A seismic upheaval in world politics was registered on 27 February 2014 when masked Russian troops seized the parliamentary building in Sevastopol on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Other strategic sites were overwhelmed without serious resistance. A new government was proclaimed for Crimea. Its ministers held a referendum on independence, and used the favourable outcome to declare a wish for incorporation in Russia. On 18 March 2014 the Federal Assembly in Moscow voted to accept Crimea as a territory of the Russian Federation.
For Vladimir Putin it was axiomatic that Russians and Ukrainians share a single national identity.1 His is a mindset that is centuries old. Admittedly, he has also talked in a more nuanced way: ‘But we love Ukraine and I truly think of the Ukrainians as a fraternal people, if not exactly one and the same as the Russians and a part of the Russian people.’2 Usually, though, he fudges the distinction between a Russian and a Ukrainian.
The Kremlin elite could only accept an independent Ukraine so long as no other state controlled its future and Ukraine regarded Russia as its most important partner. Alarm bells would ring in Moscow whenever Ukrainian politicians talked about applying for membership of the European Union or NATO. Putin and his entourage were especially sensitive to such sentiments: Russian politicians wanted to keep Ukraine as a zone of their special economic interest, and Russian big business felt the same. Russian commanders saw the Sevastopol naval base in Crimea as crucial for Russia’s security, Sevastopol being venerated in Russian military annals for the sieges that took place in the Crimean War of 1853–6 and in the Second World War. Many ordinary Russians felt that Russia and Ukraine ought to stick together.3
Putin can hardly deny that millions of Ukraine’s people speak Ukrainian rather than Russian. He points instead to those other millions who are Russian speakers, some of whom speak no Ukrainian. Bilingual citizens, moreover, can be found in every place in Ukraine, big or small, and the linguistic overlap between Russian and Ukrainian is extensive: a monolingual Russian and a monolingual Ukrainian can read each other’s language, albeit imperfectly.
There are deep cultural links. The Russian Orthodox Church draws on a heritage founded in Kyiv in the ninth century, when the entities of ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’ had yet to exist. The lands that now constitute Ukraine fell under Russian suzerainty in 1654 when Ukrainians threw off the Polish yoke and sought Russia’s protection. Russia, Prussia and Austria chopped up Poland among themselves in the partitions of 1771–95. This resulted in still more Ukrainian communities becoming subjects of the tsars. It was an empire that had recently spread southward at the expense of the Ottomans and annexed Crimea and the surrounding region. The authorities in Russia’s capital St Petersburg divided the conquered lands into provinces and encouraged the resident nobility to adopt the Russian language. Ukrainian schools were few. The Ukrainian tongue was spoken primarily by peasants. When Nikolai Gogol and other writers from Ukraine burst onto the literary scene, they chose Russian as their preferred language. The lasting result was that many Russians, including Putin, never accepted that Ukrainians were a separate people with their own nationhood.
Even so, the critics of Putin tend to overestimate Ukraine’s national homogeneity and the longevity of its frontiers. Before the First World War the Ukrainian lands were shown on tsarist maps as provinces of the Russian Empire without reference to ethnicity, and the region where Ukrainian was the main language was officially called Malorossiya (Little Russia) – the authorities in St Petersburg wanted there to be no doubt about Russian dominance. This changed after the February 1917 Revolution, when the Russian Provisional Government took account of a rise in Ukrainian national assertiveness. But it was the Germans, not the Russians, who were the first to designate and demarcate a state called Ukraine, when they held peace talks at Brest-Litovsk with Lenin’s communists, who had seized power in Russia in the October 1917 Revolution, only to find that Germany could and would overwhelm them unless they ceded sovereignty over Ukraine and the other western borderlands of the former Russian Empire.
Ukraine was for some months a puppet state, nominally independent but under German military occupation. With Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the subsequent communist victory in the civil war, Lenin and Stalin had to decide what to do about the territories that Ukrainians inhabited. Against many objections from communist veterans, they decided to maintain a Ukrainian Soviet republic, albeit under Moscow’s control. Yet they did not trust the Ukrainians to rule themselves unless the new Ukraine had a strong industrial sector, and consequently carved off Kharkov and the Don Basin from the Russian Soviet republic and transferred them to the Ukrainian authorities. The result was that millions of Russians found themselves resident in Soviet Ukraine. At the same time the communist administration encouraged the Ukrainian language to be taught in schools. Ukrainian speakers were promoted to public office. Despite it being a Soviet republic of mixed ethnicity, by the 1920s national confidence was taking hold in Ukraine. In 1929 that confidence turned into hatred and resentment when Stalin brutally imposed the collectivization of its farms. Mass famine followed in 1932–3. Stalin also restricted the use of the Ukrainian language in schools and the press. Great Russia was hailed as little Ukraine’s elder brother. The entire experience only sharpened Ukrainians’ feelings of hatred towards Moscow.
Then came the German invasion in 1941, and again the Ukrainians suffered appallingly. History brought nationhood cruelly to Ukraine. Putin draws a veil over this, and when he speaks of the sufferings Stalin inflicted, he picks out as ‘the first and greatest victim’ of repression not the Ukrainians but the Russians.4
When the fighting stopped in 1945 a redrawing of frontiers took place. Chunks of pre-war Poland were transferred to Soviet Ukraine, while post-war Poland received German lands east of the rivers Oder and Neisse, something Putin has cited to press the point that present-day Ukraine is an artificial creation.5 After Stalin’s death in 1953 his successor, Nikita Khrushchëv, who had once been his appointee as the leader of Ukraine’s Communist Party, knew how bruised most Ukrainians felt by the rough treatment they had received at the hands of Moscow.
Khrushchëv’s gesture to the Ukrainians was to transfer Crimea from the Russian to the Ukrainian republic. It also made equal sense from an economic viewpoint: water and transport went into the peninsula from Ukraine, whereas Russia was separated from Crimea by the waters of the Kerch Strait – something Russia has overlooked when highlighting the supposed capriciousness of Khrushchëv’s decision. Putin too has reason to ignore the fact that the deed was done in 1954: Khrushchëv had not yet become the Kremlin’s ruler, and required approval from the Soviet leadership.
In Khrushchëv’s time the matter seemed of little moment, as Russia and Ukraine were part of the same communist multinational state. At any rate, Ukrainian sensitivities were not assuaged. Restrictions on national self-expression lasted into the late 1980s, and the political leadership in Kyiv was appointed and supervised by the Kremlin. Under Gorbachëv, Ukraine stayed troubled but quiet, still ruled by a communist elite for the most part appointed back in Brezhnev’s time. This was how Gorbachëv liked it: he did not want trouble from Ukraine while he had his hands full with reform in Moscow.
Tensions between Russia and Ukraine grew as both moved towards independence. After the abortive August 1991 coup against Gorbachëv, some of the politicians close to Yeltsin travelled to Kyiv to scout the Ukrainian scene. They warned President Kravchuk to act with caution: if Ukraine unilaterally seceded from the USSR, they said, it would be unwise for Ukrainian leaders to regard the existing Russo-Ukrainian border as immutable. Some Russians of influence wanted Russia to take over the neighbouring parts of Ukraine where Russian speakers were in the majority and where Russian security interests were at stake. As things turned out, over the next few years the rulers of Russia and Ukraine avoided a clash as Yeltsin negotiated smoothly with Kravchuk and his successor Leonid Kuchma, despite a drawn-out wrangle over Russia’s naval base in Sevastopol.6 In any case, Russia and Ukraine were at the time both dependent on the West’s financial assistance. The result in 1994 was an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum, signed by Russia, Ukraine, the USA and the United Kingdom, under which the Russians and Ukrainians committed themselves to respecting each other’s sovereignty and frontiers.
On this basis Ukraine gave up all its nuclear forces, which only increased Russian leverage on Ukraine’s leaders, since Ukraine remained dependent on Russia for its fuel supplies. Whereas the Russian recovery from economic depression was difficult until the turn of the millennium, the Ukrainian budget remained a basket case, and Russian ministers took grim pleasure in publicizing their indulgence of Kyiv’s failure to pay its gas bills on time, or even at all.
The election that brought Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency in Ukraine in 2004 was a turning point in Russo-Ukrainian relations, especially when Yushchenko talked about forming a close association with the European Union, with a view to perhaps even joining as a full member. There was also talk about applying for NATO membership. This horrified Russian ministers, whose preference was for Ukraine to enter a projected Eurasian Economic Union. Putin had long wanted to create a regional economic bloc that Russia could dominate, and regarded Ukraine as the most prized potential member. The stakes were high, and from the turn of the millennium the Kremlin’s edginess about Crimea was voiced many times. With encouragement from Moscow, the Crimean Russian speakers pushed hard for their rights. Activists in Sevastopol demanded recognition of Russian as a state language and denounced Ukrainian nationalism and Kyiv’s reverence for Stepan Bandera, who in the Second World War had fought for Ukraine’s independence by collaborating with the Third Reich. They were proud of the Russian naval base in the city, and lauded Crimea as the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy.7 The newspaper Legendarny Sevastopol declared that Sevastopol would never be divided from the Russian Federation – a strange notion when the city was separated from Russia by an agreed international frontier.8
At the Munich Security Conference on 10 February 2007 Vladimir Putin complained that the ‘guarantees’ made in 1990 against NATO’s eastward expansion had not been honoured. While voicing annoyance at the presence of NATO forces on the Russian borders, he affirmed that Russians would refrain from reacting: too much force had been used in recent times. He called for international disputes to be referred to the United Nations.9
Putin’s anger increased the following year when President Bush, exasperated by Serbia’s renewed refusal to leave Kosovo’s Albanians undisturbed, yielded to the Kosovan government’s demand for complete independence. Ignoring Russia’s inevitable objections, on 18 February 2008 the United States went ahead and granted recognition.10 It could not have happened at a more sensitive time for US–Russian relations. At the beginning of the year the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry had picked up that the Bush administration was entertaining the idea of admitting Ukraine and Georgia to NATO membership, if not immediately then at least by agreement on a Membership Action Plan (MAP). Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had doubts about the prudence of such a step, and when she ran the plan by President Yushchenko in February at the Davos Economic Forum, it brought him near to tears: ‘It will be a disaster, a tragedy, if we don’t get the MAP.’11 The US Ambassador in Warsaw, William J. Burns, reported that Russia’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Sergei Lavrov, consistently stressed that this would be an expansionist step too far: the West had to understand the ‘emotional and neuralgic’ nature of the Ukrainian question for the Russian side. In any case, Lavrov had added, Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens would most likely reject such a proposal, and then there could be civil war.12 Discussions proceeded at the National Security Council in Washington. Bush continued to push for a positive response to Ukrainian and Georgian overtures: ‘If these two democratic states want MAP, I can’t say no.’ The problem was that the other NATO countries were largely left out of these discussions until shortly before their leaders arrived in Bucharest in early April 2008 for the NATO summit, and even Bush had not taken a final decision in advance of leaving the United States.13
Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel had never trusted Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili, and was disappointed by Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko. Saakashvili, honey-tongued but impetuous, scared her with his willingness to provoke the Russians, while Yushchenko, who had won the 2004 election on a platform of democracy and outreach to the European Union, had failed to fulfil his promises. Moreover, Merkel and her Foreign Affairs Secretary Frank-Walter Steinmeier wanted to damp down the discussion inside NATO. The Poles took the opposite view, asking why Berlin was more anxious about Moscow than sympathetic to Moscow’s past and potential victims. Merkel huddled with east European leaders speaking Russian, ironically the sole common language. The result was a compromise that involved less than the offer of a Membership Action Plan but something towards it. Rather than take a decision in Bucharest, the idea was to hold a meeting of foreign ministers later in the year, in the hope that this would soothe Russian anger.14 It may have patched up cracks in NATO, but it would never appease Russia. No one was more aware of this than Merkel, who had assured Putin that Germany would withhold support for the American proposal.15
Putin aimed to poke a stick into the rolling wheel of NATO policy. He signalled his intention by arriving forty minutes late for his own speech to the summit. An atmosphere of nervous expectancy mounted in the hall. As Poland’s Foreign Affairs Minister Radek Sikorski put it, usually the distinguished audience would have stalked off after being kept waiting even ten or fifteen minutes. They stayed in their seats because they wanted to hear the official Russian line on the most delicate item on their agenda.16
His words were full of menace. He denounced all talk of Georgia entering NATO, stressing that Russia had resisted the temptation to recognize Abkhazian and South Ossetian independence in response to America’s recent recognition of Kosovo. His next words caused a shudder among his listeners. Any attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO, he warned, would place the country on ‘the verge of extinction’.17 His listeners were in deep shock. The speech was so incendiary that, to this day, Moscow has refrained from publishing it. Sikorski, however, asked the Russian Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister for a copy, which he later handed over to the Ukrainians, wanting them to know the danger that was facing them, and to encourage them to strengthen their military preparations.18
Putin’s implied threat to invade and break up Ukraine – indeed, his whole combative performance – gave NATO leaders much cause for disquiet. In North America and across Europe the media carried vivid descriptions of his impact. But over subsequent days the story faded. It was as though Western politicians wanted to forget the unpleasantness and get on with other business. Putin was not their favourite politician, and the idea spread that his successor, Medvedev, was a more amenable public figure who, it was hoped, would strike a different posture in international relations on Russia’s behalf. When Bush and Secretary of State Rice stopped talking about encouraging Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO Merkel appeared to conclude that the heat had gone out of the question. Only Poland’s President Lech Kaczyński wanted to keep the pot boiling, but he failed to persuade anybody except Saakashvili, who was already convinced anyway.19
Russo-American tensions relaxed further when discussions seemed to indicate that, whatever he thought about NATO expansion, Putin had no strenuous objection to Ukraine becoming a member of the European Union. According to the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, the Russian leadership drew a distinction between military alliance and political and economic realignment: ‘They were opposed to Ukraine’s membership in NATO. But Putin has told me several times – so I’m not quoting second hand – that he would not have an objection in principle regarding membership of Ukraine to [sic] the EU Membership!’20 What Barroso perhaps failed to understand – or ask about – was what terms of EU membership Putin would have found acceptable for the Ukrainians; but in any case it was the prevention of NATO’s further eastward expansion that the Russian leadership had focused on. This was a period when Russia itself was negotiating on a number of levels for integration into bigger international commercial blocs, including the World Trade Organization. The Russians even explored whether they themselves might acquire some kind of associate membership of the European Union.21
But the geopolitical considerations did not change when Putin stepped down from the presidency, something Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili overlooked when in August 2008 he moved troops into South Ossetia, which was part of Georgia but enjoyed a Russian security guarantee. US Secretary of State Rice had heard Putin ranting, ‘If Saakashvili wants war, he’ll get it. And any support for him will destroy our relationship too,’22 and had tried her best to persuade Saakashvili to do nothing to provoke the Russians. ‘You can’t use force,’ she had bluntly warned him in July. Putin had been dispatching forces into the Ossetian enclave for months. He had issued Russian passports to any South Ossetian who chose to apply. Saakashvili knew all this, but had decided that if he failed to assert Georgia’s authority, South Ossetia would become a Russian province. When he put this to Rice, she issued her bleakest warning: ‘No one will come to your aid, and you will lose.’23
Saakashvili offered tentative compromises to Moscow without changing his course. War clouds gathered, and Putin and Medvedev, who had succeeded him in May, thought the Americans should have done more to stop Saakashvili.24 Seeing him as Washington’s puppet, they could not believe that Rice could not have simply ordered him to be sensible. They also wanted to settle accounts with Saakashvili for his drive to become a NATO member, and now he was giving them the excuse they needed.25
Medvedev, facing the first international test of his presidency, ordered Russian armed forces over the Caucasus mountains on 7 August. The Georgian army was swiftly overwhelmed. Medvedev was convinced that more was at stake in the conflict than the protection of Ossetian rights: Georgia’s liaison with the Western powers was regarded in Moscow as a serious challenge to Russia’s interests. If it had not been for the Russian military operation, Medvedev believed, the Georgians would sooner or later have achieved NATO membership.26
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France involved himself for the European Union by flying to Tbilisi and seeking Saakashvili’s assent for a ceasefire before the Russians advanced further. There was talk about the Georgian capital Tbilisi falling to them in the coming days. Saakashvili agreed, and Sarkozy sped off to Moscow to ask the Russian leadership to stop the fighting on their side.27 Though Putin was prime minister at the time and no longer president, he talked publicly about the campaign and the merits of occupying Tbilisi. Buoyed by Russia’s military victory, he exclaimed to Sarkozy that he was thinking of copying what the Americans had done to Saddam Hussein and ‘hang[ing] up Saakashvili by the balls’.
Sarkozy, himself no stranger to a volatile temperament, urged him to think of the likely political outcome: ‘Yes, but do you want to end up like Bush?’ Putin calmed down, admitting, ‘Ah, you’ve got a point there.’28 Sarkozy secured a compromise for an end to the war. It was vaguely drafted and not as definite on Georgia’s security needs as Saakashvili had asked, but he was in no position to refuse.29
Both Medvedev and Putin wanted the Western powers to understand their concerns about what they saw as Russia’s legitimate interests. At the NATO summit, Putin had already issued a caution: Crimea, he stressed, had not been joined to Ukraine until an arbitrary decision taken by the communist leadership in Moscow in 1954. He went further: in Ukraine’s southern region, he asserted, there were only Russians, no Ukrainians.30 In reality, according to the 2001 census, Russians were three-fifths of the Crimean population; Ukrainians constituted nearly a quarter. It was preposterous too for Putin to deny the existence of large Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar minorities, and he must have realized that many in the audience – including Ukraine’s President Yushchenko – knew he was spouting nonsense. Probably he just wanted to feel sure that he had got his strategic sensitivities about Crimea across. If so, he failed. Western leaders, with the notable exception of the Poles and others in east-central Europe, listened anxiously to the speech and then promptly forgot about it.
In subsequent public declarations Putin omitted to remind them. On the contrary, on 30 August 2008 he gave an interview to Germany’s ARD television station in which he robustly rejected any idea that Russia was ever likely to infringe on Ukraine’s sovereignty, bristling at the suggestion by the French Foreign and European Affairs Minister Bernard Kouchner that the Russian leadership might be contemplating an invasion of Ukrainian territory and the seizure of the port city of Sevastopol in Crimea. ‘Crimea is not a disputed territory,’ he sternly explained:
There has been no ethnic conflict there, unlike the conflict between South Ossetia and Georgia. Russia has long recognized the borders of modern-day Ukraine. On the whole, we have completed our talks on borders. The issue of demarcation still stands, but this is just a technicality. I think questions about such goals for Russia have provocative undertones.31
The interview took place a few days after Russia ended its Georgian war. It was a time when the Kremlin was under severe international criticism, and Putin, like Medvedev, was trying to persuade the world that Russian armed forces had no further objectives in the former Soviet Union.
This remained Putin’s public position. Having issued his threats in Munich and Bucharest, he put them aside. Perhaps he was encouraged by the return to the Ukrainian presidency in February 2010 of Viktor Yanukovych.32 Yanukovych defeated rivals who wanted a continuation of the ‘Orange Revolution’ and imprisoned one of his leading critics, the businesswoman and ex-prime minister Yulia Timoshenko, on a charge of economic corruption. He cheered the Kremlin by speaking of the need to conciliate Russia even though he continued to engage positively with the European Union. Yet refraining from repeating his Munich and Bucharest performances had the baleful consequence of sedating the West. In diplomacy, what is left unsaid is often as important as what is spoken.
As prime minister Putin kept his attention on Ukraine, particularly when talking to Russians about Crimea. He encouraged Russian entrepreneurs to set up branches in Sevastopol.33 Rich Russian businessmen had for years been buying up Crimean real estate and developing the region’s seaside resorts,34 a trend Putin applauded. An increase in Russia’s economic presence would bolster the naval commitment at Sevastopol. While Crimea’s Russian-speaking inhabitants voted mostly for politicians who wanted friendly links with Russia, the Tatar community, worried by the rise of Ukrainian nationalism in Kyiv, gave some of its support to Yanukovych on the grounds that he would look after them.35
All this pleased the Kremlin leaders as Yushchenko looked on with alarm. He had a definite preference for closer alignment with the European Union and NATO, and the lessons of the Georgian war led him to see Ukraine’s security more than ever as depending on entry into NATO via a Membership Action Plan.36 In both Moscow and Kyiv worried discussions continued as to what was being considered in the other capital.
Meanwhile the Kremlin addressed the question of Sevastopol. Russia’s naval base with its 25,000 serving officers and sailors had been a matter of disquiet for Moscow since the mid-1990s, when Kyiv had claimed ownership of the entire fleet. But the naval oath to Russia retained its authority, and Kyiv realized its ambition was impractical because most of the forces would have mutinied. In 1997 Kyiv pragmatically agreed a division of the fleet between the two countries, granting Moscow a twenty-year licence to station its ships and troops at Sevastopol.37 On coming to power President Yanukovych had agreed an extension of the Russian lease in April 2010 under the Kharkiv Accords, by a further twenty-five years, in return for a huge discount in the price Ukraine paid for Russia’s oil. Altogether Russia had to stump up $40–45 billion for permission to use its Sevastopol facilities. Putin was livid. ‘I would be willing to eat Yanukovych and his prime minister for that sort of money! No military base in the world costs that much!’38
Yanukovych had won the Ukrainian presidency on a pro-Russia ticket, a victory welcomed by the Russians for putting an end to Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’. Yushchenko, the revolution’s leader, had always lacked a majority in the Supreme Rada (the Ukraine parliament), and had originally appointed Yanukovych as prime minister to establish a political balance. Though Yanukovych’s rise now to presidential office cheered the Russian authorities, it was not to the point where they felt they could be complacent. Ukraine’s politics remained volatile. Russian-language activists in Kyiv expressed fears that Ukrainian nationalists might pull off a coup with American assistance.39 Smartly produced brochures appeared urging Ukrainians as a people to support moves to join the European Union and enter NATO.40 And Yanukovych could lose another election, just as he had lost to Yushchenko in 2005. What is more, Yanukovych was a tough negotiator. He had not only driven a hard bargain for Russia’s retention of its Black Sea naval facilities, but he had also resumed Ukraine’s negotiations for associate membership of the European Union. He continually played off Moscow against Brussels, aiming to increase Russia’s financial support by hinting that he might otherwise choose the European Union as Ukraine’s partner. There was no guarantee the favourable line towards Moscow would endure.
This display of enthusiasm for the European Union led Brussels to explore ways of tempting Yanukovych to break with Moscow. Russia’s reaction was to introduce a range of economic sanctions against Ukraine.41 Predictable though this might have been, it naturally increased the standing of Ukrainian politicians who were more principled than Yanukovych in their desire to take the road towards Europe.
In autumn 2013 the European Union made a detailed offer to include Ukraine in a ‘deep and comprehensive free trade area’. Putin saw a double economic danger in this. One possible outcome would have placed Ukraine in a customs union from which Russia would have been excluded; another would have provided the European Union with tariff-free access to the Russian economy, since there were no commercial barriers between Russia and Ukraine. Geopolitics were also in play. Putin hated the thought that Ukraine might move beyond the Russian orbit of influence. Foreign Affairs Minister Lavrov raised objections, calling for multilateral negotiations: ‘We must work for a union of unions, an alliance of the EU and the Eurasian Union.’42 Meanwhile the European Union kept up the momentum on preparing the ground for Ukraine to proceed to full membership at some future date. Reforms would have to be made involving free markets, sanctity of contract, political liberty, fair elections and the rule of law – all utterly incompatible with the prevailing conditions in Russia and the rest of the projected Eurasian Economic Union.
Inside the Russian government, deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov had responsibility for nudging Ukraine into a tighter embrace. He went on a public relations offensive in Kyiv, and at the same time tried to convince European public opinion that the European Union had no reason for anxiety if Ukraine chose to enter the Eurasian Economic Union as Russia’s partner.43 But about one thing he was adamant: the Ukrainians had to opt either for the Eurasian Economic Union or the European Union. As Shuvalov put it, the customs arrangements of the two bodies were incompatible. This was his way of stressing that Russia would suffer from unrestricted Western economic competition if Ukraine joined the European Union while maintaining its existing free-trade regime with Russia.44 From the Russian leadership’s standpoint, the Ukraine-in-Europe proposal would be a Trojan horse inside Russia’s walls.
Brussels underestimated the agitation it was causing in Moscow. Foreign Minister Lavrov got nowhere when he brought up the matter with President Barroso, who saw no problem in the European Commission’s conduct. The Europeans had done nothing, Barroso reminded Lavrov, to impede the rapprochement between the Russians and the Chinese, so why, he asked, would the Russians want to interfere when the Europeans and Ukrainians chose to get closer.45 In Barroso’s opinion, expressed in late 2014, the European Union was innocent of the charge of recklessness:
We were perfectly aware of all of the risks. I spoke with Putin several times, and he told us how important for him was the customs union, the Eurasian [Economic] Union, and the specific role he saw for Ukraine. But should we have given up? Should we say, ‘OK, Vladimir, Ukraine is yours, do whatever you want?’ That is the logical consequence of what they are saying. That’s perfectly unacceptable.46
Theoretically, if Ukraine were to acquire association status with the European Union, this could have the advantage for Russia that a cleansed political and economic order in Ukraine – one of the requirements for such status – would be able to meet its financial obligations. Kyiv would cease to disappoint its Russian creditors. But this was not how Moscow saw it. In Putin’s opinion, the granting of association status to Ukraine would disrupt any chances of harmony between the two countries and damage the Russian economy. The Russians could have no confidence that if Ukraine moved into the European Union’s orbit, it would not also eventually obtain membership of NATO. Putin could not appear to be weak in reacting to foreign threats. He was not as invulnerable to the vagaries of public opinion as he appeared, and he knew it.47 Barroso refused to back off. When Lavrov raised objections with European Union negotiators, he hit a brick wall: ‘It’s none of your business.’48 Putin was offended by the way Brussels was trying to speed up the talks with Ukraine: Russia, he was later to note, had had to spend seventeen long years negotiating its accession to the World Trade Organization.49
After 1991 it was in the interests of the Kremlin rulers for Ukraine to remain stuck in a morass of corruption: if Ukraine reformed with the rule of law now governing public life and business, the Russian people might want the same, and that would mean revolution and the end of Putin and his clique.
By December 2013, according to Kremlin officials, the Russian General Staff was already conducting contingency planning for a military operation.50 But back in summer that year, it would seem, professional soldiers were already being asked whether they would be willing to fight in Ukraine, and those who demurred were released when their contracts expired.51 The commanders were getting ready even before the politicians gave the go-ahead. But the politicians were already moving – or being moved. At the December Security Council Patrushev was pleased to hear Vladimir Konstantinov, the Speaker of the Crimean parliament, who was visiting Moscow at the time, let it be known that Crimea would readily ‘go to Russia’ if Yanukovych should be overthrown.52
On 29 November 2013 the Kremlin’s worries suddenly faded when Yanukovych announced his desire to come to an agreement with Russia. Abandoning the understandings he had worked out with Brussels, he was now plumping for Moscow’s Eurasian Economic Union.
Yanukovych would have been conscious anyway of the serious trouble likely to arise in Moscow if Kyiv chose in favour of Brussels. He had recently flown to Sochi for discussions with Putin at his presidential residence. It was a place of much symbolism: close to the Russo-Ukrainian border, and to Yalta, where in 1945 Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had planned the future of Europe. Putin was used to having to pay for Yanukovych’s compliance, and this time was no different. When Yanukovych revealed his budgetary difficulties, Putin agreed to advance $15 billion in credits. Yanukovych had stretched Putin’s patience to the limit and had obtained a financial bailout. Whatever words were exchanged, on the Russian side they were unlikely to have been kindly. On his return to Ukraine, Yanukovych tried to persuade his citizens that he had achieved a better deal than anything that would be available from the European Union.
Putin was delighted, but only for a few days. Huge demonstrations were held in Kyiv’s Maidan and surrounding boulevards against Yanukovych’s decision. He sent in armed police, but resistance only increased as the young street protesters were bolstered by support from western Ukraine, where hostility to Yanukovych and to Russia was profound. Western politicians and media rushed to express their support.
Putin rejected appeals from pro-Russia political groups in Crimea for him to send more troops into the peninsula for the protection of Russian-speaking inhabitants, even though it was put to him at a press conference on 19 December 2013 that this was what the Russians had done in 2008 in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The reason for armed intervention in those two enclaves, replied Putin, was not merely to defend the Russian speakers but to restore order. He denied that Crimea was in similar ferment, stressing that the Russian naval garrison in Sevastopol ensured stability. He did, though, repeat his warning that the Moscow authorities were not indifferent to the ‘situation of our compatriots’. He also took a swipe at the European Union for failing to act against Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – EU member countries – which discriminated against Russian residents who did not speak the state language. But, Putin assured people, ‘this absolutely doesn’t mean that we’re about to flash our swords and put the troops in’. ‘Complete rubbish,’ he insisted. ‘Nothing like this is happening or can happen.’53
Nevertheless, contingency plans were afoot. By the first weeks of February 2014, according to the anti-Putin newspaper Novaya gazeta, a memorandum was doing the rounds in the Kremlin’s highest reaches with a proposal to occupy and annex both Crimea and eastern Ukraine in the event of Yanukovych’s overthrow. The thinking behind it was that a coup in Kyiv would lead to an abrupt collapse of Ukrainian statehood and cause a division of the country between its western and eastern regions. Kyiv had fallen into the hands of football hooligans, criminals and fascists; Yanukovych was a broken reed, low in moral authority and resolve; his supporters were inadequate to the task of restoring order, and the European Union was aiming to swallow up the west of Ukraine in a ‘geopolitical intrigue’. Several of Ukraine’s ‘oligarchs’, the memorandum went on, were financing the Maidan disturbances, and they in turn were operating under the control of the Polish and British secret services. Russia, it was recommended, should take the initiative and arrange for the ‘unification’ of the Ukrainian eastern regions with itself.54
It’s not known who wrote the memorandum, but the contents point to the kind of thinking widespread in both the governing elite and public opinion. At its heart is the presumption of external conspiracies against Russia and even against Ukraine. Many of Putin’s public statements rested on the same assumptions.
As late as the end of January 2014, American intelligence saw no reason to warn of an impending political emergency.55 But the street demonstrations grew fiercer and the Maidan area was still occupied by protesters. The threat to Yanukovych swelled with the arrival of activists from western Ukraine. Moscow media denounced them as fascists who denied the role of the Red Army in defeating the Third Reich. Yanukovych ordered heavy police action to quell the growing insurgency and licensed snipers to fire on demonstrators.
Repression, however, served to stiffen the protesters’ resolve. US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland arrived in Kyiv and personally distributed food to those camped out on the Maidan, which only infuriated the Kremlin. Talk of an American conspiracy to foment trouble in Ukraine became common fare on Russian TV news broadcasts. Moscow urged Yanukovych to take decisive action, but in Kyiv Yanukovych could see that the situation might spin out of control if he ordered more repression. Negotiations had become essential to avert civil war.
With the European Union’s consent, Poland, Germany and France offered to mediate. Foreign ministers Radek Sikorski, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Laurent Fabius flew to Kyiv. Sikorski arrived on 19 February and, while waiting for Steinmeier and Fabius to join him, witnessed the brittleness of public order. He tweeted a photograph of snipers ready to fire down on demonstrators. On 20 February the three ministers met with Yanukovych and told him time had run out for him and that he must resign. Yanukovych turned pale, and he left the room to take a phone call ‘from abroad’; in his absence his officials explained that the caller was in Moscow. Everyone knew this meant Putin. When Yanukovych resumed his place half an hour later he agreed to discuss the question of his departure. Though he would give no exact date, he said it would be by the end of the year. Russian support for him had evidently crumbled, and Putin had accepted the idea that Yanukovych had to go. There was agreement to bring Russian special envoy Vladimir Lukin into the talks, since it would be hard to work out a peaceful solution if Moscow was not involved.56
The three foreign ministers from the European Union, having Yanukovych’s consent to act as intermediaries, established a base in the European Union embassy for talks that evening with the opposition leaders Vitali Klichko, Oleh Tyahnibok and Arseniy Yatsenyuk. They resisted the signature of an agreement before Yanukovych had acceded to their terms for the treatment of the Maidan protesters. Lukin helpfully proposed that both the Berkut security force and the demonstrators camped on the Maidan should cease to confront one another. At seven o’clock in the morning of 21 February agreement was finally reached for a formal signing ceremony at midday. Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, indicated assent. The Obama administration did likewise. The Kremlin was the only fly in the ointment, refusing to allow Lukin to sign any agreement that did not envisage a reorganization of Ukraine on a federal basis. Even so, Putin did not act to block the agreement itself. Fabius had already left for a scheduled trip to China. This left Sikorski and Steinmeier to complete the job and sign alongside Yanukovych, Klichko, Tyahnibok and Yatsenyuk.57
The ceremony was arranged for 6.45 p.m. Yanukovych had made momentous concessions by promising to restore the 2004 Ukrainian constitution and give the Rada back all its old powers. New presidential elections would be organized no later than December 2014. Street confrontations were to cease and illegal weapons be surrendered.58
That evening Yanukovych spoke by phone to Putin and reported that he had steadied the situation. Putin was not reassured. ‘But in any case,’ he was to recall, ‘I told him, “It seems wrong to pull the forces of law and order out of Kyiv.”’ ‘Yes,’ Yanukovych had replied: ‘I understand that.’ But he went on to say that he intended to stick to his prearranged programme and fly to Kharkiv to attend a conference. Putin could hardly believe his own ears: he urged Yanukovych to stay in Kyiv and restore law and order. But Yanukovych insisted on doing things in his own way. In desperation Putin himself turned to Obama, phoning him to extract a promise that Washington would continue to support the Kyiv agreement. It was the most Putin could achieve under such unstable circumstances.59 His worries about Yanukovych were well founded: the Berkut security troops did not merely withdraw from the streets but pulled out from the central district altogether, and Yanukovych did nothing to bring them back. Overnight, he lost his grip on power.
A day later, Kyiv was convulsed by revolt. Putin’s worst fears were realized, leading him to develop a lasting anger and contempt for Yanukovych: ‘What a handsome fellow too!’60 By then Yanukovych had decided to flee with whatever money and possessions he could take with him. Fearing for his life if the Ukraine’s new authorities were to lay hands on them, Yanukovych picked up his suitcases and money and entrusted himself to Russians who were dispatched to bring him across Ukraine to Crimea.
A makeshift plan was agreed to meet Putin in Rostov-on-Don across the Russo-Ukrainian frontier.61 Meanwhile a crowd broke into his residence outside Kyiv, and footage of abundant ill-gotten wealth was broadcast on state television. Documents retrieved from the presidential offices proved that Yanukovych had been ordering savage repression up to the moment of his flight. Yanukovych’s feared police retreated from sight.
Suddenly Russia had ‘lost’ Ukraine. This, at least, was how Russian leaders and probably many ordinary Russians felt. In the Kremlin, anger followed astonishment as the administration tried to fathom why Yanukovych had not stayed and toughed it out. His flight had left a power vacuum, and no one could tell who would take over the presidency and government, except that it would be one of those who had confronted him. The Supreme Rada elected a cabinet led by Arseniy Yatsenyuk. American and European politicians hastened to announce their support.
Russia’s plans lay in ruins. The outcome Putin had sought to prevent through his speeches in Munich and Bucharest had become reality. Putin and his associates were hated in Kyiv, and the Ukrainian media freely exposed the depth of malfeasance and corruption under Yanukovych, who had treated Ukraine as his family’s cash cow. Putin was living a personal nightmare.