Népek tavasza Novorossiya Foto: Map Novorossya; Doneck When the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire conspired, two centuries ago, to dismember and divvy up Poland and Ukraine, Catherine the Great ended up with the southeastern portion, the Donbas (Donetsk basin) and Crimea, an area plastered on Czarist maps with names like “Little Russia” (Malorossiya) and “New Russia” (Novorossiya), while regions like Transcarpathia, Galicia, Bukovina, Silesia, and Bessarabia became Habsburg lands centered on vigorously multi-cultural cosmopolitan cities like Lvov and Odessa. In reality, this cultural and geopolitical divide in Ukraine is long-standing. When Russian Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War consolidated their control over the entire area, pushing out the more multi-ethnic and progressive Mensheviks of western Ukraine, these differences rapidly declined in significance: everyone was ruled directly from Moscow anyway, under a Russophilic hegemony thinly disguised as a petty-nationalism-transcending Red internationalism. Thus, there were no real administrative implications when Nikita Khrushchev (during a vodka bender, according to popular belief) swapped Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (R.S.F.S.R.) over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. But when the Soviet Union unravelled in 1990 and internal administrative boundaries became international frontiers, it suddenly mattered quite a bit. Crimea, dominated by ethnic Russians, including many rootless military families, resisted inclusion in independent Ukraine, but Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Communist leader, did not press the matter. Russian-speakers who dominated the southeastern oblasts were willing to reclassify themselves as Ukrainian nationals. But when, in late 2013 (Ukraine’s divisions premiered on last year’s list at no. 8), Ukrainian nationalists began to push back against diplomatic bullying from Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, over the question of ties to the European Union (E.U.), and when the Ukrainian parliament removed the pro-Russian president under popular pressure, Novorossiya boiled over. After Putin’s sotto voce Blitzkrieg and Anschluß of Crimea, to which the stunned West to all practical purposes acquiesced, Novorossiyans wanted a similar deal. With heavy covert (but only half-heartedly denied) backing from Russia, two of the several oblast rebellions gelled over the summer as the Donetsk People ’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic (loosely federated as the Federal State of Novorossiya). Slow to react, the central government in Ukraine eventually moved in, and the resulting grinding war has so far cost nearly 5,000 lives, with pro-Kremlin rebels still in control of big parts of those two oblasts. For whatever reason, Putin has declined to recognize the republics, let alone annex them, but he has also not called off his dogs. His strategy now seems to be to permanently destabilize the rump Ukraine, so as to make it an unappealing morsel for NATO or the E.U. to ever want to swallow up. It has worked. Putin has won. No one thinks Ukraine’s central government can ever fully reassimilate the rebel areas. In 2015, we will learn if the situation will drift into a “frozen conflict”—like Transnistria (no. 3 below), Armenia’s client state the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), or Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia (no. 4 below)—or if more oblasts will declare their own “people’s republics”—Transcarpathia, Odessa, and Kharkiv seem ripe for it—or if Putin will pull his support and allow the Kyiv government to move back in, perhaps as a way of easing sanctions against Russia.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 13:49:19 +0000
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