The Parties Bickering Over Ukraine

In his Wall Street Journal column William Galston attempts to explain Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s view of the situation with respect to the Ukraine:

Mr. Putin’s master narrative rests on his interpretation of more than 1,000 years of Russian history, from which he derives a conclusion: Russians and Ukrainians are “one people—a single whole,” speaking variants of one language, professing a common faith, sharing a common culture, whose separation results from a divide-and-rule strategy pursued for centuries by Russia’s enemies. He attributes the idea of the Ukrainian people as a separate nation to 19th century “Polish elites” and Malorussian (“Little Russian”) intellectuals, a theory concocted with “no historical basis” and subsequently adopted by Austro-Hungarian authorities for their own purposes before World War I.

I should point out that the view expressed above he is hardly knew. It’s a key component of what is called “Pan-Slavism” and has been the preeminent view in Russia for nearly 200 years. He continues:

Russia’s enemies in the West have conspired with right-wing and neo-Nazi Ukrainians to create an “anti-Russia project” whose purpose is to drive a wedge between Russia and Ukraine. Although the two countries are “natural complementary economic partners” that have long developed as a “single economic system,” the West has used loans and grants to cut Ukraine off from Russia and subordinate it to foreign economic interests.

After what Mr. Putin labels a “coup” in 2014 that led to the removal of a pro-Russian government, Ukraine’s new government signed an association agreement with the European Union that deepened Ukraine’s anti-Russian orientation, “inevitably” provoking “civil war” in the Donetsk region. Worse still from the Russian president’s perspective: the deployment of Western military advisers, infrastructure and weapons on Ukrainian soil.

to which James Joyner responds:

Now, this is almost complete horseshit. But I can understand why Putin would see it this way.

I wish James had expanded on that a bit more. Much of it is merely a statement of fact. There was a coup in 2014 which led to the removal of the pro-Russian Yanukovych government which was the legitimate and democratically elected government of Ukraine as had been certified by international observers, among them Jimmy Carter. Does he disagree that some of the supporters of the coup were “right-wing and neo-Nazi Ukrainians”? That, too, is a statement of fact. Some were. Were they all? I doubt it. I think they were just anti-Russian. Is it the notion that the coup had the support of the United States or other Western countries? My understanding is that is hotly disputed. I think it is beyond question that some in the West did, indeed, encourage the coup but I doubt it was officially supported by the U. S. government. Given the rather obvious involvement of the Biden family, the participants in the coup may have believed they had the support of the U. S. government.

I wouldn’t claim that the Yanukovych government was good; it was corrupt as all Ukrainian governments since the collapse of the Soviet Union have been.

What is apparent is that there are more than just two parties (Russia and Ukraine) and, indeed, more than three (Russia, Ukraine, and the U. S.) involved in this matter. There’s also Germany, as Katja Hoyer observes in an op-ed in the Washington Post:

As things stand now, Russia supplies a quarter of the E.U.’s oil and 40 percent of its gas. Germany’s controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which runs under the Baltic Sea — bypassing Ukraine, unlike some of earlier routes — will make this dependency worse. Putin has already tested the political potential of this situation by withholding gas supplies when Europe recently asked for more.

Deterrence works only if the other side believes that you mean business. Putin knows that the E.U. will not risk high energy prices, power outages and domestic friction to protect the integrity of Ukraine. The invasions of Georgia and Crimea showed this. And now that Germany is phasing out nuclear energy and coal, European dependency on Russian gas is more severe than ever.

With so little credibility behind economic threats, the only way to make deterrence work is a united military front through NATO. Merkel’s 16-year tenure has done much damage in this regard. A Russian speaker who grew up in East Germany, she has always had a very personal relationship with Putin, who speaks fluent German and also spent years in East Germany as a KGB agent. In conflicts, Merkel’s first instinct was to call Moscow directly, going over the heads of the people of Eastern Europe. She has done the same during the recent migrant crisis in Belarus, making two calls to Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.

The new German government will have to break this pattern of bilateral diplomacy, which is sowing resentment among its European neighbors. There is growing suspicion that Berlin believes it has a special relationship with Moscow.

I would point out that no two of these parties have interests that are perfectly aligned and bringing them closer together will be no mean feat. There are many things I don’t understand about all of this. For the life of me I don’t understand the U. S. interest in Ukraine and, in particular, in having Ukraine join the European Union or NATO. Since we’re apparently willing to risk global thermonuclear war over Ukraine we must have some interest but, as long as Germany is more aligned with Russia than it is with us, it’s very hard for me to see the interest.