By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript
I will admit to being surprised by the invasion of Ukraine launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin, though I am not entirely unsympathetic to some of the claims, geopolitical, historical, and ideological, that he makes.
He appears to see himself standing alone against the United States and what he portrays, hyperbolically, as the “far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis” that “the leading NATO countries are supporting” in Ukraine.
Behind all this is Putin’s anger over the perceived Western humiliation of Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union three decades ago, followed by NATO’s subsequent expansion eastward, to now encompass former satellite states such as Hungary and Poland, and even the three former Soviet republics on the Baltic.
The seeds of the current crisis were planted in 2014, when the pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was deposed in an uprising and replaced by pro-Western politicians.
Putin’s response was decisive. Russia annexed the Crimea and threw its weight behind a separatist insurgency in the eastern Ukrainian region of the Donbas, with its heavily ethnic Russian population.
Putin backed the rebels and distributed more than 700,000 Russian passports. This conflict with the Kyiv government has already claimed an estimated 14,000 lives.
He has now gone further, recognizing the independence of the two People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, the breakaway separatist regions, so that they could ask Russia for “help.” Russia says it was within its rights, under the United Nations Charter, in responding to this request for assistance.
But the incursion into the Ukrainian heartland is a far greater gamble, and the Russian president has put forward his narrative to justify it. Putin believes that Russians and Ukrainians constitute a single nation -- in other words, that Ukraine is a component of Russia.
Last July, Putin wrote a long essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” in which he defended this thesis. “Russians and Ukrainians are one people, a single whole, occupying the same historical and spiritual space,” he asserted.
In this he is correct: Both Ukrainians and Russians trace themselves to Kievan Rus, a trading center set up by Vikings along the Dnieper River more than 1,000 years ago.
To Putin, modern Ukraine is “entirely the product of the Soviet era,” having been incorporated into the Bolshevik state after the Russian Revolution. Putin takes note of the fact that Ukraine was part and parcel of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires prior to 1917.
He is dismissive of the modern-day Ukraine, arguing that its creation as a sovereign state was a tragedy and an accident, the handiwork of Communist leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in the 20th century, to Russia’s detriment.
He was particularly scornful of the decision of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to remove Crimea, with its Russian majority, from the Russian Soviet republic in 1954 and award it to Ukraine, with no justification.
With the passing of the Soviet Union, Putin asserted, many Russians and Ukrainians sincerely believed that “our close cultural, spiritual and economic ties would certainly last.” But since 2014, the state has fallen into the hands of what he refers to as “neo-Nazis.”
His supposed evidence? The existence of far-right ultranationalist and extremist groups, specifically the National Corps and its associated militia, the Azov Regiment.
He paints today’s Ukraine as a corrupt puppet of the United States that, with its desire to join NATO, threatens Russia’s security. In his view, the NATO alliance, now at Russia’s border, should go no further.
Putin’s aim will be to oust President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government and install a pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. “We will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine,” was the way he phrased it. However, it’s unlikely he will permanently occupy Ukraine, with its 44 million people, the largest country in Europe in size after Russia itself.
Behind all this lies the way in which two multi-national Communist states, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, suddenly dissolved. Relatively unimportant internal boundaries, often containing rival ethnicities, suddenly became international borders, and this has since then caused no end of trouble.
A case could have been made that strange creations such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, and even Ukraine, should have been partitioned, with sections carved off and attached to adjoining ethnic kin-countries.
No comments:
Post a Comment