• http://teacheval.ubc.ca/online-evaluation/

Ukraine

GEOG220 - Geopolitics

This week

• Geopolitics perspectives on Ukraine

• Secessionism, Crimea, Donetsk and Lugangsk

• The ‘return’ of geopolitics?

A year ago …

• Gathering of Ukrainian people on Maidan (Independence) square in Kiev

Þ Demand for closer European integration following decision of suspension of negotiations for U-EU Association Agreement

Þ #Euromaidan protestsÞ Feb 2014 … Ukrainian Revolution, exile of Pdt

Viktor Yanukovych, restoration of pre-2010 Constitution, possible revocation of 2012 linguistic rights for Russian speakers

Þ Protests against new government and referendums (Crimea peninsula - March, & Donetsk and Lugangsk oblasts)

• Historical dimensions– Russian ‘borderlands’ and buffer states with repeated

invasions from western powers (Napoleon, Nazi Germany)– Emancipation from Soviet/Russian influence

• Contextual factors– Economic crisis– Growing authoritarianism of President Yanukovych– Rising far-right Ukrainian nationalism

• Triggering events– Preference for Russian deal over EU Association Agreement

Conventional geopolitical perspective• “the dictates of geography make it nearly impossible

for that nation to reorient itself entirely to the West.” Robert Kaplan, Times

• Dnieper River– West: Lithuanian, Polish, Austro-Hungarian influence =>

‘European’ anchoring– East: Russian influence, importance of access to the Black

sea

• Major front in WWII -

Russian perspective(s)

• Historic and cultural:– Kiev as first capital of ‘Russia’ under

Kievan Rus (Rurik dynasty) – 880s-1240s– 17% of Ukraine’s population Russian-

speaking (78% Ukrainian, Slavic language – 12th cent)

• Military:– Russian access to the Black Sea– Resistance to NATO enlargement

• Politico-economic:– Maintenance of ‘Russian’ sphere of

influence (Commonwealth of Independent States; Collective Security Treaty Organization)

Russian realist perspective

• From Soviet ‘Satellite States’ to Russian ‘Near Abroad’– Geopolitical security argument (‘buffer states’,

‘sphere of influence’, etc…)• ‘West’ as an invasive Other– NATO– EU– US

European perspective(s)

• ‘Natural’ enlargement of the European UnionEuropean Neighbourhood Policy

- Strong interests- Major concerns over

governance under Yanukovich- Association Agreement,

pending Tymoshenko case

US Perspective

• Pre-emptive move towards ‘Russian imperialism’

“Russia is more likely to make a break with its imperial past if the newly independent post-Soviet states are vital and stable. Their vitality will temper any residual Russian imperial temptations.” Brzezinski, former Carter administration

“not only clashing claims over the same area of influence, but two geopolitical views that structure incompatible ways of handling international politics.”

Virginia Mamadouh, Geopoliticshttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pdf/papers/FGEO-archival-collection-Ukraine-Intro.pdf

European liberal perspective

• ‘Ring of Friends’ in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean

• 19th century: Russia conquers most of Ukraine• Ukraine briefly describes her independence in

1917 during Bolshevik Revolution … but (re)included in the Soviet Union in 1922

The ‘Bloodlands’

• Forced collectivization and Stalinist repression; massive famine in 1932-33 with about 6 million deaths mostly in eastern part

• WWII: about 8 million deaths from massive battles and deaths camps– 1942-43 Dnieper front: about 2 million casualties

Independence

• Ukraine gains independence in 1991, but remains under control of a pro-Russian regime

• ‘Orange Revolution’ in 2004 following alleged fraudulent election of Pdt Yanukovich

• Pro-European Victor Yushchenko and Yulia Timochenko win re-run elections with clear East/West break in voting

• Yanukovich elected in 2010

Ukrainian perspectivesPro-European Pro-Russian

Greater democracy Greater stability

Fear of Federalism leading to partition Desire for greater autonomy

Economic opportunities of integration Economic support from Russia

Documentaries

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoFMcNa6oto

Sources

• Geopolitical visions of the protagonists• http://explore.tandfonline.com/content/pgas/

geopolitics-ukraine-collection

•

Main differences EU / Russia

• Russia is an “autocratic state, politically centralized and culturally sustained by a strong national identity” => military might

• EU is a “quasi-federal configuration with a complex structure of multiple layers and plural identities based on consensus and compromise” => diplomatic and juridical solutions

• Ukraine as a borderland• Etymology: ukraina (Slavic) = borderlandsÞ The Ukraine: the (Russian) borderlandsÞ Defined by its relative geopolitical position and

representation

• “Until 1917, Ukrainians called their northern neighbors ‘velykorosy’, the great Russians, based on the ideological reasoning behind the triune “Russian tribe.” In USSR times, when soviet identity was constructed, the resulting soviet nation was referred to as ‘russki’. Modern Russia replaced it with ‘rossiyanie’, yet the Kremlin still wants to see a supranational term in the word russki used as an umbrella name for Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians.”

• The bill coming in to force in Aug 2012 reaffirms Ukrainian as the sole national language, but allows local and regional governments to grant official status to Russian and other languages spoken by at least 10 percent of their residents

• On 9 February 2013 the authors of the 2012 language law, Serhiy Kivalov and Vadym Kolesnichenko, were awarded the "Medal of Pushkin" by Russian President Vladimir Putin for "great contribution to the preservation and promotion of the Russian language and culture abroad“

• Major official motive for secession of Crimea and Donesk (and other Eastern oblasts) was abrogation of 2012 language law, but not certain it was in fact abrogated…

Percentage of Russian-speakers

What language(s) do you speak at home?

Both

• narcissism of small differences 'the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other'

“Bloodlands”• the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical

destruction“During the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, the lethal armies and vicious secret policemen of two totalitarian states marched back and forth across these territories, each time bringing about profound ethnic and political changes. In this period, the city of Lwów was occupied twice by the Red Army and once by the Wehrmacht. After the war ended it was called L’viv, not Lwów, it was no longer in eastern Poland but in western Ukraine, and its Polish and Jewish pre-war population had been murdered or deported and replaced by ethnic Ukrainians from the surrounding countryside… Each time power changed hands there were battles and sieges, and each time an army retreated from the city it blew up the harbor or massacred Jews. Similar stories can be told about almost any place in the region.“

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/worst-madness/

“Between 1933 and 1945, fourteen million people died there, not in combat but because someone made a deliberate decision to murder them. These deaths took place in the bloodlands, and not accidentally so: “Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow … but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between.”

• Beginning in the 1930s, Stalin conducted his first utopian agricultural experiment in Ukraine, where he collectivized the land and conducted a “war” for grain with the kulaks, the “wealthy” peasants (whose wealth sometimes consisted of a single cow). His campaign rapidly evolved into a war against Ukrainian peasant culture itself, culminating in a mass famine in 1933

• “In 1933 Hitler came to power and began dreaming of creating Lebensraum, living space, for German colonists in Poland and Ukraine, a project that could only be realized by eliminating the people who lived there.2 In 1941, the Nazis also devised the Hunger Plan, a scheme to feed German soldiers and civilians by starving Polish and Soviet citizens. Once again, the Nazis decided, the produce of Ukraine’s collective farms would be confiscated and redistributed: “Socialism in one country would be supplanted by socialism for the German race.”

• Elimination of local elites• Brutal transformation of local cultures and

quasi-genocide of populations• Jewish holocaust: of the 5.4 million Jews who

died in the Holocaust, four million were from the ‘bloodlands’

• Three million Soviet Prisoners of War died during WWII

• “modern Germany’s very real sense of guilt about the Holocaust does not often extend to Soviet soldiers or even to Poles.”

Anne Applebaum - The Worst of the Madness(http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/worst-madness/?page=2)