K Sarath Chandra
Ukraine is the last major unresolved issue from the end of the cold war. With whom does it align with the East or the West is a big question? The crisis started in November over a binary choice for Ukraine: choose the European Union or the Eurasian Customs Union.
Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych looked East, enticed by a $15bn (£9bn) offer of Putin’s pledge to prop up the Ukrainian economy. A significant element of his population looked West and protested his decision and forced him to flee Russia, where he was given personal protection by Russia.
Followed by escalating violence over the last several days, in which – according to the Health Ministry — 77 people, including police personnel, have been killed and 577 injured. Yanukovych on February 21 announced early elections and a return to the 2004 Constitution, which will limit the President’s powers.
The violence caused severe divisions throughout the country, with several police officers siding with or joining the protesters; as it was, the Yanukovych government had long incurred public distrust for corruption and nepotism.
International condemnation was rapid, with U.S. President Barack Obama warning against Ukrainian military involvement and calls for sanctions coming from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande.
The West has been angling over the years to draw Ukraine into National Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). It has been doing whatever it could to support a pro-European government in the Ukraine, and to oppose or to bring down a pro-Russian government.
The new Ukrainian government too is likely to revoke the 2010 law on the country’s non-aligned status and seek a Nato Membership Action Plan (MAP).
The major economic powers have suspended planning for the upcoming G8 summit scheduled for June in Sochi, Russia for its role in crisis. In all likelihood, the meeting will be cancelled. But Russia doesn’t seem to be perturbed, as still it has considerable leverage over Europe in the energy sector. Germany still gets a third of its gas from Russia.
Crimea plans a referendum to consider continued autonomy, independence or union with the Russian Federation. Russia being a permanent security council member and with its nuclear status has ample room for manoeuvre in Crimea.
Putin has already signalled to a core constituency – those with Russian citizenship or with strong ethnic, language and cultural ties to the motherland – that he has their back. Moscow has given political, economic and military support to the local, pro-Russian elements who never accepted Ukraine’s ownership of Crimea, which was transferred from Moscow’s to Kiev’s administration in 1954.
In Crimea, Moscow appears keen to strengthen its grip, with a package of financial aid to the peninsula in the form of pensions and salaries. It has also promised that a $3bn bridge will be built, linking the Russian mainland to Crimea over the Kerch Strait, a distance of some 4.5 km (2.8 miles).
Putin won permission from his parliament to use military force to protect Russian citizens in Ukraine. Russian forces have already bloodlessly seized Crimea – an isolated Black Sea peninsula where Moscow has a naval base. Russian troops from the Black Sea fleet – as it has now been acknowledged by the pro-Russian prime minister of Crimea – have seized airports and strategic locations, including government buildings and broadcast centres. Saboteurs have damaged the fiber optic telephone cables connecting Crimea to Ukraine.
Under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the US, Russia, Ukraine and the UK agreed not to threaten or use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine. They also pledged never to use economic coercion to subordinate Ukraine to their own interest.
Ukraine has asked for help from NATO, Britain and the United States, as co-signatories with Moscow to a 1994 accord guaranteeing Ukraine’s security after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The steps taken in the early days after the fall of the Soviet Union, the breach of what Gorbachev believed to be a firm agreement that NATO would not move east, was bound to create difficulties for the future. NATO responded to Kiev’s call by holding a meeting of member states’ ambassadors in Brussels.
There have also been discussions about possible strategic arrangements between China and Russia. Are the mistaken policies of the US and the unfolding drama in Ukraine going to push both Russia and China towards a strategic partnership?
Russia states that it is acting in Ukraine to protect the human rights of its citizens. But is it justified of taking de facto control of Crimea? The circumstances in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Kharkiv too are similar to the situation in Crimea.
Part of the problem is that the new government had little connection to Ukraine’s more Russophile east. One of its first actions was to repeal a 2012 law recognising Russian as an official regional language and a separation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the Moscow Patriarchate. With this decision, the Russian-speaking majority in the region feels beleaguered and provoked, with its cultural heritage under existential threat.
Across Ukraine, Moscow is calling for the February 21 agreement to be implemented. Moscow is stressing the need for a government of national unity. Russia sees the current government as anti-constitutional and not representative of the native Russian-speaking population. It also wants “extremist gangs” to disband.
A Crimean secession would be a bitter pill for a new Ukrainian government to accept. Kiev is unlikely to agree to Crimea’s secession, even if backed by clear popular will: this would be discounted because of the “foreign occupation” of the peninsula.
A succession of ambassadors in UN Security Council accused Russia of violating international law and its own duties as a permanent member of the UN body.
In response to the criticism, Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin stated that former U.S. president Ronald Reagan had invaded Grenada in 1983 to protect 1,000 Americans. “We have millions living there [Russian speakers in Crimea] and we are protecting their concerns.”
Crimea crisis is directly related to the misguided steps taken after the Soviet Union’s fall. A second round of the cold war may ensue as a punishment for leaving many issues unsolved – such as Ukraine’s internal cohesion, the special position of Crimea, or the situation of Russian ethnics in the newly independent states; but, above all, leaving unresolved Russia’s integration within the Euro-Atlantic community.
All of which may lead to a truncated, divided, increasingly impoverished and perhaps politically and militarily impotent Ukraine will emerge from this crisis. The restoration of the language law in eastern Ukraine and firm action to prevent armed groups of anti-Russian nationalists threatening public buildings are the plausible solutions to de-escalate the situation.
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