Mykola Riabchuk :
In 2010, the Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych scandalised his countrymen by saying – facetiously – that the next time the Donbas region, on the mainland northeast of Crimea, expressed an eagerness to secede, we shouldn’t stop it. He was recalling a moment in 2004 when the local elite of the Ukrainian southeast, watching in horror as the Orange Revolution played out in Kiev, summoned a congress and threatened to quit Ukraine. It never happened, of course. The people didn’t want it, and Ukrainian law forbade it.
Still, Andrukhovych’s words are remembered as a comment on how difficult the marriage between eastern and western Ukraine has been. Any group in a diverse country may one day want to divorce its government. But in every divorce, there are matters to settle fairly – of property, of obligations, of the weaker party’s rights. Which is why divorce courts exist. Amicable divorce is next to impossible when there is nobody to apply the rule of law.
So it is worth considering the extent of legal and political dysfunction introduced after Viktor F. Yanukovych assumed power in 2010 and installed a huge number of Donbas people in the central government and local administrations throughout Ukraine. This transferred his region’s corrupt political habits to the central government, undermining respect for law and encouraging the use of the state apparatus for blackmail and racketeering.
Profound popular dissatisfaction followed, but for a time, people could hope that an association agreement with the European Union that Yanukovych had said he would sign would temper his predatory regime. But then he shelved the agreement, turning to Russia for help instead. For many, this clarified the kind of future he was building; the revolution known as Maidan, after the Kiev square where protests mushroomed, followed.
Maidan was, in effect, a middle-class revolt against the remnants of post-Soviet feudalism, an attempt to link Ukraine to Europe rather than see it become another autocratic kleptocracy like Russia or Belarus. But efforts toward that goal had been hijacked twice before: in 1991, when post-Communist leaders restored corrupt and arbitrary rule, and in 2004, when the Orange Revolution for democracy was spoiled by leaders more intent on infighting than reform.
Now, most dangerously, Russia’s de facto invasion has put the Maidan uprising at profound risk of derailment. I don’t think Russia will try to take over all of Ukraine; occupying Crimea as a Russian protectorate may be enough to prevent integration of Ukraine with the European Union, let alone NATO. That would satisfy Russia’s policy toward its “near abroad”: Create internal conflict, exploit it to blackmail a sovereign government, and see the West shrink from building closer relations with the target country because its future is now uncertain.
Still, if the Kremlin is succeeding as an international spoiler, it is doing worse at strategic vision, prediction and calculation. With Ukraine, its apparatchiks succumb to their own propaganda and misunderstand important facts. For one, the Orange Revolution was not a Western plot. Nor were the Maidan protesters pogromchiks, extremists or neo-fascists, as the Kremlin has shamelessly tarred them. And linguistic heritage is not the same as political loyalty. The fact that nearly half of Ukraine’s people speak Russian as their primary language doesn’t necessarily make them any more loyal to Putin than English binds the Irish to the British crown.
In addition, sociologists have found that Maidan’s social, regional and ethnic base was broad. Even though the percentages were a bit higher among residents of western Ukraine, ethnic Ukrainians and highly educated people, a series of World Value Surveys found a shift in the past decade – across all regions and ethnic groups – from “survival values” of the industrial era toward post-industrial “self-expression.”
In one 2012 survey more than 90 per cent of respondents in the west and 70-plus per cent in the east considered themselves “a patriot of Ukraine.” Even in Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, only 2 per cent rejected this description definitively. Another poll, conducted on February 8-18, found that virtually nobody in western Ukraine wanted Ukraine to unite with Russia, and in central Ukraine between 2 and 5 per cent did. Moving east, the numbers rose only to 15 per cent in the Kharkiv region; 24 per cent in Luhansk and Odessa; 33 percent in Donetsk; and 41 per cent in Crimea.
Crimea is perhaps the most complex case, because its Tatars are the only ethnic group truly native to the peninsula. Before 1783, they had a state. Then Russia seized the peninsula and subjugated them; in 1944, the Soviets deported them to Central Asia. It was 1989 before they could return – only to encounter neglect by the government and Russian chauvinism, racism and Islamophobia from the Russian-speaking majority. Their hopes for security and prosperity now point more to Kiev and the European Union than to Moscow.
The Kremlin’s efforts to ignite tensions in other Ukrainian regions are likely to fail. Ukraine is divided along many lines, but there are encouraging signs in the sudden support that Ukrainian oligarchs have shown for the new government in Kiev, and in thousands of letters from Ukrainians, Russians and Russophones to Putin urging him to spare them from the Kremlin’s “protection.”
These actions, alongside the polls, show that Ukrainians as a whole are not much divided over their territorial integrity.
So, Putin, spare them your help. They can help themselves without bloodshed, as they had done for more than 22 years of independence from Moscow.
(Mykola Riabchuk, a political and cultural analyst in Kiev and a senior fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna)
