THE HEART OF THE MATTER: UKRAINE
In geopolitics, the past never dies, and there is no modern world.
—ROBERT D. KAPLAN
“You have to understand, George,” said Putin to Bush at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, “Ukraine isn’t even a real country.”
It is not only Putin but millions of other Russians, from workers to intellectuals, who share that sentiment. Discussing Russians and Ukrainians, even former president Mikhail Gorbachev said: “It might not be a scientific fact but we are one people.”
That attitude has two very different aspects—one is a mélange of history, mythology, and emotion, while the other is cool, practical, pure geopolitik.
For generations it was drummed into every Russia schoolchild’s head that Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. In fact, Russia’s two great foundation myths are centered on Kiev and Ukraine. The ancient Chronicles report that around 860 the forever-warring Russian princes sent an envoy to the Vikings with the following plea: “Our land is vast and rich, but there is no order in it. Come and rule over us.” The second sentence—“Come and rule over us”—is disingenuous. In all probability, the Vikings had already conquered the country, and the chronicler was using verbal sleight of hand to turn invasion into invitation.
The other foundation myth concerns the conversion of Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 988. Vladimir himself was baptized in Crimea, and more than a thousand years later Putin would use that fact as one of his justifications for the annexation of that territory, calling that land “sacred.” When word went out for the mass baptism of his subjects in Kiev, Vladimir made himself quite clear on the point: “If anyone does not come, let him consider himself my enemy.”
Had it not been for Genghis Khan’s Mongol Horde that overran the lands of the Eastern and Southern Slavs in the early 1200s, it might well have been a Ukrainian leader confiding to President Bush: “You know, George, Russia is not even a real country.”
The some 250 years between Vladimir’s baptism and the violent arrival of the Mongols is claimed by both Ukrainians and Russians as their happy childhood. Subsequent miseries may have cast too bright a light on the whitewashed walls and golden cupolas of ancient Kiev, yet contemporaries describe the city as architecturally splendid. The art of icon painting swiftly reached a high level. Bards with stringed instruments sang epics that still read well on the page. An enlightened system of laws was in effect, with fines playing a greater role than corporal punishment or incarceration. A Kievan princess married King Henry I of France and, proving the only literate one in the family, began signing her name to official documents to which the king would append his royal, analphabetic mark.
The main problems were discord among the princes—no order in the land—and the still only intermittent raids from the horsemen of the Central Asian steppe.
Speaking of Bukhara’s rulers, “they must be very sinful,” said Genghis Khan, “otherwise God would not have sent a punishment like me down upon” them. The Mongols’ usual MO was to offer a city the chance to surrender, and in return for 10 percent of their wealth and their sworn obedience, the people’s lives and their city would be spared. But sometimes the Mongols would simply destroy a city without even first making any such offer so that the terror of that example would spread like prairie fire. That appears to be what happened to Kiev, which was torched and sacked. A victory feast was arranged—still alive, the captured Kievan princes were laid out on the ground, then covered with planks and rugs on top of which banquet tables and benches were placed. The Mongols then held their victory feast to the music of screams and breaking bones.
Much of the surviving population fled north to other cities or into the forests, where the Mongols lost their advantages of horsemanship and marksmanship with their long and excellently engineered bows (even their arrows were notched in such a way as to make it impossible for the enemy to reuse them.)
The Mongols disliked forests and cities. Genghis Khan, who said that he “hated luxury,” thought a Mongol best off either in the saddle, using his stirrups, a Mongol invention, to fire more accurately, or in an encampment of yurts on the open steppe. That is how Crimea was originally settled by Tatars, a tribe allied with the Mongols. The Russians preferred the term Tatar, so the years of Mongol domination are called the “Tatar yoke.” Under Stalin the entire Tatar population of the Crimea was exiled en masse to Siberia for supposed treason, and it took the Crimean Tatars the better part of twenty years to get back home. They are now suffering under Russian rule in annexed Crimea and have been involved in partisan-like tactics, e.g., the destruction of four electricity pylons in late November 2015 that put the entire Crimea in the dark. In Russia all stories are old stories, the problem is they won’t stay old.
A mystic who worshipped the Eternal Blue Sky, Genghis Khan was quite tolerant when it came to local religions, having none of the iconoclasm of the Kievans themselves. He was known as much for his tolerance as for his savagery. Gibbon, in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, said of Genghis Khan’s tolerance: “The Catholic inquisitors of Europe who defended nonsense by cruelty, might have been confounded by the example of a barbarian, who anticipated the lessons of philosophy and established by his laws a system of pure theism and perfect toleration.”
That “perfect toleration” meant that the Orthodox Church now began to play a role as the keeper of historical memory, especially in the Chronicles compiled by monks, and as a haven of uplifting beauty amid the scorched earth. In Soviet times the Russian Orthodox Church would again offer a sanctuary of beauty amid the brutalist gray-cement architecture of advanced socialism. And it is now one of the pillars that supports the House of Putin.
The Mongols dominated Russia for something like two and a half centuries (1240–1500) but continued to pose a serious danger well after that. St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, the very symbol of Russia, was built in the 1550s by Tsar Ivan the Terrible to commemorate his victory over the Tatar stronghold of Kazan in 1552.
Apart from the words for money and customs control, the Mongols left little trace in Russia’s culture or language, but they changed its history and mentality. The force of the Mongol invasion shifted the center of Slav civilization from south to north. Eventually Moscow, until those times a tiny settlement of no importance whatsoever on the bend of a muddy river, emerged as the new power center under the various Ivans of the sixteenth century, the fourth of whom, known as the Terrible, was also the first to assume the title of tsar. The south languished over the centuries to such an extent that when Catherine the Great entered on her grand tour of her newly acquired lands in Ukraine and Crimea in the late eighteenth century she was simply shocked by Kiev, calling it “abominable.”
Moscow and Muscovite Russia were the historical success stories, of that there can be no doubt. The southern lands were called ukrainia, meaning “borderlands.” The Mongol domination taught Russia the lesson that Putin summed up laconically as “the weak get beaten.” The state must be strong and centralized; top-down one-man rule was the most effective model. The state alone could provide security and order. The state was a fortress, a kremlin, to which people fled in time of attack. And if attack came once, it could come again. From any direction, any nation—humanistic France, scientific Germany. A case could be made that after the Mongol invasion and rule all Russian politics were post-traumatic.
The Mongols left the Russians with a culture of invasion. The driving force of Russian civilization became the avoidance of and preparation for the next invasion. This has induced suspicion and conservatism, xenophobia, paranoia, and an imperialism that seeks to buffer the heartland with as much territory as possible.
In an invasion-minded culture special attention is paid to the enemy within, the traitors who would open the gates to the enemy. The free city-states like Novgorod that resisted Moscow’s centralizing will were subjected to intense, focused cruelty. Ivan the Terrible created the oprichniki: black-clad horsemen answerable only to the tsar, their symbols the dog’s head that sniffs out treason and the broom that sweeps it away. They were the world’s first secret police, the archetype and granddaddy of them all, including the KGB that Vladimir Putin so longed to join in his youth.
* * *
Russia became imperialistic as a defense against invasion, not that any nation worried overmuch about justifying its land grabs back then. Harried by Swedes, Lithuanians, and Poles from the north and west, steppe tribes and Turks from the south and east, Russians considered every acre of land won not only possession but protection. Russia became a nation-state and an empire at the same time; imperialism was thus fused with its very sense of identity.
Inevitably, there would be some people who saw no place for themselves in the new Russia forming around Moscow. Some of the more adventurous sorts joined the expeditions to the east, Siberia, where the natives were few and far between and easy to subdue. But most of the freebooters and free spirits who rejected Kremlin rule and, later, the imposition of serfdom headed south to the wide-open spaces of the steppe, the grasslands they called the “wild fields.” The weather was better, the black earth richer, and Moscow’s arm could not yet reach that far. People lived a life something like that of the early Romans, every man a farmer and a soldier. They won the respect of the fierce Turkic-speaking nomadic tribes they encountered in battle, who called these transplanted northerners “free warriors,” Kazaks (Cossacks), a name they took on for themselves. A heterogeneous bunch, their numbers included “escaped serfs, indebted nobles, defrocked priests, pioneers, fortune-hunters, fugitives of various sorts.”
By the mid-1500s, the time of Ivan the Terrible, Mongols were no longer the problem. Poland was the problem. Having combined with the then good-sized Lithuania to form a commonwealth that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Poland routinely trounced Russia and put Moscow to the torch on more than one occasion.
Poland was part of the Catholic West, even calling itself antemurale Christianitatis, the outer wall of Christendom, protecting Europe from savages like Mongols and Russians. Poland went through the developmental stages of European civilization, participating vigorously in the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Enlightenment. The Mongol invasion not only had cut Russia in two, north and south, but had cut it off from Europe and its great fugue of development. Leonardo da Vinci had lived and died before Ivan the Terrible was even born.
Polish domination over much of Ukraine had deleterious effects. The Ukrainian elite adopted “the faith, language and manners of the ruling Poles,” Ukrainian becoming the “language of serfs and servants.”
But the Cossacks rebelled against Polish rule, rising up periodically against the Poles and the Jewish middlemen who were used by the ruling classes to collect rents and debts, thereby deflecting anger onto them. The greatest Cossack rebellion of all, the 1648 uprising, was led by Hetman (Chieftain) Bohdan Khmelnitsky, who slaughtered Jews and Poles in great numbers, making him a heroic freedom fighter to this day in Ukraine, while for Jews he remains a figure of biblical evil like Haman.
A few years into the uprising Khmelnitsky was deserted by his Tatar allies (steppe politics also made for strange bedfellows) and faced a stark choice: defeat by the Poles or alliance with Muscovite Russia.
In January 1654, in a small town near Kiev called Pereyaslav, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky formally swore Ukraine’s allegiance and union with Moscow. For many years the Ukrainian national anthem asked:
Oh Bohdan, Bohdan,
Our great Hetman,
Why did you give Ukraine
To the wretched Muscovites?
Except for the briefest of intervals in the twentieth century during times of war and upheaval, Ukraine was not so much ruled by Russia as it had become an integral part of it. It was “to Russians what Ireland and Scotland were to the English—not an imperial possession, like Canada or India, but part of the irreducible centre, home.”
Ukraine was a county, not a country. The Ukrainian language almost died out like Gaelic. In any case, the Russians considered it only an amusing dialect spoken only by yokels. A classic quip has it that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. But for the eastern Slavs, for whom language and literature assumed an especial importance, that quip might be amended to read: A language is a dialect with an army, a navy, and a great poet. Russia, Poland, and Ukraine all got their great national poet at roughly the same time: Russia’s Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), Poland’s Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), and Ukraine’s Taras Shevchenko (1814–61).
Shevchenko, who would turn the patois of servant and serf into poetry, was himself born a serf and soon orphaned. He seemed fated to a life of dreary and anonymous labor. But he had a passion for drawing and would exercise it with whatever was at hand, a lump of coal, a stick of chalk. Taken to St. Petersburg, he drew copies of the statues in the Summer Garden. His talents were noticed and encouraged by other artists and writers, Ukrainian and Russian alike. They took up a collection, and in 1838, when he was twenty-four, they bought his freedom for the sum of 2,500 rubles. Shevchenko was delighted, even giddy, with his new freedom, cutting a chic swath in St. Petersburg nightlife in his new coat, for which he had paid 100 rubles, and thus we know that the exact worth of the freedom of a human being in the Russia of that time was twenty-five coats.
Now he devoted more time to his poetry, “an odd mixture of pastoralism, xenophobia and self-hatred. His themes are the beauty of Ukraine’s landscape, her lost Cossack greatness and her shame in laboring under the Russian and Polish yokes. Though Russians, Poles (and, embarrassingly, Jews) all get short shrift, most of his bile is directed at the treachery and complacency of the Ukrainians themselves.”
Success and excitement were immediate. The Ukrainians had their poet.
Shevchenko now moved between St. Petersburg and Kiev, where in 1846 he joined an underground discussion group that espoused the abolition of serfdom and a democratic confederation of Slavs headed by Ukraine. As was nearly always the case in both Tsarist and Soviet times, such groups were infiltrated and betrayed by an informer. Shevchenko was arrested in 1847 and dispatched to St. Petersburg. There, in a rare honor, he was interrogated by the head of the secret police, Count Alexei Orlov, who concluded: “Shevchenko has acquired among his friends the reputation of a brilliant Ukrainian writer, and so his poems are doubly harmful and dangerous. His favorite poems could be disseminated in Ukraine, inducing thought about the alleged happy times of the Hetman era, the exigency of a return to those times, and the possibility of Ukraine’s existence as a separate state.”
Socially, creatively, amorously, Shevchenko had enjoyed life to the fullest in his nine years of freedom between his liberation and his arrest. He would spend the next ten years in exile near the border with Kazakhstan. In his own hand Tsar Nicholas I, so absolute a monarch that he considered criticism sedition and praise impertinence, added a note to the paperwork on the poet’s exile: “Under the strictest surveillance, prohibited from writing or painting.”
But as Tsar Nicholas himself had once exclaimed: “I don’t rule Russia, ten thousand clerks do!” And the local clerks and officials in Shevchenko’s place of exile on the Ural River were only too glad to have their provincial boredom alleviated by welcoming a celebrity into their midst. Shevchenko painted and wrote without much intrusion at all, and was able to live in private quarters and wear civilian clothes.
After ten years of exile, Shevchenko was freed by the new, more liberal Tsar Alexander II on condition that he register with the police and “not misuse his talent.” With his typically Ukrainian walrus mustache and Astrakhan hat, Shevchenko once again became a fixture on the St. Petersburg literary scene, appearing at readings with luminaries like Dostoevsky and Turgenev.
In his most famous poem, “Testament,” he asks to be buried on the steppe but declares that he will not leave his grave for heaven and will “know nothing of God” until Ukraine has risen up against the tyrants, watered its rivers with their blood, and finally joined “the family of the free.”
On March 10, 1861, he died after a night of caroling and carousing at the age of forty-seven.
Shevchenko’s life was a drama of freedom gained and freedom lost, then freedom gained again, that would become every bit as iconic to his fellow countrymen as his work itself. In his youth he had felt that both he and Ukraine were doubly unfree, as serfs and as subjects of a foreign master, the Moskali, as the Russians were called with hatred and disdain. All the serfs of the Russian empire were freed around the time of Shevchenko’s death in 1861 (two years before the slaves in America), but that did not change Ukraine’s subject status one whit. The dream would remain national liberation. Freedom, however, proved as elusive for Ukraine as it had for Shevchenko.
In the four years between the fall of tsarism and the establishment of Communist rule in 1921, Ukraine made three failed attempts at securing its independence. After the last tsar, Nicholas II, abdicated in February 1917, Ukrainians by the tens of thousands took to the streets holding banners of blue and yellow, the national colors, and pictures of Shevchenko. An independent government was formed and lasted a year until internal squabbling and Red artillery put an end to it. A second attempt was made in the western city of Lviv, whose fortunes had changed so often that it had four names—Lviv (Ukrainian), Lvov (Russian), Lwow (Polish), and Lemberg (German)—causing the locals to say: “We don’t travel to Europe. Europe travels to us!” The attempt at forming an independent government in Lviv failed in much less time, falling victim to a shortage of cohesion and an excess of enemies. Guerrillas would, however, fight on for years.
Out of their diplomatic depth, the Ukrainians got very short shrift at the peace talks in Versailles, unlike Poland, which was better equipped diplomatically, more European, and viewed as a better buffer against any new dangers from the east. So newly independent Poland got a part of western Ukraine, and the rest of the country would in time fall under Moscow’s control and become a Soviet republic. It all left a very bitter taste.
But no doubt Ukraine would have been more than content with the defeats and indignities it suffered in those years if it had even a moment’s foretaste of the nightmares soon to come.
* * *
The Soviet twenties were relatively tranquil. Lenin allowed the return of small enterprise, which brought goods back to the shops and added some color and variety to daily life. The arts flourished, there being too many other immediate problems for the authorities to deal with. Meanwhile, practically unnoticed, described by some later as a “gray blur,” Joseph Stalin, the former strike organizer of the Baku oil fields, was gradually rising through the party’s ranks, taking on the tedious tasks that the other, more romantic revolutionaries felt were beneath them but which allowed him to grant favors and build constituencies. Lenin died in 1924, possibly nudged along by Stalin, who was in charge of his medical care. By 1929 Stalin’s archrival for power, Leon Trotsky, had been exiled from the country. The shops were closed, the artists silenced, or worse, instructed.
Officially, the Soviet Union was the land of the workers and the peasants as symbolized by the hammer and sickle. The truth, however, was that while the workers tended to be progressive, “politically conscious,” to use a term of the time, the peasants tended to be recalcitrant and reactionary, especially the wealthier ones known as “kulaks,” meaning “fists.” The Russian peasants were bad enough, but the Ukrainians were even worse. Not only were they greedy, benighted, and obstinate, they were nationalistic as well, preferring an independent Ukraine to one still dominated after centuries by Moscow and the Moskali.
Stalin and the Stalinists saw themselves as social engineers. A class that obstructed progress was ultimately no different from an outcropping that impeded the flow of a river needed for hydroelectric power. The solution was the same in both cases: remove the obstacle.
The Russian peasants were forced to collectivize in the early thirties, moving from small family plots to large collective or state-run agricultural enterprises. A special solution was created for the peasants of Ukraine—artificial famine, known in Ukrainian as the Holodomor, “murder by hunger.” The peasants’ food stocks were confiscated, roads were blocked at the beginning of winter, and in the spring the bodies were simply collected, with no damage done to property.
Because of the dishonesty of Soviet statistics and the execution of many statisticians in Stalin’s time, we don’t have a very exact number of how many Ukrainians perished during the Holodomor. As an example of shifting Soviet statistics, until the time of Gorbachev the figure for Soviet war dead was twenty million, a number that had acquired the tragic charisma of the six million Jews. Suddenly, and without even much fanfare, the official number was changed to twenty-six million. Where had that New York’s worth of the dead been all those years?
Some of the same holds true for the Holodomor as well. Making use of census data and the statistics that weren’t prohibited, like the production of various shoe sizes, scholars have constructed a general numerical picture of five million victims in Ukraine. Whatever the exact number, there is no doubt that the Holodomor qualifies as one of the great crimes of the twentieth century, that is to say of all history. The fact that this crime is largely unknown in the West and the wider world makes the pain of its memory all the keener.
In June 1941, some ten years after the millions of Ukrainians were starved to death, Hitler’s armies attacked the USSR with a three-pronged blitzkrieg strategy of taking Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev. But Leningrad held off the invaders in what would become a nine-hundred-day siege; Moscow, reinforced by an early winter and Siberian troops, halted the onslaught on the outskirts of the city; Kiev fell. Many Ukrainians went over to the German side on the assumption, reasonable but wrong, that nothing could be worse than Stalin.
The Germans, however, failed to capitalize on Ukrainian sympathy. Erich Koch, head of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, considered Ukrainians untermenschen, “niggers” fit only for “vodka and the whip.”
For all the bad blood between Moscow and Kiev, less than ten years after the end of the war, to mark the three hundredth anniversary of the union of Ukraine and Russia, Nikita Khrushchev made Ukraine the magnificent and meaningless present of Crimea. The gift had no more significance than taking money from one pant pocket and putting it in another. Ukraine’s “ownership” was largely nominal. It was all one Soviet Union ruled by Moscow, and that Soviet Union would last forever, or at least until the attainment of the ultimate goal of Marxism—the withering away of the state. Still, just to be on the safe side, the city of Sevastopol, where the Black Sea Fleet was stationed, would remain under control of the city of Moscow. The only problem, of course, was that the state did in fact wither away, not in some unimaginably distant future in which people had evolved enough to live without laws and police, but a mere thirty-seven years later, and it didn’t so much wither away as suddenly collapse like a building stripped from within by thieves.
* * *
On December 1, 1991, more than 90 percent of Ukraine voted for independence from what one legislator called “probably the worst empire in the history of the world,” though one might ask how bad an empire could be if you could vote your way out of it.
Impoverished, corrupt, ill-prepared for the real rigors of statehood, Ukraine was now, whether Putin or any of his ilk liked it or not, a real country, a state. Not only that, with its some 4,500 nuclear missiles, Ukraine had suddenly become the world’s third-largest nuclear power, in a league with Russia and the United States, far ahead of China, England, and France. Ukraine, however, did not possess operational control over the missiles—the launch codes remained in Moscow. Still, the nuclear warheads or nuclear material could be reconfigured into other sorts of weapons, and if nuclear material fell into the wrong hands there could be serious trouble, as would become all too apparent in November 1995, when Chechen rebels planted cesium-137 in a large Moscow park, then alerted the media.
According to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine would surrender its nuclear weapons to Russia for dismantlement. In turn, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom pledged to “respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty within its existing borders” and to “refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine.” The memorandum was, however, not binding like a treaty, as subsequent events would amply demonstrate.
At first Ukraine seemed to have a good chance. It had coal, iron, and the fabled “black earth.” The people had the positive, life-affirming energy of the sunny south, as John Steinbeck noted when traveling through back in 1948: “The people in Kiev did not seem to have the dead weariness of the Moscow people. They did not slouch when they walked, their shoulders were back, and they laughed in the street.”
But things went bad soon enough. Though the economy righted itself after a long, nasty bout of inflation and a 60 percent drop in GDP in the nineties, Ukraine was still failing at its two principal tasks—state-building and nation-building. The east and west of the country, which had been in agreement about seceding from the USSR, soon found themselves increasingly at odds, splitting along the fault lines of cultural allegiance either to Moscow or toward Kiev, meaning Europe and the West. With a little luck Ukraine might have developed into something like Bulgaria, a largely invisible European country, a destination for adventurous vacationers. There were, however, forces afoot that would make Ukraine the most important country in Europe.
Chief among them was what might be called “Gorby and the angry inch.” Though its implications are blurred with denial and duplicity, there is a generally agreed upon version of the event itself. In a 1990 conversation between Soviet leader Gorbachev and American secretary of state James Baker, Baker promised Gorbachev that if he pulled Soviet troops out of East Germany and permitted the peaceful reunion of the two Germanys, NATO, in return, would not move “one inch east.”
NATO, of course, moved not inches but hundreds of miles east. This was effectuated by granting membership to three former Soviet republics—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—and seven former Eastern Bloc countries—Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia between 1999 and 2004. George Kennan, U.S. ambassador to the USSR and author of the containment doctrine that guided U.S. policy throughout the Cold War, called NATO expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold-War era” and foresaw its leading to a resurgence of “nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.”
But of course there were other factors and forces here besides NATO expansionism. The former Soviet Bloc countries were only too happy to take cover behind NATO’s shield. Having suffered centuries of Moscow’s domination, their desire for freedom and security was only natural. And among those nations there was also a strong sense that the democratic Russia of the nineties was a passing illusion, or as Estonia’s president Lennart Meri, saw it, Russia was a malignancy in remission: the Yeltsin era was at best a fleeting opportunity to be seized before Russia relapsed into authoritarianism at home and expansionism abroad.
What gave those formerly Warsaw Pact nations their sense of security was Article 5 of the NATO charter, which states: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”
This meant that the United States and Europe were in the rather odd position of having to risk nuclear armageddon to defend Slovenia.
And of course none of this went over well in Moscow, where Baker’s promise had been taken seriously. The obvious rejoinder here is: Next time, get it in writing, pal, or perhaps Samuel Goldwyn’s immortal line that a “verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”
But the obvious rejoinder from Gorbachev and company could be: We were dismantling a nuclear empire and facing one crisis after the other, and did not have the time for all the niceties. Not only that—one’s word counts for a great deal in any dealings with Russians, and true partners don’t need everything on paper. As Gorbachev himself put it in a recent interview: “The Americans promised that NATO wouldn’t move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises. It shows they cannot be trusted.”
In the view from the Kremlin, Russia had essentially been outflanked from the Baltic to the Black Sea by March 2004, when seven former Soviet Bloc nations were admitted into NATO. To lock that ring tight only one more country was needed: Ukraine. So when the Orange Revolution broke out in November 2004 in protest against the rigged presidential elections, Putin could not fail to notice that it came on the heels of the latest round of NATO recruitment in March. Apart from the geopolitical dangers Ukraine’s Orange Revolution would subject Russia to, there was also the danger of its spreading across the border, a bad example being infectious, as the Russian saying goes.
Ukraine’s elections were reheld and a liberal president was elected. His administration, would, however, prove both so corrupt and inept, so riddled with factious infighting, that by the time the next elections were held in 2010, Viktor Yanukovich, who had won the rigged elections and lost the fair, would now, in an irony of democracy, be fairly elected to the presidency in what would prove a disastrous choice.
Ukraine was a calamity waiting to happen. It had had the same number of post-Soviet years as, say, its neighbor Poland, which was thriving, whereas Ukraine was almost a failed state. The country’s east and west abraded against each other like tectonic plates. As usual, there was plenty of wisdom after the fact, with Gorbachev, for example, declaring: “Ukraine is in many ways due to the mistakes of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Once they decided to dissolve the union, they should have agreed on territories and boundaries.” He was referring to what Solzhenitsyn had termed the “false Leninist borders of Ukraine,” although they could in addition be termed “false Khrushchevian borders,” for it was he who so cavalierly made Ukraine a present of Crimea.
Russia’s street politicians saw the split coming in Ukraine. Asked in 2008, “If Ukraine were to move into NATO, what do you think the Russian reaction would be?” Aleksandr Dugin, the founder of the International Eurasian Movement, replied: “I think that the Russian reaction would be to support an uprising in the Eastern parts and Crimea and I could not exclude the entrance of armed forces there.” A Moscow Times article of April 8, 2008, “Putin Hints at Splitting Up Ukraine,” reported that at the same NATO conference where Putin remarked to Bush that Ukraine was not a real country, Putin also “threatened to encourage the secession of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, where anti-NATO and pro-Moscow sentiment is strong.”
Even the National Geographic magazine, whose prose is usually as anodyne as its pictures are vivid, entitled an April 2011 article on Crimea “A Jewel in Two Crowns: Russia’s Paradise Lost Belongs to Ukraine—and That’s Where the Trouble Begins.”
All the same, Putin himself was surprised by events in 2014. When the fissures began splitting the surface of Ukraine, he was busy with the concluding ceremonies of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, which had been a resounding success, though some opposition figures like Boris Nemtsov would take Putin to task for the corruption involved in, at $50 billion, the most expensive Games in history. Still, there had been no problems with Chechen terrorists or gay demonstrations as feared, and the Games had accomplished what they had been designed to do—remind the world that Russia was resurgent, a major player again.
What really surprised Putin was how rapidly and radically events developed in Ukraine. One moment he is offering the lordly sum of $15 billion as a loan to prop up President Yanukovich and to keep the country from sliding into the Western camp; the next moment Putin is offering that same president refuge in Russia as Yanukovich flees his country, leaving behind a trail of carnage and vulgar luxury. Of course, Putin had designs on Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and no doubt his planners had worked out various scenarios to cover the foreseeable possibilities, but it is also clear that the events of late February were neither at the time nor in the manner of his choosing.
There is a point where geopolitics becomes existential, Darwinian, and, for Putin, the situation in Ukraine was one. Forget all the icons and cupolas and Cossacks—this was a matter of life and death. No Russian leader could allow his country to be outflanked from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He would be seen as weak. And Putin knows what happens to the weak.
The sage of Cambridge Tip O’Neill’s remark that all politics is local even applies to Moscow, where Putin’s principal role is Lion Tamer of the Kremlin. Though he has to a large extent defanged and declawed the oligarchs, who make public and servile protestations of their loyalty, that does not mean that they cannot harbor grievances or hatch intrigues. He must also balance the needs and ambitions of the security and military leaders, not to mention those of the gas and oil industry on which the country’s economy depends.
Putin, a paranoid if not by nature then by profession, found himself being outflanked by a hostile military alliance that also manifestly seeks to drastically reduce his economic lifeline of gas and oil, all of which puts him in supreme jeopardy in the infighting of the Kremlin. To have failed to understand this was a cardinal sin on the part of the West. A February 2, 2015, New York Times article entitled “Britain and Europe Sleepwalked into Ukraine Crisis Report Says” states: “Britain and the European Union made a ‘catastrophic misreading’ of President Vladimir V. Putin and ‘sleepwalked’ into the Ukraine crisis, treating it as a trade issue rather than as a delicate foreign-policy challenge, British lawmakers said … in a scathing report.… The European Union had failed to appreciate the ‘exceptional nature’ of Ukraine.”
The West was surprised not only by the importance of Ukraine to Russia, but by the violence of the Russian response. So intent on building a new world order based on the rule of law, the West somehow missed the obvious fact that Russia was still a country where the rule of law counted for very little, another way of saying that the law of the jungle prevailed.
When discussing their country’s behavior, Russians will often say with a wistful, self-mocking irony: “Whereas in civilized countries…,” meaning as opposed to in Russia. Murder is an instrument of politics by other means in Putin’s Russia. The KGB renegade Alexander Litvinenko is murdered with radioactive polonium in London, the harshly critical journalist Anna Politkovskaya is gunned down on Putin’s birthday while returning home with her groceries, the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is put to death by abuse and neglect in prison after purportedly committing the very crimes he attempted to expose, and the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is shot dead in sight of the Kremlin while walking home from a date. Putin’s critics are frequently killed, his supporters never.
Until the Ukrainian crisis the civilized West and Darwinian Russia were able to coexist in an uneasy equilibrium of interests. Russia’s authoritarianism lite kept any of the various assassinations and injustices from tipping the balance to the breaking point. Business was done. Russian gas and oil were bought, the French contracted to build Mistral assault carriers for Russia. There were independent newspapers, a radio station, Ekho Moskvy (Moscow Echo), and a web TV station, Dozhd (Rain). And Russians had the right that human-rights champion Andrei Sakharov considered the most important of them all—the right to leave the country. Some suggested that Putin’s new, modern, twenty-first-century authoritarianism would, unlike the Soviet Union, much prefer to be rid of anyone who was at odds with the system. All the same, it remained possible to believe that Russia just might be zigzagging its own way to its own version of a free society, as George Kennan had predicted.
Still, Putin had long been suspicious of the West’s intentions toward Ukraine. He knew full well that if he were in charge of Western intelligence he would use all those pleasant and neutral-sounding NGOs to gradually draw Ukraine into the Western camp, and the EU. Membership in NATO could come later. And even without any such malign intent it is still all part of one process. As Fiona Hill, former national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, put it: “The E.U. operates in a completely different framework, when you pool sovereignty and have the same temperature gauges, the same railway gauges and do lots of other boring things that have a profound impact. Once you do this you don’t come back. Russia looked at places like Estonia and Poland and said we can’t let this happen to Ukraine.”
The fog of war has been particularly thick in Ukraine, and truth as always was the first casualty—it was in fact assassinated. Putin has maintained deniability from the start, employing tricks and tactics that have been called “hybrid warfare,” meaning a newfangled combination of proxies, volunteers, propaganda, and lies. But it’s nothing so new either. In 1921 the British foreign secretary and “arch-Russophobe” Lord Curzon wrote to Georgy Chicherin, the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs: “When the Russian government desire to take some action more than usually repugnant to normal international law and comity, they ordinarily erect some ostensibly independent authority to take action on their behalf.… The process is familiar, and has ceased to beguile.”
Except for its command of English, that letter could have been written today.
Murky as the situation remains, a few things are clear. First, the Crimea will remain part of Russia. The leading opposition figure, the valiant anticorruption muckraker and often-jailed Alexei Navalny, who took 27 percent in his 2013 run for mayor of Moscow, has said he wouldn’t return Crimea if he became president: “Despite the fact that Crimea was seized with egregious violations of all international regulations, the reality is that Crimea is part of Russia” and “will remain part of Russia and will never again in the foreseeable future become part of Ukraine.” Like Putin and Gorbachev, Navalny doesn’t “see any kind of difference at all between Russians and Ukrainians,” a sentiment, that, tellingly, is almost never voiced by Ukrainians.
If the leader of the government and the leader of the opposition are agreed on the status of Crimea, we can be sure that any negotiations contesting Crimea’s status will be a nonstarter. The West will ultimately make a sharper distinction between Crimea and east Ukraine, continuing not to recognize Crimea’s annexation and to apply sanctions to companies in Crimea or doing business with it. If, however, Russia complies sufficiently with the Minsk agreements, and proves a compellingly necessary partner in international affairs like the fight against ISIS, the sanctions imposed in connection with Ukraine will gradually be lifted. Though like China no fan of “splittism,” Russia was glad to see cracks appear in Western unity with the exit of Britain from the European Union. The Russians can ask why the UK’s referendum was legitimate and Crimea’s was not.
Meanwhile the sanctions are still in force. Those sanctions have caused Russia genuine pain, hurting Russian businesses big and small, delaying exploration for oil in the Arctic, pushing millions into poverty, depriving the better-off of their European vacations and French cheeses. Though they offer no immediate emotional satisfaction, sanctions do work, as shown by Iran coming to the negotiating table in 2015. Still, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the sanctions cut both ways. The French had to return the 1.2 billion euros to the Russians for the Mistral assault carriers and also had to pay out some 2.5 million euros a month for their maintenance. By 2016 the Italians had lost upward of $10 billion because of the sanctions.
Russia will be satisfied with some low level of continued turmoil in eastern Ukraine because NATO will not offer membership to countries with frozen conflicts and border disputes. Ideally for Putin the rebels will bite off a bit more territory to create a land bridge to Crimea, which can now only be supplied by sea or air without risk of obstruction. A bridge to link the Russian mainland and Crimea is under discussion with China as the probable contractor, but it will take years and cost billions, a cost that may be offset by the gas and oil deposits off the Crimean shore.
The lasting consequence of the Ukrainian adventure was the revelation that Russia is a Darwinian society that will not play by the West’s rules, because, by its very nature, it cannot.
Breaking with the West over Ukraine, Russia veered in two directions—north to the Arctic and east to China.