The Crimean Nexus

There seems to be a growing international consensus regarding the origins of the crisis in the east: the involved parties sleepwalked into it, having misinterpreted each other’s agendas. Miscommunication that persistent must have had a method to it. To deconstruct it, we shall look at both the approximations—half-truths and honest mistakes—and controversies surrounding basic concepts of international relations, such as spheres of influence.[1]

Approximations

Possibly the biggest approximation fueling the conflict in the east has been a dichotomous approach to almost every aspect: historical, political, cultural, personal. The “us versus them” outlook that prevails in Ukraine, Russia, and the United States turns amorphousness into concrete, gray areas into black-and-white, a quilt into brick.

Too often the current clash between Moscow and Kiev gets presented as a battle between good and evil, with all the complexities, inconsistencies, and absurdities reduced to a Harry Potter level of analysis: Russian president Vladimir Putin is Lord Voldemort, the United States is Dumbledore, and Ukraine takes the role of Harry Potter, the boy who lived. One could only wish the protagonists and their agendas were that well defined.

To begin with, not two but three worlds meet (or, if you prefer, clash) in Ukraine: European, Russian, and Turkic. Like every other stretch of the Black Sea coast, southern Ukraine used to be part of the Ottoman Empire (it was not for nothing that the Black Sea was known as the Ottoman Lake). Yet in each narrative—Ukrainian, Russian, and American—it is “Russia against the West,” the adversaries solid, fully formed, definite in their values and intentions. In this discourse, the only sort of agency Ukraine has is the capacity to choose between the two, to eventually join the “right” side. This strange duality misjudges the nature of the protagonists in the conflict and misplaces its context.

Depending on where Ukrainian politicians currently stand on NATO and the European Union, U.S. media tend to describe them as either “pro-Western” good people or “pro-Russian” bad types. The classification is unfortunate, as it originates in the false premise that the main ambition of Ukrainian leaders is to choose between Russia and the West. Of course, this has never been the case. In Ukraine, as anywhere else, politicians exhibit cold pragmatism, healthy manipulative skills, and a praiseworthy inclination to exploit the animosity between great powers to its fullest.

In the vernacular of U.S. media or, for that matter, academia, “pro-Western,” or “Westernized” is a compliment, synonymous with “reform” and “progress,” even when the signs of Westernization cited and praised are oddly superficial: beer parties in post-Saddam Baghdad, miniskirts in post-Taliban Kabul, McDonald’s in post-Soviet Moscow.

Strictly speaking, the term “pro-Western” should not really be part of the foreign policy lexicon: when calling someone “pro-Western,” do we mean that he or she is pro-U.S., pro-France, or pro-Germany? Pro-E.U. or pro-NATO? Also, aren’t “Western values” time- and place-specific? Is support of, say, gay rights now a mandatory part of being pro-Western? Questions of this sort never end.

With remarkable ease, we classify political movements and public figures in the developing world as either anti- or pro-Western, mistaking intention for commitment and promises for achievements. Not surprisingly, each time a “pro-Western reformer” switches ideological gears or proves corrupt, it leads to handwringing, disillusionment, and a rushed search for a new favorite.

This vicious cycle brings to mind a warning given to the Solidarity movement of the 1980s by the old wise man of Polish politics, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński: “It’s not a question of wanting to change the leaders, it’s they who must change. We must make sure—and I make this comparison quite deliberately—that one gang of robbers doesn’t steal the keys of the state treasury from another similar gang.”[2]

The second approximation dimming our understanding of the crisis is related to nation-building. Every modern state in Eastern Europe is young; all got carved from the territory of a fading empire—Austria-Hungary, Germany, Turkey, Russia. Many descend from greater and mightier entities. Sixteenth-century Poland, for example, was the equal of France, and in the 1610s Polish troops occupied Moscow. Riches-to-rags journeys like that make territorial disputes endemic to the region.

“Self-determination,” introduced to Europe by President Woodrow Wilson, was neither comprehensible nor practical. Wilson’s own secretary of state, Robert Lansing, posed questions not fully answered a century later: “When the President talks of ‘self-determination’ what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community?” Defining units worthy of self-determination was just one problem among many. As the decision lay with foreign sponsors naturally swayed by self-interest and prejudice, verdicts were arbitrary. Wilson was a champion of independent Poland, but he wanted Ukraine to stay within an undivided, albeit already Communist, Russia. Lansing found the policy geopolitically sound, yet warned that cases like that turned self-determination into a mere phrase: “It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives.” In cases of “submerged” nations recognized by foreign sponsors, there was no way of establishing their borders in a manner that would be universally found fair because of the past migrations, cleansings, and repatriations. An American participant in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that granted nationhood to several Eastern European nations, including two abortive projects—Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia—wrote: “The ‘submerged nations’ are coming to the surface and as soon as they appear, they fly at somebody’s throat.”[3]

Conflicts among formerly “submerged nations” have been going on for more than a century, and the Balkan Wars set the scene for World War I. After World War II, stiffened by the military blocs of the Cold War era, they temporarily reduced in intensity, yet it is still inaccurate to insist, as Robert Kagan does, that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea was the first time since World War II that a nation in Europe had engaged in territorial conquest.” In 1974, Turkey and Greece went to war over Cyprus, and the island has been divided into “pro-Turkish” and “pro-Greek” parts ever since.[4]

Many experts, underestimating the difficulties of nation-building in Eastern Europe in the post-Soviet euphoria, also failed to see that Russia was wrestling with nation-building just as painfully as, say, Serbia.

The third problematic approximation concerns the character of modern Ukraine. Difficult for Russians, nation-building is precarious for Ukrainians. Contrary to the well-meaning patriotic mythology, Ukraine was never independent prior to 1991. Its territory is a quilt of lands ceded by (in chronological order) Turkey, Poland, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. It has been a battlefield for the past six centuries. In 1709, Russian tsar Peter the Great and Swedish king Charles XII fought the decisive battle of the Russo-Swedish War in the core of Ukraine, Poltava. After losing the battle, Charles fled to the Ottoman domains close to modern Odessa. It is hard to believe that Sweden’s and Turkey’s spheres of influence ever overlapped—yet in Ukraine they did. The last time Poles occupied Ukraine’s capital city of Kiev was in 1920. What is happening in Ukraine now is tragic, but neither novel nor unexpected, and the more propagandists insist on the intrinsic unity of a Ukrainian nation, the dimmer the prospects for a true settlement.

Transition to sovereignty can be (relatively) smooth only when the birth of a nation-state is preceded by the emergence of a nation. That was certainly not the case with Ukraine. A state but not yet a nation, Ukraine struggles like a forced bulb. In this condition, encouraging it to choose between Russia and Europe means exerting too much pressure on the fragile domestic balance. In 2013–2016, that pressure brought unendurable distress.

Ukraine is a divided nation, but its divisions are more intricate than the “pro-European” west and the “pro-Russian” east. Every conflict on its territory involves numerous regional agents. Conflated and fluid local identities make Ukraine’s territorial integrity frail. In foreign policy, this makes it a swing state. Domestically, the power of regional actors undercuts the authority of the central government in Kiev. Henry Kissinger writes: “Ukraine has been independent for only 23 years; it had previously been under some kind of foreign rule since the 14th century. Not surprisingly, its leaders have not learned the art of compromise, even less of historical perspective. The politics of post-independence Ukraine clearly demonstrates that the root of the problem lies in efforts by Ukrainian politicians to impose their will on recalcitrant parts of the country, first by one faction, then by the other.”[5]

Parties to a long conflict may think of themselves as oil and water that do not mix, but on a territory that keeps changing hands, they do. Ceded for a decade or a century, a region becomes culturally transformed, and when it returns to the country that had lost it, it does so with a new face and character. Several cultures had overlapped on the territory of modern Ukraine, resulting in peculiar, region-specific cultural molds.

It is this state without a nation, unused to independence and self-governance, that has now become subject to the “Monroe doctrines” of regional powers, NATO and European Union eastward expansion, and attempts at regime change.

Monroe Doctrines

Russia responded to the collapse of the USSR with an incarnation of the Monroe Doctrine: all of the former Soviet republics were defined as the “near abroad,” and part of Russia’s exclusive sphere of influence. All had once shared a continuous human and economic space, and Russia, as the former imperial core, had a particularly big stake in keeping the legacy. Every attempt by a foreign power, whether the United States, China, Iran, Germany, or Turkey, to step into Russia’s backyard was deemed poaching, a provocation, brinkmanship. When in 1995 NATO announced plans to expand eastward, Russians reacted as Americans did when Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba.[6]

The “near abroad” concept has been deservedly criticized as neo-imperialist, yet immorality does not necessarily invalidate realpolitik. Many failing empires of the past had cushioned their disintegration precisely by creating a “near abroad.” The British Commonwealth is a good example. Second, contemporary great powers, such as the United States and China, maintain and guard their periphery zealously and determinedly (the United States in the Caribbean, China in Southeast Asia), so it makes little sense to hold Moscow to a higher standard. Finally, in the end of the Cold War, both American and Western European leaders had led Russians to believe that they would have preferred the Soviet Union to stay undivided (minus the Baltic countries, whose right to secede no one in the West doubted). Pretty much like the Entente in 1919, they now suspected that the disintegration would lead to geopolitical chaos. As a veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service, former ambassador Jack F. Matlock, puts it, “The Soviet Union collapsed as a state despite the end of the Cold War, not because of it.” In 1991, in a speech in Kiev, President George H. W. Bush advised the non-Russian Soviet republics to keep a democratic federation with Moscow. Aggressive U.S. involvement in nation-building in the post-Soviet space would not start until Bill Clinton’s presidency.[7]

Just like the Monroe Doctrine, the “near abroad” was a response to new ideological and geopolitical challenges. For the United States in 1823, those challenges came from the reactionary politics of European powers after the downfall of Napoleon, and the formation of the Holy Alliance. For Russia in the 1990s, the ideological challenge was the worldwide triumph of Western universalism, with NATO a new Holy Alliance.[8]

What worried the United States in the 1820s was the possible return of old foes to the Americas, and this is why President James Monroe proclaimed that the American continents were not “to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” He warned that the United States “should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and security.” A similar rationale stood behind the “near abroad”: after seventy years of forced absence, Western powers were returning to Eurasian heartlands.[9]

No newly independent nation in the near abroad is more intertwined with Russia than Ukraine. A Russian ambassador to the United States said that Russia’s relations with Ukraine were “identical to those between New York and New Jersey.” A deputy foreign minister warned: “Remember, anything between us and the Ukrainians is a family affair, and any disagreement we have is a family feud.” The most prominent American realist, Henry Kissinger, concurs: “The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. …Even such famed dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky insisted that Ukraine was an integral part of Russian history and, indeed, of Russia.”[10]

Russia does not have a right or a duty to remain Ukraine’s custodian, and its military and economic superiority are not going to last forever. Nor should Russia’s pretentions go unquestioned or unchallenged. The point is that for Russians, Ukraine is part of their continuous national space, not unlike what Canada is for the United States, but even closer.

Eastward Expansion: NATO and the European Union

If we looked for a single factor that pushed Moscow into annexing Crimea and then invading Donbass, NATO’s eastward expansion, especially into the former Soviet republics in the Baltics in 2004, would be it.[11]

When NATO was born in 1949, its mission (as famously put by its first secretary-general, Lord Ismay) was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” While keeping the Russians “out” was not necessarily a bad idea, the question remains whether the eastward expansion of the alliance has served the purpose or, alternatively, made things worse.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the global system of alliances froze in suspense. Even the unification of Germany did not look guaranteed. The prime minister of Italy, Giulio Andreotti, quipped: “We love the Germans so much that the more Germanies there are the better.” U.S. secretary of state James A. Baker asked, “Would the Soviets permit a unified German state to remain in NATO, the military alliance that protected the West against Soviet aggression?” Not only the Soviet Union but also France and Britain were doubtful “about the implications for Europe and the world of reconstituting the state responsible for two of the bloodiest wars of the century.”[12]

Yet East and West Germany were allowed to merge, with the reunified Germany a NATO country. That was the first expansion of NATO in the post–Cold War world. The administration of George H. W. Bush allegedly assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would stop on the reunified Germany’s eastern border. According to several accounts in February 1990, Baker told Gorbachev: “If we maintain a presence in Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.” Later, Baker insisted that he had been misunderstood and that NATO expansion east of Germany simply did not come up in the negotiations. The former U.S. ambassador to the USSR Jack F. Matlock, though not a big fan of NATO enlargement, emphasizes that all there had been was “a general understanding” Bush and Gorbachev reached that “the USSR would not use force in Eastern Europe and the U.S. would not ‘take advantage’ of changes there. This was not a treaty binding on future governments.” This is not to say that the “understanding” was not sincere; it was—but only as long as the two leaders stayed in power. “I am sure,” Matlock continues, “that if Bush had been reelected and Gorbachev had remained as president of the USSR there would have been no NATO expansion during their terms in office.”[13]

Russian diplomats later accused the United States of breaking a promise, but the fact remains that no one ever unequivocally promised Moscow that NATO would not start taking new members.

The newly independent Eastern European countries demanded NATO membership loudly and emotionally, openly referring to Russia as a threat. In April 1993, the presidents of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary approached President Clinton in person to ask for admission. Their strongest advocate in NATO was German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who argued that NATO could not tell Eastern Europeans they were not welcome “after what they did to survive communism.” But in a private conversation with President Clinton’s adviser Strobe Talbott in January 1997, Kohl admitted that for Germany NATO expansion was “not just a moral issue,” and that it was in Germany’s “self-interest to have this development now and not in the future.” According to Talbott, Kohl’s reasoning amounted to blackmail: as long as Germany sat on the frontier between East and West, he allegedly said, it would be tempted to relapse into extreme nationalism, but if the European Union expanded eastward, making Germany the middle of Europe, not its fringe, all German insecurities would be gone. But the E.U., Kohl stressed, could not expand unless NATO led the way.[14]

If Talbott’s rendering is correct, then in buying this logic, the Clinton administration agreed to subsidize European economic dreams with U.S. military clout and American taxpayers’ money.

Among the few staunch enthusiasts of NATO enlargement was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. To promote the unpopular cause, in February 1997 she published an essay in The Economist called “Enlarging NATO: Why Bigger Is Better.” “Those who ask ‘where is the threat?’ mistake NATO’s real value,” Albright wrote. “The alliance is not a wild-west posse that we trot out only when danger appears. It is a permanent presence, designed to promote common endeavors and to prevent a threat from ever arising.” She claimed that NATO enlargement was not taking place because of a new Russian threat, yet at the same time insisted that Russia could not be allowed to “look at countries like Poland or Estonia or Ukraine as a buffer zone that separates Russia from Europe.”

Albright assured readers that “poll after poll has shown that few ordinary Russians express concern about an alliance that many of their leaders concede poses no actual military threat to Russia.” Her claim was unsubstantiated, if not outright false. “It would not be in our interest,” Albright argued, “to delay or derail enlargement in response to the claims of some Russians that this constitutes an offensive act. Doing so would only encourage the worst political tendencies in Moscow. It would send a message that confrontation with the West pays off.” The latter was a mistake in judgment: it was not appeasement, but NATO enlargement, that eventually brought about the “worst political tendencies in Moscow.”[15]

The president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, seemed to regard Clinton’s public endorsement of NATO expansion as a personal betrayal. Repeating what Russian analysts across the whole political spectrum had been saying, Yeltsin warned that “the security of all European countries depends on Russia feeling secure.” It was not necessary to add that the incorporation of Eastern Europe into NATO did not help Russia feel secure.[16]

Initially, NATO expansion was a hard sell. French president Jacques Chirac complained that it did not take into account “Russian sensitivities.” In Washington, outside Clinton’s White House almost no one liked it. The Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were apoplectic. General Barry McCaffrey warned that if the United States was not careful, Americans would “get ourselves sucked into some godforsaken Eurasian quagmire” that could result in a “shooting war with Russia.”[17]

George F. Kennan, the ninety-three-year-old patriarch of U.S. foreign policy, came out of retirement to denounce the plan as “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era,” in an op-ed piece in the New York Times. He predicted that NATO enlargement could be expected to “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”[18] In May 1998, after the Senate vote affirming Clinton’s NATO plan, Kennan saw the “beginning of a new cold war.” “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely,” he told Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times, “and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. …Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.”[19]

To another influential thinker, Samuel P. Huntington, creating a “new dividing line through Europe” looked logical, justified, and historically inevitable. The “logic of civilizations,” he argued, dictated that Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, the Baltic republics, Slovenia, and Croatia should join the European Union and NATO. The region thus defined by these organizations “would be coextensive with Western civilization as it has historically existed in Europe.” But he opposed extending the alliances to the territories “where Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy begin”—including Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and, of course, Ukraine.[20]

Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999. Boris Yeltsin and his cabinet protested but were not really in a position to argue. Post-revolutionary Russia was in the throes of deprivation: the economic collapse due to Gorbachev’s misconceived perestroika coupled with the inevitable hardship of a socialism-to-capitalism transition had resulted in an ineffectual and highly exploitative economy run by oligarchs and organized-crime dons, all but indistinguishable from one another. The price of oil was so low that it had stopped being a substantial revenue source. If Russia was to stay afloat, it needed American money, and therefore Bill Clinton’s friendship.[21]

In May 1998, Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times: “There is one thing future historians will surely remark upon, and that is the utter poverty of imagination that characterized U.S. foreign policy in the late 1990s. They will note that one of the seminal events of this century took place between 1989 and 1992—the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which had the capability, imperial intentions and ideology to truly threaten the entire free world. …And what was America’s response? It was to expand the NATO cold-war alliance against Russia and bring it closer to Russia’s borders.”[22]

The Clinton administration also aggravated Russian insecurities with its global military interventions. In Russians’ eyes, no case epitomized this brazen geopolitical engineering more strongly than Kosovo.

In Yugoslavia, Kosovo was an autonomous province within Serbia. The idea behind the autonomy was to acknowledge the rights of a minority, Albanians, who shared the region with Serbs. Together with the rest of the mini-empire of Yugoslavia, in the 1980s Kosovo descended into ethnic strife. By 1998, clashes had grown into war between Albanians’ Kosovo Liberation Army and Kosovo Serbs’ paramilitary units. The president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević, sent in federal troops—not for peacekeeping, but to crush the Albanian rebels in the most brutal way. Milošević rejected all the United Nations resolutions of protest, explaining that Kosovo was an integral part of Serbia and that he would not consider Albanian rebels anything but terrorists.[23]

NATO countries, led by the United States, wanted to use military strikes against Serbia to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. Russia expressed outrage. In the words of Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s Russia adviser (and an avid supporter of a NATO military campaign against Serbia), Kosovo became the “substantiation of all the Russians’ reasons for fearing NATO and opposing its expansion.”[24]

Another great power with several potential Kosovos on its territory, China, also vehemently objected to any military campaign. Russia’s and China’s objections meant that the U.N. Security Council could not pass a resolution authorizing “humanitarian” intervention in Serbia. So NATO went in unilaterally. To use Madeleine Albright’s language, that was a new, post–Cold War “common endeavor.”

By doing so, the alliance was taking on an entirely new function, that of a policeman on a foreign territory not even bordering any NATO country. As the British author Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote: “Whether or not a military response in the former Yugoslavia was desirable, it’s hard to see what it had to do with NATO. Under the crucial Article 5 of the 1949 treaty [that created the alliance], the members agreed that ‘an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,’ and whatever else Milošević and [Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko] Mladić might be accused of, they had not attacked any NATO member.”[25]

Still furious, but willing to cooperate with NATO in order to play at least a limited role in the Balkans, Russia agreed to send peacekeeping troops to Kosovo. The uneasy partnership led to a brief all-out war scare. One day, Russian peacekeepers were found in a place they were not supposed to be, and the commander of NATO forces in Kosovo, General Wesley Clark of the United States, ordered his British subordinate General Mike Jackson to attack and “overpower” them. Jackson famously told Clark off: “Sir, I am not going to start World War III for you.”[26]

If for the NATO powers the intervention in Kosovo was a straightforward matter of rescuing the Kosovar people from a murderous Serbian regime—and for the United States in particular, an effort to prevent in Kosovo the genocide it had conspicuously failed to prevent a few years earlier in Rwanda—for other nations the matter was more complicated. When Kosovo proclaimed its independence from Serbia in 2008, many U.N. members objected. As of 2016, Kosovo had been recognized by 108 states, but among those that still ignored its existence were the powerhouses of the developing world—Russia, Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Iran, Mexico, and Singapore—as well as several U.S. allies, including Greece, Israel, Romania, Slovakia, and Spain. All of these states contained minorities striving for nationhood that might be inspired by Kosovo’s example to try to cleave off chunks of territory and declare independence. One of the nations objecting to Kosovo’s recognition was Ukraine. If American diplomacy remained blissfully unaware that by crafting an independent Kosovo it had opened a Pandora’s box, politicians in Kiev knew very well that they had their own potential Kosovo in Crimea.

As edited by Western advisers, the declaration of Kosovo independence emphasized that Kosovo was a special case, not a precedent to be exploited by secessionists worldwide. Yet as Timothy Garton Ash pointed out, all sixty-eight other members of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, “from Abkhazia to Zanzibar,” were “special cases too.” The “Kosovo precedent” became a rallying cry in every separatist hotbed: Nagorno-Karabakh and Trans-Dniester in the former Soviet Union; the Basque Country and Catalonia in Europe; Northern Cyprus; Quebec.[27]

The enthusiastic American support of the breakaway republic had prompted Russians to take the attitude, “if they can do it, so should we.” After a brief war with Georgia in 2008, Russia sponsored “sovereignty and independence” for the Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.[28]

On George W. Bush’s watch, NATO membership was extended to Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, and three post-Soviet countries—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. U.S.-Russia relations plummeted. But bigger challenges were to come: the candidacies of both Ukraine and Georgia for admission to NATO.

By Russians’ lights, this crossed the line. As a British author put it, Washington would have felt the same had Leonid Brezhnev “invited Mexico and Cuba to join the Warsaw Pact.”[29]

Regime Change in a Foreign Country

Since the end of the Cold War, supposedly won by the United States, the winner has scored remarkably few foreign policy victories. No doubt many factors had contributed to the debacles in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere, but one major miscalculation seems to have been the striking readiness to launch political engineering and sometimes endorse regime change in countries that are neither willing nor ready to ally with the West.

The moral permissibility of such interference aside, typically neither the U.S.-sponsored opposition nor the U.S. representatives engineering the transition of power have a positive program in mind. The “down with” bit is the easiest part of any uprising, but if there is no clear answer to the “what next” question, in all likelihood all the sacrifice would be in vain.

In 2004, in the viciously contested presidential elections in Ukraine, the United States supported the “pro-Western” candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, as Moscow rallied behind the “pro-Russian” Viktor Yanukovych. The campaign was nothing short of operatic. A dig in Yanukovych’s dirty linen revealed felony: as a young man, he had been found guilty of violent street crime. Now he professed to be “reformed,” a claim that many did not find entirely convincing. His opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, a very handsome man, had suddenly developed a brutal rash on his face. He claimed poisoning, and blood tests run by a European clinic confirmed the presence of herbicide, dioxin. Blaming the Russian secret services for his Shrek looks, Yushchenko bravely went on campaigning.

The “pro-Russian” Yanukovych claimed electoral victory, but the many reports of fraud coming from polling stations around the country caused popular anger, and that led to riots. Yushchenko refused to concede; as his campaign had been using the color orange for banners, t-shirts, and other paraphernalia, the resistance was dubbed the “Orange Revolution.” The movement got the support of the U.S. government, but the Kremlin, mistaking American cheerleading for a disciplined cabal, exaggerated the level of U.S. involvement. Much was made of the fact that Yushchenko’s wife was an American citizen and a former U.S. State Department official.[30]

Under pressure, a Ukrainian court annulled the results and ordered a rerun. The schism within Ukrainian society remained so strong that even after the electoral fraud scandal, 44 percent of Ukrainians voted for the disgraced Yanukovych.

With 52 percent of the vote, Yushchenko’s victory was secure, but the Orange Revolution was not. Yushchenko’s presidency was defined by infighting, corruption, abuse of executive power, and ineffectiveness. Running for reelection in 2010, he got less than 6 percent of the popular vote. But Washington’s encouragement of the Orange Revolution had convinced the Kremlin that the U.S. was capable of unseating a government in the post-Soviet space. That was a game changer.[31]

To judge from its record of intervention in non-Western societies in the past twenty-five years, America’s urge to improve the world has become persistent, aggressive, and unyielding. Bill Clinton had called the United States the “indispensable nation,” and Barack Obama called it “exceptional.” Despite the fact that Obama’s declaration was largely for domestic consumption, intended to appease conservative audiences in the United States, Vladimir Putin responded with a furious piece on the op-ed page of the New York Times. “God created us equal,” he growled. “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. …It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.” The interventionist intellectual Robert Kagan responded with a smile: “What gives the United States the right to act on behalf of a liberal world order? In truth, nothing does, nothing beyond the conviction that the liberal world order is the most just.”[32]

Where Putin saw geopolitical failure—Afghanistan “reeling,” Libya “divided into tribes and clans,” Iraq still in the throes of civil war—Kagan saw promising if unfinished political engineering. Most of the “sizeable” U.S. military operations of the past twenty years, he noted with approval, had not been responses to “perceived threats to vital national interests. All aimed at defending and extending the liberal world order—by toppling dictators, reversing coups, and attempting to restore democracies.”[33]

The interventionist politician most eager to seize the opportunity for another Kitchen Debate was Senator John McCain. Who is Putin to judge the United States, McCain indignantly asked in an essay posted on the Russian news site Pravda. “He has given you a political system that is sustained by corruption and repression and isn’t strong enough to tolerate dissent.” He had made Russia a “friend to tyrants and an enemy to the oppressed”; he did not even have enough faith in the Russian people to trust them to handle freedom. “I do believe in you,” McCain assured his Russian audience. “I believe in your capacity for self-government and your desire for justice and opportunity.” Exemplary in its tone deafness—McCain was talking to a foreign nation as one would to a delinquent child—the address became infamous.[34]

Furthermore, no term McCain used—“justice,” “opportunity,” “freedom”—could be defined with any degree of precision. Twenty-first-century Americans do not see eye to eye on fundamental rights and liberties, and while debating these fundamentals is, of course, the norm of human existence, it is strange to demand that “they” be like “us” when “we” cannot agree on what we are. Why, for example, advocate gay marriage in developing countries at a time when homophobia was rampant among American presidential hopefuls?

What McCain no doubt viewed as a plain-spoken expression of universal values that only barbarians would oppose, Russians saw as an example of arrogant, almost willful cognitive dissonance. When it came to American support of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot, the dissonance came to seem grotesque.

In 2010, the members of Pussy Riot staged a flash mob performance in the national cathedral in Moscow, chanting “Mother of God, kick Putin out.” It is most unlikely that the action was intrinsically political: the group’s prior performances had included copulation in a natural history museum. The event was more in the vein of Marina Abramović’s artistic provocation than Andrei Sakharov’s ideological dissent. No matter how we define it, however, it involved the desecration of a holy site.

Rather stupidly, a Moscow court sentenced the young women to jail terms. But when commentators in the United States declared Pussy Riot martyrs of the anti-Putin revolutionary movement, many Russians found it odd: they had not forgotten that just thirty years before, the privileges of Russian Christians had sat at the top of Washington’s human rights agenda. In the days of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, desecration of a church in Russia would have been called a godless Communist act. Yet on the day the 2014 Olympics opened in Sochi, Russia, the New York Times ran an editorial stating that no celebration of Russian Olympic hospitality should overshadow the plight of the women of Pussy Riot. Americans saw no contradiction: they had spoken out for freedom of religion for Russian Christians when that was under assault, and they spoke out for Pussy Riot’s freedom of expression for the same reason—even if that expression offended the very Christians they had once supported.[35]

But Russians did see a contradiction, and to them it smelled of opportunism. Washington seemed willing to support any dissent in Russia—pro-church under Communism, anti-church under Putin—so long as it undermined existing authority. If the Western campaign of solidarity with the women of Pussy Riot had any practical effect at all, it was to compromise the opposition in the eyes of the pro-Putin Russian majority.

Obama’s ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, certainly did not see it that way. He had come up with the concept of a “dual track” in Russia: dealing simultaneously with the government and the opposition. Arriving to Moscow in January 2012, he cheerfully introduced himself to the Russian media as a “specialist on democracy and revolution.” The timing could not have been worse: Moscow was going through the strongest anti-Putin protests ever. McFaul apparently thought he had arrived just in time for the start of the Russian Spring.

The Kremlin did not hesitate to make its displeasure clear. Harassed by government TV crews, who seemed to know the ambassador’s schedule better than his assistants did and shadowed his every move, McFaul eventually lost his cool, publicly called Russia a “barbaric, uncivilized country,” and in February 2014 angrily submitted his resignation—in the midst of the crisis his “dual track” diplomacy had facilitated.

Twenty years earlier, the then “pro-Western” Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev told Clinton’s Russia hand Strobe Talbott: “It’s bad enough having you people tell us what you’re going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interests to obey your orders.” Talbott’s assistant at the time, Victoria Nuland, good-naturedly commented: “That’s what happens when you try to get the Russians to eat their spinach. The more you tell them it’s good for them, the more they gag.” In his memoir, Talbott smirks: “Among those of us working on Russia policy, ‘administering the spinach treatment’ became shorthand for one of our principal activities in the years that followed.”[36]

When, at the end of the spinach years, Russia handed a landslide electoral victory to the xenophobic strongman Vladimir Putin, Talbott and Clinton acted surprised. Nuland, meanwhile, moved up in the world, making a name for herself in December 2013 on the streets of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.

Every person who has ever crossed from Russia into Ukraine on land—and until recently that was how most travelers did it—must have noticed a gradual change in the scenery occurring in the borderland. No natural boundary separates Ukraine from Russia, no mountain range or river, and the terrain the traveler negotiates stays the same—a treeless plain, occasionally made unattractive by overdevelopment—yet something changes, and at some point, still in Russia or already in Ukraine, the traveler is aware of having entered a different culture. The front yards have flowers, if not exactly flower gardens. Logs and brick give way to whitewashed walls. Streets are cleaner, the people louder and more cheery.

From a junction in central Ukraine—say Kharkiv, or Zaporizhia—you have a choice of continuing south or west. If you go west, aiming at Galicia with Lviv its capital city, you will encounter yet another cultural metamorphosis, perhaps best represented by the presence of Catholic churches, which the locals still call by their Polish name, kostyol. Continue west, and you arrive at one of the border crossings—into Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, or Romania. This would be Europe’s edge.

But if you have chosen the southern route, toward the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, instead of the Occident you would be traveling toward the Orient, its approach announced by the Turkic names of hamlets, creeks, and junctions. When translated, these names speak of abandonment, war, and drought. You are on what used to be called the Wild Fields. The Crimean Peninsula dangles from their underbelly.

Ukraine-Russia

When Moscow and the European powers clashed in Ukraine in the twenty-first century, the catastrophe continued a historical pattern. Theoretically, Ukraine’s sheer size should have prevented such a staggering loss of agency, but paradoxically, one could argue that for Ukraine, its size was its worst enemy: too much diversity, and too little time to bind it all together. Western Lviv thought of itself as Europe, eastern Donbass identified with Russia, and the rest of the country struggled between these extremes. Centuries of imperial rule by Austria, Poland, Russia, and Turkey left it in fragments.

The underlying reason for the Ukraine-Russia conflict is that both are offshoots of the same long-dead state: siblings with very different fortunes. One became an empire, another a borderland. It is hard to find another example of this kind of connection: Russia and Ukraine are joined more tightly than England and Scotland or the United States and Canada.

The first state of the eastern Slavs developed on the upper Dnieper River in the 880s. It is remembered as Kievan Rus’. A millennium later, Kiev is the capital of Ukraine; in Russian tradition, it remains the “Mother of All Russian Cities.” Ivan the Terrible of Russia claimed to be a direct descendant of the Kievan dynasty.[1]

Seeking unity for the loosely connected assembly of tribes and princelings, the princes of Kiev implemented a cultural revolution by borrowing Eastern Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium and then enforcing it as a state religion. The Cyrillic alphabet came from Byzantium as well. The idea was brilliant: the enforcement of borrowed memes put all subjects of the Kievan prince in an equal position. In the ecclesiastical writings and folklore of Rus’, this Kievan revolution is a focal point—not a mere episode in the nation’s history but its beginning. With their common language, alphabet, faith, early statehood, and the pantheon of saints and heroes, Russians and Ukrainians share a national creation myth.[2]

Not unlike other early states, Rus’ quickly disintegrated. The hundred years from 1146 to 1246 saw forty-seven changes of head of state, involving twenty-four different princes. The Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century hit Rus’ at the height of disunity, making the Mongols’ victory instantaneous and its consequences lasting. As a Russian chronicle stated in 1224, “for our sins, there came unknown tribes. No one knew who they were or what was their origin, faith, or tongue,” but they had already “conquered many lands.”[3]

The southern principalities of Rus’ sitting at the edge of the steppe (a natural avenue for Mongol cavalry)—Kiev, Galich, Chernigov—were devastated, but the northern Russians hung on in the dense boreal forests of Vladimir and Novgorod. By 1300, the surviving Kievan elites, including the leaders of the Orthodox Church, had moved north. The south entered seven centuries of statelessness; the north eventually grew into what is nowadays known as Russia.[4]

The name “Ukraine,” meaning “borderland,” initially meant the periphery of Kiev but gradually became the name for all the southern territories of the former Rus’. That was what the area had become geopolitically—contested land for Ottomans, Russians, and Poles.[5]

In the sixteenth century, most of Ukraine fell under Polish rule. Its upper class adopted the language and culture of the conqueror (the process known as Polonization), causing a critical alienation between the elites and the lower classes. When Bohdan Khmelnytsky led Ukrainian peasants in a revolt against the Poles in 1648, he was also fighting his own country’s aristocracy. Though a hero to Ukrainians, Khmelnytsky became infamous among Jews for the exceptional brutality of the Cossack pogroms under his rule.

Seeing the impossibility of domestic consensus, Khmelnytsky realized that he needed a powerful foreign patron and that his options were limited to just Russia and the Crimean Khanate, an offshoot of the Mongol empire, and by this time a protectorate of the Ottomans.

Russia was Poland’s nemesis. Russians were Eastern Orthodox, like the majority of Ukrainians. There was little doubt, though, that eventually the Kremlin would want total control over Ukraine. But no lasting alliance with the only alternative patron, the Crimean Khanate, was possible, as Khmelnytsky had a chance to see for himself after visiting its capital, Bakhchisaray: there was nothing in it for the khan. Choosing what looked a lesser evil, in 1654 Khmelnytsky pledged allegiance to the Russian tsar.[6]

For nearly four hundred years since then, Russians have celebrated the 1654 pledge as a “reunification” of the “two Slavic peoples.” That was not how Khmelnytsky intended it, but with his death his nation-building project fell apart. The succession crisis led to a fratricidal war commanded by regional warlords, who were, in turn, manipulated by foreigners: Russians, Poles, Ottomans, Tatars, and Swedes. In Ukraine, the period is still remembered till this day as the Ruin (Ruina).

By the time of Khmelnytsky’s death, with opportunism as their modus operandi, the upper classes of eastern and central Ukraine sided with Russia. Polonization was replaced by Russification, which lasted as long as the aristocracy did. The greatest Ukrainian man of letters, the nineteenth-century satirist Nikolai Gogol, wrote in Russian.[7]

In the eighteenth century, Russia’s war against the Ottoman Empire and its client state, the Crimean Khanate, did not seem to directly concern Ukraine. The Turkic-speaking khanate, which at that time encompassed not just the Crimean peninsula but the Wild Fields and the entire region surrounding the Sea of Azov, was next door but not part of the Ukrainian narrative. This changed when Russia took over the khanate, christened the region “Novorossiya,” or New Russia, and began to rule it straight from the imperial capital as frontier provinces. Trade hubs and industrial centers along the coasts, from Odessa to Taganrog, were multinational. So was the new farming class.[8]

In the official vernacular of the empire, Ukraine became “Malorossia”—“Little Russia” (Belorussia, now Belarus, was “White Russia,” and the imperial Russian core “Velikorossia,” or “Greater Russia”). The basic administrative imperial unit was the province (guberniya); no entity called Ukraine appeared on any map. The idea of Ukrainian nationhood would not appear until the mid–nineteenth century.[9]

This idea was conceived in Ukraine’s western regions, collectively known as Galicia and belonging to Austria-Hungary. While hardly a paragon of free thinking, the Habsburg Empire was nevertheless more liberal than the Romanov dynasty in Russia. In the words of the historian Orest Subtelny, Galicia became the “bastion of Ukrainianism.”[10] Many believe it still is.

The task of defining, or, to use Benedict Anderson’s term, “imagining,” Ukraine was similar to that facing a number of Eastern European peoples, all of whom were influenced by the new German concept of nationhood—common language and shared heroic mythology. A founding father of nationalism in Ukraine, Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866–1934), dismissed the political and cultural fragmentation of the previous six centuries as inconsequential, claiming that since the breakup of the Kievan state Ukrainians had still continued as a single ethnos, or nation. Looking for a historical myth that would separate Ukrainians from Russians, nationalists zoomed in on Cossacks, denizens of an autonomous rogue republic, Bohdan Khmelnytsky one of them. This mythology, however, held little appeal for the Russian and Jewish artisans and bourgeoisie who made up the majorities in Ukrainian cities, and who saw little benefit in participating in a new imagined community, particularly since the myth of “Cossackdom” was intensely xenophobic. The national poet of Ukraine, Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861), who wrote Cossacks into the literary canon, defined them by their struggles against “Polaks” (lyahi), “Ivans” (moskaly), “kikes” (zhidy), and Tatar “infidels” (pohantsy).[11]

Ukraine had no clear boundaries, either in reality or in collective memory. Mental maps of the country differed widely depending on who was thinking them up, and when, and where. Crimea was not part of any “mental map.” Nationalist lore remembered it as an infidel horde that raided Ukraine in search of slaves and loot; liberal intelligentsia such as the outstanding poet Larysa Kosach-Kvitka (1871–1913), known by her nom de plume Lesya Ukrainka, empathized with Tatars as victims of Russian imperialism, on par with Ukrainians themselves.[12]

For Ukraine, only a catalyst of extraordinary proportions could have made a national movement possible. It arrived in the form of the two Russian revolutions of 1917. The revolution of February swept away the Romanov monarchy, and the revolution of October took care of pretty much everything else, leaving no value in the country standing and hardly any structures. The civil war, apocalyptic in brutality, continued for three years. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania used the chaos to secede: each was a compact territory where the educated class upheld a national myth. Ukraine, still fragmented, tried and failed.

Having no structure, power base, or resources, the succession of three nationalist regimes in Kiev between November 1917 and December 1919 (the Central Rada, the Hetmanate, and the Directory) exercised suzerainty only over Kiev. Throughout 1918, Ukraine was occupied by Germany, a condition incompatible with any but titular independence. After signing the armistice in the west in November 1918, the Germans evacuated, and the only force holding Ukraine together departed with them. Total collapse and lawlessness followed. No government could claim continuous authority. In two years, Kiev changed hands eighteen times.[13]

The very notion of the “territory of Ukraine” remained unresolved. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 refused to recognize it as a state. Woodrow Wilson was a strong proponent of a revived Poland but entertained no such ideas about Ukraine. The revived Poland, meanwhile, occupied Galicia in the spring of 1919 and received the allied powers’ blessing.[14]

It is ironic that bringing down statues of Lenin became a mark of the civil conflict in Ukraine in 2013–2016, because Lenin is the person who put Ukraine on the political map. Under Soviet rule, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was endowed with all the attributes of a state.

When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in the works in the fall of 1922, Lenin was a dying man. A succession of strokes, striking at an early age (he turned fifty-two that year), bestowed bitter lucidity upon him. The state he was leaving behind was terribly unfair, and the person likely to succeed him, Joseph Stalin, was certain to make it even more repressive. The principles of the Union became Lenin’s last battle. Stalin wanted minorities in the USSR to have cultural autonomy—meaning just titular recognition of ethnic diversity. Lenin wanted the larger ethnicities to have quasi-states with all the attributes of sovereignty, including maintaining their own borders with the outside world—the latter was a provision Lenin insisted on, in case a republic chose to secede.[15]

Within a few years, Ukraine had established itself as second among equals in the USSR, after Russia proper. In 1945, at Stalin’s insistence, the United States accepted the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as a founding member of the United Nations—a bizarre arrangement legitimizing Ukraine’s ersatz sovereignty (the only other faux state among the U.N. founding members was another Slavic Soviet republic, Belorussia).

Having Polonized with the Poles and Russified with the Russians, in the Soviet Union the Ukrainian elites Sovietized. Together with Russians, Ukrainians made up the bulk of the Communist Party, KGB, police, and officer corps. The leader of the USSR between 1964 and 1982, Leonid Brezhnev, came from Ukraine, as did several other Politburo members.[16]

No other republic of the union increased its territory as much as Ukraine did. In 1939, after dividing up Poland with Hitler, Stalin assigned Galicia to the Ukrainian SSR. Ukraine now encompassed both former Russian and former Polish territories. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev awarded it Crimea. As Orest Subtelny noted, because Crimea was the “historic homeland of the Crimean Tatars,” the Russians did not have “the moral right to give it away nor did the Ukrainians have the right to accept it.”[17]

Lenin’s 1922 provisions paved the way for the bloodless disintegration of the USSR in 1991: the republics had a right to secede, and the fact that each had a border with the outside world facilitated this. Ukraine seceded from the union with most structures of statehood already in place—ministries, law enforcement, schools, research centers, power grid, transportation system, even a modest foreign service. The military had to be reorganized, but not forged anew: Ukraine had inherited the Soviet Union’s well-trained officer corps, infrastructure, and arsenals.

But tensions among different regions, frozen by the federal Soviet state for decades, now surfaced. As in Russia, the post-Soviet transition to a free market economy led to the emergence of an exploitative class of the shady new rich, presided over by the oligarchs—fifty people owning about 85 percent of national wealth. Their business empires tended to be region-based, contributing to general fragmentation. Times were especially hard in eastern and southern Ukraine: that’s where the Soviet-era megalomaniac industry enterprises, now unfit for the new economy, were. Already in the early 1990s, thoughtful observers, of which Ambassador Jack F. Matlock was one, “began to wonder if Ukraine could retain its unity if the process of regional estrangement continued.”[18]

Ukrainian politics became incredibly volatile. In the 2012 parliamentary elections, the party of the hero of the Orange Revolution in 2004, Viktor Yushchenko, received barely more than 1 percent of the vote. Riches to rags has been the fate of many a politician, but the Ukrainian seesaw suggests an electorate entirely divorced from the political machine, feeling no loyalty to and, for sure, no trust for any political force. Political parties are the dayflies of Ukrainian politics, set up by a leader on the eve of general vote, only to crumble after serving the campaign’s purposes. Almost twenty-five years since independence, Ukraine’s multiparty system remains tentative and unstable. This instability is a direct outgrowth of the country’s historical lack of definition.

In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel P. Huntington defined Ukraine as “cleft” and Russia as “torn.” “Torn” countries, Huntington argued, were the ones struggling with their civilizational belonging; “cleft” nations had large groups clearly belonging to “different civilizations.” Ukraine, in Huntington’s view, was a “cleft country with two distinct cultures,” the “civilizational fault line between the West and Orthodoxy” running through Ukraine’s “heart.”

Huntington’s analysis seems to govern American experts’ current interpretation of the crisis. But the assumption that Ukraine is divided only along east-west lines is a damaging approximation. In Ukraine, divisions cross neighborhoods and families, not only regions. In Huntington’s terminology, Ukraine is at least as “torn” as Russia is.[19]

The Black Sea Fleet and Sevastopol

The Soviet Union was dismantled with frightening ease and staggering thoughtlessness. Among other things, no provisions were made for the reapportioning of federal property, including the Black Sea Fleet and its facilities.[20]

The USSR ran twenty-six naval bases on the Black Sea. On twenty-two of them, Russian sailors went to sleep on December 24, 1991, in the Soviet Union and woke up the next morning in a foreign country. Nineteen bases were in Ukraine, three in the Republic of Georgia. The facilities in Georgia, such as Poti and Batumi, were second-tier. Ukraine had gotten the best.[21]

The only Black Sea port left in Russian hands was Novorossiisk (close to Sochi). Due to “adverse weather conditions,” mainly local storms from the northeast called bora (from Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind), Novorossiisk remains closed on average for two months a year. Hitting the area in fall and winter, the bora brings winds exceeding one hundred miles per hour, turning the harbor into a boiling cauldron and tossing smaller vessels ashore like toys. After a bora sank a Russian fleet in 1848, the Admiralty prohibited the navy from anchoring in Novorossiisk between November and March. The British navy’s manual warned that Novorossiisk was “very dangerous, on account of N.E. winds, which are prevalent from the month of September to the beginning of April; it sometimes blows with the fury of a hurricane,” rushing down from the mountains “with such violence, and causing such a sea, that vessels are driven on shore.”[22]

It is simply not possible to run a big operational facility in Novorossiisk. If Russia was to keep a substantial naval force on the Black Sea, it had no alternative to Sevastopol. This is why the “Crimean question” came up on Russia’s official agenda just one month after the collapse of the USSR. In January 1992, the Russian parliament’s committee on foreign affairs proposed declaring Khrushchev’s 1954 act granting Crimea to Ukraine “invalid and devoid of legal force.” The motion was dismissed by Yeltsin, who considered it too aggressive. Negotiations started. It took five years to prepare the Partition Treaty on the Status and Conditions of the Black Sea Fleet. Signed on May 28, 1997, the treaty allowed for the armaments and bases to be shared by two independent fleets. Russia could lease Sevastopol and other naval facilities in Crimea for ten more years. In addition, it could keep up to 25,000 soldiers, 132 armored vehicles, and 22 airplanes on the peninsula. In 2010, the arrangement was extended until 2042—in exchange for discounted natural gas supplies to Kiev.[23]

A British Russia expert, Angus Roxburgh, calls the price Russia paid for the Crimean bases “extortionate.” In a book published in 2013 he quotes Vladimir Putin, who clearly agreed: “‘The price we are now asked to pay is out of this world. …No military base in the world costs that much. Prices like that simply do not exist. If we look at what the contract would cost us over ten years, it amounts to $40–45 billion.’”[24]

As often happens, the treaty did not resolve the underlying conflict.

Petrostate

The term frequently used to describe Russia nowadays—“petrostate”—was popularized by Marshall Goldman. In the book of that title, Goldman, who had been watching the Kremlin for five decades, noted with grudging admiration how Putin seemed to be winning the “giant chess match” of energy politics.[25]

Vladimir Putin had appeared, seemingly from nowhere, in 1999. The first foreign leader to be told of his appointment as prime minister of Russia, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, reported it this way to Bill Clinton: “The replacement that was mentioned to me was some guy whose name is Putin.” Russians shared his bewilderment. On the day Yeltsin introduced Putin as his designated successor, few Muscovites knew who he was. When interviewed, they referred to the new leader of the country as someone whose name “started with a P.”[26]

Putin’s eventual popularity with the Russian Main Street came from two sources. One was his claim to limit the power of the oligarchs, kick them out of politics, and restore Russia’s “vertical of power,” a euphemism for strong state. Another was completely accidental. During the Yeltsin years, the price of crude oil on world markets had fallen as low as $10 a barrel, sending the newly independent Russian nation into bankruptcy. In Putin’s first year in office, the price of crude skyrocketed, filling the coffers of the state treasury and allowing many government offices that had become almost moribund for lack of funds to begin functioning again. Putin was able to claim credit for reviving the state, government workers were once again being paid, and money trickled down to the people. Russia paid off the last of its foreign debt in 2006, and in 2008, when crude oil crossed $100 a barrel, it could boast almost $800 billion in foreign reserves.[27] As Stephen Weisman noted in the New York Times in 2006, a “more assertive Russia” was back, and the United States was not “welcome to set up shop in the old Soviet empire.”[28]

In 2015, Russia’s energy exports to Europe netted $160 billion a year, and Europe depended on Russia for at least 30 percent of its natural gas needs. According to a March 2014 estimate, Russian oil and gas made up 98 percent of all energy imports in Slovakia, 92 percent in Lithuania, 91 percent in Poland, 90 percent in Bulgaria, 86 percent in Hungary, 76 percent in Finland, 73 percent in the Czech Republic, 72 percent in Latvia, 69 percent in Estonia, and 47 percent in Romania. All of these nations were once either part of the Soviet Union or in its zone of influence. But Western Europe had grown dependent on Russian energy as well. Sweden got 46 percent of its energy imports from Russia, Greece 40 percent, the Netherlands 34 percent, Germany and Belgium 30 percent, Italy 28 percent, and France 17 percent.[29]

In his fourteen years in the Kremlin, Putin has cultivated and increased this dependence, using it to forge special relationships with a number of European customers, especially Germany and Italy. The only problem for him was Ukraine: about 50 percent of Russian gas flows to Europe through its territory. In the past the service had been disrupted several times: Moscow and Kiev could not agree on a fair selling price for Ukrainian purchases, though it must be noted that until 2005 Russia sold gas to Ukraine at a heavily discounted rate. The resulting annual subsidy to the Ukrainian economy amounted to at least $3 billion a year—a price Putin was willing to pay to keep Kiev in Moscow’s orbit. Whenever Russia stopped supplies to Kiev, Ukrainians started siphoning gas contractually designated for Europe. Alienating European customers was not part of the plan, and Putin decided a bypass was needed.

In 2005, Putin and German chancellor Gerhard Schröder concluded a deal for Nord Stream, an offshore mega-pipeline in the Baltic Sea. All of the other Baltic nations—Sweden, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia—protested, but Germany paid no attention. The bypass became operational in 2011, and after Schröder stepped down as chancellor of Germany, he became the chairman of the board of Nord Stream A.G.[30]

Nord Stream eased but did not solve the problem of gas transit through Ukraine. Its capacity was still not enough to make the Ukrainian route redundant, and in any case it did nothing for southern Europe. Putin started negotiating to create a South Stream, which would connect Russia and the Balkans. Once it became operational, Russian gas exports to Europe would be immune to any crisis in Ukraine. Coupled with Nord Stream, the two would become Russia’s pincers holding on to Europe.

Pushing the project forward is Gazprom, the giant Russian energy company, with foreign partners that include Eni of Italy, Wintershall of Germany, and Electricité de France (EDF). Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, and Slovenia have all made intergovernmental agreements with Russia facilitating the deal.

As this one example demonstrates, the Russia-Ukraine relationship is staggeringly complex. The two countries, their populations, culture, history, and economy are so interconnected that they may be called the conjoined twins of the Slavic world.

One would have thought that on a space like that, great powers would tread carefully. But no such luck.

It will probably never be known with certainty what exactly happened in Kiev in the winter of 2013–2014. Not that information was scarce, but the opposite: there has been too much of it. The sheer number of conflicting uncorroborated sources used by political parties, governments, and media was dumbfounding, and as every digital source—video, photograph, tweet—claimed authenticity and immediacy, it was virtually impossible to resolve conflicts between different angles, perspectives, and tags. When every picture can be invisibly doctored, none can be trusted.

If the warring parties could agree on any interpretation at all, that would be a bare-bones narrative: in the fall of 2013, Ukraine was poised to choose between two economic patrons—Russia and the European Union. Contrary to the wishes of many, the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, chose Russia; protests started in Kiev; there were clashes between rioters and government forces, and people on both sides died; Yanukovych fled, and opposition leaders formed a pro-E.U. revolutionary government. Beyond that utterly minimal summary, accord ends.

Euromaidan

Elected to the Ukrainian presidency in 2010, the “pro-Russian” Yanukovych was not averse to dallying with the West, and once in office, he continued the precarious East-West “dual vector” balancing act of his predecessors. His cabinet dropped plans to join NATO, but not the intention to intensify cooperation with the European Union.[1]

The Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement was conceived in 2012. The majority in the Ukrainian Rada (its parliament), including Yanukovych’s party, supported the move. The agreement was to be signed at the E.U. summit on November 29, 2013, in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.

At first, Putin applied the stick. In August, Russia changed its customs regulations for Ukrainian goods, causing a 10 percent drop in Ukrainian exports—a hard blow for an already destitute country. But that alone did not deter Yanukovych. What made him change his mind were the finalized figures of Western aid, presented in November. The European Union offered $838 million in loans; the International Monetary Fund $4 billion, provided Yanukovych made budget cuts and raised domestic gas prices by 40 percent. Putin responded with a promise of $15 billion in loans plus $3 billion a year in natural-gas subsidies. On November 21, Yanukovych’s cabinet suspended its deal with the European Union.

An overlooked fact is that no one ever actually offered Ukraine membership in the European Union. Contrary to the beliefs of the pro-E.U. Ukrainians, the “association” would not have given them the rights of unrestricted travel and access to jobs throughout the continent enjoyed by citizens of E.U. nations. For Brussels, the underlying rationale for expanding to Ukraine was to take over a market with 44 million customers. At the same time, Ukrainian agricultural produce, while popular in Russia, did not stand a chance in the heavily regulated European markets. Still, indignant that Yanukovych had made the strategic decision unilaterally, protestors filled the government quarter of Kiev’s Right Bank, along Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Instytutska streets. The largest crowds assembled on Maidan Nezalezhnosti—Independence Square. As the protestors demanded association with the European Union, the movement was dubbed the Euromaidan.

Various sources, referencing different dates, estimated the number of participants anywhere from 50,000 to 800,000. More than half were from western Ukraine.

They were quickly joined by far-right groups vowing to persecute “Ivans and kikes.” Putin’s provocateurs stepped in as well. Rallies turned violent. What had started as a grassroots protest against a “rogue state” developed into something infinitely more complex: an interregional conflict informed by different ideologies, special interests, a shadow economy, and foreign intervention.[2]

From Kiev, clashes between revolutionaries and loyalists spread to the provinces. Government buildings were attacked, local administrations overtaken. The Euromaidan groups prevailed in the west, Russophiles in the east.

There is plenty of evidence to support the claim that during his years in power, Yanukovych enriched his own associates at the expense of other oligarchs. There is also evidence of the anti-Yanukovych oligarchs’ deep involvement in the 2013–2014 political overhaul. Petro Poroshenko, known as the Chocolate King for having made his fortune as the owner of a confectionary manufacturer (and who would later become the president of Ukraine), boastfully admitted: “From the beginning, I was one of the organizers of the Maidan. My television channel—Channel 5—played a tremendously important role.” Another oligarch, Dmitry Firtash, claimed to have manipulated both the Euromaidan and Poroshenko. And so on. The events in Kiev would not have been possible without the oligarchs’ participation, but hardly any tycoon had a clear vision of where things should be going, and steered the protests accordingly.[3]

The same applies to the revolt’s foreign participants.

Regime Change

If Yanukovych’s was a rogue state, U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine in 2013–2014 can only be described as rogue diplomacy. Most certainly without the imprimatur of President Obama, and perhaps even without a silent nod from Secretary of State John Kerry, a group of senior American diplomats allied with bipartisan interventionists in Congress started brokering regime change in Kiev.

The protagonists included assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs Victoria Nuland, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey R. Pyatt, and Senator John McCain.

McCain was the first prominent American to descend on Kiev to fraternize with the people on the barricades and encourage them to overthrow the democratically elected president. On December 15, 2013, he told Ukrainians that their future was “with Europe,” not Russia: “The free world is with you, America is with you, I am with you. Ukraine will make Europe better and Europe will make Ukraine better.” Speaking to 200,000 rebels in a foreign capital, he said without apparent irony that he wanted to make it clear to “Russia and Vladimir Putin that interference in the affairs of Ukraine is not acceptable to the United States.” What had started as competition over spheres of interest was, in McCain’s telling, turning into a civilizational clash, the forces of light against the forces of darkness.[4]

Putin could have dismissed this fiery talk. McCain was a loose cannon and had been bashing Russia for years, at one point leading Putin to quip, tastelessly, “I don’t blame McCain. He spent five years in a cage in Vietnam. Anyone would’ve lost his marbles there.”[5] But interference by U.S. government officials was another matter.

Assistant secretary of state Nuland, the one who had coined the “spinach treatment” adage, seems to have been the spearhead of the project. Not insignificantly, her husband was the leading neoconservative intellectual Robert Kagan. During the crisis, Nuland was a frequent visitor to Kiev. In turmoil like that it was not humanly possible not to make mistakes, and on December 13, 2013, speaking to the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation Conference in Washington, Nuland revealed that since 1991, the United States had “invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine” in building “democratic skills and institutions.” She later claimed she was “still jetlagged” from her “third trip in five weeks to Ukraine,” and maybe that’s why the wording was dangerously imprecise, the message conflicted, the delivery most certainly untimely. In a subsequent interview, Nuland reluctantly confirmed that the United States had spent $5 billion “on supporting the aspirations of the Ukrainian people to have a strong, democratic government that represents their interests. But,” she stressed, “we certainly didn’t spend any money supporting the Maidan; that was a spontaneous movement.”[6] It had been spontaneous—in the beginning.

If John McCain found Putin the personification of evil, Nuland became that for Russians. Later, the Russian foreign minister would say: “That woman has played a very nasty role at every stage of the crisis in Ukraine.”[7]

Nuland first made headlines on December 11: visiting Independence Square in Kiev, she offered sandwiches to antigovernment protesters and police in front of the TV cameras. Taken as an intensely patronizing gesture, Nuland’s sandwiches became infamous, and not only in Russia. When pressed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Nuland explained that the “visit happened the night after the Ukrainian special forces… moved against peaceful demonstrators, and began pushing and shoving them off the Maidan… and the next day, when I went to visit Maidan, I didn’t think I could go down empty-handed, given what everybody had been through. So as a sign, a gesture of peace, I brought sandwiches.”[8]

The world media made so much of the wretched sandwiches that Nuland might have been better off distributing hand grenades. After the sandwiches saga, Russian secret services started monitoring Nuland’s every move. On February 6, 2014, Russians leaked the transcript of a phone conversation between Nuland and Pyatt in which the two were matter-of-factly building a new government for Ukraine. It is not clear when exactly the conversation took place, but the State Department did not dispute its authenticity.

The three opposition leaders Nuland and Pyatt discussed, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Oleh Tyahnybok, and Vitaliy Klichko, were Maidan favorites—Yatsenyuk a polished technocrat, Tyahnybok a crowd pleaser with a history of Jew bashing, Klichko a world champion heavyweight boxer. From the start, Pyatt and Nuland agreed they were all “in play.” “Yats” (Yatsenyuk) would become prime minister. “Klitch” remained the “complicated electron” (Nuland: “I don’t think Klitch should go into the government.” Pyatt: “Just let him stay out and do his political homework and stuff”). The right-wing Tyahnybok “and his guys” were going to be a “problem.” A deal had to be solidified soon, said Pyatt, because “the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it.” Having by that time given up on the European Union’s negotiating skills, Nuland now wanted to recruit the United Nations: “So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and to have the U.N. help glue it and, you know, fuck the E.U.” “No, exactly,” Pyatt agreed.[9]

Nuland’s “Fuck the E.U.” remark became notorious in Europe (a furious Angela Merkel called it “unacceptable”—the highest form of disapproval in diplomatic vernacular short of profanity), but the real harm was done in the east. Russians claimed they had caught Nuland and Pyatt red-handed at orchestrating regime change in Ukraine. Pyatt, interviewed by the press, refused to discuss “any phone calls” and claimed that his “role has been an appropriate diplomatic one”: “I don’t consider it meddling when we’re in the business of helping to build bridges between the government and the opposition.”[10]

Little wonder that with both Russia and America involved, the polarization of Ukraine sped up. But let’s stop for a moment. We know that neoconservatives regard unseating a democratically elected president as permissible in a third-world country. But what was their plan for Ukraine, and what made them think they could achieve it (whatever it was) through the regime change?

Did they hope to promote Ukraine’s association with the European Union? The reality was that no such association was possible without Russia’s consent. Ukraine and Europe depended on Russian gas. If Putin chose to shut the tap—which he could do at any time—Europe would suffer, but Ukraine would fold.

Did they seek a closer partnership between Ukraine and NATO? It was no secret that the Ukrainian military remained in disheartening disarray. How could one possibly tease Ukraine’s aggressive eastern neighbor by suggesting NATO expansion, when Ukraine did not stand a chance of deterring a preemptive assault, let alone defeating one? And what would NATO gain from such a conflict? Would most of the NATO powers even risk coming to Ukraine’s defense? And what would happen to NATO’s credibility—even the survival of the NATO treaty—if they did not?

Was the interventionists’ goal “Westernization” of Ukrainian society? Leaving aside the unanswerable question about what exactly “Westernization” means, I would simply note that America had already tried introducing a “pro-Western” government in Ukraine in 2004, during the Orange Revolution, and that it did not work. Absent any effective system of checks and balances, the government remained corrupt, the economy stagnant. There was no reason to expect a revolution to succeed in 2014 where the earlier one had failed. In any case, any attempt at ousting Yanukovych, a lawfully elected president—even if an embezzler and a thug—was bound to anger eastern and southern Ukraine, his base of support. How would the United States benefit from a civil conflict in a nation of 44 million sitting on Russia’s borders?

It does not seem as if American interventionists really had a plan for Ukraine. Most likely, their work in Kiev followed Napoleon’s principle, famously appropriated by Lenin, On s’engage, et puis on voit—Let’s engage, and take it from there.

After the Nuland-Pyatt leak, Europeans and Russians both stepped up their involvement in Kiev—Europeans offended, Russians enraged. Meanwhile, confrontations between government forces and protestors escalated. By February 20, at least seventy-seven people had died.

On February 21, Germany, France, Poland, and Russia brokered a compromise between the government and the Maidan. The opposition was represented by Nuland’s and Pyatt’s favorites: Yatsenyuk, Klichko, and Tyahnybok. Yanukovych signed for the government. Three E.U. foreign ministers signed as the agreement’s guarantors: Radoslaw Sikorski of Poland, Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany, and Laurent Fabius of France. Called the “Agreement on the Settlement of Crisis in Ukraine,” the document called for an “immediate end of bloodshed” and a “political resolution of the crisis.” The signees pledged to form a national unity government. Presidential elections would be held “as soon as the new Constitution is adopted but no later than December 2014.” “Recent acts of violence” would be investigated, the “authorities and the opposition will refrain from the use of violence,” and the authorities “will not impose a state of emergency.” The parliament would declare amnesty for “illegal actions” during the riots, and “illegal weapons should be handed over to the Ministry of Interior.”[11]

The first international agreement to arise from the Ukrainian upheaval quickly became the first international document to collapse. Within hours after it was signed, Maidan rioters overtook government quarters. It is not clear who was behind the escalation, and it is not impossible that the resumed violence was spontaneous. What is clear is that opposition leaders used it to topple the regime, discarding any notion of “national unity.”

Unable to take the stress anymore and apparently fearing for his life, Yanukovych left for eastern Ukraine—officially to attend a regional meeting of governors—and then disappeared. He would not resurface until February 28—in the Russian city of Rostov. Now leaderless, his faction in the parliament folded and voted with the opposition minority. The insurgency leaders declared the position of president vacant, formed an interim cabinet, scheduled presidential elections for May, and briefly banned the official use of the Russian language in Ukraine—a folly of grand magnitude.[12]

Putin: How to Respond?

What is often missed about Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy is that it is largely reactive. Moscow deemed Western involvement in Ukraine unacceptable. If Ukraine forged a strong relationship with NATO, would that make the Russian Black Sea Fleet homeless and bring NATO troops to Sevastopol, the “City of Russian Glory”? After the United States’ involvement in the Orange Revolution in 2004, every effort U.S. representatives made in Russia on behalf of the opposition was taken by the Kremlin as part of a conspiracy. The ease with which the United States now dropped a democratically elected president, Yanukovych, and gave unqualified recognition to insurgents in Kiev enraged the Kremlin. For the second time in ten years, America had supported, if not outright orchestrated, a regime change in Russia’s “sister country.” Was a coup in Moscow next?

NATO expansion and U.S. political engineering in the near abroad were two factors driving the strong Russian response to regime change in Kiev. The third was the domestic corrosion of Putin’s regime.

In the winter of 2011–2012, Moscow saw a tide of spontaneous grassroots protest. The authorities managed to overwhelm it bloodlessly, and Russian voters did put Putin in the Kremlin for a third term (officially, he got 63.6 percent of the vote, but even if the election was rigged, no poll or estimate puts his actual support below 55 percent). In Putin’s “managed democracy,” Russian living standards were possibly better than they had ever been (in 2013, 56 percent of Russians between the ages of eighteen and forty-five vacationed abroad). Yet the 2011–2012 protests signified the end of national accord. That had to be restored, and a “little victorious war” could do it.[13]

With President Yanukovych toppled and the interim cabinet sworn in, Kiev became ungovernable. Hundreds of Maidan rioters camped in government buildings and showed no intention of leaving. The ill-conceived ban on the official use of Russian lasted for just five days before being repealed, but in the meantime it had done a lot of damage. The Russophile media in Crimea, Donbass, and Odessa prophesied forced Ukrainization and pogroms coming from “fascists” in Kiev. Pro-Russian activists in eastern and southern Ukraine demanded secession and asked Russia for help. But Russia was not in a hurry.

The event that made Putin postpone any action was a pet project, the Winter Olympics in Sochi, scheduled for February 2014. Conceived as the triumphant symbol of Russia’s resurrection from its years of chaos and poverty, carefully planned as a splendid display of national heritage and riches, and also extravagantly expensive, the Sochi Olympics were meant to be a coming-of-age fete for Putin’s Russia. But the Western media did not take the hoped-for congratulatory tone. The correspondents’ reports from Sochi were gleeful, sneering, and diminishing, suggesting an anti-Russian bias. As one American web site commented, “It got to the point where Western journalists in Sochi for Putin’s overpriced Olympics were cheered like heroes for tweeting about how the curtains in their hotel rooms were falling down.” A leading historian of Russia, Stephen F. Cohen, called the coverage “toxic.”[14]

As Putin and the Russian street saw it, no matter what Russia tried, in the eyes of the West it was never good enough. The president sat calmly through the Winter Games.