Putin’s Struggle to Revive the Soviet State
“I guess I’ll shake your hand but I have only one thing to say to you: You need to get out of Ukraine.” These were the words used by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to the President of Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, in their initial meeting during the first day of the 2014 G20 summit. This was Canada’s official response to what has been a devastating year for Ukraine, which began with the ousting of a Moscow-backed corrupt president and was followed by the annexation of Crimea. The situation then evolved into a continuing invasion of eastern Ukraine by Russian-backed mercenaries and soldiers, all for the purported purposes of stamping out Nazism and protecting the Russian ethnic population from the Fascist-Banderites (Banderites are Ukrainian ultra-nationalist groups used in the Russian government’s propaganda machine to assert the claim that the entire country is under a pro-fascist regime). In the fog of war, Russian-backed terrorists utilizing a Buk anti-aircraft system managed to knock the now infamous Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 forty-thousand feet out of the air and murder all two-hundred ninety-eight people on board. What started as direct aggression between Russia and Ukraine had, through this atrocity, brought itself to the attention and focus of Europe, and of course the West.
Now that that Ukraine is in the spotlight, the question faced by the international community is: what should be done? But in determining what must be done, it is necessary to understand what has already happened. The West is aware of what is happening now, but Ukrainian history tells a longer and more convoluted story. To fully appreciate some of the rhetoric Putin has used over the course of this past year to legitimize blatant breaches of international law and order, the historical context between the two countries is discussed in this article. In considering this history, I stress that we, as Canadians, must understand our attachment to this conflict.
Ukrainian nationalism, or Ukraine’s existence as an independent state, has been a sore spot, a source of resentment and contempt, for a century of Soviet rulers, who are now represented by Putin. Before 1991, when it proclaimed its independence after the formal collapse of the USSR, numerous attempts and campaigns were waged by the Soviet authorities to stamp it out. The worst of these efforts — not unlike the German attempt to exterminate the Jews during the Holocaust — is now known as the Holodomor. As Kramarenko states, during this period between 1932 and 1933, “Stalin and his henchmen annihilated the Ukrainian intelligentsia and nationally conscious party members, who were all viewed as potential leaders of a possible Ukrainian uprising, under the guise of communist farming collectivization and killed half the Ukrainian peasantry by famine.”
Many different estimates range on the scale of death by hunger imposed on Ukraine by Stalin. From as low as two million, to as high as twenty-eight million people died in Ukraine during this Soviet-created genocide, depopulating huge swaths of the center and eastern regions of the country. While largely supressed by the Iron Curtain, there were Western journalists who reported on it. Gareth Jones was one such western journalist who published eye witness accounts and was assassinated by the KGB in 1935 for his exposéon this genocide. The official state response by Stalin was to deny to the world that there was any famine in Ukraine. To support this assertion, Russia continued to export millions of tonnes of grain – more than enough to have saved every starving man, woman, and child. The same playbook is being used in today’s continuing invasion of Ukraine.
This genocide led to the creation of a nationalistic guerilla movement called the Ukrainian Partisan Army, or UPA, of which Stepan Bandera became the leader. Bandera’s leadership of the UPA is, to this day, a very contentious political and historical topic. Putin’s current use of his name to stir up anti-Ukrainian sentiment was due to the fact that the UPA did, in fact, align itself with Germany in World War II when Germany invaded Ukraine to fight the oppressive Soviet forces. The UPA fighters were responsible for countless attacks on Russian troops, officers and supporters during this period leading to thousands of Russian, Polish and Jewish casualties. When the war started to turn against Germany, the UPA declared itself against both the Russian and German army. At that point, Bandera was himself imprisoned in a German concentration camp at Sachsenhausenwhen he became of no use to the Germans. Ultimately released from imprisonment in 1944, Bandera was assassinated by the KGB in Berlin in 1959. To this day, he has remained a contested figure in Ukraine, representing to many in Western Ukraine a central figure who defended Ukraine from Stalin and, in Russia, a Nazi collaborator who killed thousands of Russians during World War II. After the invasion and annexation of Crimea, Putin welcomed Ukrainian Crimeans into Russia by declaring that he was saving them from new Ukrainian leaders who are the “ideological heirs of Bandera, Hitler’s accomplice during World War II.” In today’s context, the current supporters of this group have been used as a critical tool for Putin to drum up support in Russia for the continued invasion and its economic costs.
Canada’s connection to Ukraine has been that of a nation with deep Ukrainian immigrant roots. As stated in the Canadian Encyclopedia, “[a]ccording to 2006 Census of Canada figures, Ukrainian Canadians number 1,209,085 (3.9 per cent of the country’s population) and are mainly Canadian-born citizens. This makes them Canada’s ninth largest ethnic group, and means Canada has the world’s third-largest Ukrainian population.” This undeniable relationship, along with a majority of Ukrainian Canadians living in Western Canada, has no doubt made the recent events a decisive issue for Canadian politicians looking towards the next federal election. The PMO (Prime Minister’s Office) has been especially occupied in building a stronger relationship with Ukraine and in September hosted newly elected president Petro Poroshenko in Ottawa. In addition to the PMO’s office, Canada has been on the forefront of assisting Ukraine in casting off the endemic corruption formerly found in elections and sent over three hundred observers for the 2014 presidential elections. Canada has played a pivotal role in the current state of Ukraine as an independent nation and was the first Western nation to recognize and affirm its sovereignty in 1991. It also played a role via NATO in the 1997 NATO-Ukraine Charter. This Charter was preceded by the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. By entering into this memorandum, Ukraine became the first and only nuclear power to completely disarm. This was done on the promise of the signatories’ respect for independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine. The signatories included: Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States, and, most importantly, the Russian Federation. While, it is needless to say this treaty has been breached, Putin has continued to categorically deny Russia’s involvement in the invasion in Ukraine. This lying, not only during the invasion and annexation of Crimea but the continued invasion of Eastern Ukraine, is a geo-political travesty and a use of double-speak that even George Orwell would cringe upon hearing.
While it can be understood from a geopolitical perspective that Russia is struggling to maintain its regional grip, it cannot be given a pass as to the methods and tactics it has been using. From Ukraine’s sovereign perspective, it is legitimately choosing to turn away from Russia, the endemic corruption it represents and the old power structure which had been installed and supported by Russia. After a people’s revolution banished a superbly corrupt president, who had amassed a personal fortune to the tune of billions of dollars (up to $36 billion were stolen by Yanukovich), Ukraine has made its claim that it is willing to fight for its own truly independent future.
To say that many in Ukraine want greater integration with the West is an understatement. On 16September, the Ukrainian president, on behalf of the Parliament, signed an Association Agreement with the European Union formalizing Ukraine’s initial step towards Member State status. Even more recently, on 21 November, the newly formed coalition government stated its intention to cancel its non-aligned status with NATO and resume full integration and eventual membership with NATO. While many arguments exist which forward the idea that the “real fight” going on in Ukraine is between the United States and Russia, and that this is simply a proxy battle, it would be a disservice to the ongoing battle for Ukrainian sovereignty and true independence to accept them and ignore the context discussed above. As Russia has continually promised to be the “Fatherland” for ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, it should be noted what kind of new reality the Ukrainian Tatars and business people are now facing after Crimea’s annexation; forced evictions/expulsions and nationalization of businesses “unfriendly” to the newly appointed Russian control mechanism in Crimea.