1. The cultural divide between the northern/western (strong ethnic Ukrainian majorities, dominance of Ukrainian language in government/politics and commerce) and southern/eastern oblasts (weaker Ukrainian majorities, more Russians, dominance of Russian as language of government/politics and commerce), is reflected in the political base for Yanukovych's Party of the Regions and for the various pro-European opposition parties. The prevalence of recent anti-government protest activity faithfully follows the same ethnic/lingual divide. Any understanding of the recent Ukrainian crisis must be predicated on a knowledge of this divide.
I cannot do as much justice to the larger topic conveyed in the above conclusion as various other analysts have done by means of cartographic analysis on the ethnic divide in Ukraine and its consequent reflections on Ukrainian national politics. Thus, my intention is to throw out a bunch of maps, with ethnographic and political information and, subsequently, sort out the details of what they have to say. So, here goes:
(Who says I don't give the Wiki Folks Credit Where Credit is Due!)
So here is what I take out of all of this. First, on the eve of the recent protests, supportive of a trade agreement with the European Union, Ukraine had been a drastically divided country, in both cultural (ethnically Ukrainian v. ethnically Russian populations) and economic terms. The eastern oblasts, which retained a stronger degree of industrialization and urbanization from the Soviet period, continue to concentrate wealth relative to the western, predominantly ethnically Ukrainian oblasts (as reflected in the distribution of salaried incomes in figure 6A). For this reason, the eastern oblasts continued to enjoy a great deal of political power, manifest explicitly through the electoral dominance of the Party of the Regions, at least since the 2010 elections (Figure 5). Notwithstanding, an ethnic divide has clearly been pervasive since the independence of Ukraine with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Figure 4, on the 2004 elections, prior to the Orange Revolution, most clearly demonstrate the nature of this divide.
The ethnic divide in Ukraine is also, emphatically, a linguistic divide. For my part, with an ethnic heritage in French-speaking Québec, I can appreciate the fact that, for Ukrainian-speaking ethnic Ukrainians, a serious and irreconcilable problem existed in the economic and political divisions existing within the country going into the second decade of the Twenty-first century. Like Francophone Québécois, the Ukrainians wanted to be "maitres chez nous." In important ways, cultural-linguisitic issues in Ukraine appear to be intimately tied to economic ones. The oblasts in which income and revenue generation have been concentrated (and, hence, the oblasts with higher monthly salary levels in figure 6A) have (with the noteworthy exception of metropolitan Kiev) largely Russian-speaking populations and conduct the majority of their business in Russian. In particular, the urban agglomerations of the lower Dnieper (e.g. Dniepropetrovsk) and the Don Basin (e.g. Donetsk and Makiivka) appear to be, for economic purposes, Russian city-regions. Further, notwithstanding existing Ukrainian majorities within these cities and a palpable commitment on the part of local governments to prioritize the Ukrainian language in official communications (the official website for the municipality of Makiivka opens in Ukrainian, although it offers both Russian and English translations, at: http://www.makeyevka.dn.ua/), it seems quite evident that such commitments have more to do with legal mandate than practicality - urban residents in the Donetsk, Lugansk, and Kharkiv oblasts (where Regional State Administrations have been occupied by pro-Russian demonstrators since the overthrow of the Yanukovych government, see figure 7) are much more apt to speak Russian as a first language and to identify more closely with Moscow than with Kiev.
Moreover, under existing patterns of economic development, concentrated in older industrial areas of the eastern oblasts, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, around the military (both Ukrainian and Russian) and shipping industries in Crimea and on other areas of the Black Sea coast (e.g. Odessa), the Ukrainians were destined to be locked into an economic system that would prioritize eastward linkages at the expense of new possibilities for investment and trade with the EU. While some quantity of trade in basic ferrous metallurgical products from the Donetsk oblast (i.e. the heavy-industrial Don Basin) must have flowed westward toward the EU economies, it seems quite certain that the overwhelming majority of exports from Donetsk were sold to Russian or other post-Soviet republican markets. Under such circumstances, working populations, both ethnically Russian and Ukrainian, in aging industries in the Don Basin must understand the economic consequences evident in any reorientation of the Ukrainian economy toward the EU as a fundamental threat to their continued livelihood. By contrast, any effort to formally solidify Eurasian/Russian trade ties (i.e. through a customs union) and, thus, accentuate the importance of older eastern industrial zones as sites for reinvestment would certainly have undermined efforts to establish export processing zones in the Lviv and Uzhgorod oblasts, focused on westward trade with EU economies. No doubt, in addition to basic cultural-linguistic issues, ethnic Ukrainians in the western oblasts understood this economic picture and the political consequences portended by it all too well.
With this in mind, it would have seemed that the Yanukovych government was attempting to placate the irreconcilable differences in economic interests between pro-Russian and pro-European camps by negotiating simultaneously with Moscow and EU delegates. Russia's financial intervention in December 2013, however, forced Yanukovych's hand (as if it was not going to be forced by the effects of Ukraine's persistent trade imbalance with the Russian Federation induced by Ukraine's dependency on Russian natural gas). Under the circumstances, pro-European ethnic Ukrainians did the only thing they conceivably could do - protest loudly demanding that their side in the larger economic (and cultural/ethno-linguistic) debate should hold the day. It is questionable whether they would have actually succeeded had Yanukovych not followed advice from the Putin government to forcefully show pro-European demonstrators that the government would not be bullied by an unelected mob. As in many other global contexts over the past decade (Egypt, Tunisia, Venezuela, etc.), the events of late February in Kiev raise questions concerning the ultimate meaning of democracy. That is to say, are elected governments the exclusive signature of democratic rule, or do people on the streets, actively making their voice heard above the repressive measures of a formally elected government also exemplify democracy sovereignty? It is not necessary to anwer this question here (although I lean demonstrably toward an expressive, popular definition of democracy). The important point is that the victory of the pro-European camp in Kiev will have drastic consequences for the geographic dimensions of Ukraine that emerge by the end of 2014.
2. Any effort by a new, opposition government headed by the All-Ukrainian Fatherland Party or any of the other opposition parties to impose its will in governing the eastern and southern oblasts, especially Crimea, will be met with vigorous regional resistance if not outright defiance by pro-Russian populations supporting Yanukovych's government, which they are likely to continue to regard as the sole legitimate government of Ukraine. In this regard, it may be impossible for the opposition parties in Kiev to either consolidate their power relative to the Yanukovych regime or, certainly, to prosecute criminal charges against Yanukovych for actions against pro-European protesters.
I had hoped to post an elaboration to this conclusion before pieces of Ukraine started to break off and rejoin Russia. In this respect, less than one month was simply to long to wait to flesh out these comments. It was incomprehensible that Ukraine would retain the Crimean peninsula, with its majority of ethnic Russians and broader strategic utility to the Russian military. In a sense, the result of the plebiscite held on March 16 in favor of secession from Ukraine and reunification with the Russian Federation was a foregone conclusion and it merely ratified the notion that the Soviet Krushchev government's 1954 relegation of Crimea to administration through the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was a mistake on Moscow's part. The only logical connection between Crimea, as an autonomous republic under Kiev's loose administration, derived from its geography as an extension from the larger ethnic Ukrainian heartland. A liberal, pro-European Ukrainian nationalist regime in Kiev can hardly claim the capacity to speak for a territory in which less than one quarter of the population is ethnically Ukrainian! In view of the past weekend's political events, it would behoove the interim government in Kiev to negotiate with the regional government of Crimea a peaceful withdrawal of its remaining military forces from the peninsula. If such negotiations were to take place (a very wishful thought at this point!), then they might go a long way toward legitimizing the political division of Ukrainian within its competing camps, formally renouncing Kiev's claims on Crimea and acknowledging, at least indirectly, in Moscow that the interim government in Kiev is the sole legitimate representative of the larger interests of the Ukrainian people, even if the dimensions of this population remains in flux.
I have two immediate comments to make in regard to Crimea's departure from Ukraine. First, the ethnic Russians living in Crimea (constituting nearly 60 percent of the Crimean population, see figure 2) are suspended within their history as heirs to the Russian conquest of the peninsula of which at least some can, no doubt, recount the war experiences of their ancestors defending this land against the Anglo-French intervention of the 1850s and against the onslaught of the German Wehrmacht in the 1940s. They have a proud Russian heritage to defend largely distinct from that of their Ukrainian neighbors in the adjacent oblasts up the Dnieper basin from the Black Sea coast. It stands to reason that they would feel a threat emerging from the overthrow of a pro-Russian government in Kiev. Unfortunately, the Crimean Russians are also trapped by their history and their intrinsic ethnic connection to a country that is actively driving itself into hostile isolation not only from Europe but also from anything approaching the progressive, liberal, civic republican ethos of the Enlightenment. Again, as someone who entertains a fair amount of respect for everything that is beautiful about Russian culture, I cannot help but ask when Russia will ever wake up from its imperial past to join the liberal West.
Having expressed a certain exasperation at a population so committed to reunifying itself with a nation that seems bound to regress into militaristic imperialism in its relations with its neighbors and xenophobic ethnic-nationalism and reactionary cultural intolerance in its domestic affairs, I also adamently defend the sovereign democratic right of the Crimeans to do so, in the same sense that I defend the sovereign democratic right of pro-European Ukrainians of the Euromaidan protests in Kiev to overthrow the Yanukovych government. In a world leveled by the sort of globalizing post-nationalist ideology that I find latent both within the aspirations of contemporary transnational capitalist practices and within the expectations and hopes of anti-capitalist Marxian theorizations (like my own!), Ukrainians in Kiev and Crimean Russians in Simferopol might locate their common interests in a borderless, free-trading and culturally cosmopolitan openness. In the contemporary reality of post-revolutionary Ukraine, the incommensurably divergent interests of Crimean Russians and Ukrainians in the western oblasts can only find a democratic solution in separation.
A more interesting, contentious, and likely volatile situation exists in the eastern oblasts of Lugansk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhya, and Dniepropetrovsk (see video, "Protestors Face off in Donetsk," at: http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2014/03/14/lklv-chance-ukraine-donesk-demo.cnn&iid=article_sidebar&video_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F2014%2F03%2F18%2Fworld%2Feurope%2Fukraine-crisis%2F#/video/world/2014/03/14/lklv-chance-ukraine-donesk-demo.cnn). Each of these oblasts has a sufficiently large ethnically Russian population and an economy sufficiently oriented toward Eurasian/Russian commerce that the stakes for these provinces to separate from Kiev's governance are rather high. If, as I have suggested so far in this post, ethnic Ukrainians in the eastern oblasts vote with their wallets, then I find it incomprehensible that there will not be a political reallignment, consistent with the direction of demonstrations taking place in these oblast in favor of Russia. The interim government in Kiev indisputably lacks the credibility with state political agents in these oblasts to execute ethnically nationalist measures prioritizing the Ukrainian language in government and commerce. It, likewise, seems clear that the Euromaidan demonstrations were solidly opposed by their populations, even among the ethnic Ukrainians. If these oblasts were left to their own devices, it is apparent that they would certainly seek some degree of autonomy from Kiev to undertake regionally specific economic and cultural policies supportive of some greater degree of integration with the Russian Federation. On the other hand, in view of Russia's capacity and apparent willingness to intervene on behalf of co-ethnics or allied populations in other post-Soviet republics (e.g. the 2008 intervention into Georgian Abkhazia and South Ossetia), it seems unlikely that these oblasts will be left entirely to their own devices - they will have a powerful, militarily engaged ally.
3. The domestic conflict within Ukraine cannot, by any means, be extracted from the larger context of the post-Soviet Russian sphere of influence, especially given the muscular regional policy stance exerted by Putin's United Russia regime. In this respect, any effort by a new pro-European government in Kiev to steer Ukraine away from Russian domination is likely to be dealt with aggressively by the Russian Federation in an effort to guard its interests in the creation of a Eurasian economic bloc, dominated by Russia.
It is impossible to disentangle the aspirations of Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens in Crimea and the eastern oblasts from the larger articulation of a Russian worldview, through the aegis of United Russia and its head, Vladimir Putin. While this perspective predates both recent manifestations of territorial aggression by the Russian Federation and the larger Soviet interim, Ukraine has experienced a long night under the Muscovite yoke since at least the mid-1700s. It is a testament to the ethnic Ukrainians themselves that Russian domination never vanquished their ethnic uniqueness. Conversely, it is a testament to the pre-Soviet Russian empire and, in particular, the Tsarist monarchs and its regional aristocratic vassals that the empire never engaged, in any significant way, in a rigorously imposed homogenization to culturally suppress the uniqueness of the Ukrainians, as a particular, non-Russian slavic subject population. In this respect, I may be approaching the problem of Ukrainian culturally uniqueness with the engrained prejudices of an American within a rigorously assimilationist culture, proceeding from the myth of the "melting pot." The history of the Russian empire is distinct from that of the American republic, and our battles for and against cultural difference/uniqueness have probably amazingly little in common with the ethnic politics of Slavic peoples under Muscovite control from the close of the Eighteenth century to the founding of the Soviet Union.
As a distinct and fleeting moment in the larger history of the region, Bolshevism manifest an ambiguous legacy on the cultural survival of Ukraine. The first decade of after the revolution, predictably, held the promise that ethnicities previously subject to Russian political dominance and cultural subjugation (Russification) would be enabled to engage in self rule and participatory definition of roles within the larger project of socialist transformation. On the other hand, the geographic distribution of Russian-speaking peoples/ethnic Russians from the period of the Tsarist empire continued into the Soviet period, and the re-introduction of Russian nationalist rhetorical/ideological appeals from the mid-1930s through the war period and the postwar recovery by the Georgian Stalin, undermined the vigor of contrary national aspirations by non-Russian peoples within the Soviet "empire." Clearly, by 1991, remaining CPSU loyalists to the Soviet project had yet to defeat the nationalist project of Russification, which, over time, had been coopted by CPSU, notwithstanding its Marxist commitments to internationalism. More importantly, the Soviet period was formative to this generation of Russian leadership (i.e. United Russia), to the extent that Putin has recounted that he regards the collapse of the Soviet Union as the worst catastrophe of the Twentieth Century.
In a larger sense, we need to acknowledge an underlying mythology, contained as much within the writings of Nineteenth century Russian Slavophile thinkings (e.g philosopher Ivan Kireyevsky) as within the broader structure of the Leninist revision of Marxian thinking regarding the role of industrializing peripheries (e.g. Lenin's "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism"). Both such bodies of theory contain a nexus of belief constituting Russia within a quasi-messianic role in relation to both the decadent bourgeois materialism of the advanced Western capitalist economies and the perpetually backward, primitive Eastern cultures (e.g. China). In important ways, such a cultural prejudice continues to exist as a motivation for Russian political hegemony in Putin's government. In these terms, we have to understand the pro-European revolution in Ukraine as a challenge to Putin's broader portrait of Russia the messianic. Liberal, pro-European Ukrainians of the Euromaidan protests are standing up for an Enlightenment ideal of free markets, civic republicanism, the elimination of government corruption, and a broader unity of nations in the interest of peaceful, de-militarized coexistence, something that is currently inimical to the perspective of Putin's United Russia.
4. Given the above conclusions, the existence of a wholly unified Ukraine appears presently untenable. Ukraine will fracture geographically and politically, with oblasts remaining loyal to Yanukovych's Party of the Regions splitting off, perhaps to join in some meaningful way with the Russian Federation (e.g. as a new federation-level republic). The remaining northern and western oblasts are unlikely to manifest any tangible opposition to such a move, backed vigorously (and, certainly, militarily) from Moscow, and will, thus, be left to govern a highly constricted national polity and economic space in which a nationalistic Ukrainian culture will predominate.
With the secession of Crimea, this process has already been set in motion. Likewise, I find it improbable that the interim government in Kiev will be able to retain the Lugansk, Donetsk, or Zaporizhya oblasts. The entire Don Basin urban agglomeration will almost certainly leave to join the Russian Federation. A number of critical questions arise here, however. First, will the departure of these oblasts be accompanied by a military intervention by the Russian Federation, in the same manner as the seizure of strategic sites in Crimea occurred following the overthrow of the Yanukovych government? Second, assuming the departure of these oblasts as a fait accomplit, with or without the intervention of Russian military forces, will the U.S. and EU interpret their actions as an act of aggression and act accordingly to punish the Russian Federation? Third, insofar as each of these oblasts has a Ukrainian majority, will there be a substantial population shift (i.e. a voluntary or induced ethnic cleansing) arising from the integration of the oblasts into the Russian Federation?
I want to save the second question here for the final conclusion in this post, which, from my position as an American, I regard as quite important. For now, the possibilities of a Russian military intervention (of a comparatively more intrusive degree than that of Crimea) rely on two factors: the response of the central Ukrainian interim government toward pro-Russian demonstrations in Don Basin and the probability, in view of tangible pro-Russian political organization within each oblast, that an electoral determination in favor of unification with Russia will hold the day. In the first case, I feel somewhat certain that the interim government in Kiev will deploy whatever security forces that it has at its disposal into the Don Basin in an effort to hold these regions and prevent their departure. Thus, the Russian Federation will have the excuse to intervene militarily in the eastern oblasts, whether or not a referendum would ratify their actions. The Ukrainian military/security forces would be wise not to challenge Russia (i.e. Ukraine will lose!). That said, I really do not completely understand all of the issues involved in the politics of these regions. The majority of the population maintains Russian as its first language. This might be enough to bring the oblasts into the Russian Federation. It might not. The ethnic majority in each of the oblasts of the Don Basin is still Ukrainian. In this regard, I continue to believe that latent Ukrainian nationalism may be enough to hold Kharkiv, Dniepropetrovsk, and the remainder of the Black Sea coast (i.e. the Odessa oblast) if the political existence of each of these jurisdictions enters debate.
Having considered the above question, I believe that the Don Basin and Zaporizhya will end up in the Russian Federation. Concluding in this manner, I believe that there will be a partial exodus of Ukrainians from these oblasts. Most of those departing will be young (under 30), with a relatively high level of education. There will be a "brain drain" from the Don Basin. Such individuals will be more likely to engage in advanced service sector (e.g. information technology, finance, real estate, insurance, etc.) entrepreneurship. These will be growth sectors in western Ukraine, including, of course, Kiev. Realizing this portrait, the good people of Dniepropetrovsk, as the most technologically advanced of the old, industrial urban centers of contemporary Ukraine would be wise to mind the fact that they may be throwing away their best shot at a prosperous future if they join Russia(!) With this in mind, including the hope that Dniepropetrovsk and Odessa realize fully where their best interest lies and that the pro-European ethnic Ukrainians are skillful enough to inform them as such, Ukraine will certainly lose the lower Don Basin and its diminished population centers, from which a significant number of ethnic Ukrainians may depart. I expect that they will retain some stretch of the Black Sea coast, including Odessa, from which some Russians may depart. I finally expect that a given portrait of economic development will emerge from a dismantled Ukraine, featuring particular, distinct patterns of restructuring relative to the contemporary Ukraine.
5. The political and economic viability of the two post-revolutionary Ukraines will depend on the capacity of each to successfully integrate into interregional economic blocs and security regimes and, thus, to develop respective economic niches in relation to neighboring states within their economic blocs. For the pro-European regime in Kiev, this task is liable to be hampered by interference from Moscow in what Putin regards as an adjunct to Russian domestic economic and regional security policy for the Russian Federation.
Insofar as the previous section in this post was relatively short and straight forward, I think this one will mirror it. Provided Dniepropetrovsk realizes its larger interests in remaining within an independent Ukraine, it stands to become an important growth pole for various high tech manufacturing operations, particularly in the aerospace industry, capable of generating a discrete range of specialized exports for the European market. If it does not, then various fields with which Dniepropetrovsk currently enjoys a degree of specialization may migrate up the Dnieper to Kiev to take advantage of the larger international markets available through progressive integration with the EU. In general, Kiev will certainly continue to be the principal financial entrepôt for the country, concentrating investments from diverse international sources. Various export processing regions in the western oblasts will, with greater degrees of integration with the EU, expand manufacturing operations to generate larger quantities of goods and services and, thus, to take advantage of relatively lower wages in Ukraine, relative to various Eastern European EU states.
A noteworthy question obviously arises here: should Ukraine become a member of the Euro-zone? At this point, the answer to this question seems murky to me, insofar as the future of the Euro, as a currency remains in doubt. The larger purpose underlying the EU has been (and always will be) free trade. In this respect, Ukraine deserves a chance to participate as a full and equal partner in a broader project of the continental European states, east and west, to improve their individual standards of living by opening their economies to lower cost competition from their neighbors. In my opinion, the Euro adds little, if anything, to this project. The persistent nightmare of the Greek economy reveals why membership in the Euro is a double-edged sword for economies with a miniscule range of high value export commodities. Thus, it would probably by better for Ukraine to maintain its hryvnia, as long as its EU neighbors allow it to do so, in order to maintain whatever miniscule advantage in trade with Euro-zone states for maintaining a relatively weak national currency.
The post-division Ukraine will obviously have to deal with the painful loss of tax revenues and foreign exchange (i.e. roubles) from the loss of the Don Basin, which will enjoy significant reinvestment from Russian sources. This point is key - Russia will attempt to revive the industrial capacity of the Don Basin for broader purposes of utilizing its output for domestic investment, particular steel output for use in petroleum and petro-chemical industries in Russia. In this respect, the Russian Federation obviously stands to gain significant industrial assets from the breakup of Ukraine but assets in which state or private investors will have to expend significant financial resources to restore diminished industrial capacities (e.g. investment in basic oxygen furnace technologies for basic steel production - I am not clear that steel manufacturers in the region have made such investments since the 1980s). Certainly, in the Don Basin, Russia will not be gaining any industrial assets that do not manifest significant costs in order to make production competitive in relation to production by trading partners. Moreover, if the Don Basin is not an undiminished prize for Russia, the economic value of Crimea is far more murky. Most Russians on the peninsula may find themselves reduced to dependents on the largesse of the Russian Federation, either by virtue of their connection to Russian military operations or by virtue of the necessity of the state to provide social safety net functions (e.g. pensions, income supports, food subsidies). Crimea will certainly become a drain on Russian government revenues, at least initially only partially offset by revenues generated in the Don Basin. In certain ways, both Russia and Ukraine will experience some degree of pain in the break up of the contemporary Ukrainian economy.
The importation of natural gas and its transhipment from Russia through Ukraine to Europe will remain an important and contentious issue. Ukrainian industries obviously need Russian gas to maintain their productivity and Ukrainian domestic consumers will need Russian gas for diverse household uses. Barring any significant and improbable transformation of trade patterns (e.g. a deal with the U.S. and/or Canada for Ukraine to purchase large quantities of liquified natural gas at preferential rates relative to those charged by Gazprom), Ukraine will continue to run a substantial trade deficit with Russia that it will need to address through recourse to foreign/Western lenders. One way or another, external debt for Kiev is bound to rise significantly unless it can find domestic gas resources (i.e. shale gas fields) that will enable it to reduce its foreign dependence. By contrast, the Don Basin will enjoy some measure of savings in its expenditure on energy resources from integration with the Russian Federation. This is certainly not the source of a counter-argument in favor of closer relations by Ukraine with (subservience to!) the Russian Federation, but it is a recognition that there will be costs for Ukraine in seeking closer relations to the EU.
Ultimately, Ukraine will need to take advantage of all available assets offered by the EU and U.S. in order to maintain its functional independence from Moscow. In line with this suggestion, Kiev will need to aggressively support the implantation of new facilities for processing of exports to the EU at export processing zones in the western oblasts, closest to Poland, Slovakia, and other EU member states. The operation of such firms will generate foreign currency assets for Kiev at the expense of a range of tax resource to the central and region/oblast governments. In a larger sense, we need to acknowledge that the very notion of Ukraine going off on its own will be difficult, when, since the 1780s, Ukraine existed as a miniscule vasal for Moscow, filling in for the deficiencies of other Soviet republics in the maintenance of outputs for the larger economic system of the larger Soviet and post-Soviet system. Russia is not going to watch Ukraine leave its political spehere quietly without some manner of struggle!
6. The U.S. and the EU need to cautiously embrace the pro-European regime in Kiev, perhaps by fast-tracking EU membership for this Ukraine, certainly by extending financial assistance directly and through IMF and the World Bank, and, tentatively, by opening the discussion of NATO membership for the Kiev regime. Recognizing that any of these steps is likely to be viewed as an act of outright aggression from Moscow, U.S. and the EU must pursue a continuous dialogue with the Putin regime that remains firmly insistent on the necessity of integrating the Kiev regime into Europe, but that also makes jestures (however difficult) to "sweeten the pot" for Moscow to accept such a new allignment of the region.
As an initial point, I must emphasize that the Euromaidan revolution in Kiev and the overthrow of the Yanukovych regime is a good thing that the U.S. and EU need to support and defend against Russian aggression. Indisputably, ethnic Ukrainians in Kiev and the western oblasts embody a tangible interest in closer economic ties with the EU that their neighbors and co-ethnics in the eastern oblasts may not share. However, if the U.S. and EU truly believe that democratic self-determination is a virtue that needs to be nurtured everywhere in the world where people stand up for their interests, beliefs, and hopes for a better future transcending the limited terms of their existing political systems, then we need to commit tangible financial resources to see to it that Ukraine will be able to wrestle out its future as a nation away from the grip of a backward looking empire. In this sense, one part of the West's approach to Ukraine should be relatively simple. We need to extend immediate financial assistance to Kiev in order to ensure that the interim government can continue to pay its debt to Gazprom to keep the lights on throughout the country. The U.S., Canada, and the EU states should extend loans to Ukraine to assist it in long term economic restructuring so that it can find its place within the larger division of labor among EU member states. The interim government and its successors need substantial technical assistance to determine what sort of long term changes need to be made to promote the economic interdependence of Ukraine with the EU and its economic independence from Russia. If it is not granted immediate membership in the EU, then the prerequisites for its admission need to be laid out in order to facilitate a transformation of economic and governmental institutions favoring greater governmental transparency and reducing inefficiencies arising from corruption in the actions of governmental policymakers and private sector agents. Finally, EU and Ukrainian financial experts need to raise the question of integration of Ukraine into the Euro-zone to determine the particular obstacles to and possible consequences from such a transition away from the hryvnia.
The military question for Ukraine is much murkier! New York Times editorialist Thomas Friedman has repeatedly made the point that he opposed extension of NATO into Eastern Europe in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union for the simple reason that such a movement would be inclined to isolate Russia at the very moment when Russian liberals needed the sort of support in institutional transformation that could have come from progressive integration into the European mainstream. I agree entirely with Friedman, but at this point we are dealing with the long term consequences of foreign policies crafted against a greater Russophobic ethos within the immediate post-Cold War U.S. and European Community. The fears of Western policy makers like James Baker (in whom I otherwise have a great deal of respect for his brand of statemanship) with regard to the rise of militaristic, imperial intentions from a post-Soviet Russia have become the self-fulfilling prophecy in the seizure of Crimea. Putin's United Russia and the rise of the Russian nationalist right wing, in general, are products of policies for the promotion of European continental security that retained an integrated, aggressive role for the U.S. and that, thus, permanently marginalized Russia. Having placed ourselves in this very unfavorable foreign policy context when we could done things very differently in the early 1990s, we now need to ask the question: how can we successfully integrate Ukraine into the broader NATO security scheme, perhaps as a junior partner, in order to restore some measure of territorial integrity to Ukraine, without intimidating Moscow in some unacceptable manner? I do not think that this question has an easy answer, but it seems inevitable that we are going to have to formulate some kind of foreign/military policy that will ensure Ukrainian independence on the doorstep of the Russian Federation.
The military question conveys itself to a broader consideration of the particular ways in which the U.S. and EU are approaching the Ukrainian crisis relative to the particular actions undertaken by the Russian Federation in response to the overthrow of Yanukovych. That is to say, how are we going to approach Putin/United Russia in order to reestablish regional political stability and prevent Russian military aggression against the interim government in Kiev and its successors. One very basic and highly relevant question here involves the particular historical framework against which we view the events that have transpired over the last month. In this respect, there is one particular standpoint that I adamently believe that we need to eschew as entirely unhelpful in dealing, especially, with the problem of Crimea's secession and annexation by Russia. Namely, we are absolutely not reliving the 1938 Munich crisis. Crimea is not the Sudetenland (Russians compose a majority, sixty percent of the Crimean population, while Germans made up around thirty percent of the Bohemian/Sudeten population in 1938), and Putin and United Russia are not Hitler and the German National Socialist (Nazi) Party. On some level, perceptions formed from this historical analogy appear to predominate in evaluations of Russian actions in Crimea, and they are not helping to bring a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian crisis.
It would be more helpful for the West to adopt another historical frame of reference in order to step inside the shoes of Putin/United Russia (and, for that matter, those of the Crimean Russians). Specifically, we are presently dealing with a government in the Russian Federation that is, to the maximum extent possible, attempting to restore its geopolitical power through the reconstitution of the space of the Soviet Union and, even more succinctly, of the pre-Soviet Tsarist Russian Empire. This is obviously as problematic to the sovereign democratic aspirations of non-Russians on the periphery of the Russian Federation as it is to the non-Russians seeking democratic self-determination within the Russian Federation (e.g. Muslim Chechens, Dagestanis, Ingush, etc. in the North Caucasus region). To the extent that the U.S. and EU, as a matter of principle more that politics, support national self-determination, the idea of restoring the Russian Empire must, therefore, be contested. On the other hand, we need to simultaneously comprehend the limited character of Putin's geopolitical ambitions and select tools/weapons accordingly in our efforts to support the democratic aspirations of non-Russians in the Russian regional political sphere. If nothing else, we need to recognize the peculiarity of Crimea as a quintessentially Russian space awkwardly grafted onto Ukraine. Its return to Russia ratifies the larger reality of the situation that it should never have been handed to Ukraine in the first place and, in the present moment, its overwhelmingly Russian population is getting its wish to return home. In my view, as someone committed to prioritizing democracy above the limitations of a worldview that reinterprets every reorganization of Eurasian landspace as a threat to U.S. interests, I cannot understand how the Russian annexation of territory that had been Russian since the 1780s merits the imposition of sanctions by the U.S. and EU, constituting warfare by economic means!
Moreover, the imposition of static geographical forms on nation-states, per se, as a matter of foreign policy, contravening the evolving realities of ethnic composition and group identification, is both a hindrance to democratic self-determination and a possible source for unnecessary geopolitical confrontation. By this I mean that the self-identification of Ukrainians with some national entity called Ukraine is more important than the particular cartographic dimensions contained by Ukraine's political jurisdictional boundaries. As far as I am concerned, it is irrelevant that Crimea has been drawn as an autonomous jurisdiction contained by Ukraine if the majority of its population does not regard itself as Ukrainian. I hold the same inclinations with regard to the oblasts of the Don Basin. If Russia ultimately annexes these oblasts, as I think it will, then the only concerns I have regard the fairness and openness of referendum processes conducted to determine whether the populations of these oblasts want to be Russian rather than Ukrainian. At the end of the day, Russia only deserves to be punished if it is aggressively incorporating populations where a majority of the population has expressively and openly defined its intentions not to be Russian.
Having clarified, in part, my perspective on Russia's side in the Ukrainian crisis, I have two concerns with the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU. First, do Russia's actions to date and their future anticipated actions merit the imposition of sanctions as an act of economic warfare to dissuade imperial intentions? Second, will the sanctions be effective in meeting their goals? Quixotically, I am going to answer the second question first. In the short run, there is very little that the West can do to Russia through sanctions unless the sort of regime contemplated is extensive enough to obstruct Russian trade and financial flows with the West writ large. That is to say, the U.S. and EU would need to undertake a full scale trade embargo and cessation of all financial dealings by Western financial institutions against Russia. Such a full scale offensive enactment of economic warfare might be possible but it seems unlikely to obtain the requisite political support, especially in the continental EU states, which rely on Russian natural gas imports.
Ultimately, the success of efforts to economically isolate Russia must come from long term efforts at economic restructuring within the West. Again, in this respect, Friedman has astutely zeroed in on the grand strategy (see Thomas Friedman, "From Putin, A Blessing in Disguise," New York Times (March 18, 2014), at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/opinion/friedman-from-putin-a-blessing-in-disguise.html?_r=0). That is to say, Europe must attain energy independence in relation to Russian gas imports, and, in a much broader sense, the Western economies must reduce their usage of fossil fuels sufficiently to cause petroleum prices, the critical axis against which Russian geopolitical power is leveraged, to enter a secular decline. American and Canadian efforts at petroleum and gas exploration, including both hydraulic fracturing of shale gas and transformation of tar sands, also play a role in this strategy but they need to be situated against a broader effort to reduce carbon-based fuel usage in the Western economies. Such a restructuring could, over perhaps fifteen to twenty-five years, have the effect of strangling the Russian economy, assuming the unwillingness of both public and private sector investors to pursue a broader diversification of the Russian economy.
To a substantial extent, I think that I may have already answered my first question above. Maybe we should have imposed sanctions on Russia for the actions of Putin/United Russia in the North Caucasus (something I would wholly agree with!), but it seems clear to me that, at least to date, Russia has acted in Ukraine to support the democratic aspirations of people who expressively wanted to be Russian. In this sense, I do not think that sanctions are merited here. On the other hand, I think we do need to approach the Ukrainian crisis and Russia's role in it proactively to ensure that Russia cannot run roughshod over the independence of Ukraine. It is succinctly a question of what we are attempting to achieve.
With the larger question of long term goals in the West's engagement with Russia in mind, we need to reconsider the economic, political, and cultural isolation of Russia from Europe as the key problematic driving this crisis and fueling Russian imperialist nationalism in the first place. Indisputably, if Russia had become a full partner to the European economy after the fall of the Soviet Union, then Europe would have enjoyed some greater capacity to prevent the rise of figures like Putin and the ultra-nationalist contemporaries to his right. Likewise, much of the outright political corruption that currently characterizes Russian politics might have been contested in ways that would have greatly benefited the Russian people as a whole. Emphatically, the West needs to engage in policies that bring Russia closer to Europe, and a regime of sanctions is unlikely to do so, at least not in the short run. Moreover, the sort of long run strategy of restructuring in the Western economies advocated by Friedman has its own merits, as a means of mitigating climate change, but it would be even more helpful to a broader strategy to integrate Russia into Europe if it was accompanied by Western investments in Russian economic diversification away from a fundamentally extractive economy. Such investments might manifest some tangible impact in creating a liberal, globalist political opposition in Russia and, thus, undermine over time the strength of parties committed to the image of Russia the messianic.
Minimally, in defining the broader engagement of Western states with Russia, we need to stop the Russophobes from acting as the primary writers and executors of policy. Western governments need to recognize the particular contextual political circumstances in which United Russia has exploited opportunities to reconstitute Russia's grip on peripheral spaces. In doing so, we cannot generalize Russian motives in places like Crimea to cultivate new myths about reckless military aggressiveness by Russia against its non-Russian neighbors. That is not to say that Russian seizure of the Don Basin against the expressed preferences of its ethnic Ukrainian majorities should not lead to some punishment. On the other hand, before we actively reconstruct the conditions for a new Cold War against Russia, we should consider a broader range of possible responses to undermine, over time, the image of imperial Russia within the broader Russian population and favor an alternative, radically open engagement with the West, as well as a more peaceful engagement with its neighbors.
