Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 11 – The notion
that the West has a strategy for Ukraine is “a myth of Kremlin propaganda,”
Vladimir Pastukhov says. “What is happening in Ukraine is the result not so
much of the application of a mistaken strategy by the West as much as it is the
sad consequence of the absence of any strategy altogether.”
In an interview published today on
Polit.ru on the occasion of the publication of his book, “The Ukrainian
Revolution and the Russian Counter-Revolution” (in Russian, Moscow: OGI), the
St. Antony’s scholar says that as a result Western leaders are treating the symptoms
of the problem rather than the problem itself (polit.ru/article/2014/08/11/pastukhov/).
This is a more general problem, he
suggests, as can be seen in the West’s approach to the Middle East, one that
reflects an absolute lack of understanding among Western leaders of what is
going on but their sense that in every case, they “must take some sort of
position” in order to suggest to themselves and their publics that they are
adequate.
On the one hand, Pastukhov says, the
West “wants to strengthen its position in the region, especially given that
Russia is becoming ever more hostile to the West. [But] on the other hand, it
does not particularly want to get into an argument with Russia since no one
needs a major war.”
And because Western leaders feel that “a revolution is going on” in
Ukraine and that it is “necessary to stand on someone’s side,” they have
simplified the situation, declared that what is going on in Ukraine is all
about democracy and what is going on in Russia is all about reaction, and “under
this fiction,” they are employing “algorithms” from the past.
Moreover,
he continues, because Western leaders do not understand the complexities of
what is happening, they often respond in what is more a “hysterical” way than
the result of considered policy, something that is obscured only because Moscow
is behaving in an even worse way in that regard.
Sanctions,
Pastukhov says, are “to a large extent” a reflection of this, although he
hastens to add that he “is not an opponent of sanctions in general. If there is
an aggressor and a violator of the international order, then he must be
punished.” But what has happened so far is “more an attempt to comfort oneself
and show that one is doing something.”
Strategically,
however, such things are not worth a lot because if there is going to be a new
cold war, then the West must “restore the instruments of long-term impact.” It
needs to focus not on sanctions but on investments in “systems of political
influence,” something that requires the careful “study of one’s opponent.”
Unfortunately,
the Russian scholar says, in the West today, “almost all the sovietological
schools in practice were long ago disbanded.” Were that not the case, people in
the West might see that “what is taking place now is not the story of the last
10-15 years” but rather one “of approximately three hundred.”
Pastukhov
says that he views “everything which is going on not in the context of a
conflict of Russia and Ukraineas some kind of independent entities but in the
context of the continuing and rapidly accelerating collapse of an empire, which
both present-day Ukraine and present-day Russia were part of for a long time.”
An ethnic Russian himself who was born in
Ukraine, the St. Antony’s scholar says that he “never had any doubt that
Russian and Ukrainian cultures are two completely self-standing cultures with
completely different accents” even if there are “family ties” between the two.
“One
of the key problems,” he says, in this relationship is that “Russia needs not ‘fraternal’
(in quotation marks) relations with Ukraine but normal ones.” Those are two
very different things, with the first stressing a patron-client relationship and
the second one of two independent entities. Russians find it hard to shift from the first to the
second, and Ukrainians are offended that they haven’t.
That means that Russia bears much of
the responsibility for the current crisis, Pastukhov says, but Ukraine bears
some of it as well. The crisis arose “not
only as a result of the efforts of Russia to preserve patron relations and keep
Ukraine in its imperial clutches.” It
also arose because of Ukraine’s “childish disease of nationalism” and its
unwillingness to focus on the realities of its situation, preferring instead to
“speculate on its weakness.”
Ukraine now, he argues, “is not to
any degree a more democratic and more liberal state than Russia is. This is a
war in the saddest sense of equal parts of an empire on the periphery of
European civilization.” That is harsh, “but it is closer to reality” than many
of the attempts to describe it otherwise.
“Naturally, Ukraine is a victim of
obvious and shameful aggression. There is no doubt that an undeclared war is
being conducted against it. It is indisputable that part of its territory is
now occupied by Russia. But this does not mean that it is possible to say only
good things about Ukraine or nothing at all.”
There is another “simple and
indisputable fact” that must be taken into consideration, the St. Antony’s
analyst says. “The Ukrainian economy in the
form in which it has evolved to this day in the immediate and mid-term cannot
exist completely apart from the Russian economy and without financial subsidies
from third countries.”
“This is an objective reality,” albeit
for Ukrainians an unpleasant one. But what can you do, the world is an unjust
place.” Unfortunately, since 2004, Ukraine has attempted to “ignore this
reality, but to ignore a problem is not the best way of resolving it.”
Ukrainians assumed that they would
get support from the West and that Russia would unilaterally support them as
well lest it get involved in a conflict with the West. But that was a serious
miscalculation. On the one hand, the West provided less help than Kyiv
expected; and on the other, Russia decided to act unilaterally in another way.
In doing so, of course, Pastukhov
says, “Russia underestimated the strength of the national movement” and unintentionally
provoked a dramatic rise in “self-consciousness of the Ukrainian people.” Moscow thought resistance to it would be “weak,
but the resistance has turned out to be enormous.”
And that in turn has set in motion
something that may be very different than any of the participants want. “Little
children play little games; their elders need bigger ones. But then a moment
comes when the play begins to develop not according to those rules which those
engaged in the game assumed but by those which arise in the course of the game
itself.”
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