While my attention remains on the resurgent conflict in eastern Ukraine, two separate articles by the BBC in December paint a rather persuasive portrait of the radical, ultra-nationalist character of partisan, paramilitary contingents on both the pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian sides engaged in Donetsk and Lugansk. See:
Tim Whewell, "The Russians fighting a 'holy war' in Ukraine," on BBC News Magazine (17 Dec 2014), at: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30518054
David Stern, "Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict,"on BBC News Magazine (13 Dec 2014), at: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30414955
These separate reports reinforce a number of conclusions concerning the conflict over Donetsk and Lugansk:
1. Over the course of 2014, right-wing, ethnic and monarchical nationalists and supporters of the reconstitution of Russian imperial space, inclusive of Ukraine, backed at least to some degree by the Putin government and United Russia, hijacked the legitimate cultural and economic concerns of residents and Ukrainian citizens in Donetsk and Lugansk in order to transform local demands for greater autonomy into a movement for secession and unification with the Russian Federation.
In this respect, I think it is fully impossible to discern the actual aspirations of the local populations in Donetsk and Lugansk relative to the political, economic, and cultural future of their country (i.e. Ukraine) as a whole and their particular oblasts for the simple reason that these aspirations were taken up as foder for political manipulation by the Putin government, which further incited non-governmental "volunteers" from the Russian far-right to transform local discontent arising from the overthrow of the Yanukovych government in ways that, at least potentially, distorted the original intentions of Ukrainian citizens in these oblasts. That is to say, I doubt that the average Ukrainian citizen in these oblasts, no matter their ethnic origin (i.e. Ukrainian, Russian, or other) or degree of sympathy for the Russian Federation under Putin's leadership, actually would have opted for secession and unification with Russia. Furthermore, it is one thing to fear the possibilities of a decisive turn of the Ukrainian economy toward the EU in a region that has traditionally prospered from its orientation toward Eurasian markets (Russia and the former Soviet Caucasus and Central Asian republics) and to fear that a partisan revolution in Kiev might elevate the stature of intolerant, right-wing Ukrainian cultural bigots relative to movements more sensitive to the traditional linkages between these oblasts and Russia. It is another thing entirely to comprehend a conflict over eastern Ukraine as a struggle for the integrity of a Nineteenth century conception of Russia, in which the defense of pre-Soviet geographic boundaries, the spiritual and social-moralistic domination of Russian Orthodoxy, and aspirations for the return to a tsarist autocracy for all Russians are all served by the defense of Donetsk as the frontline and bastion of imperial Russia against the impinging West and their ignorant dupes in Kiev! Again, something is missing here - actual democratic expression of the wishes of residents in these oblasts with regard to the future economic wellbeing of their children and continuity of their cultural, linguistic, and religious lineages on the soil and in the cities where they and their ancestors may have resided for hundreds of years. I have previously argued on this blog that the sham elections and referendum perpetrated by the People's Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk failed to approximate such a democratic assertion of the wishes of these populations if only because differential control of the region by rebel groups and the central government disrupted the possibility of hearing from all citizens in the two oblasts through an open and fair referendum process. In the end, the unbridgeable divide between the legitimate sources of a conflict between Ukrainian citizens and their post-revolutionary government in Kiev and the current wellsprings of right-wing Russian nationalist support for secession and incorporation of these oblasts into the Russian Federation/Empire demonstrates why the government in Kiev needs to embark on new efforts to forge a middle ground with residents of Donetsk and Lugansk, respecting the economic and cultural uniqueness of the Don basin and isolating the outside influence of Russian nationalist fanatics.
2. To date, Putin and United Russia have succeeded in stoking right-wing nationalist support for pro-Russian groups in Donetsk and Lugansk by painting the efforts of the post-revolutionary government in Kiev to forge a new, Westward course for the Ukrainian economy as a product of infiltration by European and American governments seeking to further politically/militarily and economically isolate Russia and restrict Russia's efforts to pursue its historically destined domination of Eurasian space. In this respect, the intervention of the U.S. and EU against Russia in regard tp Ukraine have, however inadvertently, played into Putin's hands and nurtured a dynamic through which the conflict in eastern Ukraine becomes, within the mind of Russian nationalists, a crusade against the Western heathen.
My conclusion here does not seek to argue that the U.S. and EU should avoid further actions to dissuade or otherwise punish the Russian Federation, its government, and key economic and political agents in response to Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine. Emphatically, it is preceisely this behavior by the Putin government that should be counteracted by aggressive economic measures intended to isolate Russia and make it more difficult for Russia to actively intervene in the conflict between local, pro-Russian groups in the Don basin and the Poroshenko government. On the other hand, Western governments need to keep in mind that what is at stake in this conflict in this conflict is an internal matter within Ukraine, concerning a legitimate divergence of economic and cultural interests between different regions of the country. Moreover, they need to realize that whatever they do to compel Russia to stay out of the domestic politics of Ukraine will unintentionally play into the larger Nineteenth Slavophile narrative of imperial Russia, defender of Christian civilization and morality, against the decadent, liberal West.
In the near term, there may be no way for Western governments to avoid a perception, within the Russian media, that Western intervention against Russia over the conflict in Ukraine has supported a purely offensive agenda intending to isolate Russia and diminish both its geographic sphere of influence and its capacity to employ military force to pursue legitimate national security policies within that sphere. In the long run, Western policies vis-à-vis the Russian Federation need to respect a broader goal of liberalizing Russia and bringing it into the European fold, a goal at which the U.S. and other NATO states have been miserable failures in promoting since the breakup of the Soviet Union thanks to residual veins of Russophobia within Western foreign policy communities. Such an agenda would explicitly seek to marginalize right-wing nationalist voices within the Russian political spectrum and amplify the visions of liberalizers in their efforts to reform Russian political oligarchy to promote more pluralistic democratic institutions and restructure the Russian economy to expand entrepreneurial opportunities and more broadly distribute the gains for economic development, diversify export sectors, and support deepened market integration with the West beyond energy markets.
Having made the point that Western governmental strategies for dealing with Russian intervention in Ukraine inadvertently play into the hands of Putin to paint Ukraine as a battlefield on which to save Russia's place in the world against Western domination, Western governments also need to recall that the conflict within Ukraine is prefigured on legitimate internal grievances that have characterized the evolution of Ukrainian domestic politics since the breakup of the Soviet Union. In this sense, neither the U.S. nor the EU nor the Russian Federation have any business dictating a particular resolution to internal political, cultural, and economic issues within Ukraine. That is to say, the best that we can accomplish in Ukraine is to convince the Poroshenko government to actually engage local, pro-Russian groups in the eastern oblasts in discussions on the economic and cultural future of the country without any predetermined conditionalities in economic development and nationwide cultural and/or linguistic homogenization. As such, in attacking one (Russian) right-wing nationalist agenda, the West needs to sensitively pursue the marginalization of its Ukrainian, right-wing nationalist counterpart, which has similarly shaped the course of the current conflict in the Don basin and, in my understanding, reinforced the unwillingness of the Poroshenko government to palpably address the divergent interests of Ukrainian citizens in the eastern oblasts to the extent that the pursuit of such interests might offend the Ukrainian right-wing.
3. The presence and influence of the Ukrainian nationalist far-right, as the intolerant other to imperialist Russian nationalism, both constitutes a legitimate basis for the fears of Ukrainian citizens in Donetsk and Lugansk that their cultural distinctiveness in relation to their own countrymen will be, at best, ignored and, at worst, crushed in the name of cultural homogenization and ethnic purity and shapes the particular hard-line nature of the Poroshenko government's approach to dealing with pro-Russian sentiments in the eastern oblasts.
If, on the one hand, it seems unlikely that the Ukrainian far-right played a significant role in the Euromaidan revolution against the Yanukovych government, it appears, on the other hand, that Ukrainian nationalists have constituted a small but disproportionately influential political bloc impacting security policy by the Poroshenko government. As suggested both in Stern's article and commentary by Volodymyr Ishchenko in The Guardian (see "Ukraine has ignored the far right for too long - it must wake up to the danger," (13 November 2014), at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/13/ukraine-far-right-fascism-mps), the presence of an energetic and well organized ultra-nationalist movement across Ukraine has effectively shifted Ukrainian political discourse to the right and dictated a more aggressive and militaristic response by Kiev to pro-Russian dissent in the eastern oblasts in the aftermath of Yanukovych's overthrow. Moreover, as both again suggest, the willingness of the Poroshenko government and other centrist and/or liberal political actors in Kiev to turn a blind eye to right-wing extremism (if not outright neo-nazism) and the compliant ignorance of Ukrainian media toward the far-right reflect a consensus that acknowledgement of the scale and influence of the far-right can only play into the hands of Putin and United Russia, exacerbating the fears of ethnic Russians in the eastern oblasts that they will face discrimination and violence at the hands of nationalist vigilantes. Finally, the existence and engagement of such organizations as the Patriot of Ukraine and its Azov Battalion in actual fighting against pro-Russian groups in the Don basin ensures that the continuity of a militant strategy by the Poroshenko government against pro-Russian groups in the eastern oblasts can only strengthen and legitimize the far-right in the eyes of the majority of Ukrainian citizens.
With these issues in mind, it is, again, critical that the U.S. and EU recognize the integral role played by right-wing nationalism in Ukraine and demand from the Poroshenko government, as a condition of Western material assistance and support, a tangible and significant effort to both acknowledge and marginalize ethnically intolerant and racist groups in government and in the execution of security policy in the eastern oblasts. It cannot be enough for the West to acknowledge the play of Russian ultra-nationalism in the Don basin without also recognizing that there is something to criticisms of fascism in Kiev leveled by the Russian media.
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