Crimea Scene Investigation
Ukraine's national awakening can seem like chauvinism
and oppression to Russian and Tatar Crimeans.

By Joshua Kucera
Updated Friday, Feb. 27, 2009, at 6:55 AM ET
From: Joshua Kucera

Subject: Is Ukraine Next?

Posted Monday, Feb. 23, 2009, at 12:02 PM ET

KIEV, Ukraine—At the end of Kiev's main street, Khreschatyk, with its advertisements for
mail-order-bride agencies and posh boutiques selling $3,000 opossum-fur duffel bags, stands a monument
to an older Ukraine. Two burly 20-foot-tall members of the proletariat—one Russian, one Ukrainian
—stand manfully, chests thrust forward, together holding up a five-pointed star inscribed with the hammer
and sickle and the words "Friendship of Nations." The formerly exalted spot is now somewhat cheapened
by the presence of a few rickety attractions, like bumper cars and a shooting range where you can plink
empty beer cans with a Kalashnikov-shaped air rifle.
Monuments like this are usually a good barometer for how a former Soviet republic feels about its
relationship with Russia. Lithuania, which sprinted as fast as possible from Russia after the collapse of the
Soviet Union, has moved its Soviet-era statues to a museum park, and Estonia even went so far as to
remove a World War II memorial from the center of its capital city. On the other end of the spectrum,
Lenin still stands tall in the central square of Minsk, the capital of Belarus, a country that regularly
entertains proposals to reunite with Russia.
Ukraine is a bit more ambivalent. The Friendship of Nations monument stands next to a panoramic lookout
spot over the Dnieper River, and most people who come to the monument barely pay it any attention; it's
just something they pass by to get to the view. The base's inscription (a relief text that read "In
Commemoration of the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia") has been removed, though the outline of
the letters is still visible because decades of pollution discolored the background around them. The statue
now sports a little Ukrainian nationalist graffiti. But the Russian and Ukrainian workers still stand side by
side.
The friendship between Russia and Ukraine is on the rocks these days. The 2004 Orange Revolution
brought in pro-Western leaders who have prioritized joining NATO and the European Union to the
detriment of Kiev's ties to Moscow. The summer 2008 war between Georgia and Russia ratcheted up the
tension even more: Ukraine sold arms to Georgia (some secretly, Russia and a few Ukrainians allege), and
its president, Viktor Yushchenko, flew to Georgia to show Ukraine's support. Meanwhile, Russian navy
ships based in Ukraine ferried troops to Georgia and sank one Georgian coast guard vessel.
Immediately after the dust settled in Georgia, speculation had it that Ukraine was next in Russia's sights.
(Google "Is Ukraine next?" to see just how much speculation.) Like Georgia, Ukraine has NATO
aspirations and a president dedicated to moving away from Moscow and toward the United States and
Europe. And it has Crimea, a peninsula on the Black Sea where most of the population is not Ukrainian but
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ethnic Russian. It also hosts a large Russian naval base. Although Crimea is still firmly under Ukrainian
control, Russia can turn up the heat there when it wants to. Shortly after the war in Georgia, I ran into a
Russian diplomat I know in Washington; I asked him what came next. He grinned and said, "Watch
Crimea." While the world's attention has lately been focused on the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute, the issue
of Crimea holds more long-term potential for conflict.
But while the situations in Ukraine and Georgia have several ominous parallels, they are also different in
important ways. Ukraine is much larger—a population of 46 million, 10 times as large as Georgia's—with a
much stronger military. Georgians, traditionally mountain dwellers, have a legendarily fiery temperament,
while Ukrainians' reputation is more as mild-mannered farmers. The Ukrainian population itself is divided:
While independence has allowed Ukrainian nationalism to flourish, especially in the western part of the
country, 17 percent of Ukrainian citizens are ethnic Russians and many others still look to Moscow for
cultural and political orientation. Public support for NATO membership hovers in the 30 percent range,
while in Georgia it's more than 80 percent.
Perhaps most important, though, Ukrainians share a long history and a cultural affinity with Russians.
While Russia's relations with Georgia date only to the 18th century, the histories of Ukraine and Russia
have been inseparable for more than 1,000 years. Kiev was the site of the first great Slavic civilization,
Kievan Rus, established in the 10th century. When the Mongols sacked Kiev in 1240, the city fell into
decline, and the center of Slavic civilization shifted to Moscow (which had been founded by a prince from
Kiev in 1147). Russians and Ukrainians still dispute whose country is the true successor of Kievan Rus. A
Russian proverb says that Moscow is the heart of Russia and St. Petersburg is its head—but Kiev is its
mother. Russia values these inter-Slavic ties highly; its low birth rates and high death rates create the
potential that Russians will, over time, become demographically overwhelmed by the non-Slavic minorities
that surround Russia.
I recently traveled through Ukraine to try to see whether my diplomat friend—and everyone else—was
right. Was Ukraine next in Russia's sights? No one knows, of course, probably not even at the Kremlin.
But if there is an eventual conflict in Crimea between Russia and Ukraine, we'll be able to point fingers in
many directions: Moscow, for fomenting anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Crimea; Kiev, for pursuing clumsy
nationalist policies that alienate Russians in Ukraine; Crimean Russians, for stubbornly holding onto the
Soviet past rather than focusing on a future in an independent Ukraine; and Western governments, in
particular the United States, for supporting the Ukrainian government so enthusiastically that Kiev feels
emboldened to act more rashly than it otherwise might.
The shared history of Russia and Ukraine is a double-edged sword. Over and over, people in
Ukraine—both pro-Russian and pro-Western—told me that Ukraine and Russia would never fight because
of their close historical and cultural ties. But, I wondered, had close ties helped the Croats and Serbs, the
Union and Confederacy, Iraqi Sunnis and Iraqi Shiites, or countless other groups of compatriots-turnedenemies?
Russia's roots in Ukraine make the stakes much higher here—the loss of Ukraine to the west
would be felt more keenly in Moscow than would the loss of Georgia, and so Russia will be willing to try
harder and to risk more to keep it in its sphere of influence.
In addition, Ukrainians have centuries of grievances against Russia on which to draw and a walk through
Kiev's grand old center provides plenty of reminders. Just across from the golden-domed St. Sophia's
cathedral (which dates from 1037 and whose connection to Kievan Rus history probably spared it from
destruction under the Soviets) and in the shadow of a gleaming Hyatt hotel is an equestrian statue of
Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Ukrainian Cossack leader who signed a peace deal with Russia in 1654.
Ukrainians now criticize the deal as having sold out the country, resulting in Ukraine's subjugation to
Russia. (The statue, erected in the czarist era, points toward Moscow.)
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Just across the cobblestoned street is a small monument commemorating those who starved during the
Soviet collectivization of the 1930s; in November 2008, the Ukrainian government inaugurated a new,
much larger monument to the famine. Between 3 million and 6 million Ukrainians died, and historical
opinion in Ukraine is increasingly reaching the conclusion that the famine was a deliberate genocide
against the Ukrainian people perpetrated from Moscow, rather than the unintended consequence of
collectivization—something that Russian historians hotly dispute and that has become another issue of
contention between the two countries.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who never misses an opportunity to needle Russia, attended the
new monument's inauguration. In his remarks, Saakashvili said current Russian attempts to deny the
genocide show that "the ideology of evil remains alive. Even 75 years after the tragedy, the seeds of evil
still grow in some individuals." Meanwhile, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev sent a letter to President
Yushchenko complaining that "the tragic events of the 1930s are being used in Ukraine in order to achieve
instantaneous and conformist political goals."
The Georgia war was a watershed moment for this part of the world. It demonstrated vividly that the
balance of power here had tipped. Georgia was the most loyal ally the United States had in the former
Soviet Union, and when America failed to come to Georgia's aid, Russia essentially called Washington's
bluff—they were willing to use force to defend their interests, and the United States wasn't. The advances
Washington had made in the last two decades—expanding NATO, building new oil and gas pipelines,
establishing military relations—suddenly looked a lot more fragile.
I had been wondering whether this was causing other U.S. allies in the former Soviet Union to have second
thoughts about throwing in their lot with Washington. So I arranged a meeting with Boris Tarasyuk, an
elder statesman of Ukrainian diplomacy and Yushchenko's first foreign minister. If he was having second
thoughts, he wasn't admitting it. In fact, he was offended by the very premise of my question.
"Ukraine is not Georgia. The Georgian situation is not the same as the Ukrainian situation. So you cannot
speak as if you are speaking about similar situations. This is a completely wrong conceptual approach. You
should not speak in these terms," he said. "In Ukraine there are no territories outside of its control.
Ukraine, by its size, is not comparable to Georgia. Ukraine has one of the largest armed forces in Europe,
so one cannot compare the military capabilities of Georgia with those of Ukraine. This is a rather serious
situation, to attack Ukraine militarily, because the consequences of such a confrontation would affect the
whole of Europe. I am of the opinion that this is understood by both sides."
Still, he admitted that Russia has the same kind of designs on Ukraine that it does on Georgia. "Their
strategic foreign-policy objective is to impose domination over Ukraine," he said. And Ukrainian fear has
only grown since the war in Georgia: Polls showed that 47 percent of Ukrainians felt less secure as a result
of the war. "What happened in Georgia convinced many people in Ukraine, especially those in charge, to
pay adequate attention to the quality of its armed forces and the necessity to allocate adequate funding for
making the armed forces modern, well-equipped, and ready." (After the Georgia war, Ukraine's defense
minister called for the military budget to be more than tripled from 2008 to 2009.)
"We are always using all means to protect our interests," he said. Then he added, "And at the same time,
we are not provoking any unpredictable results. We have to calculate first, what is the challenge, how to
cope with the challenge in an effective way, and not to cause unexpected result. In this sense, Ukrainians
are different from Georgians."