‘Here we go again” has been the reaction of most western observers to the new crisis in Ukraine. Demands for a referendum on the status of largely Russian-speaking areas along the frontier have ominous echoes of the events leading to the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea last month.
Is Vladimir Putin replaying that scenario? Or is something more combustible gathering pace? Unlike in Crimea, there is no clear demarcation between any would-be “Russian” republics in south-east Ukraine and the Ukrainian-speaking rest of the country. Nor are any Russian troops in place to back up separatists. Despite western fears, Putin has shown a reluctance to move beyond taking easily digested chunks. He did that in 2008, when he sponsored the independence of tiny South Ossetia and Abkhazia after the five-day war with Georgia. Despite its immense military value to Russia, Crimea, too, is small and clearly defined.
The trouble is, by posing as the champion of discontented Russians there, Putin has risked igniting uncontrollable aspirations elsewhere in Ukraine. Poking the West in the eye was wildly popular in Russia. But for a president whose domestic appeal is built on a tough-guy approach, Putin may alienate supporters if he now allows Ukraine’s pro-Russian demonstrators to be suppressed. His problem is that the Kremlin has little to gain from being drawn into an open-ended conflict in Ukraine. Even if Russia’s forces could quickly disperse resistance, guerrilla fighting would continue, because drawing up a neat boundary where Russians end and Ukrainians begin is impossible. Even in the rust-belt south-east of Ukraine, the economic pressures that pull coal- and steel-workers towards Russia are why the region’s oligarchs still cling to Kiev: they fear being swallowed up by the big beasts of Russia’s economy.
Although the terms of the EU Association Agreement were demanding enough, the oligarchs could see that integration into a Russian customs union would be curtains for them. Strikingly, Putin referred to his emasculation of Russia’s new rich in his first public comments after the revolution in Kiev. He blamed ousted president Yanukovych for failing to rein in his over-mighty economic subjects, as Putin had done in Russia. In fact, the new regime in Kiev appointed oligarchs as governors in restive regions, hoping they could pay for security forces, which a bankrupt Kiev could not.
Since Ukraine’s police forces are still the ones who performed so woefully under Yanukovych, with their divided loyalties and an eye to who can pay most, effective crowd control is virtually impossible. If Kiev were to assert its authority by deploying troops or the new paramilitary National Guard (necessarily drawn from western Ukraine) it could look like a “foreign” occupation to local Russians who have not taken part in the protests. And the pro-western oligarchs are treading on egg-shells as they try to assert the nominal authority of Kiev and protect their business interests. It would be easy for Russia to stir up anti-oligarchic sentiment, since that is what the new rulers in Kiev were doing until a month ago. The oligarchs’ employees are not necessarily loyal to them. That may be why the country’s richest man, Donetsk-based Rinat Akhmetov, has been trying to calm both sides.
Provoking intervention
However, Russian separatists have an interest in sabotaging the central government’s authority, especially the presidential elections on May 25, so nationalists will press Kiev to be assertive and not repeat the humiliation in the Crimea. That episode makes it doubly difficult for Kiev to play softly-softly. It fears that the Kremlin is nibbling away at its territory, but knows that cracking down clumsily on separatist Russians could provoke Putin’s intervention. Undisciplined Ukrainian nationalists might act on their own. Tuesday’s brawl in parliament, when nationalist MPs dragged the Communist leader from the podium, and reports that separatists occupying a building in Luhansk may have a bomb, are evidence of the fluid situation. Fisticuffs are one thing, but bloodshed could transform the public mood. That is, after all, what happened in central Kiev six weeks ago. If both sides in Ukraine were merely puppets of Great Power sponsors, the situation would be much less dangerous. Naturally, both the West and the Kremlin have their agendas. But neither side has control of radicals on the ground. The tension rattles western stock markets, especially in Germany, and discourages talk of tougher sanctions — a plus for Putin. Any Russian intervention would put these back on the agenda. But without tangible pressure from Russian power, Kiev is unlikely to concede the demands of the Donetsk separatists for their own status. So agitators there might push the envelope further than the Kremlin would like.
The weeks until the presidential election offer extremists on both sides plenty of opportunity to make the running. Pro-Russians have no interest in a successful election; Ukrainian nationalists will stoke up tension as their best chance to rally voters. Such polarisation makes the chances of the Kremlin or Kiev achieving its aims peacefully virtually nil.
— The Telegraph Group Ltd, London 2014
Mark Almond is a lecturer in modern history at Oriel College Oxford, and author of the forthcoming Post-Communist Ukraine - A Short History.
