Ukraine War: Who amongst the wand-carriers protests?

The tale of the three brothers

In 988 AD, Volodymyr the Great - the Prince of Novgorod and Grand Prince of Kyiv - accepted the Orthodox Christian faith. Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine draw their lineage from his early Slavic state of Kievan Rus. Kyiv is even called “the mother of Russian cities.”

But today, the three states are more divided than ever.

Russia and Belarus, with their autocratic regimes, stand on one side while a divided Ukraine aspires for a European future. I say divided because ground realities in Ukraine differ from most media reports we see.

People in western Ukraine are more aligned with the idea of Ukraine joining the EU and NATO, mostly due to a shared history of oppression by the Russian Empire and later the Soviets. Eastern parts of Ukraine are more inclined towards the Russian Federation as these are the areas where ethnic Russians are in the majority.

Trouble started with the Orange Revolution in 2004. It was a people’s movement that protested widespread corruption in the Ukrainian government. Allegations of fraud marred the presidential election. After a Supreme Court-ordered re-vote, Russia’s favoured candidate was ousted.

In 2008, NATO announced a pathway to allow Ukraine and Georgia to join reportedly at America’s behest, despite opposition from its European members. Former US ambassador to Russia and current CIA Director William J. Burns summed it up at that time, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). Ukraine in NATO is anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. I can conceive of no grand package that would allow the Russians to swallow this pill quietly.”

Vladimir Putin was an invitee to the conference and termed NATO expansion as a ‘direct threat’ to Russia.

Back in Ukraine, as is the norm with corrupt democracies, the new government also failed. Viktor Yanukovych, favoured by Russia, won the presidential election in 2010. The election was considered fair by international observers.

But four years later, in another revolution, known as Euromaidan or the Revolution of Dignity, Yanukovych was ousted a second time. After rejecting an aid package of €610 million from the EU, Yanukovych had agreed to a financial loan of €15 billion from Russia.

Rioters occupied government buildings and marched towards the parliament. Under the shadow of civil unrest, Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament voted 328-0 in favor of removing President Yanukovych. The Right Sector, a coalition of far-right political and militant organisations within Ukraine, demanded his arrest.

Yanukovych fled to Kharkiv and then to Russia.

A leaked call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt confirmed a US hand in the coup.

“I think we’re in play,” says Pyatt, after Nuland asked for an update.

Once bitten, twice shy, the Russians knew that Ukraine was slipping from their sphere of influence. And more concerning was the probable loss of their Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula.

Crimea was part of Russia until 1954 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine. On his part, it was a gesture of “brotherly ties between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples.”

Putin held meetings with his security service chiefs, remarking, “We must start working on returning Crimea to Russia.”

A swift response from Russia isolated Crimea from the mainland. The Russians organised a formal referendum on 16 March 2021 and annexed the peninsula two days later on 18 March. Following the annexation, separatists supported by Russia started an insurgency in Donbas, a historical, cultural, and economic region in eastern Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government responded with an Anti-terrorist Operation (ATO) but failed initially due to poor military preparedness. The Americans stepped in to provide arms and training, and the Ukrainians started gaining ground. The separatists appealed to the Russians to send more help. Vladimir Putin authorised military action, and the tide was turned once again against the Ukrainians.

Following months of fighting the Minsk Ceasefire Agreement was signed. But the agreement lasted only a few months before the fighting resumed. A second round of diplomatic efforts brought us to Minsk II. This time, the ceasefire held till the commencement of the Russian “special military operation”.

The war in Ukraine has two main reasons, and no, one of them is not Vladimir Putin’s imperial dreams.

1. The United States’ drive to continue its hegemony

2. The Russian inferiority complex after the collapse of the USSR

A cold peace

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia inherited most of its nuclear arsenal but none of the power. Soon after, the Americans decided that Russia was too weak a power to be entertained. Promises of “not one inch eastward” were quickly discarded and NATO moved towards Russian borders.

Stung but helpless, the Russian President Boris Yeltsin said in 1994,

“Europe, even before it has managed to shrug off the legacy of the Cold War, is risking encumbering itself with a cold peace.”

Washington was in no mood to listen.

George Kennan, the intellectual architect of America’s containment policy during the Cold War, said in an interview with the New York Times in 1998, “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely, and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake.”

After Yelstin resigned in 1999, Vladimir Putin took office. Early Putin tried to be friendly with America and Europe and even proposed NATO membership for Russia to Bill Clinton. In a BBC interview by David Frost, Putin said that it was hard for him to visualise NATO as an enemy, “Russia is part of European culture. And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilised world.”

Those hopes were in vain, as NATO expanded the fastest in 2004. Like his predecessor, Putin could only bemoan and express doubts about NATO’s relevance in the face of challenges like terrorism and the war in Afghanistan.

Before the Americans struck the final nail in the proverbial coffin at Bucharest, Putin spoke testily at the Munich security conference in 2007, “It is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”

After the announcement of the intent to admit Ukraine and Georgia by NATO in April 2008, Russia invaded Georgia. Six years later, after the coup that ousted Yanukovych, Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea.

“We don’t think we’re at war with NATO... unfortunately, NATO believes it is at war with Russia,” says the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

NATO maintains that it's not seeking a confrontation with Russia, and only supporting Ukraine in “its right to self-defence.”

But former CIA director Leon Panetta differs, telling ABC that the US is ‘without question’ involved in a proxy war with Russia.

It’s easy to see that the West is indeed waging a war against the Russian Federation through Ukraine. If two CIA directors, one former and another current, know and understand the Russian concerns about the bloc, and yet the United States is bent on driving NATO to the federation’s borders, then what else gives?

The warring leaderships

Vladimir Putin is no pope, but nor is he the ruthless imperialist the West portrays. Is he corrupt and conniving? Who isn’t in that part of the world?

He is a man besieged by the grand conceptions of the past and the limits of Russian power in contemporary times. The modest economic and military growth in his early years might have given him false ideas about the reach of the Russian state. The almost clinical annexation of Crimea strengthened his belief and has made him bite off more than he could chew.

As it turns out, the Western powers never had the intention to honour the Minsk II Accords. Ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a December 2022 interview with “Die Zeit,” said, “The 2014 Minsk Agreement was an attempt to buy time for Ukraine. Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today. Ukraine in 2014-2015 and Ukraine today are not the same.”

Although the Russians have a habit of dying in numbers since World War II, it explains the disproportionate battlefield losses they have suffered in Ukraine. Putin’s “little green men” have turned out to be just that, an army of green men.

However, the Russian decision to invade cannot be termed entirely irrational as well. Putin and his advisers have acted in terms of straightforward balance-of-power theory.

Even if Alexei Navalny is miraculously released from prison and becomes the President of Russia, I don’t think there will be an appetite for Ukraine in NATO. Would the United States allow any of its border states, or the states in the western hemisphere for that matter, to become part of a rival security alliance?

Think the Monroe Doctrine. 

In Kyiv, the government of Voldoymyr Zelenskyy, who came to power in 2019, too has turned increasingly hawkish. War can do that to people, especially an unjust one. Today, he is the symbol of Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression.

Zelenskyy was elected with 73 percent of the votes in a heavily populist election. At the time, he was not a professional politician; his team included no known diplomats or activists. His election reflects the intense desire of the Ukrainian people for a change after years of mismanagement and false promises by their leaders.

While Zelenskyy made an emotional appeal to Russian citizens before the invasion, his narratives have decidedly shifted since then. Zelenskyy now has a self-imposed legal ban on talks while Putin remains in office.

But recent reports indicate that Zelenskyy, too, is losing his sheen among the Ukrainians. The unlimited wartime powers and Eastern European Realpolitik seem to have caught up with him. Though Zelenskyy personally has not been implicated in a scandal, some 77 percent of Ukrainians think he is responsible for ongoing corruption in the government and local military administrations. Recently, some new allegations of corruption were dismissed by him as having taken place under “difficult circumstances.”

Reports of war crimes by Ukrainian forces and far-right neo-Nazi organisations like the Azov Battalion have also been hushed by mainstream media. Yet Ukraine’s main backer in the war, the US government, is concerned about its ‘volunteer’ citizens returning home after fighting in the war.

Given America’s troubled history of gun violence, they should be.

A far-right disaster waiting to happen

If recent history is any evidence, American weapons have failed to bring the desired change every single time.

Every war where America has been the enabler or a direct participant has left the native populations worse off than they were under their autocratic or corrupt regimes. Examples include Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and at least 22 countries in Africa, where American military power has failed its war on terror.

It looks like the US government is standing on the brink of another catastrophic miscalculation, this time in Ukraine. An aspect of this war that doesn’t get much media coverage is the freehand enjoyed by Ukrainian far-right militants and volunteers from America and Europe.

While the Russian pretext of ‘denazification’ has been tagged as superfluous by the West, the problem of far-right extremism in Europe is more real than we have been led to believe. From Marine Le Pen in France to the AFD in Germany, the neo-Nazi movements are reaching the houses of power once again.

Ukraine, even before the war, was a cesspool of fascist activities. The annual Asgardsrei festival in Kyiv is but one example of many such openly fascist platforms in operation.

What happens once the war concludes? Regardless of the off-ramps and compromises reached, Ukraine may remain on the brink of instability for the foreseeable future. The far-right militants are quite candid about their aversion to authority, Ukrainian or otherwise.

So, the US-orchestrated second ‘Afghanistan’ moment in Ukraine still has the potential of becoming just that and coming home to haunt America and Europe at a later date.

No end in sight