Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The unimaginable is now before us. The higher chamber of the Russian parliament has authorized Russia to send troops “on the territory of Ukraine” leaving open the possibility that the Russian army currently occupying Crimea may be dispatched elsewhere on Ukrainian territory. In seeking to legitimize its military operation, Russian invokes political, ethnic, and security arguments. None stand up to analysis.
The political argument is that Ukraine is in the throes of an illegitimate political regime that came to power a week ago as a result of a “fascist” coup. Fascism means something very specific in Russian discourse. Since World War II the invasion by Germany has always been presented as an invasion of fascists, not of Germans. The fascists are the Nazis and their collaborators. In western Ukraine, a violent Ukrainian insurgency against the Soviet Union tactically allied with Germany during the war. Russian discourse labels these insurgents fascists or Banderites, after their leader Stepan Bandera, a term that acquired equivalent meaning.
Since key groups on the Maidan, namely the parliamentary party Svoboda and the popular movement Pravy Sektor, claim lineage from the wartime insurgency, the collapse of the Yanukovych regime is portrayed in Russia as an internal fascist invasion.
This narrative omits three basic points. The first is that the Yanukovych regime collapsed because all police forces withdrew on Friday, February 21, 2014, leaving government buildings unprotected. They withdrew not because they were overcome by armed militants but because they were demoralized either because they had previously used live ammunition against civilians or because they were unwilling to defend a regime perceived as widely corrupt.
The second thing is that it was not the insurgents who attacked civilians, unlike the case with the wartime insurgents, but rather the state. In the end the state security forces gave up.
The third is that the political pillars of the previous regime, the Party of Regions and the Communist Party of Ukraine, have both recognized the legitimacy of the new government. The Communists, who depict wartime insurgents as fascists, have in fact voted en bloc for all constitutional changes in the past week.
The ethnic argument is that the life of Russia's compatriots—and I'm putting “compatriots” in brackets here—is in danger. The resolution of the Russian parliament refers both to citizens, who outside of Sevastopol are in principle not too numerous since dual citizenship is illegal in Ukraine, and to this vague category of compatriots, which has no standing in international law. Compatriots is a code word for ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in the context where most residents of eastern Ukraine prefer to speak Russian. It is this undifferentiated Russian mass that the Russian state now sees as being under threat by the so-called nationalists who have taken power in Kiev. I should add that “nationalists” since Soviet days has been used as a synonym for “fascists”.
This narrative assumes that in the defining moment that Ukraine is now experiencing, eastern Ukrainians will choose Russian protection over Ukrainian “nationalist” rule. Russia's power play could actually have the opposite effect of further crystallizing Ukrainian identity in the east. There is no organized Russian community in eastern Ukraine, unlike in Crimea, because many, if not most, Russians are partly of Ukrainian background and many Ukrainians are partly Russian.
This ethnic mixité likely explains the ambivalence expressed by eastern Ukrainians towards Russia. Under quasi-war conditions, the ambivalence could lead way to a greater assertion of Ukrainian identity.
The fact that mass demonstrations are now occurring in eastern Ukraine, a traditionally passive society, could be seen as a barometer of a rising attachment to the nation defined in civic terms. Although we have demonstrations going both ways right now, yesterday there were 10,000 people singing the Ukrainian national anthem in Dnipropetrovsk.
The security argument is that the events that have “destabilized” Ukraine are the result of western meddling in a territory that has historically belonged to the Russian sphere of interest. The Russian historical narrative actually places Kiev as the so-called mother of all Russian cities.
Russian President Putin appears to firmly believe that Maidan was instigated by western powers—that includes Canada, by the way—a claim obliquely repeated by former Ukrainian President Yanukovych in his Rostov press conference. The meddling, however, was declarative, with western powers expressing support for the right of Maidan demonstrators to peacefully air their grievances and repeatedly inviting the Ukrainian authorities to find a political solution and avoid the use of violence.
Up until the protests turned into mass killing, the EU and the United States were in fact criticized in the west for how little concrete help they provided to Maidan—the EU resisting, for instance, the imposition of personal sanctions until the very end, after the police began shooting at demonstrators.
The argument of western intervention, however, operates on a higher plane than immediate support on the ground, taking the form of the claim, also often made in western liberal and leftist circles, that the west's ulterior motive is to secure military bases in Russia's backyard and to make the Ukrainian market available for cheap labour to benefit advanced western economies.
While these points merit a rigorous hearing, primarily or exclusively focusing on them evacuates the profoundly civic dimension of the Ukrainian rebellion. Maidan, initially a protest for Europe, became a protest against police brutality, large-scale corruption, and the lack of political accountability. Since all these features are also associated with the current Russian state, opposing them became a symbolic reaffirmation of European values, even if the free trade agreement was no longer talked about. It is easy to be dismissive of the weight of values, but the fact is that insurgents were willing to risk and pay with their lives. It is their stance that ultimately broke the will of the Yanukovych regime.
The meddling, in the end, was of so-called European ideas. They in themselves are seen as an infringement on the security not of Russia but of the Russian political system developed under President Putin. The logical fallacy is that since western powers could benefit from the bottom-up Ukrainian civic uprising, then they must have caused it. They did not.
Thank you.