History, Diplomacy and Western Readings of the Crisis in Ukraine

Rome, 28^th March 2014

The West’s difficulty in understanding Russia’s position isn’t helped by the historical models the Western media and commentators have employed to explain events in Ukraine. Many have groped for parallels drawn from the historical confrontation between the liberal, democratic West and its totalitarian adversaries during the twentieth century.

As a result, it’s become popular compare Mr Putin’s defence of the rights of Russian speakers in southern and eastern Ukraine to Hitler’s crusade on behalf of central Europe’s German minorities in the 1930s and to liken Russia’s annexation of Crimea to the Soviet Union’s brutal crushing of dissent in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968: Hilary Clinton’s analogy between Putin and Hitler is perhaps one of the most obvious examples.

Tempting though they are, these comparisons are wrong. From a policy point of view, they’re also dangerous. That’s because such narratives rehearse a model of confrontation between east and west, autocracy and democracy, whose moral and ethical lines are so well drawn as to make serious thinking about the right response to them almost redundant.

Hitler’s duping of Chamberlain at Munich in 1938 taught us that it’s the West’s moral duty to stand up to expansionist dictators and we expect our leaders to do so. Freed of any shades of diplomatic or geopolitical grey, policy-making for Ukraine becomes a relatively easy choice between the ‘goodies’ (us and our aspiring democratic allies) and the ‘baddies’ (repressive and autocratic Russia).

Yet history offers us others parallels that are both morally murkier and politically more complex. As I’ve written before, the First Partition of Poland in 1771 offers us a model through which to read Russia’s actions in Ukraine that puts the emphasis on Ukraine’s own divisions and Russia’s historically vigorous defence of its national interest on the broad plains of Eastern Europe.

The same model suggests the naivety, not to say irresponsibility, with which the United States and European Union entered into strategic competition with Russia in a region which the Kremlin has always identified as critical to its national interest. And it neatly, if tragically, sheds light on the full complexity of the factors that ought to shape the Western response, where some of the options are less bad than others but none really good.

History isn’t a morality play. If it teaches us anything, it’s that diplomacy is often a choice between evils.

Russia, the West and the Problem with Sanctions

Rome, 28 March 2014

 

I’ve written before that in confronting Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the West’s options aren’t much better than Austria and Prussia’s in 1771. Unwilling to fight, Frederick the Great and Maria-Theresa reasoned that Catherine’s Russia was too big and too important to the European system to be ignored, punished or excluded for long. The only other option, however ignoble, was to talk.


When it comes to talking today, however, the only thing the West seems willing to talk about is sanctions. It’s very unlikely that this will get us anywhere.

Sanctions, it’s worth remembering, are not so much a diplomatic as a coercive, not to say a punitive, instrument. It’s clear they won’t force Putin out of Crimea. Neither will they do anything to deter a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine. The only thing they will certainly achieve is Russia’s humiliation and embitterment towards the West, confirming what Putin has of late been saying (that the West is out to oppose Russia) and uniting Russians behind him. Both outcomes will make real diplomacy, in the sense of a negotiated compromise, more difficult.

Today, we don’t know what will keep the Russian army out of eastern Ukraine but we cannot now be under any illusion about what will bring it in: any move by the West to guide Ukraine closer to its sphere of influence, in the form either of NATO or the EU. Both the United States and Europe must be very careful about giving the impression that either organization is preparing to offer Ukraine anything more than moral support.

Putin is sending the West an unequivocal message: either leave the rest of Ukraine alone as a buffer between Russia and NATO/EU, or partition it with him—peacefully or violently. He has hinted that the outcome he now wants is a federalized Ukraine that would allow each of its various regions to choose its own foreign and trade policies. And this morning, the Russian media is reporting that, in an address to the Ukrainian people, Yanukovich himself called for ‘a referendum to determine the status of every one of Ukraine’s regions’. Whether by the ballot box or the rolling of tanks across Ukraine’s eastern and southern plains, it seems Putin will have what he sees as that part of Ukraine necessary to Russia’s security.

The problem with the West’s current approach is that it fails to listen to what Russia wants: a guarantee that the United States and Europe won’t try to draw Ukraine any further into what it sees as a hostile Western camp. The more sanctions they apply, the stronger Western leaders speak out in support of Ukrainian revolution and its desire for ‘democracy’, the more loans and other aid they offer, the more in fact they alarm Russia—and the more likely they make an invasion.

Ukraine: is a diplomatic solution still possible?

Rome, 28 March 2014

 

Almost a month since protesters in Kiev forced President Viktor Yanukovich to flee for his life to southern Russia and almost a fortnight since Crimea’s referendum on secession, the crisis in Ukraine looks no closer to resolution. On the contrary, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision last week formally to annexe Crimea to the Russian Federation, and the sanctions which the United States and the countries of the European Union have imposed—albeit some more reluctantly than others—in response, reflect a hardening of positions on both sides.

Western leaders still speak hopefully of a ‘diplomatic solution’, but there was little evidence of a desire to talk in the G-8’s suspension on Monday of Russia from its meetings or President Obama’s spirited rejection in Brussels of the reasons Russia has advanced for its actions. With Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s eastern borders, war seems not less likely, but more.

In his Brussels speech, Mr Obama claimed boldly that ‘no amount of propaganda can make right what the world knows to be wrong’. This is a funny way to go about diplomacy. A precondition for negotiations is an understanding of your opponent’s position, a willingness to put yourself in his or her shoes and see the issue under contention from his or her point of view. The problem is that Western leaders have rarely given the impression of taking Russia’s position or its concerns seriously. By failing to do so, they share a large share of the blame for the polarization that has since resulted.

When, for example, Russia declares—as it has done for over two decades—that it identifies a core national interest in Ukraine not acceding to either NATO or the EU, or that Crimea, the home of its most important fleet, is of key strategic value to it, it’s not announcing a global challenge to democratic values or its intention to upend the international system: it’s just doing what all countries do and wondering why nobody in the White House or Brussels is listening. Neither, in responding to Russia’s claims, is the West being asked to make a moral or ethical judgement about the quality of Russian democracy or the accounting practices of its leaders. It’s simply being asked to treat Russia’s interests as a state with the same respect it seeks for its own.

The point is that, for all the rhetoric about democracy and international law, the West is asking Russia to part with far more of its national security than the United States, or any other Western country, would be prepared itself to do. Consider, for example, that when the United States announces, as it has, the deployment of more F-14 and F-16 fighter jets to Poland and Estonia, American pilots will, in the latter case, be patrolling the skies a mere 150km from Russia’s second city and former capital, St Petersburg. Were Russian planes based anywhere near as close to Los Angeles, Chicago or Dallas, the United States would protest furiously.

The fifty-six-year old American embargo on Cuba demonstrates the kind of punishment the United States is prepared to impose on neighbours who choose their foreign partners wrongly. In fact, the embargo, which America still enforces and which cuts off almost all American trade with the country, was Washington’s fall back after its preferred option—invasion—was scuttled at the Bay of Pigs. This ought to throw Russia’s threatened gas cut-off to Ukraine into some relief, without excusing either.

Crime and Punishment: The consequences of the West’s reaction to Russia’s activities in Crimea

Rome, 11^th March 2014

 

Crime and Punishment: The consequences of the West’s reaction to Russia’s activities in Crimea

On Sunday, the inhabitants of the Crimea will vote in a referendum on secession. They will answer two questions:

1.       ‘Are you for the entry of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea into the Russian Federation?’

2.      ‘Are you for the restoration of the constitution of 1992 and the preservation of the Crimea as a part of Ukraine?’*

The leaders of the peninsula’s minority Tatar population have already said they will boycott the plebiscite. But the ethnic Russians who make up 60% of the territory’s population will almost certainly vote in favour of leaving Ukraine, probably overwhelmingly. In Sevastopol, posters encouraging them to do so read: ‘Let’s go home, to Russia!’ (Домой, в Россию!) If that’s what they decide to do, how will the West react?

Russia has chosen Sunday’s referendum as the means to legitimize the seizure of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine unidentified, but certainly Russian, forces carried out almost two weeks ago. With its ethnic Russian majority and longstanding strategic significance to Moscow, most Russians, it seems, already understand the desire of many in Crimea for ‘reunion’, as the Russian media mainly refer to the referendum’s expected outcome.

Led by the United States, however, the West has refused to see the situation in such terms. Although Crimea was in fact Russian until 1954, when a redrawing of the Soviet Union’s internal boundaries transferred it to Ukraine, the West has insisted on casting Russia’s takeover of part of its neighbour’s territory as all but an invasion. In this sense, Sunday’s referendum is part of Moscow’s effort to draw a line under the crisis in relations with the West that Ukraine’s February revolution has entailed.

The referendum in fact presents the West with an unpleasant choice. Either it accepts its outcome and endorses what it perceives to be a trampling of Ukrainian sovereignty and a gross violation of international law—not to mention a dangerous precedent that might embolden Russia to more such takeovers. Or it rejects it and adds further sanctions to those it has already imposed as a result of February’s events with the aim of isolating Russia, politically and economically, until forced to disgorge its prize.

Given their rhetoric so far, Western leaders seem set to choose this second path. If seizing Crimea was Russia’s crime, sanctions are the punishment most in the West seem to agree it’s fair to exact. As Sunday’s referendum shows, however, Russia appears equally determined to normalize its Crimean fait accompli, meaning that the West, if its principles are to prevail over what Moscow has already achieved on the ground, will have to be prepared to enforce a very high degree of political and economic isolation. So long as Russia resists, what this means is the creeping criminalization of Russia and its activities in the world.

Quite apart from whether this is even practical (especially in view of Europe’s dependence on Russian gas), is it as a policy really in the West’s interests? Surprisingly, some eminent figures in foreign policy circles think it is (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/opinion/crimea-a-pyrrhic-victory.html?ref=international). Certainly, there is much about the Russia of Vladimir Putin that is corrupt and unpleasant and making it generally more difficult for its oligarchs to launder their funds through Western stock markets and stock exchanges would be a good thing (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/anne-applebaum-russias-western-enablers/2014/03/05/bcba2a88-a4a6-11e3-8466-d34c451760b9_story.html). But, given the Crimea’s symbolic and strategic value to Russians, and the humiliation both Russia and its president would suffer in letting it go now, the West would need to impose more biting sanctions than this to achieve its goal.

If the first problem with sanctions aimed at isolating Russia is that they’re likely not to be tough enough to work, the second is that they will antagonize it anyway, driving it into a self-imposed isolation from which the West has probably the most to lose. For this reason, Western leaders should think twice before turning Russia—a veto-wielding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council—into the world’s bandit-at-large. On a range of international issues, from Syria and Iran to the future of Ukraine itself, Russia’s cooperation is not an optional extra; it’s vital.

 

In other words, if the West uses sanctions to punish Russia, it can forget about Russian help when it needs it next. In the Security Council it will meet Russia’s veto again and again. And, having made Russia a criminal, the West will need a clear idea how it can effect its redemption. But what if Russia holds firm on Crimea? Sooner or later the West will have to compromise. Russia is simply too big and, as permanent member of the Security Council, its consent too important in legitimizing the West’s projects elsewhere, to isolate sufficiently to get it to back down in a region it considers germane to its national interest. For the West to pretend otherwise amounts to hubris.

Is there another way out?

 

Perhaps. What’s interesting in this crisis is the respect for the law that Russia itself seems to insist that it is observing. From the start, Russia has insisted that President Yanukovich remains the sole legitimate president of Ukraine. What the West considers a revolution, it calls a coup against a democratically elected leader and an established constitution. Trained to expect Orwellian ‘double speak’ from the Kremlin, many Western commentators will reject this as disingenuous—and, at least in part, it is. But Russia’s concern for the law, which masks a deeper desire for legitimacy, may none the less offer the best, if still imperfect, means for resolving the crisis.

Certainly, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, seems to be going to great lengths to give the return of the Crimea to Russia as great a cloak of legality and hence legitimacy as possible, lengths that don’t end with Sunday’s referendum. This morning, for example, Russian news sources reported that the Russian State Duma will begin discussion of a law that would create the legal basis for Crimea to become part of Russia by giving Moscow the right to approve the addition of new territories without the consent of that state (i.e. Ukraine) of which any such a territory is already a part. The conditions the bill imposes are two: a local, ‘democratic’ referendum in favour of such a change and the absence of ‘effective, sovereign state authorities, prepared to protect their citizens and preserve their rights and freedoms’. In the Crimea, the Kremlin will doubtless considered both fulfilled come Sunday.



Given that last week all of the parties represented in the Duma expressed their support for Crimea’s admission to the Russian Federation, there can be little doubt that the bill will pass. It’s tempting to see this as a smoke screen.* But what’s really striking here is Mr Putin’s apparent desire to ensure that the annexation he is determined to bring about is (or is seen to be) legal, at least under Russian law.

Parliamentary votes, referenda, the rule of law: these are the trappings of democracy that have distinguished the West from Russian ‘autocracy’ for at least two centuries. We might see it as a dictator’s pathetic ruse, yet even the lack of identifying insignia on the uniforms of the Russian soldiers in Simferopol may actually reflect Mr Putin’s awareness that something like international law exists and that an actual out invasion would be illegal. So long, then, as Russian troops aren’t seen to be occupying Crimea, its referendum can be presented as a plausible act of self-determination, a principle which, as the West taught him in Kosovo, international law does in fact provide for.

Perhaps the West should take the compliment and look on Sunday’s referendum as what it is—the only place to start defusing the confrontation that risks criminalizing a country that seems bound for the foreseeable future to be essential to the West, even if doesn’t share its values. After all, the Kremlin’s preoccupation with elections and the law as a route to legitimacy suggests those values might be indirectly shaping Russia’s actions more than even it would ideally like to admit.



What if, then, the West took Sunday’s referendum as the starting point for a discussion with Russia and Ukraine on the Crimea’s future? Europe and the United States have already missed the opportunity to send observers or pressure Moscow to put measures in place to ensure the voices of the peninsula’s minorities are heard. But to consign Crimea and its ethnic Russian majority set on self-determination (‘going home’), with Russia as its patron, to a permanent black hole seems self-defeating.

At the moment the West seems bent on humiliating a country whose interests in the Crimea are, by our own admission, infinitely greater than our own. If we succeed, it may be that the only thing worse than letting Russia get away with its seizure of Crimea is preventing it from doing so—with or without a fig leaf of legality.

 

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* «Вы за вхождение АРК в качестве субъекта в состав РФ?», «Вы за восстановление Конституции Крыма 1992 года и сохранение Крыма как составной части Украины?»

 

* Worryingly, although Sunday’s vote in Crimea is clearly the bill’s immediate context, it would apply to any state or territory that sought ‘reunification’ with the Russian Federation. Abkhazia, which detached itself from Georgia in 1992-3, and Southern Ossetia, which Mr Putin seized from the same country in 2008, spring to mind as obvious candidates.

 

Crimea: Is a Grand Bargain with Putin still Possible?

Rome, 7^th March 2014
 

Crimea: Is a Grand Bargain with Putin still Possible?

 

This morning, to rousing applause, Sergei Narishkine, Speaker of the Russian Duma, welcomed a delegation of deputies from Crimea’s autonomous regional parliament who had travelled to Moscow to present a request for readmission to the Russian Federation. ‘We understand’, he said, ‘Crimeans’ clear and natural aspiration to provide for their security, and the authorities’ decision to seek the opinion of all Crimeans through the democratic procedure of a referendum.’ He said Russia would ‘support the free and democratic choice of Crimea’s population’ and that ‘support for the Crimea’ was one of the Duma’s ‘priorities’.

According to Mr Narishkine, Russia considered that the Crimean authorities’ decision [to hold a referendum on secession from Ukraine] was ‘clear’ in the light of Ukraine’s ‘acute political crisis’ and ‘linked to an aspiration to safeguard the rights and freedoms of its citizens’ as well as the ‘simple defence of human life’. Offering an insight into Russian views on the origins and nature of the crisis, he said events in Ukraine and Crimea had arisen out of ‘causes of a historical, spiritual and philosophical character’.

Representatives from all of the Duma’s various parties have already expressed their support for Crimea’s self-determination through the free expression of the will of the Crimean people, stating the Duma’s intention to send its own observers to the referendum now scheduled for 16 March.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the tone couldn’t have been more different, with the White House announcing the first visa bans for Russian officials involved in the Russian occupation of Crimea. The United States in particular seems blind to those ‘historical, spiritual and philosophical’ issues that make Crimea for most Russians a touchstone of national identity and their country’s status as a great power.

Russia has already invested too much prestige in Crimea to defuse the crisis on the terms the West is demanding. Were Mr Putin still undecided about whether or not to give satisfaction to what will surely be a vote in favour of Crimea’s reunion with Russia, he wouldn’t have let events move so quickly. On the contrary, the fulsome support the leaders of Crimea’s pro-Russian authorities have received in Moscow send a clear signal that Mr Putin is ready to reassert Russian sovereignty over the peninsula—more or less regardless of Kiev’s firm opposition and the outrage of Western governments, above all that of the United States.

Indeed, it’s becoming increasingly clear that two very different world views stand behind each side’s actions. Where President Obama dismisses Crimea’s Russian-sponsored referendum as a ‘violation of international law’, Russians routinely cite Kosovo, which they see as the West having unilaterally detached from Serbia in 2008. To many Russians, this smacks of hypocrisy. And why was it right for the United States to help Bahrain suppress its Arab Spring, but wrong for Russia to do the same in Syria?

From a ‘realist’ point of view, the West’s appeals to international law seem to complicate rather than clarify the issues at stake in Crimea. Before February’s revolution, Crimea’s autonomous status recognized its separate identity. Now that Ukraine has itself changed, why shouldn’t the people of the Crimea determine for themselves whether they want to be a part of the new Ukraine? The question seems less important to the West than other a host of other matters on which it needs Russia’s help—notably, Syria and Iran.

But the United States seems unable to see events in Ukraine from Moscow’s point of view—and unwilling even to try. Full of shrill threats, Washington’s response has been found wanting in form and substance, lacking both the humility to take seriously Russia’s concerns and the expert insight that might warn that there is no simple answer to the complex issues of history, memory and identity the crisis has thrown up. Sanctions, visa bans and emergency NATO meetings have all taken place before the representatives of both governments have properly met. This has made Washington look desperate.

 

What’s more, by refusing to listen to what the Russians want in this crisis, the United States has lost an opportunity to extract cooperation from Russia where the United States’ own national interest is more critically at stake. Instead of having the US and Russian foreign ministers shout out each other on television, why not have a trusted third party—Germany is the obvious candidate—host a summit where each side can present its own position and ensure the other party knows exactly where what is most important to it?

In the heyday of the Concert of Europe, the powers—mutatis mutandi—might have found a solution to the Crimea along the following lines. The West agrees to recognize the result of Crimea’s referendum, to which it sends international observers to ensure that Russian soldiers don’t intimidate Crimea’s Tatar and Ukrainian minorities, internationally-guaranteed protections for whose rights are then written in to Crimea’s accession agreement with the Russian Federation. The West then calls Russia’s bluff and goes a step further by agreeing to internationally sponsored referenda in all of Ukraine’s eastern districts. If they vote for reunion, they go back to Moscow. But if, as many Ukrainian commentators claim, the region’s love of Russia is skin deep, Moscow permanently loses a stick with which to beat future Ukrainian governments. Russia and NATO guarantee Ukraine’s borders, but Ukrainian membership of NATO is ruled out; instead, it is agreed to give the country the same neutral status Finland enjoys. Both the European Union and Russia are free to go on wooing its no longer torn people with trade agreements.

In return for all this, the West prevails on Mr Putin to take Syrian President Bashar Assad into exile and to promise Russia’s help in building a government of national unity—one based on the principles of electoral democracy employed to settle Russia’s quarrel in Crimea and Ukraine. In addition, Moscow gets to keep its naval base on the Syrian coast, but promises to continue to support Western efforts to control Iran’s nuclear programme. Simple.

Yesterday, the Russian Writers’ Union issued an open letter to President Vladimir Putin conveying its dismay over the ‘crimes’ against Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority perpetrated by Western-supported nationalists in Kiev and expressing strong support for Mr Putin’s tough stance in upholding their cause. To Western ears, the letter, which attributes the February revolution in Kiev to the activities of Western-sponsored ‘Nazis’ and compares the revolutionaries’ early decision to revoke the Russian language’s official status in the eastern half of Ukraine to ‘book-burning in the Third Reich’, appears to have arrived from another planet. But we would be wrong to laugh. Such rhetoric, and our inability to comprehend what motivates it, merely reflects the gaping hole between Russia and the West that makes cooperation an increasingly fleeting prospect—in Crimea and everywhere else.

What next for Vladimir Putin, Ukraine and the West?

Rome, Monday 3^rd March

 

What next for Vladimir Putin, Ukraine and the West?

 

Yesterday and today, Mr Putin consolidated his hold over the Crimea and his grip seems firm. True, the soldiers manning the checkpoints that control access to the peninsula’s ports and airports are not wearing Russian uniforms—yet. But it would be a mistake to interpret such signs of caution as a suggestion of a lack of resolve. Mr Putin has taken back a territory that was for centuries the object of Russia’s strategic longing before Catherine the Great conquered it from the Turks; the site during the Crimean War (1853-6) of an immense baptism of blood that did more than anything to end serfdom and propel Russia into the modern world; and the home throughout the Cold War of the Soviet Union’s largest fleet and proudest sailors. According to the legends of the Orthodox Church, the Crimea was even the place where the first ‘Russian’ (though we might equally call him ‘Ukrainian’) prince to receive Christianity was baptized—imbuing the territory with a sacred aura the presence of robed priests among the soldiers in Simferopol seemed to underline.

This hasn’t stopped the United States and Europe from talking about ways to get Mr Putin to order his troops out: visa bans, the freezing of accounts, a boycott of the G-8 meeting scheduled for Sochi in June—even Russia’s expulsion from the prestigious club. Some have suggested that if Mr Putin can’t hand the peninsula back to the Ukrainians, he should do so to an international peace-keeping force. But they seem blind to the fact that if Mr Putin were to do either, he would suffer a humiliation few Russian leaders could survive. He hasn’t pushed so far to go home now. It would seem more realistic to accept that the previous status quo in the Crimea—and perhaps Ukraine more generally—has gone. The Western leaders who insist on a return to it should recognize they’re wagging a finger against a mix of history, myth and symbolism only something more potent than boycotts and visa bans can disarm. Without the threat of military action they already seem to have ruled out, it won’t be enough to dislodge Mr Putin from Crimea. In short, the West needs to do a better job of understanding Mr Putin’s motivations or risk underrating the seriousness of his intentions—and pursuing wrong-headed and ultimately ineffective policies as a result.

This isn’t to condone Mr Putin’s meddling in Ukraine’s politics for the past decade or his exploitation, over the past few days, of the revolution in Kiev to flex Russian muscle in Crimea and other parts of eastern Ukraine. Nor is it to plead against the corrupt and often violent and repressive government over which he presides in Russia. But it is to say that Russia has real interests in Ukraine, and especially the Crimea, which are the legacy of history and which no Russian government could reasonably be expected to ignore—and which the world itself would do better to acknowledge rather than deny. In other words, it’s possible to reject to reject Mr Putin’s political values and the means he has chosen to assert himself in Ukraine and yet—for reality’s sake—recognize that we’re dealing today with the consequences of the disorderly disintegration, not even a generation ago, of what we might call ‘the historical Russian state’, whether embodied in the Soviet Union or the tsarist empire whose frontiers it almost completely inherited (in fact, only Poland and Finland escaped)—consequences that now outraged Western powers could have done more to foresee and avert.

No Russian state in history has ever occupied the frontiers of today’s Russian Federation and few Russians consider those frontiers contiguous with the true Russian nation or rightful Russian territory, ethnically and historically defined. This is especially true in Ukraine, where most Russians see not a separate people but a regional branch of a greater Russian nation: the Romanovs called themselves tsars ‘of all the Russias’—Great (Muscovy), White (Belarus) and Little (Ukraine). Moreover, the disintegration of the Soviet state was rapid and unexpected and left millions of ethnic ‘Great’ Russians stranded on the opposite side of an international border that suddenly ran through what had been a single state—and, in the case of the Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine, for well over 300 years.

Consider what, to many Russians, the Crimea alone means. Not only is it still the home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and a million or so ethnic Russians; it’s also a prime site of Russia’s national myth and memory. Between 1853 and 1856, some 400,000 to 600,000 Russian soldiers died there defending the peninsula against a British and French invasion. Russia lost the Crimean War but the horrific slaughter left a deep imprint on the national psyche. Tolstoy, a captain in the Russian army, first won fame as an author through his account of the terrible siege of Sevastopol.* When the city finally fell to the Western powers, Tsar Nicholas I (1825-55) proclaimed: ‘The name of Sevastopol […] will be eternal and the memory of its defenders will remain always in our hearts’. A symbol of patriotic sacrifice, the myth of ‘Crimea’ also stands in the Russian mind for resistance to the West, unable to understand its own unique civilization. And even if they can’t compete with Crimea in symbolic or strategic value, other parts of  southern and eastern Ukraine are strongly entwined with most Russians’ sense of their historical nation, such as Odessa—a city which the tsars built (before Miami, Dallas or Los Angeles were American) and where, in the form of the battleship Potemkin, mutinying sailors played an important part (at least in Soviet memory) in the early stages of the Russian revolution.

At least in the Crimea, the West already seems tacitly to acknowledge the strength of Russia’s hand: not only does Mr Putin control the peninsula; he taken it over without bloodshed and with the apparent support of most, if certainly not all, its people. Western leaders have mostly ruled out war—and some have even shied from sanctions—and it seems unwilling to encourage Kiev to try to use force. Realistically, then, the United States, European Union, Ukraine will have to talk frankly and seriously with Mr Putin. They ought to be pragmatic enough to recognize what Mr Putin has already done on the ground in Crimea. Critics will call this hypocrisy, but, short of force, the West has little choice other than to deal with Russia as it really is, not as the power it would like it to be.

Elsewhere things are less clear. Yesterday (Sunday) I wrote on this blog that Mr Putin would almost certainly stop at the Crimea. Something tells me today that he won’t: if the Crimea was going to be it, today would have been the day for Mr Putin to announce a referendum and bring the issue of its future to a head. It would also have been a good time to start discouraging protesters in other parts of the country, lest Mr Putin lose whatever prestige he might have won for himself in Simferopol by disappointing impossibly inflated expectations in Kharkiv or Donetsk—not to mention, thanks to Russian television, Moscow. On the contrary, however, pro-Russian protesters have grown louder there, even storming government buildings in Odessa in Ukraine’s south.

Mr Putin and his advisers probably haven’t yet taken the final decision to cross the isthmus that separates the Crimea from southern Ukraine or the Russian border that’s a short distance from the eastern cities. But I think they’re thinking seriously about it. All day long, they’ve heard from the United States and Europe a series of contradictions: under no circumstances will they accept Russia’s fait accompli in Crimea; on the other hand, they won’t take any measures to force him out, the Europeans seeming lukewarm even about the sanctions the United States has allusively threatened. At the same time, the government in Kiev is barely a week old, fresh from the barricades and out of money. If you were president of a country that has always lauded those of its rulers that have proved themselves on the battlefield (Peter I, Catherine II, Stalin) and a propitious intersection of fortune with cunning seemed to give you the opportunity to go down in history as the restorer of Russia’s greatness by returning to the Fatherland millions of lost ‘compatriots’ and some of the nation’s most sacred sites of memory, what would you do?

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* As Orlando Figes, author of the pre-eminent account in English of the conflict, puts it: ‘[Tolstoy’s] Sevastopol Sketches fixed in the national imagination the idea of the city as a microcosm of that special Russian spirit of resilience and courage which has always saved the country when it was invaded by a foreign enemy.’

The First Partition of the Ukraine or Mr Putin takes a page out of Catherine’s book

Rome, Sunday 2^nd March

The First Partition of the Ukraine or Mr Putin takes a page out of Catherine’s book

 

Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the personal system of power he has built around him are often compared to the tsars that ruled the country until the 1917 revolution. But of all the Romanovs Mr Putin’s penchant for hard-nosed Realpolitik perhaps puts him closest to Catherine the Great (1762-96)—an outsider, like Mr Putin, whose rise no one foresaw and whose grip on power few expected to last. Having presided over after a ruthless but inconclusive war in Chechnya and a victory in a modest bust-up with Georgia, Mr Putin hasn’t always seemed able to fill the empress’s shoes. But, barely a week after the flight of his ally and crony Viktor Yanukovich from Kiev appeared to have handed control of Ukraine to the supporters of closer integration with the West, he has boldly seized the (in Russian eyes, immensely symbolic) Crimea—an audacious act of opportunism even the indomitable empress would have been proud of.

Modern Russia was perhaps born in the Crimea. The humiliating defeat Russia suffered in the Crimean War (1853-6) at the hands of Britain and France set in train contradictory forces of reaction and reform that tsarism couldn’t resolve and ultimately led to revolution. Until the late eighteenth century, however, the peninsular was the home of the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people descended from the Golden Horde whose rulers, known as khans, owed nominal allegiance to the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, now Istanbul. The Crimea was a rich and fertile place and the Tatars’ Ottoman overlords still struck enough fear into Europeans to deter most predators. But then as now the Crimea had the misfortune of being situated in a turbulent region—a borderland where the Ottoman domains brushed uneasily against those of an aggressively expanding Russia and a fast-disintegrating Polish Commonwealth, which as the largest state in Europe, after Russia, then incorporated much of the territory of present-day Ukraine. Within a few short years a combination of Polish disunity, Turkish mistakes and Russian opportunism (superbly executed by Catherine) saw Russia oust the Turks from the Crimea, handing the tsarist empire the Black Sea port it longed for.

The parallels with events in Ukraine today are so illuminating, it bears looking at them a little more closely. In 1768 Stanislav Poniatowski, the recently elected king of Poland, signed a ‘Perpetual Treaty’ with Catherine as empress of Russia. Outwardly, the treaty sought to protect the freedoms of Poland’s Orthodox minority of which Catherine styled herself the defender—much as Mr Putin has lately been doing on behalf of Ukraine’s large Russian-speaking minority. But Catherine also used the treaty to restore in Poland an ancient but unwieldy system of government, which Stanislav (a puppet who turned out to be made of stronger stuff than she expected) had sought to reform by restricting the nobles’ right to veto royal legislation. All but ungovernable, Poland was left defenceless against its eastern neighbour, on which, given Catherine’s role as guarantor of Poland’s constitution, its continued existence now completely depended. The trap had now been laid.

It was duly sprung. When, despite the restoration of their rights, a faction of nobles cast Stanislav as a Russian puppet, the ensuing war gave Catherine the opportunity she needed: in 1771, under the guise of protecting the Polish constitution, a Russian army entered Poland. With an unworkable constitution and in-fighting among its nobles (some of whom were in Russian pay), Poland collapsed, sending ripples across Europe. Fearful of the Russian advance, the Turks joined in, but the Russians defeated them and forced them to hand over the Crimea. Prussia and Austria, unwilling to sacrifice themselves for Polish sovereignty, decided instead to join Catherine in dividing Poland up. In 1772 the First Partition of Poland awarded some 12 per cent of Polish territory to Russia and handed bits of the rest to Austria (11 per cent) and Prussia (5 per cent). A second partition followed in 1793 (which gave Russia most of modern Ukraine between Kiev and Lvov as far north as Minsk in today’s Belarus); a third in 1795 erased Poland from the map. To round it off, Catherine formally annexed the Crimea in 1783 and, in a second war with Turkey between 1787 and 1792, extended the Russian frontier as far south as the Dniester, just below the modern Ukrainian port city of Odessa, which the Russians founded.

Russian settlers then followed to farm the fertile Ukrainian steppe, which explains the mixing of Ukrainian-, Russian- and Tatar-speaking people in modern Ukraine—and why the fate of Russian-speakers in Ukraine’s east and south hangs so closely together with those in the Crimea in the defence of whose ‘rights’ (remember the Polish nobles) Mr Putin deployed the Russian army and navy on Saturday.

What’s so striking is that behind Mr Putin’s mobilization orders lies a combination of elite in-fighting, constitutional wrangling and Russian opportunism at Europe’s eastern crossroads that’s almost a set-piece replay of the situation Catherine exploited. Just as she took advantage of the endemic squabbles among Poland’s disunited and venal nobility, so Mr Putin has managed to exploit the competition between Ukraine’s modern-day elites (Ms Timoschenko in the west, Mr Yanukovich in the east) for a division of the country’s economic spoils. And just as Catherine’s treaty trapped Stanislav into a dependence that robbed him of his legitimacy, so from 2004 the Kremlin’s deal-making with Mr Yanukovich delivered him into Mr Putin’s pocket, making him look in many Ukrainians’ eyes like a Russian stooge unworthy of the presidency. And chief among these deals was the fateful promise of a $15bn loan last November in return for Ukraine’s walking away from an agreement with the European Union that, in the long run, would have reduced Russia’s influence over its neighbour.

This is not to say that Mr Putin foresaw the protests that erupted in Kiev when he forced Mr Yanukovich to abandon the deal with the EU, nor that he either hoped for or planned Mr Yanukovich’s subsequent downfall. But like Catherine in Poland, Mr Putin has so well shaped the landscape of power inside Ukraine that he has been able to turn both events to his advantage now they have occurred. So well laid was Mr Putin’s trap that even Mr Yanukovich’s departure (like Stanislav’s pluckiness) has proved no impediment.

As in eighteenth-century Poland, Russian meddling has plunged Ukraine into a constitutional crisis that has left the country fatefully divided and allowed Russia to portray itself as the defender of law and order, and minority rights. Picking up on the legacy of decades of anti-nationalistic Soviet propaganda, Mr Putin has even been able to cast Kiev’s revolutionaries and their supporters in western Ukraine as ‘Nazis’ and ‘Fascists’—and Russia as the defender not only of the lawful Ukrainian president and legitimate Ukrainian constitution, but of freedom from tyranny itself. (The audacity of it all would surely have pleased Catherine.)

What, thanks to skilful diplomacy, the eighteenth-century empress had but Mr Putin lacks right now is international partners to legitimize his activities. This makes his Crimea-grab more vulnerable than Catherine’s territorial acquisitions at any one of Poland’s partitions. And such legitimization is, ultimately, what he needs the West for. Can he get it?

How far Mr Putin pushes the advantage of the current moment will determine the answer to that question. The West has no way to force Moscow out of the Crimea—and no interest in encouraging Kiev to try. Ukraine’s new leaders have hammered their colours to Europe’s mast, but scan the horizon in vain for Western aid to avert the economic disaster the withdrawal of Russia’s loan has made imminent. For all their bluster, the Western powers won’t risk a war for a distant peninsula—and they need Mr Putin’s help in other places (such as Syria, Iran) and Russia’s gas to heat homes from Vienna to Prague and Berlin to make even serious economic sanctions unlikely. The only real deterrent is the Ukrainian army and the spectre of war itself. Even against Georgia, a much smaller and poorer equipped opponent, Russia held itself back from more than a limited war and modest territorial gains that it could defend at little cost. In this respect, Mr Putin seems more circumspect than Catherine ever was.

The weaker and more divided the politicians in Kiev show themselves to be, the more numerous pro-Russian demonstrations in eastern Ukraine will be and the more insistent on Russian intervention they will become. And the more pro-Russian demonstrations appear in these eastern cities, the more Mr Putin will feel tempted to give them satisfaction and intervene. A successful referendum in Crimea (now scheduled for 30 March) with a healthy margin in Russia’s favour, will also add fuel to their fervour. With a favourable referendum result—and given the curious history and ethnic composition of the peninsula—the West might just be able to accept a Russian Crimea. But it won’t give its blessing to a larger redrawing of the border, or a partition, the way Prussia and Austria did for Catherine. Instead, Mr Putin must way the chance of legitimizing his fait accompli in the Crimea against the uncertain outcome of a messy lunge for a bigger chunk of eastern Ukraine—Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk.

Given Mr Putin’s caution and the peninsula’s overwhelmingly greater value (strategic and symbolic), he’ll almost certainly choose the Crimea. Catherine would have too—if she’d had to.