According
to Vladimir Putin, Crimea and Ukraine
are where the spiritual sources of Russia’s nationhood lie. And he
“always saw the Russians and Ukrainians as a single people. I still think this
way now.”
People
observing the crisis triggered by Putin’s aggression against Ukraine
therefore ought to understand what these words mean. Quite simply they mean
that for Putin—and for much of Russia as well, even without the constant
incitement of Kremlin propaganda—there is no such thing as a separate Ukrainian
people, national identity, culture or history.
Seen
through this Russian lens, the concept of a Ukrainian state independent of Russia is at
best a legend or fantasy. At worst it incarnates a threat to the very existence
of the Russian state. And obviously Moscow
will meet that threat with violence.
But
the implications of Putin’s rhetoric and actions go deeper. If no Ukrainian
state has the right to exist, the entire settlement of 1989 to 1991 in Eastern Europe, and
especially in the former Soviet Union, is
illegitimate and a standing threat to the Russian state. Thus Putin not only
aims to overthrow the entire post–Cold War order in Europe, the Caucasus and
Central Asia, he is also saying that the Russian state as such not only cannot
tolerate an independent Ukraine, it can only survive as an empire.
We
need to be clear about this point and what it means because empire, to put it
bluntly, means permanent war or conflict. The imperial concept inherently
denotes the domination of one people by another and the subjugation of the
weaker state by the stronger without any possibility of democratic political
expression in the colony.
Given
Russian history, it is equally obvious that no autonomous political life can
therefore occur in Russia
itself. For Russia,
empire is the logical corollary if not precondition for the preservation and
extension of Putin’s autocracy. Indeed, it is the only form of state that he
and his entourage can envision for Russia or that they have ever
known. Moreover, a Russian empire is intrinsically an inherent extra-legal form
of rule whose basis is violence (as well as Dostoevsky’s triune formula of
mystery, miracle and authority).
Putin’s
objective, then, can only lead only to a perpetual state of war within the
former Soviet space and a state of siege with Europe
and the world. That means another Cold War, if not a series of hot wars along Russia’s
periphery.
Russia has already been a state in a permanent war condition
since 1994 when the Chechen war broke out as what used to be called a war of
national liberation. Now the entire North Caucasus is aflame with a militant
Islamist uprising that Moscow
cannot quell and that has become ever more brutal.
The
Kremlin’s 2008 war with Georgia, which Putin admitted to planning from 2006,
its coercive incorporation of the Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South
Ossetia into Russia, and the war with Ukraine all represent a working out of
this logic of imperialism and war.
Even
if the Ukraine
war devolves into a so-called frozen conflict, that logic will still be
operative. We already have seen how quickly frozen conflicts can become
unfrozen and how they corrode civility and democracy throughout their regions.
Beyond that, a renewed Russian empire essentially reincarnates the idea that Russia is not
safe unless everyone connected to it, and not only its immediate neighbors, is
unsafe or insecure.
This
state can only be preserved then by what the late Russian defense analyst,
Vitaly Shlykov, called structural militarization. And we see that happening now
with the growth of the defense sector as the rest of the economy shrivels due
to sanctions and falling energy prices.
This
is what is at stake in Ukraine.
It is not just a quarrel over the fate of Ukraine. It is a war for the future
of Russia
and beyond that for the long-term future of European and Eurasian security. And
to the extent that we hide behind rhetoric that masks a deeper inaction or
complacency about Russia and
Ukraine,
we are only storing up for ourselves and future generations a larger
continental crisis.
That
crisis, even if we ignore it now, will inevitably occur when the
unsustainability of this imperial adventure becomes fully clear not to analysts
in the West but to the Russian people and their government. For this regime,
unlike Gorbachev’s, will not go peacefully. In a country that is arming itself
to the hilt, and that possesses nuclear weapons, that is a terrifying future.
Thus
inactivity today only ensures and accelerates the onset of the much larger
conflict that Putin’s action will inevitably bring upon Russia.
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