Window on Eurasia: Putin’s Moves in Ukraine Pushing Russia toward Disintegrtion, Portnikov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 2 – By his actions in Ukraine and elsewhere, Vladimir Putin is pushing Russia toward disintegration, Vladimir Portnikov says. Indeed, he argues, the Kremlin leader has “already taken all the decisions necessary” for that to happen and to happen far more quickly than anyone expects.

            In an interview at the end of last week, the Ukrainian commentator says that it isn’t so much that Putin has miscalculated, although he has not made the best decisions he might have, but that the Russian president was “chosen by history itself to liquidate the state” he heads (obozrevatel.com/interview/19627-portnikov-rossiya-raspadetsya--putin-vse-neobhodimyie-resheniya-uzhe-prinyal.htm).

            In that respect, Portnikov continues, Putin’s elevation was “not the most successful choice because he is not a very educated man.  It is possible that this process would have gone better if Russia had a leader who had greater intellectual potential ... and an understanding of strategic consequences, was not so greedy for money, and who was not so tied to his entourage.”

            But however that may be, he continues, Putin faces a problem that no one could have solved: “The Russian Federation is not a state, it is a fragment of the former Soviet Union which unlike other former Soviet republics never had real statehood, never had its own communit party, with the exception of he last two years of the existence of the Union and to a large extent was the nucleus of the empire itself.”

             Russia’s statehood after 1991 “did not undero any changes,” Portnikov says. "Up to now, it exists as a quite strange conglomerate consisting of republics, oblasts, krays, and national districts ... and unresolved national, religious and territorial issues connected with the existence of the regions.”

            “Everything has remained Soviet. And the main thing for the preservation of this territory was to avoid setting precedents which would allow its disintegration.” Boris Yeltsin and his advisors understood this, but Vladimir Putin does not.  The first Russian president backed the independence of the RSFSR so that autonomies inside it would have nowhere to go.

            That was “the correct decision,” Portnikov says, “because then in fact Tatarstan was at the point of leaving the Russian Federation as was Chechnya.” Indeed, “the entire existence of the Russian Federation [since then has been] based on the Soviet status quo of the inviolability of borders.”

            Indeed, “the harshness of Russia in the Chechen war was to a large extent justified by the necessity of observing this status quo and not taking any legal changes which would allow the borders of Russia to be changed.”

            “Having recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Osetia and even more having carried out the annexation of Crimea, Putin has violated this order of things,” Portnikov continues, because he knows very well that “if Crimea can liberally in the course of a week change its jurisdiction then nothing will prevent declaratons of independence or a change in jurisdiction by Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Tuva, Yakutia, Buryatiya, [and] Kabardinia-Balkaria.

Still more fatefully, by what he is doing in Donetsk and Luhansk, Putin is opening the door for such actions by predominantly Russian territories as well. Crimea could at least be presented as ethnically different, but the others and even more  “Novorossiya” cannot possibly be described that way.

They thus open “a direct path to a Urals Republic,” like the one Yeltsin worked so hard to suppress, “to a Siberian Republic” and to all other similar arrangements.

            Given Putin’s incautious actions, the disintegration of Russia will proceed, triggered by an economic crisis. “Russia is a territory which is held together exclusively by the common striving of the population to make use of energy resources.”  If that becomes less profitable and possible, then the end will be near.

            Sanctions may bring that day closer, but other factors are at work, including massive corruption and diversion of earnings by Putin and his entourage into their own pockets, the Ukrainian analyst says.

            And once this process starts, it will move quickly, so quickly that those like Putin who believe that his deal with China will stop it miss an important detail: the Moscow-Beijing accord goes into effet only in 2018. And “today is still 2014.”  Between then and now is four years, and much can and will happen.

            History is accelerating. In the 19^th century, people looked forward “approximately a hundred years.  In the early 20^th, “in 50-year categories.” “Somewhere at the start of the 1970s, many experts came to the understanding that the Soviet Union would not last out the net 20-25 years.” Now, events are moving faster, and people need to think about four or five years out.

            Look how fast things have moved in Ukraine, he says. The same thing is going to be true of Russia.  “To talk about the Chinese contrat which will go into effet only four years from now is simply funny. Five years from now, we will lie in a completely different world in which the Russian Federation in its current form won’t exist.”

            Moreover, the Russian Federation’s demise will have enormous consequences for its neighbors because “Russia is the main generator of instability” both for itself and for them. According to Portnikov, Moscow will focus on Kazakhstan. It won’t be able to do much while Nursultan Nazarbayev is in office, “but no one knows what will be the situation there after his departure.”

            If Russia does not become “a civilized state which respects its neighbors and the norms of international law” before Nazarbayev’s departure, Portnikov says, then Russian “aggression in Kazakhstan isinevitable.” And it will involve far larger forces, far more instability, “and this will lead to serious ethnic clashes in Russia’s Middle Volga.”

            Asked when Moscow will leave Ukraine in peace, Portnikovsays that will happen “only if the Ukrainian leadership together with that of the US and the European Union agree to the following Russian conditions:” recognition of Crimea as part of Russia, the federalization of Ukraine, state status for the Russian language, and Russian control of the gas pipeline network.

            “If all these conditions were to be fulfilled, that is, if Ukraine, the US and the EU capitulate before Russia, then [Moscow] will leave us in peace,” he says. Otherwise, “it will continue its destabilizing actions” in Ukraine, and those in turn will destabilize the entire region and Russia itself.