Guest post: Putin is destroying Russian-Ukrainian unity
http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2014/03/17/guest-post-putin-is-destroying-russian-ukrainian-unity/
Mar 17, 2014 Financial Times
By Taras Kuzio of the University of Alberta
Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) has said that Russia reserves
the right to intervene in eastern Ukraine in defence of "persecuted"
Russian speakers. This, and Russia's annexation of the Crimea, will not
be not welcomed throughout the former USSR, where Russian speakers are
scattered in enclaves. After all, in the autumn of 2008 none of Russia's
allies, even the pro-Russian Belarus and Kazakhstan, followed Moscow in
recognising the independence of the two Georgian territories of South
Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Russia's MFA statement on March 15 came after five deaths were reported
from violent clashes in Donetsk and Kharkiv. I spent three days in
Kharkiv last week and was in the city on the night of the violence.
Kharkiv was calm and peaceful for most of my time there although many
people were apprehensive that Russia was building up its forces about 30
km across the border near Belgorod.
On my first day I went to a rally in support of Hennadiy Kernes, the
controversial pro-Moscow mayor who was summoned to the prosecutor's
office after being put under criminal investigation. Ukrainian flags
were everywhere to be seen, with only one orange and black striped flag
of St George, the symbol adopted by pro-Russian forces in the Crimea and
eastern Ukraine. No Russian flags were in sight.
A Euromaidan ribbon tied to my rucksack did not cause any heckling or
violence the whole time I was in Kharkiv.
The violence on Friday March 14 was isolated and did not reflect the
calm mood prevalent in Kharkiv, a prosperous city. It has a large
student population, from the Arab world, Africa and elsewhere, to some
of whom I gave a seminar on the Euromaidan revolution and Russia and the
Crimean crisis.
Violence in Kharkiv and Donetsk between rival political groups is out of
character for eastern Ukraine and is an artificial strategy imported by
Vladimir Putin, Russia's president to create chaos. Fake statements are
emanating from Russian speakers requesting Russian "protection" and
intervention, which the MFA is promising to heed.
But Putin's strategy is backfiring and leading to a surge of Ukrainian
patriotism. Within a week of the adoption of a law creating a Ukrainian
National Guard, 40, 000 volunteers, many from Euromaidan self-defence
units, signed up for what is set to become an elite force. Military
recruitment centres have been thronged by volunteers.
Ukrainians were reluctant to be drawn into a fight in the hostile
territory that is the Crimea but are actively making preparations to
fight for eastern Ukraine. Military bases in Kharkiv such as that at
Chuhuyevare are readying for what Oleksandr Turchynov, Ukraine's acting
president, says could become a Russian invasion. Ukrainian airborne
forces have pushed back a Russian advance unit on the Crimean-Kherson
administrative border.
Kharkiv was a centre for Soviet Ukraine's military-industrial complex
and has many academies for branches of the military and police where
thousands of cadets receive instruction. A Russian intervention into
Kharkiv would suck in volunteers and military units from neighbouring
Poltava and Sumy regions that have traditionally voted for the
opposition. In the 2004 presidential elections, Sumy, the home region of
the pro-western Viktor Yushcenko, voted for him in similarly high
numbers as what Putin believes to be "nationalistic" western Ukraine.
The outbreak of hostilities in eastern Ukraine would be a signal for
Tatars, who boycotted the referendum, to launch a guerrilla war in the
Crimea. This would attract support from the millions of the Tatar
diaspora in Turkey and from war-toughened jihadists in the northern
Caucasus.
Putin, although he claims to feel empathy for the Soviet Union, has
never understood the deeply felt patriotism that the Soviet regime
inculcated in Ukrainians and other non-Russian peoples and their loyalty
to republican borders. Putin also habitually confuses ethnic Russians
with Russian speakers.
In the USSR, the non-Russian republics had their own Soviet institutions
such as a republican communist party and academy of sciences, which
Russia never possessed. Soviet Ukraine, the second largest Soviet
republic, had the largest republican communist party in the Soviet Union.
In Moscow there were only Soviet institutions, leading to a conflation
of Soviet and Russian identities, evidence of which we see in Putin.
Russia alone of the 15 republics never declared independence from the USSR.
Ultimately, Putin is no different from the ethnic Ukrainian nationalists
he allegedly despises in not believing that a Russian-speaking Ukrainian
could be a Ukrainian patriot. Yet, such examples of Russian-speaking
Ukrainian patriots are countless in all walks of life, including
opposition leader Vitaliy Klitschko and internationally acclaimed
novelist Andrey Kurkov.
A strategy ostensibly meant to "defend" Russian speakers and maintain
Ukraine within the Ruskyi Mir (Russian World), Putin's invasion and
annexation of the Crimea has torn it apart. March 16, when the Crimea
held its referendum, made Ukraine even more determined to sign an
Association Agreement with the EU six days later. The referendum and the
signing are the undoing of Russian-Ukrainian unity.
What has been conspicuously absent from analysis of the Crimean crisis
is the symbolism of the year 1954, when the Crimea was transferred from
Russia to Ukraine. The official Soviet reason for the transfer was to
celebrate the 300th anniversary of the "reunion" of Ukraine and Russia
in 1654, when Ukrainian Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytskyy signed the
Treaty of Pereyaslav with the Muscovite (Russian) tsar.
Soviet propaganda and historiography indoctrinated Ukrainians and
Russians into the belief that they should be forever united and that
Ukrainians seeking independence were traitors, Nazi collaborators or the
agents of NGOs financed by the west. True to his homo Sovieticus
mentality, Putin really does believe there was a US conspiracy behind
the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan.
The majority of Russians have never seen Ukrainians as a separate
people, as Germans see Austrians, for example. Instead, they see them as
Prussians see Bavarians and view an independent Ukraine as an historical
aberration. Putin, unlike his predecessor Borys Yeltsin in the 1990s,
has never respected Ukrainian independence.
Putin's annexation of the Crimea and Ukraine's integration into Europe
have driven nails into the coffin of Ukrainian-Russian unity on its
360th anniversary. Putin will go down in history not as he had hoped as
the unifier of "Russian lands" but as gaining the Crimea and losing Ukraine.
Taras Kuzio is a research associate at the Centre for Political and
Regional Studies, Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies, University
of Alberta.
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