Richard Sakwa - Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands

In 2014, history returned to Europe with a vengeance. The crisis over Ukraine brought back not only the spectre but the reality of war, on the one hundredth anniversary of a conflict that had been spoken of as the war to end all war. The great powers lined up, amid a barrage of propaganda and informational warfare, while many of the smaller powers made their contribution to the festival of irresponsibility. This was also the seventy-fifth anniversary of the beginning of World War II, which wreaked so much harm on Central and Eastern Europe. The fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years earlier and the subsequent end of the Cold War had been attended by expectations of a Europe whole and free. These hopes were crushed in 2014, and Europe is now set for a new era of division and confrontation. The Ukrainian crisis was the immediate cause, but this only reflected deeper contradictions in the pattern of post-Communist development since 1989. In other words, the European and Ukrainian crises came together to devastating effect.

The Ukrainian crisis refers to profound tensions in the Ukrainian nation and state-building processes since Ukraine achieved independence in late 1991, which now threaten the unity of the state itself. These are no longer described in classical ideological terms, but, in the Roman manner, through the use of colours. The Orange tendency thinks in terms of a Ukraine that can finally fulfil its destiny as a nation state, officially monolingual, culturally autonomous from other Slavic nations and aligned with Europe and the Atlantic security community. I describe this as a type of monism, because of its emphasis on the singularity of the Ukrainian experience. By contrast, Blue has come to symbolise a rather more plural understanding of the challenges facing Ukraine, recognising that the countrys various regions have different historical and cultural experiences, and that the modern Ukrainian state needs to acknowledge this diversity in a more capacious constitutional settlement. For the Blues, Ukraine is more of a state nation, an assemblage of different traditions, but above all one where Russian is recognised as a second state language and economic, social and even security links with Russia are maintained. Of course, the Blue I am talking about is an abstraction, not the blue of Viktor Yanukovychs Party of Regions. The Blues, no less than the Orangists, have been committed to the idea of a free and united Ukraine, but favour a more comprehensive vision of what it means to be Ukrainian. We also have to include the Gold tendency, the powerful oligarchs who have dominated Ukraine since the 1990s, accompanied by widespread corruption and the decay of public institutions. Since independence, there has been no visionary leader to meld these colours to forge a Ukrainian version of the rainbow nation.

The Ukraine crisis refers to the way that internal tensions have become internationalised to provoke the worst crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold War. Some have even compared its gravity with the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. The world at various points stood close to a new conflagration, provoked by desperately overheated rhetoric on all sides. As I shall describe later, the asymmetrical end of the Cold War effectively shut Russia out from the European alliance system. The failure to establish a genuinely inclusive and equal European security system imbued European international politics with powerful stress points, which in 2014 produced the international earthquake that we call the Ukraine crisis. There had been plenty of warning signs, with President Boris Yeltsin, the Russian Federations first leader, in December 1994 already talking in terms of a cold peace, and when he came to power in 2000 President Vladimir Putin devoted himself to overcoming the asymmetries. The major non-state institution at the heart of the architecture of post-Communist Europe, the European Union (EU), only exacerbated the tensions rather than engaging in transformative conflict resolution. The EU represented the core of what in this book I call Wider Europe, a Brussels-centric vision of a European core that extended into the heartlands of what had once been an alternative great-power system centred on Moscow. The increasing merger of Wider Europe with the Atlantic security system only made things worse.