Foreign Policy: It’s Time for Ukraine to Let the Donbass Go

The Donbass has consistently supported Ukraine’s most retrograde, anti-reformist, anti-European, pro-Russian, and pro-Soviet political forces. It was the Donbass that made Viktor Yanukovych, whose political career was dedicated to bringing Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, president in 2010. It was out of the Donbass that came his corrupt Party of Regions. And it was the Donbass that opposed popular pro-democracy uprisings in 2004 and 2014.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s occupation of the eastern Donbass in the summer of 2014 effectively disenfranchised its voters. That was bad for the voters, but it enabled pro-democratic forces in unoccupied Ukraine to win the presidency and control of the country’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, in 2014. Most of the reforms that have been adopted in the past five years—along with Ukraine’s steady march toward Europe—would have been impossible had the Donbass remained a part of Ukraine. [...]

The Donbass and its residents have been the war’s greatest losers. Thousands have died in the fighting; houses and infrastructure have been destroyed. The region’s economy, once an integral part of Ukraine’s, went into a tailspin, unemployment went through the roof, inflation soared—and the new regime and its thugs took advantage to enrich themselves. The separatist government helped promote the decay by dismantling viable factories and selling them to Russia. Small wonder that, for many Donbass residents, the best source of employment is the separatist armed forces. [...]

Thanks to Putin’s occupation of the eastern Donbass, his leverage over Ukraine also decreased. As long as a pro-Russian, anti-Western region was part of Ukraine, he could—and did—insist on being able to intervene on its behalf—ostensibly to protect the rights of Russian speakers, but in reality to interfere in the internal affairs of democratic neighbors. If the eastern Donbass is brought back into Ukraine’s fold, Putin’s leverage will increase once more. He’d be given an inroad back into the country’s politics as a whole.

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Al Jazeera: Saakashvili on Putin, Europe's weak leaders and a return to power

Saakashvili dismisses accusations that he was heavy-handed in suppressing opposition during this second term as Georgian president, pointing instead to progress that was made under his government.

"Georgia was a failed country. You cannot make a failed country through Scandinavian methods, overnight, something like Sweden or Norway".

"My reforms survived my presidency ... most of it is still there, so from that standpoint: public services, absence of corruption, safety, I left a good legacy and a legacy that is still intact."

Asked about an EU report's claim that he was responsible for Georgia's 2008 war with Russia due to his "penchant for acting in the heat of the moment", Saakashvili says: "There is only one choice when your country gets attacked by a hundred times bigger neighbour: either to surrender or to fight. And we chose not to surrender."

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The New York Review of Books: The Revolution That Wasn’t

These two answers essentially span the spectrum of explanations for the phone calls: few attribute noble motives to President Poroshenko. Even officials only a step or two down from the president often seem loath to explain or justify his more controversial behavior, such as his unwillingness to replace corrupt military officers or ministers. Among Ukrainians, this translates into a deep malaise. Four years after the flight from Kiev of Poroshenko’s predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, who was forced out by months of protests that paralyzed the capital, many Ukrainians are disillusioned with their leaders and the political class in general, demoralized by the weak economy, worried about the frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine, and frustrated by the president’s failure to address the systemic corruption that permeates all aspects of life. In many cases Poroshenko has fought hard to protect controversial figures like Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin, whom he defended for over a year before firing him only when US Vice President Joe Biden threatened to withdraw a $1 billion loan guarantee. [...]

Gerard Toal’s Near Abroad is a rich and dense study of geopolitics in and around the now-independent states that once composed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,1 probably the best available today.2 He argues forcefully against reducing complicated geopolitical issues to facile formulas, and particularly against the US tendency to back leaders who talk a good line, preferably in English. “Embracing Bonapartism in the Caucasus or shoring up select Ukrainian oligarchs, no matter how good a game they talk, is not ‘support for freedom,’” he writes. At the center of Toal’s book is the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, where the alliance declared that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become members. Putin warned that this would be viewed as a “direct threat” to Russian security. That summer he invaded Georgia, consolidating Moscow’s control over the two breakaway territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russian troops continue to nibble away at Georgia’s border with Russian-occupied South Ossetia, a few yards at a time. [...]

Toal quotes the US political scientist John Mearsheimer’s description of Putin as “a first-class strategist who should be feared and respected by anyone challenging him on foreign policy,” but does not seem convinced by it. He suggests that Putin’s character can be more usefully understood with reference to his hypermasculinity and the role of affect, or emotion, in his political choices. Putin’s lengthy record indeed indicates that his reactions are often provoked by a sense of spite or revenge. Russian analysts—some loyal, others critical—have long noted that under Putin action often precedes policy. Some have resorted to slang to define his leadership style, perceiving elements of the sovok—the constantly aggrieved, misogynist, racist post-Soviet man in the street—in his behavior. He is clearly a gosudarstvennik, a firm believer in the dignity of the state (gosudarstvo), who believes that this dignity must be protected at any price, including that of the truth. Another intriguing glimpse of Putin’s psychological makeup comes from Putin himself. In an early political biography he confided with apparent pride to one of his interviewers that he had not gone through the Soviet youth movements but had instead been a shpana, a young tough or punk.

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Book of the Week: Putin: From Oligarch to Kleptocrat

The independent media was Putin’s first target. Newspapers, and TV and radio stations, often funded by wealthy oligarchs, were playing an increasingly important part in Russian politics by the late 1990s. One media organization in particular, NTV, had attracted Putin’s ire by airing a satirical puppet show ahead of the 2000 presidential election in which a Putin puppet played Little Zaches, an evil changeling from a fairy tale by E.T.A. Hoffman. In Hoffman’s story, the people of a village are so manipulated by Zaches that they mistake him for a gentleman and scholar, and award him the job of minister to the prince. Putin’s supporters reacted fiercely to the caricature; a letter was published in St. Petersburg’s Vedomosti newspaper signed by the rector of St. Petersburg State University, calling for charges to be brought against the producers of the show. [...]

By the end of his second term in office, in 2008, Putin had altered the criteria for judges serving on the Qualification Colleges that can dismiss judges from their posts, a move that enabled him to pack this oversight body with his appointees. He had also signed an edict extending his executive powers over all law enforcement and securities agencies, and made several watchdog bodies subordinate to the very ministries they were meant to monitor. Meanwhile, his political party, United Russia, had abolished elections for regional governors and replaced them with a system of presidential appointments—any of which could be rescinded by the president if he deemed a governor to be disloyal. Russian autocracy was back. [...]

A month ahead of the March 2012 presidential election, some 100,000 Russians demonstrated in -18° C temperatures in Moscow, calling for a rerun of the disputed December parliamentary elections—to no avail: Putin won his third term. But the day before his inauguration, violent clashes erupted between police and some 20,000 protesters in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. He responded by signing a law criminalizing public protests without a permit. Even so, on June 12, about 70,000 brave demonstrators marched in defiance. The war between Russian civil society and the Kremlin was on. Unfortunately, it received limited attention outside Russia, much less any credible coverage on traditional media inside Russia—which the government already controlled. [...]

Oligarchical capitalism destroys legitimate competition and eats away at the resources of a nation like a cancer. Any semblance of dynamic, healthy competition is strangled by fake competition based solely on firms’ relationships with people in power. When a shrinking private sector is entirely owned by the oligarchical elites, this precludes ordinary citizens from having a stake in the real economy and increasing their personal wealth over time. As the nation’s wealth becomes more concentrated in fewer hands, there is less incentive and fewer resources to resist the momentum of this disparity. The twenty or so oligarchs in Putin’s Russia do not get access to powerful people in government because of their wealth, as is the case, say, with many billionaire political donors in America, but rather the reverse: Russian oligarchs get access to obscene amounts of wealth because of their affinity with those most powerful in government. Men become oligarchs in Russia (there are no women oligarchs) because they are loyal to the only person in government who matters: Vladimir Putin.

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