By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The restrained Western reaction to Russia's military activities in Crimea demonstrates the limits to how much the West is willing to sacrifice - both in terms of its political and economic relations with Russia - for the sake of integrating former Soviet states into the European Union. While the Ukrainian crisis will continue to push certain countries in the periphery to pursue stronger ties with the West, Western-oriented countries in the former Soviet periphery probably will not be able to fully integrate in the short to medium term. However, the polarization of the former Soviet states will continue (see also our 2009 report about another part of the Ukraine) as Russia and the West compete for influence.

Catherine the Great conquered the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in the 18th century (when it was called New Russia/Novorossiya) primarily to make Russia a great power. Then, when US President Woodrow Wilson went to the post-World War I peace conference committed to “self-determination” for other parts of eastern Europe, he kept Ukraine tied to Moscow in the hope that a rebuilt Russian empire would reverse the Bolshevik takeover.

From history it is also known that before Crimea was made an ethnic Russian stronghold by Stalin it was a potential Jewish Homeland, followed by the forcible deportation of the Crimean Tatars out of the Crimean to be replaced by Russians.

And now we have the following claim; Ukranian fascists, nationalists and anti-Semites, sponsored by America, seize power in Kiev, overthrowing the legitimate (if ineffectual) president, Viktor Yanukovych. These new overlords humiliate Russian-speakers by outlawing the language and stand poised to sack Russia’s naval base in Sebastopol. Ethnic Russians run to Vladimir Putin for protection; he duly comes to their rescue. Mysterious military men with Russian rifles save the peace-loving people from the fascist threat.

So runs the plot invented by Russian propagandists to plunge Ukraine into chaos and seize the Crimean peninsula. Surreal as it sounds, the plot has been given some substance: parts of it only in the rantings of Russian politicians and journalists, parts - notably the bit about the rifles - in boots-on-the-ground reality. This spectacle of deception has jeopardised European security and pushed Russia into a confrontation with the West unlike any seen since the cold war.

On February 27th, four days after the end of the Sochi Olympics, Russia in effect occupied Crimea, part of the sovereign territory of Ukraine, under the pretence of protecting its Russian-speaking population. Russian forces based at various installations on the peninsula seized airports, government buildings and broadcasters within hours, and blockaded Ukrainian military bases. In Sebastopol, home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet, local people celebrated their liberation in the central square, waving Russian flags to the accompaniment of Cossack songs, a Soviet-era pop group, and the fleet’s choir.

There was only one thing missing: the enemy. Everyone in Crimea. and now across eastern Ukraine, is talking about Ukrainian fascists, but nobody has actually seen one. “We have not seen them here yet, but we have seen them on television,” said Stanislav Nagorny, an aide to the leader of a local “self-defence” force in Sebastopol. The confusion was understandable: Russian television had unleashed a propaganda campaign impressive in both its intensity and cynicism, stoking ethnic hatred and exacerbating historical divides, mixing half truths with outright lies. Right-wing extremists and nationalists did take part in the revolution, but they do not control the government.

Russia struck when Ukraine was at its weakest - mourning the deaths of those who died on the Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square, during an abortive crackdown by Mr Yanukovych, and struggling to form a new government. The Kremlin was greatly assisted in its task by Ukraine’s parliament which, despite the obvious tension between the Russian-speaking east of the country and the Ukrainian-speaking west, irresponsibly passed a bill (later dropped) that repealed the status of Russian as an official language on a par with Ukrainian. Parliament also failed to bring politicians from eastern Ukraine into the government.

The choreography was at once smooth and farcical. Assisted by Mr Yanukovych’s sudden reappearance on February 27th, Russia described events in Kiev as a coup while mounting a coup of its own to the south. As gunmen looked on, local deputies installed Sergei Aksenov, nicknamed “Goblin” and a rumoured ex-gangster, as prime minister (a perfectly legitimate procedure, according to Mr Putin). Mr Aksenov promptly called an unconstitutional referendum on Crimea’s status, declared himself in charge of Crimea's armed forces and called on Mr Putin for help. Days later Crimea’s parliament voted to join Russia.

On March 1st Mr Putin asked the upper house of Russia’s parliament to grant him the right to use military force in Ukraine. It dutifully did so, in a lurid and theatrical session that evoked the days of Soviet grandstanding and grand pretence. Senators competed to evoke to the greatest effect the horrors being visited upon Russians in Ukraine. Thus, under the guise of fighting fascism, Russia achieved a bloodless takeover that could not help but remind the West of the Nazi annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938-39.

Still, not everything has gone quite to plan. Ukrainian troops in Crimea were put under enormous psychological pressure to defect, their officers blackmailed with threats of retribution to their families if they did not surrender. Thugs surrounded the Ukrainian naval headquarters, cutting off its water and electricity. But if Russia was hoping to follow the scenario of the Georgian war in 2008, when it managed to provoke the Georgians to fire first, it flopped. Ukrainian forces remained calm, the vast majority refusing to budge. As a Russian speaker who serves in the Ukrainian fleet put it ironically, “Russians do not surrender.” Dogged, as yet non-violent resistance seems to have given them a new sense of purpose and unity. Yet the tension could still result in violence. If it were to do so the Tatars, the indigenous Turkic people of Crimea, would fight on the side of the Ukrainian army.

On March 4th, in his first public comments since the crisis broke, Mr Putin ludicrously denied that the troops on the ground were Russian forces. The very fact that he spoke lessened the tension, but what he said was not encouraging. Asked about the possibility of a wider war in Ukraine, Mr Putin sounded indifferent: it didn’t seem necessary, he said, but if he chose to invade eastern Ukraine, the move would be entirely legitimate. And as for the Budapest memorandum of 1994, under which Russia, America and Britain guaranteed Ukraine’s integrity in exchange for the country giving up its nuclear arsenal, Mr Putin no longer felt bound by it. Ukraine’s revolution, he claimed, has produced a new state with which Russia has no binding agreements. Later on the same day, Russia tested a ballistic missile.

With the economy in the dumps, his personal popularity declining and discontent rising, Mr Putin needs to mobilise the country and tighten his control over its elites. Entering the 15th year of his reign, he lacks a narrative to carry him through until 2018 and beyond. A war with Ukraine could provide a boost if it led to the de facto annexation of Crimea, which in the Russian imagination is a storied, cherished territory, the place where Vladimir I adopted Christianity as the state religion of ancient Rus, and a part of Russia until 1954.

It might equally backfire. If Mr Putin’s confrontation with the West results in isolation and real economic pain, it could further alienate the elites and the public at large - rather as the war in Afghanistan did. On March 3rd Moscow’s MICEX index fell by 11% (rebounding a fair bit the next day). The central bank spent $11.3 billion of its ample reserves defending the rouble; even so capital flight is likely to surge.

After talking to Mr Putin Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, reportedly described him as “in another world.” It is a place where Mr Putin appears to see himself not as an aggressor, but as a defender of all Russians (including Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine). He is an historic figure who is reversing the course of history that brought the Soviet Union to its knees, a hero standing up to the alien West.

When Mr Putin came to power in 2000, he was guided by the post-Soviet idea that Russia was converging with the West, albeit slowly and on its own terms. Membership of clubs such as the G8 mattered to him. This no longer seems to be the case. He appears to be driven by the idea that Russia is fundamentally different and morally superior. The fact that the Russia elite, dominated by former KGB men, is corrupt and cynical only strengthens the need for such an ideology: extraordinary corruption requires extraordinary justification.

Maria Snegovaya, a scholar at Columbia University, argues that Mr Putin’s thinking is influenced by the writings of Ivan Ilyin, an émigré Russian philosopher of the first half of the 20th century, whose grave he has visited and whose works he often cites. “We know that Western nations don’t understand and don’t tolerate Russia’s identity…They are going to divide the united Russian ‘broom’ into twigs to break these twigs one by one, ” Ilyin wrote. A book of his essays, along with the works of like-minded philosophers, was given by the Kremlin as Christmas reading to its apparatchiks. Another favourite is “Third Empire: The Russia that Ought to Be”, a Utopian fantasy set in 2054 that features a ruler named Vladimir II, who integrates eastern Ukraine into a new Russian Union.

In this world view, Ukraine’s revolutionary bid to escape to the West is a betrayal of Slavic brotherhood. Russia’s attempts to destabilise and split Ukraine are driven by a desire to “save” what it still considers to be part of the Russian world from Western annexation. This is the Kremlin’s way of punishing a traitor, demonstrating strength to the West and to its own population and preventing the emergence of an alternative civilisation on its territory.

Mr Putin may not wish, or be able, formally to annex Crimea, and he says that Russia has no plans to do so. More likely he intends to use it as a destabilising factor and leverage for splitting Ukraine further. The ultimate goal may be turning it into a federation where tight Russian control of the eastern parts stops the country as a whole from moving towards the West.

Repeating the Crimean scenario in the east of the country would be harder. One reason is the reluctance of local elites, including the oligarchs, police chiefs and criminal bosses, to cede their territory to their Russian counterparts. The interim government in Kiev has already appointed powerful tycoons to run the vulnerable areas in eastern and central Ukraine.

Russia is already sending tremors through the industrial east. In Donetsk, the Ukrainian and Russian flags have alternated atop the local administrative offices. The pro-Russian crowds are warmed up by agents provocateurs and supported by “volunteers” from across the Russian border. Russian social networks have been used to recruit volunteers to go to Kharkiv, Donetsk and Odessa for “moral support” and to participate in anti-Ukrainian rallies. “We need men aged 18-45 who are already in Ukraine, or are ready to go,” says a page called Civil Defence of Ukraine. “Don’t take anything…with you. Remember you are just a tourist”.

There are also strong rumours of the involvement of the Russian security services and forces loyal to Mr Yanukovych. On March 3rd a 1,000-strong crowd of pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk stormed the building of the local administration and nominated as governor Pavel Gubarev, a marginal politician who was previously unknown in Donetsk. Mr Gubarev is an activist of the Eurasian Youth Movement, a Russian nationalist outfit set up after the Orange revolution of 2004 to counter the spread of Western ideas. Two days later Mr Gubarev was pushed out and the Kiev-appointed governor, the oligarch Sergei Taruta, walked in.

 

Will there be war?

At first glance, the Ukrainian military appears quite capable. Though largely equipped with legacy systems from the late Cold War, the weapons - whether tanks, combat aircraft or helicopters - in Ukraine's inventory remain potent. In fact, the Russians continue to use much of the same equipment despite a recent modernization drive. On paper at least, the Ukrainian armed forces have a few hundred combat aircraft, a number of relatively advanced surface-to-air missile batteries, thousands of armored fighting vehicles and a large inventory of self-propelled and rocket artillery. Ukraine also benefits from a nominal standing army of approximately 150,000 troops, 1 million more in reserve and a large pool of people fit for military service within the wider population. Finally, Ukraine has already successfully transitioned to a more flexible brigade structure and has increasingly benefited from joint training exercises with NATO.

In reality, however, Ukraine's military suffers from a number of key structural weaknesses that severely undermine its nominal strength. First of all, a large portion of Ukraine's military equipment is either in storage or inadequately maintained. For instance, photos of the 204th Tactical Aviation Brigade stationed in the dual civilian-military airport of Belbek, which the Russians recently seized, show numerous mothballed fighter aircraft unfit for immediate service. Similarly, the majority of Ukraine's tanks are known to be in long-term storage. With a modest annual military budget of approximately $2 billion, Ukraine could not hope to adequately maintain its oversized equipment inventory. Training for much of the regular units in Ukraine has also reportedly been limited due to a lack of funding.

Moreover, Ukraine's military currently is widely dispersed, and mobilization at a time of political crisis and widescale domestic opposition is difficult, to say the least. Even if the bulk of Ukraine's conventional army is in the center and the west, a number of its key units are based close to Russia in the east and far from the core concentration of Ukraine's forces. Ukraine would also likely have to deal with transportation bottlenecks, sabotage and -- as seen in Crimea -- disruption attempts by pro-Russian forces, such as those that blocked critical causeways into the peninsula. The dispersed nature of the potential threat complicates matters for Ukrainian planners. Russia has military elements in Crimea to the south and exercising along portions of Ukraine's eastern border, while to the north is Belarus, a staunch Russian ally that cannot be ignored.

Furthermore, unlike the small and militarily weak Baltic states that also must contend with Russia, Ukraine does not benefit from a military alliance system that it can rely on against Russia. As during the 2008 Georgia war, NATO and the United States are unlikely to intervene militarily on the side of a non-member state against a Russian Federation that still maintains thousands of nuclear weapons. From the point of view of Western capitals, the dangers of escalation and the associated costs simply do not justify the minimal strategic gain intervention would yield.

Finally, Kiev's greatest weakness is the polarized nature of Ukrainian society, and by extension the Ukrainian military. The transitional government in Kiev understands that it cannot fully rely on the loyalty of the armed forces, so sending them into conventional battle against the Russians would risk substantial defections. Indeed, Ukraine's military leadership has seen a number of changes over the last month, highlighting the lack of dependability even at its highest echelons.

Both Russia and Ukraine have largely attempted to minimize bloodshed during the crisis. Despite highly provocative actions, the Russians repeatedly have sought to disarm Ukrainian forces without exchanging gunfire, while the Ukrainians in turn have largely ceded Crimea without a fight. A conventional war is something that both Russia and Ukraine strongly want to avoid. Ukraine's current military weakness and the West's limited appetite to escalate militarily will be major factors in Moscow's decision, and ability, to employ its military in pursuit of its goals in Ukraine.

Georgia and Moldova, two former Soviet countries that have sought stronger ties with the West, have accelerated their attempts to further integrate with the European Union -- and in Georgia's case, with NATO. On the other hand, countries such as Belarus and Armenia have sought to strengthen their economic and security ties with Russia. Countries already strongly integrated with the West like the Baltics are glad to see Western powers stand up to Russia, but meanwhile they know that they could be the next in line in the struggle between Russia and the West. Russia could hit them economically, and Moscow could also offer what it calls protection to their sizable Russian minorities as it did in Crimea. Russia already has hinted at this in discussions to extend Russian citizenship to ethnic Russians and Russian speakers throughout the former Soviet Union.

The major question moving forward is how committed Russia and the West are to backing and reinforcing their positions in these rival blocs. Russia has made clear that it is willing to act militarily to defend its interests in Ukraine. Russia showed the same level of dedication to preventing Georgia from turning to NATO in 2008. Moscow has made no secret that it is willing to use a mixture of economic pressure, energy manipulation and, if need be, military force to prevent the countries on its periphery from leaving the Russian orbit. In the meantime, Russia will seek to intensify integration efforts in its own blocs, including the Customs Union on the economic side and the Collective Security Treaty Organization on the military side.

So the big question is what the West intends. On several occasions, the European Union and United States have proved that they can play a major role in shaping events on the ground in Ukraine. Obtaining EU membership is a stated goal of the governments in Moldova and Georgia, and a significant number of people in Ukraine also support EU membership. But since it has yet to offer sufficient aid or actual membership, the European Union has not demonstrated as serious a commitment to the borderland countries as Russia has. It has refrained from doing so for several reasons, including its own financial troubles and political divisions and its dependence on energy and trade with Russia. While the European Union may yet show stronger resolve as a result of the current Ukrainian crisis, a major shift in the bloc's approach is unlikely -- at least not on its own.

On the Western side, then, U.S. intentions are key. In recent years, the United States has largely stayed on the sidelines in the competition over the Russian periphery. The United States was just as quiet as the European Union was in its reaction to the Russian invasion of Georgia, and calls leading up to the invasion for swiftly integrating Ukraine and Georgia into NATO went largely unanswered. Statements were made, but little was done.

But the global geopolitical climate has changed significantly since 2008. The United States is out of Iraq and is swiftly drawing down its forces in Afghanistan. Washington is now acting more indirectly in the Middle East, using a balance-of-power approach to pursue its interests in the region. This frees up its foreign policy attention, which is significant, given that the United States is the only party with the ability and resources to make a serious push in the Russian periphery.

As the Ukraine crisis moves into the diplomatic realm, a major test of U.S. willingness and ability to truly stand up to Russia is emerging. Certainly, Washington has been quite vocal during the current Ukrainian crisis and has shown signs of getting further involved elsewhere in the region, such as in Poland and the Baltic states. But concrete action from the United States with sufficient backing from the Europeans will be the true test of how committed the West is to standing up to Moscow. Maneuvering around Ukraine's deep divisions and Russian countermoves will be no easy task. But nothing short of concerted efforts by a united Western front will suffice to pull Ukraine and the rest of the borderlands toward the West.

Looking ahead, the West and Russia eventually might reach an understanding over Ukraine that results in that country's Finlandization. In this case, Ukraine, along with the rest of the borderland states, would be integrated exclusively neither with the West nor with Russia. Instead, they could be integrated with the West economically while confined to certain foreign policy and defense policy limits to reassure Moscow. The other and more likely possibility is that neither Russia nor the West will recognize the neutrality of the borderland states. In this case, the competition over this perennially contested region would continue, shifting according to the strengths and weaknesses of the dueling sides.

 

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