It does not seem as if American interventionists really had a plan for Ukraine. Most likely, their work in Kiev followed Napoleon’s principle, famously appropriated by Lenin, On s’engage, et puis on voit—Let’s engage, and take it from there.
After the Nuland-Pyatt leak, Europeans and Russians both stepped up their involvement in Kiev—Europeans offended, Russians enraged. Meanwhile, confrontations between government forces and protestors escalated. By February 20, at least seventy-seven people had died.
On February 21, Germany, France, Poland, and Russia brokered a compromise between the government and the Maidan. The opposition was represented by Nuland’s and Pyatt’s favorites: Yatsenyuk, Klichko, and Tyahnybok. Yanukovych signed for the government. Three E.U. foreign ministers signed as the agreement’s guarantors: Radoslaw Sikorski of Poland, Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany, and Laurent Fabius of France. Called the “Agreement on the Settlement of Crisis in Ukraine,” the document called for an “immediate end of bloodshed” and a “political resolution of the crisis.” The signees pledged to form a national unity government. Presidential elections would be held “as soon as the new Constitution is adopted but no later than December 2014.” “Recent acts of violence” would be investigated, the “authorities and the opposition will refrain from the use of violence,” and the authorities “will not impose a state of emergency.” The parliament would declare amnesty for “illegal actions” during the riots, and “illegal weapons should be handed over to the Ministry of Interior.”[11]
The first international agreement to arise from the Ukrainian upheaval quickly became the first international document to collapse. Within hours after it was signed, Maidan rioters overtook government quarters. It is not clear who was behind the escalation, and it is not impossible that the resumed violence was spontaneous. What is clear is that opposition leaders used it to topple the regime, discarding any notion of “national unity.”
Unable to take the stress anymore and apparently fearing for his life, Yanukovych left for eastern Ukraine—officially to attend a regional meeting of governors—and then disappeared. He would not resurface until February 28—in the Russian city of Rostov. Now leaderless, his faction in the parliament folded and voted with the opposition minority. The insurgency leaders declared the position of president vacant, formed an interim cabinet, scheduled presidential elections for May, and briefly banned the official use of the Russian language in Ukraine—a folly of grand magnitude.[12]
Putin: How to Respond?
What is often missed about Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy is that it is largely reactive. Moscow deemed Western involvement in Ukraine unacceptable. If Ukraine forged a strong relationship with NATO, would that make the Russian Black Sea Fleet homeless and bring NATO troops to Sevastopol, the “City of Russian Glory”? After the United States’ involvement in the Orange Revolution in 2004, every effort U.S. representatives made in Russia on behalf of the opposition was taken by the Kremlin as part of a conspiracy. The ease with which the United States now dropped a democratically elected president, Yanukovych, and gave unqualified recognition to insurgents in Kiev enraged the Kremlin. For the second time in ten years, America had supported, if not outright orchestrated, a regime change in Russia’s “sister country.” Was a coup in Moscow next?
NATO expansion and U.S. political engineering in the near abroad were two factors driving the strong Russian response to regime change in Kiev. The third was the domestic corrosion of Putin’s regime.
In the winter of 2011–2012, Moscow saw a tide of spontaneous grassroots protest. The authorities managed to overwhelm it bloodlessly, and Russian voters did put Putin in the Kremlin for a third term (officially, he got 63.6 percent of the vote, but even if the election was rigged, no poll or estimate puts his actual support below 55 percent). In Putin’s “managed democracy,” Russian living standards were possibly better than they had ever been (in 2013, 56 percent of Russians between the ages of eighteen and forty-five vacationed abroad). Yet the 2011–2012 protests signified the end of national accord. That had to be restored, and a “little victorious war” could do it.[13]
With President Yanukovych toppled and the interim cabinet sworn in, Kiev became ungovernable. Hundreds of Maidan rioters camped in government buildings and showed no intention of leaving. The ill-conceived ban on the official use of Russian lasted for just five days before being repealed, but in the meantime it had done a lot of damage. The Russophile media in Crimea, Donbass, and Odessa prophesied forced Ukrainization and pogroms coming from “fascists” in Kiev. Pro-Russian activists in eastern and southern Ukraine demanded secession and asked Russia for help. But Russia was not in a hurry.
The event that made Putin postpone any action was a pet project, the Winter Olympics in Sochi, scheduled for February 2014. Conceived as the triumphant symbol of Russia’s resurrection from its years of chaos and poverty, carefully planned as a splendid display of national heritage and riches, and also extravagantly expensive, the Sochi Olympics were meant to be a coming-of-age fete for Putin’s Russia. But the Western media did not take the hoped-for congratulatory tone. The correspondents’ reports from Sochi were gleeful, sneering, and diminishing, suggesting an anti-Russian bias. As one American web site commented, “It got to the point where Western journalists in Sochi for Putin’s overpriced Olympics were cheered like heroes for tweeting about how the curtains in their hotel rooms were falling down.” A leading historian of Russia, Stephen F. Cohen, called the coverage “toxic.”[14]
As Putin and the Russian street saw it, no matter what Russia tried, in the eyes of the West it was never good enough. The president sat calmly through the Winter Games.
PART II
Peninsula of Sun and War
FOUR
History
The “little green men,” or “polite soldiers,” as local Russophiles affectionately called them, first appeared on Crimean streets in the last week of February 2014. Masked and silent, they wore green camouflage uniforms without any insignia and would not reveal their identity; they had clearly come from elsewhere, were very knowledgeable concerning the whereabouts of Ukrainian troops, and were armed with Russian military weapons. Sometimes mixing with the grassroots Russian militias, sometimes leading them, often pretending to be them, the strangers took over government buildings, train stations, and airports, and blocked Ukrainian forces in their bases. Surrounded by these armed men, the Crimean parliament appointed a new government, which in turn quickly scheduled a referendum on whether Crimea should secede from Ukraine and join Russia.
11
“Agreement on the Settlement of Crisis in Ukraine—full text,”
12
Andrew Higgins and Andrew E. Kramer, “Defeated Even Before He Was Ousted,”
13
“Rossiyane nazvali Turtsiyu liubimeishim kurortom,” Lenta.ru, October 8, 2014, http://lenta.ru/news/2014/10/08/turkeystillrules (retrieved 8 October, 2014).
14
“Ukraine, Putin, and the West,”