By David Remnick, The New Yorker
02 March 14
Vladimir Putin, the Russian President and autocrat, had a
plan for the winter of 2014: to reassert his country’s power a generation after
the collapse of the Soviet Union. He thought that he would achieve this by
building an Olympic wonderland on the Black Sea for fifty-one billion dollars
and putting on a dazzling television show. It turns out that he will finish the
season in a more ruthless fashion, by invading a peninsula on the Black Sea and
putting on quite a different show—a demonstration war that could splinter a
sovereign country and turn very bloody, very quickly.
Sergei Parkhomenko, a journalist and pro-democracy
activist who was recently detained by the police in Moscow, described the
scenario taking shape as “Afghanistan
2.” He recalled, for Slon.ru, an independent Russian news site, how the
Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, in 1979, under the pretext of helping a
“fraternal” ally in Kabul; to Parkhomenko, Putin’s decision to couch his
military action as the “protection” of Russians living in Crimea is an equally
transparent pretext. The same goes for the decorous way in which Putin, on
Saturday, “requested” the Russian legislature’s authorization for the use of
Russian troops in Ukraine until “the socio-political situation is normalized.”
The legislature, which has all the independence of an organ grinder’s monkey,
voted its unanimous assent.
Other critics of Putin’s military maneuvers in Ukraine
used different, but no less ominous, historical analogies. Some compared the
arrival of Russian troops in Simferopol to the way that the Kremlin, in 2008,
took advantage of Georgia’s reckless bid to retake South Ossetia and then
muscled its tiny neighbor, eventually waging a war that ended with Russia
taking control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
[...]
Obama and Putin spoke on the phone today for an hour and
a half. The White House and Kremlin accounts of the call add up to
what was clearly the equivalent of an angry standoff: lectures,
counter-lectures, intimations of threats, intimations of counter-threats. But
the leverage, for now, is all with Moscow.
The legislators in the Russian parliament today parroted
those features of modern Putinism. In order to justify the invasion of the
Crimean peninsula, they repeatedly cited the threat of Ukrainian “fascists” in
Kiev helping Russia’s enemies. They repeatedly echoed the need to protect
ethnic Russians in Ukraine—a theme consonant with the Kremlin’s rhetoric about
Russians everywhere, including the Baltic States. But there was, of course, not
one word about the sovereignty of Ukraine, which has been independent since the
fall of the Soviet Union, in December, 1991.
If this is the logic of the Russian invasion, the
military incursion is unlikely to stop in Crimea: nearly all of eastern Ukraine
is Russian-speaking. Russia defines its interests far beyond its Black Sea
fleet and the Crimean peninsula.
[...]
It is worth noting that, in Moscow, the modern dissident
movement was born in 1968, when four brave protesters went to Red Square and
unfurled a banner denouncing the invasion of Prague. Those demonstrators are
the heroes of, among other young Russians, the members of the punk band Pussy
Riot. This is something that Putin also grasps very well. At the same time that
he is planning his vengeful military operation against the new Ukrainian
leadership, he has been cracking down harder on his opponents in Moscow. Alexey
Navalny, who is best known for his well-publicized investigations into state
corruption and for his role in anti-Kremlin demonstrations two years ago, has
now been placed under house arrest. Navalny, who won twenty-seven per cent of
the vote in a recent Moscow mayoral ballot, is barred from using the Internet,
his principal means of communication and dissidence. The period of Olympic
mercy has come to an end.
It’s also worth noting that, in 1968, Moscow was reacting
to the “threat” of the Prague Spring and to ideological liberalization in
Eastern Europe; in 1979, the Kremlin leadership was reacting to the upheavals
in Kabul. The rationale now is far flimsier, even in Moscow’s own terms. The
people of the Crimean peninsula were hardly under threat by “fascist gangs”
from Kiev. In the east, cities like Donetsk and Kharkov had also been quiet,
though that may already be changing. That’s the advantage of Putin’s
state-controlled television and his pocket legislature; you can create any
reality and pass any edict.
I spoke with Georgy Kasianov, the head of the Academy of
Science’s department of contemporary Ukrainian history and politics, in Kiev.
“It’s a war,” he said. “The Russian troops are quite openly out on the streets
[in Crimea], capturing public buildings and military outposts. And it’s likely
all a part of a larger plan for other places: Odessa, Nikolayev, Kherson. And
they’ll use the same technique. Some Russian-speaking citizens will appear, put
up a Russian flag, and make appeals that they want help and referendums, and so
on.” This is already happening in Donetsk and Kharkov.
“They are doing this like it is a commonplace,” Kasianov
went on. “I can’t speak for four million people, but clearly everyone in Kiev
is against this. But the Ukrainian leadership is absolutely helpless. The Army
is not ready for this. And, after the violence in Kiev, the special forces are
disoriented.”
Just a few days ago, this horrendous scenario of invasion
and war, no matter how limited, seemed the farthest thing from nearly everyone’s
mind in either Ukraine or Russia, much less the West. As it happens so often in
these situations—from Tahrir Square to Taksim Square to Maidan Square—people
were taken up with the thrill of uprising. After Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev,
the coverage moved to what one might call the “golden toilet” stage of things,
that moment when the freedom-hungry crowds discover the fallen leader’s
arrangements and bountiful holdings—the golden bathroom fixtures; the paintings
and the tapestries; the secret mistress; the lurid bedrooms and freezers
stocked with sweetmeats; the surveillance videos and secret transcripts; the
global real-estate holdings; the foreign bank accounts; the fleets of cars,
yachts, and airplanes; the bad taste, the unknown cruelties.
[...]
Masha Lipman, my colleague in Moscow, sketched out in stark
and prescient terms some of the challenges facing Ukraine, ranging from the
divisions within the country to the prospect of what Putin might do rather than
“lose” Ukraine.
Putin’s reaction exceeded our worst expectations. These
next days and weeks in Ukraine are bound to be frightening, and worse. There is
not only the threat of widening Russian military force. The new Ukrainian
leadership is worse than weak. It is unstable. It faces the burden of
legitimacy. Yanukovych was spectacularly corrupt, and he opened fire on his own
people. He was also elected to his office and brought low by an uprising, not the
ballot; he made that point on Friday, in a press conference in Rostov on Don,
in Russia, saying that he had never really been deposed. Ukraine has already
experienced revolutionary disappointment. The Orange Revolution, in 2004,
failed to establish stable democratic institutions and economic justice. This
is one reason that Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister, newly released
from prison, is not likely the future of Ukraine. How can Ukraine possibly move
quickly to national elections, as it must to resolve the issue of legitimacy,
while another country has troops on its territory?
Vladimir Ryzhkov, a liberal Russian politician who no
longer holds office, said that the events were not only dangerous for Ukraine
but ominous for Russia and the man behind them. “It’s quite likely that this
will be fatal for the regime and catastrophic for Russia,” he told Slon.ru. “It
just looks as if they have taken leave of their senses.”
