 January 2015: ‘there will be no discussion of Ukraine’s European choice; and the sole state language is and will be Ukrainian.’25 Putin’s military operations were never enough to overturn the political leadership in Kyiv, but more than sufficient to stiffen Ukraine’s resolve to stave off the Russian assault. Poroshenko presided over a country with many internal divisions, but united by its commitment to national defence. In February yet another ceasefire was agreed in Minsk after talks involving Belarus, France and Germany as well as Russia and Ukraine. The Minsk Accords demanded fresh elections and demilitarization in eastern Ukraine and an amnesty for all fighters.
The chances of success were poor, not least because Putin maintained that Ukraine was an artificial political construct. Western Ukraine, he had publicly noted, was part of Poland before the Second World War: ‘What was Lvov if not a Polish city?’ He now went further, dredging up a legal problem that brought into question the very integrity of Ukrainian statehood. When Khrushchëv had transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, he had omitted to push the change through the Russian and Ukrainian Supreme Soviets, but only through their Presidiums.26 Constitutionality, Putin was suggesting, had been flouted. It was a dubious assertion, but he was correct insofar as the transfer had taken place without a properly broad discussion: Crimea had been shifted on the map through a perfunctory process overseen by the Kremlin leadership.
Then Putin went on the attack, accusing the Western powers of hypocrisy:
Today we are talking about events in Ukraine, and our partners confirm the need to observe the country’s territorial integrity. They say that all those fighting for their rights and interests in the east of Ukraine are pro-Russian separatists. Whereas those who fought against us in the Caucasus, including under the leadership of ‘al-Qaida’ – using its money and holding its weapons in their hands and even with al-Qaida militants taking a direct part in combat actions – were fighters for democracy. It’s shocking but it’s a fact. They talked to us about the disproportionate use of force. They said, ‘How come you’re firing from tanks and bringing up artillery: you can’t do that, you can’t do that!’ And what about Ukraine? The aircraft and the tanks, the heavy artillery and the salvo systems. They’ve even used cluster bombs and ballistic missiles – it challenges all reason! Yet there’s complete silence about the disproportionate use of force.27
His stance, of course, was that of a Great Russian nationalist, who does not recognize Ukrainians as a people in their own right. ‘I make no distinction between Ukrainians and Russians,’ he explained on Russian TV. ‘I think that we are one people. Someone may have a different opinion on this, and we can discuss it. This is probably not the place to talk about it right now. But we are helping people, above all we’re helping the Ukrainian people.’28
What he failed to accept was that his own actions had done more than anyone since Stalin to drive a wedge between the two peoples.
Putin claimed that foreigners were secretly involved in fighting on the side of Ukraine’s government. ‘We often talk of “the Ukrainian army, Ukrainian army”,’ he exclaimed in a speech to students at the St Petersburg Mining University, where in 1997 he had received his doctorate:
Who is doing the fighting there? Yes, there are official units of the armed forces, but a large part of the fighting is carried out by so-called volunteer nationalist battalions. Essentially this isn’t an army but a foreign legion – in this case a NATO legion which naturally does not pursue the national interests of Ukraine. It has entirely different goals which are linked to the achievement of geopolitical goals of containing Russia, which is absolutely not in the interests of the Ukrainian people.29
Suggesting that the fighters taking on the Russian army units in eastern Ukraine were not Ukrainian nationals could hardly be more bizarre.
He went on to justify his operation in Crimea on humanitarian grounds:
These were [Crimean] people who were scared of the coup; let’s be direct about this, they were shaken by the state coup in Ukraine. And after the coup in Kiev – and it was nothing but a coup d’état, however much they dressed it up: the extreme nationalist forces who were coming to power at that moment, and to a significant extent came to power, simply started to threaten people. And threaten Russian people and Russian-speaking people living in Ukraine in general and in Crimea in particular because there’s a greater concentration of Russians and Russian speakers [in Crimea] than in all the other parts of Ukraine.
What did we do? We didn’t go to war, we didn’t occupy anyone, we didn’t fire our weapons, nobody perished as the result of events in Kiev. Not a single person. We used the armed forces only to prevent the more than twenty thousand troops serving there from interfering in the free expression of their will by the people living there. People went to the referendum and voted. They wanted to be part of Russia. The question is: what is the nature of democracy? For me, what’s important is not territory or borders but the fate of people.30
In other words, the Kremlin had done nothing wrong. Putin had seldom exploited sentiment so blatantly.
It was left to Foreign Affairs Minister Lavrov to put a pragmatic spin on things. Speaking to American reporters, Lavrov recalled that Yanukovych had signed an agreement on 21 February 2014 for early elections, despite knowing he faced almost certain defeat at the hands of Ukraine’s voters. The Crimean outcome, he insisted, could have been avoided if only Yanukovych’s enemies had shown some patience and waited to trounce him at the hustings,31 But the continuing street violence and anti-Russian extremism in the Supreme Rada left Russia with no choice but armed action.
Almost the entire ruling group in Russia declared strong support. The exception was the Minister of Finances, Siluanov, who acknowledged the economic damage caused by the invasion, especially to most people’s savings. ‘Nobody can refund that money, because it went to Crimea, to anti-crisis measures.’32 Kudrin, his predecessor at the Finance Ministry, went further and called the policy in Ukraine a disaster:
For me the defence of Russian national interests lies in the strengthening of economic might. Without this, we shall not have military might nor might of any kind. But now our economic strength is weakening and we cannot achieve the objective we have set in external and in internal policy, and this is why my concerns have strengthened.33
Gleb Pavlovski, a ‘political technologist’ inside the Presidential Administration until 2011, when he crossed into opposition, suggested Russia would continue to suffer until its forces ceased to interfere in the Donbass.34 Neither Pavlovski nor Kudrin was driven by a moral or legal calculus: each judged that Putin had chosen an option he ought to have shunned, and the country was going to pay a heavy price.
At least Putin could take solace from the steep rise in his personal popularity. The annexation won Russian hearts, and even the American-led sanctions served to confirm his reputation as a fearless patriot. No Western policy-maker had foreseen this. Meanwhile he went on feeding the hunger for national pride, remarking at the Federal Assembly in December 2014 that Prince Vladimir the Great had received his Christian baptism on the Crimean peninsula in 988:
[This] gives us every reason to say that Crimea, ancient Korsun, the Chersonese and Sevastopol have invaluable civilizational and sacral importance for Russia. Like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism.35
No Russian media commentator chose to expose this designation of the peninsula as the Russian ‘ancestral’ homeland as conflicting somewhat with the historical record. But those few Russians who wished that Medvedev had contested and won the 2012 presidential election were wrong if they believed he would not have ordered the Crimean operation. It had been Medvedev who had set in train the 2008 invasion of Georgia. The Kremlin was united in its determination to seize Crimea, and Medvedev would have faced trouble had he decided to ignore the consensus.
Six years later Putin was the president in office, and revelling in his ability to rewrite history as he chose. He denied that it had been Ukrainians who started the Maidan protest movement of 2013–14. He charged the CIA with having conducted a thoroughgoing campaign of interference in Ukraine’s politics. The trouble had supposedly started not in Moscow or even Kyiv but in Washington.36 As usual, it was Patrushev who drew the starkest picture:
For the last quarter of a century this activity [of the USA and its closest allies] has been directed towards the complete break between Ukraine and the other republics of the USSR and Russia and towards the total reformatting of the post-Soviet space in favour of American interests. The conditions and pretexts were created for the colour revolutions, which were ensured by generous state financing.37
‘We cannot allow,’ fulminated Patrushev, ‘the genocide of the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass.’ He charged the European Union with permitting the growth of neo-Nazi groups, and the West as a whole with planning to instigate a ‘colour revolution’ in Russia, as it had done in Georgia and Ukraine, by subsidizing non-governmental media organizations to spread destabilizing ideas among the Russian people.38
Though the dominant emotion among Russians in 2014 was joy about Crimea joining Russia, leaving Putin basking in its sunshine, there were already signs of approaching bad weather. Putin had dreamed of tempting a fraternal Ukraine into the Eurasian Economic Union. Perhaps he might never have achieved this goal, but the annexation of Crimea deprived Russia permanently of the opportunity to use the Crimean Russians to exert permanent peaceful pressure on Kyiv.39 Cain’s hands were bloody after he attacked Abel. But the Ukrainian Abel survived the assault and remained full of resentments. If the Ukrainian people had been divided about Europe before 2014, they were now united in the national cause of defence against a future Russian yoke. The price was paid by both countries: Ukraine losing Crimea and being forced into a bloody defence of eastern Ukraine; Russian troops committed to a war that has no foreseeable end. There will be no rapprochement for generations.