Stephen Cohen: How the current crisis developed – and the media myths about it
Part
3 of Stephen Cohen Lecture, “The Ukrainian Crisis: A New Cold War?”
on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Russian, East
European, and Central Asian Studies Program, Fairfield University,
February 5, 2015
So
now come to the current crisis. And the myths. The American orthodox
assertion is that this is all due to Putin’s aggression. That’s
the phrase, “Putin’s aggression”. And here too we find myths
beginning with this fundamental one. And I apologize to Ukrainians or
people of Ukrainian descent in the room, but I think if they think
about it they’ll agree with me. All this talk of the Ukraine and
the Ukrainian people striving to be free of Russian influence and
join the West is, to put it politely, fragmentary. For centuries
Ukraine has been a divided country. It’s not my fault, it’s not
Putin’s fault; it’s God’s fault. Centuries of being formed from
fragments of different empires left Ukraine divided. Religiously,
ethnically, economically, politically, geographically. Mainly between
the pro-Russian eastern provinces and the western provinces that look
to Europe, but not only, you find both sides in central Ukraine. Even
in Kiev.
When
this crisis began, Ukraine had one state. But it wasn’t, in the
sense that the rhetoric has it, one country. It should have remained
one country; it was struggling to do that after the end of the Soviet
Union. But anybody who was going to tamper with this delicate balance
in Ukraine either had an evil deed on his or her mind or didn’t
know history. Or didn’t know Ukraine. So the civil war that we now
see in Ukraine is not Putin’s fault. It was latent, at very least
latent, in Ukrainian society in history all along.
That
brings us to a related myth. In November 2013 the European union,
backed by Washington, offered – this is the myth – President
Yanukovych of Ukraine a benign, generous association agreement with
the European Union, but Putin bullied and bribed poor Yanukovych into
refusing it and then Yanukovych fell to the protests in the streets.
What’s
the reality? The European Union proposal was a reckless provocation.
It told Yanukovych – even though Putin had said, let’s do a
three-way plan to save Ukraine from meltdown, Moscow, Kiev, Brussels
– it told Yanukovych, the European Union did, “Choose between
Russia and us, the West.” That was an ultimatum. Why would
anybody do this?
Nor
was it so benign; the financial terms that the European union was
offering [were] virtually no money up front and austerity measures of
the kind that Greece has just rejected in a vote and that savaged
European society, 25 percent unemployment, for a decade. What would
this have done to Ukraine, which was already on financial ropes, with
an elderly population dependent on pensions? What would this have
done?
Moreover,
nobody seems to read anything anymore. But buried in the
thousand-page protocol was the section called Military Security
Issues, which if signed, Yanukovych and Ukraine would have been
obliged to abide by Europe’s military and security policies. NATO
wasn’t mentioned, but what are Europe’s military and security
policies? They are those of NATO. This was clearly an attempt – all
right, let me take that back – this seems to have been an attempt
in fine print to hook Ukraine to NATO, I’m mixing my metaphors,
through the back door. So it wasn’t all that benign, and Russia has
lawyers and they read everything, and they knew what was going on. Or
thought they did. And they weren’t happy about it.
So
it wasn’t Putin’s aggression that initiated the crisis but a kind
of velvet aggression by Washington and Brussels to bring all of
Ukraine into the West and at least into the embrace of NATO.
And
here arises another myth: “The Ukrainian Civil War was triggered
by Putin’s aggressive response to peaceful demonstrations at the
Maidan.” The reality was different, and you will remember it,
because you saw it on TV. You saw the people in the streets throwing
flaming Molotov cocktails. You saw that they were increasingly
armed. You saw that people were being shot. You saw the burning
barricades. You saw the assaults on government buildings. The
reality is, is that by February of last year, what had begun as
peaceful protests had become violent. And the violence was inspired
in part, in large part, by ultra-nationalist Ukrainian forces. Some
of whom indisputably, any reasonable person would call neo-fascist.
What
does that mean? They want to rid Ukraine of Jews, Gypsies, Russians,
homosexuals, anybody who’s not a pure ethnic Ukrainian. Whatever
that is, after centuries of mixed marriages. That’s their written
ideology. Leave aside that they carry around pictures of Hitler.
Maybe it’s just ornamentation. (Read your programs.) So these
people – a small, small minority – got traction in the streets.
And influenced events.
What
happened?
What
happened? The violence grew. Three European foreign ministers flew
to Kiev and they brokered an agreement between the president and the
street demonstrators’ leaders. They said “Look, Yanukovych will
form a coalition government, [will] bring in the opposition leaders,
[and] he will stay as president until December” – February to
December, whatever, that is 10 months – “and then there’ll be
new elections.” They brokered a democratic agreement. I don’t
know who initiated the phone call, but within minutes Putin and Obama
were on the phone with each other. Apparently Obama said to Putin,
“Do you support this?” Putin said, “I do.” Putin said to
Obama, “Do you support this?” Obama said, “I do.” Within
hours it was overthrown as street protestors marched on the
Presidential palace. Yanukovych fled to Russia. A new government was
formed and was immediately endorsed by the United States and Europe.
The new government. Nobody ever mentioned in the West again the
agreement they had negotiated themselves. The Western diplomats. And
out of that came all the rest.
Out
of that came all the rest. All the rest meaning Russia’s
annexation of Crimea, the rebellion in Eastern Ukraine, the civil
war, the new American Cold War, and Merkel’s flight, desperate
flight to Kiev, Moscow, and Washington in these last two or three
days, to ward off actual war.
Part one: Stephen
Cohen deconstructs “the historical fallacies and political myths”
behind the current crisis
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