Russias Still Does Not Get It
During my visit to Ukraine for the elections I also paid a short visit to Moscow. By coincidence the weekend was Vladimir Putin’s birthday and the anniversary of the murder of the courageous Russian journalist Ala Politkovskaya.
On my way from Red Square to the Tretiakov Gallery I passed a small park where I saw the two Russia’s. On one side of the park was an exhibition of photographs from Chechnya by Politkovskaya. On the other side of the park was a rally of pro-Putin students in orange (!) teeshirts and carrying Russian flags with Putin’s portrait. The youth group (www.putin.su) was a “Club of Putin Fanatics” who were to march to Red Square to celebrate Putin’s birthday.
The difference between Ukraine and Russia was so evident. Could you imagine a “Club of Yushchenko Fanatics” or “Club of Yanukovych Fanatics” in Ukraine? Leonid Kuchma was right in his world famous 2004 book “Ukraine is not Russia”. Vladimir Putin is writing, so I hear, a sequel entitled “Russia is not Ukraine”. He is right!
My Ukrainian colleagues advised me to take the train rather than the plane as it takes you into downtown Moscow, the famous Kyivski Vokzal. I just made the train with five minutes spare - I had failed to take into account the traffic in Kyiv which is as bad, or worse, than London. I have never seen so many expensive SUV’s and jeeps as in in Kyiv (for some reason nearly all black in colour)!
A Russian joined me in the SV compartment. He seemed to be an intellectual but I remained cautious asa foreigner in explaining my views. His anti-Putin sentiments seemed genuinely those of the Moscow intelligentsia.
In Moscow I stayed with a Western diplomat whom I acquainted on an earlier occasion when I headed an OSCE election mission in Odesa. He explained to me that Russians still do not get it, as you would say in English - they simply cannot understand developments in Ukraine. Russians see “chaos” - not democracy - as associate this “chaos” with Russia’s own “chaos” in the 1990s under the incoherent and barely sober Borys Yeltsin. Russians do not see democracy in Ukraine as they do not understand that uncertainty is a natural product of democracy.
Back in the 2004 elections it was no different. Russian political technologists who worked for the Viktor Yanukovych campaign (through Viktor Medvedchuk and Leonid Kuchma) never understood Ukraine. I remember following their so-called analyses and predicted they would be wrong. During the regular internal US government seminars on the Ukraine elections usually held at the State Department we were more likely to predict events correctly than Russian political technologists.
What are the origins of these Russian views on Ukraine?
A Norwegian scholar Tor Bukkvoll gives a number of answers in an academic article he wrote 6 years ago. He says (I believe correctly) that Russians do not get Ukraine because they do not see it as a foreign country. Therefore, they have no policy towards Ukraine.
Other reasons are what the Moscow scholar Dmitri Trenin, with whom I was on a panel with in Washington earlier this year, says are the lessons learnt by Putin from his crass intervent5ion in Ukraine in 2004. Namely, that there is no such thing as a “pro Russian” force in Ukraine. The Party of Regions is not “pro Russian” in the Moscow sense of that term. Five years ago I wrote an article entitled “Ukraine’s Foreign Policy: Neither Pro-Western nor Pro Russian, but Pro Kuchma”. Party of Regions foreign policy is pro-Regions, Renat Akhmetov and Donetsk - not pro-Western or pro-Russian.
If , after all, Alyaksandr Lukashenka is not “pro Russian” enough for Moscow than who is in Ukraine?
We should all thank Russians for their arrogance, chauvinism and incomprehension about Ukraine. May it continue indefiinetly!
On my way back to Ukraine I shared a compartment with a Russian young woman. As we arrived in Kyiv I said to her “Welcome to democracy”. Her face growled in response to my point that Ukraine is not Russia.
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What if the Russians are right, because they sense and understand a post-Soviet development Ukraine is going through, which they have experienced themselves?
The fight still goes between a pro-Western and a pro-Soviet approach, with both sides pulling for “their” Ukraine.
Where is the genuinely pro-Ukrainian approach?
Sigurd, Norway