Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 3 – Perhaps the
most important development in the post-Soviet space in 2015 is that most
Russians and nearly all Ukrainians view Ukraine as a separate country that will
never return to Moscow in the fashion of some sort of “prodigal son,” according
to Moscow commentator Leonid Radzikhovsky.
In 2015, he writes today, Ukraine
separated itself from Russia not only economically but more important
psychologically. “It turned out,” he says, that “one has to live poorly without
Russia but one can do so.” And that
attitude affects the entire political spectrum, including parties that
represent ethnic Russians (nv.ua/opinion/radzihovsky/ostyvshij-sup-donbassa-i-plany-putina-na-vostok-ukrainy-89102.html).
Voters in Ukraine regardless of
ethnicity may “hate Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk and even the Americans but there is
no talk about ‘the return of a prodigal son’” among any of them. This reflects
a most important development: “Internally, Ukraine has broken from Russia –
less than the Baltic countries but nonetheless in a completely fundamental way.”
At the same time, Russians “if not
all … then a significant part of them as well as a significant part of the
Russian political elites have recognized this fact” as well, Radzikhovsky says,
a dramatic change from a year earlier when “Russians quite sincerely believed
that no Eastern Ukraine exists and that this is only part of Russia” which has
been temporarily lost.
The situation with regard to Crimea
was and remains different and is viewed differently both by the residents of
the peninsula and of Russia. That is something other Ukrainians are going to
have to take into account even though as Radzikhovsky says, the annexation of
Crimea was “a horrific political error” that involved “the crudest violation”
of Rusisa’s obligations.
But, he says, “that train has left
the station,” and Ukrainians must come to terms with it just as Russians are coming
to terms with the departure of the rest of Ukraine from Moscow’s sphere of
influence.
This leaves Vladimir Putin in a most
awkward position. On the one hand, he doesn’t need the Donbas but can’t take
more without ensuring that there will be even more crippling Western
sanctions. And on the other, he can’t
fulfill the Minsk accords because to do so, even with the new Russian attitudes
about Ukraine, would be and look like a complete personal defeat.
The Kremlin leader could pull out of
Syria, Radzikhovsky says, “because no one understands what we are doing in
Syria,” without many problems. But pulling out of the Donbas unless Ukraine
were federalized, something Minsk doesn’t call for, would be a step Russian
public opinion would not forgive for “it would mean that Putin had failed.”
In this situation, Putin has little
choice but to pursue a frozen conflict strategy in the region and hope that something
will turn up to prompt the West to end sanctions or at the very least not
impose harsher ones. Indeed, Radzikhovsky says, Putin’s policies seem
increasingly to be based on such hopes. But so far, things are going against
him.
For that strategy to have a chance,
Putin has to avoid a wider war in Ukraine because no one not even Belarus would
support such a conflict and “more than that, “next year most likely will be the
year of the collapse of the Eurasian Economic Union,” an institution that came
into existence only so other members could get money from Moscow, something it
doesn’t now have.
And so in the short run at least,
the Russian commentator says, “Russia cannot do anything” with regard to
Ukraine and “will not do anything.” And that will give some advantages to Kyiv
because it will provide him with justification not to carry out the reforms
many are pressing him to make.
But, of course, as Radzikhovsky
points out, all governments use conflicts to justify not doing what they do not
want to do. The difference in the
present case is that someone really “attacked Ukraine, but no one has attacked
Russia and no one is threatening to do so.”
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