PART III Consequences
SEVEN
From Crimea to Donbass
Ninety-two United Nations member states refused to judge Russia’s actions in Crimea. The handful of countries that joined Russia in voting against the American-sponsored U.N. resolution to condemn the annexation were either perennially anti-American or eating from Moscow’s hand: Armenia, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. Their vote was to be expected. But among the countries that either abstained or did not vote were several third-world powerhouses and U.S. allies, including Afghanistan, Argentina, China, India, Iraq, Israel, and Pakistan. All were involved in territorial disputes with other countries; none wanted the West as an arbiter.
In Washington, support for Ukraine immediately became a bipartisan issue. On March 6, the House of Representatives approved $1 billion in financial aid to Kiev by a vote of 385 to 23. The White House introduced sanctions against Russia. Conservatives and liberals alike asked for an even stronger response. Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Robert Menendez demanded that Obama send weapons to Ukraine. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times urged the president to act preemptively and start rescuing another post-Soviet nation potentially facing Russian intervention—Moldova.[1]
Within weeks, the Moscow-supported “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk began battling Ukrainian forces. By March 2016, according to U.N. estimates, there were 9,160 deaths.[2]
Russian Volunteers
In neither Ukraine nor Russia are Donetsk and Luhansk referred to as “eastern Ukraine,” a broad term that is applicable to several additional provinces. The region is called Donbass.
Donbass stands for “Donetz Coal Basin”—the Donetz a river, and coal the essence of the local economy. Donbass is part of the steppes. It supported no urban centers before the Russian Empire secured it, and no significant towns until coal became an indispensable commodity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Almost every settlement was born as a mining town, and most remain mining towns today. The peak of development happened in the 1920s and 1930s. As a result, the foundations of Donbass social norms and human geography are neither Ukrainian nor Russian, but Soviet, formed by central planning serving the needs of industrialization. Migration of a skilled workforce, establishment of vocational and technical education, city planning—nothing was spontaneous. Donbass is a product of social engineering. Nowadays, its coal deposits depleted and heavy industry outdated, many towns of Donbass resemble former mill towns in the American Northeast: places where economic depression manifests itself in decay, unemployment, poverty, and anger.
The exact mechanism of the separatist insurgency in Donbass is still not known, but it was neither a grassroots revolution, as Moscow claims, nor a conspiracy cooked up in the Kremlin, as Kiev insists. The overthrown president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was from Donbass, and his ouster was a victory of Donbass’s nemesis—nationalist Galicia.
The whole of Ukraine was in turmoil between February and April of 2014, and at first, the rallies in Donbass did not look so different from those roaring in Lviv or Odessa. When pro-Russian activists in Donetsk and Luhansk proclaimed “people’s republics,” it sounded almost like comic relief. It took the Kremlin to turn a soap opera into a war.
It does not look as if Moscow planned the infiltration of eastern Ukraine as a smooth continuation of the expansion begun in Crimea. Nor was it attempting, as it is often argued, to create a land corridor to Crimea along the coast of the Sea of Azov. No Russian traffic there would ever be safe from Ukrainian paramilitary attacks. Most likely, Putin opted for the escalation because he was angered by the U.S. reaction to the “ascension” of Crimea into Russia, yet scornful of the first round of sanctions. Indeed, in the spring of 2014, they did not bite. Like a willful cat testing the limits of what he can get away with, the Russian leader supported the separatist insurgency with no endgame in mind except to further destabilize Ukraine. As Andrew S. Weiss put it, “Mr. Putin’s efforts look more like a short-term tactical play than a carefully considered embrace of an ethnocentric approach to defending Russia’s declared interests in the neighborhood”—and that was precisely what made the Ukraine showdown “even scarier and more dangerous.”[3]
It is not impossible that Putin also saw the stealth invasion as an opportunity to perfect the hybrid warfare first applied in Crimea, a novel stratagem blurring the lines between soft and hard power, already praised by Western military professionals. A former NATO commander, Admiral James G. Stavridis, said he admired the “finesse” of the campaign in Crimea and that the strategy was applicable “no matter where you are operating in the world.”[4]
The first important step was the decision to prompt Russian volunteers to organize through the Internet, set up recruiting sites and physical training camps and, last but not least, let them cross the Russo-Ukrainian border with weapons. Some of the most notorious volunteer commanders later claimed full responsibility for what happened next. “If my group had not crossed the border,” one of them boasted, there would have been no real fighting: “Just a few dozen killed, burned, arrested. That would have been all.”[5]
From the Ukrainian side, the “pro-government” forces also consisted largely of volunteers. The so-called volunteer battalions belonged to far-right groups and egomaniac millionaires. Azov Battalion, originating in the neo-Nazi movement, wore Waffen-SS symbols on its insignia. The billionaire Ihor Kolomoyski equipped the Dnipro Battalion.[6] And so on.
Radicals from Russia crossed into Donbass with ease. So did soldiers of fortune and sociopaths. Tim Whewell of the BBC described a grotesque mix of monarchists, secular nationalists, Orthodox mystics, and people who had signed up to “save the Russian state” from Western aggression. Aptly, Whewell reminded readers about the Russian tradition of volunteering abroad to protect Slavic “brethren”: in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, after the heroine dies, her lover Vronsky signs up to fight against the Turks in Serbia. In the 1990s, Russians fought alongside Serbs in the Yugoslav wars.
Other fighters were “clearly driven partly by an existentialist quest to give meaning to their lives,” reading Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre between battles. Because they all kept their mouths shut, it was impossible to tell whether a young man had joined the separatists “in search of money or adventure” or had been “ordered to Ukraine as part of an unofficial mission that will never be acknowledged,” an article in the New York Times Magazine reported.[7]
After Putin decided to have boots on the ground, military professionals arrived, bringing advanced weapons such as Buk surface-to-air missiles. It is unlikely that the Russian high command planned attacks or calculated strategic costs in Donbass. Most probably, it just made sure that the separatists had everything necessary to sustain their armies. The Kremlin stayed in the shadows, allowing the leaders of the two “people’s republics” every foolishness. The purpose was to keep the rebellion aflame.
At the end of 2014, New York Times correspondent Andrew Roth wrote: “The scale of destruction throughout the region is often breathtaking. Residential apartments bear craters from tank shells. Many places, especially smaller towns, lack basic utilities, like water and electricity. Power lines have been downed, mines flooded, substations incinerated and rail service halted.” The “minister” of building, architecture, and utilities of the Luhansk “People’s Republic,” plucked straight “from the trenches,” still sported a pistol on his hip. The regime imposed by the insurgents was a mixture of village justice, warlordism, and patriarchy. An attempt was made to prohibit single women from visiting bars and clubs.[8]
With Donbass, the Kremlin miscalculated. The annexation of Crimea had brought it only a slap on the wrist: Crimea was a disputed territory with a complicated past; the takeover had been bloodless. The insurgency in Donbass turned very bloody very early. The almost certainly accidental shooting down of a Malaysian plane in July 2014, by either separatists or the Russian military, epitomized the outrage felt around the world. The separatists obstructed the investigation while Moscow refused to acknowledge its presence in Donbass and blamed the Ukrainian air force. After that, sanctions against Russia began to hit at the very heart of the Russian economy—its energy sector and the banks sustaining it. Later in the year, Putin officially announced that Russia was in recession; he urged his compatriots to tighten their belts.[9] He wouldn’t admit the presence of Russian military personnel in Donbass until December 2015.[10]
In the wake of the annexation of Crimea and war in Donbass, Russia experienced an upsurge of jingoism and xenophobia, both spontaneous and Kremlin-propagated. The consequences are bound to be extensive: the unleashed aggression targets not just Ukraine or the West but virtually any group the Russian patriotic majority chooses to see as the Other—including domestic liberal opposition and every minority.
Referring to previous coups in the near abroad—in Georgia and Kirgizstan as well as Ukraine—Putin declared that the world could now see “what tragic consequences the wave of the so-called color revolutions has led to. …We have to do all that is needed to ensure that similar things never happen in Russia.” His foreign minister seconded that: “The West is making clear it does not want to force Russia to change policy but wants to secure regime change.”[11]
In December 2014, Russia officially adopted a new military strategy. The list of threats to Russia now included NATO “moving closer” to Russia’s borders; political coups in neighboring countries and the installment of anti-Russian regimes there; and destabilization of Russia to promote “violent regime change.”[12] The last accusation had not been heard from the Kremlin since the Stalin era.
By nurturing the insurgency in Donbass, Putin gambled with Russia’s future in more ways than one. Unleashing the vengeful rabble was perhaps worse than losing standing with the great powers of the West. When, at some point, the Russian street turns its attention to corrupt administrators in Russia, the rioters are likely to use the same methods Russian volunteers used in Donbass: lynching, looting, killing. The tiger has tasted blood, and as Alexander Pushkin put it two centuries ago, God forbid one should ever witness a Russian rebellion, “senseless and merciless.”[13]
Ukraine as a Failed State
By unleashing war in Donbass, Putin foolishly jeopardized the future of his regime, or “managed democracy” as his ideologues call it. But the other side in the conflict, Ukraine, simply collapsed as a state.
A state fails when it loses (in Max Weber’s famous formulation) its monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force on its territory. The Ukrainian state has done that, and now also meets all the other criteria of a failed state: massive movement of refugees and domestically displaced persons, vengeance-seeking group grievance, the rise of factionalized elites, and the intervention of external actors.[14]
The movement of refugees and displaced persons is the largest in Europe since World War II; as of August 2015, according to United Nations data, at least 1.3 million people had been “internally displaced” within Ukraine, and 900,000 had fled abroad, mostly to Russia.[15]
“External actors”—Russia and NATO—were fighting a proxy war in Donbass. Vengeance-seeking groups enjoyed the support of about 5 percent of Ukrainian voters, but their influence was so disproportionately big that the failure of democracy in Ukraine was hard to dispute. David Stern of the BBC wrote that because no one in Kiev wanted to “provide fuel to the Russian propaganda machine,” the presence of the far right in positions of authority went unmentioned. Meanwhile, according to Stern, commanders of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion were close to the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior; one of them was named police chief of the Kiev region. After the Maidan uprising, the crime rate throughout Ukraine increased by 40 percent, military and police arsenals had been looted, and more weapons came from eastern Ukraine. In August 2015, members of another right-wing party, Oleh Tyahnybok’s Svoboda, clashed with police in front of the parliament building in Kiev, killing three servicemen.[16]
Within a year, the power of warlords spread beyond the war zone. In July 2015, a Right Sector battalion clashed with government forces in the town of Mukachevo in western Ukraine. The fighting originated in a business dispute over trade in contraband cigarettes: Mukachevo sat on Ukraine’s border with Hungary. Several people died; the weapons used included machine guns and grenade launchers.[17]
In 2015, more than forty private battalions existed in Ukraine. Besides Donetsk and Luhansk, several other areas were controlled by warlords. Among the most colorful was Ihor Kolomoysky, an oligarch commanding at least $3 billion, and a citizen of three countries—Ukraine, Cyprus, and Israel—who spent at least $10 million to create the Dnipro Battalion. He called Putin a “schizophrenic of short stature.” Putin returned the compliment by calling him a “unique crook.”[18]
The war in the east has been too bloody, too ugly, and too dishonest on both sides for any Ukrainian national unity to be feasible. Even after the bloodshed eventually ends, Ukraine will likely never be able to return to its 2013 borders.
Since the coup in February 2014, Ukraine has conducted two elections. In the first, held in May 2014, Petro Poroshenko won the presidency with 54.7 percent of the votes; the leader of the Orange Revolution of 2004, Yulia Tymoshenko, came in a distant second with 12.8 percent. In the October 2014 parliamentary election, six parties got into the new Rada, the winners being Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front, with 22.1 percent of the vote, and President Poroshenko’s party, somewhat tellingly called just Petro Poroshenko Bloc, with 21.8 percent. The Yatsenyuk-Poroshenko alliance began to crumble almost immediately. The government formed in November 2014 included three foreigners, one of whom could neither speak nor understand Ukrainian. The post of the minister of finance went to the American investment banker Natalie Jaresco, whose only qualifications for the job seemed to be Ukrainian roots and past employment with the U.S. Department of State. In May 2015, Poroshenko equally inexplicably appointed the former president of the Republic of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, as the governor of Odessa Province.[19]
With each faction accusing others of corruption, the infighting mounted, resulting in ugly public brawls in the parliament and cabinet meetings. To Moscow’s immense satisfaction, in February 2016 the Poroshenko-Yatsenyuk coalition collapsed.
All sides in the escalating power struggle appealed to the Ukrainian street, making another violent insurgency possible. Two years since Maidan, Ukraine had more factions and more fanaticism, and its prospects for nation-building were in decline. Putin’s Kremlin couldn’t be happier with the results.
Ukraine may be turning into another Yugoslavia, a young state that cannot survive except as a dictatorship. Both Ukraine and Yugoslavia belong to the category of artificial entities formed by foreign leaders: Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Ukraine by Lenin in 1922. In both countries, people spoke a spectrum of dialects, the official language a sort of linguistic median. Both were also divided along religious and cultural lines. Iosip Broz Tito held Yugoslavia together; a viceroy appointed by Moscow did that for Ukraine. But absent its strongman and outside a Cold War context, Yugoslavia was not a coherent nation. Neither is Ukraine, and this is the ultimate cause of the present civil war.
Peace in Ukraine at the initial, promising stage of nation-building between 1991 and 2013 was made possible by the precarious balancing act of all four of its presidents, including the “pro-Western” Yushchenko and the “pro-Russian” Yanukovych. The February 2014 coup (call it a revolution if it makes you feel better) threw the country off balance, and the submerged interregional tensions surfaced with a boom.
A Russian Lake
On December 4, 2014, in his equivalent of the State of the Union address, Putin summed up the party line on Crimea. As befits a national fetish, the language he applied to the annexed territory was metaphysical. Referring to the semi-legendary baptism of Prince Vladimir in Chersonesus, he called Crimea the “spiritual foundation” of the Russian state. For Russia, Putin announced, Crimea had “an enormous civilizational and sacral meaning. Just like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for those who practice Islam or Judaism.”[20]
The allusion was new, idiosyncratic, and strange. For starters, clashes over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem have become an epitome of an unending conflict. Perhaps appropriately, the first federal investment in Crimean sacral grounds was an army group. Tanks and armored vehicles were ferried across the Kerch Strait with praiseworthy efficiency, up to fifty a day—an accomplishment given the sad state of the ferries.
In November 2014, the Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed that it had deployed a squadron of thirty jet fighters to Belbek air base. NATO’s commander, General Philip Breedlove, in Kiev at the time, said that the ongoing Russian “militarization” of Crimea would have an effect on “almost the entire Black Sea.”[21] In the 1950s–1960s, Taiwan was called the unsinkable U.S. aircraft carrier. Was Crimea about to become Russia’s aircraft carrier?
The annexation of Crimea has changed the balance of power in the Black Sea. Under the terms of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982, Russia now claims an exclusive economic zone along the peninsula’s coastline—an avenue for underwater pipelines and a repository of fossil fuels. Ukraine, dispossessed, is losing its role as a transit corridor between Russia and Europe.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet had been stationed in Crimea before, as were some Russian air force units. With the annexation, the air force presence expanded; Russian ground troops, tanks, and armored personnel carriers arrived; the Russian military established a new army group on the peninsula. Russian ground troops now surround Ukraine from the north, east, and south. Just 450 miles separate the army groups in Crimea from those in Bryansk, across Ukraine’s northern border. If they advanced simultaneously, the two could touch in central Ukraine within days. Along the Black Sea coast, the shipbuilding facilities of Ukrainian Mykolaiv are just 100 miles away from the Russian army group in Crimea; Odessa is 75 miles farther west; 25 miles more, and one is in Moldova.
With Russia having gained in the strategic balance, the influence of every other Black Sea nation, including Turkey, has shrunk. The United States and NATO have lost some of their clout in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. To make this clear, in May 2015 Russia and China held their first joint naval exercises in the Mediterranean.
As the naval base at Sevastopol had been the focal point of the Russian Crimea myth and a major goal of the annexation rush, now the Black Sea Fleet found itself the center of attention. It also found a new role: intimidating every other Black Sea nation, as none is Russia’s friend. Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania are NATO members; Ukraine and Georgia have begged for membership. Another mission became Russian warships’ regular visits to Syria, bringing arms to Moscow’s friend Bashar al-Assad.
But contrary to the patriotic Russian myth, the Black Sea has never been a Russian lake, and despite the fears of Russia’s neighbors, it will likely never be one. For two centuries, Russia has been the dominant naval power in the basin, but it is Turkey, not Russia, that determines the net balance. The Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles, collectively known in European diplomacy as the Straits, belong to Turkey, and it is up to Turkey alone to determine who will have access to the Black Sea and on what conditions. All other Black Sea countries are in the situation of a homeowner whose driveway is separated from the turnpike by somebody else’s property.
Globally, the Straits are not as important as the Suez and Panama canals, or Gibraltar. Those three serve every seafaring nation; the Straits serve only the Black Sea countries. Yet they are a lifeline for Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, and Ukraine, their only oceanic connection. To that, add the landlocked nations of the Caucasus—Armenia and Azerbaijan—and also the five “stans” of post-Soviet Central Asia. Russia’s Eurasian coastline is immense, but the Black Sea coast is the only one that is ice-free year round. Close the Straits, and Russian commerce will suffocate. Open the Straits to powers at war with Russia, and the Russian navy will bleed.
In the Crimean War, Turkey turned the Straits into a highway for the British and French navies. In World War I, it let its ally, Germany, send cruisers into the Black Sea, largely incapacitating the Russian fleet there. In World War II, Ankara refused to let Germans and Italians in, thus saving the Soviets from losing the south.[22]
The international treaty regulating the Straits—the Montreux Convention of 1936—allows Turkey to close them to all foreign warships in times of war or when threatened by aggression. It may refuse access to the merchant ships of nations with which it is at war. In peacetime, all civilian vessels are guaranteed free passage “by day and by night, under any flag with any kind of cargo.” The transit of naval vessels is regulated, and the passage of naval ships not belonging to the Black Sea nations is heavily restricted. Outsiders’ warships must be under 15,000 tons, the guns they carry under 203 millimeters. No one, including the Black Sea nations, may send an aircraft carrier through the Straits.
These provisions have been charged with conflict from the day the convention was signed. After 1945, wanting uninhibited access to the Mediterranean, Stalin demanded that Ankara cede him “joint ownership” of the Straits. That strategic pressure led U.S. president Harry Truman in 1947 to proclaim the Truman Doctrine, in which he pledged support of every nation threatened by the USSR, a move many historians consider to have launched the Cold War. Though universal in its wording, the Truman Doctrine was specifically crafted to protect Turkey and its Mediterranean neighbor Greece.
Grudgingly, the Soviets caved in. To evade the ban on aircraft carriers, they designated the only two they had—the Kiev and the Admiral Kuznetsov—as “aircraft carrying cruisers.” They usually passed through the Bosporus at night; Orhan Pamuk writes in his Istanbul memoir: “A great hulk, growing larger and larger as it rose from the pitch-dark sea and approached the closest hill—the hill from which I was watching—this was a colossus, a leviathan, in shape and size a specter from my worst nightmares, a Soviet warship!—rising out of the night and the mist as if in a fairy tale, a vast floating fortress.”[23]
NATO had to use semantic evasions as well. In the 1960s, when the United States started sending ships armed with 305-millimeter missiles into the Black Sea, the Soviet Union complained that this violated the 203-millimeter limit. NATO responded by saying that the Montreux Convention did not mention missiles, only guns. The superpowers’ semantic dodging was a Cold War equivalent of the joke about the priest who, when reproached for eating a chicken on a Friday, christened it a fish.
With the annexation of Crimea, Russian share of control over the region spiked. The Ukrainian navy—or what was left of it—evacuated to Odessa. Another, indirect victim of the annexation was the Republic of Georgia. In 2008, Russia and Georgia fought a short war with lasting consequences. Georgia has strong NATO aspirations and had sided with Ukraine against Russia in the past. The Russian annexation moved Ukraine so far west that military cooperation between Tbilisi and Kiev is now all but impossible. For Russia, the acquisition of Crimea makes every hostile act against Georgia—intelligence collecting, sea traffic blockade, or military strikes—infinitely easier. If Russia ever lays siege to Ukrainian and Georgian ports, that may be the end of sovereignty for both. Russian strategists undoubtedly want as much control over the Black Sea as the United States holds over the Caribbean.
The worst-case strategic scenario for Russia on the Black Sea would be the closure of the Straits to Russian vessels, paired with foreign naval intervention—in other words, the repetition of the Crimean War and World War I. For that to happen, Turkey must be at war with Russia, a scenario hard to imagine only a year ago, but not totally unthinkable now, since the two powers clashed over Syria.
Also, Russia’s adversaries do not even need Turkey’s cooperation to block the Straits at their southern end, at the Dardanelles in the Mediterranean. Position a naval force in international waters there, and the hostile fleet will stop all the Russian traffic. This may turn out to be the way to impose the severest sanctions on the Russian economy.
Energy
If there is one achievement that Vladimir Putin can be truly proud of, it would be a series of carefully engineered victories in energy wars. Crimea is a monumental foothold in that battle.
According to the Convention on the Law of the Sea, coastal states “have sovereign rights” in a 200-nautical-mile “exclusive economic zone” where they own the natural resources on the sea floor. The annexation of Crimea has added 36,000 square miles to Russia’s exclusive economic maritime zone in the basin, more than tripling its size.[24]
There are gas fields in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Until recently, these reserves did not seem terribly important: the Ukrainian company that owned and developed the fields, Chernomorneftegaz, accounted for just 5 percent of Ukraine’s energy production. In the past few years, however, there have been reports suggesting large fossil fuel fields in the basin.
As in Marco Polo’s time, today the Black Sea is again the terminus of a transcontinental route—this time not for silk but for gas. With the annexation, a new Russia-to-Europe gas pipeline bypassing Ukraine could be built mostly in Russian waters. There is an option of laying part of it through Crimea, or very close to its coast, cutting the costs of construction and operation.
When the European Union, to punish Russia, put the South Stream project on hold, Putin just scrapped the whole thing, flew to Turkey, and negotiated an alternative: an undersea pipeline taking Russian gas to the Turkish border with Greece. With a planned annual capacity of 63 billion cubic meters, the project was christened Turkish Stream.[25]
Putin’s geopolitical rationale had been based on the premise that although Turkey is a NATO country, it is thoroughly un-Western, and in the previous decade progressively anti-Western. That is still true, but Turkey became Russia’s enemy the moment Moscow intervened militarily in the Syrian conflict, and the Turkish Stream project stalled.
In the meantime, Gazprom agreed to buy out the Western companies that had signed up for the aborted South Stream—Italian Eni, German Wintershall, and Electricité de France. The contractor to build the South Stream was the Italian company Saipem, and until the spring of 2015, Gazprom paid Saipem the costs of keeping its two enormous pipe-laying vessels in the Black Sea, idling at the Bulgarian port of Varna.[26]
To keep its energy monopoly in the Black Sea area, Moscow strongly discourages every attempt at developing fracking in Ukraine and Romania. In December 2014, Chevron backed out of a deal with a government-owned Ukrainian company to develop gas fracking in western Ukraine, negotiated a year earlier.[27] NATO’s secretary general at the time, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, believed that Moscow was underwriting Eastern European environmentalists’ anti-fracking campaigns: “I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.”[28]
Ninety-two United Nations member states refused to judge Russia’s actions in Crimea. The handful of countries that joined Russia in voting against the American-sponsored U.N. resolution to condemn the annexation were either perennially anti-American or eating from Moscow’s hand: Armenia, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. Their vote was to be expected. But among the countries that either abstained or did not vote were several third-world powerhouses and U.S. allies, including Afghanistan, Argentina, China, India, Iraq, Israel, and Pakistan. All were involved in territorial disputes with other countries; none wanted the West as an arbiter.
In Washington, support for Ukraine immediately became a bipartisan issue. On March 6, the House of Representatives approved $1 billion in financial aid to Kiev by a vote of 385 to 23. The White House introduced sanctions against Russia. Conservatives and liberals alike asked for an even stronger response. Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Robert Menendez demanded that Obama send weapons to Ukraine. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times urged the president to act preemptively and start rescuing another post-Soviet nation potentially facing Russian intervention—Moldova.[1]
Within weeks, the Moscow-supported “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk began battling Ukrainian forces. By March 2016, according to U.N. estimates, there were 9,160 deaths.[2]
Russian Volunteers
In neither Ukraine nor Russia are Donetsk and Luhansk referred to as “eastern Ukraine,” a broad term that is applicable to several additional provinces. The region is called Donbass.
Donbass stands for “Donetz Coal Basin”—the Donetz a river, and coal the essence of the local economy. Donbass is part of the steppes. It supported no urban centers before the Russian Empire secured it, and no significant towns until coal became an indispensable commodity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Almost every settlement was born as a mining town, and most remain mining towns today. The peak of development happened in the 1920s and 1930s. As a result, the foundations of Donbass social norms and human geography are neither Ukrainian nor Russian, but Soviet, formed by central planning serving the needs of industrialization. Migration of a skilled workforce, establishment of vocational and technical education, city planning—nothing was spontaneous. Donbass is a product of social engineering. Nowadays, its coal deposits depleted and heavy industry outdated, many towns of Donbass resemble former mill towns in the American Northeast: places where economic depression manifests itself in decay, unemployment, poverty, and anger.
The exact mechanism of the separatist insurgency in Donbass is still not known, but it was neither a grassroots revolution, as Moscow claims, nor a conspiracy cooked up in the Kremlin, as Kiev insists. The overthrown president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was from Donbass, and his ouster was a victory of Donbass’s nemesis—nationalist Galicia.
The whole of Ukraine was in turmoil between February and April of 2014, and at first, the rallies in Donbass did not look so different from those roaring in Lviv or Odessa. When pro-Russian activists in Donetsk and Luhansk proclaimed “people’s republics,” it sounded almost like comic relief. It took the Kremlin to turn a soap opera into a war.
It does not look as if Moscow planned the infiltration of eastern Ukraine as a smooth continuation of the expansion begun in Crimea. Nor was it attempting, as it is often argued, to create a land corridor to Crimea along the coast of the Sea of Azov. No Russian traffic there would ever be safe from Ukrainian paramilitary attacks. Most likely, Putin opted for the escalation because he was angered by the U.S. reaction to the “ascension” of Crimea into Russia, yet scornful of the first round of sanctions. Indeed, in the spring of 2014, they did not bite. Like a willful cat testing the limits of what he can get away with, the Russian leader supported the separatist insurgency with no endgame in mind except to further destabilize Ukraine. As Andrew S. Weiss put it, “Mr. Putin’s efforts look more like a short-term tactical play than a carefully considered embrace of an ethnocentric approach to defending Russia’s declared interests in the neighborhood”—and that was precisely what made the Ukraine showdown “even scarier and more dangerous.”[3]
It is not impossible that Putin also saw the stealth invasion as an opportunity to perfect the hybrid warfare first applied in Crimea, a novel stratagem blurring the lines between soft and hard power, already praised by Western military professionals. A former NATO commander, Admiral James G. Stavridis, said he admired the “finesse” of the campaign in Crimea and that the strategy was applicable “no matter where you are operating in the world.”[4]
The first important step was the decision to prompt Russian volunteers to organize through the Internet, set up recruiting sites and physical training camps and, last but not least, let them cross the Russo-Ukrainian border with weapons. Some of the most notorious volunteer commanders later claimed full responsibility for what happened next. “If my group had not crossed the border,” one of them boasted, there would have been no real fighting: “Just a few dozen killed, burned, arrested. That would have been all.”[5]
From the Ukrainian side, the “pro-government” forces also consisted largely of volunteers. The so-called volunteer battalions belonged to far-right groups and egomaniac millionaires. Azov Battalion, originating in the neo-Nazi movement, wore Waffen-SS symbols on its insignia. The billionaire Ihor Kolomoyski equipped the Dnipro Battalion.[6] And so on.
Radicals from Russia crossed into Donbass with ease. So did soldiers of fortune and sociopaths. Tim Whewell of the BBC described a grotesque mix of monarchists, secular nationalists, Orthodox mystics, and people who had signed up to “save the Russian state” from Western aggression. Aptly, Whewell reminded readers about the Russian tradition of volunteering abroad to protect Slavic “brethren”: in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, after the heroine dies, her lover Vronsky signs up to fight against the Turks in Serbia. In the 1990s, Russians fought alongside Serbs in the Yugoslav wars.
Other fighters were “clearly driven partly by an existentialist quest to give meaning to their lives,” reading Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre between battles. Because they all kept their mouths shut, it was impossible to tell whether a young man had joined the separatists “in search of money or adventure” or had been “ordered to Ukraine as part of an unofficial mission that will never be acknowledged,” an article in the New York Times Magazine reported.[7]
After Putin decided to have boots on the ground, military professionals arrived, bringing advanced weapons such as Buk surface-to-air missiles. It is unlikely that the Russian high command planned attacks or calculated strategic costs in Donbass. Most probably, it just made sure that the separatists had everything necessary to sustain their armies. The Kremlin stayed in the shadows, allowing the leaders of the two “people’s republics” every foolishness. The purpose was to keep the rebellion aflame.
At the end of 2014, New York Times correspondent Andrew Roth wrote: “The scale of destruction throughout the region is often breathtaking. Residential apartments bear craters from tank shells. Many places, especially smaller towns, lack basic utilities, like water and electricity. Power lines have been downed, mines flooded, substations incinerated and rail service halted.” The “minister” of building, architecture, and utilities of the Luhansk “People’s Republic,” plucked straight “from the trenches,” still sported a pistol on his hip. The regime imposed by the insurgents was a mixture of village justice, warlordism, and patriarchy. An attempt was made to prohibit single women from visiting bars and clubs.[8]
With Donbass, the Kremlin miscalculated. The annexation of Crimea had brought it only a slap on the wrist: Crimea was a disputed territory with a complicated past; the takeover had been bloodless. The insurgency in Donbass turned very bloody very early. The almost certainly accidental shooting down of a Malaysian plane in July 2014, by either separatists or the Russian military, epitomized the outrage felt around the world. The separatists obstructed the investigation while Moscow refused to acknowledge its presence in Donbass and blamed the Ukrainian air force. After that, sanctions against Russia began to hit at the very heart of the Russian economy—its energy sector and the banks sustaining it. Later in the year, Putin officially announced that Russia was in recession; he urged his compatriots to tighten their belts.[9] He wouldn’t admit the presence of Russian military personnel in Donbass until December 2015.[10]
In the wake of the annexation of Crimea and war in Donbass, Russia experienced an upsurge of jingoism and xenophobia, both spontaneous and Kremlin-propagated. The consequences are bound to be extensive: the unleashed aggression targets not just Ukraine or the West but virtually any group the Russian patriotic majority chooses to see as the Other—including domestic liberal opposition and every minority.
Referring to previous coups in the near abroad—in Georgia and Kirgizstan as well as Ukraine—Putin declared that the world could now see “what tragic consequences the wave of the so-called color revolutions has led to. …We have to do all that is needed to ensure that similar things never happen in Russia.” His foreign minister seconded that: “The West is making clear it does not want to force Russia to change policy but wants to secure regime change.”[11]
In December 2014, Russia officially adopted a new military strategy. The list of threats to Russia now included NATO “moving closer” to Russia’s borders; political coups in neighboring countries and the installment of anti-Russian regimes there; and destabilization of Russia to promote “violent regime change.”[12] The last accusation had not been heard from the Kremlin since the Stalin era.
By nurturing the insurgency in Donbass, Putin gambled with Russia’s future in more ways than one. Unleashing the vengeful rabble was perhaps worse than losing standing with the great powers of the West. When, at some point, the Russian street turns its attention to corrupt administrators in Russia, the rioters are likely to use the same methods Russian volunteers used in Donbass: lynching, looting, killing. The tiger has tasted blood, and as Alexander Pushkin put it two centuries ago, God forbid one should ever witness a Russian rebellion, “senseless and merciless.”[13]
Ukraine as a Failed State
By unleashing war in Donbass, Putin foolishly jeopardized the future of his regime, or “managed democracy” as his ideologues call it. But the other side in the conflict, Ukraine, simply collapsed as a state.
A state fails when it loses (in Max Weber’s famous formulation) its monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force on its territory. The Ukrainian state has done that, and now also meets all the other criteria of a failed state: massive movement of refugees and domestically displaced persons, vengeance-seeking group grievance, the rise of factionalized elites, and the intervention of external actors.[14]
The movement of refugees and displaced persons is the largest in Europe since World War II; as of August 2015, according to United Nations data, at least 1.3 million people had been “internally displaced” within Ukraine, and 900,000 had fled abroad, mostly to Russia.[15]
“External actors”—Russia and NATO—were fighting a proxy war in Donbass. Vengeance-seeking groups enjoyed the support of about 5 percent of Ukrainian voters, but their influence was so disproportionately big that the failure of democracy in Ukraine was hard to dispute. David Stern of the BBC wrote that because no one in Kiev wanted to “provide fuel to the Russian propaganda machine,” the presence of the far right in positions of authority went unmentioned. Meanwhile, according to Stern, commanders of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion were close to the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior; one of them was named police chief of the Kiev region. After the Maidan uprising, the crime rate throughout Ukraine increased by 40 percent, military and police arsenals had been looted, and more weapons came from eastern Ukraine. In August 2015, members of another right-wing party, Oleh Tyahnybok’s Svoboda, clashed with police in front of the parliament building in Kiev, killing three servicemen.[16]
Within a year, the power of warlords spread beyond the war zone. In July 2015, a Right Sector battalion clashed with government forces in the town of Mukachevo in western Ukraine. The fighting originated in a business dispute over trade in contraband cigarettes: Mukachevo sat on Ukraine’s border with Hungary. Several people died; the weapons used included machine guns and grenade launchers.[17]
In 2015, more than forty private battalions existed in Ukraine. Besides Donetsk and Luhansk, several other areas were controlled by warlords. Among the most colorful was Ihor Kolomoysky, an oligarch commanding at least $3 billion, and a citizen of three countries—Ukraine, Cyprus, and Israel—who spent at least $10 million to create the Dnipro Battalion. He called Putin a “schizophrenic of short stature.” Putin returned the compliment by calling him a “unique crook.”[18]
The war in the east has been too bloody, too ugly, and too dishonest on both sides for any Ukrainian national unity to be feasible. Even after the bloodshed eventually ends, Ukraine will likely never be able to return to its 2013 borders.
Since the coup in February 2014, Ukraine has conducted two elections. In the first, held in May 2014, Petro Poroshenko won the presidency with 54.7 percent of the votes; the leader of the Orange Revolution of 2004, Yulia Tymoshenko, came in a distant second with 12.8 percent. In the October 2014 parliamentary election, six parties got into the new Rada, the winners being Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front, with 22.1 percent of the vote, and President Poroshenko’s party, somewhat tellingly called just Petro Poroshenko Bloc, with 21.8 percent. The Yatsenyuk-Poroshenko alliance began to crumble almost immediately. The government formed in November 2014 included three foreigners, one of whom could neither speak nor understand Ukrainian. The post of the minister of finance went to the American investment banker Natalie Jaresco, whose only qualifications for the job seemed to be Ukrainian roots and past employment with the U.S. Department of State. In May 2015, Poroshenko equally inexplicably appointed the former president of the Republic of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, as the governor of Odessa Province.[19]
With each faction accusing others of corruption, the infighting mounted, resulting in ugly public brawls in the parliament and cabinet meetings. To Moscow’s immense satisfaction, in February 2016 the Poroshenko-Yatsenyuk coalition collapsed.
All sides in the escalating power struggle appealed to the Ukrainian street, making another violent insurgency possible. Two years since Maidan, Ukraine had more factions and more fanaticism, and its prospects for nation-building were in decline. Putin’s Kremlin couldn’t be happier with the results.
Ukraine may be turning into another Yugoslavia, a young state that cannot survive except as a dictatorship. Both Ukraine and Yugoslavia belong to the category of artificial entities formed by foreign leaders: Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Ukraine by Lenin in 1922. In both countries, people spoke a spectrum of dialects, the official language a sort of linguistic median. Both were also divided along religious and cultural lines. Iosip Broz Tito held Yugoslavia together; a viceroy appointed by Moscow did that for Ukraine. But absent its strongman and outside a Cold War context, Yugoslavia was not a coherent nation. Neither is Ukraine, and this is the ultimate cause of the present civil war.
Peace in Ukraine at the initial, promising stage of nation-building between 1991 and 2013 was made possible by the precarious balancing act of all four of its presidents, including the “pro-Western” Yushchenko and the “pro-Russian” Yanukovych. The February 2014 coup (call it a revolution if it makes you feel better) threw the country off balance, and the submerged interregional tensions surfaced with a boom.
A Russian Lake
On December 4, 2014, in his equivalent of the State of the Union address, Putin summed up the party line on Crimea. As befits a national fetish, the language he applied to the annexed territory was metaphysical. Referring to the semi-legendary baptism of Prince Vladimir in Chersonesus, he called Crimea the “spiritual foundation” of the Russian state. For Russia, Putin announced, Crimea had “an enormous civilizational and sacral meaning. Just like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for those who practice Islam or Judaism.”[20]
The allusion was new, idiosyncratic, and strange. For starters, clashes over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem have become an epitome of an unending conflict. Perhaps appropriately, the first federal investment in Crimean sacral grounds was an army group. Tanks and armored vehicles were ferried across the Kerch Strait with praiseworthy efficiency, up to fifty a day—an accomplishment given the sad state of the ferries.
In November 2014, the Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed that it had deployed a squadron of thirty jet fighters to Belbek air base. NATO’s commander, General Philip Breedlove, in Kiev at the time, said that the ongoing Russian “militarization” of Crimea would have an effect on “almost the entire Black Sea.”[21] In the 1950s–1960s, Taiwan was called the unsinkable U.S. aircraft carrier. Was Crimea about to become Russia’s aircraft carrier?
The annexation of Crimea has changed the balance of power in the Black Sea. Under the terms of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982, Russia now claims an exclusive economic zone along the peninsula’s coastline—an avenue for underwater pipelines and a repository of fossil fuels. Ukraine, dispossessed, is losing its role as a transit corridor between Russia and Europe.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet had been stationed in Crimea before, as were some Russian air force units. With the annexation, the air force presence expanded; Russian ground troops, tanks, and armored personnel carriers arrived; the Russian military established a new army group on the peninsula. Russian ground troops now surround Ukraine from the north, east, and south. Just 450 miles separate the army groups in Crimea from those in Bryansk, across Ukraine’s northern border. If they advanced simultaneously, the two could touch in central Ukraine within days. Along the Black Sea coast, the shipbuilding facilities of Ukrainian Mykolaiv are just 100 miles away from the Russian army group in Crimea; Odessa is 75 miles farther west; 25 miles more, and one is in Moldova.
With Russia having gained in the strategic balance, the influence of every other Black Sea nation, including Turkey, has shrunk. The United States and NATO have lost some of their clout in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. To make this clear, in May 2015 Russia and China held their first joint naval exercises in the Mediterranean.
As the naval base at Sevastopol had been the focal point of the Russian Crimea myth and a major goal of the annexation rush, now the Black Sea Fleet found itself the center of attention. It also found a new role: intimidating every other Black Sea nation, as none is Russia’s friend. Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania are NATO members; Ukraine and Georgia have begged for membership. Another mission became Russian warships’ regular visits to Syria, bringing arms to Moscow’s friend Bashar al-Assad.
But contrary to the patriotic Russian myth, the Black Sea has never been a Russian lake, and despite the fears of Russia’s neighbors, it will likely never be one. For two centuries, Russia has been the dominant naval power in the basin, but it is Turkey, not Russia, that determines the net balance. The Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles, collectively known in European diplomacy as the Straits, belong to Turkey, and it is up to Turkey alone to determine who will have access to the Black Sea and on what conditions. All other Black Sea countries are in the situation of a homeowner whose driveway is separated from the turnpike by somebody else’s property.
Globally, the Straits are not as important as the Suez and Panama canals, or Gibraltar. Those three serve every seafaring nation; the Straits serve only the Black Sea countries. Yet they are a lifeline for Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, and Ukraine, their only oceanic connection. To that, add the landlocked nations of the Caucasus—Armenia and Azerbaijan—and also the five “stans” of post-Soviet Central Asia. Russia’s Eurasian coastline is immense, but the Black Sea coast is the only one that is ice-free year round. Close the Straits, and Russian commerce will suffocate. Open the Straits to powers at war with Russia, and the Russian navy will bleed.
In the Crimean War, Turkey turned the Straits into a highway for the British and French navies. In World War I, it let its ally, Germany, send cruisers into the Black Sea, largely incapacitating the Russian fleet there. In World War II, Ankara refused to let Germans and Italians in, thus saving the Soviets from losing the south.[22]
The international treaty regulating the Straits—the Montreux Convention of 1936—allows Turkey to close them to all foreign warships in times of war or when threatened by aggression. It may refuse access to the merchant ships of nations with which it is at war. In peacetime, all civilian vessels are guaranteed free passage “by day and by night, under any flag with any kind of cargo.” The transit of naval vessels is regulated, and the passage of naval ships not belonging to the Black Sea nations is heavily restricted. Outsiders’ warships must be under 15,000 tons, the guns they carry under 203 millimeters. No one, including the Black Sea nations, may send an aircraft carrier through the Straits.
These provisions have been charged with conflict from the day the convention was signed. After 1945, wanting uninhibited access to the Mediterranean, Stalin demanded that Ankara cede him “joint ownership” of the Straits. That strategic pressure led U.S. president Harry Truman in 1947 to proclaim the Truman Doctrine, in which he pledged support of every nation threatened by the USSR, a move many historians consider to have launched the Cold War. Though universal in its wording, the Truman Doctrine was specifically crafted to protect Turkey and its Mediterranean neighbor Greece.
Grudgingly, the Soviets caved in. To evade the ban on aircraft carriers, they designated the only two they had—the Kiev and the Admiral Kuznetsov—as “aircraft carrying cruisers.” They usually passed through the Bosporus at night; Orhan Pamuk writes in his Istanbul memoir: “A great hulk, growing larger and larger as it rose from the pitch-dark sea and approached the closest hill—the hill from which I was watching—this was a colossus, a leviathan, in shape and size a specter from my worst nightmares, a Soviet warship!—rising out of the night and the mist as if in a fairy tale, a vast floating fortress.”[23]
NATO had to use semantic evasions as well. In the 1960s, when the United States started sending ships armed with 305-millimeter missiles into the Black Sea, the Soviet Union complained that this violated the 203-millimeter limit. NATO responded by saying that the Montreux Convention did not mention missiles, only guns. The superpowers’ semantic dodging was a Cold War equivalent of the joke about the priest who, when reproached for eating a chicken on a Friday, christened it a fish.
With the annexation of Crimea, Russian share of control over the region spiked. The Ukrainian navy—or what was left of it—evacuated to Odessa. Another, indirect victim of the annexation was the Republic of Georgia. In 2008, Russia and Georgia fought a short war with lasting consequences. Georgia has strong NATO aspirations and had sided with Ukraine against Russia in the past. The Russian annexation moved Ukraine so far west that military cooperation between Tbilisi and Kiev is now all but impossible. For Russia, the acquisition of Crimea makes every hostile act against Georgia—intelligence collecting, sea traffic blockade, or military strikes—infinitely easier. If Russia ever lays siege to Ukrainian and Georgian ports, that may be the end of sovereignty for both. Russian strategists undoubtedly want as much control over the Black Sea as the United States holds over the Caribbean.
The worst-case strategic scenario for Russia on the Black Sea would be the closure of the Straits to Russian vessels, paired with foreign naval intervention—in other words, the repetition of the Crimean War and World War I. For that to happen, Turkey must be at war with Russia, a scenario hard to imagine only a year ago, but not totally unthinkable now, since the two powers clashed over Syria.
Also, Russia’s adversaries do not even need Turkey’s cooperation to block the Straits at their southern end, at the Dardanelles in the Mediterranean. Position a naval force in international waters there, and the hostile fleet will stop all the Russian traffic. This may turn out to be the way to impose the severest sanctions on the Russian economy.
Energy
If there is one achievement that Vladimir Putin can be truly proud of, it would be a series of carefully engineered victories in energy wars. Crimea is a monumental foothold in that battle.
According to the Convention on the Law of the Sea, coastal states “have sovereign rights” in a 200-nautical-mile “exclusive economic zone” where they own the natural resources on the sea floor. The annexation of Crimea has added 36,000 square miles to Russia’s exclusive economic maritime zone in the basin, more than tripling its size.[24]
There are gas fields in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Until recently, these reserves did not seem terribly important: the Ukrainian company that owned and developed the fields, Chernomorneftegaz, accounted for just 5 percent of Ukraine’s energy production. In the past few years, however, there have been reports suggesting large fossil fuel fields in the basin.
As in Marco Polo’s time, today the Black Sea is again the terminus of a transcontinental route—this time not for silk but for gas. With the annexation, a new Russia-to-Europe gas pipeline bypassing Ukraine could be built mostly in Russian waters. There is an option of laying part of it through Crimea, or very close to its coast, cutting the costs of construction and operation.
When the European Union, to punish Russia, put the South Stream project on hold, Putin just scrapped the whole thing, flew to Turkey, and negotiated an alternative: an undersea pipeline taking Russian gas to the Turkish border with Greece. With a planned annual capacity of 63 billion cubic meters, the project was christened Turkish Stream.[25]
Putin’s geopolitical rationale had been based on the premise that although Turkey is a NATO country, it is thoroughly un-Western, and in the previous decade progressively anti-Western. That is still true, but Turkey became Russia’s enemy the moment Moscow intervened militarily in the Syrian conflict, and the Turkish Stream project stalled.
In the meantime, Gazprom agreed to buy out the Western companies that had signed up for the aborted South Stream—Italian Eni, German Wintershall, and Electricité de France. The contractor to build the South Stream was the Italian company Saipem, and until the spring of 2015, Gazprom paid Saipem the costs of keeping its two enormous pipe-laying vessels in the Black Sea, idling at the Bulgarian port of Varna.[26]
To keep its energy monopoly in the Black Sea area, Moscow strongly discourages every attempt at developing fracking in Ukraine and Romania. In December 2014, Chevron backed out of a deal with a government-owned Ukrainian company to develop gas fracking in western Ukraine, negotiated a year earlier.[27] NATO’s secretary general at the time, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, believed that Moscow was underwriting Eastern European environmentalists’ anti-fracking campaigns: “I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.”[28]
EIGHT
#CrimeaIsOurs
After the annexation, the Russian middle class fell into a strange euphoria, turning a blind eye to the diplomatic, financial, and political costs of Putin’s Crimean Reconquista. Flights to the peninsula were overbooked: people felt moved to support the region’s economy. #CrimeaIsOurs became the hashtag of Russian social networks.
Basking in popularity, Putin interpreted the future of Crimea casually, giving simple answers to difficult questions. Russia had just developed Sochi, with its expensive hotels empty since the 2014 Winter Olympics; now it had to fill another resort in the face of the world’s disapproval. Putin dismissed the problem, saying that Sochi would be for the “moneyed” and Crimea for the “ordinary people.” Plans were made to open casinos, to turn Crimea into a Russian Las Vegas. But very quickly, Crimeans realized that the bright future promised by Moscow was far away, if it was to come at all.
Economy
The peninsula got 80 percent of its electricity and 85 percent of its water from Ukraine. Now Kiev retaliated. Power outages plunged Crimean towns into darkness. Ukraine shut down the North Crimea Canal, which supplied the peninsula with Dnieper River water, effectively killing large-scale agriculture in the region. Crimea had gotten nearly 90 percent of its imports by rail. The railroads, naturally, passed through Ukraine, and now shut down.[1]
The Kerch Straits crossing had been better served in Marco Polo’s time. Ferries were few. Moscow either had not foreseen the closure of the land route to Crimea or decided travelers would put up with hardship. Regular closures of ferries because of inclement weather were a Kerch staple, but they had never been more than an inconvenience. Now, whenever a hurricane-force northeaster shut down traffic for five days in a row, it was a problem. Fistfights flared up; truck drivers mutinied, blocking the landing altogether.[2]
Crimeans found themselves on an island—shipwrecked.
On the eve of the annexation, in December 2013, out of 2.3 million Crimeans, only 251,000 were employed. Even those with jobs were, as I mentioned, the worst-paid workers in Europe. Technically, Crimea should have been considered a catastrophe, with each working person supporting eight dependents, and on the scantiest of wages. But things in the post-Soviet space are rarely what they seem. Since 1991, Crimea had grown a robust shadow economy serving 6 million tourists a year: rooms for rent, food stalls, guided tours, escorts, illicit substances, all bought with cash. At least 70 percent of hotels, hostels, and vacation rentals operated in the shadow economy. Obviously, none of their revenues reached the treasury in taxes. Kiev subsidized 52 percent of Crimea’s budget.[3]
Putin had doubled Crimeans’ pensions and state employees’ salaries, but most workers nevertheless took a hit. First, small businesses were now taxed (registering all rentals had become mandatory), and although Russia was hardly a paragon of law-abidance and its taxation rate is among the lowest in the world, this was a loss for entrepreneurs spoiled by Kiev’s lenience. Second, despite the patriotic fever in mainland Russia, in the summer of 2014 Crimea got barely half of its typical tourist flow: it was a conflict zone, its transportation link to the mainland had been severed, and so had its water and energy supplies. Three million tourists visited, versus 5.9 million in 2013. These numbers failed to improve during the 2015 season.[4]
There are only a handful of established businesses on the peninsula. Crimea’s tourism sector had failed to develop into an industry, first because of the overcentralized management from Kiev and Moscow, then because of the chaos of the transition period with its gangster privatization and consequent random takeovers. Environmental degradation had undermined the fisheries; the famed Black Sea oysters became all but extinct, eaten by a stowaway Pacific mollusk that had arrived on ship bottoms in the 1950s, the Sea of Azov sturgeon overfished by poachers. Crimean agriculture still harvests the follies of central planning. Growing rice in Crimean steppes inherently prone to droughts proved ultimately unsustainable. A noxious profitable plant tobacco, when grown on Crimean plantations, is just noxious: apparently, its quality has not improved one tiny bit since the 1850s, when Leo Tolstoy complained about its disgusting taste in his Sevastopol diary.[5]
One of the few reputable enterprises is Massandra Winery, founded in 1894, some say at the behest of Tsar Nicholas II. The “reunification” made Massandra workers so happy that they painted a forklift with the colors of the Russian flag, but it did little for the winery’s sales. Massandra wines are about as popular on world markets as Scottish haggis. They belong to the category of fortified wines—sherry, port, madeira, drinks whose heyday is long past and whose very limited connoisseur market is largely owned by Portugal and Spain. Energized by what they saw as new opportunities, the Massandra winemakers announced that their product was special because it was fortified with beetroot ethanol, not grape brandy like in Europe. But instead of getting showered with orders from London and New York, their sales in Russia plummeted: Russian epicures were horrified to discover that all those decades they had been drinking glorified moonshine. Within a year, Crimean wine sales were off by 61 percent.[6]
Crimean agriculture plummeted as well. Irrigation, credit, and exports became difficult, if not impossible to secure. The leader of the Crimea Farmers Association dryly commented: “On a scale of one to five, we are at negative three.”[7]
Moscow recklessly sanctioned the reapportioning of property on the peninsula. According to a recent New York Times correspondent’s estimate, more than $1 billion in “real estate and other assets have been stripped from their former owners,” including “banks, hotels, shipyards, farms, gas stations.” The victims of confiscation maintain that the Crimean government received “carte blanche” from Moscow to fund its budget by whatever means available. Calling the confiscations “nationalization,” the authorities focused on property belonging to Ukrainians—both oligarchs and small businesses—but Russian-owned enterprises were not necessarily spared. “Nationalization” of that kind heralds a long period of seizure of the spoils of annexation, with economic growth the least of anyone’s worries.[8]
Violating E.U. sanctions, on September 17, 2014, the Greek cruise liner Ocean Majesty, chartered by a German tourist agency, dropped anchor at Yalta. As the first European ship to visit the peninsula since the annexation, it caused a media splash. Only 330 of the 436 tourists on board dared to go ashore. But the visit did not augur a return to normalcy: in December 2014, the European Union imposed a ban on E.U. cruise ships visiting Crimean ports.[9]
The new set of sanctions was aimed not at Russia but at Crimea. European businesses were prohibited from investing in or trading with the peninsula. Energy and telecommunications deals were specifically prohibited. In a coordinated move, a day later the White House also introduced sanctions against the peninsula. President Obama said the goal was “to provide clarity to U.S. corporations doing business in the region and reaffirm that the United States will not accept Russia’s occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea.” The U.S. Treasury Department placed new restrictions on Crimean companies and individuals supporting the separatist cause. Among the latter were members of the Night Wolves motorcycle group, who had been prominent during the takeover. Predictably, that had the Sevastopol bikers howling with joy about the free publicity and mockingly challenging the U.S. government to punish them more.[10]
The local and regional elections in Crimea and Sevastopol in September 2014 could not be dismissed as a sham. The results were real, and they demonstrated continuing support for Moscow and Putin. The turnout was 53.6 percent, which was very high: city elections held in Moscow the same day saw turnout of just 20.2 percent. Twelve parties had participated in the campaign, but only two won any seats. Out of 75 new members of the Crimean State Council, 70 represented Putin’s United Russia party, and 5 were from the right-wing party known as LDPR. Again, the Crimea proved far more conservative than the capital, where United Russia won only 28 seats out of 45 and the LDPR 1.[11]
The majority of Crimean Tatars boycotted the vote.
Kirim
So far, Crimea has been spared the horrors of the civil war—by good luck rather than good management. Meanwhile, the socioeconomic plunge Crimea is taking promises social unrest. And then there is the Tatar “problem.”
Because Tatars returned to Crimea in the 1990s as squatters, they are now required to “renegotiate” lease and property rights with the Russian government—a road to immense abuse and predictable injustice. The founders of the Crimean Tatar national movement plainly refuse to participate in the Russian state in any manner. In retaliation, Russian authorities have banned their leader, Mustafa Dzhemilev, from Crimea. They have also threatened to end the “dual power” on the peninsula if the Tatars’ legislative bodies, the Qurultai and Mejlis, refuse to recognize the annexation. Meanwhile, Moscow promoted a loyalist Tatar movement, Kirim, led by Remzi Ilyasov, a former vice-chairman of Mejlis. With Crimean Tatars, Putin was attempting what Americans had been trying to achieve in Afghanistan and Iraq for over a decade: foster a friendly force.
Exiled to Kiev, Dzhemilev responded to Moscow’s threats by saying that if they were carried out, he would take Tatar power structures underground. Until then, he pointed out, the struggle of the Tatars had been executed by peaceful means; now all options were on the table.[12]
Dzhemilev’s Russian opponents do not appear to understand how incredibly lucky they are that he is the Crimean Tatar leader. For twenty years, he has been restraining the radicals within the movement. Nor do the Russians seem to acknowledge that an intercommunal conflict spreads like wildfire. It does not take many hotheads to turn a territory into a Beirut or a Sarajevo.
There is evidence that some Crimean Tatars have gone to Syria to join ISIS. As early as May 2014, a Crimean Tatar military commander in Syria, Andul Karim Krymsky [of Krym], addressed compatriots on the peninsula in a video, arguing that the West was not going to save them and advocating armed struggle against Russians instead. Yet when the pro-Russian mufti Ruslan Saitvaliev announced at a press conference that five hundred Crimean Tatars were already fighting for ISIS, that was most likely a gross exaggeration. Meanwhile, for the authorities, the ISIS specter became the pretext to arrest Tatar activists indiscriminately.[13]
In Crimea, ISIS is more or less an imagined influence. In Turkey, not so. Crimea used to be part of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey is now a staunch supporter of Crimean Tatars. Under Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP (Justice and Development party), Turkey is redefining its cultural identity and regional role. Shunned by the European Union and feeling used by NATO, it is moving away from Europe. Crimea is part of its legacy, and some Tatar communities in Anatolia formed by nineteenth-century Crimean exiles are still in place.
The Russian annexation brought Crimea back on to Turkey’s national agenda; in 2015–2016, Russian bombings of Syria, a country Turkey considers its backyard, made Turkish mainstream opinion firmly anti-Russian.
A rose is a rose under any other name, but a nation is not. To claim nationhood, the group has to shed its dual identity—“Crimean” and “Tatar”—and forge a single unambiguous face. “Crimean Tatar” implies the existence of a bigger Tatar nation, linking Crimean Tatars to the Tatars of Volga, Central Asia, and Siberia. Clearly, this reading undermines their claim on Crimea. It makes them another part of the peninsula’s population, like Crimean Russians or Crimean Greeks.
As a centerpiece of their nation-building, Dzhemilev and his fellow leaders emphasize that “Crimean Tatars” are not a branch of the general Tatar population but a unique people, a merging of Mongol, Kipchak, Goth, Greek and other groups, the sum of the peninsula’s history, not a mere particle of it.[14]
That this reading of history is a recent construct does not undermine its validity. The tricky (and dangerous) part is defining the endgame. Let’s assume that the Kirim concept gets accepted by the Tatars and their neighbors: the Kirim are the sum of every indigenous people of Crimea of the past two or three millennia. Where do they go from there? An independent Kirim state is not a realistic option. The majority of the Crimean Tatar diaspora remains in Central Asia, Turkey, and the Balkans, with no plans of ever resettling in Crimea. Even if the entire diaspora moved back (and such a move were economically sustainable), they would still be a minority in today’s Crimea.
If Tatars ever develop a true national liberation movement, it will be a disaster for all involved. Crimea would turn into another Bosnia, except that instead of fighting a small, weak state like Serbia, the Crimean Tatars would be up against the much more powerful Russia.
Another dangerous scenario would be Ukraine trying to reclaim the peninsula by force. This would be a foolish move. Strategically, Crimea is an island, and thus difficult to seize; a Russian retaliatory strike would most likely take their troops to Nikolayev and Odessa; and the crisis could end with the whole Ukrainian Black Sea coast becoming another “people’s republic” under Moscow’s patronage. Nor is there much reason to believe that the majority of Crimeans would support reunification with Ukraine. Yet “restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty in Crimea” has found its way on the agenda of some powerful private foreign policy institutions in the United States, such as the Atlantic Council and Freedom House.[15]
In 1786, the British socialite and writer Elizabeth Craven reported: “The Crimea might with great ease be made an island.” In 1979, the Soviet writer Vasily Aksyonov wrote a novel called The Island of Crimea that became an instant samizdat bestseller. It took a counterfactual approach to history, exploiting a real occurrence: during the Civil War, in 1920, Crimea became the last stronghold of the Whites. Had Britain, France, and the United States provided the support the White commanders begged for, Crimea could have seceded and become an alternative to the Soviet Union, a Russian Taiwan. In the novel, a twenty-two-year old British lieutenant, Richard Bayley-Land, aboard the dreadnaught Liverpool opens artillery fire on the Reds storming the Perekop, triggering a chain of events that leads to victory for the Whites. (Interviewed by the reporters, the sly, aristocratic, and hard-drinking Bayley-Land insists he did it “just for fun.”)[16]
Aksyonov’s novel articulated a historically Crimean trend: the peninsula’s tendency to break away from bigger entities. The Crimean independence movement is not exactly around the corner, but it is in the making. There is, for example, a concept of Crimea as “testing grounds of a new common Eurasian culture.” And the peninsula is becoming multicultural again. As early as the 1990s, minority groups included 2,794 Armenians; 2,166 Bulgarians, 3,000 Greeks, 17,000 Jews, 898 Karaims, 900 Krymchaks, and 3,000 Germans.[17]
The “reunification” with Russia has brought the people of Crimea nothing but grief. By 2016, power supplies from Ukraine had stopped completely, and blackouts became the new norm. Schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, cinemas, government offices—all got electricity and heating only sporadically. With streetlights off, driving turned hazardous. The most expensive restaurants in Yalta advertised as places where one could get warm (they had reserve generators, or so the ads claimed).
Destitution of such magnitude hadn’t been seen on the peninsula since World War II. Wolves, extinct in Crimea in the twentieth century, returned (they had crossed the Sea of Azov on ice), and were spotted in towns foraging for food. As I am writing this, the City of Russian Glory, Sevastopol, is considering ordering pharmacies to start selling medications by the pill.
In two years since the annexation, the Kremlin had done nothing for the population. Only when the blackouts peaked at the end of 2015 did Moscow order the construction of the so-called “energy bridge”—simply put, an underwater cable bringing electricity to Crimea from the mainland across the Kerch Strait. Incidentally, no Russian company was ready to build at such short notice, and the Kremlin had to hire a Chinese contractor. A real bridge across the Kerch Strait, promised to Crimeans since day one of the annexation, is still in its prenatal stage.
All of this—sudden deprivation, Moscow’s indifference, inept, corrupt local government—breed new political activism on the peninsula. It must be said that returning to Ukraine is not a realistic option—at least not until the Ukrainian state is strong enough to curtail the power of the right-wing paramilitary forces, which would be only too happy to descend on Crimea looking for violent revenge.
If (when?) Crimea finds itself in a position to secede, the position of the United States will be crucial. So will be the choices Americans will be forced to make.
After the annexation, the Russian middle class fell into a strange euphoria, turning a blind eye to the diplomatic, financial, and political costs of Putin’s Crimean Reconquista. Flights to the peninsula were overbooked: people felt moved to support the region’s economy. #CrimeaIsOurs became the hashtag of Russian social networks.
Basking in popularity, Putin interpreted the future of Crimea casually, giving simple answers to difficult questions. Russia had just developed Sochi, with its expensive hotels empty since the 2014 Winter Olympics; now it had to fill another resort in the face of the world’s disapproval. Putin dismissed the problem, saying that Sochi would be for the “moneyed” and Crimea for the “ordinary people.” Plans were made to open casinos, to turn Crimea into a Russian Las Vegas. But very quickly, Crimeans realized that the bright future promised by Moscow was far away, if it was to come at all.
Economy
The peninsula got 80 percent of its electricity and 85 percent of its water from Ukraine. Now Kiev retaliated. Power outages plunged Crimean towns into darkness. Ukraine shut down the North Crimea Canal, which supplied the peninsula with Dnieper River water, effectively killing large-scale agriculture in the region. Crimea had gotten nearly 90 percent of its imports by rail. The railroads, naturally, passed through Ukraine, and now shut down.[1]
The Kerch Straits crossing had been better served in Marco Polo’s time. Ferries were few. Moscow either had not foreseen the closure of the land route to Crimea or decided travelers would put up with hardship. Regular closures of ferries because of inclement weather were a Kerch staple, but they had never been more than an inconvenience. Now, whenever a hurricane-force northeaster shut down traffic for five days in a row, it was a problem. Fistfights flared up; truck drivers mutinied, blocking the landing altogether.[2]
Crimeans found themselves on an island—shipwrecked.
On the eve of the annexation, in December 2013, out of 2.3 million Crimeans, only 251,000 were employed. Even those with jobs were, as I mentioned, the worst-paid workers in Europe. Technically, Crimea should have been considered a catastrophe, with each working person supporting eight dependents, and on the scantiest of wages. But things in the post-Soviet space are rarely what they seem. Since 1991, Crimea had grown a robust shadow economy serving 6 million tourists a year: rooms for rent, food stalls, guided tours, escorts, illicit substances, all bought with cash. At least 70 percent of hotels, hostels, and vacation rentals operated in the shadow economy. Obviously, none of their revenues reached the treasury in taxes. Kiev subsidized 52 percent of Crimea’s budget.[3]
Putin had doubled Crimeans’ pensions and state employees’ salaries, but most workers nevertheless took a hit. First, small businesses were now taxed (registering all rentals had become mandatory), and although Russia was hardly a paragon of law-abidance and its taxation rate is among the lowest in the world, this was a loss for entrepreneurs spoiled by Kiev’s lenience. Second, despite the patriotic fever in mainland Russia, in the summer of 2014 Crimea got barely half of its typical tourist flow: it was a conflict zone, its transportation link to the mainland had been severed, and so had its water and energy supplies. Three million tourists visited, versus 5.9 million in 2013. These numbers failed to improve during the 2015 season.[4]
There are only a handful of established businesses on the peninsula. Crimea’s tourism sector had failed to develop into an industry, first because of the overcentralized management from Kiev and Moscow, then because of the chaos of the transition period with its gangster privatization and consequent random takeovers. Environmental degradation had undermined the fisheries; the famed Black Sea oysters became all but extinct, eaten by a stowaway Pacific mollusk that had arrived on ship bottoms in the 1950s, the Sea of Azov sturgeon overfished by poachers. Crimean agriculture still harvests the follies of central planning. Growing rice in Crimean steppes inherently prone to droughts proved ultimately unsustainable. A noxious profitable plant tobacco, when grown on Crimean plantations, is just noxious: apparently, its quality has not improved one tiny bit since the 1850s, when Leo Tolstoy complained about its disgusting taste in his Sevastopol diary.[5]
One of the few reputable enterprises is Massandra Winery, founded in 1894, some say at the behest of Tsar Nicholas II. The “reunification” made Massandra workers so happy that they painted a forklift with the colors of the Russian flag, but it did little for the winery’s sales. Massandra wines are about as popular on world markets as Scottish haggis. They belong to the category of fortified wines—sherry, port, madeira, drinks whose heyday is long past and whose very limited connoisseur market is largely owned by Portugal and Spain. Energized by what they saw as new opportunities, the Massandra winemakers announced that their product was special because it was fortified with beetroot ethanol, not grape brandy like in Europe. But instead of getting showered with orders from London and New York, their sales in Russia plummeted: Russian epicures were horrified to discover that all those decades they had been drinking glorified moonshine. Within a year, Crimean wine sales were off by 61 percent.[6]
Crimean agriculture plummeted as well. Irrigation, credit, and exports became difficult, if not impossible to secure. The leader of the Crimea Farmers Association dryly commented: “On a scale of one to five, we are at negative three.”[7]
Moscow recklessly sanctioned the reapportioning of property on the peninsula. According to a recent New York Times correspondent’s estimate, more than $1 billion in “real estate and other assets have been stripped from their former owners,” including “banks, hotels, shipyards, farms, gas stations.” The victims of confiscation maintain that the Crimean government received “carte blanche” from Moscow to fund its budget by whatever means available. Calling the confiscations “nationalization,” the authorities focused on property belonging to Ukrainians—both oligarchs and small businesses—but Russian-owned enterprises were not necessarily spared. “Nationalization” of that kind heralds a long period of seizure of the spoils of annexation, with economic growth the least of anyone’s worries.[8]
Violating E.U. sanctions, on September 17, 2014, the Greek cruise liner Ocean Majesty, chartered by a German tourist agency, dropped anchor at Yalta. As the first European ship to visit the peninsula since the annexation, it caused a media splash. Only 330 of the 436 tourists on board dared to go ashore. But the visit did not augur a return to normalcy: in December 2014, the European Union imposed a ban on E.U. cruise ships visiting Crimean ports.[9]
The new set of sanctions was aimed not at Russia but at Crimea. European businesses were prohibited from investing in or trading with the peninsula. Energy and telecommunications deals were specifically prohibited. In a coordinated move, a day later the White House also introduced sanctions against the peninsula. President Obama said the goal was “to provide clarity to U.S. corporations doing business in the region and reaffirm that the United States will not accept Russia’s occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea.” The U.S. Treasury Department placed new restrictions on Crimean companies and individuals supporting the separatist cause. Among the latter were members of the Night Wolves motorcycle group, who had been prominent during the takeover. Predictably, that had the Sevastopol bikers howling with joy about the free publicity and mockingly challenging the U.S. government to punish them more.[10]
The local and regional elections in Crimea and Sevastopol in September 2014 could not be dismissed as a sham. The results were real, and they demonstrated continuing support for Moscow and Putin. The turnout was 53.6 percent, which was very high: city elections held in Moscow the same day saw turnout of just 20.2 percent. Twelve parties had participated in the campaign, but only two won any seats. Out of 75 new members of the Crimean State Council, 70 represented Putin’s United Russia party, and 5 were from the right-wing party known as LDPR. Again, the Crimea proved far more conservative than the capital, where United Russia won only 28 seats out of 45 and the LDPR 1.[11]
The majority of Crimean Tatars boycotted the vote.
Kirim
So far, Crimea has been spared the horrors of the civil war—by good luck rather than good management. Meanwhile, the socioeconomic plunge Crimea is taking promises social unrest. And then there is the Tatar “problem.”
Because Tatars returned to Crimea in the 1990s as squatters, they are now required to “renegotiate” lease and property rights with the Russian government—a road to immense abuse and predictable injustice. The founders of the Crimean Tatar national movement plainly refuse to participate in the Russian state in any manner. In retaliation, Russian authorities have banned their leader, Mustafa Dzhemilev, from Crimea. They have also threatened to end the “dual power” on the peninsula if the Tatars’ legislative bodies, the Qurultai and Mejlis, refuse to recognize the annexation. Meanwhile, Moscow promoted a loyalist Tatar movement, Kirim, led by Remzi Ilyasov, a former vice-chairman of Mejlis. With Crimean Tatars, Putin was attempting what Americans had been trying to achieve in Afghanistan and Iraq for over a decade: foster a friendly force.
Exiled to Kiev, Dzhemilev responded to Moscow’s threats by saying that if they were carried out, he would take Tatar power structures underground. Until then, he pointed out, the struggle of the Tatars had been executed by peaceful means; now all options were on the table.[12]
Dzhemilev’s Russian opponents do not appear to understand how incredibly lucky they are that he is the Crimean Tatar leader. For twenty years, he has been restraining the radicals within the movement. Nor do the Russians seem to acknowledge that an intercommunal conflict spreads like wildfire. It does not take many hotheads to turn a territory into a Beirut or a Sarajevo.
There is evidence that some Crimean Tatars have gone to Syria to join ISIS. As early as May 2014, a Crimean Tatar military commander in Syria, Andul Karim Krymsky [of Krym], addressed compatriots on the peninsula in a video, arguing that the West was not going to save them and advocating armed struggle against Russians instead. Yet when the pro-Russian mufti Ruslan Saitvaliev announced at a press conference that five hundred Crimean Tatars were already fighting for ISIS, that was most likely a gross exaggeration. Meanwhile, for the authorities, the ISIS specter became the pretext to arrest Tatar activists indiscriminately.[13]
In Crimea, ISIS is more or less an imagined influence. In Turkey, not so. Crimea used to be part of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey is now a staunch supporter of Crimean Tatars. Under Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP (Justice and Development party), Turkey is redefining its cultural identity and regional role. Shunned by the European Union and feeling used by NATO, it is moving away from Europe. Crimea is part of its legacy, and some Tatar communities in Anatolia formed by nineteenth-century Crimean exiles are still in place.
The Russian annexation brought Crimea back on to Turkey’s national agenda; in 2015–2016, Russian bombings of Syria, a country Turkey considers its backyard, made Turkish mainstream opinion firmly anti-Russian.
A rose is a rose under any other name, but a nation is not. To claim nationhood, the group has to shed its dual identity—“Crimean” and “Tatar”—and forge a single unambiguous face. “Crimean Tatar” implies the existence of a bigger Tatar nation, linking Crimean Tatars to the Tatars of Volga, Central Asia, and Siberia. Clearly, this reading undermines their claim on Crimea. It makes them another part of the peninsula’s population, like Crimean Russians or Crimean Greeks.
As a centerpiece of their nation-building, Dzhemilev and his fellow leaders emphasize that “Crimean Tatars” are not a branch of the general Tatar population but a unique people, a merging of Mongol, Kipchak, Goth, Greek and other groups, the sum of the peninsula’s history, not a mere particle of it.[14]
That this reading of history is a recent construct does not undermine its validity. The tricky (and dangerous) part is defining the endgame. Let’s assume that the Kirim concept gets accepted by the Tatars and their neighbors: the Kirim are the sum of every indigenous people of Crimea of the past two or three millennia. Where do they go from there? An independent Kirim state is not a realistic option. The majority of the Crimean Tatar diaspora remains in Central Asia, Turkey, and the Balkans, with no plans of ever resettling in Crimea. Even if the entire diaspora moved back (and such a move were economically sustainable), they would still be a minority in today’s Crimea.
If Tatars ever develop a true national liberation movement, it will be a disaster for all involved. Crimea would turn into another Bosnia, except that instead of fighting a small, weak state like Serbia, the Crimean Tatars would be up against the much more powerful Russia.
Another dangerous scenario would be Ukraine trying to reclaim the peninsula by force. This would be a foolish move. Strategically, Crimea is an island, and thus difficult to seize; a Russian retaliatory strike would most likely take their troops to Nikolayev and Odessa; and the crisis could end with the whole Ukrainian Black Sea coast becoming another “people’s republic” under Moscow’s patronage. Nor is there much reason to believe that the majority of Crimeans would support reunification with Ukraine. Yet “restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty in Crimea” has found its way on the agenda of some powerful private foreign policy institutions in the United States, such as the Atlantic Council and Freedom House.[15]
In 1786, the British socialite and writer Elizabeth Craven reported: “The Crimea might with great ease be made an island.” In 1979, the Soviet writer Vasily Aksyonov wrote a novel called The Island of Crimea that became an instant samizdat bestseller. It took a counterfactual approach to history, exploiting a real occurrence: during the Civil War, in 1920, Crimea became the last stronghold of the Whites. Had Britain, France, and the United States provided the support the White commanders begged for, Crimea could have seceded and become an alternative to the Soviet Union, a Russian Taiwan. In the novel, a twenty-two-year old British lieutenant, Richard Bayley-Land, aboard the dreadnaught Liverpool opens artillery fire on the Reds storming the Perekop, triggering a chain of events that leads to victory for the Whites. (Interviewed by the reporters, the sly, aristocratic, and hard-drinking Bayley-Land insists he did it “just for fun.”)[16]
Aksyonov’s novel articulated a historically Crimean trend: the peninsula’s tendency to break away from bigger entities. The Crimean independence movement is not exactly around the corner, but it is in the making. There is, for example, a concept of Crimea as “testing grounds of a new common Eurasian culture.” And the peninsula is becoming multicultural again. As early as the 1990s, minority groups included 2,794 Armenians; 2,166 Bulgarians, 3,000 Greeks, 17,000 Jews, 898 Karaims, 900 Krymchaks, and 3,000 Germans.[17]
The “reunification” with Russia has brought the people of Crimea nothing but grief. By 2016, power supplies from Ukraine had stopped completely, and blackouts became the new norm. Schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, cinemas, government offices—all got electricity and heating only sporadically. With streetlights off, driving turned hazardous. The most expensive restaurants in Yalta advertised as places where one could get warm (they had reserve generators, or so the ads claimed).
Destitution of such magnitude hadn’t been seen on the peninsula since World War II. Wolves, extinct in Crimea in the twentieth century, returned (they had crossed the Sea of Azov on ice), and were spotted in towns foraging for food. As I am writing this, the City of Russian Glory, Sevastopol, is considering ordering pharmacies to start selling medications by the pill.
In two years since the annexation, the Kremlin had done nothing for the population. Only when the blackouts peaked at the end of 2015 did Moscow order the construction of the so-called “energy bridge”—simply put, an underwater cable bringing electricity to Crimea from the mainland across the Kerch Strait. Incidentally, no Russian company was ready to build at such short notice, and the Kremlin had to hire a Chinese contractor. A real bridge across the Kerch Strait, promised to Crimeans since day one of the annexation, is still in its prenatal stage.
All of this—sudden deprivation, Moscow’s indifference, inept, corrupt local government—breed new political activism on the peninsula. It must be said that returning to Ukraine is not a realistic option—at least not until the Ukrainian state is strong enough to curtail the power of the right-wing paramilitary forces, which would be only too happy to descend on Crimea looking for violent revenge.
If (when?) Crimea finds itself in a position to secede, the position of the United States will be crucial. So will be the choices Americans will be forced to make.
NINE
You Break It, You Run
With at least nine thousand people killed and more than 2 million displaced, and with relations between Russia and the West set back by three decades, did we really, as many analysts suggest, sleepwalk into a new cold war? Or is the conflict just a seismic outburst, after which the relationship will go back to its chilly normal? With Europe in a state of disarray not seen since early in the postwar era, interpretations are difficult, and there is no agreement on the nature of the historical period we live in.
David Brooks of the New York Times finds the scope of the problems Americans face “way below historic averages. …Our global enemies are not exactly impressive. We have the Islamic State, a bunch of barbarians riding around in pickup trucks, and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, a lone thug sitting atop a failing regime.” Pope Francis has repeatedly voiced an opposing assessment, calling our times a third world war “fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction.”[1]
Pacta Sunt Servanda
As an international law specialist, Yuval Shany, noted, the “combined effect of the international response to Crimea and Kosovo throws international law on self-determination into a state of uncertainty, threatening the stability of the existing state system.”[2] The Crimean takeover has rendered five international accords meaningless, thereby deflating an important underlying principle of international cohabitation, pacta sunt servanda—that treaties should be honored.
The annulled agreements include the Belovezh Accords of December 8, 1991, which declared all fifteen republics of the former USSR sovereign and independent successor states; the Alma Ata Protocols of December 21, 1991, establishing the post-Soviet community of equals, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and mutually recognizing the member states’ borders; the Partition Treaty on the Status and Conditions of the Black Sea Fleet of May 28, 1997, leasing Crimean military bases to Russia; and the Russian-Ukrainian “Naval Base for Gas” Accord, extending the Russian navy’s lease in Sevastopol until 2042.
The final international agreement that was cast aside, and the one with the most lasting consequences, is the Budapest Memorandum of December 5, 1994, providing national security assurance to Ukraine after it surrendered its portion of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Signed by the heads of state of Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, it called upon each of the latter three to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine” or from “economic coercion.”[3] Obviously, during the Crimea and Donbass crises, the United States and Britain failed to guarantee Ukraine’s “existing borders.” As a result, any other nuclear state in the world, if offered a similar arrangement, need not think twice before rejecting such a guarantee as worthless.
But what else could the United States and Britain do after Russia annexed Crimea, without risking direct military confrontation with Moscow? No one expected the guarantors of 1994 to do for Ukraine what Britain and France did for Poland in 1939 after Hitler invaded, and declare war on the aggressor. But the ambiguity of the security commitment to Ukraine raises serious questions about a bigger issue: Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which in the popular understanding requires all members to come to the aid of any member subject to military attack. If Russia invades, for example, Estonia, in order to “rescue” its disgruntled Russian minority, many of whom hold Russian citizenship, what would NATO do?
If the Ukrainian crisis is any indication, the great powers of the West may be inclined to exercise caution. The underappreciated thing is that Article 5 actually lets them limit their response to the minimum they choose. Its spirit is “one for all, and all for one,” but its letter is not. Formulated with enviable foresight, this is what it says:
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.[4]
The reference to the U.N. Security Council is not very practical, as Russia and its diplomatic partner China have veto powers there. What is practical, however, is the exact wording of the “one for all” principle: each NATO country will “assist” the party under attack by taking “such action as it deems necessary.” Despite the expectations of Eastern European nations on Russia’s border, soft economic sanctions against the aggressor would legally suffice. If you read the fine print of Article 5 closely, it’s hard not to see that in promoting NATO expansion in the 1990s, and waking up Russia’s aggressiveness in the process, Washington did not guarantee new NATO members’ security even on paper.
One may question whether the eastward expansion has made the NATO alliance stronger. In a fleet on a combat mission, the slowest ship determines the speed of the entire force. Recent NATO members such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have nothing to contribute to the alliance militarily: they only add vulnerability. If there is a place where diversity does not belong, that would be a military alliance.
When the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949, the founders included Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States—a not entirely solid, but still acceptably united political core. Greece and Turkey, added in 1952, put the alliance on the USSR’s southwestern flank, although these two did not really fit in with the group the way the other NATO countries did. The fact that the two went to war against each other over Cyprus in 1974 is sufficient proof of this. In the past decade, ideas for further NATO expansion have become grotesque: in 2007, Rudy Giuliani, then a presidential candidate, proposed adding Australia, India, Israel, Japan, and Singapore to the alliance.[5]
Every step forward in NATO expansion is paid for largely by the American taxpayer. Every member is supposed to devote 2 percent of its GDP to military spending, but as this is a recommendation, not a requirement, the vast majority of members find it easy to ignore. Only the United States, Britain, France, Greece, and Turkey meet the target, and the latter two are spending the money mainly to deter each other. If it is understandable that economically depressed Spain spends just 0.9 percent of its GDP on defense, Germany’s 1.4 percent comes with no such excuse. President Barack Obama made his frustration clear at the September 2014 NATO summit in Wales; the meeting’s final statement asked everyone to “move towards the 2% guideline”—but within a decade.[6]
The summit condemned Russia’s “illegitimate occupation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine” and ordered the creation of a “spearhead” force of several thousand troops prepared to deploy within a few days to respond to similar crises. Ten days later, 1,300 NATO troops from fifteen countries, including 200 Americans, began a military exercise called Rapid Trident around the Ukrainian city of Lviv. The Russian Foreign Ministry called that a continuation of NATO’s eastward expansion and promised an “adequate” Russian response.[7]
On a broader scale, NATO’s collective role remains problematic. The strategic response to the Crimean annexation has come mainly from the United States, whose Sixth Fleet, headquartered in Naples and traditionally focused on Libya, Egypt, and the Levant, has taken a renewed interest in the Black Sea. Typically nowadays, one U.S. warship is always on patrol in those waters. The NATO reconnaissance planes monitoring the area, shadowed and occasionally dangerously intercepted by Russian jets, are American too.[8]
NATO membership for Ukraine remains on the table. President Petro Poroshenko repeatedly voices his belief that “there is no other system in the world but NATO” that could ensure Ukraine’s security. Although the prospect seems to arouse zero enthusiasm at NATO headquarters, it remains a faint possibility. The same applied to NATO membership for the Republic of Georgia, which by no stretch of imagination could be called a North Atlantic country.[9]
Rather dramatically, in December 2015, NATO invited another Eastern European nation to join the alliance: Montenegro. That was NATO’s first expansion since 2009, and Russia angrily promised “retaliatory actions.” Geopolitically, Montenegro is a burden. The country of 650,000 people has a military force of just 2,000, and its territory is hard to defend: the Adriatic Sea in the west provides an invader with several convenient gateways, and in the east Russia’s friend Serbia waits.[10]
Despite the vast military power of the United States, there are many spaces on the globe where its presence simply cannot be introduced, even with casualties. The question is whether NATO has expanded to the edge of such a space, or past the edge.
How to Proceed?
The Crimea crisis has activated debates among competing schools in American foreign policy—neoconservatives, liberal interventionists, realists, isolationists, and paleoconservatives, to name just a few.
The harshest critique of America’s handling of the crisis came from isolationists. Ron Paul called President Obama’s sanctions against Russia “criminal” and declared that Crimea had a right to self-determination. Paul Craig Roberts angrily commented that on the hundredth anniversary of World War I, the Western powers were “again sleepwalking into destructive conflict,” because “Washington interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine” had led to developments beyond American control, raising the possibility of a “great power confrontation, which could be the end of all of us.” Oliver Stone announced that he would be making a documentary on the events in Kiev, dubbing what had happened “America’s soft power technique called ‘Regime Change 101.’ …The West has maintained the dominant narrative of ‘Russia in Crimea’ whereas the true narrative is ‘USA in Ukraine.’”[11]
Interventionists were largely pleased with the regime change in Kiev. The British historian Andrew Wilson called it an uprising “on behalf of everybody in the former Soviet Union,” a delayed “anti-Soviet revolution” that, he hoped, might inspire copycat rebellions in other post-Soviet nations, Russia included. But for that to happen, interventionist intellectuals not unreasonably concluded, the White House had to intervene more aggressively. Michael McFaul, a “specialist in revolution” and the U.S. ambassador to Moscow for two years during the Obama administration, warned from his premature retirement that Putin’s regime “must be isolated. The strategy of seeking to change Kremlin behavior through engagement, integration and rhetoric is over for now. …There must be sanctions, including against those people and entities—propagandists, state-owned enterprises, Kremlin-tied bankers—that act as instruments of Mr. Putin’s coercive power. Conversely, individuals and companies not connected to the government must be supported, including those seeking to take assets out of Russia or emigrate.”[12]
The leading neoconservative Robert Kagan saw the crisis as a test of America’s ability to lead the world: “Many Americans and their political leaders in both parties, including President Obama, have either forgotten or rejected the assumptions that undergirded American foreign policy for the past seven decades. In particular, American foreign policy may be moving away from the sense of global responsibility that equated American interests with the interests of many others around the world and back toward the defense of narrower, more parochial national interests.”[13]
Realists argued that interference in Ukraine—past, present, and proposed—did not further American interests but hurt them. This is what Henry Kissinger had to say: “Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other—it should function as a bridge between them. …A wise U.S. policy toward Ukraine would seek a way for the two parts of the country to cooperate with each other. We should seek reconciliation, not the domination of a faction.” Ambassador Jack F. Matlock: “Americans, heritors of the Monroe Doctrine, should have understood that Russia would be hypersensitive to foreign-dominated military alliances approaching or touching its borders.”[14]
Strategy experts Dimitri Simes and Paul Saunders wrote in the Washington Times that if, in the fall of 2013, the White House and the European Union had “offered half of what they are now providing Ukraine, ousted President Viktor Yanukovych would likely have signed the E.U. deal that he abandoned instead. If the White House and Brussels had been willing to enforce the February 21 agreement, Ukraine would have had a new government without providing the Kremlin a pretext to seize Crimea or leverage for new demands. By trying to have it all in Ukraine for free, Mr. Obama blundered into disaster.”[15]
Veterans of American politics George P. Shultz and Sam Nunn: “Recent history has shown the damage done to global security and the economic commons by cross-border threats and the uncertainty that emanates from them. As far as Russia is concerned, the world is best served when Russia proceeds as a respected and important player on the world stage. …A key to ending the Cold War was the Reagan administration’s rejection of the concept of linkage, which said that bad behavior by Moscow in one sphere had to lead to a freeze of cooperation in all spheres. …Although current circumstances make it difficult, we should not lose sight of areas of common interest where cooperation remains crucial.” Shultz and Nunn mentioned securing nuclear materials, destroying Syrian chemical stockpiles, and preventing nuclear proliferation on their list of such areas.[16]
One could add other items. If the United States is to continue the global “war on terror,” cooperation with Russia is imperative, whether in intelligence gathering, covert operations, or the United Nations. The Northern Distribution Network, the elaborate web of land routes connecting American troops in Afghanistan to seaports in the Baltic and Pacific, runs through Russia. U.S. astronauts need Russian rockets to be able to travel to the International Space Station (in May 2014, reacting to U.S. sanctions, Russia announced that it was not interested in maintaining the ISS past 2020). Many American businesses have deep connections to partners in Russia. To name just two examples, ExxonMobil is drilling for oil in Siberia and the Arctic; and a company developing spaceships for NASA, Orbital Sciences Corporation, has been purchasing rocket engines from the Russian manufacturer Kuznetsov in Samara.[17]
The situation is paradoxical. In February 2016, the White House announced plans to quadruple military spending in Eastern European NATO countries. U.S. marines began prepositioning tanks and artillery in “classified” caves along the Norwegian-Russian border. Yet, at the same time, Washington started negotiating with Russia on the future of Syria and a joint fight against ISIS.[18]
If American rapprochement with Putin is still tentative and reversible, a number of European NATO countries want a solid anti-ISIS alliance with Moscow. In the immediate aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks in November 2015, the French president François Hollande rushed to Moscow for consultations, breaking the diplomatic boycott of the Kremlin.[19]
Europe
If you listen only to American interventionists, you can get the impression that the single obstacle to European unity is Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately, things are not that simple. The main obstacle to European unity is Europe. The European Union, built and sold as a tightly knit alliance, was never meant to replace nation-states.
In the course of the crisis, “Europe” for all intents and purposes fell apart. Those of Russia’s neighbors that were once part of the Russian empire—Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—demanded a strong response. Russia’s economic partners—Germany, Italy, and France—tried doing business as usual.
Twenty-four hours after the infamous Crimea referendum, the Italian energy company Saipem pledged to build the offshore section of the South Stream gas pipeline. The state-of-the-art pipe-laying ship assigned to the task, Saipem 7000, was already a familiar sight on the Black Sea: Saipem had worked for Putin before, laying the Blue Stream pipeline that brought Russian gas to Turkey.[20]
On March 17, 2014, still at the peak of the Crimea crisis, E.U. energy commissioner Günther Oettinger said sanctions against Russia should not target the Russian economy. “It would be wrong,” Oettinger said, “to question the economic ties that have been built over decades. They are important for the economy and jobs in Europe and Russia.” Former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder went farther. At a meeting in St. Petersburg he proclaimed: “One should be speaking less about sanctions right now but instead about Russia’s security interests.” A furious John McCain declared that the leaders of Germany, starting with Angela Merkel, were “governed by the industrial complex.” The comment caused outrage in Berlin, which deemed the senator’s analysis “vicious nonsense.”[21]
All of the big transnational oil companies, or “supermajors,” do business with Russia—BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Total, and three of the five are European. After a new set of sanctions was imposed in July 2014, BP lost $4.4 billion in market value within twenty-four hours. Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann commented: “I cannot approve of the euphoria of many in the EU over the success of sanctions against Russia. I see absolutely no cause for celebration. I do not know why we should be pleased if the Russian economy collapses.”[22]
With Western sanctions still in place, in September 2015, European energy companies signed three major deals with Gazprom. These included an asset swap, joint development of Siberian oil and gas fields, and building a second Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea. This last agreement was equivalent to a geopolitical statement, as the pipeline would let Russia send more gas straight to Germany, bypassing Ukraine.[23]
In fairness to the Europeans, natural gas is a vital necessity, something that a nation might want to procure at all costs. But European trade with Russia is by no means limited to energy. At the time of the annexation, France was building two Mistral-class warships for Russia. Mistral is the amphibious assault ship that can carry up to sixteen helicopters, seventy tanks, and four landing barges. It is a perfect instrument of maritime aggression. When they signed the contract in 2011, the Russians had already decided on the names: one Vladivostok, another Sevastopol.
In 2014–2015, the deal became an embarrassment. The Russians had prepaid $900 million of the contract price of $1.3 billion. The Mistrals were being built at a shipyard in Saint Nazaire, at the mouth of the Loire. The local unions insisted that the town needed the seven thousand jobs the Russian order had secured. A union representative expressed hope that the deal would be the “start of a sustainable cooperation with Russia.” The ships he said, were simply “big ferries” with a “few weapons.”[24]
Several Eastern European E.U. members, such as Hungary and the Czech Republic, objected to being dragged into a confrontation with Russia for strategic, economic, and status reasons. First, Russia was important economically; second, Hungary and the Czech Republic did not want the European Union to become a capitalist version of the Soviet-era COMECON, in which they, as junior partners, had to take orders from the headquarters; third, for Eastern Europe, Ukraine was a periphery, not necessarily deserving sovereignty, much less Western protection. In May 2014, the Hungarian government demanded from Kiev autonomy for the Hungarian minority in Ukraine—envisaging, one may assume, a little Hungarian Crimea. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán is a vocal supporter of 3 million ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries, whose ancestors ended up there after the Trianon Treaty of 1920. In 2014, Orbán started talking about “illiberal democracy,” praising the example of Russia, China, India, and Turkey. After Senator McCain called him a “neo-fascist dictator getting in bed with Vladimir Putin,” Orbán responded that he “would not be a viceroy in Hungary commissioned by some foreign state.” The president of the Czech Republic, Miloš Zeman, called the U.S.-sponsored Kosovo an illegitimate state and said he wished the Czech Republic could take back its recognition. He defined the events in Ukraine as a civil war (a term most other E.U. countries refuse to use) and said Ukraine should become neutral.[25]
In Ukraine, the European Union had followed the principle, “You break it, you run”: having disrupted Ukrainian politics with vain promises of a “European future,” after the first shots were fired in Kiev the E.U. all but disappeared, leaving it to the United States to clean up the mess. It took the Europeans a year to return—but not as the European Union. Two great powers—Germany and France—began the process of mediation, their leaders conferring with the Ukrainian and Russian presidents on neutral territory, in authoritarian Minsk.
With the European Union undermined by the migrants crisis, and Russia seen as a strong ally in the fight against ISIS, European leaders are now likely to relegate war in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea to the icebox of diplomacy.
Intervention in the east was unpopular with Europeans from the start. The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy complained in the New York Times: “To see the European Union acting so pusillanimously is very discouraging. France wants to hold on to its arms contracts for the jobs they are supposed to save in its naval shipyards. Germany, a hub of operations for the Russian energy giant Gazprom, is petrified of losing its own strategic position. Britain, for its part, despite recent statements by Prime Minister David Cameron, may still not be ready to forgo the colossal flows of Russian oligarchs’ ill-gotten cash upon which the City, London’s financial district, has come to rely.”[26]
Some members of the American establishment tried to save Europe from itself. In May 2014, three U.S. congressmen, Eliot Engel, William Keating, and Michael Turner, sent a letter to NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, suggesting that NATO purchase or lease the Mistral warships being built for Russia. Five months later, Engel, Keating, and Turner, this time joined by four other members of Congress—Mike Rogers, Steve Chabot, Steve Cohen, and Gerry Connolly—repeated the idea in a letter to the new NATO chief, Jens Stoltenberg.[27]
But the French had decided to build the ships for Putin after Russia had already started a Reconquista by sending troops into Abkhazia and South Ossetia during the Russo-Georgian War in 2008. At that point, Putin’s aggression in the near abroad did not seem unacceptable to Paris. That should have been seen as a real challenge to U.S. diplomacy, not the financial loss France faced in 2014.
Quite tellingly, when after unrelenting pressure from Washington the French government eventually cancelled the deal, it immediately sold the ships to another problematic customer—Egypt, with very little regard for what the two powerful assault carriers would do to the naval balance in the Middle East.[28]
In a recent book, noted international relations specialists Rajan Menon and Eugene Rumer warn that with the crisis in Ukraine the “consensus underpinning a European security order” has been torn apart, and that the “task facing Europe’s leaders now is nothing less than fashioning a new European political and military order.”[29]
A General and a Seagull
It is in our cultural code to choose David over Goliath, and a weaker nation challenging a stronger nation tends to attract our sympathy—as long as David and Goliath are not wrestling in our backyard, because, with humans, avoiding damage to self and property goes deeper than empathy.
Not just Davids but Goliaths too have interests, and we can’t ignore them on moral grounds. A founding editor of The American Conservative, Scott McConnell, wrote that after the collapse of the USSR the West could choose between two models—that of 1815, when the defeated France was brought into the Concert of Europe, and that of 1919, when Germany was ostracized under the Versailles Treaty. George H. W. Bush, continued McConnell, clearly thought along 1815 lines, but his approach was incrementally “reversed by his successors, first by the Clinton-Albright duo, and then by his son, and now by Obama, the latter prodded by his belligerent assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland.”[30]
One can’t help noticing that throughout the 1990s the policy makers of the West generally ignored Russia’s national feelings. “Eat your spinach,” representatives of the West said to the confused, angry nation, expecting it to emerge a smiling happy democracy. A great testimony in this respect comes from Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist advising Russians on “shock therapy” economic reform in the early 1990s. For Sachs, the crisis in Ukraine proved the road to Damascus, and this is what he had to say about it: “It took me 20 years to gain a proper understanding of what had happened after 1991. Why had the US, which had behaved with such wisdom and foresight in Poland, acted with such cruel neglect in the case of Russia? Step by step, and memoir by memoir, the true story came to light. The West had helped Poland financially and diplomatically because Poland would become the Eastern ramparts of an expanding NATO. Poland was the West, and was therefore worthy of help. Russia, by contrast, was viewed by US leaders roughly the same way that Lloyd George and Clemenceau had viewed Germany at Versailles—as a defeated enemy worthy to be crushed, not helped.”[31]
Critique of Western universalism is among the underappreciated theses of Huntington’s magisterial Clash of Civilizations. There is something in his interpretation of the West that can make liberals and conservatives equally uncomfortable: humility. Modernization, Huntington reminds us, “is distinct from Westernization and is producing neither a universal civilization in any meaningful sense nor the Westernization of non-Western societies.” Consequently, efforts “to shift societies from one civilization to another are unsuccessful.” Therefore, he concludes, the survival of the West depends on “Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal.”[32]
By siding with “pro-Western” dissidents abroad, we compromise our values in the eyes of those peoples, undermine the future of the values we want to spread, and exacerbate divisions within the torn societies. In short, by interfering, we make an un-Western country anti-Western.
A popular point of view is that there used to be a “good” Russia, which later got corrupted into something evil. But it is incorrect to separate Vladimir Putin from the Russian Main Street. Within two decades, in the course of several acceptably free elections, the Russian majority has moved from laissez-faire democracy to soft authoritarianism. As Henry Kissinger succinctly put it, “For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.”[33]
As I write these words, Putin’s approval rating in Russia stands at 86 percent. By the time you read them, it may have slipped to 60 percent or less. Russia may even have a new leader. But Putin’s triumph or fall is not the point. The point is that it is precisely Russia’s un-Westernness that makes the majority of Russians so proud.
The ideological disconnect between Russia and the West is strong again. This time, Russian elites and the majority of Russian voters swear not by Communism, but by civilizational particularism. They see the Russian civilization as distinctly separate from the rest of the world, including a specifically “native” understanding of people’s rights and freedoms.
Desperate to see light at the end of the tunnel, a number of American analysts are now saying that there will be a “better” Russia after Putin. There might be. Or not. Most likely, there will be one, but only briefly. Russia will open up to the West for a decade or so, and then close down again, following its own endemic rhythm.
That should give us pause: Russia refuses to change, we refuse to accept that. But then again, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s king put it, “If I commanded a general to fly from one flower to the next like a butterfly, or to write a tragedy, or to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not carry out my command, which of us would be in the wrong, the general or me?”[34]
In the summer of 2014, President Obama, exasperated by critics asking for a clear sense of direction in and a philosophy of foreign policy, told reporters that his guiding principle in foreign affairs was “Don’t do stupid stuff” (according to witnesses, the president used a stronger word). His enemies immediately called that fecklessness and a comedown. His former secretary of state Hillary Clinton scolded the president in an interview with The Atlantic, pronouncing, “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”[35]
For sure, “First, do no harm” is not a principle that sits well with the twenty-first-century American zeitgeist. Don’t just stand there, do something—we are being taught. Operate immediately, spike up the meds, be aggressive in treatment, can’t you see that we are losing him/her (Libya/Ukraine)? Yet Obama’s philosophy of non-maleficence did get endorsed by a number of renowned experts. David Remnick of The New Yorker approvingly commented: “When your aim is to conduct a responsive and responsible foreign policy, the avoidance of stupid things is often the avoidance of bloodshed and unforeseen strife. History suggests that it is not a mantra to be derided or dismissed.”[36]
Future historians of the American presidency will, no doubt, uncover the reasons for and the ways in which Obama’s principle of non-maleficence got hijacked in 2011–2014, but no matter their origins, the consequences of the follies in countries like Libya or Ukraine will be now felt for generations.
“Organizing principle” is an attractive expression, and when applied to foreign policy makes it sound as if the chaos of international relations could be scientifically controlled, like nuclear synthesis or tomato growing. It seems that for the interventionist the method is never to visit a developing country empty-handed, that is without non-negotiable gifts—business models, progressive mores, societal structures, political institutions, or “freedom” and “justice.”
In the course of The Atlantic interview, Clinton blamed Obama for the emergence of ISIS, quoting his “failure” to help Syrian anti-Assad rebels as resolutely as she had helped the anti-Gaddafi rebels in Libya in 2011. But her critics may point out that it was the interventionist policy of blanket endorsement of the “Arab Spring,” culminating in the NATO bombing of Libya, that made ISIS possible.
Taking out dictatorial regimes in North Africa and the Middle East created a structural void, where warlordism and lawlessness thrived. Libya is now a failed state in a key geopolitical location, and it is unclear whether the damage done to the nation is even repairable. Civil war rages, jihadism soars, and on the Libyan coast swarms of migrants fight for a place on a boat to cross the sea to Europe, the continent stupefied by the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have already arrived.
Compared with the brazen use of force in Libya, U.S. interference in Ukraine in 2013–2014 had been “soft.” Yet its underlying principle was the same—impose a gift of “freedom” on a divided nation, and take it from there—again, in the spirit of the infamous Napoleonic motto On s’engage, et puis on voit.
“Do no harm” and “organize”: the balance between the two in U.S. foreign policy will determine the fate of the unsettled parts of Eastern Europe, but also America’s gains and losses on that gigantic isthmus stretching between the Baltic and the Black seas.
With at least nine thousand people killed and more than 2 million displaced, and with relations between Russia and the West set back by three decades, did we really, as many analysts suggest, sleepwalk into a new cold war? Or is the conflict just a seismic outburst, after which the relationship will go back to its chilly normal? With Europe in a state of disarray not seen since early in the postwar era, interpretations are difficult, and there is no agreement on the nature of the historical period we live in.
David Brooks of the New York Times finds the scope of the problems Americans face “way below historic averages. …Our global enemies are not exactly impressive. We have the Islamic State, a bunch of barbarians riding around in pickup trucks, and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, a lone thug sitting atop a failing regime.” Pope Francis has repeatedly voiced an opposing assessment, calling our times a third world war “fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction.”[1]
Pacta Sunt Servanda
As an international law specialist, Yuval Shany, noted, the “combined effect of the international response to Crimea and Kosovo throws international law on self-determination into a state of uncertainty, threatening the stability of the existing state system.”[2] The Crimean takeover has rendered five international accords meaningless, thereby deflating an important underlying principle of international cohabitation, pacta sunt servanda—that treaties should be honored.
The annulled agreements include the Belovezh Accords of December 8, 1991, which declared all fifteen republics of the former USSR sovereign and independent successor states; the Alma Ata Protocols of December 21, 1991, establishing the post-Soviet community of equals, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and mutually recognizing the member states’ borders; the Partition Treaty on the Status and Conditions of the Black Sea Fleet of May 28, 1997, leasing Crimean military bases to Russia; and the Russian-Ukrainian “Naval Base for Gas” Accord, extending the Russian navy’s lease in Sevastopol until 2042.
The final international agreement that was cast aside, and the one with the most lasting consequences, is the Budapest Memorandum of December 5, 1994, providing national security assurance to Ukraine after it surrendered its portion of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Signed by the heads of state of Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, it called upon each of the latter three to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine” or from “economic coercion.”[3] Obviously, during the Crimea and Donbass crises, the United States and Britain failed to guarantee Ukraine’s “existing borders.” As a result, any other nuclear state in the world, if offered a similar arrangement, need not think twice before rejecting such a guarantee as worthless.
But what else could the United States and Britain do after Russia annexed Crimea, without risking direct military confrontation with Moscow? No one expected the guarantors of 1994 to do for Ukraine what Britain and France did for Poland in 1939 after Hitler invaded, and declare war on the aggressor. But the ambiguity of the security commitment to Ukraine raises serious questions about a bigger issue: Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which in the popular understanding requires all members to come to the aid of any member subject to military attack. If Russia invades, for example, Estonia, in order to “rescue” its disgruntled Russian minority, many of whom hold Russian citizenship, what would NATO do?
If the Ukrainian crisis is any indication, the great powers of the West may be inclined to exercise caution. The underappreciated thing is that Article 5 actually lets them limit their response to the minimum they choose. Its spirit is “one for all, and all for one,” but its letter is not. Formulated with enviable foresight, this is what it says:
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.[4]
The reference to the U.N. Security Council is not very practical, as Russia and its diplomatic partner China have veto powers there. What is practical, however, is the exact wording of the “one for all” principle: each NATO country will “assist” the party under attack by taking “such action as it deems necessary.” Despite the expectations of Eastern European nations on Russia’s border, soft economic sanctions against the aggressor would legally suffice. If you read the fine print of Article 5 closely, it’s hard not to see that in promoting NATO expansion in the 1990s, and waking up Russia’s aggressiveness in the process, Washington did not guarantee new NATO members’ security even on paper.
One may question whether the eastward expansion has made the NATO alliance stronger. In a fleet on a combat mission, the slowest ship determines the speed of the entire force. Recent NATO members such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have nothing to contribute to the alliance militarily: they only add vulnerability. If there is a place where diversity does not belong, that would be a military alliance.
When the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949, the founders included Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States—a not entirely solid, but still acceptably united political core. Greece and Turkey, added in 1952, put the alliance on the USSR’s southwestern flank, although these two did not really fit in with the group the way the other NATO countries did. The fact that the two went to war against each other over Cyprus in 1974 is sufficient proof of this. In the past decade, ideas for further NATO expansion have become grotesque: in 2007, Rudy Giuliani, then a presidential candidate, proposed adding Australia, India, Israel, Japan, and Singapore to the alliance.[5]
Every step forward in NATO expansion is paid for largely by the American taxpayer. Every member is supposed to devote 2 percent of its GDP to military spending, but as this is a recommendation, not a requirement, the vast majority of members find it easy to ignore. Only the United States, Britain, France, Greece, and Turkey meet the target, and the latter two are spending the money mainly to deter each other. If it is understandable that economically depressed Spain spends just 0.9 percent of its GDP on defense, Germany’s 1.4 percent comes with no such excuse. President Barack Obama made his frustration clear at the September 2014 NATO summit in Wales; the meeting’s final statement asked everyone to “move towards the 2% guideline”—but within a decade.[6]
The summit condemned Russia’s “illegitimate occupation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine” and ordered the creation of a “spearhead” force of several thousand troops prepared to deploy within a few days to respond to similar crises. Ten days later, 1,300 NATO troops from fifteen countries, including 200 Americans, began a military exercise called Rapid Trident around the Ukrainian city of Lviv. The Russian Foreign Ministry called that a continuation of NATO’s eastward expansion and promised an “adequate” Russian response.[7]
On a broader scale, NATO’s collective role remains problematic. The strategic response to the Crimean annexation has come mainly from the United States, whose Sixth Fleet, headquartered in Naples and traditionally focused on Libya, Egypt, and the Levant, has taken a renewed interest in the Black Sea. Typically nowadays, one U.S. warship is always on patrol in those waters. The NATO reconnaissance planes monitoring the area, shadowed and occasionally dangerously intercepted by Russian jets, are American too.[8]
NATO membership for Ukraine remains on the table. President Petro Poroshenko repeatedly voices his belief that “there is no other system in the world but NATO” that could ensure Ukraine’s security. Although the prospect seems to arouse zero enthusiasm at NATO headquarters, it remains a faint possibility. The same applied to NATO membership for the Republic of Georgia, which by no stretch of imagination could be called a North Atlantic country.[9]
Rather dramatically, in December 2015, NATO invited another Eastern European nation to join the alliance: Montenegro. That was NATO’s first expansion since 2009, and Russia angrily promised “retaliatory actions.” Geopolitically, Montenegro is a burden. The country of 650,000 people has a military force of just 2,000, and its territory is hard to defend: the Adriatic Sea in the west provides an invader with several convenient gateways, and in the east Russia’s friend Serbia waits.[10]
Despite the vast military power of the United States, there are many spaces on the globe where its presence simply cannot be introduced, even with casualties. The question is whether NATO has expanded to the edge of such a space, or past the edge.
How to Proceed?
The Crimea crisis has activated debates among competing schools in American foreign policy—neoconservatives, liberal interventionists, realists, isolationists, and paleoconservatives, to name just a few.
The harshest critique of America’s handling of the crisis came from isolationists. Ron Paul called President Obama’s sanctions against Russia “criminal” and declared that Crimea had a right to self-determination. Paul Craig Roberts angrily commented that on the hundredth anniversary of World War I, the Western powers were “again sleepwalking into destructive conflict,” because “Washington interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine” had led to developments beyond American control, raising the possibility of a “great power confrontation, which could be the end of all of us.” Oliver Stone announced that he would be making a documentary on the events in Kiev, dubbing what had happened “America’s soft power technique called ‘Regime Change 101.’ …The West has maintained the dominant narrative of ‘Russia in Crimea’ whereas the true narrative is ‘USA in Ukraine.’”[11]
Interventionists were largely pleased with the regime change in Kiev. The British historian Andrew Wilson called it an uprising “on behalf of everybody in the former Soviet Union,” a delayed “anti-Soviet revolution” that, he hoped, might inspire copycat rebellions in other post-Soviet nations, Russia included. But for that to happen, interventionist intellectuals not unreasonably concluded, the White House had to intervene more aggressively. Michael McFaul, a “specialist in revolution” and the U.S. ambassador to Moscow for two years during the Obama administration, warned from his premature retirement that Putin’s regime “must be isolated. The strategy of seeking to change Kremlin behavior through engagement, integration and rhetoric is over for now. …There must be sanctions, including against those people and entities—propagandists, state-owned enterprises, Kremlin-tied bankers—that act as instruments of Mr. Putin’s coercive power. Conversely, individuals and companies not connected to the government must be supported, including those seeking to take assets out of Russia or emigrate.”[12]
The leading neoconservative Robert Kagan saw the crisis as a test of America’s ability to lead the world: “Many Americans and their political leaders in both parties, including President Obama, have either forgotten or rejected the assumptions that undergirded American foreign policy for the past seven decades. In particular, American foreign policy may be moving away from the sense of global responsibility that equated American interests with the interests of many others around the world and back toward the defense of narrower, more parochial national interests.”[13]
Realists argued that interference in Ukraine—past, present, and proposed—did not further American interests but hurt them. This is what Henry Kissinger had to say: “Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other—it should function as a bridge between them. …A wise U.S. policy toward Ukraine would seek a way for the two parts of the country to cooperate with each other. We should seek reconciliation, not the domination of a faction.” Ambassador Jack F. Matlock: “Americans, heritors of the Monroe Doctrine, should have understood that Russia would be hypersensitive to foreign-dominated military alliances approaching or touching its borders.”[14]
Strategy experts Dimitri Simes and Paul Saunders wrote in the Washington Times that if, in the fall of 2013, the White House and the European Union had “offered half of what they are now providing Ukraine, ousted President Viktor Yanukovych would likely have signed the E.U. deal that he abandoned instead. If the White House and Brussels had been willing to enforce the February 21 agreement, Ukraine would have had a new government without providing the Kremlin a pretext to seize Crimea or leverage for new demands. By trying to have it all in Ukraine for free, Mr. Obama blundered into disaster.”[15]
Veterans of American politics George P. Shultz and Sam Nunn: “Recent history has shown the damage done to global security and the economic commons by cross-border threats and the uncertainty that emanates from them. As far as Russia is concerned, the world is best served when Russia proceeds as a respected and important player on the world stage. …A key to ending the Cold War was the Reagan administration’s rejection of the concept of linkage, which said that bad behavior by Moscow in one sphere had to lead to a freeze of cooperation in all spheres. …Although current circumstances make it difficult, we should not lose sight of areas of common interest where cooperation remains crucial.” Shultz and Nunn mentioned securing nuclear materials, destroying Syrian chemical stockpiles, and preventing nuclear proliferation on their list of such areas.[16]
One could add other items. If the United States is to continue the global “war on terror,” cooperation with Russia is imperative, whether in intelligence gathering, covert operations, or the United Nations. The Northern Distribution Network, the elaborate web of land routes connecting American troops in Afghanistan to seaports in the Baltic and Pacific, runs through Russia. U.S. astronauts need Russian rockets to be able to travel to the International Space Station (in May 2014, reacting to U.S. sanctions, Russia announced that it was not interested in maintaining the ISS past 2020). Many American businesses have deep connections to partners in Russia. To name just two examples, ExxonMobil is drilling for oil in Siberia and the Arctic; and a company developing spaceships for NASA, Orbital Sciences Corporation, has been purchasing rocket engines from the Russian manufacturer Kuznetsov in Samara.[17]
The situation is paradoxical. In February 2016, the White House announced plans to quadruple military spending in Eastern European NATO countries. U.S. marines began prepositioning tanks and artillery in “classified” caves along the Norwegian-Russian border. Yet, at the same time, Washington started negotiating with Russia on the future of Syria and a joint fight against ISIS.[18]
If American rapprochement with Putin is still tentative and reversible, a number of European NATO countries want a solid anti-ISIS alliance with Moscow. In the immediate aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks in November 2015, the French president François Hollande rushed to Moscow for consultations, breaking the diplomatic boycott of the Kremlin.[19]
Europe
If you listen only to American interventionists, you can get the impression that the single obstacle to European unity is Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately, things are not that simple. The main obstacle to European unity is Europe. The European Union, built and sold as a tightly knit alliance, was never meant to replace nation-states.
In the course of the crisis, “Europe” for all intents and purposes fell apart. Those of Russia’s neighbors that were once part of the Russian empire—Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—demanded a strong response. Russia’s economic partners—Germany, Italy, and France—tried doing business as usual.
Twenty-four hours after the infamous Crimea referendum, the Italian energy company Saipem pledged to build the offshore section of the South Stream gas pipeline. The state-of-the-art pipe-laying ship assigned to the task, Saipem 7000, was already a familiar sight on the Black Sea: Saipem had worked for Putin before, laying the Blue Stream pipeline that brought Russian gas to Turkey.[20]
On March 17, 2014, still at the peak of the Crimea crisis, E.U. energy commissioner Günther Oettinger said sanctions against Russia should not target the Russian economy. “It would be wrong,” Oettinger said, “to question the economic ties that have been built over decades. They are important for the economy and jobs in Europe and Russia.” Former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder went farther. At a meeting in St. Petersburg he proclaimed: “One should be speaking less about sanctions right now but instead about Russia’s security interests.” A furious John McCain declared that the leaders of Germany, starting with Angela Merkel, were “governed by the industrial complex.” The comment caused outrage in Berlin, which deemed the senator’s analysis “vicious nonsense.”[21]
All of the big transnational oil companies, or “supermajors,” do business with Russia—BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Total, and three of the five are European. After a new set of sanctions was imposed in July 2014, BP lost $4.4 billion in market value within twenty-four hours. Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann commented: “I cannot approve of the euphoria of many in the EU over the success of sanctions against Russia. I see absolutely no cause for celebration. I do not know why we should be pleased if the Russian economy collapses.”[22]
With Western sanctions still in place, in September 2015, European energy companies signed three major deals with Gazprom. These included an asset swap, joint development of Siberian oil and gas fields, and building a second Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea. This last agreement was equivalent to a geopolitical statement, as the pipeline would let Russia send more gas straight to Germany, bypassing Ukraine.[23]
In fairness to the Europeans, natural gas is a vital necessity, something that a nation might want to procure at all costs. But European trade with Russia is by no means limited to energy. At the time of the annexation, France was building two Mistral-class warships for Russia. Mistral is the amphibious assault ship that can carry up to sixteen helicopters, seventy tanks, and four landing barges. It is a perfect instrument of maritime aggression. When they signed the contract in 2011, the Russians had already decided on the names: one Vladivostok, another Sevastopol.
In 2014–2015, the deal became an embarrassment. The Russians had prepaid $900 million of the contract price of $1.3 billion. The Mistrals were being built at a shipyard in Saint Nazaire, at the mouth of the Loire. The local unions insisted that the town needed the seven thousand jobs the Russian order had secured. A union representative expressed hope that the deal would be the “start of a sustainable cooperation with Russia.” The ships he said, were simply “big ferries” with a “few weapons.”[24]
Several Eastern European E.U. members, such as Hungary and the Czech Republic, objected to being dragged into a confrontation with Russia for strategic, economic, and status reasons. First, Russia was important economically; second, Hungary and the Czech Republic did not want the European Union to become a capitalist version of the Soviet-era COMECON, in which they, as junior partners, had to take orders from the headquarters; third, for Eastern Europe, Ukraine was a periphery, not necessarily deserving sovereignty, much less Western protection. In May 2014, the Hungarian government demanded from Kiev autonomy for the Hungarian minority in Ukraine—envisaging, one may assume, a little Hungarian Crimea. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán is a vocal supporter of 3 million ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries, whose ancestors ended up there after the Trianon Treaty of 1920. In 2014, Orbán started talking about “illiberal democracy,” praising the example of Russia, China, India, and Turkey. After Senator McCain called him a “neo-fascist dictator getting in bed with Vladimir Putin,” Orbán responded that he “would not be a viceroy in Hungary commissioned by some foreign state.” The president of the Czech Republic, Miloš Zeman, called the U.S.-sponsored Kosovo an illegitimate state and said he wished the Czech Republic could take back its recognition. He defined the events in Ukraine as a civil war (a term most other E.U. countries refuse to use) and said Ukraine should become neutral.[25]
In Ukraine, the European Union had followed the principle, “You break it, you run”: having disrupted Ukrainian politics with vain promises of a “European future,” after the first shots were fired in Kiev the E.U. all but disappeared, leaving it to the United States to clean up the mess. It took the Europeans a year to return—but not as the European Union. Two great powers—Germany and France—began the process of mediation, their leaders conferring with the Ukrainian and Russian presidents on neutral territory, in authoritarian Minsk.
With the European Union undermined by the migrants crisis, and Russia seen as a strong ally in the fight against ISIS, European leaders are now likely to relegate war in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea to the icebox of diplomacy.
Intervention in the east was unpopular with Europeans from the start. The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy complained in the New York Times: “To see the European Union acting so pusillanimously is very discouraging. France wants to hold on to its arms contracts for the jobs they are supposed to save in its naval shipyards. Germany, a hub of operations for the Russian energy giant Gazprom, is petrified of losing its own strategic position. Britain, for its part, despite recent statements by Prime Minister David Cameron, may still not be ready to forgo the colossal flows of Russian oligarchs’ ill-gotten cash upon which the City, London’s financial district, has come to rely.”[26]
Some members of the American establishment tried to save Europe from itself. In May 2014, three U.S. congressmen, Eliot Engel, William Keating, and Michael Turner, sent a letter to NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, suggesting that NATO purchase or lease the Mistral warships being built for Russia. Five months later, Engel, Keating, and Turner, this time joined by four other members of Congress—Mike Rogers, Steve Chabot, Steve Cohen, and Gerry Connolly—repeated the idea in a letter to the new NATO chief, Jens Stoltenberg.[27]
But the French had decided to build the ships for Putin after Russia had already started a Reconquista by sending troops into Abkhazia and South Ossetia during the Russo-Georgian War in 2008. At that point, Putin’s aggression in the near abroad did not seem unacceptable to Paris. That should have been seen as a real challenge to U.S. diplomacy, not the financial loss France faced in 2014.
Quite tellingly, when after unrelenting pressure from Washington the French government eventually cancelled the deal, it immediately sold the ships to another problematic customer—Egypt, with very little regard for what the two powerful assault carriers would do to the naval balance in the Middle East.[28]
In a recent book, noted international relations specialists Rajan Menon and Eugene Rumer warn that with the crisis in Ukraine the “consensus underpinning a European security order” has been torn apart, and that the “task facing Europe’s leaders now is nothing less than fashioning a new European political and military order.”[29]
A General and a Seagull
It is in our cultural code to choose David over Goliath, and a weaker nation challenging a stronger nation tends to attract our sympathy—as long as David and Goliath are not wrestling in our backyard, because, with humans, avoiding damage to self and property goes deeper than empathy.
Not just Davids but Goliaths too have interests, and we can’t ignore them on moral grounds. A founding editor of The American Conservative, Scott McConnell, wrote that after the collapse of the USSR the West could choose between two models—that of 1815, when the defeated France was brought into the Concert of Europe, and that of 1919, when Germany was ostracized under the Versailles Treaty. George H. W. Bush, continued McConnell, clearly thought along 1815 lines, but his approach was incrementally “reversed by his successors, first by the Clinton-Albright duo, and then by his son, and now by Obama, the latter prodded by his belligerent assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland.”[30]
One can’t help noticing that throughout the 1990s the policy makers of the West generally ignored Russia’s national feelings. “Eat your spinach,” representatives of the West said to the confused, angry nation, expecting it to emerge a smiling happy democracy. A great testimony in this respect comes from Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist advising Russians on “shock therapy” economic reform in the early 1990s. For Sachs, the crisis in Ukraine proved the road to Damascus, and this is what he had to say about it: “It took me 20 years to gain a proper understanding of what had happened after 1991. Why had the US, which had behaved with such wisdom and foresight in Poland, acted with such cruel neglect in the case of Russia? Step by step, and memoir by memoir, the true story came to light. The West had helped Poland financially and diplomatically because Poland would become the Eastern ramparts of an expanding NATO. Poland was the West, and was therefore worthy of help. Russia, by contrast, was viewed by US leaders roughly the same way that Lloyd George and Clemenceau had viewed Germany at Versailles—as a defeated enemy worthy to be crushed, not helped.”[31]
Critique of Western universalism is among the underappreciated theses of Huntington’s magisterial Clash of Civilizations. There is something in his interpretation of the West that can make liberals and conservatives equally uncomfortable: humility. Modernization, Huntington reminds us, “is distinct from Westernization and is producing neither a universal civilization in any meaningful sense nor the Westernization of non-Western societies.” Consequently, efforts “to shift societies from one civilization to another are unsuccessful.” Therefore, he concludes, the survival of the West depends on “Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal.”[32]
By siding with “pro-Western” dissidents abroad, we compromise our values in the eyes of those peoples, undermine the future of the values we want to spread, and exacerbate divisions within the torn societies. In short, by interfering, we make an un-Western country anti-Western.
A popular point of view is that there used to be a “good” Russia, which later got corrupted into something evil. But it is incorrect to separate Vladimir Putin from the Russian Main Street. Within two decades, in the course of several acceptably free elections, the Russian majority has moved from laissez-faire democracy to soft authoritarianism. As Henry Kissinger succinctly put it, “For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.”[33]
As I write these words, Putin’s approval rating in Russia stands at 86 percent. By the time you read them, it may have slipped to 60 percent or less. Russia may even have a new leader. But Putin’s triumph or fall is not the point. The point is that it is precisely Russia’s un-Westernness that makes the majority of Russians so proud.
The ideological disconnect between Russia and the West is strong again. This time, Russian elites and the majority of Russian voters swear not by Communism, but by civilizational particularism. They see the Russian civilization as distinctly separate from the rest of the world, including a specifically “native” understanding of people’s rights and freedoms.
Desperate to see light at the end of the tunnel, a number of American analysts are now saying that there will be a “better” Russia after Putin. There might be. Or not. Most likely, there will be one, but only briefly. Russia will open up to the West for a decade or so, and then close down again, following its own endemic rhythm.
That should give us pause: Russia refuses to change, we refuse to accept that. But then again, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s king put it, “If I commanded a general to fly from one flower to the next like a butterfly, or to write a tragedy, or to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not carry out my command, which of us would be in the wrong, the general or me?”[34]
In the summer of 2014, President Obama, exasperated by critics asking for a clear sense of direction in and a philosophy of foreign policy, told reporters that his guiding principle in foreign affairs was “Don’t do stupid stuff” (according to witnesses, the president used a stronger word). His enemies immediately called that fecklessness and a comedown. His former secretary of state Hillary Clinton scolded the president in an interview with The Atlantic, pronouncing, “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”[35]
For sure, “First, do no harm” is not a principle that sits well with the twenty-first-century American zeitgeist. Don’t just stand there, do something—we are being taught. Operate immediately, spike up the meds, be aggressive in treatment, can’t you see that we are losing him/her (Libya/Ukraine)? Yet Obama’s philosophy of non-maleficence did get endorsed by a number of renowned experts. David Remnick of The New Yorker approvingly commented: “When your aim is to conduct a responsive and responsible foreign policy, the avoidance of stupid things is often the avoidance of bloodshed and unforeseen strife. History suggests that it is not a mantra to be derided or dismissed.”[36]
Future historians of the American presidency will, no doubt, uncover the reasons for and the ways in which Obama’s principle of non-maleficence got hijacked in 2011–2014, but no matter their origins, the consequences of the follies in countries like Libya or Ukraine will be now felt for generations.
“Organizing principle” is an attractive expression, and when applied to foreign policy makes it sound as if the chaos of international relations could be scientifically controlled, like nuclear synthesis or tomato growing. It seems that for the interventionist the method is never to visit a developing country empty-handed, that is without non-negotiable gifts—business models, progressive mores, societal structures, political institutions, or “freedom” and “justice.”
In the course of The Atlantic interview, Clinton blamed Obama for the emergence of ISIS, quoting his “failure” to help Syrian anti-Assad rebels as resolutely as she had helped the anti-Gaddafi rebels in Libya in 2011. But her critics may point out that it was the interventionist policy of blanket endorsement of the “Arab Spring,” culminating in the NATO bombing of Libya, that made ISIS possible.
Taking out dictatorial regimes in North Africa and the Middle East created a structural void, where warlordism and lawlessness thrived. Libya is now a failed state in a key geopolitical location, and it is unclear whether the damage done to the nation is even repairable. Civil war rages, jihadism soars, and on the Libyan coast swarms of migrants fight for a place on a boat to cross the sea to Europe, the continent stupefied by the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have already arrived.
Compared with the brazen use of force in Libya, U.S. interference in Ukraine in 2013–2014 had been “soft.” Yet its underlying principle was the same—impose a gift of “freedom” on a divided nation, and take it from there—again, in the spirit of the infamous Napoleonic motto On s’engage, et puis on voit.
“Do no harm” and “organize”: the balance between the two in U.S. foreign policy will determine the fate of the unsettled parts of Eastern Europe, but also America’s gains and losses on that gigantic isthmus stretching between the Baltic and the Black seas.
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