Ukraine on the Brink

An old joke used to say the Soviet Union was Chad with missiles, combining poor living conditions with sophisticated modern technologies, and little in between. Now the joke has become reality as the Russians have created Donetsk-with-missiles, a feral posse unable to manage the complex weaponry given to them.

The reason Putin gave for descending on Crimea and eastern Ukraine was that Russian speakers, being discriminated against by Ukrainians, had appealed to Russia for help. No examples of this discrimination have ever surfaced. On the contrary, polls have repeatedly shown that, over the twenty-five years since communism’s collapse, Russians in Ukraine were assimilating and accepting it as their home. Caught on the hop when Yanukovych was suddenly outed, Putin didn’t have time to stage provocations beforehand, but he had to have some plausible excuse for going in. His actions have actually ignited the ethnic tensions he claimed to be so concerned about. Trust gradually built up over a long period can be shattered in a few weeks. This has the makings of a long-term disaster. A group of Russian Ukrainians have raised an armed insurgency in their own country, and may be treated by the rest for what they are, a treacherous fifth column in their midst, so, whichever side wins, high tensions are likely to contaminate daily life for a long while to come.

Putin’s medium-term goal is to keep the insurgents either on top militarily, or at least of equal strength with the Ukrainian forces. The latter option is actually preferable for him, as it keeps the dissolution of Ukraine on the boil, which is his long-term aim. In either event he needs strength on the ground so that when a truce and negotiations ensue, his people will have possession of territory, which will constitute a fait accompli. This strategy however went awry, and led to the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner. After Ukraine’s presidential election the nation was finally able to get its act together, and it began to win the war. The Slaviansk enclave, symbol of the insurgency, was taken. Ukraine was winning because it had aerial supremacy. The rebels complained to Russia that they were being neglected and asked for more military aid. Without them acting effectively, Putin had no bargaining chip. So armoured personnel carriers and tanks began to cross the porous border in large numbers to reinforce the rebels, along with rocket launchers and Buk missiles to minimise Ukraine’s decisive control of the air.

The big change since the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner has been in plausible deniability. Previously Russia had been committing two linked outrages: fomenting insurrection in eastern Ukraine, and then disguising it by always having a plausible anti-Ukrainian counter-narrative. Some disinformation story was essential for the actual operation to succeed. But the missile that blew up the Malaysian airliner also blew up the Russian cover story. The links with Russian commanders, the transfer of equipment, the perpetrators controlling the crime scene, the absence of Ukrainian involvement and so on were all exposed naked for the world to see. The two outrages were simultaneously exposed. The plausible deniability strategy has now become a liability in its own right, and makes it harder, not easier, to carry out military operations. Putin has gone too far to genuinely back off, for, as another military adventurer, Macbeth, understood: “I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

The insurrections in Crimea and Donetsk/Lugansk are a carbon copy of the Russian military invasion of Georgia in 2008. In both cases Russia claimed to be responding to cries for help, and in both cases quickly took chunks out of a neighbouring country. This was a red-line moment for President Obama, which he failed to act on, just as he subsequently failed to follow up on his red-line vow over Assad’s chemical weapons in Syria. A bully like Putin can smell weakness, he can pick a patsy at a thousand paces. Inaction by the EU and the USA since the invasion of Georgia has encouraged Putin to escalate his depredations.

Russia claims it is being encircled by NATO, the EU and American power, and that as a result it is a victim nation acting defensively. In fact it is Ukraine which is being encircled. It is not generally appreciated that Russia now has six armed enclaves outside its borders: South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Crimea, Transdniestra, Donetsk/Lugansk and Konigsberg, only the latter of which is legally held. Even if the fighting in eastern Ukraine is resolved, a heavily armed Crimea will remain for decades a dagger pointed northwards at the innards of Ukraine, and southwards as a destabilising naval force in the Black Sea, with the ability to threaten Turkey, which also wants to join the EU.

The former Soviet satellite states were destroyed by having communism imposed on them against their wish. After communism collapsed they were left vulnerable and impoverished. Ukraine has been on the long slow road to recovery from Russian depredations, aiming to become a nation like Poland. Instead of making up for past misdeeds by assisting that reconstruction, Russia, on the contrary, encouraged by Western diffidence, is moving in for a second bite.

Present Russian attitudes have to be understood as part of the country’s unwillingness to face its Stalinist past. There has been no lustration, no cleansing of the national conscience in Russia, only ethnic cleansing. From the Nuremberg trials to the later apology to Israel, the German government and people have come to terms with their horrific past. Even Russia’s ally, Serbia, is now handing over its war criminals in order to gain admission to the EU. There has been no parallel reappraisal in Russia. Textbooks under the Putin regime undertake a guarded resurrection of the Stalin era, with the worst events, such as the Stalin-Hitler Pact, rationalised away in a sea of disinformation. Torturers and executioners, sometimes observed by their victims’ families, have walked the streets of post-Stalin Russia with impunity. There have been no trials or public shamings. Memorial, the Russian organisation set up to document the victims and keep their memory alive, is being harassed to the point of closure by the authorities. Russia is collectively in denial. Until this trajectory is reversed and the nation confesses, we can expect more internal and external delinquencies from Russia’s authorities.

What sort of people are the Donetsk/Lugansk rebels? We don’t sufficiently understand that some personalities thrive on war, chaos and lawlessness; in these situations psychopaths emerge from the shadows. In the vast tract of territory from eastern Europe through to the remote Caucasus, breakdown conditions have intermittently prevailed. The Chechnyan, Georgian, Armenian and other civil wars have left a sea of disaffected, militarily trained men, the makings of an irregular force. In this area the mentality of the Cossack marauder still lingers. Wandering desperadoes materialise at any new flashpoint. A region such as eastern Ukraine, in which many males aged between fifteen and thirty-five are unemployed, is headed for civil strife. These temperamentally footloose and thrill-seeking paramilitaries boost their self-esteem, such as it is, by destroying the lives of others. The historic fate of freebooting proxies has always been to do the dirty work for others, but to be unloaded when they become too embarrassing for their sponsors.

The West’s role has not been encouraging. The EU’s Foreign Minister, Baroness Ashton, has never been elected to public office, and had virtually no foreign policy credentials when she took on one of the EU’s most important positions. Her only claim to fame before she rose without trace was as treasurer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the years around 1980. The CND was a Soviet front organisation partly paid for by the Soviet Union. In Ashton’s time its main activity was to sponsor the Women of Greenham Common’s protest against a missile shield in the UK set up as a defence against Soviet weapons. Baroness Ashton is therefore just about the last person you would want on your side to argue against Russian missiles, until you start to think about President Obama. During the last US Presidential debates, when Mitt Romney said Russia was the main threat, Obama scoffed that this was Cold War rhetoric, a throwback to the 1950s. Who looks regressive now?

Putin’s monopoly on oil and gas supplies endangers not just Ukraine’s security, but the whole of Europe, which had a decade to build an alternative pipeline bypassing the Russian supply, but did nothing. When Obama planned to put monitoring stations in eastern Europe and Putin objected, Obama meekly backed down, to the horror of the Poles, who correctly predicted dire consequences for their region. Obama claimed to push the reset button on relations with the Arab world and Russia, which turned out to mean John Kerry speaking loudly and carrying no stick. This fantasy view of foreign affairs has evaporated under the pressure of events. As was said at the time of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the world cannot afford the luxury of a US President who learns while in office the hard truths of how nations act.

Putin’s personality is a crucial factor. His biographer, Masha Gessen, rightly says his main message is a threat: “Don’t mess with me.” In public he composes his facial features and body language in a peculiar way which he believes conveys this message. With Putin it is a dialogue of the deaf; he is not listening, he breaks his word, his promises and his treaties at will. He allows himself to be interviewed only under Dorothy Dix conditions; in spite of his macho image, this is the behaviour of the bully/coward. His speciality is to exploit vulnerability in others, but never to allow himself to be vulnerable. Just ask yourself: Why does Putin need a tiny corner of Ukraine when he controls by far the largest landmass of any country in the world, a landmass he can’t manage already, with Siberia underdeveloped, and Russia’s main cities with crumbling infrastructure, rustbelt industries and frequent accidents in mines, aviation, power stations and railways, as equipment deteriorates?

Putin is not unique: he belongs to a recognisable group of dictators who have arisen since the Second World War. They are basically authoritarians who exhibit an incongruous mixture of atavistic prejudices and modern control techniques, such as media saturation and pervasive intelligence services. The list is endless: Castro, Chavez, Mugabe, Gaddafi, Ceausescu, Tito, Milosevic, Nkrumah, Idi Amin, Nasser, Soekarno, and many of the rulers of Pakistan. They can’t be defined as Left or Right, as they have replaced discredited fascism and communism with nationalism, while retaining the trappings of those ideologies, such as the cult of personality. Destructive of their own economies, they are liable to embark on external adventures to divert attention from failures at home, and end up destroying their own side as much as their opponents. As with Putin, there is something faintly ridiculous about the cavortings of these rulers, a feature Charlie Chaplin caught so accurately in his film classic The Great Dictator. They are tin-pot totalitarians, hard to take seriously as personalities, self-inflating egos in whom insolence replaces substance, cardboard cut-outs of the real thing. But Putin differs from the others because he commands a world power.

It’s no accident that Russia is run by a KGB operative. After the Soviet Union stagnated under Brezhnev in the 1980s, it had to be “saved” by the KGB chief Andropov, as the intelligence services and the military-science complex were the only institutions properly functioning. As communism became , General Jaruzelski ruled in Poland, and the last communist ruler of East Germany was the security minister. After the chaos of the 1990s the same thing has happened in post-communist Russia. An intelligence service can for a time prop up a regime from behind the scenes, but can’t run it from the front. Secret policemen like Putin can never be open with their own people, as they operate on fear. Any government has two basic functions: to keep its country secure, and to promote economic advancement. Russia now has precisely the wrong mix: ex-spooks like Putin and his KGB entourage put too high a value on security, though their country is not under external threat, to the detriment of prosperity and freedom.

Russia now has an economy structured like the Gulf states. Its huge oil revenues do not filter down to the ordinary people; the oligarchs, a euphemism for the sharpest of the old communist nomenklatura, have carried off one of the biggest heists in history. Business initiative is strangled by mafias, government over-regulation and lawlessness. Don’t take my word for it—in his first term Prime Minister Medvedev repeatedly warned that corruption was inhibiting essential infrastructure projects and crippling the economy; a decade later nothing has been done about it. The $50 billion thrown away on the Sochi Winter Olympics is nothing compared with the money to be wasted on the 2018 World Cup, not to mention Crimea.

Ukraine, at one end of the European landmass, is like France at the other end, a large rectangular country, mainly flat, with a significant population and such rich soil it was known as the “granary of Europe” in the nineteenth century. But whereas the French were able to protect their country r the English left in the fifteenth century, Ukraine has never had a such free hand, as it was overrun by tribes sweeping in from the steppes, then ruled by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, torn apart by Cossack uprisings, and suborned by the Russian, Austrian and Soviet empires. It was never until 1991 a free and independent state. Like other Soviet satellites it had its heroic dissidents from the 1960s onwards who resurrected its suppressed patriotism, which triumphed as communism waned.

Ukraine is not torn between East and West, or between the EU and Russia, as much commentary has it; it just wants to be itself for the first time, and had been doing that gradually and happily until early this year. This under-recognised nation may finally crystallise as a state under its present baptism of fire, or it may be snuffed out just as it was seeing the light of day.

Patrick Morgan visited Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania last year