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.