Taras Kuzio, University of Alberta
The good news is that Russian and Donbas
separatist leaders have called an end to the “New Russia” project, which had
targeted eight Russian-speaking regions of eastern and southern Ukraine for
separatist agitation and union with Russia. The bad news is that while it
always was a mistake to assume Ukraine’s Russian-speakers were fans of
president Vladimir Putin, Ukraine’s political vacuum and its selective
“de-oligarchisation” are allowing diehards from the former ruling Party of
Regions grouped in the Opposition Bloc and funded by Ukraine’s powerful gas
lobby to retain influence in eastern and southern Ukraine.
The eight regions of “New Russia” were
artificially lumped together. In reality they consist of three groups.
First are the two regions of the Donbas, which
are similar to the Crimea in their shared Soviet cultural identity and their
regional focus, with low levels of support for Ukrainian independence and 30-40
per cent aggressive support for separatism. Crimea and Donbas were the only
regions where a majority of the security forces defected to the separatists.
Yet the separatists did not have mass support
even in Donbas, and without Russia’s military intervention in August 2014 they
would have been defeated by the then ramshackle Ukrainian army and volunteer
units. Today, with separatist forces the same size as Portugal’s 40,000 strong
army, they are larger than the armies of 15 out of 28 Nato members. Added to
this is a large modern arsenal of military equipment illegally supplied by
Russia during the Minsk 1 and 2 ceasefires.
Second, Kharkiv and Odessa are swing regions
where pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian groups battled it out during the 2014
“Russian spring”, with the former prevailing. Third, separatism is non-existent
in Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhya, Kherson and Mykolayiv.
Three further factors buried Putin’s “New
Russia”.
His decision not to invade and annex the region
in spring-summer 2014 reduced euphoria among working class Russian speakers and
pensioners who, like their Crimean counterparts, believed that their standards
of living and their pensions would be higher in an expanded Russia. Putin
prefers that the
Donbas remain inside Ukraine, with Kiev paying
for war damage and the region holding a veto over Ukraine’s domestic and
foreign policies.
After the triumph of pro-Ukrainian forces,
Russian nationalist extremists and separatists from Kharkiv and Odessa fled to
the Donbas. Some of these have received Russian training and have been
targeting areas of “New Russia” outside the Donbas with terrorist attacks.
The shock effect of massive destruction of
buildings, the deaths of 7,000 civilians and the creation of 1.5m internally
displaced persons and refugees also reduced local euphoria.
Today, there are two Russian-speaking Ukraines.
The first is a civil society extension of the
Euromaidan, which has produced volunteer patriots fighting on the front line
and other volunteer groups providing support to them and to the displaced
people.
The second consists of traditional supporters of
the Party of Regions and the Communist Party, both of which have imploded, who
prioritise standards of living and “stability” over democratisation and Europe.
They represent the low efficacy voter base of
the Opposition Bloc, which may win first place in the two regions in upcoming
local elections in October.
Typical of this duality is the factory town of
Mariupol, which I visited in April. The most polluted city in Europe has many mile-long
factories where workers can be cajoled into voting for oligarch-controlled
counter-revolutionary forces threatened by reform and Europeanisation. The same
city boasts the garrison of the Azov nationalist National Guard battalion, two
thirds of whom are Rusian-speakers, and active civil society NGOs such as “New
Mariupol” run by Professor Mariya Podybaylo, and “Soldiers Mail” headed by
journalist Olena Mokrynchuk in the nearby frontline town of Volnovakha.
Externally, through the use of military, economic
and trade pressures, Russia seeks the failure of Ukraine’s European
integration. Gas negotiations collapsed last week, threatening Europe with
disruption of supplies, as in 2006 and 2009.
Ukraine’s path to Europe remains tortuous, and
not only because of Russia. Unlike the EU’s policies towards post-communist
central Europe, Brussels demands that Ukraine must undertake deep structural
reforms without a membership “carrot” and with far less financial support.
In central Europe, populist backlash against
reforms led to the election of leftist governments that nevertheless remained
pro-EU and pro-Nato. Populist backlash in Ukraine would be different and come
from anti-European, counter-revolutionary forces in the east and south.
President Petro Poroshenko must see the train
crash coming but he seems unwilling to halt it. His “de-oligarchisation”
campaign will remain feeble and fail if it does not destroy the power of
Ukraine’s pro-
Russian gas lobby, whose member lead the
Opposition Bloc and sit in Vienna. Dmytro Firtash, who a Vienna court refused to extradite to the US, had the largest bail in Austrian history –
$155m – paid by Vasily Anisimov, “a billionaire who heads the Russian Judo Federation, the governing body in Russia of Putin’s
beloved sport”.
The recent freeze by the interior ministry on the assets of Firtash’s Ostchem, Ukraine’s biggest chemicals, energy and gas
utility, should not be misunderstood. It is not the action of Peroshenko but of
the government under prime minister Arseny Yatsenyuk, backed by a rival oligarch.
Poroshenko can either continue to honour the agreement he and Kiev mayor
Vitaliy Klitschko reached with Firtash in
Vienna in March 2014 – in which Firtash brokered
Klitschkov’s withdrawal from the presidential election – or he can include the
gas lobby in his “de-oligarchisation” campaign. In so doing he would destroy
the most powerful pro-Russian camp and assist the US, Ukraine’s most important
strategic partner, in its appeal against the Vienna court decision.
Putin was surprised by the toughness and patriotism
of Ukraine’s solders and volunteers who defeated his “New Russia” project. It
is incumbent upon Poroshenko to show the same determination the Ukrainian
citizens have shown in the Euromaidan and on the front line by defeating the
counter-revolutionary internal threat posed by pro-Russian oligarchs.
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