The same applies to the revolt’s foreign participants.
Regime Change
If Yanukovych’s was a rogue state, U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine in 2013–2014 can only be described as rogue diplomacy. Most certainly without the imprimatur of President Obama, and perhaps even without a silent nod from Secretary of State John Kerry, a group of senior American diplomats allied with bipartisan interventionists in Congress started brokering regime change in Kiev.
The protagonists included assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs Victoria Nuland, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey R. Pyatt, and Senator John McCain.
McCain was the first prominent American to descend on Kiev to fraternize with the people on the barricades and encourage them to overthrow the democratically elected president. On December 15, 2013, he told Ukrainians that their future was “with Europe,” not Russia: “The free world is with you, America is with you, I am with you. Ukraine will make Europe better and Europe will make Ukraine better.” Speaking to 200,000 rebels in a foreign capital, he said without apparent irony that he wanted to make it clear to “Russia and Vladimir Putin that interference in the affairs of Ukraine is not acceptable to the United States.” What had started as competition over spheres of interest was, in McCain’s telling, turning into a civilizational clash, the forces of light against the forces of darkness.[4]
Putin could have dismissed this fiery talk. McCain was a loose cannon and had been bashing Russia for years, at one point leading Putin to quip, tastelessly, “I don’t blame McCain. He spent five years in a cage in Vietnam. Anyone would’ve lost his marbles there.”[5] But interference by U.S. government officials was another matter.
Assistant secretary of state Nuland, the one who had coined the “spinach treatment” adage, seems to have been the spearhead of the project. Not insignificantly, her husband was the leading neoconservative intellectual Robert Kagan. During the crisis, Nuland was a frequent visitor to Kiev. In turmoil like that it was not humanly possible not to make mistakes, and on December 13, 2013, speaking to the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation Conference in Washington, Nuland revealed that since 1991, the United States had “invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine” in building “democratic skills and institutions.” She later claimed she was “still jetlagged” from her “third trip in five weeks to Ukraine,” and maybe that’s why the wording was dangerously imprecise, the message conflicted, the delivery most certainly untimely. In a subsequent interview, Nuland reluctantly confirmed that the United States had spent $5 billion “on supporting the aspirations of the Ukrainian people to have a strong, democratic government that represents their interests. But,” she stressed, “we certainly didn’t spend any money supporting the Maidan; that was a spontaneous movement.”[6] It had been spontaneous—in the beginning.
If John McCain found Putin the personification of evil, Nuland became that for Russians. Later, the Russian foreign minister would say: “That woman has played a very nasty role at every stage of the crisis in Ukraine.”[7]
Nuland first made headlines on December 11: visiting Independence Square in Kiev, she offered sandwiches to antigovernment protesters and police in front of the TV cameras. Taken as an intensely patronizing gesture, Nuland’s sandwiches became infamous, and not only in Russia. When pressed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Nuland explained that the “visit happened the night after the Ukrainian special forces… moved against peaceful demonstrators, and began pushing and shoving them off the Maidan… and the next day, when I went to visit Maidan, I didn’t think I could go down empty-handed, given what everybody had been through. So as a sign, a gesture of peace, I brought sandwiches.”[8]
The world media made so much of the wretched sandwiches that Nuland might have been better off distributing hand grenades. After the sandwiches saga, Russian secret services started monitoring Nuland’s every move. On February 6, 2014, Russians leaked the transcript of a phone conversation between Nuland and Pyatt in which the two were matter-of-factly building a new government for Ukraine. It is not clear when exactly the conversation took place, but the State Department did not dispute its authenticity.
The three opposition leaders Nuland and Pyatt discussed, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Oleh Tyahnybok, and Vitaliy Klichko, were Maidan favorites—Yatsenyuk a polished technocrat, Tyahnybok a crowd pleaser with a history of Jew bashing, Klichko a world champion heavyweight boxer. From the start, Pyatt and Nuland agreed they were all “in play.” “Yats” (Yatsenyuk) would become prime minister. “Klitch” remained the “complicated electron” (Nuland: “I don’t think Klitch should go into the government.” Pyatt: “Just let him stay out and do his political homework and stuff”). The right-wing Tyahnybok “and his guys” were going to be a “problem.” A deal had to be solidified soon, said Pyatt, because “the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it.” Having by that time given up on the European Union’s negotiating skills, Nuland now wanted to recruit the United Nations: “So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and to have the U.N. help glue it and, you know, fuck the E.U.” “No, exactly,” Pyatt agreed.[9]
Nuland’s “Fuck the E.U.” remark became notorious in Europe (a furious Angela Merkel called it “unacceptable”—the highest form of disapproval in diplomatic vernacular short of profanity), but the real harm was done in the east. Russians claimed they had caught Nuland and Pyatt red-handed at orchestrating regime change in Ukraine. Pyatt, interviewed by the press, refused to discuss “any phone calls” and claimed that his “role has been an appropriate diplomatic one”: “I don’t consider it meddling when we’re in the business of helping to build bridges between the government and the opposition.”[10]
Little wonder that with both Russia and America involved, the polarization of Ukraine sped up. But let’s stop for a moment. We know that neoconservatives regard unseating a democratically elected president as permissible in a third-world country. But what was their plan for Ukraine, and what made them think they could achieve it (whatever it was) through the regime change?
Did they hope to promote Ukraine’s association with the European Union? The reality was that no such association was possible without Russia’s consent. Ukraine and Europe depended on Russian gas. If Putin chose to shut the tap—which he could do at any time—Europe would suffer, but Ukraine would fold.
Did they seek a closer partnership between Ukraine and NATO? It was no secret that the Ukrainian military remained in disheartening disarray. How could one possibly tease Ukraine’s aggressive eastern neighbor by suggesting NATO expansion, when Ukraine did not stand a chance of deterring a preemptive assault, let alone defeating one? And what would NATO gain from such a conflict? Would most of the NATO powers even risk coming to Ukraine’s defense? And what would happen to NATO’s credibility—even the survival of the NATO treaty—if they did not?
Was the interventionists’ goal “Westernization” of Ukrainian society? Leaving aside the unanswerable question about what exactly “Westernization” means, I would simply note that America had already tried introducing a “pro-Western” government in Ukraine in 2004, during the Orange Revolution, and that it did not work. Absent any effective system of checks and balances, the government remained corrupt, the economy stagnant. There was no reason to expect a revolution to succeed in 2014 where the earlier one had failed. In any case, any attempt at ousting Yanukovych, a lawfully elected president—even if an embezzler and a thug—was bound to anger eastern and southern Ukraine, his base of support. How would the United States benefit from a civil conflict in a nation of 44 million sitting on Russia’s borders?
4
Harriet Alexander and Christopher Miller, “John McCain in Kiev: ‘Ukraine will make Europe better’,”
5
Nina Mandell, “Vladimir Putin Calls Sen. John McCain ‘Crazy,’ Trashes Russian Election Protesters,”
6
Victoria Nuland, “Remarks at the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation Conference,” U.S. Department of State, December 13, 2013, www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/rm/2013/dec/218804.htm (retrieved November 18, 2014); Victoria Nuland, Interview with Christiane Amanpour, April 21, 2014, IIP, April 23, 2014, http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/texttrans/2014/04/20140423298186.html#ixzz3JT8maijy (retrieved November 18, 2014).
7
“Lavrov rasskazal o vrednom vliyanii Nuland na ukrainskii krizis,” Lenta.ru, October 9, 2014, http://lenta.ru/news/2014/10/09/nonuland (retrieved October 9, 2014).
8
“U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland Visits Independence Square,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, December 11, 2013, www.rferl.org/media/video/25197233.html (retrieved November 22, 2014); Nuland, Interview with Christiane Amanpour.
9
“Ukraine Crisis: Transcript of Leaked Nuland-Pyatt Call,” BBC, February 7, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957 (retrieved November 18, 2014).
10
Anthony Faiola, “Germans Not Amused by Victoria Nuland Gaffe,”