So I wrote an op-ed for one of my classes, Security Issues in Russia and Eurasia. I was having a bit of trouble articulating my thoughts, so I figured I'd just lay it all out here on this blog and then clean things up (considerably) for my assignment. What happened was I started writing here, and then it just turned into a big summary. So this post comes first, and then I'll post my actual op-ed.
For those of you who follow the region, Europe/Eurasia has had some exciting/shocking developments of late. The Sochi Olympics were fun because they drew a lot of attention to Russia and the Caucasus, one of the most fascinating geographical areas in the world (IMHO, of course). Even before the Olympics, though, Ukraine started blowing up in November. Now the news is full of insane headlines, stuff like "Russia invades Ukraine", "Unidentified soldiers take over airports in Crimea", and so on. What is going on? What is Russia's role in this? Why do we seem to keep hearing about Russia these days in connection with the big conflicts in the news these days, like Syria and Crimea? I'll start with a quick(ish) background
Long story short: Ukraine's increasingly authoritarian (now ex-)president Viktor Yanukovych had been negotiating a deal, called an association agreement, with the European Union (EU) that would increase economic ties between the two entities and would have been a big first step in Ukraine's eventual integration into "the West" (i.e. the USA and EU). The Russian government (i.e. Putin & friends) didn't like this plan at all, so it threatened Ukraine with economic disincentives, and a few weeks before Yanukovych was set to sign this deal with the EU he backed out. This made a lot of Ukrainians, mostly in western and central Ukraine, mad. People went out to protest this, and then people found more and more reasons to hit the streets of Kyiv.1 They centered around a public square in central Kyiv called Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), which people just started called "Maidan" (the Ukrainian word for square). Ukraine's political opposition leaders got involved. Eventually the protesters and the police forces clashed violently, I won't get into specifics of how it happened. A lot of people died, but the protesters wouldn't leave the streets.
While it would take a whole article to talk about the complexity of the protest movement, I will summarize by saying that for the most part, this was an anti-corruption revolution. At a certain point it wasn't really about wanting to join the EU anymore: it was about wanting good governance and having the right long-term trajectory: not towards East or West, but towards fairness, ethics, and a system not defined by corruption. To skip many details, Yanukovych's supporters in his own party ditched him, and the Ukrainian parliament voted to impeach Yanukovych (who was a pretty bad leader by many standards; look up Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004 to read even more about his sorry history as a Ukrainian politician), and Yanukovych took off and eventually smuggled himself into Russia.
Ukraine's opposition leaders hastily put together an interim government to run the country temporarily until Ukraine holds new elections in May. But stuff got crazy this past weekend. The eastern and southern parts of Ukraine didn't really participate in the Maidan protests. They liked Yanukovych because many prefer closer ties with Russia and many speak Russian rather than Ukrainian. So they didn't care either way when Yanukovych dropped the association agreement with the EU, and all that protesting just seemed annoying and disruptive. One area in particular started getting restive: Crimea.
Crimea is the diamond-shaped peninsula that juts out into the Black Sea. It is attached to mainland Ukraine in the north by a narrow isthmus and stretches almost all the way to Russia in that eastern bit. It has a turbulent past. Ever heard of the Crimean War? Charge of the Light Brigade? Florence Nightingale? All that stuff went down here in Crimea back in the 19th century/Victorian Era. It's changed hands a bunch of times between empires. The Ottoman Empire had it, then the Russian Empire. Which then turned into the Soviet Union. The famous Yalta Conference near the end of World War II where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met up happened in Crimea. Lots of people who consider themselves Russians lived there under the Soviet Union, when the whole region answered to Moscow. In the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev made an administrative decision to include Crimea in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Because of this, when the USSR fell apart in 1991 and Ukraine because a sovereign nation for the first time, Crimea was included in its borders. More than 50% of Crimea's population is ethnic Russian, meaning people who speak Russian and consider themselves Russians, who just happen to live in Ukraine.
Last week, a lot of ethnic Russians in Crimea were unhappy with the regime change, and the government began to talk loudly of secession. People began hoisting Russian flags over government buildings, and plans were made to hold a referendum on independence in May. That's when the really weird stuff started going down. I'm going to skip a lot of details since I've already gotten carried away with this background introduction: Russia has a naval base in Crimea, it's been there since the Soviet times and Ukraine has allowed it to stay in exchange for cheap oil and gas from Russia. Using this base and in other inexplicable ways, Russia got a whole bunch of troops into Crimea really fast last week and has basically occupied the peninsula. The Ukrainian army units there are holed up in their bases, and are showing a lot of restraint as they are surrounded by Russian troops. Right now, we're kind of at a stand-still. Ukraine's new political leadership doesn't want a war. Nobody does. So what does Russia want? That's always the question.
We are now dealing with the reality of a de facto occupation of a significant portion of Ukraine by Russian security forces, despite Putin's claims to the contrary. At this point, there will be a referendum in Crimea on March 16th (this coming Sunday). It is technically illegal -- any referendum on secession or changing the territory of Ukraine has to be a national referendum according to Ukraine's constitution. On Sunday, only people in Crimea will be voting. Plus, the only two options in the ballot are whether you are in favor of independence from Ukraine or in favor of being annexed by Russia. Staying in Ukraine is not even on the ballot. But we will have to just wait and see how it all plays out.
Stay tuned for my op-ed, if you're interested.
For those of you who follow the region, Europe/Eurasia has had some exciting/shocking developments of late. The Sochi Olympics were fun because they drew a lot of attention to Russia and the Caucasus, one of the most fascinating geographical areas in the world (IMHO, of course). Even before the Olympics, though, Ukraine started blowing up in November. Now the news is full of insane headlines, stuff like "Russia invades Ukraine", "Unidentified soldiers take over airports in Crimea", and so on. What is going on? What is Russia's role in this? Why do we seem to keep hearing about Russia these days in connection with the big conflicts in the news these days, like Syria and Crimea? I'll start with a quick(ish) background
Long story short: Ukraine's increasingly authoritarian (now ex-)president Viktor Yanukovych had been negotiating a deal, called an association agreement, with the European Union (EU) that would increase economic ties between the two entities and would have been a big first step in Ukraine's eventual integration into "the West" (i.e. the USA and EU). The Russian government (i.e. Putin & friends) didn't like this plan at all, so it threatened Ukraine with economic disincentives, and a few weeks before Yanukovych was set to sign this deal with the EU he backed out. This made a lot of Ukrainians, mostly in western and central Ukraine, mad. People went out to protest this, and then people found more and more reasons to hit the streets of Kyiv.1 They centered around a public square in central Kyiv called Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), which people just started called "Maidan" (the Ukrainian word for square). Ukraine's political opposition leaders got involved. Eventually the protesters and the police forces clashed violently, I won't get into specifics of how it happened. A lot of people died, but the protesters wouldn't leave the streets.
 |
| Source: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/23/ukraine-oppositionsets24hourdeadline.html |
While it would take a whole article to talk about the complexity of the protest movement, I will summarize by saying that for the most part, this was an anti-corruption revolution. At a certain point it wasn't really about wanting to join the EU anymore: it was about wanting good governance and having the right long-term trajectory: not towards East or West, but towards fairness, ethics, and a system not defined by corruption. To skip many details, Yanukovych's supporters in his own party ditched him, and the Ukrainian parliament voted to impeach Yanukovych (who was a pretty bad leader by many standards; look up Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004 to read even more about his sorry history as a Ukrainian politician), and Yanukovych took off and eventually smuggled himself into Russia.
Ukraine's opposition leaders hastily put together an interim government to run the country temporarily until Ukraine holds new elections in May. But stuff got crazy this past weekend. The eastern and southern parts of Ukraine didn't really participate in the Maidan protests. They liked Yanukovych because many prefer closer ties with Russia and many speak Russian rather than Ukrainian. So they didn't care either way when Yanukovych dropped the association agreement with the EU, and all that protesting just seemed annoying and disruptive. One area in particular started getting restive: Crimea.
 |
| Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crimea_in_Ukraine.svg |
Last week, a lot of ethnic Russians in Crimea were unhappy with the regime change, and the government began to talk loudly of secession. People began hoisting Russian flags over government buildings, and plans were made to hold a referendum on independence in May. That's when the really weird stuff started going down. I'm going to skip a lot of details since I've already gotten carried away with this background introduction: Russia has a naval base in Crimea, it's been there since the Soviet times and Ukraine has allowed it to stay in exchange for cheap oil and gas from Russia. Using this base and in other inexplicable ways, Russia got a whole bunch of troops into Crimea really fast last week and has basically occupied the peninsula. The Ukrainian army units there are holed up in their bases, and are showing a lot of restraint as they are surrounded by Russian troops. Right now, we're kind of at a stand-still. Ukraine's new political leadership doesn't want a war. Nobody does. So what does Russia want? That's always the question.
We are now dealing with the reality of a de facto occupation of a significant portion of Ukraine by Russian security forces, despite Putin's claims to the contrary. At this point, there will be a referendum in Crimea on March 16th (this coming Sunday). It is technically illegal -- any referendum on secession or changing the territory of Ukraine has to be a national referendum according to Ukraine's constitution. On Sunday, only people in Crimea will be voting. Plus, the only two options in the ballot are whether you are in favor of independence from Ukraine or in favor of being annexed by Russia. Staying in Ukraine is not even on the ballot. But we will have to just wait and see how it all plays out.
Stay tuned for my op-ed, if you're interested.
1 A note on the spelling of "Kyiv": sometimes you see Ukrainian cities spelled different ways. This is mostly because one way is the Ukrainian way, the other way is the Russian way. Russian and Ukrainian are indeed two distinct languages. "Kyiv" is the Ukrainian spelling of the capital city, while the more recognizable "Kiev" is the Russian spelling. Both are transliterations from the Cyrillic alphabet, which Ukrainian and Russian use. I use "Kyiv" here as a sign of solidarity with Ukrainians.↩
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