New Pathway.
The book “Putin’s War Against Ukraine” is Taras Kuzio’s answer to the lack of understanding of Ukraine in general and the current war in particular in the West. The idea for the book came in 2012-13 with a need to research the Donbas when President Viktor Yanukovych was in power. It was the time when the now-ousted Yanukovych was at the height of his monopoly of power and ironically three months after the project began the Revolution of Dignity started. Consequently, the project, which used to be limited to just researching the Donbas, expanded into something far bigger. Taras Kuzio said that, in 2013-2015, he did 300 interviews with worldwide media and in the past three years he travelled to the Eastern Ukraine and to the war zone 15 times to conduct interviews and collect research.
Since 2014, there was an explosion of political science publications on Ukraine. Taras Kuzio said, “In my book I have a bibliography of about 300 academic and think-tank publications issued since 2014, on the Euromaidan, Donbas and Crimea. Everybody became a “Ukrainian expert” after 2014. But most of these were not Ukrainian experts, these were usually Russian experts, people from post-communist and East European studies at universities, international relations experts and historians. They often did not know Ukraine, did not travel to Ukraine and, of course, most of them have never been to the war zone. There has been a lot of bad writing and a lot of what I call “ideologically driven” writing, where some academics would blame the West for the crisis, echoing Vladimir Putin’s propaganda. And there was very little in this writing that was to do with national identity because this subject is complicated. I decided national identity to be the subject of my book because it is the root core of the war, of Russia’s hostility to Ukraine and to the West. Everything else is secondary – geopolitical questions, Putin’s siloviki and Putin’s KGB background, etc.”
The national identity issue, Taras Kuzio said, is related to how the Russian leadership and the majority of the Russian people do not view Ukrainians as a separate people, do not view Ukraine as a real state, but as an artificial and failed state. They identify Russian speakers as “if you speak Russian you are Russian.” It was only in 2016, said Taras, that the West understood that Russia believes it’s at war with the West and Ukraine is just one part of that war, because Ukraine is perceived as an anti-Russian 5th column in the Russian sphere of influence: “The West woke up to this because of the increased Russian information and cyber war in Europe and the Russian hacking of the American presidential election.”
The West’s illusions about Russia date back to the President George W Bush’s attempt to reset US relations with Russia. And then President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to reset US-Russian relations in 2009-10. Taras Kuzio explains: “Those resets never worked and then there were protests in Moscow in 2011-2012, which Putin, like Yanukovych, believes to have been a western conspiracy. He blamed Hilary Clinton for them and began to take this personally. In 2012, Putin was elected on a very conservative and imperialistic platform.”
“This conflict will not go away quickly as national identity issues are very deep”
It is important to understand the causes of this crisis, insisted Taras Kuzio, because this conflict will not go away quickly as national identity issues are very deep: “They can’t be resolved by the Minsk process, because Putin and his people in power will not change their view of Ukraine quickly. Gleb Pavlovsky described the Orange Revolution as “Putin’s 9/11” and the 2013-14 Revolution of Dignity became a second 9/11 for Putin. The Russian leadership’s view of Ukraine will not change even if Putin is overthrown by the so-called Russian opposition such as Alexey Navalny, who is also a Russian chauvinist, believes that Ukrainians are not a separate people and supports the annexation of Crimea.”
“Imperialistic views are very entrenched in Russia which never identified itself as distinct from the Soviet Union”
Imperialistic views are very entrenched in Russia which never identified itself as distinct from the Soviet Union, said Taras Kuzio: “Russia did not declare independence in 1991. It celebrates Independence Day based on the declaration of sovereignty from 1990. Unlike Ukraine, which also declared sovereignty in July 1990 but declared independence in August 1991. After the failed coup in August 1991, Boris Yeltsin took over Soviet institutions, Russia was recognized as a successor state to the USSR, it took over Soviet nuclear weapons and the Soviet seat on the UN Security Council. It was made worse from 2000 when Putin came to power and created what western political scientists call a “militocracy” – political system controlled by siloviki with a “Chekist” or KGB mentality. That mentality become more prominent after the Rose and Orange revolutions. Russia turned to the nationalist right between 2005-07, with the creation of the Nashi movement, launch of counter-revolutionary political technology, creation of Russkii Mir (Russian world), the assassination of Aleksander Lytvynenko in London, Putin’s 2007 speech to the Munich security conference, and the 2008 invasion of Georgia.”
But how could this imperialistic problem be resolved if it runs so deep in the Russian tradition? Taras Kuzio provided an example of Polish-Ukrainian relations where even though there are problems related to the war in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands in the 1940s, these relations are fundamentally different today to what they were 70 years ago: “This change began in the late 1940s in the Polish Diaspora. Polish intellectuals accepted the new borders, discussed Poland’s imperial past, these steps were supported by the election of a Polish Pope in 1979 (Cardinal Wojtyla) and then the Solidarity and Polish underground supported this. It was also helped by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, because he changed the borders of Poland, and made it ethnically homogenous thereby brutally resolving the Ukrainian-Polish conflict. This all took four decades. It also took the British a long time to come to terms with Irish independence.”
What could help Russia realize the need to depart from its imperial past is the country’s economic stagnation: “You see now a growing public discontent in stagnating Russia due to low oil prices, no reforms and a mafia state. There is a greater public awareness of corruption: a recent Russian opinion poll found that 80% of Russians believe that Putin has contributed to the high levels of corruption. This is very dangerous for Putin, it means that there is a public focus away from victories in Syria and Crimea, which is good for Ukraine.”
“it’s one thing to hold imperialistic views of Ukraine and it’s another thing to undertake military action against Ukraine”
Another positive comes from the fact that not everybody is in the same boat in Russia. Although chauvinism is widespread among pro-regime and opposition Russian political leaders, said Taras Kuzio, “it’s one thing to hold imperialistic views of Ukraine and it’s another thing to undertake military action against Ukraine. President Boris Yeltsin believed (like Navalny) that Ukrainians are not a separate people but he did not (and the latter probably would not) send military forces against Ukraine. This makes them very different to Putin. Ukraine could probably live with a Russia ruled by Navalny – just as it did with Yeltsin’s Russia.”
The worst is over for Ukraine, thinks Taras Kuzio: “The most dangerous time was in 2014, when Ukraine was bankrupt and didn’t really have an army but even then Russia was unable to defeat Ukraine. The one reason being was that Russian speakers in Ukraine supported Kyiv, not Putin, and that’s very important, and Ukrainian civil society and military volunteers rushed from the Maidan to the front to defend Ukraine. I stress in my book the importance of understanding that Ukraine’s Russian speakers are largely Ukrainian patriots. In Moscow they cannot fathom a Ukrainian patriotic Russian speaker, as language in Russian eyes determines political allegiance.”
According to Taras Kuzio, the mission of this book, which is deliberately priced low, is to reach a wider Western audience than standard very expensive academic books. This is only possible because it is the first book in Ukrainian studies published in paperback and in Kindle through Amazon.
Taras Kuzio’s research project was funded by the US Ukrainian Studies Fund and “Putin’s War Against Ukraine. Revolution, Nationalism, and Crime” is published in association with the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto.
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