Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 27 – There is an
emerging consensus in Moscow about Ukraine, one that includes the notion that
no one can require Moscow to give up what it has already seized already –Crimea
– and its positions in the Donbass lest that provoke instability within the
Russian Federation, Vitaly Portnikov says.
In an interview given to Marina
Yevtushok of the Apostrophe news
agency, the Ukrainian commentator says that Russians won’t talk about this and
that his Moscow contacts insist it can be raised only in the course of
discussions about improving Russian-Ukrainian and Russian-Western ties (apostrophe.ua/article/politics/2018-02-27/rossiyane-hotyat-reshit-problemyi-s-ukrainoy-no-u-nih-est-tri-usloviya---vitaliy-portnikov/17098
Portnikov says that he has told them
“’we cannot discuss these points together because this is schizophrenia. They
do not understand why. They say ‘You must understand out position, Vitaly. You know
you are interested in a stable Russian state because a stable Russian power can
reach agreements with Ukraine and the West and there won’t be chaos.”
“If you want that the [Russian]
power to be stable, you must understand,” they say, “that it cannot display
weakness. Any backing away from this position is a manifestation of weakness.”
And Portnikov points out that the Kremlin is using exactly the same tactic in its
relations with Japan and the question of the status of the Northern Territories.
He says he has told the Japanese
that “Putin doesn’t want to show a constructive approach. He wants to show that
he is “an ingatherer of Russian lands.’ And such a person cannot collect them
one place and give them away in another. He can’t even if he would like to do
so and even if you convinced him with logic … This is a Procustean bed.”
The only thing he can do in the case
of Ukraine is “not to go further if he sees that this will not bring any
dividents or may even lead to a worsening rather than an improvement in his
situation. I think,” Portnikov says, “that after the Vagner episode in Syria, his
desire not to go further has intensified. But there where a Russian ‘boot’ has
stood, it will stand to the end.”
Putin could strengthen his hand in
Ukraine as a whole by returning Crimea and the Donbass to Kyiv’s control. That
would change the electoral balance in the country and help to bring to power a
more pro-Russian government. But Putin is trapped by his own mental image of
how to behave as a Russian ruler and by what Russians expect.
Portnikov does not say, but using
the threat of instability in Russia against foreign powers is a long-standing Kremlin
ploy that has a double target. On the one hand, because many people want to
avoid instability at all costs, it leads them to make concessions to anyone who
says that instability will happen if outsiders do anything.
And on the other, it allows the
Kremlin to blame any threat of instability on outsiders rather than to acknowledge
the role its own policies play in this regard and then to insist upon and then
impose ever greater repression on its own population as a result. That is what
Vladimir Putin is doing now against not only Ukraine but the West as well.
Often this simple strategy works
given fears of instability in a nuclear power; but it doesn’t always. Mikhail
Gorbachev justified his turn to the right this was at the end of 1990, hoping
that the West would not criticize what he was doing and what Eduard
Shevardnadze among others warned against.
Many in Western governments accepted
his argument, talked about saving Gorbachev and preventing instability in the
Soviet Union. But the nations of the USSR in that case did not; and within a
year, both that country and its president were cast on the ash heap of history .
No comments:
Post a Comment