Donetsk... eastern Ukraine, August 1997...

A UK Radstock-affiliated church has a team of nearly 30, mostly young people, serving a church in the city, participating in its outreach, visiting hospitals and orphanages, and sharing their faith - with the blessing, it has to be said, of the authorities there.

Donetsk... August 2014...

No such team would gain access now, as the same city is the seat of a violent separatist insurgency, one in which hundreds have been killed and thousands injured. Churches like the one mentioned above are being persecuted and banned from meeting. Not many kilometres from the city, the conflict has been internationalised by the downing of a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 with the loss of nearly 300 lives, including young children. Culprits unknown, with Ukrainian armed forces and Russian-backed fighters blaming each other, but the weight of evidence pointing to a catastrophic error by the latter.

17 years ago, hardly anyone outside the region had heard of Donetsk. Now, anyone with internet access or television knows about it. To see news pictures of shell damage and death where once there was a kind of harmony is quite something to say the very least. A sad turnaround. How did things come to such a pass? To trace the roots of that question, it is necessary to ask some fundamental questions of the participants in this tragic drama. This writer began to do so in his previous article on this crisis. He attempts to go further here.

Lines in shifting sands


National borders are arbitrary things, and your correspondent, who has visited Donetsk, wonders at how they are drawn sometimes. The vast majority of Donetsk residents would identify themselves as Russians, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that they identify with Russia itself. Even within a country, ethnic and linguistic allegiances can be elastic. And in Ukraine, linguistic and ethnic allegiance is very fluid indeed. Attempts to categorise Ukraine’s population as either ethnically Ukrainian or Russian fail because of people’s propensity to ‘change’ their ethnic affiliation due to local circumstances. Since the fall of the USSR, 3 million people in Ukraine who previously had identified themselves as ‘Russian’ changed and became ethnically ‘Ukrainian.’ Similarly, categorising Ukrainians as either Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking is unhelpful, since most Ukrainians can and do speak Russian.

Furthermore, the current rebellion has not encapsulated all ‘ethnically Russian’ areas of Ukraine. Dnpropetovsk region, which your correspondent assumed would join the fray, has been largely quiet, as has the major centre of Kharkov. This is a blow to those on both sides of the border who yearn for a Novorossiya - a Russia-leaning statelet stretching from Lugansk in the north east to Odessa in the south west. The rebel- controlled zone around Donetsk and Lugansk is a tiny fraction of this.

Push me pull you?


Forcing a deeply divided country like Ukraine to decide between East and West is at the heart of what has now become an existential crisis for the country. One cannot excoriate Russian meddling without at least a backward glance at western interventions since the crisis began last November. The sight of senior western politicians and diplomats on Maidan may have stoked the morale of protestors facing off against state power, but that sight would have played very differently among the Russian-leaning areas of the south and east of the country.

Of the external powers both East and West, your commentator wants to ask: “Was it really necessary to force Ukraine to choose?” Such a choice inevitably reduces to a zero-sum game. Why should, for instance, the Russian-leaning regions say yes to the West/EU, turning their backs on their cultural and linguistic brethren across the border in Russia? And why should the more western-leaning areas of Ukraine be forced to turn their backs on their dreams in favour of the Russian-dominated Eurasian Economic Area? Real statesmen and women could have forged a middle ground for a country that looks both east and west. That opportunity, missed many times before, has been missed again. Instead, we have a country in the grip of a civil war which it may not survive. Even if it does outlive the current crisis, the wounds may take decades to heal, and may even become the seeds for a new conflict.

My double standards - or yours?


Russian leaders frequently (and with justification) accuse the West of double-standards in its dealings with Russia. Why, for instance, while the West is apparently promoting democracy around the world, was it necessary to support the overthrow of a democratically-elected president who only had a year to run in office? True, it is arguable that the 2010 election which brought the previous incumbent, Viktor Yanukovich to power, was flawed. Some, including Christians, have thus argued that he was illegitimate, and his increasingly autocratic style merited his removal earlier this year. But nowhere does Scripture advocate violent removal of those who are in civil authority over us. Indeed, Paul’s injunctions to pray for and give honour to, governing authorities (Romans 13; 1 Timothy 2) were written in the context of secular rule which was overwhelmingly autocratic, and on occasions merciless in its persecution of Christians and others. There was, therefore, no Biblical basis for Christians to join in toppling Mr Yanukovich: to speak out against injustice and corruption, yes; but violent overthrow, no. Political leaders trumpeting democracy around the world, then supporting the overthrow of a democratically-elected president, is a clear example of double standards being played out.

But Russia is not whiter than white on this. Let’s call a couple of Russian double- standards here: Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March was undertaken despite not only international condemnation, but also the vocal opposition of Crimea’s Tatar minority, which largely boycotted the ‘referendum’ on accession to Russia. Russia’s efforts to gain the loyalty of the local Tatars, including using politicians from Tatarstan (a federal subject of Russia) to gain their acquiescence, have come largely to nought.

Mr Putin’s claim to be standing in support of oppressed minorities in Russia’s ‘near abroad’ wears very thin when one considers the situation of Crimea’s Tatar nation. This is partly because Russia’s own claim on the territory is not nearly as sound as Mr Putin says, or as most Russians think. Indeed, before Catherine the Great’s encroachments there in the 18th century, the territory was under the control of Crimea’s Tatars, who were then the majority on the peninsula. They remained the largest group until the end of the 19th century. But the Tatar population declined sharply when most were exiled to Siberia in 1944, on the basis that they had collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. Some did collaborate, but most did not. (The uncomfortable fact that many more Russians fought alongside Hitler’s armies is conveniently forgotten in the Kremlin’s self-justifying narrative.)

When they were finally allowed back in the 1980’s, many Tatars found their properties had been taken over by ethnic Russians. Then, as recently as this year, the Tatars were banned by the new Russian-installed authorities from commemorating the 70th anniversary of their deportation to Siberia.

Other victims of the Kremlin’s double-standard ethnic policy include the Circassians, a people native to the Caucasus and on whose ancestral lands the Russian city of Sochi, host to the 2014 Winter Olympics, now stands. The Russian Empire’s expansion into the Caucasus resulted in a hundred-year struggle with the people of Circassia, who were finally defeated in 1864. The aftermath was a genocide of the Circassians (to this day never acknowledged by the Russian government), and expulsion from their lands. Pleas for acknowledgement and redress by Circassians - both the diaspora and those remaining in Russia - continue to fall on deaf ears.

So make no mistake then: when Mr Putin talks tough on protecting minority rights in Russia’s back yard, he means ethnic Russians (a somewhat loose designation given centuries of Russian intermarriage with other ethnic groups), and those non-Russians who have never historically taken arms against Russian expansion into their their territory. The aspirations of other national minorities are irrelevant.


Will he or won’t he?


The all-important question as to whether Mr Putin would deploy regular Russian forces in eastern Ukraine has now been answered. As your correspondent always expected, those troops have been deployed, though not yet in numbers that could be described as a mass invasion. There are limiting considerations here. One is the fact that Russia’s economy is anaemic, with a forecast GDP growth for 2014 of just 0.2% - hardly the BRICS powerhouse it once was. It may be able to face off for a while against Western sanctions. But retaliatory measures will hurt Russia’s poor even more than the croneyism and corruption that have marked Mr Putin’s years in power. Nor can he rely on China, which has always taken a dim view of Russian-sponsored separatism in neighbouring states. China may will help to fill the gaps left by Western sanctions for now, but it will not always want to be seen to be supporting Russian separatist actions when it has restive minorities of its own.

Second, although Mr Putin’s approval ratings are currently well above 80%, your correspondent’s own experience tells him that people are often prepared to ‘say the right’ things to pollsters, especially when their personal details are collected. There seems to be an undercurrent of discontent with Mr Putin that is greater than the low percentages picked up by opinion polls. As well, there is no real appetite for a major Russian invasion of Ukraine. That may change, as the Kremlin has up to now proved adept at creating realities on the ground to justify its interventions.

The current deployment seems to be following the template developed in Transnistria (a separatist enclave of the republic of Moldova), where Russian troops have been deployed since the mid 1990s, and Georgia, where Russian intervention in 2008 completed the separation of the enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from the rest of the country. These conflicts have not been solved but rather frozen according to the Kremlin’s long-standing policy of weakening those of its neighbours who look west. And frozen conflicts, as we saw in the Balkans in the 1990s, and again on Russia’s fringe in recent years, can be unfrozen at any time - whether at will or by accident.

In the foreseeable future, this deployment is likely to achieve a number of goals. The Donbas region, of which Donetsk is a part, is Ukraine’s industrial powerhouse. Up to now this region has exported to Russia, and the central government in Kiev has been able to collect the tax revenue. Should Russian troops be deployed as ‘peacekeepers’ in Donetsk and other areas, this will no longer be the case. The rest of Ukraine will be weakened with economic instability mirroring itself in the political realm and vice versa.

In the long run, however, tearing at the territorial integrity of one’s near neighbours, as Russia has done in Ukraine risks compromising the integrity of Russia itself. Such an outcome, should it ever come to pass, would be a disaster, not just for Russia, but the world. 


Outlook


Whatever happens, Ukraine’s crisis will be the defining point for East-West relations for years to come. Your correspondent has always argued that this crisis could have been avoided. At the national level a deeply divided country is now even more so. And the seeds for future conflict could well be being sown even as the current one sputters on.



Your correspondent also believes that the conflict marks the high-water mark of Putinism in Russia. But its decline could be equally dangerous and unpredictable. Russian revanchism abroad will likely bring unhappy consequences at home. Prayer for the Gospel future of Ukraine and Russia is never more necessary than now.



Gareth Davies

2nd September 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author’s own, and do not reflect the opinion of the wider Radstock network or its member churches.