Lilia Shevtsova. Journal of Democracy. Volume 25, Issue 3, July 2014.
The Ukrainian events of late 2013 and the first half of 2014 reflect the flowing together of several different crises. The first is the crisis of the post-Soviet political model. After the USSR’s 1991 collapse, this model emerged in all the newly independent countries except the Baltic states. It rests on personalized power, with a decided tilt toward repressive rule. As a place where large swaths of society have begun demanding the rule of law, Ukraine has become a problem for the forces of personalized power and repression throughout the post-Soviet space.
Next, the Ukraine situation casts light on the crisis of soft authoritarian rule in Russia. The pro-EU movement in Ukraine intensified the survival worries that have troubled the Vladimir Putin regime since large postelection protests broke out in Russia in 2011. In response, Putin has shifted toward harsh personal rule and an effort to blunt Western influence.
Then there is the crisis that flows from Russia’s struggle to control Ukraine-a struggle that implies the end of the post-Cold War settlement and with it any hope for Euro-Russian integration. Instead of trying to join Western civilization, Russia is now striving to become its antithesis. Finally, what has been happening in and to Ukraine has highlighted the normative crisis that besets the liberal democracies and their policies. These events have not only revealed liberal civilization’s failure to defend Ukrainians’ “choice for Europe,” but have also laid bare that civilization’s inability to stand in the way of attempts to undermine the existing world order.
History has taken a trying turn. The liberal democracies have been caught off guard by an offensive from an archaic civilization that is pre- pared to destabilize the existing world order for the sake of its own survival. We have yet to see whether, and to what extent, the “Ukrainian shock” will snap the liberal community out of its confusion, forcing it to reclaim not only its principles but also its will and ability to stand up for them.
Ukraine has always occupied a special place in the political consciousness of both Russia’s political elite and Russian society as a whole. There are a number of reasons for this. They range from shared economic interests to the historical interconnectedness of two peoples who shared a single country for a long time. What is far more important, however, is the continuing refusal of the Russian political class (guided as it still is by a great-power mentality) to treat Ukrainians as a separate and distinct people with every right to an independent state.
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union more than twenty years ago, Moscow has treated Ukraine with paternalism and condescension, viewing it as an ersatz state. Putin launched periodic “gas wars” (in 2006, 2008, and 2009) meant to strengthen Russia’s hold on Ukraine by means of energy-related blackmail. During the 2004 Orange Revolution, Moscow intervened in Ukrainian affairs by openly backing Viktor Yanukovych’s bid for the presidency. That is when it became evident that Ukraine had become Vladimir Putin’s personal project. He began treating Ukraine as a Russian domestic issue that he could exploit in order to strengthen his own regime. Until 2013, however, the Kremlin had no reason to be aggressive and expansionist toward Ukraine. Moscow was not yet ready to confront the West openly, and with Russian society relatively quiescent, external aggression to shore up domestic control did not seem necessary.
The hardening and sharpening of the Kremlin’s approach to Ukraine came after large popular protests broke out in Russia over the flawed Duma elections of 2011. These demonstrations, which continued into 2012, were a shock to the Putin regime and got it thinking harder than before about how to keep Russian society within the authoritarian grasp of the state. The new survival paradigm that Putin began putting in place during 2013 was one that he had previewed in his “Munich somersault” address of February 2007, when for the first time he sharply critiqued the West in general and the United States in particular.
The Putin Doctrine may be summarized as follows: First, Russia is a special “state-civilization” based on a return to “traditional values” and “sealed” by traditional religions. One need not have a particularly active imagination to see that Putin is evoking an order based on personalized power and the individual’s submission (at least in many political respects) to the state. Behind this rhetoric lurks the specter of a return to an archaic, militant, fundamentalist autocracy clearly poised against the world’s liberal democracies.
Second, Russia has become the chief defender of Christianity and faith in God. In September 2013, Putin claimed that “many Euro-Atlantic countries effectively embark on a path of renouncing their roots, including Christian values, which underlie Western civilization.” The old Soviet Union was also keen on spreading its ideology around the globe. But today’s Kremlin intends to do more: It seeks to offer the world its vision of moral values.
Third, in November 2011 Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan signed a pact forming the Eurasian Economic Union, with the stated intention of bringing a wider Eurasian Union into being by 2015. The idea is to give the Kremlin its own galaxy by unifying the post-Soviet space (starting with a customs union) and making it what the 2011 agreement calls an “independent center of global development.” The Kremlin’s struggle for control over Ukraine’s fate makes the seriousness of this plan quite plain.
Finally, Russia has a duty to defend the “Russian World,” meaning Russian-speaking minorities in other countries. This provides a ready- made pretext for meddling in those countries’ internal affairs. The Crimea annexation is an example of how efforts to defend the “Russian World” might work in the future.
Putin appears to truly believe that the West poses a threat not only on the state level (the level of Russia’s external interests) but also on the level of society and the Russian way of life. He has not merely critiqued Western civilization, but has gone on to suggest that Russia is becoming the Anti-West, the force that will counterbalance and oppose the liberal democracies. Thus, the essence of the Putin Doctrine lies not only in rejecting the West but also in containing it-in the sense both of thwarting liberal-democratic norms within Russia and of thwarting Western political interests in the wider world.
Ukraine has become the testing ground for this new doctrine. The Ukrainian revolution of early 2014 has given the Kremlin an enemy that it can designate and neutralize. According to Moscow, Russia’s security and future are threatened by Ukraine’s extreme nationalists, who receive funding from the West (mainly the United States) and support from fifth- columnists (“national traitors”) inside Russia. The fusing of foes foreign and domestic into a single force is important to note.
The Kremlin sought to begin its containment of the West in Ukraine by trying to eradicate the very idea of the EuroMaidan. To the Kremlin, any movement resembling the EuroMaidan is evil incarnate and must not be allowed to prevail-whether in Ukraine, Russia, or any other post-Soviet state. The Ukrainian situation offers Putin a useful occasion for stamping out the very idea of European values or of movement toward Europe, as well as the idea that mass protest can be a force for democratic change in the post-Soviet space.
In its treatment of Ukraine, Moscow is of course revealing its great- power and imperialistic aspirations. Yet these aspirations are not ends in themselves, but merely a means for achieving the Kremlin’s domestic political aims. This is not to say that the Kremlin worked out everything in advance. Putin’s Russia may have a general goal of containing the West, but its specific moves are situational. Putin is constantly experimenting, seeking new venues and maneuvers and testing Western reactions. For instance, as long as Yanukovych held power in Kyiv, Moscow had no need to weaken Ukraine’s central government by annexing Crimea. But once Yanukovych fled and leaders unwilling to dance to Moscow’s tune took his place, the Kremlin switched tactics and began working to make Ukraine a failed state. The Crimea annexation and clashes in the south and east of Ukraine soon followed. At the time of this writing in late May 2014, Ukraine’s government has succeeded in stabilizing the situation in the south, where the overwhelming bulk of the populace would like to stay within a Ukraine that is independent of Russia. Whether the eastern parts of Ukraine secede altogether or merely remain zones of unrest, the Kremlin will have at hand many methods of making and keeping Ukraine an unstable place controlled by Russia.
In order to put a veneer of legitimacy on its meddling in Ukraine’s affairs, the Kremlin hauled out old slogans about the need to “protect Russian speakers.” Curiously, Moscow has consistently ignored real discrimination against ethnic Russians in Central Asia (Turkmenistan has been an especially difficult country in this regard), while deciding to ride to their rescue in places where no such problems exist. The annexation of Crimea, “approved” by a local referendum held after Russian armed forces had occupied the peninsula, conjured up historical parallels to the Third Reich’s Anschluss with Austria and wresting of the Sudetenland away from Czechoslovakia. Without going farther into these comparisons, it can be said that the Crimea annexation marks a watershed of sorts. Geopolitically, it has thrown Europe back not merely to the Cold War (when the two sides at least played by some rules), but all the way back to the 1930s, when a revanchist Germany ignored the rules completely. Today’s Russia has taken on the role of a revanchist state. In order to preserve the status quo inside Russia, the Kremlin has ventured to undermine the world order and the principles underlying it.
Reformatting Ukraine
The Russian regime has been demonstrating that it can successfully deploy a host of techniques in its quest to preserve its power. A partial list of those now being used in Ukraine includes:
- Support from a local pro-Russian lobby (represented with diminishing results by close-to-the-Kremlin Viktor Medvedchuk and his Ukrainian Choice movement, the Ukrainian communists, and in part also by the once-dominant Party of Regions, though new pro-Russian forces can be expected to emerge in southeastern Ukraine);
- The dispatching of teams of Russian political strategists and military advisors, some of whom have come to Ukraine voluntarily to fight for the “Russian course”;
- The deployment of Russian provocateur brigades to stir up conflict between southeastern Ukrainians and the national government in Kyiv, with Russian media playing a major role as an instrument of “information aggression”;
- Attempts to install pro-Russian separatists as local leaders;
- Efforts to influence leading Ukrainian politicians, particularly Yulia Tymoshenko, whom the Kremlin views as its preferred leader;
- Efforts to pressure Ukrainian oligarchs who have business interests in Russia (primarily Rinat Akhmetov, Ihor Kolomoyskiy, and newly elected Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko);
- Constant Russian TV propaganda (some of which is now being blocked in parts of Ukraine) meant to paint Russia as Ukraine’s savior while stoking hostility toward the Kyiv government and Ukrainians who look to the West;
- Attempts to suffocate Ukraine by squeezing its energy supplies (in May 2014, Putin demanded as a precondition for any dialogue that Kyiv pay US$3.5 billion in order to clear up what he claims Russia was owed for prior gas shipments).
Although the Kremlin has been unable to put together a strategy for Russia’s development, it has found time to draw up a program for reformatting Ukraine. This program calls for a new Ukrainian constitution with a federal structure and substantial regional autonomy, plus guarantees of Ukrainian neutrality and military nonalignment as well as measures to legitimize the separatist and terrorist forces in the east. In effect, Moscow wants an amorphous Ukraine that will be vulnerable to regional secession movements and barred from ever joining NATO. It is ironic that the Kremlin, which is now clamoring for Ukraine’s federalization, has made its own state unitary by stripping Russia’s regions and republics of autonomy.
The Kremlin’s goal of a reformatted Ukrainian state can be achieved only by Russian occupation or a deal made with the West that forces Ukrainian leaders to accept rules imposed by a concert of foreign powers. As of this writing in May 2014, the Kremlin is working hard to make the second scenario a reality. Washington is cold to Moscow’s reformat- ting ideas, so the Kremlin is now looking to Europe. The Kremlin sees a Munich-like accord as a method for solving the Ukrainian problem that the Kremlin itself has deliberately caused. The response of the liberal democracies to Moscow’s cynical ploy will reveal whether or not they can adhere to the norms that they preach.
But even if the West refuses to aid in “reorganizing” the Ukrainian state, the Kremlin is not likely to abandon its efforts to keep Ukraine within its orbit. The thinking goes something like this: “Sooner or later, the West will grow tired of Ukraine and will have to recognize that the country lies in Russia’s ‘area of interest.’ Any Ukrainian leader will have to engage in dialogue with us and will come under our influence.” The behavior of the leading European powers, especially Germany, lends credence to the Kremlin’s belief that the West will seek some sort of compromise deal in order to make the Ukraine issue “go away.” It appears that European leaders are afraid of making Putin feel cornered, and are trying to give him a chance to save face by leaving a door open for talks regarding Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has announced (via Twitter on 12 April 2014), “The world order is being restructured … [and] the West has to accept it.”
The prospect of Russian troops crossing Russia’s long border with Ukraine in large numbers can be used to blackmail Kyiv and the liberal democracies into making concessions. Putin believes that the West’s massive support for Ukraine is largely a bluff: He has intentionally raised the stakes, provoking a real confrontation with unpredictable consequences-he creates the impression that a full-on Russian military incursion into Ukraine could still happen-because he understands that Western leaders are not prepared to escalate the conflict. After all, no one in the West wants to go to war with Russia over Ukraine. Hence the Ukraine crisis is not only helping Putin to solve his regime’s internal political problems; it is also aiding him in gauging the West’s prepared- ness to act collectively in resistance to Moscow’s aggression and the Kremlin’s new foreign-policy assertiveness.
Putin’s current tactical advantage is readily apparent: He has raised his approval rating at home; he has rallied Russians to face a common threat; he has won back an elite class that had been starting to doubt him; he has remilitarized Russian society; and he has laid bare the West’s strategic weakness and disunity. Putin also saw that the West has not yet figured out where to draw the “red line” that other international actors must not cross. The leading Western powers claimed that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would cross that red line. Meanwhile, Russia has been asserting itself in Ukraine in other ways, including some that violate Ukraine’s constitution. These incursions the West’s leaders have chosen to ignore.
True, there are signs that the Kremlin underestimated how economically burdensome the annexation of Crimea would prove to be while overestimating the strength of separatist, pro-Russian feeling among residents of southeastern Ukraine. Moscow has switched to a more pragmatic approach, trying to raise the economic price of Ukraine’s pro- Western trajectory while promising dialogue in exchange for concessions from Kyiv. On May 23, Putin vowed that “we will respect the choice of the Ukrainian people” even as he laid out conditions for an exit from the crisis that included a commitment by Kyiv not to fight terrorism and separatism in eastern Ukraine. Thus one may expect to see the Kremlin continuing to shift its tactics even as its goal-the destabilization of Ukraine-remains the same.
Revanchism versus Liberal Civilization
The Ukraine situation has also revealed that liberal civilization lacks effective instruments to stop states that are bent on violating international norms. The institutions founded after World War II to protect those norms-the UN General Assembly and above all the UN Security Council-have proven themselves unable to stop revanchist states, especially if those states are nuclear powers with Security Council vetoes. The international institutions that represent the liberal democracies (NATO and the EU) do not dare to resist, fearing-quite justifiably-the return of nuclear confrontation. One gets the impression that the West is willing to acquiesce in a return to “spheres of influence” as a way of “man- aging” Russia’s regional expansionism without risking an even greater destabilization of the global order. Beyond that, Western leaders seem to be hoping that Putin is rational and pragmatic enough not to make the next risky move.
Many in the West hope that the sanctions imposed on certain members of the Russian elite will bring it down to earth and caution it against backing new aggressions. Such reasoning fails to factor in the survival logic of Russia’s personalized power system. This system of rule appears to have entered a phase of decline, and the Kremlin appears to grasp this. Hence new and quite risky survival strategies are coming to seem more thinkable. Putin can no longer return to soft authoritarianism and building constructive relations with the West. He is too reliant on a traditional electorate that he has whipped up into a militaristic frenzy. From now on, he can only continue down the trail he began to blaze in Ukraine. If he stops or turns back (that is, if he returns to partnership with the West and “surrenders” Ukraine to Western influence), his voters and his praetorian guard (meaning the Federal Security Service and the rest of Russia’s military and security establishment) will see him as a weakling or even a traitor. Putin himself likes to talk about how the weak get beaten up; he knows that he cannot jump out of his moving truck but can only shift gears and do a bit of tactical steering to fit circumstances.
If Western sanctions were more serious, would Putin and his team feel their bite? So far, the sanctions that the West has imposed-they apply to specific members of the Russian ruling class-have actually facilitated the regime’s closing of ranks behind its leader. Even before the EuroMaidan, Putin was responding to Western moves such as the U.S. Magnitsky Act by publicly telling wealthy Russians to bring their financial and economic assets back inside Russia’s borders. The Kremlin’s encouragement of such “elite nationalization” was bound to happen anyway; the shift toward militarism and anti-Westernism required it. Putin has stopped relying on the comprador class and leans instead on Russians who feel drawn to militarism and the idea of a Russia cut off from Western influences.
It remains unclear whether the Russian elite, a group that enjoys the comforts of Western civilization, understands what it could lose as a result of harsher sanctions and isolation from the West. But as the Kremlin sees things, the only alternative to isolation is a gradual loss of control over the country, so the choice is easy. And perhaps the West, fearful of provoking a nuclear power, will stop short of truly damaging sanctions. In that case, the elite might hope to keep enjoying the West even as the rest of the country is guarded against Western influence. However that may be, harsher sanctions against Moscow following further aggression against Ukraine or other neighboring states will not succeed in changing a system that thinks it can survive only by containing the West. Moreover, the thirty-year, $400-billion energy deal that the Kremlin struck with China in May 2014 proves that Putin is trying to find ways for the Russian petrostate to prolong its lease on life by building a global antidemocratic coalition to challenge the Western-sponsored world order.
How sustainable and resilient is Putin’s survival paradigm? His choice of a militaristic path shows that he grasps the gravity of the situation and understands that soft authoritarianism is no longer enough. But a turn toward repression and tensions with the West cannot disguise the narrowing of Putin’s support base-the recent euphoria over Crimea notwithstanding, most Russians would like his current term in office to be his last-or his government’s inability to deal with worsening problems such as declining economic growth, a pension crisis, shrinking regional budgets, and endemic corruption.
The war-patriotic mobilization around Ukraine has already begun to wane. The harsher system of rule that Putin is now trying to build points toward mass repression and even totalitarianism. But there is no ideology or cause to provide a basis for consolidating such a system: Neither the elite nor Russian society at large is ready to blindly follow the leader, and the successful working of any repressive machine that Putin might try to put in place cannot be taken for granted. The state so far has managed to suppress dissent and opposition, but that could change as economic and social ills get worse. A large slice of the political class is used to integration with the West and is unlikely to support intensified isolation or a greater role for the more militarized portion of the elite. Yet the “militarists,” who currently feel inclined to back Putin, could dismiss him as “too soft” if grave expressions of discontent start breaking out.
The bottom line is that the system of personalized power enjoys better prospects than does Vladimir Putin himself. He does not have to be the one at the helm, and the supporters of the system know it. They may even try to shore the system up by replacing Putin with another figure who can be the new face of a power that is “personalized” (but which in the end turns out to be not all that dependent on this or that particular person). The new “number one” may be harsher than Putin, or may try to go back to a softer authoritarianism. At any rate, neither soft authoritarianism nor a hybrid regime will be able to keep a restive Russian society under control.
Russia’s treatment of Ukraine will have consequences for developments within Russia. Putin’s actions with regard to this neighboring country have already accelerated domestic changes-by straining Russia’s budget, for instance. Putin’s tactical victories abroad have boosted his support at home, but that will not last. In order to survive, he will have to find new enemies, new groups of Russophones who need help, and new excuses for aggression, complete with military fervor and a warlike atmosphere. Russia and its people, however, cannot live continually under such conditions; Putin’s rule is bound to end in fiasco. Will that spark a change of system, or merely one of personnel? We cannot know. For now, all we can say for sure is that Putinism has stripped Russia of its basic moral principles and inhibitions. But no one can predict what will happen after Putinism’s collapse.
In this context, the task of helping Ukraine to become a liberal democracy stands out as a work that is of the utmost importance to liberal-democratic civilization. The rise of a secure and well-institutionalized democracy in Ukraine will show that a society which has lived through much the same traumatic history of Sovietization as Russia can overcome this difficult legacy and become a law-governed state. Can Ukraine make its “choice for Europe” and make it stick? It can, but only if the West treats the challenge of helping it as a civilizational necessity-and the gravest challenge of the new century so far.