In the view from the Kremlin, Russia had essentially been outflanked from the Baltic to the Black Sea by March 2004, when seven former Soviet Bloc nations were admitted into NATO. To lock that ring tight only one more country was needed: Ukraine. So when the Orange Revolution broke out in November 2004 in protest against the rigged presidential elections, Putin could not fail to notice that it came on the heels of the latest round of NATO recruitment in March. Apart from the geopolitical dangers Ukraine’s Orange Revolution would subject Russia to, there was also the danger of its spreading across the border, a bad example being infectious, as the Russian saying goes.
Ukraine’s elections were reheld and a liberal president was elected. His administration, would, however, prove both so corrupt and inept, so riddled with factious infighting, that by the time the next elections were held in 2010, Viktor Yanukovich, who had won the rigged elections and lost the fair, would now, in an irony of democracy, be fairly elected to the presidency in what would prove a disastrous choice.
Ukraine was a calamity waiting to happen. It had had the same number of post-Soviet years as, say, its neighbor Poland, which was thriving, whereas Ukraine was almost a failed state. The country’s east and west abraded against each other like tectonic plates. As usual, there was plenty of wisdom after the fact, with Gorbachev, for example, declaring: “Ukraine is in many ways due to the mistakes of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Once they decided to dissolve the union, they should have agreed on territories and boundaries.”[281] He was referring to what Solzhenitsyn had termed the “false Leninist borders of Ukraine,”[282] although they could in addition be termed “false Khrushchevian borders,” for it was he who so cavalierly made Ukraine a present of Crimea.
Russia’s street politicians saw the split coming in Ukraine. Asked in 2008, “If Ukraine were to move into NATO, what do you think the Russian reaction would be?”[283] Aleksandr Dugin, the founder of the International Eurasian Movement, replied: “I think that the Russian reaction would be to support an uprising in the Eastern parts and Crimea and I could not exclude the entrance of armed forces there.” A Moscow Times article of April 8, 2008, “Putin Hints at Splitting Up Ukraine,” reported that at the same NATO conference where Putin remarked to Bush that Ukraine was not a real country, Putin also “threatened to encourage the secession of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, where anti-NATO and pro-Moscow sentiment is strong.”[284]
Even the National Geographic magazine, whose prose is usually as anodyne as its pictures are vivid, entitled an April 2011 article on Crimea “A Jewel in Two Crowns: Russia’s Paradise Lost Belongs to Ukraine—and That’s Where the Trouble Begins.”[285]
All the same, Putin himself was surprised by events in 2014. When the fissures began splitting the surface of Ukraine, he was busy with the concluding ceremonies of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, which had been a resounding success, though some opposition figures like Boris Nemtsov would take Putin to task for the corruption involved in, at $50 billion, the most expensive Games in history. Still, there had been no problems with Chechen terrorists or gay demonstrations as feared, and the Games had accomplished what they had been designed to do—remind the world that Russia was resurgent, a major player again.
What really surprised Putin was how rapidly and radically events developed in Ukraine. One moment he is offering the lordly sum of $15 billion as a loan to prop up President Yanukovich and to keep the country from sliding into the Western camp; the next moment Putin is offering that same president refuge in Russia as Yanukovich flees his country, leaving behind a trail of carnage and vulgar luxury. Of course, Putin had designs on Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and no doubt his planners had worked out various scenarios to cover the foreseeable possibilities, but it is also clear that the events of late February were neither at the time nor in the manner of his choosing.
There is a point where geopolitics becomes existential, Darwinian, and, for Putin, the situation in Ukraine was one. Forget all the icons and cupolas and Cossacks—this was a matter of life and death. No Russian leader could allow his country to be outflanked from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He would be seen as weak. And Putin knows what happens to the weak.
The sage of Cambridge Tip O’Neill’s remark that all politics is local even applies to Moscow, where Putin’s principal role is Lion Tamer of the Kremlin. Though he has to a large extent defanged and declawed the oligarchs, who make public and servile protestations of their loyalty, that does not mean that they cannot harbor grievances or hatch intrigues. He must also balance the needs and ambitions of the security and military leaders, not to mention those of the gas and oil industry on which the country’s economy depends.
Putin, a paranoid if not by nature then by profession, found himself being outflanked by a hostile military alliance that also manifestly seeks to drastically reduce his economic lifeline of gas and oil, all of which puts him in supreme jeopardy in the infighting of the Kremlin. To have failed to understand this was a cardinal sin on the part of the West. A February 2, 2015, New York Times article entitled “Britain and Europe Sleepwalked into Ukraine Crisis Report Says” states: “Britain and the European Union made a ‘catastrophic misreading’ of President Vladimir V. Putin and ‘sleepwalked’ into the Ukraine crisis, treating it as a trade issue rather than as a delicate foreign-policy challenge, British lawmakers said … in a scathing report…. The European Union had failed to appreciate the ‘exceptional nature’ of Ukraine.”[286]
The West was surprised not only by the importance of Ukraine to Russia, but by the violence of the Russian response. So intent on building a new world order based on the rule of law, the West somehow missed the obvious fact that Russia was still a country where the rule of law counted for very little, another way of saying that the law of the jungle prevailed.
When discussing their country’s behavior, Russians will often say with a wistful, self-mocking irony: “Whereas in civilized countries…,” meaning as opposed to in Russia. Murder is an instrument of politics by other means in Putin’s Russia. The KGB renegade Alexander Litvinenko is murdered with radioactive polonium in London, the harshly critical journalist Anna Politkovskaya is gunned down on Putin’s birthday while returning home with her groceries, the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is put to death by abuse and neglect in prison after purportedly committing the very crimes he attempted to expose, and the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is shot dead in sight of the Kremlin while walking home from a date. Putin’s critics are frequently killed, his supporters never.
Until the Ukrainian crisis the civilized West and Darwinian Russia were able to coexist in an uneasy equilibrium of interests. Russia’s authoritarianism lite kept any of the various assassinations and injustices from tipping the balance to the breaking point. Business was done. Russian gas and oil were bought, the French contracted to build Mistral assault carriers for Russia. There were independent newspapers, a radio station, Ekho Moskvy (Moscow Echo), and a web TV station, Dozhd (Rain). And Russians had the right that human-rights champion Andrei Sakharov considered the most important of them all—the right to leave the country. Some suggested that Putin’s new, modern, twenty-first-century authoritarianism would, unlike the Soviet Union, much prefer to be rid of anyone who was at odds with the system. All the same, it remained possible to believe that Russia just might be zigzagging its own way to its own version of a free society, as George Kennan had predicted.
281
Ivan Nechepurenko, “Gorbachev on Russia and Ukraine,”
282
Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
286
Steven Erlanger, “Britain and Europe Sleepwalked into Ukraine Crisis Report Says,”