Rome, Monday 3rd
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?
* 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.’
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