WHAT ARE DEEPER MEANINGS OF UKRAINE PROTESTS?
Dayton Daily News (Ohio)
February 23, 2014 Sunday
A BETTER UNDERSTANDING
>From Edward Lu-Journal cas, in the Wall Street
The news on Friday from Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, was that some
sort of peace deal, truce or standoff (it remains to be seen which) was
reached between the government and the protesters, whose violent street
clashes have captured world headlines for the last three months. It
will take time to see what holds, and we here in America might
find ourselves wondering – what’s at stake in these sudden-seeming
protests? Why are they happening? What do they mean? In recent weeks,
we’ve run across several good pieces that address those questions, and
today we offer three for a better understanding of this interesting,
developing world story.
The scenes from the Ukrainian capital are extraordinary: Lenin’s
statue toppled, hundreds of thousands of flag-waving protesters,
police raids on media outlets and opposition parties. But they are
a sideshow to the big picture: the collapse of the European Union’s
efforts to integrate its ex-Soviet neighbors in the face of a bid by
Vladimir Putin’s ex-KGB regime to restore the Russian empire.
The EU’s expansion to the east was one of its greatest achievements.
The countries that joined in 2004 – the so-called EU-8 of Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary
and Slovenia – now represent some of Europe’s most striking success
stories. Even grudging voices in “Old Europe” concede that the EU is
stronger, not weaker, because of its new members.
But that triumph was based on some particular circumstances. The EU
offered genuine membership. These countries truly wanted to reform,
modernize and integrate with the West. Their governments and people
alike realized that joining the EU was the only way to do it. They
were willing to instigate and accept tough reforms. And nobody was
able to stop them.
These advantages are absent in the countries of the “Eastern
Partnership,” the EU’s misguided plan to forge closer ties with
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. These
six countries are ill-assorted. Oil-rich Azerbaijan wants strategic
ties with the West but has scores of political prisoners and tightly
controlled media. Belarus has a marginally less bad human-rights
record but hews to the Kremlin line in its foreign policy. Armenia
has little love for Russia but depends on it for survival against
Azerbaijan. Georgia and Moldova are pro-Western but weak, small and
vulnerable. And Ukraine is larger than all the others put together.
They do have three things in common, none of them helpful. Their
abilities to make deep reforms range from weak to nil. The EU does
not want them as full members. And the Kremlin wants to keep them in
its orbit.
The result has been an unfolding disaster. The Eastern Partnership
has gotten nowhere in Belarus. Azerbaijan said it wanted easy visas to
the EU, but its government showed no desire to make political reforms.
Armenia tried to engage but was swatted back into line by Russia
and in September rejected the EU agreement. Last month, on the eve
of the EU’s summit in Lithuania, Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych
suddenly announced that he won’t sign, either. Russia was making him
and his country an offer they could not refuse.
The details of that offer are still unfolding. It appears to involve an
emergency loan for Ukraine’s stricken economy, one without the tough
conditions, such as higher gas prices, that would be required in any
deal with Western lenders such as the International Monetary Fund.
It will involve some cheap gas, probably supplied through a murky
but well-connected intermediary company. Russia will deploy its huge
media resources, especially its television channels, which are widely
watched in Ukraine, against the demonstrators and in favor of the
Yanukovych regime.
In return, Vladimir Putin will move Ukraine closer to the planned
Eurasian Customs Union, the Russian president’s pet project for
extending Kremlin influence in the former empire.
Those were the carrots for Kiev rejecting closer EU ties, but there
were sticks, too. Ukraine is vulnerable to Russian economic sanctions,
some of which Moscow had already imposed. Mr. Yanukovych’s personal
safety is a factor, too: He is terrified of being poisoned and
travels with an entourage of food-tasters and flunkies that would
not disgrace the Byzantine imperial court. In 2004, opposition leader
Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin after challenging Kremlin
influence in Ukraine. He lived
– and became president – but was permanently disfigured.
The EU cannot match that. It does not do death threats or bribes. It
helps countries improve their intellectual-property laws and
food-safety procedures. It demands proper elections, courts and media
regulation, all anathema to the likes of Mr. Yanukovych, who thrives
on rigged elections, propaganda machines and phony justice.
The other benefits the EU offers are free trade, which brings a
sharp competitive shock first and benefits later, and easier visas,
which are of no interest to Mr. Yanukovych, who can travel wherever
he wants. Having weighed both sides’ offers, the Ukrainian leader
chose the one that promised power and money: the Kremlin’s offer.
That decision left EU officials baffled. They do not understand
people like Mr. Yanukovych and their feral approach to politics. Nor
do they understand Russia. They missed the fundamental point about
Russian foreign policy: To feel secure, Moscow needs a geopolitical
hinterland of countries that are economically weak and politically
pliable. The EU’s Eastern Partnership could make Russia’s borderlands
economically strong and politically secure. Therefore the partnership
must be destroyed.
The EU’s failure to deal properly with Ukraine is a scandal. It is no
exaggeration to say that the country determines the longterm future
of the entire former Soviet Union. If Ukraine adopts a Euro-Atlantic
orientation, then the Putin regime and its satrapies are finished. The
political, economic and cultural success of a large, Orthodox,
industrialized ex-Soviet country would be the clearest signal possible
to Russians that their thieving, thuggish, lying rulers are not making
the country great, but holding it back.
But if Ukraine falls into Russia’s grip, then the outlook is bleak
and dangerous. Not only will authoritarian crony capitalism have
triumphed in the former Soviet Union, but Europe’s own security will
also be endangered. NATO is already struggling to protect the Baltic
states and Poland from the integrated and increasingly impressive
military forces of Russia and Belarus. Add Ukraine to that alliance,
and a headache turns into a nightmare.
>From Gideon Rach-Times man, in the Financial
No event has done more to spook the Kremlin, over the last decade,
than the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004. Now Vladimir Putin’s
worst moment looks like it’s turning into a recurring nightmare as
demonstrators once again fill Kiev’s Independence Square, demanding
that their country move closer to the EU and further away from Russia.
The demonstrations in Ukraine are both a humiliation and a threat to
Mr. Putin. While the Russian president may laud the deep cultural
and historical ties between Ukraine and Russia, he is discovering
that tens of thousands of Ukrainians would prefer to brave freezing
temperatures and flying truncheons rather than be drawn closer into
the Russian sphere of influence.
What is more, if a popular uprising can once again threaten to topple
a corrupt and intermittently despotic government in Ukraine, then the
potential lesson for Russia is clear. After all, it is less than two
years ago that demonstrators filled the streets of Moscow to protest
against the Putin restoration and to label his United Russia party
as the “party of crooks and thieves.”
A pro-EU uprising in Ukraine also threatens President Putin’s
vision for Russia in the world. His main foreign-policy goal is the
construction of a sphere of influence for Russia, covering most of
the old Soviet Union. Ukraine – with its 45 million people, large
territory, economic resources and longstanding links to Russia – is
meant to be the jewel in the crown. It matters far more than Moldova
or Belarus. If the Ukrainians turn west, not east, Mr. Putin’s foreign
policy is in tatters.
And yet the Russian government has only itself to blame for this turn
of events. It has set up a crude tug-of-war with the EU over the fate
of its neighbour, while forgetting the obvious lesson of the original
Orange Revolution – that if you try to settle the future of Ukraine,
over the heads of its people, they can take to the streets in numbers
so massive that they can change the political direction of their
nation. …
The idea that a popular revolt could be genuinely popular – rather
than the product of a behind-the-scenes manipulation
– seems to be one that the Putin government finds hard to grasp. (In
some ways this is surprising, given Russia’s own history – although
perhaps not so surprising, considering the role that conspiracy played
in the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October 1917.) …
As a Russian nationalist, Mr. Putin likes to argue that Russia is
a unique “civilisation” – distinct from that of Europe. As a result
the struggle for Ukraine is, for him, not just about wealth or power
politics – it is civilisational. The notion that the Ukrainian middle
class, at least in the capital city and the more developed western
half of the country, feels more attracted to the civilisations of
Warsaw, Berlin and London
– rather than Moscow – is offensive to Russian nationalists in the
Kremlin and beyond.
Yet, in reality, the prospect of Ukraine drawing closer to the rest
of Europe – and becoming wealthier and better-governed in the process
– would ultimately be in the interests of Russia. It might serve as
a template for the future development of Russia itself. But, for
that very reason, events in Ukraine are profoundly threatening to
the personal interests and ideology of President Putin and his circle.
Snyder From Timothy , in the New York Review of Books
Would anyone anywhere in the world be willing to take a truncheon in
the head for the sake of a trade agreement with the United States?
This is the question we Americans might be asking ourselves as we
watch young Ukrainians being beaten in Kiev for protesting their
own government’s decision not to enter an association agreement with
the European Union. The accord, which was to be signed on Nov. 29,
2013, offered Ukraine access to the world’s largest market. But more
importantly, it seemed to hold out to Ukraine’s youth and middle
classes a symbolic assurance that a future of normal, civilized,
European life awaited. When that promise was not kept, thousands of
Ukrainians took to the streets of their capital. After some of them
were assaulted by riot police on Nov. 30, hundreds of thousands more
have gone into the streets, in Kiev and around the country.
If this is a revolution, it must be one of the most common-sense
revolutions in history. But the desire of so many to be able to have
normal lives in a normal country is opposed by two fantasies, one of
them now exhausted and the other extremely dangerous.
The exhausted fantasy is that of Ukraine’s geopolitical significance.
Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych seems to believe, and he is not
alone, that because Ukraine lies between the European Union and Russia,
each side must have an interest in controlling it, and therefore that
smart geopolitics involves turning them against each other. What he
does not understand is that these are two very different sorts of
players. …
The dangerous fantasy is the Russian idea that Ukraine is not really
a different country, but rather a kind of Slavic younger brother. This
is a legacy of the late Soviet Union and the russification policies of
the 1970s. It has no actual historical basis: East Slavic statehood
arose in what is now Ukraine and was copied in Moscow, and the early
Russian Empire was itself highly dependent upon educated inhabitants
of Ukraine.
The politics of memory of course have little to do with the facts of
history. Putin unsurprisingly finds it convenient to ignore Russia’s
actual regional rival, China, and play upon a Russian sense of
superiority in eastern Europe by linking Kiev to Moscow. But this
move has its risks, which Putin must now consider. After all, can he
be certain which way the influence will travel? If Ukraine can be a
democracy, then why can’t Russia? If Ukraine can have mass protests,
then why can’t Russia? If Ukraine can be European, then why can’t
Russia?
Russian television is informing those who still watch it that the
Ukrainian protests are the work of operators paid by Sweden, Poland
and Lithuania. The worrying thing about this sort of claim is that
it establishes a pretext for “further” intervention. If the West is
already “present,” then there’s every reason for Russia to be as well.
If Yanukovych decides to declare martial law, he will almost certainly
fail to control the country. The riot police of Berkut can be counted
on to beat protesters a few more times, but the behavior of the regular
police, and the Ukrainian army, is far less predictable. Some reports
have already indicated that policemen have supported the protesters,
at least in the western part of the country. If Yanukovych tries force
and fails, then Putin might claim that Russian military intervention
is needed to restore order.
This would be the worst of all possible outcomes
– for Ukraine of course, but perhaps above all for Russia. The
absorption of Ukrainian lands by the USSR involved almost unbelievable
levels of violence over the course of decades. Another Russian armed
adventure in Ukraine now would likely fail, for all kinds of reasons.
Russian soldiers cannot have much stomach for invading a land whose
people speak their mother tongue and who, they are told, are brother
Slavs. Ukraine, for all of its visible political divisions, is a
single country with a big army whose people generally believe in
sovereignty. …
Indeed, it is the simple desire for peace, and the achievement of
peace, that makes the European Union attractive in Kiev and elsewhere.