The Ukrainian Crisis as Seen from Moscow

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The standard “CNN version” of the crisis in Ukraine goes as follows: In order to justify Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has concocted a narrative of resentment against America and NATO, seen as a purely defensive alliance and a force for peace and stability.

In actual fact, even before the present crisis, NATO has acted as a spearhead of American-West European attempts to bring most of the former eastern bloc –including parts of the old Soviet Union – under its suzerainty.

NATO now includes not just former Warsaw Pact countries but even the three Baltic states, former component republics of the Soviet Union. And American hawks like Senator John McCain, who never saw a crisis that American power might not take advantage of, has at times suggested that Ukraine, Moldova, and even Georgia, deep in the Caucasus, should be allowed into this “North Atlantic” alliance.

During the Balkan wars of the 1990s, this supposedly defensive alliance forced competing ethnic nationalists in Bosnia-Herzegovina to continue to co-exist in a shotgun marriage for reasons bordering on ideological fantasy. And it then, under false pretences, wrested Kosovo away from Serbia and handed it over to the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Jack F. Matlock, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, has stated that the effect of NATO actions in the 1990s was devastating, and turned Russian public opinion against the United States.

When it is in America’s interest, it has no trouble partitioning countries or interfering in their internal affairs – ask the Grenadans, Panamanians, and Nicaraguans, among others.

Yet for some reason, when Russia, already pushed back to pre-19th century borders, feels threatened by western moves, it is accused of aggression.

Day after day, we hear about threatening moves by Moscow – but in actual fact, most of the violence in Ukraine has been initiated by Ukrainian nationalists from the western part of the country.

A fire in Odessa on May 2 left at least 46 people dead after radicals joined by Right Sector militia blocked anti-government protesters in a trade union building and set it alight. Ethnic Russian secessionists also fought Ukrainian forces in Mariupol a week later, a battle that left more than 20 dead.

Putin is within his rights to invoke the emerging human rights norm known as “R2P” (responsibility to protect), which maintains that if a state fails to protect its nationals from severe human rights abuses, including ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, the international community assumes the responsibility of protection.

The nationalists seized power in an illegitimate coup in late February, and wish to make of the country a “pure” Ukrainian state. They don’t want any talk of decentralization or federalism, which Putin in fact has suggested.

Putin also discouraged ethnic Russians in cities like Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine from holding a referendum on May 11 on self-rule. (They went ahead anyhow, voting strongly in favour.)

The leading candidates in the Ukrainian presidential election scheduled for May 25 are all ethnic Ukrainians who support the aims of the coup leaders and are opposed to any forms of autonomy for Russian-inhabited regions.

Yet as far as CNN and the State Department are concerned, Putin remains behind the unrest!

Whereas the people who overthrew the Yanukovych regime were described in the press as “pro-democracy freedom fighters,” those ethnic Russians now wishing to protect their own interests are termed “militants” and “rebels.”

The only area that Russia has annexed is Crimea – rectifying a ridiculous decision made 60 years ago to transfer it to Ukraine, when internal borders in the USSR were largely meaningless anyhow. Crimea has a Russian majority and was Russian for centuries – including in Soviet times, when it was part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

For Americans to suddenly become concerned about “territorial integrity,” when they wrested Kosovo away from Serbia, oversaw the partition of Sudan, and so forth, is rather rich, especially as it was clear the vast majority of Crimeans welcomed their return to Russia.

The view from Moscow is one very different from that of the American media, who seem to have forgotten, or don’t care, that Russia has been attacked by different countries over the centuries, and most recently lost 27 million lives in bearing the brunt of Hitler’s aggression in the Second World War.

This conflict with Russia is about geopolitics, not ideology. After all, NATO and the European Union now include countries like Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania, none of which have political systems in any way superior to Russia’s -- and neither will Ukraine, no matter who eventually controls it.