By Scott Ritter, Consortium News, 12/21

Read Part One of this two-part series.

Because of their grossly inaccurate assessments of the Russian president and his country, “Putin Whisperers” in the West have Ukrainian blood on their hands.

Russians who lived through the 1990s remember the decade quite differently from Michael McFaul, the former U.S.  ambassador/Stanford University professor. One such person is Marat Khairullin, a Russian journalist who has reported on Russia since the end of the Soviet Union.

In a remarkable essay published on his Substack account (I urge anyone interested in the reality of modern Russia and the war between Russia and Ukraine to subscribe), Khairullin lays out the connection between the war that McFaul and his fellow critics call Putin’s own, and the Russian people. 

Entitled “Russia I am trying to forget,” Khairullin describes a time — the 1990s— where humanity was put on hold because of the corruption and depravations of the Yeltsin government, and reminds his readers that this is the Russia to which McFaul and the other erstwhile Western Russian “experts” want to return, something which Vladimir Putin has sworn to never allow to happen. 

The goal of the collective West in promoting and sustaining the Russian-Ukraine conflict is to remove Putin from power and install a Yeltsin-like clone in his stead. Arat’s article serves as a stark warning about the consequences of such an outcome for the Russian people. 

For Their Miserable Apartments

Khairullin recalls one assignment, in the early 1990s, where he traveled to “a small Ural town” to investigate an allegation of particular cruelty. “Lonely old people who remembered the Great Patriotic War (WWII) were evicted from their apartments throughout all the Russia,” Khairullin recalled. 

“This happened everywhere — Moscow, Balashikha, St. Petersburg, Ufa, Kazan, Vladivostok…but in big cities, old people were spared, forced to assign these damned apartments to new owners and then evicted to live in some abandoned villages. In small towns, old people were simply mowed down.”

Khairullin’s investigation uncovered collusion between the town’s bureaucracy, the local police and the local mafia. “In a very short period of time (just a couple of years) that has passed since Yeltsin’s sovereignty was established in this classic Stalinist industrial town, 136 lonely pensioners had gone missing, and their apartments had changed ownership.” 

The local police had a list of pensioners and their apartments. This list was turned over to the mafia, who simply took the pensioner out to the edge of town and murdered him or her. “The person disappears,” Khairullin noted, “after that they immediately clean the apartment up, and the next day they move in, the body of the person has not yet cooled down, but they are already in charge.”

Khairullin had to flee the Ural town in the trunk of a car to avoid being killed himself by the local mafia, who took umbrage at his investigation after being tipped off by the local police. 

Khairullin condemns Yeltsin “for the death of these hundreds of thousands of old people abandoned to the mercy of fate,” and believes that the current Russian-Ukraine conflict is being fought in part “simply to make sure that our lonely old people would no longer be killed in the thousands for the sake of their miserable apartments.”

Dec. 9, 1993: Yeltsin, second from right, in Brussels to visit NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner, on right. (NATO)

Khairullin tells of other experiences gained traveling “around the once great country where Democracy and Yeltsin had won.” One in particular hits hard. “I was a very callous person then,” Khairullin writes. “I almost never cried.”

And then he met Kuzmich, Aksa, and Sima.

Kuzmich was the local senior police officer of “some kind of God forgotten town, an eternal ‘polustanok’ [waypoint] on one of the endless outskirts of Russia.” He took Khairullin on a tour of the local train yard. 

“And suddenly,” Khairullin writes, “Kuzmich rushed somewhere to the side, between the carriages, we caught up with him only when he was already dragging a kicking lump out of some hole. ‘Don’t you scratch, little devil, you know I won’t do anything…’ Kuzmich groaned, bringing out a grimy kid at most 8-10 years old into the light of the moon.”

This was Aksa. 

Kuzmich took Aksa and Khairullin to the basement of the police building, where he sat the boy down at a table and fed him a sandwich. 

“’Wait, that’s not all…’, Kuzmich said. “The door suddenly opened slightly and a girl of about six slipped through the crack and sat down next to Aska and took his hand. ‘Here, meet Sima,’ Kuzmich grinned: ‘I have about thirty of them running around the station here, but these ones are in love … Real love, they hold on to each other — she works in the carriages with shift workers, and this one guards her…Yes Seraphim? How much did you do today? Come on eat…’. Sima just bowed her head and began to smile at the floor quietly…Even then I noted what a nice, childlike smile she had.”

Khairullin and Kuzmich smoked cigarettes while Aksa and Sima ate and drank tea, before falling asleep in their chairs. 

“That’s how it is here, correspondent,” Kuzmich said. “The nearest orphanage is half a thousand miles away … Yes, they escape from there…Where to place them…No one cares about them.” Khairullin writes:

“As far as I remember, starting from year 1997, the U.N. annually issued a special report on torture in the police (‘militia’ at the time) — this, of course, was an unfriendly move by the United States, nevertheless, it spoke about the state of the law enforcement system in the country. At the same time more than a thousand people annually died from the bullets of murderers on the streets of the capital city of my tortured country.

And in the very year when Putin became prime minister [1999], another terrible study was released which stated that every third girl in Russia under the age of 18 had the experience of ‘commercial sex.’ This is how Western researchers found a tolerant term to label prostitution in our country.

And there also used to be a slave market in Russia (about 15 thousand Russians were sold annually without their consent) and a special market for sexual slavery — according to various estimates, up to half a million of our girls were held ‘against their will’ in foreign brothels…”

Khairullin also says an unverified number of people, likely in the thousands, were victims of human organ traffickers every year during the 1990s. 

Nineties Mortality Rates

1992 flea market in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia. (Brian Kelley, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

According to Western researchers, “an extra 2.5-3 million Russian adults died in middle age in the period 1992-2001 than would have been expected based on 1991 mortality.” 

This figure does not include infant mortality rates, the fate of missing children like Aksa and Sima, or the murdered pensioners. Altogether,  it is believed at least 5 million Russians died as a direct result of the chaos that gripped Russia in the 1990’s — a chaos that Michael McFaul derides as “mythology.”

The 1990s is a reality that Khairullin and the people of Russia will never forget, regardless of how people like McFaul, Applebaum, Kendall-Taylor and  Hill try to rewrite history. 

Moreover, the linkage between the 1990s and the present in the minds of the Russian people is visceral — they support Russia’s conflict with Ukraine and the collective West not because they have been misled by Putin, but rather because they know their own history — much better than western pundits such as McFaul and company. 

1998: Russians protest the economic depression caused by market reforms with banner saying: “Jail the redhead!” referring to Anatoly Chubais, the Russian economist who oversaw Yeltsin-era  privatizations. (Pereslavl Week, Yu. N. Chastov, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

These pundits, whom I have classified as “Putin whisperers,” have had a hugely detrimental impact on fact-based discourse about Russia today. 

“Rather than dealing with the reality of a Russian nation seeking its rightful place at the table of a multi-polar world,” I’ve previously noted, “the ‘Putin whisperers’ created a domestic market for their personification of all things Russian into the form of a single man” — Vladimir Putin. 

“Russia stopped being a national security problem to be managed through effective diplomacy, but rather a domestic political issue which American politicians from both sides of the aisle used to scare the American people into supporting their respective visions of the world.” 

What Putin Told David Frost

Gennady Zyuganov in February 2019, during Putin’s presidential address to the Federal Assembly. (Duma.gov.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

On March 5, 2000, shortly before Putin was inaugurated following his victory over Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Russian Communist Party, in the first presidential election following Boris Yeltsin’s resignation, the famous (and now departed) BBC journalist David Frost sat down for an interview with the Russian president-elect. The transcript of this interview is essential reading for anyone who seeks to “speak Putin.”

“My position,” Putin told Frost, 

“is that our country should be a strong, powerful state, a capable and effective state, in which both its citizens and all those who want to cooperate with Russia could feel comfortable and protected, could always feel in their own shoes — if you allow the expression — psychologically and morally, and well off. 

But this has nothing to do with aggression. If we again and again go back to the terminology of the Cold War we are never going to discard attitudes and problems that humanity had to grapple with a mere 15–20 years ago. 

We in Russia have to a large extent rid ourselves of what is related to the Cold War. Regrettably, it appears that our partners in the West are all too often still in the grip of old notions and tend to picture Russia as a potential aggressor. That is a completely wrong conception of our country. It gets in the way of developing normal relations in Europe and in the world.”

Compare and contrast the tone and construct of Putin’s response to Frost with comments made recently in an interview with the Russian journalist Pavel Zarubin, who asked the Russian leader if he would “have been called a naive person in the 2000s?”

Putin answered:

“I had a naive idea that the whole world — and above all, the so-called ‘civilized’ one understands what happened to Russia [after the collapse of the Soviet Union], that it has become a completely different country, that there is no longer any ideological confrontation, which means there is no basis for confrontation.” 

“If,” Putin continued,

“something negative happens in the policies of Western countries towards Russia — in particular, support for separatism and terrorism on Russian territory was obvious, I, as director of the FSB, saw this, but in my naivety, I believed that this was simply the inertia of thinking and action. This was a naive view of reality.”

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In his discussion with Frost, when the BBC interviewer asked if he viewed NATO as an enemy, Putin answered:

“Russia is part of the European culture. And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. So it is hard for me to visualize NATO as an enemy. I think even posing the question this way will not do any good to Russia or the world. The very question is capable of causing damage. Russia strives for equitable and candid relations with its partners.”

The BBC’s David Frost interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on March 5, 2000. (Kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

‘Now We’ll Ruin Russia Too’

In his answer to Zarubin, one can detect the disappointment in Putin’s words once the depth of betrayal by his erstwhile “partners” in the West had become clear.

“But the reality is,” Putin said, that “later I became absolutely one hundred percent convinced” that his Western “partners,” following the collapse of the Soviet Union, “thought that we [NATO] needed to be patient a little, ‘now we’ll ruin Russia too.’”  Putin said:

“Such a large country by European standards, with the largest territory in the world and a fairly large population compared to other European countries, is generally not needed. It is better — as the famous U.S.  politician Brzezinski proposed — to divide it into five parts, and these parts are separately subordinated to oneself and use resources, but based on the fact that everything separately will not have independent weight, independent voice, and will not have the opportunity to defend their national interests the way a united Russian state does. Only later did this realization come to me. And the initial approach was quite naive.” 

Putin said Russia’s 

“main concern is our own country, its place in the world today and tomorrow. When we are confronted with attempts to exclude us from the process of decision-making, this naturally causes concern and irritation on our part. But that does not mean we are going to shut ourselves off from the rest of the world. Isolationism is not an option. Victory is only possible when every citizen of this country feels that the values we promote yield positive changes in their day-to-day lives. That they’re beginning to live better, eat better, feel safer and so on. 

But in this sense one can say we are still very far from our goal. I think we are still at the start of that road. But I have no doubt that the road we have chosen is the right one. And our goal is to follow this road, and to make sure our policies are absolutely open and clear for the majority of the Russian people.” 

The fact that the layperson would be unable, in isolation, to readily identify Putin’s statement as part of his answer to Frost or Zarubin underscores the consistency of Putin’s position vis-à-vis Russia’s relations with the West over the course of the past 23-plus years. 

It also upends the narrative that Putin has somehow transitioned from one type of leader when he first entered office, to another, more autocratic and isolated leader today. The above quote was from the Frost interview, but it could have been made today, or at any time during Putin’s more than two decades at the helm of the Russian Federation.

Words have meaning. Take, for instance, Putin’s use of the term “Special Military Operation.” It signifies something other than an invasion. Military operations do not rise to the level of full-scale war. 

Putin has always sought negotiations with Ukraine — the proof of the pudding, they say, is in the eating: Up until the end of 2021, Putin promoted the Minsk Accords as the preferred mechanism for conflict resolution regarding Ukraine. 

Once it became clear that neither Ukraine, France nor Germany (the three signatories to the Minsk Accords) was serious about their implementation, Russia next sought to negotiate directly with the United States and NATO, promulgating two draft treaties which were turned over to Russia’s Western partners for their evaluation and consideration in December 2021. 

Dec. 7, 2021: U.S. President Joe Biden, on screen during video call with Putin. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Both the U.S. and NATO gave short shrift to Russia’s proposals, leading to the decision to initiate the “Special Military Operation” on Feb. 24, 2023. Here is where the importance of words comes into play — rather than seeking the strategic defeat and destruction of Ukraine, which one would normally expect from a military operation of the scope and scale of the one undertaken on Feb. 24. 

Whisperers’ Malign Influence 

Russia — according to Davyd Arakhamiia, leader of the Servant of the People faction (Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s party), who led the Ukrainian delegation during peace talks with the Russians in Belarus and Turkey in March 2022, was willing to exchange peace with Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine refusing to join NATO. Ultimately Ukraine, under pressure from then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, rejected the Russian offer.

The collective West, not fully comprehending the limitations built into the term “Special Military Operation,”perceived weakness from Russia’s willingness to negotiate. The main reason for this lack of comprehension was the influence that the “Putin Whisperer’s” had on those who wrote the lexicon used to define and decipher Russia’s goals and objectives regarding NATO and Ukraine.

Had they “spoken Putin” (as any genuine expert could, and would), there is a good chance the collective West could have avoided the military embarrassment, economic consequences and geopolitical isolation that has taken place in the months since Ukraine walked away from the peace table.

Because of their grossly inaccurate assessments of Putin and Russia, Hill, Kendall-Taylor, Applebaum, McFaul, and a host of other “Putin Whisperer’s” have the blood of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians on their collective hands. 

Their crime was not just that they did not know how to “speak Putin,” but rather that they deliberately refused to try, instead choosing a path of deliberate obfuscation and deceit when it came to defining Russia and its leader for the western audience.

When advising on issues of national security involving Russia, the failure to “speak Putin” on the part of anyone charged with influencing and/or making Russia policy, borders on the point of criminal negligence.

And if your job is to provide assessments on Russia of a more commercial nature, the failure to “speak Putin” means not only that you’re not very good at your job, but also that perhaps it is time to begin considering finding another career. 

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Link here.

By Norm Solomon, CounterPunch, 12/8/23

Forty years ago, across a dozen pages of The Nation magazine, I was in a debate with the English historian E. P. Thompson about the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race, the relative culpability of both governments, and how activists should approach it all. At the time, Cold War hostility was rampant. In a March 1983 speech to an audience of evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan declared that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” and, for good measure, “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Weeks later, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov accused the United States of pursuing an arms buildup to win a nuclear war; in his words, “not just irresponsible, it is insane.” Both countries were gunning their military-industrial engines in a feverish drive for more advanced nuclear arsenals.

Such was the frightening distemper of the times. But a grassroots movement calling for a bilateral freeze on nuclear weapons had quickly gained wide support and political momentum since Reagan took office. In April 1982, he responded to the growing upsurge of alarm with a radio address that tried to reassure. “Today, I know there are a great many people who are pointing to the unimaginable horror of nuclear war. I welcome that concern,” Reagan said. He added that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Two months later, not mollified by soothing words, 1 million people gathered in New York’s Central Park at a demonstration for nuclear disarmament and peace. That protest was part of a transatlantic uprising against reckless escalation of the arms race. Activists struggled to challenge a spiraling arms contest propelled by two nations with very different political systems but mutual reliance on brandishing huge quantities of nuclear weaponry.

Deeply unsettling as that era was, the specter of omnicide now looms much larger. Inflamed tensions between Washington and Moscow while the Ukraine war rages — as well as between the U.S. and China, over Taiwan and the East China and South China seas — are making a nuclear conflagration plausible via any one of numerous scenarios. Meanwhile, disagreements over how to view relations between the U.S. and Russia are roiling peace groups and much of the left here at home. Fears of being perceived, if not smeared, as pro-Putin or sympathetic to Russia are palpable, with ongoing constraints on advocacy.

We hear next to nothing about the crying need to reinstate the Open Skies and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaties canceled by President Trump or the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty canceled by President George W. Bush, while the absence of those pacts today makes a nuclear war with Russia more likely. Neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden tried to revive those agreements snuffed out by their Republican predecessors.

For his part, beginning with the Ukraine invasion, Putin has done much to boost atomic tensions. His threats to use nuclear weapons said the usually untrumpeted doctrine out loud. Both Russia (except for an eleven-year hiatus) and the United States have always been on record as asserting the option to be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict.

The war in Ukraine has thrown the world closer to a thermonuclear precipice than ever. And, while daily horrors are being inflicted on Ukrainian people by Russia’s warfare, the prevailing attitude in the U.S. is that Putin isn’t worthy of negotiations over much of anything.

But if efforts for détente and arms control should be backburnered when a superpower is making horrific war on a country after an illegal invasion, neither Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin nor President Ronald Reagan got the memo. In 1967, while the U.S. government was escalating the Vietnam War, Kosygin met with President Lyndon Johnson in direct talks that lasted for more than a dozen hours at the Glassboro Summit in New Jersey. Twenty years later, Reagan met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the White House, where they signed the INF treaty; at the time, Soviet troops were continuing their war in Afghanistan, which took an estimated 100,000 Afghan lives, while the CIA provided military aid worth billions of dollars to mujahadeen resistance fighters.

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Midway through 1983, at the end of the published exchanges between E. P. Thompson and me, The Nation told readers that “the debate ventilates important issues, tactical and philosophical, confronting the antiwar movements in this country and in Europe.” Echoes of those important issues are with us now, and the stakes could not be higher.

Renowned as a social historian, Thompson was also a prominent leader of the European disarmament movement during the 1980s. He warned against “sleepwalkers in the peace movement” of the West who, he contended, were toeing the Soviet line while blaming the arms race on the United States. “Neither moralism nor fellow-traveling sentimentalism,” he wrote, “can be of any service in guiding the peace movement in its difficult relations with the Communist states.” The rulers of those states “are the ideological look-alikes of their opposite numbers in the West, thinking in the same terms of ‘balance’ and security through ‘strength.’”

In my view, the history of the nuclear arms race remained significant, with the United States as always in the lead. The fact that the U.S. was a country with far more freedom had not made its government more trustworthy in terms of nuclear weapons. As the Soviet dissident historians Roy and Zhores Medvedev had written a year earlier in The Nation, “despite the more open character of American society . . . the role of successive U.S. administrations has been, and continues to be, more provocative and less predictable than the Soviet Union’s in the global interrelationship between East and West.” They added: “Military-industrial complexes exist in all modern industrial societies, but they are under much less responsible control in the United States than in the USSR.”

At the close of our debate, I expressed doubt that the U.S. movement for disarmament and peace was in danger of being insufficiently critical of the Soviet Union. “A far greater danger is that, eager for respectability and fearful of finding itself in the line of fire of our nation’s powerful Red-baiting artilleries, it may unwittingly reinforce chronic American-Soviet antipathies . . . . We cannot reduce our society’s Cold War fervor by adding to it.”

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In the summer of 1985, Gorbachev announced a unilateral moratorium on nuclear test explosions, and he invited the United States to follow suit. If reciprocated, the move would pave the way for both countries to end their underground detonations of nuclear warheads, closing an intentional loophole that had been left by the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. But major U.S. news media were on guard. In the first CBS Evening News report on Gorbachev’s initiative, correspondent Lesley Stahl used the word “propaganda” four times. Influential newspapers were no less dismissive. A New York Times editorial called the moratorium “a cynical propaganda blast.”

Although the U.S. refused to reciprocate, Russia kept renewing its moratorium. In December 1985, when reporting news of an extension, CBS anchor Dan Rather began by saying: “Well, a little pre-Christmas propaganda in the air, a new arms-control offer from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.” The Kremlin’s unrequited moratorium went on for nineteen months, while the Nevada Test Site shook with twenty-five nuclear explosions beneath the desert floor.

Later in the decade, the cumulative impacts of grassroots organizing and political pressure helped shift Reagan’s attitude enough to bring about some U.S.-Russian reproachment and genuine diplomacy. A stellar result was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in December 1987. It was a triumph for activists and a wide array of other outspoken advocates who over the previous years had grown accustomed to epithets like “Kremlin dupes” and “Russia apologists.”

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Four decades later, such epithets are again common. American society’s Cold War fervor is somewhere near an all-time high. It doesn’t take much these days to be called pro-Putin; merely urging a ceasefire in Ukraine or substantive diplomacy can suffice.

“I think Putin is not only thrilled by the divide over whether we continue and at what levels to fund Ukraine, I think he is fomenting it as well,” Hillary Clinton said during a PBS NewsHour interview in October. She added: “When I see people parroting Russian talking points that first showed up on Russia Today or first showed up in a speech from a Russian official, that’s a big point scored for Putin.”

Such smeary tactics aim to paralyze discourse and prevent on-the-merits discussions. The techniques are timeworn. Twenty years ago, opponents of the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq were often accused of parroting Iraqi talking points and serving the interests of Saddam Hussein. Now, in the prevalent media and political environments, the kinds of “talking points” that Clinton meant to defame include just about any assertion challenging the idea that the U.S. government should provide open-ended military aid to Ukraine while refusing to urge a ceasefire or engage in substantive diplomacy.

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During Reagan’s first term, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock at between three and four minutes to apocalyptic midnight. It is now ninety seconds away, the closest ever.

Crucial lessons that President John Kennedy drew from the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he articulated eight months later in his June 1963 speech at American University, are now in the dumpster at the Biden White House: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

But no matter how dangerous Biden’s policies toward Ukraine and Russia are, most sizable arms-control and disarmament groups in the United States have bypassed dissent. Few have pushed for serious negotiations to find a peaceful resolution. Many have, in effect, gone along with treating “diplomacy” as a dirty word. Such stances are particularly striking from organizations with an avowed mission to reduce the risks of nuclear war — even though the longer the war in Ukraine persists and the more it escalates, the greater the chances that those risks will turn into global nuclear annihilation.

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We can’t know E. P. Thompson’s outlook on the 21st century events that led to the current nuclear peril — he died in 1993 — but the core of his seminal 1980 essay “Protest and Survive” resonates now as a chilling wake-up shout to rouse us from habitual evasion. “I have come to the view that a general nuclear war is not only possible but probable, and that its probability is increasing,” he wrote. “We may indeed be approaching a point of no-return when the existing tendency or disposition towards this outcome becomes irreversible.” And yet, Thompson went on, “I am reluctant to accept that this determinism is absolute. But if my arguments are correct, then we cannot put off the matter any longer. We must throw whatever resources still exist in human culture across the path of this degenerative logic. We must protest if we are to survive. Protest is the only realistic form of civil defense.”

The essay quickly became the opening chapter in an anthology also titled Protest and Survive. Daniel Ellsberg wrote in the book’s introduction that “we must take our stand where we live, and act to protect our home and our family: the earth and all living beings.”

What Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism” finds its supreme expression in the routine of nuclear weapons policies, which rely on an extreme shortage of countervailing outcry and activism. The ultimate madness thrives on our daily accommodation to it.

This article was originally published by The Nation.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, is published by The New Press.

By Prof. Paul Robinson, Canadian Dimension, 11/22/23

Of all the political events that have rocked Europe in recent years, it is probably fair to say that none have been as important, or as tragic, as the mass protest known as ‘Euromaidan’ that began in Ukraine ten years ago, on November 21, 2013. Euromaidan lasted four months, culminating in the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. One cannot tell what condition Ukraine would have been in today were it not for Euromaidan. But it’s unlikely that it would have been as dire as the current reality. A full reckoning of what transpired is thus essential.

For this, one has to explore the context that made Euromaidan possible. This requires one to look at both internal and external factors, namely the divisions that existed within Ukrainian society, the peculiar ideology of Ukraine’s pro-European liberal intelligentsia, and the manner in which Ukraine became a battleground for competing geopolitical interests.

In 2013, Ukraine was what political scientists call a ‘cleft country,’ in other words a country containing more than one distinct cultural grouping. Roughly speaking, the two main groups consisted of a largely Russian speaking east and a largely Ukrainian speaking west. Religious, economic, and political differences also divided these two. The east, for instance, was the home of heavy industry, while the west was more rural. The east and the west also voted for different political candidates. In 2004, for instance, Viktor Yanukovych won over 90 percent of the vote in the eastern area of Donbas, while his rival Viktor Yushchenko won over 90 percent of the vote in the western region of Galicia. The political divisions were very stark indeed.

Ukraine nevertheless survived, in part because the balance between the two sides was fairly even and each took turns to hold power. As long as neither side sought to impose its vision of Ukrainian society too firmly on the other, they were able to sustain what was an unstable equilibrium but an equilibrium nonetheless.

Euromaidan changed all that, as the violent overthrow of Yanukovych broke all the previous rules of the game. So too did the determination of Euromaidan’s leaders to make what they called a ‘civilizational choice’ against Russia and for Europe. From the late Soviet period onward, the most deeply held mantra of Ukrainian, and also Russian, liberal intellectuals has been the need to ‘return to civilization,’ by which is meant full-scale absorption into the cultural and political milieu of Western Europe. Europe is regarded as the embodiment of ‘normality,’ whereas Russia is seen as the embodiment of Soviet backwardness and oppression. The path to Europe will involve the eradication of the ‘Sovok,’ the ‘Soviet person,’ supposedly characterized by submissiveness to authority, aggressive imperialism, and retrograde social values. In the Ukrainian context, the Sovok was often identified with the working class of the east of the country. Becoming European implied the elimination of the culture, values, and historical memory of that particular class.

When President Yanukovych declared in November 2013 that he would not sign an association agreement with the European Union, he struck a massive blow to the identity of Ukrainian liberal intellectuals. It was this that sparked the Euromaidan revolt. At the same time, the cultural language of the Euromaidan protestors posed a direct threat to the identity of their ‘Sovok’ opponents. During the 2004 Orange Revolution, the pro-European camp had avoided talking in terms of ‘civilizational choices.’ In 2013, they were not so cautious. In her book about Euromaidan entitled The Ukrainian Night, American academic Marci Shore recounts how one of the protestors told her: “To these people [those opposed to Euromaidan] it seems that their history, their lives, are being taken from them. Perhaps that’s so, Marci. It will seem strange to you, but we don’t feel sorry for these people at all, and we do not even want to understand them.” Needless to say, ignoring others in this way proved to be an extremely foolish attitude.

Unfortunately, it was a folly that Western states did their best to encourage. In 2008, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski and Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, both well known for their Russophobic tendencies, successfully persuaded the EU to adopt a new ‘Eastern Partnership’ program, which promised funds for democracy promotion and economic development in former Soviet states. Documents published by Wikileaks make it clear Sikorski and Bildt aimed to pull post-Soviet states away from Russia’s orbit and into that of the EU. The program’s originators viewed its “purpose [as] challenging Russia’s influence in the target countries,” with the Eastern Partnership’s being “a tool to expand EU cooperation with the likes of Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova, and to loosen Russia’s grip on these countries.”

By advancing this agenda, Sikorski, Bildt, and the EU were playing with fire. From the start, the Kremlin viewed the Eastern Partnership as a direct threat to core national interests. As an American diplomat cable published by Wikileaks stated, the Russians had a deep “suspicion of EU member-states” motives, particularly with Sweden and Poland as the main drivers behind the proposal. According to the cable, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told EU ambassadors that the partnership program was equivalent to NATO expansion. In Moscow’s eyes, the EU was intruding into areas where it had “privileged interests,” and was creating “new barriers” between Russia and other countries. Russia was determined to resist.

Western states were well aware of Russia’s attitude, but the EU pressed on anyway, offering Ukraine an association agreement. This came at considerable cost to Ukraine. For instance, its terms meant that Ukraine would have to come into line with European free trade regulations by cutting subsidies to Ukrainian industries. This would directly threaten Yanukovych’s electoral base in the industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine. In return, all the EU had to offer were promises of marginally improved access to European markets, along with a small loan that fell far short of the Ukrainian government’s immediate financial needs.

Sensing an opportunity, the Russian government stepped in to nix the deal, offering Yanukovych a large loan at a very favourable interest rate, with no conditions attached. The Russian offer was far more attractive than the European one. At the last minute, therefore, Yanukovych backed off from the EU association agreement and took the Russian loan instead. Their dreams of European integration shattered, the Ukraine’s pro-European liberals came out to protest, and Euromaidan began. The rest, as they say, is history.

One might well argue that Russia had no right to a zone of ‘privileged interests’ and that the social, economic, and political reforms endorsed by the EU’s Eastern Partnership and the Euromaidan protestors were in Ukraine’s interests. The problem lay not in the actions of the EU or the Maidan protestors but in the violent response to them. There is much to this argument. But any plan that ignores how others respond to it cannot be a good one. This was something that the West and its Ukrainian supporters never seemed to have considered. Both seemed to imagine that they could ‘damn the torpedoes’ and go full speed ahead, ignoring opposing interests and imposing their will without any adverse reaction. Sadly for Ukraine, they were proven to be horribly wrong.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.

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