I finally got around to reading the long historical essay by Putin on Ukraine. It's kind of the standard Russian take on Ukraine. One people, stretching back to the 7th century. People should read it. I’m very interested in this issue, the Russian periphery. God knows why. Sometimes it’s hard to understand why what grabs you grabs you. I visited the Donbass breakaway “Russian-backed” republics with a caravan of self-styled “anti-imperialists” in 2018. I am not an academic. I’m not one of those many spooky Atlantic-Council-DC-Beltway journalists living in Kiev off of the Russian-hybrid-war gravy train. And I’m not one of this new breed of tankies who reflexively fetishize China and Russia over the US (yes, they actually exist off the internet.)
I have been thinking about the kind people I met in the breakaway republics—some of them expressed resentment toward Putin, for holding them at such a distance. Everyone appreciates it more when someone is openly in their corner than someone who offers clandestine “assistance.” Since my visit, 750,000 residents have been issued Russian visas and passports and more than 20,000 Russian troops have massed across the border around Rostov-on-Don, waiting on god knows what.
I will go ahead and say I am skeptical about Russia invading Ukraine, especially about the idea that they’d “sack” Kiev or go any farther than taking the breakaway republics. And taking the republics might be a relief for both sides, end the limbo—Kiev already views the residents there largely as traitors.
I am also obliged to note that I found Putin’s essay disturbing. Very disturbing. The fact that it is published at all, with his name on it… it’s probably a bad sign. Probably means something. It wasn’t just for love of history.
The argument in the text has a certain Hitler-ish echo of, “Our poor ethnic Germans, trapped in the Sudetenland.” Putin and Russia have a fair amount of unresolved legitimate grievance at the mistreatment after the Soviet collapse. Not Germany after Versaille level, but the palpable desire to correct a grievous wrong done to them decades ago seems to be motivating their confrontational behavior in the present.
Also, the Kremlin arguments that Ukraine is some kind of ethnically-purifying nazi state are half-bullshit…yeah, there is a scary, ethnically-racist underbelly in Ukraine, but the president is also a Jewish sitcom star. And while its true that segments of the Ukrainian population and policy establishment whitewash their fascist-nationalist “founding fathers;” and they seem bent on dragging the US and Europe into their problems; and it suits their interests for us to be dragged into a war with Russia on their behalf; I have no doubt that the bulk of the population just want to live peacefully in a liberal, modern European state, like all those EU-flag wavers in Romania and the other Eastern satellites.
I do wonder, however, about the motivations of the American administration. There is a Veep, Selena Meyers-and-the-Georgian-president feeling to the whole thing. A 2008 Russian-Georgian war feeling. And this idiotic slogan they have—”Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine”—what do they think this is?
1. Going back to the 1800s, “Ukrainian nationalists” have been groups bent on orienting themselves toward Poland, Lithuania, and Romania and Western Europe. The west was considered the beacon, the cure for the backwardness which they blamed on Russia. They have fostered all kinds of theories about being an ethnically-seperate people, going back to the 7th century Rus and the Golden Horde. At the same time, these Western “borderland” areas (now part of Ukraine but formerly Polish/Romanian/Austro-Hungarian) have been ground zero for the world’s nastiest types of anti-semitism. (see Gregor von Rozzori’s WW1-era Memoirs of Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories.)
2. After the Bolshevik revolution and Russian civil war in which some western Ukrainians collaborated with Poles and Romanians or with local bandit-type anarchist militias, the Bolsheviks actively encouraged Ukraine as a separate federal and cultural entity within the USSR. It was one of the founding “republics” of the Soviet Union. The idea of just lumping Ukraine in with Russia was considered backwards and not even up for debate. The revolutionaries were bent on weeding out “great Russian prejudice.” It is ironic that it was Bolshevik activists who pushed for the standardized and widespread adoption of Ukrainian language, culture, and identity that is today considered “Ukrainian culture.”
3. Ukrainians ended up in the absolute heights of the USSR state structure—Brezhnev and Khrushchev and Lazar Kaganovich… among many others. They showed individual talent, sure, but there was also an affirmative action element. Putting them at the top was meant to show something about the Soviet Union… about how multi-ethnic and equitable it was. I think of it like American presidents from the South, LBJ and Huey Long—they gained traction at a national level because of their folksiness, Americans liked the idea of a president from Texas. At the same time as Ukraine was a recruitment station for political talent, it was the breadbasket and industrial heartland vital to the USSR’s survival. As is well known, it was exploited and plundered ruthlessly, with the complicity of these Ukrainian leaders doing much of the dirty work. At the same time it was also a place where Russians would go to escape the cold indignity of modern life and get closer to the “real and honest” folk.
4. During World War II, you had two divergent things going on in Ukraine. You had irregular partisan, pro-Bolshevik resistance to the German and Italian occupation. But you also had opportunistic Ukrainian nationalists (followers of Stephen Bandera and others) collaborating and pushing forward the Axis occupation in hopes of becoming the leaders of a puppet state. After and during the war, the status of these Ukrainian nationalist-fascists was complex and horrifying. Even the Nazis considered them to be extreme and frightening. Bandera was jailed by the Germans under extremely ambiguous circumstances. After the war, some of these nationalist leaders were hunted down by the USSR; some became kind of stateless mercenaries and were picked up and used by the CIA and MI6 (Their CIA and MI6 handlers found them to be disgusting, but useful pitbulls they could use to build an “Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations”). Some re-wrote and concealed their political histories and ended up getting citizenship in the US and Canada—the descendents of these emigre families form the basis of the current powerful American and Canadian Ukrainian lobby.
6. In a normal world, Ukraine and Russia would have a stable relationship like that of US and Mexico. They should be each others largest trading partners. They were before the conflict in 2014. The bulk of Ukraine’s revenue came from tariffs and fees from the oil and gas pipeline from Russia to Europe. Ukraine showed that it more highly valued a political relationship with the EU than it did the revenue it depended on from Russia. This dispute has been a bizarre nightmare with Russia intermittently cutting off Ukraine’s oil and gas for non-payment (and probably political reasons), but then Ukraine just siphoning or stockpiling heating oil from the pipeline. The main reason Russia built Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 was so they could get their product to Europe without having Ukraine have their oil revenue by the balls. Ukraine’s president recently insisted that Ukraine was a “great power.” Every country has value and is great in its own self-conception, but reality is also made by comparisons—Ukraine was always a vital but secondary founding partner in the Soviet Union. Since then, its GDP has dropped below most Eastern European states, it has given away its cache of nuclear weapons, it has been outmaneuvered with pipelines, and it has one of the most frightening nationalism problems in the world.
I think Ukraine has gotten too big for its britches. I personally don’t think Ukraine has any business ever being in NATO. And I’m turned off by the Spooky Deep State commentariat banging the drum that we all have to “do something” for Ukraine. Following them into anything seems like it will only lead to disaster. It’s often in the best interests of a small nationalist state to provoke a great power conflict, while it may not be in our best interests.
If you are interested in diving deeper into this subject, I recommend delving into The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv by Tarik Amar, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands by Richard Sakwa, Anthony Beevor’s Second World War, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe’s Stephen Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult and Gerard Toal’s excellent Near Abroad.