In an editorial Le Monde wrote at that time that the treaty on the Union State between Yeltsin and Lukashenko “emphasizes in the first place the permanent desire of the Kremlin to gather around it the former Soviet republics, at least the Slavic ones. Everything suggests that Ukraine will be next to bear the brunt of the Russian pressure: already dependent of her ‘big brother’ for her energy, she finds herself surrounded on three sides by Russian garrisons.”[15] This commentary was, indeed, farsighted. The objective to bring Ukraine back in its orbit would become the overriding motive behind the Kremlin’s policies in the next decade. The choice facing Russia in 1997 was the choice between becoming a “normal,” democratic nation state, living in peace with its neighbors, or becoming—again—an empire. In the crucial year, 1997, the Founding Act with NATO pointed in the direction of the former, the Union Treaty with Belarus toward the latter. It was as though both initiatives mimicked the Russian coat of arms: the double-headed eagle whose heads face in two opposite directions. It was clear from the beginning that these two strategies could not be reconciled. As soon as 1994 Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: “In not being an empire, Russia stands a chance of becoming, like France or Britain or earlier post-Ottoman Turkey, a normal state.”[16] He added the warning: “If not openly imperial, the current objectives of Russian policy are at the very least proto-imperial. That policy may not yet be aiming explicitly at a formal imperial restoration, but it does little to restrain the strong imperial impulse that continues to motivate large segments of the state bureaucracy, especially the military, as well as the public.”[17] Brzezinski’s caution was certainly justified. It was shared by the Russian liberal politician Yegor Gaidar, who was Yeltsin’s prime minister from June 15, 1992, to December 14, 1992. Referring to the years 1918–1922—when the Red Army, in only four years, reconquered most of the lost tsarist territories—he wrote: “Russia is unique in restoring a failed empire.”[18]
Putin’s project for a Eurasian Union is the Kremlin’s latest attempt to reintegrate the post-Soviet space. According to Jeremy Smith, a professor of Russian history at the University of Eastern Finland, “It is less clear what economic advantages Russia gains from the Union, given that so much of its trade is orientated to Europe, China, and elsewhere.”[19] According to Smith, “this has fuelled the suspicion that the whole project is a way of enhancing Russian regional hegemony and, in the most alarmist interpretations, moving toward the recreation of some form of the USSR…. Critics of the project maintain that, like the European Union, pressures for political integration will follow close upon the heels of economic integration, with the major difference that there will be a clear hegemonic power, Russia, dominating the Union.”[20] One must add here one important reservation: the project of the Eurasian Union was not launched to recreate the Soviet Union, and the objective is not to reintegrate the Central Asian states into Russia proper. Its real and overriding objective is preventing Ukraine from establishing closer relations with the European Union and NATO, bringing this country definitively and irreversibly back into the orbit of its Slavic “brother country” Russia. This objective is openly admitted. Fyodor Lukyanov, for instance, a prominent Russian political scientist, wrote in a comment on Putin’s Eurasia article: “The paradox of the Eurasian Union is that its primary goal is not Eurasia. Its most desired object is Ukraine.”[21] Lukyanov considered membership of Ukraine—a country of 45 million—an economic necessity to make the Eurasian Union work. He also mentioned that “the growth of xenophobia [in Russia]… means that building an integrationist unification with the Central Asian countries will be accompanied by increased tensions. Ukraine is, in this sense, the ideal partner, together with Belarus, in as much as it immediately brings a sense of ‘Slavicness’ to the created structure.”[22] Lukyanov spoke further, tellingly, of an “attempt to bring together what is profitable [the Slavic countries] and dissociate oneself from ‘ballast’ [i.e., the Central Asian countries].”[23]
THE KREMLIN’S OBSESSION WITH UKRAINE
During the Russia-NATO Council session in Bucharest in April 2008, Putin called Ukraine “a complex state formation. If the NATO issue is added there,” he said, “along with other problems, this may bring Ukraine to the verge of existence as a sovereign state.”[24] Later during the same summit, in a discussion with U.S. President George Bush, Putin said that Ukraine was “not a real country.” This is clearly light-years away from the “common principles” laid down in the Founding Act, signed by Russia and the members of NATO in 1997, in which Russia had recognized the inherent right of all countries “to choose the means to ensure their own security.” Putin’s declaration was a scarcely veiled threat that Russia would intervene if Ukraine decided to join NATO. Doubts on Ukraine’s viability as a sovereign state were expressed on many occasions by leading Russians. On March 16, 2009, the Kremlin ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky wrote in the Russkiy Zhurnal, a Russian online magazine of which he is the owner, an article titled: “Will Ukraine Lose Its Sovereignty?”[25] This article was followed four days later by an interview with Sergey Karaganov, the éminence grise of the Russian foreign policy community and head of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. This article had the title: “No One Needs Monsters. Desovereignization of Ukraine.”[26] Karaganov depicted Ukraine as a failed state that was in a process of “passive desovereignization.” The process was, however, not only “passive.” Karaganov warned that “Russia will not want to see absolutely ungovernable territories close by.”[27] Yuriy Shcherbak, former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, wrote in response: “In military language it is called the ideological-propagandistic support of the future operation on capturing the territory of a sovereign state.”[28] In fact, Russian politicians continued to denounce Ukraine as an “artificial” country that had no right to exist. At the height of the financial crisis Valery Fadeyev, editor of the political journal Ekspert, wrote: “Ukraine is cheap, we can buy it.”[29] It sounded less aggressive, almost as a joke, but it expressed the same contempt for Russia’s neighbor and its status as an independent, sovereign state.
19
Nargis Kassenova, Alexander Libman, and Jeremy Smith, “Discussing the Eurasian Customs Union and Its Impact on Central Asia,”
20
Kassenova et al., “Discussing the Eurasian Customs Union and Its Impact on Central Asia.”
24
“What Precisely Vladimir Putin Said at Bucharest,”
25
Gleb Pavlovsky, “Will Ukraine Lose Its Sovereignty?”
26
“No One Needs Monsters: Desovereignization of Ukraine,” Interview with Sergey Karaganov,
28
Yuriy Shcherbak, “Ukraine as a Failed State: Myths and Reality,”
29
Quoted in Nicu Popescu and Andrew Wilson, “The Limits of Enlargement-Lite: European and Russian Power in the Troubled Neighbourhood,” Policy paper (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, June 2009), 29.