Ukraine may be turning into another Yugoslavia, a young state that cannot survive except as a dictatorship. Both Ukraine and Yugoslavia belong to the category of artificial entities formed by foreign leaders: Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Ukraine by Lenin in 1922. In both countries, people spoke a spectrum of dialects, the official language a sort of linguistic median. Both were also divided along religious and cultural lines. Iosip Broz Tito held Yugoslavia together; a viceroy appointed by Moscow did that for Ukraine. But absent its strongman and outside a Cold War context, Yugoslavia was not a coherent nation. Neither is Ukraine, and this is the ultimate cause of the present civil war.
Peace in Ukraine at the initial, promising stage of nation-building between 1991 and 2013 was made possible by the precarious balancing act of all four of its presidents, including the “pro-Western” Yushchenko and the “pro-Russian” Yanukovych. The February 2014 coup (call it a revolution if it makes you feel better) threw the country off balance, and the submerged interregional tensions surfaced with a boom.
A Russian Lake
On December 4, 2014, in his equivalent of the State of the Union address, Putin summed up the party line on Crimea. As befits a national fetish, the language he applied to the annexed territory was metaphysical. Referring to the semi-legendary baptism of Prince Vladimir in Chersonesus, he called Crimea the “spiritual foundation” of the Russian state. For Russia, Putin announced, Crimea had “an enormous civilizational and sacral meaning. Just like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for those who practice Islam or Judaism.”[20]
The allusion was new, idiosyncratic, and strange. For starters, clashes over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem have become an epitome of an unending conflict. Perhaps appropriately, the first federal investment in Crimean sacral grounds was an army group. Tanks and armored vehicles were ferried across the Kerch Strait with praiseworthy efficiency, up to fifty a day—an accomplishment given the sad state of the ferries.
In November 2014, the Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed that it had deployed a squadron of thirty jet fighters to Belbek air base. NATO’s commander, General Philip Breedlove, in Kiev at the time, said that the ongoing Russian “militarization” of Crimea would have an effect on “almost the entire Black Sea.”[21] In the 1950s–1960s, Taiwan was called the unsinkable U.S. aircraft carrier. Was Crimea about to become Russia’s aircraft carrier?
The annexation of Crimea has changed the balance of power in the Black Sea. Under the terms of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982, Russia now claims an exclusive economic zone along the peninsula’s coastline—an avenue for underwater pipelines and a repository of fossil fuels. Ukraine, dispossessed, is losing its role as a transit corridor between Russia and Europe.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet had been stationed in Crimea before, as were some Russian air force units. With the annexation, the air force presence expanded; Russian ground troops, tanks, and armored personnel carriers arrived; the Russian military established a new army group on the peninsula. Russian ground troops now surround Ukraine from the north, east, and south. Just 450 miles separate the army groups in Crimea from those in Bryansk, across Ukraine’s northern border. If they advanced simultaneously, the two could touch in central Ukraine within days. Along the Black Sea coast, the shipbuilding facilities of Ukrainian Mykolaiv are just 100 miles away from the Russian army group in Crimea; Odessa is 75 miles farther west; 25 miles more, and one is in Moldova.
With Russia having gained in the strategic balance, the influence of every other Black Sea nation, including Turkey, has shrunk. The United States and NATO have lost some of their clout in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. To make this clear, in May 2015 Russia and China held their first joint naval exercises in the Mediterranean.
As the naval base at Sevastopol had been the focal point of the Russian Crimea myth and a major goal of the annexation rush, now the Black Sea Fleet found itself the center of attention. It also found a new role: intimidating every other Black Sea nation, as none is Russia’s friend. Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania are NATO members; Ukraine and Georgia have begged for membership. Another mission became Russian warships’ regular visits to Syria, bringing arms to Moscow’s friend Bashar al-Assad.
But contrary to the patriotic Russian myth, the Black Sea has never been a Russian lake, and despite the fears of Russia’s neighbors, it will likely never be one. For two centuries, Russia has been the dominant naval power in the basin, but it is Turkey, not Russia, that determines the net balance. The Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles, collectively known in European diplomacy as the Straits, belong to Turkey, and it is up to Turkey alone to determine who will have access to the Black Sea and on what conditions. All other Black Sea countries are in the situation of a homeowner whose driveway is separated from the turnpike by somebody else’s property.
Globally, the Straits are not as important as the Suez and Panama canals, or Gibraltar. Those three serve every seafaring nation; the Straits serve only the Black Sea countries. Yet they are a lifeline for Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, and Ukraine, their only oceanic connection. To that, add the landlocked nations of the Caucasus—Armenia and Azerbaijan—and also the five “stans” of post-Soviet Central Asia. Russia’s Eurasian coastline is immense, but the Black Sea coast is the only one that is ice-free year round. Close the Straits, and Russian commerce will suffocate. Open the Straits to powers at war with Russia, and the Russian navy will bleed.
In the Crimean War, Turkey turned the Straits into a highway for the British and French navies. In World War I, it let its ally, Germany, send cruisers into the Black Sea, largely incapacitating the Russian fleet there. In World War II, Ankara refused to let Germans and Italians in, thus saving the Soviets from losing the south.[22]
The international treaty regulating the Straits—the Montreux Convention of 1936—allows Turkey to close them to all foreign warships in times of war or when threatened by aggression. It may refuse access to the merchant ships of nations with which it is at war. In peacetime, all civilian vessels are guaranteed free passage “by day and by night, under any flag with any kind of cargo.” The transit of naval vessels is regulated, and the passage of naval ships not belonging to the Black Sea nations is heavily restricted. Outsiders’ warships must be under 15,000 tons, the guns they carry under 203 millimeters. No one, including the Black Sea nations, may send an aircraft carrier through the Straits.
These provisions have been charged with conflict from the day the convention was signed. After 1945, wanting uninhibited access to the Mediterranean, Stalin demanded that Ankara cede him “joint ownership” of the Straits. That strategic pressure led U.S. president Harry Truman in 1947 to proclaim the Truman Doctrine, in which he pledged support of every nation threatened by the USSR, a move many historians consider to have launched the Cold War. Though universal in its wording, the Truman Doctrine was specifically crafted to protect Turkey and its Mediterranean neighbor Greece.
Grudgingly, the Soviets caved in. To evade the ban on aircraft carriers, they designated the only two they had—the Kiev and the Admiral Kuznetsov—as “aircraft carrying cruisers.” They usually passed through the Bosporus at night; Orhan Pamuk writes in his Istanbul memoir: “A great hulk, growing larger and larger as it rose from the pitch-dark sea and approached the closest hill—the hill from which I was watching—this was a colossus, a leviathan, in shape and size a specter from my worst nightmares, a Soviet warship!—rising out of the night and the mist as if in a fairy tale, a vast floating fortress.”[23]
20
“Poslaniye presidenta Federalnomu Sobraniyu. 4 dekabrya 2014 g.,” Kremlin.ru, December 4, 2014, http://kremlin.ru/news/47173 (retrieved January 9, 2015).
21
“Nato Commander Warns Russia Could Control Whole Black Sea,” BBC, November 26, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30214172 (retrieved November 26, 2014).
23
Orhan Pamuk,