Ukrainian politics became incredibly volatile. In the 2012 parliamentary elections, the party of the hero of the Orange Revolution in 2004, Viktor Yushchenko, received barely more than 1 percent of the vote. Riches to rags has been the fate of many a politician, but the Ukrainian seesaw suggests an electorate entirely divorced from the political machine, feeling no loyalty to and, for sure, no trust for any political force. Political parties are the dayflies of Ukrainian politics, set up by a leader on the eve of general vote, only to crumble after serving the campaign’s purposes. Almost twenty-five years since independence, Ukraine’s multiparty system remains tentative and unstable. This instability is a direct outgrowth of the country’s historical lack of definition.
In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel P. Huntington defined Ukraine as “cleft” and Russia as “torn.” “Torn” countries, Huntington argued, were the ones struggling with their civilizational belonging; “cleft” nations had large groups clearly belonging to “different civilizations.” Ukraine, in Huntington’s view, was a “cleft country with two distinct cultures,” the “civilizational fault line between the West and Orthodoxy” running through Ukraine’s “heart.”
Huntington’s analysis seems to govern American experts’ current interpretation of the crisis. But the assumption that Ukraine is divided only along east-west lines is a damaging approximation. In Ukraine, divisions cross neighborhoods and families, not only regions. In Huntington’s terminology, Ukraine is at least as “torn” as Russia is.[19]
The Black Sea Fleet and Sevastopol
The Soviet Union was dismantled with frightening ease and staggering thoughtlessness. Among other things, no provisions were made for the reapportioning of federal property, including the Black Sea Fleet and its facilities.[20]
The USSR ran twenty-six naval bases on the Black Sea. On twenty-two of them, Russian sailors went to sleep on December 24, 1991, in the Soviet Union and woke up the next morning in a foreign country. Nineteen bases were in Ukraine, three in the Republic of Georgia. The facilities in Georgia, such as Poti and Batumi, were second-tier. Ukraine had gotten the best.[21]
The only Black Sea port left in Russian hands was Novorossiisk (close to Sochi). Due to “adverse weather conditions,” mainly local storms from the northeast called bora (from Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind), Novorossiisk remains closed on average for two months a year. Hitting the area in fall and winter, the bora brings winds exceeding one hundred miles per hour, turning the harbor into a boiling cauldron and tossing smaller vessels ashore like toys. After a bora sank a Russian fleet in 1848, the Admiralty prohibited the navy from anchoring in Novorossiisk between November and March. The British navy’s manual warned that Novorossiisk was “very dangerous, on account of N.E. winds, which are prevalent from the month of September to the beginning of April; it sometimes blows with the fury of a hurricane,” rushing down from the mountains “with such violence, and causing such a sea, that vessels are driven on shore.”[22]
It is simply not possible to run a big operational facility in Novorossiisk. If Russia was to keep a substantial naval force on the Black Sea, it had no alternative to Sevastopol. This is why the “Crimean question” came up on Russia’s official agenda just one month after the collapse of the USSR. In January 1992, the Russian parliament’s committee on foreign affairs proposed declaring Khrushchev’s 1954 act granting Crimea to Ukraine “invalid and devoid of legal force.” The motion was dismissed by Yeltsin, who considered it too aggressive. Negotiations started. It took five years to prepare the Partition Treaty on the Status and Conditions of the Black Sea Fleet. Signed on May 28, 1997, the treaty allowed for the armaments and bases to be shared by two independent fleets. Russia could lease Sevastopol and other naval facilities in Crimea for ten more years. In addition, it could keep up to 25,000 soldiers, 132 armored vehicles, and 22 airplanes on the peninsula. In 2010, the arrangement was extended until 2042—in exchange for discounted natural gas supplies to Kiev.[23]
A British Russia expert, Angus Roxburgh, calls the price Russia paid for the Crimean bases “extortionate.” In a book published in 2013 he quotes Vladimir Putin, who clearly agreed: “‘The price we are now asked to pay is out of this world. …No military base in the world costs that much. Prices like that simply do not exist. If we look at what the contract would cost us over ten years, it amounts to $40–45 billion.’”[24]
As often happens, the treaty did not resolve the underlying conflict.
Petrostate
The term frequently used to describe Russia nowadays—“petrostate”—was popularized by Marshall Goldman. In the book of that title, Goldman, who had been watching the Kremlin for five decades, noted with grudging admiration how Putin seemed to be winning the “giant chess match” of energy politics.[25]
Vladimir Putin had appeared, seemingly from nowhere, in 1999. The first foreign leader to be told of his appointment as prime minister of Russia, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, reported it this way to Bill Clinton: “The replacement that was mentioned to me was some guy whose name is Putin.” Russians shared his bewilderment. On the day Yeltsin introduced Putin as his designated successor, few Muscovites knew who he was. When interviewed, they referred to the new leader of the country as someone whose name “started with a P.”[26]
Putin’s eventual popularity with the Russian Main Street came from two sources. One was his claim to limit the power of the oligarchs, kick them out of politics, and restore Russia’s “vertical of power,” a euphemism for strong state. Another was completely accidental. During the Yeltsin years, the price of crude oil on world markets had fallen as low as $10 a barrel, sending the newly independent Russian nation into bankruptcy. In Putin’s first year in office, the price of crude skyrocketed, filling the coffers of the state treasury and allowing many government offices that had become almost moribund for lack of funds to begin functioning again. Putin was able to claim credit for reviving the state, government workers were once again being paid, and money trickled down to the people. Russia paid off the last of its foreign debt in 2006, and in 2008, when crude oil crossed $100 a barrel, it could boast almost $800 billion in foreign reserves.[27] As Stephen Weisman noted in the New York Times in 2006, a “more assertive Russia” was back, and the United States was not “welcome to set up shop in the old Soviet empire.”[28]
In 2015, Russia’s energy exports to Europe netted $160 billion a year, and Europe depended on Russia for at least 30 percent of its natural gas needs. According to a March 2014 estimate, Russian oil and gas made up 98 percent of all energy imports in Slovakia, 92 percent in Lithuania, 91 percent in Poland, 90 percent in Bulgaria, 86 percent in Hungary, 76 percent in Finland, 73 percent in the Czech Republic, 72 percent in Latvia, 69 percent in Estonia, and 47 percent in Romania. All of these nations were once either part of the Soviet Union or in its zone of influence. But Western Europe had grown dependent on Russian energy as well. Sweden got 46 percent of its energy imports from Russia, Greece 40 percent, the Netherlands 34 percent, Germany and Belgium 30 percent, Italy 28 percent, and France 17 percent.[29]
21
Duygu Bazoglu Sezer, “Balance of Power in the Black Sea in the Post-Cold War Era: Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine,” in
22
Sezer, “Balance of Power in the Black Sea,” 179;
24
Angus Roxburgh,
25
Marshall I. Goldman,
27
Daniel Yergin,
28
Stephen R. Weisman, “Just When It’s Needed, Russia’s Not There,”
29
“How Much Europe Depends on Russian Energy,”