I'll admit up front that I haven't really followed the protest movement that spurred recent events, so I'm not sure about the causes. I followed the Orange Revolution in 2004. The Orange Revolution arose when the pro-Russian presidential candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, was declared the victor in the Ukrainian election. The election was widely reported to have been rigged. The opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, also suffered severe dioxin poisoning, which many attribute to the Russians. A popular uprising resulted in the ouster of Yanukovych, and Yushchenko and his political ally Yulia Tymoshenko took power. Yanukovych was later elected President in 2010. (Tymoshenko has also been imprisoned for quite a while, possibly on trumped up political charges, and I have yet to hear whether she's been released as a result of the recent turmoil.) UPDATE: My friend Windshield Ninja, who follows all things Russia a bit closer than I do, informs me that Tymoshenko was released a couple of weeks ago.
Just as in the West, Ukrainian politics aren't as simple as good guys and bad guys. Around 2008, I met a young Ukrainian woman who was visiting the States, and when I brought up Tymoshenko, she told me that "she's evil." I've also heard reports and read news stories about how widespread corruption and cronyism are in Ukraine. (I've never been to Ukraine myself, and can't speak to any of this from personal experience.) Ukraine also sent troops to both Afghanistan and Iraq in support of Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom. At one time, Ukraine and Georgia were on a trajectory to join NATO, but this has been opposed by Russia, and the 2008 South Ossetia War between Russia and Georgia appears to have put such prospects on an indefinite hold.
The take-away from all of this should be that Ukraine has some internal challenges, and that both the West and Russia are constantly competing for influence there. Western media has been trying to paint the recent protests and political action as a de facto referendum on whether Ukraine should align with Europe or Russia; however, my gut feeling is that we should remember that "all politics is local", and look for both domestic and international causes for the recent turmoil. At any rate, the dispute escalated a couple of weeks ago when troops opened fire on protestors and killed a number of them. Events moved swiftly out of that, Yanukovych was removed from office, and he fled the country.
The latest news is that Russian-speaking gunmen (suspected to be Russian Spetsnaz special operations troops) have seized various sites in the ethnic Russian majority Crimea region, to include the Crimean parliament building and two airports. Additional Russian military assets have deployed (from what I've seen, they appear to be from Russia's naval base - more on that in a second), and President Putin has requested and received unanimous approval to deploy Russian military assets to the Crimea. So, this begs two questions: why is Russia so concerned with the Crimea, and what is the international community likely to do about it?
Beyond Ukraine being on Russia's border (think of how concerned America is with security turmoil in Mexico), Russia's big concern with Ukraine (and specifically the Crimean Peninsula) is their naval base at Sevastopol. After the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812, and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Russian leaders have been (somewhat justifiably) paranoid about its massive land borders. During the Cold War, they attempted to overcome these challenges by establishing strategic depth through conquests and alliances to expand their sphere of influence. As Sir Laurence Martin noted in 1981 (transcript, podcast):
Now the Soviet Union, for its part, has sought ever since its foundation to extend its influence over the less developed as well as the developed world. This has been partly an ideological imperative and partly, a result of the Soviet obsession - inherited from Russia and compounded by Bolshevik revolutionary experience - with real and imagined external threats. It has been ironically observed that the Soviet Union feels encircled because the world is round, and that they think it a fortunate feature of solid geometry that after they control half the globe, each further addition to their territory will necessarily reduce the length of their exposed frontier.The result is that the Russians take their naval bases very seriously - particularly since Russia's access to the sea is very limited, and because their bases are both geographically distant from one another and iced in for much of the year. (For that reason, Russia also maintains a naval base at Tartus, in Syria, and has investigated opening a base in Libya and reopening another base in Yemen. The Syrian base is widely regarded as being a key reason for Russian support of the sitting Syrian regime in the current civil war.) The base at Sevastopol is Russia's only point of access to the Black Sea, and by extension the Mediterranean Sea, so they will be reticent to see it jeopardized by the latest instance of Ukrainian turmoil. As one commentator over at Doctrine Man!! somewhat sensibly noted:
[I wonder] what we would do if there was civil war with armed militias looming in Cuba outside Guantanamo.There's also the issue of the Crimea's ethnic makeup, as it's the only Ukrainian province in which Ethnic Russians and/or Russophiles constitute the majority. Ethnic politics played a big role in Soviet domestic and foreign policy, and those policies remain a big factor to this day. Writing in 2008 at the time of the South Ossetia War in Georgia, independent journalist Michael Totten observed:
“A key tool that the Soviet Union used to keep its empire together,” Worms said to me, “was pitting ethnic groups against one another. They did this extremely skillfully in the sense that they never generated ethnic wars within their own territory. But when the Soviet Union collapsed it became an essential Russian policy to weaken the states on its periphery by activating the ethnic fuses they planted.One way that Moscow accomplished this was by relocating different ethnic groups throughout the borders of the Soviet Union. Operation Lentil, which involved the relocation of the populations of Chechnya and Ingushetia, is the most noteworthy example, but Wikipedia has an entire article about Soviet population transfer. One of their methods was the resettle ethnic Russians throughout the various Soviet republics. When I was working in the Middle East, one of my employees (an American) was married to an "Uzbek" woman who was an Uzbek citizen, but an ethnic Russian, and whose father had been an officer in the Uzbek army whose career hit a ceiling because he wasn't an ethnic Uzbek. On pages 120 to 122 of World Politics and the Evolution of War, John J. Weltman describes how the fate of ethnic Germans in places like the Rhineland, the Sudetenland, and elsewhere became a cause de guerre for the Hitler's invasions of those German-speaking regions prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. In the case of Ukraine in 2014 (and in Georgia in 2008), the Russian government seeks to safeguard the same ethnic Russians whom their Soviet predecessors settled there in the first place.
“They tried that in a number of countries. They tried it in the Baltic states, but the fuses were defused. Nothing much happened. They tried it in Ukraine. It has not happened yet, but it's getting hotter. They tried it in Moldova. There it worked, and now we have Transnitria. They tried it in Armenia and Azerbaijan and it went beyond their wildest dreams and we ended up with a massive, massive war. And they tried it in two territories in Georgia, which I'll talk about in a minute. They didn't try it in Central Asia because basically all the presidents of the newly independent countries were the former heads of the communist parties and they said we're still following your line, Kremlin, we haven't changed very much.”
He's right about the massive war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, though few outside the region know much about it. Armenians and Azeris very thoroughly transferred Azeris and Armenians “back” to their respective mother countries after the Soviet Union collapsed through pogroms, massacres, and ethnic-cleansing. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled savage communal warfare in terror. The Armenian military still occupies the ethnic-Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh region in southwestern Azerbaijan. It's another so-called “frozen conflict” in the Caucasus region waiting to thaw. Moscow takes the Armenian side and could blow up Nagorno-Karabakh, and subsequently all of Azerbaijan, at any time. After hearing the strident Azeri point of view on the conflict for a week before I arrived in Georgia, I'd say that particular ethnic-nationalist fuse is about one millimeter in length.
The Russians will have their hands full. As I documented elsewhere, the Russian military faces a lot of challenges. Doctrine Man!! posted an alleged order of battle for the Russian military campaign. As that prior piece of mine noted, the Russians had some noteworthy equipment shortfalls on their way to Georgia, and the Crimea is more than twice as large as South Ossetia and Abkhazia (the Georgian regions annexed in 2008) combined. NATO will no doubt be watching the Crimean operation with rapt interest.
The next question: how is the international community likely to respond? At this point, it's tough to say. I see neither the means nor the international will for military intervention, and non-military measures are unlikely to compel Russia to desist in their operation. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances (signed by Ukraine, the United States of America, Russia, and the United Kingdom) has been invoked by some commentators, though the memorandum was apparently never ratified by the United States. Russia suffered some diplomatic and economic consequences after the 2008 South Ossetia War, and I would expect that some such fallout will take place once the dust has settled. The scope and nature of that fallout will depend upon how Russia's campaign plays out.
In the mean time, you can expect the international community to release a flurry of statements about "restoring order" and "reducing tensions", some of which may be worded as condemnations of Russia's actions. However, as evidenced by the repeated disputes over energy supplies which have taken place in recent years, Russia has military, political, and economic leverage to insulate itself.
There are a lot of outlets commenting on the current crisis. Two of the better items I've seen are:
So, to review the bottom line: Russia has both legitimate and fabricated strategic interests in the Crimea, as well as historical precedents there and elsewhere, and those factors are motivating this campaign. As for the international community, it's unlikely that a response of any substance will take place in the short term, and any long-term consequences will come as a function of the campaign's actual events and duration.
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