Putin is Waging War on Eastern Ukraine

Putin is Waging War on Eastern Ukraine


Historians have known for a long time that the idea that Ukrainians form a different nation than Russians, and therefore decide of their own destiny, is seen by Moscow, and a large segment of the Russian population, as artificial, as a creation of foreign powers (Austria and Poland before the wars, the United States since).


They have also known that since World War II, Russia has associated Ukrainian nationalism, or the right of Ukrainians to self-determination, with fascism. In this view, it is not merely the Ukrainian insurgents of World War II (who called themselves the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) who were fascists; it is the very idea of Ukrainian nationalism that is fascist.

What we did not know is that a Russian ruler would be willing to wage a full-scale war on this premise. When Putin tells us that the objective of the so-called “military operation to protect Donbas” is to “denazify” Ukraine, what he literally means is that a Ukrainian state that persists in making its own choices, such as aligning itself with the West (EU, NATO) and maintaining a competitive electoral system, is nationalist, and therefore artificial, fascist, and threatening since fascists kill civilians. This is the link between “denazification” and the absurd claim of “genocide” in Donbas.

Putin is telling us that in order to stop the genocide in Donbas, an army operation is necessary to overthrow the government and eradicate the very idea of Ukrainian nationalism. The state propagandists are loud and clear: the goal, in tones reminiscent of the darkest hours of the modern era, is to bring about a “solution to the Ukrainian problem” (reshenie ukrainskogo voprosa). In this macabre representation, the virus of Ukrainian nationalism, and the fake Ukrainian state, can be extirpated, and the real Ukrainians will emerge. He explicitly called on Ukrainian generals to lay down their arms to save themselves from fascism. We are now lightyears away from geopolitical neutrality and a special status for Donbas. Putin aims to destroy what he sees as Western-created unreal Ukraine, once and for all.

The real Ukraine, however, is resisting. Before Maidan, Ukraine oscillated between Western-oriented and Russian-oriented governments. In 2014, in the wake of the annexation of Crimea, Russia expected that Ukraine would collapse on its own in all of the East. Yet the fate of Ukraine was decided largely in the street, and Ukraine prevailed everywhere except in the portion of Donbas territory where ethnic Russians were most concentrated. It seems that Putin learned nothing from 2014 and expected once again that Ukraine would collapse quickly once the Russian army entered.


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Since the Ukrainians are resisting, Putin is resorting to bombing cities with ever-increasing civilian casualties. Some missiles miss their mark (as in Kharkiv, where the university campus was hit instead of the adjacent Interior Ministry); others appear to target civilians directly (such as an entire apartment in Irpin). No matter what, the shelling is indiscriminate, and Russia is engaging in systematic war crimes. Ukrainian authorities, and Western intelligence agencies, are bracing for a terrible escalation, with Grozny 1994 or London 1940 coming to mind.

Putin may be obsessed with “fascists,” “radical nationalists,” and “neo-Nazis,” but what his army is actually doing is attacking Eastern Ukraine, not particularly known historically as a hotbed of nationalism. With the exception of some military installations in Western Ukraine in the early going, all the bombing has been taking place in Kyiv and Eastern Ukraine, where the majority of the population prefers to speak Russian. In other words, he is attacking the Russian-speakers that he claims belong to his Russian World (Russkii mir). The result has been the vaporization of whatever support and affinity Russia had in Eastern Ukraine.

There is no doubt that historical, cultural, linguistic, religious and family ties with Russia run deep in Eastern Ukraine. Any doubt that these ties translated into an actual loyalty to the Russian state dissipated in 2014: the Eastern Ukrainians declared themselves Ukrainian. Now that Russia is literally bombing their cities, the deep bonds are getting shattered.

Mikhail Dobkin, the governor of Kharkiv in 2014 whom Russia counted upon to organize an anti-Maidan resistance in Eastern Ukraine, is done: “Much of what I believed in collapsed overnight . . . just burned out,” “May this war be damned.” The man who sent vigilantes to beat up Maidan protesters in 2014 has broken with Russia. Onufriy, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate, denounced the “unjust war” and called on his flock to pray for the Ukrainian army. He is facing an internal revolt from priests who want a total break from Moscow. Brave Russian-speaking protesters in occupied Kherson are telling soldiers to leave along with their “Russian World.” The Russian flags that could be seen throughout Eastern Ukraine in early 2014 have vanished.

The imaginary Ukrainians applauding the Russian “operation” don’t exist. How could it be otherwise? Russia is attacking them, killing their children and wives, destroying their livelihood. Putin aims to extinguish the Ukrainian idea, and he has achieved the total opposite: everybody is now Ukrainian, in the sense of identifying with an independent Ukrainian state. The old debate over whether the Ukrainian nation was “incomplete” or the province of as a “minority faith” is over. There is no more East/West divide on the most fundamental issue: the existence of a Ukrainian state, where decisions are taken in Kyiv, not Moscow. An overwhelming majority stands behind Zelensky, the Eastern Ukrainian President.

If we assume the worst and the Russian army does take control of the large cities, at the cost of enormous civilian casualties, what next? We saw in World War II that every state has its collaborators. The Vichy types believed in a Nazi-led project of a New Europe. But what can potential Ukrainian collaborators believe in since Russia is waging war on the notion that the Ukrainian state is not real? How can the Russian military be expected to rule without social support? No matter what happens next, Russia has lost Ukraine, and Eastern Ukraine, forever.

 

 

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