Russian Insecurity and the War in Ukraine

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Vladimir Putin claims he attacked Ukraine because he felt Russia was being pushed against a wall. This, according to him, was a war of necessity, not choice. What reasons did he give for this?

If Ukraine were allowed to join NATO – a military alliance, remember – Russia would face the prospect of the American-led alliance in striking distance of major cities like Moscow and Volgograd (better known by its Soviet-era name of Stalingrad).

Not only would Ukraine be part of the new encirclement, but so might even Georgia, in the Caucasus. After all, United States Senator John McCain’s dream to admit Georgia to NATO was only stopped after Moscow’s 2008 war with Tbilisi.

The 30-member NATO alliance outmatches and outguns Russia manyfold. The U.S. alone is stronger, and NATO comprises at least four other major powers – France, Germany, Great Britain and Turkey.

From the original 12 states in 1949, when it was a defensive alliance against Soviet aggression, it has grown to today’s 30, including many former Soviet client states and even three ex-Soviet republics.

Putin claims further eastern expansion of NATO would represent an incursion into Russia’s sphere of influence, and a direct threat to its security.

Part of Putin’s argument aligns with that made by political scientist Samuel Huntington in his most famous book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996. In Clash, Huntington predicted the crisis in Ukraine. His theory that nations would return to their historical and cultural roots had a natural corollary: those that were divided between civilizations, so-called “cleft” countries, would most likely generate great-power conflict.

While Ukraine is a buffer between Europe and Russia, it is also a cleft country, divided internally, with western Ukraine firmly in the European corner and eastern Ukraine and Crimea firmly in the orbit of Orthodox Russia. So any attempt to upset this equilibrium meant that Ukraine “could split along its fault line into two separate entities, the eastern of which would merge with Russia.”

After the Second World War, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic western Ukrainian territories that had been ruled by Austria-Hungary and then, following the First World War, Poland. These ethnic Ukrainians wanted no part of Soviet Russia. Some of them even collaborated with the invading Germans to prevent that outcome.

Maybe these newly-conquered western Ukrainian regions should have become an “independent” satellite state, like Poland and Hungary. Then in 1989 they would have cast off Communist rule, and there wouldn’t have been any problem when the USSR itself dissolved in 1991. It would resulted in two sovereign Ukrainian-speaking states; or maybe the eastern part and Crimea would have remained in the Russian Federation.

Today, while almost one-third of Ukraine’s population has Russian as its first language, mainly in the east and southwest of the country, Russian is no longer an official state language. Kyiv also refuses to consider some form of autonomy for its Russian east.

As for Crimea, with its majority Russian population, it had been part of Russia since 1783 until it was transferred to Ukraine in 1954 by Communist ruler Nikita Khrushchev. It wasn’t settled by Ukrainians and its population feared the new Ukrainian government.

Huntington also argued that most civilizational blocs emerging in the post-Cold War world would have natural leaders, what he called “core states.” Orthodox civilization would be led by Russia, and Western civilization by the United States.

These core states are key to managing the challenges that would emerge in cleft nations such as Ukraine. Rather than sponsoring a proxy war in Ukraine and risking a bigger war, the leaders of the core states, he suggested, needed to step back and acknowledge that both Russia and the West have legitimate claims in Ukraine and that a diplomatic solution was the only path forward.

On this subject, he wrote that “The principal responsibility of Western leaders, consequently, is not to attempt to reshape other civilizations in the image of the West, which is beyond their declining power, but to preserve, protect and renew the unique qualities of Western civilization.”

But American policy toward Ukraine has been the opposite of what Huntington would have advised. It has been a crusading democracy promotion that led to a U.S.-backed coup d’état in Kyiv, and a refusal to recognize any legitimate Russian interests in Crimea and eastern Ukraine despite their deep historic ties.

Whether an eventual solution might be a partition of Ukraine, a federation where the aspirations of both parts of the country are respected, or some other compromise, remains to be seen.