Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has faced a storm of criticisms and this has been entirely one-sided. The mainstream media and several foreign policy experts have described it as imperialistic and a danger to the sovereignty of states.
There are, no doubt, factors that are Symptomatic of hegemonic designs. A reality that historian, Professor Ronald Suny, says has been influenced by Putin’s “ideological predilections, which include his fabricated histories of Russia that has occasionally forced him to act impulsively.” But these positions seem to disregard other important factors that may have incited the Russians to action.
Rather than our fixation on the narrative that this is simply a great military power spoiling for a fight with its smaller neighbour, it is pertinent to consider the complex origins of the conflict, and nuances in the narratives, so as to appreciate the diverse arguments involved.
We must understand that this is more about the mutual geo-strategic concerns of great powers rather than the egotistic desires of one man, as portrayed by the media, and Ukraine is at the core of Russia’s geo-strategic concerns. When we even speak of the sovereign right of Ukraine to choose its alliances, this should not be done in denial of Russia’s strategic interests.
Ukraine and Russia: A History
Ukraine is an important part of Russia’s ancient and contemporary history. To this day, a significant part of Ukrainian population (about 20 percent) is ethnic Russian and another 30 percent speak Russian as their first language. Former U.S Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, explains lucidly that “Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then.”
Kissinger adds that “Some of the most important battles for Russian freedom, starting with the Battle of Poltava in 1709, were fought on Ukrainian soil. The Black Sea Fleet – Russia’s means of projecting power in the Mediterranean – is based by long-term lease in Sevastopol, in Crimea. Even such famed dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky insisted that Ukraine was an integral part of Russian history and, indeed, of Russia.” In simple language, Ukraine is Russia’s underbelly.
NATO Expansion
Successive Russian governments have consistently warned that NATO’s expansion eastwards is an existential threat. They have always insisted that NATO’s inclusion of former Warsaw Pact nations in the organisation violates promises made in a number of discussions held after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Declassified documents show that on February 9, 1990, in a meeting between U.S Secretary of State, James Baker and Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev at the Kremlin, also attended by Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, Eduard Shevardnadze, Secretary Baker stated explicitly that “if we maintain a presence in a Germany that would be a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east”. The U.S still maintains its bases in a unified Germany that is still a part of NATO to this day, but the military alliance has moved full swing to the east, encroaching on Russia’s borders.
There were several warnings about the implications of this move. Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns, warned about the implications of NATO expansion eastwards in 1995 when he was political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Burns noted that “hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.”
In 1997, Jack F. Matlock Jr., US Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991, warned that NATO expansion was “the most profound strategic blunder, [encouraging] a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat […] since the Soviet Union collapsed”.
Also, in June 1997, when the U.S moved to include the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary in NATO, 50 leading foreign policy experts that included diplomats, retired military officers and legislators signed an open letter to the U.S president Bill Clinton, saying, “We believe that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic proportions that would “unsettle European stability.”
In contrast to NATO expansion, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has not moved an inch westward in search of military alliances. It has remained within its sphere of influence and has not forced through any military alliances that would provoke the security concerns of the great powers to the west.
Ukraine’s Complicated Democracy
Selling Ukraine as democratic is a bit of a stretch, especially if we consider that the process by which the legitimate government in Ukraine, headed by Viktor Yanukovych, was removed in 2014, during the “Orange Revolution”, was not a democratic one, and was a major factor in the decision by Ukrainians of ethnic Russian descent in the Eastern Donbas region to demand secession.
The European Union and the U.S actively encouraged and supported the Putsch against a legitimate government without considering the wider implications for democracy as they now loudly warn. The U.K. Guardian described the “Orange Revolution” as “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing.”
As the U.S and the European Union (EU) push this democracy narrative, they ignore allegations by the opposition in the majority Russian speaking areas of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbas region that subsequent Ukrainian governments consistently shelled cities in this region for 8 years, since 2014. Ironically, it was for similar reasons that NATO unilaterally launched its bombing campaigns against Serbia in 1991, when it forced the country to accede to demands for Kosovar independence.
What has also not been addressed is the fact that Ukrainian governments have repeatedly refused to implement the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 in the last 8 and 7 years respectively, in which it was agreed that Lugansk and Donetsk would be allowed some level of autonomy, as former NATO adviser on Ukraine, Jaques Baurd, unambiguously explains, “guaranteeing them the use of the Russian language as an official language. For the first legislative act of the new government resulting from the overthrow of President Yanukovych, was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 that made Russian an official language.” Russia says its invasion is also intended to protect the people of these regions.
Right-wing connection
Russia also claims it is fighting to stop what it describes as the ‘Nazification’ of Ukraine. No one is under the false impression that this is out of an altruistic desire to prevent a global spread of right-wing ideology. But there is plausible evidence that right-wing groups enjoyed a surge in popularity in the country and they had visible support from Ukrainian government institutions. These groups have also been actively involved in the conflict in the Donbas region.
For a fact, a far-right Ukrainian nationalist political party and paramilitary movement, known as the Right Sector, has strong connections in government. Its connections are so strong that a BBC report in 2017 suggested that its operations appeared to have been “given the nod” by state authorities. For even greater emphasis, Ukraine is the only country in the world that has an active division within its armed forces whose very existence is a result of its right-wing sentiments.
The news outfit Al Jazeera mentioned in an online report it published on March 1, that the Azov Brigade, a right-wing armed group linked to the Right Sector, has expanded to be part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and that the unit received backing from Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, in 2014 to fight pro-Russian militias in Lugansk and Donetsk. The group is also credited with leading the “Orange Revolution” at the Maidan to oust Yanukovych in 2014.
Since the revolt at the Maidan, Russia has consistently protested the imposition of what it considered a puppet of the NATO alliance and a threat to its own security. Rather than address these concerns, NATO continued prepping up subsequent governments since 2014, while stalling on Russia’s demands to hold Ukraine to account on the Donbas issue.
Russia’s concerns about the implications of allowing evidently right-wing sympathising governments claim legitimacy cannot be undermined. We may waive Putin’s concerns in this regard as a distraction, but the evidence of Ukraine’s right-wing inclined sentiments confronted a global audience when, on January 22, 2010 Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko honored Stepan Bandera, a known Nazi collaborator during the second World War whose supporters were complicit in the murder of over four thousand Jews in Ukraine, by posthumously bestowing on him the state honor, “Hero of Ukraine”. Then newly inaugurated president Yanukovich revoked the decree in May 2010.
It is also imperative to scrutinise the reasons behind the decision by Ukraine and the U.S (among only four countries) to vote against the United Nations resolution on “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” at the General Assembly in December of 2014.
Between Unipolarism and Multipolarism.
The Russia/Ukraine crisis is the outcome of a conflict between two power poles, both simply concerned about state interests and their place in the global power structure. What the world is witnessing today is the Cuban nuclear crisis of 1966 in reverse.
For the global south, on the fringes of the global power play, this conflict should be viewed as a struggle to maintain a multipolar order over a unipolar one. If we look at it from that perspective, we would find that it is essential that alternatives exist in the global power play and limit the subservience to selective interests without any opposing positions.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was once asked about the EU’s conditions for restoring diplomatic relations with Syria, and he replied, “The time has passed when Europe turned its back on us, and it would be as if we were sitting on the side of the road. The world today is heading east, where its countries represent 65% of the global economy, eastward”.
An honest assessment of the current situation would start by examining other similar events in the past that have long been undermined due to selective interests. We must ask, what purpose has unipolarism served? Unipolarism has seen the imposition of unilateral decisions demonstrated by arbitrary overthrow and executions of world leaders who did not serve western interests under the pretext of “entrenching democratic values”.
This unilateralism has seen the vicious use of sanctions as tools against states that have refused to conform to the demands of the west. It has also resulted in the subservience of weak states to the dominant powers of stronger states that have long enforced self-serving doctrines in international politics. Russia seems to be fighting hard to regain its voice and relevance in this global space.
For the United States, the Monroe doctrine presents a perfect script for what the Russians are demanding. That doctrine insists that all territory in the western hemisphere is of key geo-strategic importance to the U.S and no other nation is allowed to move its military forces into that region.
The U.S has used this doctrine as the basis for its incursions into several Central American states and also to provide financial and logistical support to rogue regimes in South America between the 1960s and 80s under the pretext of fighting communism.
The “Operation Condor” campaign of political repression and state terror in 1975 was a brazen example, which involved intelligence operations and assassination of opponents by right-wing dictatorships across Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. A campaign that Patrice McSherry, in her penetrative study of the events, “Predatory States: Operation Condor and covert war in Latin America”, asserts that the U.S government provided planning, coordinating and training on torture for.
The key question is, would the United States fold its arms and accept Chinese or Russian military incursion into Organisation of American States (OAS) territory as an exercise of the sovereign rights of the host States? It is the same thing here. While Ukraine wants its sovereignty, Russia wants its security. Both needs are valid.
Strangely, the world conveniently ignores the contradiction here. What NATO fervently opposes here is what is currently happening in Palestine, Syria and Yemen without any condemnation. In the Russian case, interestingly, it is an attempt to forestall an impending threat by the same alliance that has ridden roughshod over the affairs of the above mentioned states.
A classic example is the mainstream media raging over Russia’s actions and conveniently ignoring Israel as it demolishes a thousand Palestinian structures to accommodate refugees from Ukraine. As Journalist, Richard Medhurst, puts it, “territorial integrity means very little when you violate the sovereignty of the global South”.
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The OPINION / COLUMN is authored by independent contributors to the National Accord Newspaper. While contributors adhere to our editorial guidelines, they are not employed by the National Accord Newspaper. The perspectives and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of the National Accord Newspaper or its staff.
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