DOUBLETAKE: Is Ukraine a Failed State?

Written by Grzegorz Gil

Since the collapse of the Viktor Yanukovych regime in early 2014 and the onset of Russian-supported separatism in the east of the country, Ukraine’s socio-economic indicators have plummeted. The new government in Kyiv has scrambled to secure new credit and support to keep the economy afloat while slowly reforming its over-bloated, corrupted public sector in order to become more dynamic and open to competition. The result however, has been drastic. In just one year, the hryvnia, Ukraine’s currency, has lost 60 per cent of its value against the dollar; while its gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by seven per cent. Inflation has risen at a dramatic rate of 34 per cent in only 12 months and Ukrainians now face a 285 per cent increase in gas prices and a 50 per cent increase in electricity costs over the same period of time. On the political level, there appears to be a growing level of frustration within the society. The people are more and more of the opinion that the government is not doing enough to enact much needed reforms to stop widespread corruption, while the war in the east of the country has taken a significant toll on the both Ukraine’s economic and social well-being.

All of these facts have pushed many people to ask the much dreaded question – is Ukraine a failed state? As expected, some answer this question with a definite “yes” not seeing much hope for the future of Ukrainian statehood, while others are more convinced that the current difficulties are a temporary obstacle and not a long-term impediment that would affect Ukraine’s political system. In light of this, we asked a Polish scholar and researcher on failed states, Grzegorz Gil, to closely examine certain assertions about Ukraine as well as the definition of “failed state” in the current context, which may help us get closer to find our own answer.

Assertion one: A failed state is not an analytical category but rather an axiologically-burdened term reflecting one’s preferences or even propaganda. However, even if Ukraine is not an archetypical “failed state”, the current crisis invokes the question of the very nature of its state-building and nation-building processes.

The crisis and strife in Ukraine has once again brought failed state semantics and experts to the centre of the debate. The term “failed state” had been popularised in the mid-1990s by the United States as a new label for civil conflicts and complex humanitarian emergencies, and was often used to stigmatise weak and conflict-prone states. Empirically the “measure” of a failed state primarily refers to the quality of government (its legitimacy, security and capacity) and a lack of key attributes (delegitimisation, defragmentation and distress). However, excluding extreme cases of state collapse, such as Sierra Leone and Somalia in the 1990s, a failed state category is often relative and subjective.

Firstly, there is no universal threshold above which quantitative features, such as low legitimacy, civil strife or weak capacity, change into qualitative ones – “state failure”. Thus, even fierce sectarian violence and civil war do not necessarily equate to a failed state situation, as the latter is mostly defined by its scale and protracted character. It is noteworthy that each of the previously recognised “failed states”, or even collapsed states, could not fail according to the international law which presumes the continuation doctrine, in other words a state maintains its legal identity even if it loses portions of its territories or undergoes some other radical change.

Secondly, with no single accepted source on the definition of a failed state, the rhetoric of world powers, such as Russia, about others, in this case Ukraine, is vague and becomes truth only through repetition. Even though there are no exact criteria that would determine what a failed state is, some states are certainly stronger, more capable or less dysfunctional than others – as depicted by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine’s “Fragile States Index” (FSI), which was previously called the “Failed States Index”. In the 2014 edition of the FSI Ukraine ranked only 133rd out of 177 countries, but it needs to be kept in mind that this place in fact refers to 2013. Nonetheless, according to the ranking Ukraine is not an archetypical failed state like SierraLeone or Somalia.

Aside from the methodology of such rankings, Ukraine’s statehood should be seen in the broader context of the 25th anniversary of its independence. There is no doubt that Ukraine’s sovereignty has always been a complicated issue, one that could be called into question.To the casual observer, a Russian one in particular, the current crisis taking place in the country is just one more argument in favour of the “artificial character” of the Ukrainian state; a state that such an observer sees as regionally and ethno-linguistically divided. The name Ukraine itself derives from the Russian okráina, meaning a “frontier region” or “outskirts”. What is more, the splintered history of Ukraine cannot disqualify it as a state but defines it as a “cleft country” (a term coined by Samuel P. Huntington) divided between the western and the Orthodox orientations. Even if the independence of Ukraine was welcomed by 92 per cent of the Ukrainians (though only 54 per cent in Crimea), the main challenge to the state- and nation-building processes has been to bond the Russian minority, which makes up to 22 per cent of the population, with the Ukrainian state.

In practice, a perception of the Russian threat to the young Ukrainian statehood was Kyiv’s excuse for the lack of state-buildingand good governance in the 1990s. After the stagnant presidency of Leonid Kuchma which promoted a “blackmail state”, the Orange Revolution’s shift westward was countered by Viktor Yanukovych’s reign. The impeachment of Yanukovych was then called illegal and the EuroMaidan Revolution “illegitimate” and inspired by the West. However, two Pew Research Centre surveys conducted in May 2014 show that 77 per cent of Ukrainians, as well as 58 per cent of Russian speakers in Donbas, want to remain united. Yet, they probably consider this unity in two completely different ways.

Nevertheless, this strategic cleavage is not the only cause of Ukraine’s political and economic misery. From the very beginning a lack of capacity building and rent-seeking for the transit of gas and other schemes have been just as damaging. In addition, independence has institutionalised problems such as energy dependency, oligarchic rule or rampant cronyism and corruption that impede state and social modernisation. Such a “soft state” – as Gunnar Myrdal originally referred to the South Asian governments – operates amidst corruption, incompetence and disorder. In Ukraine’s case, “management” was preoccupied with oligarchs’ profits since president Kuchma parcelled out control of heavy industry to regional clans. As a result, in today’s Ukraine the 50 richest citizens control almost 50 per cent of the country’s GDP. Not surprisingly, in the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index 2014 Ukraine ranks 142nd out of 175. All of these facts suggest that Ukraine is not a failed state in the conventional sense, but it is a state that has been faced with an endemic political crisis and whose well-known economic problems, amplified by Russian influence, only increase the difficulty of succeeding in any area.

Assertion two: After the Cold War the label of a failed state has been used to add a security dimension in order to legitimise aggressive policies. It also serves as a tool to reintegrate the Russian sphere of influence by direct or veiled interference.

Modern political history has taught us that a state’s formation process is not linear. State failure is usually more spectacular and occasionally used to annex parts of weak states (consider the partitions of Poland), install a puppet regime or to stabilise and rebuild them in a more liberal way. After 1990 Russia has clearly intended to restore the former Soviet sphere of influence and cling to the first two patterns. Though Ukraine is a very special case both in political and economic terms, the Kremlin’s strategy refers also to Transnistria, the South Caucasus and Central Asia. To this end Moscow wanted to institutionalise its supremacy through the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Nevertheless, at various times Ukraine, Georgia and Uzbekistan, which are out of the CSTO, resisted adhering to or fully co-operating with these forums under Russia’s conditions. Thus, an instrument of last resort for the Kremlin was to channel sub-state separatisms to its “near abroad” against prospective geopolitical losses.

Russian presence in the separatist republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia was simply justified as a defence of ethnic Russians and its legally deployed peacekeeping troops. But Russia also aspires to gauge order in the post-Soviet space. Even you are not fully convinced about this, think of how Russia’s former president, Dmitry Medvedev, openly qualified Kirgizstan as a state on the brink of failure in 2010, signalling a possible need for Russian intervention as a gesture of “goodwill”.

Russia has always perceived Ukraine as part and parcel of a founding myth of Russian statehood– regardless of the latter’s political status. Suffice to say that the media in Russia continue to use the preposition na (on) Ukraine, which a more apolitical description than v (in) Ukrajini – the politically correct expression that Ukrainian authorities have recently begun championing aiming to semantically uphold their state’s sovereign status. Overall, Ukraine’s “failure” has served Russia’s geopolitical interests and well predates 2014. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has presented Ukraine as a sick, pseudo-state on the road to international isolation. This sentiment was even reflected in the well-known 1994 CIA report which stressed that, except for a significant Russian minority, the NATO issue “may bring Ukraine to the verge of existence as a sovereign state”. The Russian position was also expressed by Putin in his private remarks to George W. Bush at the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit. Subsequently, each pro-western regime change in Kyiv urged Russia to either meddle or curb gas supplies (or both). The former is easier to do successfully in Ukraine than elsewhere as 17 million ethnic Russians and an unconsolidated sense of Ukrainian nationhood in Crimea and the Donbas region made Ukraine a particularly vulnerable state.

That is why, after Ukraine’s regime change in February 2014 Putin had an easy task. All he had to do was to open up a source of “domestic” instability in eastern Ukraine. In the broader context the current crisis and the war in Donbas reflect a conflict between legality, represented by an anti-terrorist campaign, and legitimacy – self-determination in this case. These two are always intertwined, but also at odds. To avoid accusations of unlawful conduct, Russia keeps up an appearance of non-interference in Ukraine by acting below the level of open war,as well as by simple Soviet-era propaganda.The Kremlin foments the illegitimacy of the new “Nazi” government, lack of order and human rights violations. Responding to these accusations at a meeting with the European Commission in Brussels Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk replied that “Russia will not succeed in making Ukraine a failed state”.

To this end the Kremlin has already (successfully) securitised the annexation of Crimea. In the case of Donbas, it brought back the term Novorossiya that was used to denote large swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine prior to the 1917 Revolution. The difference is that the annexation of Crimea has helped Putin to boost his domestic legitimacy, while the war in Donbas is the hostage of Ukraine’s pro-Russian alignment. Overall, two Levada Centre surveys conducted in Russia in August 2014 suggest that Putin’s policy towards Ukraine faces limited domestic opposition and that Russians continue to suspect the West of installing a puppet regime in Kyiv to the detriment of the legal authorities.

Assertion three: The war in Donbas is a key argument for the artificial character of Ukraine which paradoxically could also consolidate Ukrainian statehood, as war generally creates demand for institutions.

Historically, both declarations of Ukrainian independence (1941, 1991) were a side-effect of internal turbulence in revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union. It could suggest that Ukraine’s existence goes hand-in-hand with Russia’s weakness and vice versa. However, today’s situation differs from previous periods in Kyiv’s pro-European drift sustained by the growing pro-western civil society. Of course, regional polarisation and a corrupted oligarchic system need time to be toned down. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has to prove it by winning the “anti-terrorist operation” in Donbas that primarily depends on Russia and western, including not-lethal, military support. Bearing in mind that apart from voluntary extinction a state cannot fail due to internal disturbances, Russia has to legitimise further territorial losses of Ukraine. This is the case for the two pro-Russian self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples’ Republics which held status referenda and separate elections.

Such externally sponsored quasi-statehood, despite the lack of Russia’s diplomatic recognition thus far, stands for a metaphorical failure of Ukraine. In parallel to the conflict, discussions on the federalisation of Ukraine have taken place. Ironically, this issue was ignored during the pro-Russian Yanukovych’s term. However, even with a more federalised Ukraine, an end to the stalemate is unlikely unless Russia changes its attitude. Conversely, the Kremlin intends to maintain low intensity conflicts in order to paralyse the state-building process and western pivots of its former subordinates.

Given the pro-Russian sentiment in Donbas, one should consider how crucial it really is to Ukraine’s economy. Even if the region produces 20 per cent of GDP and about a quarter of Ukraine’s export volume, this story also covers a myth since the coal from Donbas is subsidised and the region itself has been artificially revived over the last three decades, mainly for social reasons. Apart from space and defence components that Russia imported from eastern Ukraine, driving this separatism is equally risky in political terms as only 17 per cent truly want to secede. In other words,Putin’s “artificial state” argument primarily serves to undermine Ukraine’s credibility as a worthy partner for NATO and, increasingly, for the EU.

In the short-term, the prospects for Ukraine’s statehood seem to be akin to “the prisoner’s dilemma”, in which both players’ rational and dominant strategy is to win unilaterally due to the lack of mutual trust. Accordingly, there are four models of payoffs. A unilateral win for the pro-western government of Ukraine would be if it joins European political and military structures without compromising Donbas, which would in fact put an end to Putin’s “artificial state” argument. Conversely, for the Kremlin the federalisation scenario – if accepted by Kyiv – could lead to Ukraine’s legal partition and its final collapse. It would be a prize for Russia. Another option is that Russia and its proxies mitigate the pro-western pivot of Ukraine as well as stop sponsoring the separatists. This lets Ukraine stay formally intact and profit from eastern exports. Likewise, Russia aggrandises the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union, which seems to be likely a paper tiger without Ukraine. This “Finlandisation” scenario would prevent future Ukrainian disintegration and lead to a possible win-win situation. Finally, penalty payoffs for both sides would be represented by Ukraine’s rapprochement to liberal Europe with protracted destabilisation of eastern Ukrainian quasi-statehood up to the Dnieper River. Such a conflict would surely need more direct Russian assistance and thus force the West to act decisively. Ironically, this deadlock could also create incentives for the state’s development and for nation building in Ukraine, as every war promotes the demand for effective institutions and unity.

In conclusion, Ukraine will not utterly fail as long as it is still “manageable” by Russia. However, the most important question that should be asked remains unanswered: Is Putin’s Russia truly a rational player in this matter?

Grzegorz Gil is a Polish political scientist and adjunct professor at the department of international relations of the Maria Curie Skłodowska University in Lublin. He specialises in state failure semantics, socioeconomic correlates of war and most recently joined the “international state building” research project.

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