The Battle for Novorussiya

[Paul Rigby]

20 February 2015 2:42 PM

Putin's Bite is Worse than His Bark - should we have been surprised?

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2...l#comments

I have not yet had time to read the entire report by the House of Lords EU sub-committee on Russia, which can be accessed here http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa...15/115.pdf

but I do urge my readers to study it, especially the section beginning on page 53. the crisis in Ukraine and the EU's response'. I suspect the whole thing has benefited by the presence on the sub-committee of Lord (Norman) Lamont, who knows a thing or two about the EU. There is also quite an impressive list of witnesses, who might be expected to know what they were talking about, including Vaclav Klaus, former President of the Czech republic, and Sir Tony Brenton, former British ambassador in Moscow.

But it also has a pleasingly sober willingness to examine things that are generally ignored in the Putin is Hitler' hysteria which has engulfed so much of politics and the media.

In his evidence, Mr Klaus said some very interesting things (it is easily found by clicking on the red numbers opposite his name in the list of witnesses)

For example , after opening by saying : I am also no a prioristic advocate or defender of Russia or Mr Putin due to our communist experience. I am the last one to be motivated to speak positively about that country. However, our life with communism taught us something. Since then, I have always tried to oppose lies and manipulative propaganda, which I see in this case just now.

He then says :Moreover, in April in our commentary on the situation in Ukraine we stated that Ukraine was a heterogeneous, divided country, and that an attempt to forcefully and artificially change its geopolitical orientation would inevitably result in its break-up, if not its destruction. We considered the country too fragile and with too weak an internal coherence to try to make a sudden change. I am sorry to say that it developed according to our expectations. I am afraid that Ukraine was sort of misused. The West suddenly and unexpectedly offered Ukraine early EU affiliation.

I am afraid that the West, especially western Europe, has accepted a very simplified interpretation of events in Ukraine. According to the West, the Ukraine crisis has been caused by external Russian aggression. The internal causes of the crisis have been ignored, and so are the evident ethnic, ideological and other divisions in Ukraine.

The developments that have taken place since the spring of this year have proved that this approach cannot lead to a solution of the problem. It only deepens the division of the country, increases the tragic costs of its crisis and further destabilises the country. So I do not see that the politicians in Ukraine are looking for a political solution. They do not have any compromise proposals that they could offer to the people of eastern Ukraine to win their confidence. They rely on fighting, on repression and on unrealistic expectations of western economic and military aid.'

He then adds: I cannot see inside the heads of leading Russian politicians but I do not believe that Russia wanted or needed this to happen. My understanding is that Russia was dragged into it. Dragging Russia into the conflict is a way of making Ukraine a permanent hotspot of global tensions and creating permanent instability in a country that deserves, after decades of suffering under communism, a quiet and positive evolution.'

He says (Q.211) that he suspects that the EU had got into the habit of making vague future promises of EU memevrship to Ukraine .

But this answer , from a leading statesman of a formerly-Communist Central European state, who cannot conceivably be accused of being a Kremlin stooge or of desiring the return of the USSR, is absolutely gripping:

I am afraid that just reading the misleading headlines in the media and watching CNN or BBC news is giving such a distorted picture of the situation. I am afraid that the knowledge is missing. I was shocked two weeks ago. There was a long interview with a 21 year-old Ukrainian student in Prague, a lady from western Ukraine. She was on the side of western Ukraine politically. A question was put to her: "What about the Crimea?". She was a 21 year-old student abroad, which means that she was a literate person. "I visited Crimea for the first time in my life last year, when I was 20, and I was absolutely shocked that no one understood my language. They supposed that I am from Moldova". For me it was eye-opening that there was such a problem. The eastern part of the country is really, really different, and the question is whether we can help.

I would suggest one thing in a negative sense: do not support the Maidan demonstrations in an unconditional way. That is the best recommendation that I would dare to give to anyone in western Europe and in Britain.'

The report itself, in the passage I named above, also shows quite clearly that the EU simply did not take seriously the Russian objections to the Association Agreement . Nor did it understand or take seriously Russia's very real fears about the possible cancellation of the treaty by which it retained fleet basing rights at Sevastopol.

There is, of course the general problem about so many people in the West assuming that Russia's supine, stunned posture under Yeltsin after 1991 was normal and likely to endure. A Russian witness, Fyodor Lukyanov, said the European Commission never showed any interest in discussing Russia's concerns over the planned agreement.

The Russians never even saw the planned text until the summer of 2013, and plainly assumed that a resolution was still a long way off, not least because the EU were still very hostile to Ukraine because of the continued imprisonment of Yulia Timoshenko.

Even so, there was alarm. Another Russian official witness, Dmitriy Poliyanskiy, said The detail in the annexes "clearly showed to [the Russians] that with such an agreement Ukraine would no longer be able to maintain the same level of relations" with Russia'.

And from August Russia began to fight against it, using coercive economic diplomacy'. Andrii Kuzmenko, Ukrainian Acting Ambassador to the UK, spoke of a "number of different wars'a customs war, a gas war, a milk war, a meat war, cheese war, a chocolate war", which "the Russians started against Ukraine with the solemn purpose of pursuing us to postpone and then refuse European integration."

No doubt these Russian methods were unpleasant. But the point is that they were a reaction to an EU initiative. And by November 2013, Russian hostility to the agreement was so obvious and fierce that the EU were at last aware of it. Whether they understood its depth and power is another matter.

Paragraph 181 is worth quoting in full : Mr John Lough, Associate Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House (Britain's premier foreign affairs think tank), informed us that Russia "suddenly woke up" to the challenge, having believed the AA to be "a totally under-resourced and hopeless initiative that was being conducted by an organisation with so many divisions in it."266 Mr Lukyanov agreed that Russia was surprised that the signature was imminent, because the situation in Ukraine"corruption, dysfunction" and the detention of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenkosuggested that Ukraine was far from meeting the requisite conditions. However, when the issue of Tymoshenko's fate was "removed from the picture and the decision was made that it should be signed anyway", then "Russia woke up'.

There's some dispute about whether, at this stage, the EU was ready to listen Russia's concerns.

In any case, the putsch against Yanukovych followed soon afterwards. The report recounts By February, Sir Tony Brenton explained, the "Russians had decided that there was a great western plot against them, probably more American than EU, to displace them from their oldest and closest friend, Ukraine". 291 The trope of a western-fomented plot was one that recurred in Russian political thinking: in the words of Dr Alexander Libman, Associate of Eastern Europe and Eurasia Division, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, in the "eyes of the Russian leadership, Euromaidan is just one more step in the sequence of events, which were initiated by the West'".

This was greatly reinforced by moves in Kiev to de-privilege the Russian language, and to make NATO membership a Ukrainian national strategy.

But most pressing of all was the issue of Sevastopol,. Paragrph 193 relates:

In particular, Moscow feared that the 2010 Kharkiv Agreements, which had extended the Russian Navy's lease of Sevastopol as a base for 25 years from 2017 until 2042, would be renounced. Professor Roy Allison has pointed out that even in 2010 "President Yanukovych's approval of this extension was virulently opposed by Ukrainian opposition politicians, suggesting that efforts may well be made to revise it in the future." On 1 March 2014, three former Ukrainian Presidents, Leonid Kravchuk, Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yushchenko, called on the new government to renounce the Kharkiv Agreements. Mr Lukyanov said that President Putin's "real motivation was national security and the risk that the new rule in Kiev would very quickly denounce" the agreements of 2010 that prolonged Russia's base in Crimea for 25 years.'

I think that is very probably the case. Here's a good line, too Sir Tony Brenton said that "the assumption that the Russians don't like this but they will probably live with it' was reasonably consistent with the Russia that we thought we had prior to the Maidan revolution."

Yes, the Russia we thought we had'. But that Russia had been, for many years, an illusion. President Putin's speech in Munich in February 2007 was a clear change of tone, for anyone who wanted to know. But it was ignored. In the end, we tested him by action, and found that , after all, he did bite, and his bite was worse than his bark his bark, an unusual thing in modern politics. Now we complain about hs teeth, but is that a rational attitude towards events.