by D.J. Webb
I am not sure to what extent relations with Russia and the Ukraine are relevant to British libertarians. If they are, the relevance is likely to be this: that our interests in Russia and its backyard do not go beyond the maintenance of free trade. The existence of NATO, and its extension ever further east, are an outright provocation to Russia. While no country is likely to use nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future, this does not justify relentless and thoughtless provocation of a country that can destroy us, for no discernible purpose.
I have to make a disclaimer: that I studied Russian at university, although my Russian is rusty after nearly 20 years without speaking it. I spent three months abroad in Voronezh in 1994 as part of my degree, and also visited Moscow, Kiev and Odessa at that time. So I have my own reasons to object to an anti-Russian foreign policy, although I can hardly expect my own history of Russian interest to have an impact on British foreign policy and the wider preferences of libertarians in the UK.
The folding up of the Soviet Union
It is clear to me that Mikhail Gorbachev expected Russia to be accepted into the counsels and councils of the West after the fall of Communism. If you recall the siege of Leningrad during World War Two, when the people of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, were reduced to eating cats and dogs, then you will wonder why Gorbachev allowed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to become independent. These territories are vital to the defence of St. Petersburg, and Estonia and Latvia in particular had large Russian minorities of over 40% of the population, whose interests Moscow might have been thought likely to take into consideration. The Latvian capital, Riga, was overwhelmingly Russian and served as the headquarters of the Soviet Baltic fleet. None of these countries had been independent save for a brief period between 1918 and 1940. They were historically part of Russia.
I am not arguing against Baltic independence or for the retention of recalcitrant territories in a nation’s borders. I am pointing out that there were good reasons why the Soviet government might not have wanted to allow these nations to resume their inter-war independence. In addition to the reasons cited, the fact that Russia gained part of East Prussian Königsberg after the war, now the region of Kaliningrad, meant that Lithuania in particular divided the main part of Russia from one of her territories. In short, Gorbachev allowed the Baltic states to become independent because he did not anticipate the treatment Russia would receive in the post-Soviet period.
There was an attempt to keep the rest of the Soviet Union together—and that was ratified by a referendum in the USSR—but ultimately all 14 of the non-Russian republics became independent, including the Ukraine and Byelorussia, both core parts of the Eastern Slav heartland, and, like Russia, heirs to the mediaeval Eastern Slav state of the Kievan Rus. The Baltics were not core parts of the mediaeval Rus in the same way, and it is clear that the loss of Kiev in particular was keenly felt by Russia, as Kiev had been the original capital of the Eastern Slav peoples.
The loss of these territories could be justified in Moscow by the consideration that they represented a buffer zone between NATO and Russia, and so Russia had defensible borders, at least in so far as NATO forces would have to take the whole of the Ukraine before they approached Russia proper. This calculation becomes nugatory once an attempt is made to bring the Ukraine into the EU and NATO. Given the Soviet loss of around 30m people in World War Two, it is unsurprising that the Russian government would regard such a development as a total unpicking of all the gains of the Second World War in a way that threatened Russia security more keenly than at any point since the Mongol Yoke period when large parts of Rus were conquered by the Golden Horde.
The irony is that it is not clear that the “West”, such as it, wishes to subsidise the Ukraine sufficiently to allow that country to become a prosperous part of the EU. US figures have frequently been quoted saying that Russia will never be an empire without the Ukraine, and so, whatever the intentions of countries like Germany, the US has sought to destabilise the Ukraine and prevent its consolidation as part of a pro-Russian sphere of influence.
The borders of the Ukraine
If we look at the Ukraine historically, we note that the Ukrainian territories formerly part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that reunited with Russia in 1654 comprise less than half of the modern territory of the Ukraine. Kiev and all points West are the traditional Ukraine. Cities such as Kharkov and Lugansk, only a few miles from the Russian border, were part of Russia before 1654, although the city of Kharkov itself was founded during the disturbances that led to the 1654 reunification of the Eastern Slavs, and so its population has from the beginning comprised both Russians and Ukrainians fleeing the disturbances further West. Consequently, the city is almost entirely Russian-speaking, although the majority of the population is “ethnic-Ukrainian”, meaning they have Ukrainian surnames, revealing their ultimate ancestry to be Ukrainian in much the same way as someone called “James Murphy” in London could be described as “ethnic-Irish”, by virtue of having a single Irish ancestor 3 or 4 generations ago. In reality, there is not much difference between the Russian-speaking ethnic-Ukrainians and the ethnic-Russians themselves.
Other parts of the Ukraine were conquered jointly (from the Turkish Empire) after the reunification of the Eastern Slavs, and so became called Novorossiya, or “New Russia”. These territories include Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk, the Crimea and Odessa—all territories that are majority Russian-speaking and that have never been Ukrainian-speaking. If you go far enough back, you can find a time when the Tartars, Greeks and Armenians had a larger ethnic presence in these territories. But these cities are Russian-speaking today, although surrounded in some cases by Ukrainian-speaking countryside. Odessa itself had a large Jewish presence before the Holocaust, and so was roughly 50:50 Yiddish- and Russian-speaking, with the Ukrainian language coming nowhere.
Consequently, the Ukraine has “inherited” Soviet-era borders that do not correspond to the historical Ukraine and are not coterminous with the borders within which the Ukrainian language is spoken. Why did the Soviets award so much territory to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic? This was probably because, firstly, they wished to include Russian-speaking territories in the Ukraine, to bind it into the USSR, and secondly, the far-flung Russian-speaking cities of the Ukraine do have Ukrainian ethnic majorities (in the same way that English-speaking Cardiff has an “ethnic-Welsh” population, in so far as it may be presumed that people with surnames like Parry are of Welsh descent). The only part of the Ukraine to have an ethnic-Russian majority tout court was the Crimea, which has now been reabsorbed into Russia, reversing Khrushchev’s absurd decision to give it as a present to the Ukraine in 1954 to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the reunification of the Eastern Slavs in 1654.
The Russian language in the Ukraine
For these reasons, therefore, Russian is not really a minority language in the Ukraine. The 2001 Ukrainian census—the last—showed only 29.3% of the population reporting Russian as their native language. However, the issue is politicised, and many or most people are bilingual, and so it seems that only people who reported only speaking Russian were listed in the census as Russian-speaking. All others, including bilinguals, were reported as Ukrainian speakers. It is for this reason that polls in the Ukraine show much higher levels of preference for Russian. The 2004 opinion poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology showed that 43-46% of the population reported using Russian in the home, similar to the proportion using Ukrainian. In addition to the Crimea (97%), the regions of Donetsk (93%), Lugansk (89%), Odessa (85%), Zaporozhie (81%) Kharkov (74%), Dnepropetrovsk (72%) and Nikolaev (66%) all reported being majority Russian-speaking. I don’t have the figures for the Kherson region, directly adjacent to the Crimea, but that region is likely to be majority Russian-speaking too. In all cases, the larger cities are much more solidly Russian-speaking than surrounding countryside. More nuanced polls (such as that undertaken in 2005 by the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences) show that 36.4% spoke mainly Russian in the home, 21.6% spoke both languages in the home, and the balance only Ukrainian.
Consequently, attempts by the government in Kiev to maintain Ukrainian as the only official language of the country are contrary to the linguistic reality on the ground, not forgetting that most of these areas have never been Ukrainian-speaking at any point in history. Interestingly, the 2001 census listed around 25% of the Kiev population as native speakers of Russian, but polls taken since and much anecdotal evidence shows that Russian is the preferred language of the street in Kiev, in much the same way that French has the edge over Flemish in Brussels. It is completely false to pretend that Russian is a minority language that has no valid place in the culture of the Ukraine. Other studies have shown that over 80% of books and newspapers published in the Ukraine are in Russian, and that over 70% of television programmes are in Russian. Ukrainian is largely a spoken language, and Russian is used in writing and in the media all over the Ukraine.
I am at a loss to work out why the mulish Ukrainian government refuses to allow a policy of official bilingualism, similar to that that obtains in Finland, where Swedish, a language spoken by less than 6% of the population, has official status. There is an extremist tinge to Ukrainian nationalism, associated with the alliance of Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazis in World War Two. (Close observers will note that nearly all of the remaining concentration camp guards being hunted down to this day tend to be ethnic-Ukrainians, which tells its own story.) It is possible that the extremist edge to Ukrainian nationalism was accentuated by the deaths of millions of Ukrainians in an artificially generated famine in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s. Nevertheless, to this day, there is no spirit of compromise on the language issue.
Toppling Yanukovych
When the democratically elected pro-Russian president of the Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was toppled from power in February 2014, he had only a year left to run of his presidential term. In a culturally divided nation, there will always be stiff opposition to the government, but opposing forces could have allowed his presidential term to finish before putting up a strong candidate against him in 2015. In the event, the rage against his refusal to sign an economic agreement with the EU that would have had negative repercussions on the Ukrainian economy, opting instead for a more generous package from Russia, led to a sustained campaign to eject him from power.
It is certain that the protests in Kiev’s Independence Square were masterminded by the US government, which the US Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, stated had spent US$5bn on destabilising the Ukraine (or, in more positive terms, forging civil-society institutions). A tapped phone call even showed that Arseniy Yatsenyuk had been identified by the US in advance as the future prime minister of a pro-Western Ukraine. The protests in the Independence Square lasted for months, and eventually included the occupation of government ministry buildings, until Yanukovych fled to Russia. The speaker of Parliament assumed the presidential role, and the US candidate for the prime ministership, Yatsenyuk, became prime minister in February 2014, well before any attempt to hold a general election to ratify such a change.
It is important for libertarians to understand the concept of sustained occupation of central areas. I’m pretty sure many libertarians would subsume this under the right to protest. But sustained occupation is not just a quick demonstration of opinion, but an existential challenge to a sitting government. Another example that can be cited is the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square in the Chinese capital, Beijing. At some point, and particularly when ministry buildings began to be invaded, the sustained occupation of Independence Square took on a putschist dimension. Either the government would be toppled, or the square would be cleared. The protesters were embedded in, camping in the square, and using burning tyres to prevent police clearance operations. It was no longer a strictly peaceful demonstration, and was one being controlled by a foreign embassy. Consequently, I would argue, and probably face stiff “libertarian” resistance, that this was not an exercise of free speech, but an operation to achieve a coup d’état by ejecting an elected government from office. This issue deserves discussion by libertarians.
The separatist régimes in the East
We have since seen Russian intervention establish proto-régimes in parts of Donetsk and Lugansk, although I believe Russian-speaking Kharkov, only 30 miles from the Russian border, to have proved a significant disappointment to the Russian government of Vladimir Putin, largely because of quick action taken by that city’s government to prevent the occupation of government buildings in Kharkov by pro-Russian protesters. Of course, the occupation of government buildings in Donetsk and Lugansk is no better than similar actions taken by pro-EU forces in Kiev, but once the national government had been toppled, a wider free-for-all was set in motion. It makes no sense to approve of a putsch in Kiev, but not in Donetsk and Lugansk. Odessa is also a firmly pro-Russian language region, and we have seen the burning alive of 42 pro-Russian protesters in a building in Odessa in May—an action that had it taken place in Donetsk and the victims been pro-Kiev protesters would have attracted much more Western media comment. It is amazing how this event has sunk without trace.
Ukrainian attempts to reconquer the separatist-held areas have also been conducted with blithe disregard for civilian lives, including the use of cluster bombs, banned in most countries, in civilian areas, and aerial bombardment of the separatist militias, who don’t have aircraft. We can imagine the Western response if the Assad regime in Syria were using aerial bombardment of rebel-held parts of Syria to bring them to heel: the use of aircraft against those who have no way of responding, other than trying to bring down the planes bombing them, is highly provocative. Could Britain have bombed the Falls Road in Belfast in the 1970s to defeat the IRA? For this reason, I blame the Kiev authorities for the attack on a Malaysian airliner flying over the rebel territories: had the Ukrainian government not been engaged in aerial bombardment of Donetsk and Lugansk, the Malaysian plane would not have been brought down, and the Ukrainian government had no business assuring foreign airliners it was safe to fly over territories where it knew separatists were trying to shoot down its own military aircraft.
Putin would probably be happy with an agreement that the Ukraine not join the EU or NATO and that it allow Russian to become a joint official language of the republic. These are reasonable demands. Yet we have seen constant attempts by Western governments to up the tempo of the dispute and nudge Kiev away from a settlement. Given that the whole of the Ukrainian coast is Russian-speaking, the long-term outcome of such brinkmanship could be Russian occupation of the entire Black Sea coast of the Ukraine, reducing a rump Ukraine to its Ukrainian-speaking heartland, and turning it into a landlocked state. This would also allow Russia to incorporate the Transdniestrian Republic, a breakaway Russian-speaking part of Moldavia that adjoins Odessa.
Sanctions as economic warfare
The response to these moves by Putin—largely in reaction to Western intervention—has been a ratcheting up of “sanctions”, with Britain’s own David Cameron doing his level best to stoke tensions in the Ukraine. Sanctions are economic warfare: they are intended to destroy the Russian economy. We should not kid ourselves on this. It is only Russian weakness that prevents a stronger response. Governments who aim explicitly to destroy the economies of neighbouring states are at war with them, economically at least. It should not be our aim to destroy Russia, not least because the long-term threat to Britain comes from, if anyone, Germany, and Russia has historically shown itself to be a reliable ally against German expansionism. It is worth recalling promises made to Russia in 1990-91 that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe, let alone former members of the Soviet Union. As a weaker state, Russia has evolved a military doctrine that permits it to use tactical nuclear weapons to force NATO to stand down in a confrontation and accept a return to the status quo ante. In the event of war, this could see the use of smaller tactical nuclear weapons against countries such as Poland that have sought to stoke the conflict in Kiev, leaving the US to determine whether “mutually assured destruction” by responding with a nuclear strike on Russia was worth it.
It is time that NATO be wound up. Britain should rescind all of its fatuous military guarantees to countries like Poland. As far as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are concerned, we should warn them that, no only will we not intervene militarily in their defence, but that their long-term security would be enhanced by their taking steps to improve their relationship with Russia, instead of constantly provoking Russia by mistreatment of their own ethnic-Russian minorities. Some of these countries are behaving like young boys wielding an implied threat by their older brothers to come their defence in playground arguments. Just as the Scandinavian countries are no longer under Swedish rule, but the countries of the Nordic region manage to get along and even see each other as allies, it is appropriate for ex-Soviet nations to maintain a broadly pro-Russian policy, designed to establish a relationship between them and Russia similar to that that exists between Finland and Sweden today. For the Ukraine or Lithuania to turn themselves into anti-Russian states is a threat to their own long-term survival—we should not attempt to give them any blank cheque in the forms of money, arms and men that would encourage them to continue to behave in this fashion.
It is high time, therefore, that we looked beyond the EU and NATO and sought the creation of a Europe of trading nations that maintained their national sovereignty and independence from each other, in the interests of their own nations and identities. As a long-term policy, the alienation of Russia is lousy—what is Britain’s geopolitical strategy for the world in 2050 or 2100?—and, in the final analysis, this behaviour amounts to no more than a desperate attempt to keep the Western Alliance under the fading hegemony of the US. A new world is emerging, and it won’t be run by the West, and we need to carve out our future in that world without looking back.
