UKRAINE: TIME TO CUT A DEAL?

On 7 May, after months of unrelenting
economic, military and propaganda
campaigns against his fraternal
neighbour, Ukraine, President Putin
suddenly signalled what appeared to be a
change in direction. He called on the “pro-
Russian” separatists in the eastern
Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and
Luhansk to postpone their referendums on
independence, and declared that the
presidential elections scheduled by Kiev for
25 May were a “step in the right direction.”
Earlier, on 28 April, Russian defence
minister Sergey Shoigu had claimed that the
Russian forces deployed on the Ukraine
border for months had returned to their
bases, a claim Putin repeated on 7 May. As
became clear in each case, no such
withdrawals were observed by anyone able to
do so, which seemed to suggest that any
softening of the Kremlin’s line on Ukraine
was an optical illusion.
Seemingly in defiance of Putin’s calls for a
postponement, the separatists in Donetsk and
Luhansk held their hastily scheduled
“referenda” on 11 May, with slightly farcical
claims of huge turnouts and Soviet-style
electoral margins in their favour. But their
appeal for Moscow to annex them, as it had
earlier annexed Crimea, elicited no response.
Putin has since declared again his readiness
to accept the results of the Ukrainian
presidential poll and repeated his assurance
that the troops would be withdrawn; and this
time there are indications that the troops may
indeed be embarking on a draw-back (though
many of the units could be redeployed within
a couple of days).
Despite the more conciliatory tone, Putin has
continued to make some ominous
pronouncements: renewed threats of another
gas-price war to force Ukraine to pay the
abrupt increase Gazprom is demanding;
claims that Ukraine is in the grip of a civil
war; and the polite suggestion that his close
friend Viktor Medvedchuk (Putin is godfather
of one of Medvedchuk’s children), the most
pro-Kremlin politician in the Ukrainian
political class, should become the mediator
between the Kiev government and the
“rebels” in the eastern provinces. But to
Western capitals, desperately eager to find a
solution to the problem that would relieve
them of any need for sterner measures, any
change of tone will be grasped as a sign that
Putin is finally ready to “de-escalate.”
Putin is not known for any propensity to take
a backward step, much less sudden about-
turns. In the matter of Ukraine, he has shown
a particular determination to prevail from
well before the military operation against
Crimea. So what are we to make of Putin’s
unexpected amiability? What may have
brought it about, how genuine is it, and how
long may it last? Have his objectives changed,
or is this merely a tactical shift?
he heavy media coverage of the
Ukrainian issue recently has probably
made its fundamental grammar and
vocabulary more familiar to the general
reader. But to judge by commonly recurring
omissions and misconceptions in public
discussions some salient facts might be worth
recalling.
While Russians and Ukrainians are ethnically,
linguistically, religiously and culturally close,
there are important differences between
them, only partly flattened out by tsarist and
Soviet conditioning. And those differences are
apparent within Ukraine itself. For historical
reasons, central and western Ukraine have
come under the influence over centuries of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Poland. A
substantial minority concentrated in the west
are Uniate Catholics by belief or tradition,
whose homelands had never formed part of
Russia before the end of the second world
war. Though Orthodoxy is the religion, at
least nominally, of the overwhelming
majority, there is an important difference
between the followers of the Moscow and Kiev
Patriarchates of the Orthodox Church. The
Moscow Patriarchate has always been
favoured by Moscow and its Ukrainian
loyalists, but the more nationalist Kiev
Patriarchate may actually have a slightly
larger following within Ukraine. Their
relationship is troubled. There is also a much
smaller Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox
Church.
Moscow rulers have often sought to suppress
Ukrainian language and culture. The Soviet
leadership in its early years was more liberal
in such matters, but for much of its
subsequent history it was very oppressive.
Even since Ukraine became an independent
state, Russia has refused to tolerate more than
the most minimal cultural facilities for the
millions of Ukrainians living in Russia. In
Moscow-ruled Ukraine, by contrast, Russian
enjoyed a privileged status and the use of
Ukrainian was informally or formally
tabooed. Independent Ukraine has taken
modest steps to improve the relative position
of Ukrainian within the state, which has
tended to anger some Russian speakers.
But the use of Russian is under no serious
threat, and repeated suggestions in the media
that the government that emerged after the
Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square)
protests wants to ban Russian are
misinformed. The bill in question, though
politically foolish given its timing, was aimed
not at “banning” Russian, a totally impossible
objective, but rather at restoring greater
official status to Ukrainian in an attempt to
rebalance very partially the wrongs of the
past. It was, anyway, very quickly vetoed by
provisional president Oleksandr Turchynov
and withdrawn.
The Soviet period was a series of demographic
disasters for most of the country. But it was
worst of all for the “ bloodlands” of Ukrainian,
Belarusian, Baltic and Polish settlement. Per
capita, Jews, but also Ukrainians and
Belarusians, suffered far more than Russians.
Slips of the tongue equating Soviet citizens
with “Russians” and referring to the twenty-
five or thirty million Russian dead in the
second world war serve to erase a universe of
suffering sustained in the west of the country,
in which Stalin’s regime was partly complicit
as a perpetrator. Similarly, in the 1930s
Ukrainians were among those national
groups, together with Jews and Poles, who
suffered disproportionately in the purges.
The early Bolshevik leadership had
encouraged strong development of the
languages and culture of the national
minorities, partly to ensure victory over the
Whites in the civil war of 1917–22. The
Ukrainian communist leadership of the 1920s
was active in this respect. From the late
1920s, however, Stalin brutally reversed this
policy to favour Russian, and the whole
emergent generation of Ukrainian national
communist leaders and cultural activists was
decimated.
Worst of all, in the process of brutally
collectivising agriculture in Ukraine (which
had been the breadbasket of the empire), and
then extracting grain from it for export, Stalin
inflicted terrible casualties. The culmination
was the artificial famine of 1932–33, which
led to mass starvation and innumerable acts
of cruelty aimed at preventing the victims
from receiving any relief. Historians debate
both the numbers of dead and the Kremlin’s
precise intent in manufacturing this holocaust
(known in Ukrainian as holodomor ), but
whether it was genocide by some definition or
not, at least three million Ukrainians perished
(and some estimates go higher).
The Soviet regime suppressed discussion of
these monstrous events and succeeded in
largely obliterating them not only from the
public domain, but also to a considerable
degree from popular awareness. The Russians
who were encouraged to migrate into
depopulated parts of Ukraine have even less
awareness of the past. Through discreet and
indeed hazardous family communication,
Ukrainians have retained at least a
fragmented folk memory of the great famine,
which naturally doesn’t always dispose them
positively to Moscow. For its part, the Putin
regime greatly resented pro-Western
president Viktor Yushchenko’s attempts to
restore a basic historical understanding
among Ukrainian citizens of the holodomor ,
which was at odds with Putin’s policy of
progressively rehabilitating Stalin and his
works. When Viktor Yanukovych succeeded
Yushchenko in 2010, he moved quickly to de-
emphasise the issue and de-fang it of any
anti-Russian accents, a difficult exercise in
the circumstances.
Until recently, despite the burden of history,
Ukrainians and Russians have continued to
get on reasonably well with one another in
Ukraine. Ukrainians living side by side with
Russians in other parts of the post-Soviet
sphere mingle easily, intermarry with
Russians, and often adopt Russian ethnicity
and the Russian language. The same has been
largely true of Ukraine itself. It was not the
case, Kremlin propaganda notwithstanding,
that ethnic Russians faced any threats of
persecution from Ukrainian fellow-citizens in
the east of Ukraine before the invasion of
Crimea. At most they might experience
irritation at the public use of what they
regarded as an inferior but basically
comprehensible rustic dialect in public places
or on street signs.
The main resentments of Russians in eastern
Ukraine centred on the fact that the central
government in Kiev, controlled by the
Donetsk-based Yanukovych clan, had done
nothing to improve their standard of living,
rather the reverse. Meanwhile, as they were
keenly aware, he and his notorious familia
were dipping into the public purse right up to
their armpits. Because of the cultural and
historical differences between the east and
west of the country, some political
polarisation also existed, reflected in differing
regional levels of support for the main
political parties.
But the differences were less than virulent,
and in the twenty-odd years since
independence they had been successfully
managed by elections that tended to produce
regular alternation between eastern-oriented
and western-oriented presidents. Eastern
Ukrainians were mostly unenthusiastic about
the pro-Western Orange revolution of 2004–
05 and the Maidan protests of 2013–14,
though a substantial minority in the east,
including Russians and Russian-speakers,
supported them as movements that might
improve their standards of living and
increase probity in public life.
In fact, there was a degree of structural
pluralism in Ukrainian society, which
contributed to the retention of more
democratic freedoms in the country than in
neighbouring Russia or Belarus, for example.
In that sense, Ukraine was a more democratic
polity than any other part of the former
Soviet Union, apart from the Baltic states and
Georgia, and remains so despite the current
artificially induced turbulence.