The Ukraine Question
Russian Federation invaded Ukraine on 24th February 2022. A standoff between Kremlin and Washington has evolved, while Ukraine becomes torn apart. We understand the conflict from a global perspective.
Five questions guide this essay:
1) What was the situation that the Ukrainian state had to face?
2) Why did establishing a viable state on the designated territory not work?
3) What happened as the Ukrainian state tried to get going?
4) How did the great powers intervene; what was the role of global polarization?
5) Where did it end up and what are the prospects?
Grasping ‘The Ukraine Question’
This question is as old as the Westphalian order. Often the year 1654 is mentioned. At times the name Cahterine the Great comes into discourse. At other occasions we see talk of Kievan Rus and the origins of Russia. Of course the way things are talked about to have them make sense in some way, and especially in a form like History can be enlightening if it is done properly, but even with a heavy bias towards reconstructing an essence named ‘Ukraine’, it becomes obvious why Kiev as the source and center of a nation, ‘Ukraine,’ that has always been around giving birth to the states of Russia and Ukraine, could be drawn into question.
That is not the meaning of ‘The Ukraine Question’ here, though. To modern political science, ‘The Ukraine Question’ concerns the demarcation of the Russian sphere of influence in the Post-Soviet world and the emergence of a functional political entity south of Poland and north of the Black Sea. One does not have to get very deep into the literature on International Relations and theories of International Politics to see the complexity arising here, and together with the intensity of emotions and overlapping interest of great powers, The Ukraine Question demands for thorough deliberation to transcend tit for tat style exchanges founded on hearsay and a-historical principles of unscientific descent. In these posts, we shall dive into investigating below the surface of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Firstly, we shall get a grip of the political condition in Ukraine and thereby get into the problemata concerning the establishment of a viable political form in Ukraine: What were the challenges facing Ukraine and why did the state fall apart even before it got going?
Post-Soviet challenges
Ukraine reaches independence 24th of August 1991. After the collapse of the Soviet Union a space was created in which many polities transformed by invoking new political constitutions. This space is referred to in Geopolitics as The Post-Soviet Space. The effect of the creation of that space, following the breakdown of The Soviet Union (1991), is a radical change of power distribution: Kremlin, the center of the former Soviet Union, embarked on the task of keeping The Russian Federation together, while other polities began to project power from their respective capitols towards their new borders and beyond. All these polities faced major challenges of transformation from being states in The Soviet Union over anarchy or intra-state conflict to incepting new political constitutions and commencing on accumulating state capacities anew. In Ukraine, Kiev stretched its influence over a vast territory in Southeastern Europe. A major issue was, that the different regimes in Kiev had troubles demanding legitimacy without which no political form can find sustenance. The new state, Ukraine, was born with Post-Soviet challenges. Not least du to the linguistic and ethnic diversity:
Map 1 Ethno-linguistic cleavages Ukraine around 2011
To grasp the challenges facing Ukraine, we dive into why the state in Ukraine could not encompass the cleavages and it all ended in division; we trace why legitimacy became scarce and Kiev slowly became paralyzed by fragmentation and plutocracy.
The source of delegitimization
Already from the time of inception, the Ukrainian polity faced substantive challenges. In the academic discipline named International Politics, a subfield of International Relations from the 20th century, these challenges became known as ‘The Ukraine Question.’ From the major hurdles facing Ukraine as a polity, it was suggested that a likely scenario was a standoff between NATO and The Russian Federation on Ukrainian soil; this is of great interest to us, because it seems that this is the way the situation is heading now.
Map 2 Frontline Ukraine primo 2023
In his The Clash of Civilizations from 1998 (p. 167-168), Samuel P. Huntington suggested that Ukraine could experience fragmentation and emphasized the presence of cleavages that could become polity divisions and lead to a frontline between Russia and Western Europe. The main problem for governments in Kiev was to balance between the interests of the Russian leaning population and the EU leaning population, a difference Huntington suggests, is enforced by the religious cleavage between Russian Orthodox and Ukrainian Uniate religion, the one under the Patriarch in Moscow, the other seeking to be enrolled under Vatican religious superiority.
A fragile state
Map 3 Electorate expressing affiliation for Kutchma in mainly the eastern Russian orthodox dominated part of Ukraine 1994.
The political unity of Ukraine was not unproblematic due to such cleavages, Huntington held: For instance, already, in 1992 the regional parliament in Crimea, where 70% are ethnically Russian and voted for independence from Kiev. The Ukraine polity was prone to fragmentation if the state could not mend emerging polity divisions hence the forces of polarization could rip the country apart should the relation between Russia and ‘The West’ deteriorate. That was Huntington’s brute assessment. In the end Ukraine descended into coup d’état, intra-state conflict and became subjected to outspoken regionalism and the disease of being able to muster only sporadic government legitimacy: Due to weak political unity, there was low legitimacy and therefore no power to develop state capacities; due to weak state capacities there was high hopes each time new leadership emerged, but very little these leaders could do to address issues since the state lacked capacities, hence after a few years in office, government legitimacy was, again, extremely low. Ukraine was caught in a downward spiral. From our perspective, this is the overarching issue. Let us look closer at this development, to understand how it unfolded.
A challenged political constitution
On the inter-structural level of political constitution, i.e., concerning the newly founded polity’s relations to the surroundings, Ukraine had to deal with The Russian Federation on two major issues: 1) The Russian bid for access to the Black Sea, i.e., the domestication of the Russian naval base in Sevastopol on the peninsula Crimea, and 2) the issue of the control of the nuclear weapons left by the Soviet Union on the territory that was now to become designated to Kiev. On the intra-structural level of political constitution, the main obstacle facing Ukraine was the coherence of the Ukrainian polity, that at first seemed to be unproblematic, since most Russian speaking, as well as the Ukrainian speaking population understood themselves to be ‘Ukrainian,’ but as Ukraine needed to clarify the substance of its proclaimed neutrality, it met severe obstacles as Moscow pulled in one direction and Brussels in the other, while the Ukrainian state succumbed to corruption and plutocracy. Why was this development and its consequence, so easy for political scientist to foresee? From our perspective, the answer is, that Ukraine is paradigmatic for the curse of our time. In Huntington’s terms: the lack of political institutionalization leaves states helpless to supply to the peoples demand for opportunities; in our terms: lack of state capacities to meet challenges leads to polity fragmentation.
Kiev’s challenge
As the 1990ies came to a close, the ethno-political cleavages became more outspoken as the question of whether Ukraine should lean eastward or westward became the main political issue during the reign of the regime under Leonid Kuchma (1994 - 2005). Concerning the infrastructural issues, Ukraine, as most post-Soviet states in their neighborhood, endured an anarcho-liberal political condition, leaving the political infrastructure prone to fragmentation: Lawlessness, regime impotence, and poverty reigned. Following thoroughly organized and successful mass protest against alleged election fraud in 2004, followed by reelection, opposition leaders were installed as president and prime minister, but Kiev was left without a strategy for how to get a grip on the corrupted central administration. As the new regime was unable to implement laws and was elected on unrealistic promises of Ukraine moving closer to the EU, it soon lost all legitimacy. Carried into office by a wave of hope, the leaders of the ‘orange revolution’ where washed out by disbelief. Strengthening state capacities was long overdue but had become almost impossible to achieve.
A new regime in Kiev
Map 4 Presidential election results Ukraine 2010
Realizing the need for a balanced approach to the emerging polity divisions and the surroundings of the new polity, the population voted for Yanukovych with the hope of establishing coherent regime in Kiev. Clearly, the interests of the rising class of plutocrats where to establish a viable regime with some autonomy, that could sustain an oligarchic type of order that could be exploited. The apparent idea amongst the Russian speaking elites were, that the regime should grow strong, but that it could be kept under control by the success of wannabe oligarchs and their clam on news media. Many people, especially those affiliated with the Russian orthodox church dreamed of a stable Ukraine under a regime mirroring the one in Moscow, that had tamed plutocracy and kept the rising oligarchy in check: they wanted political stability and economic development. No doubt Yanukovych was the right man for the job, establishing a primitive princely state, building himself a huge palace and starting to take on the economic elite by distributing large sums through his presidential office. Measures for pulling a polity out of an anarcho-liberal condition does not generally play well with the ideals of western elites. Tensions between eastward leaning and westward leaning grew, as was very visible in the rivalry between the two football teams Dynamo Kiev and Sjakhtar Donetsk that both made it to the European Champions League, sponsored by very different groups and interests. With Yanukovych the omnipresent corruption found a recognizable public face. Kiev did not get to the level of a Moscow type regime, far from: not even the level of a Minsk type regime was reached. Furthermore, GDP only ever reached half the level of Belarus. In the end utopianism prevailed and polity fragmented.
Internal balancing between east and west
After a few years in office, the Yanukovych regime was faced with hard choices and stalled accension to a trade deal with EU, while clarifying Ukraines relations with Russia, on their interdependency issues of gas supply and Crimea. This was the balance Yanukovych was elected to uphold. The balance tipped. Yanukovych fled after persistent protests on Independence Square, ‘Maidan.’ The film made about it is of course Oliver Stone’s own take of events, and arguably gives voice to Yanukovych and his side of the story. What is confirmed from that story, though, was the controversial fact, that some armed groups affiliated with the demonstrators opened fire on the security apparatus as it became clear, that the regime had lost control. Suspiciously, a USA backed president was sworn in, while the other major power in the equation, Russia, annexed Crimea and supported two breakaway republics in the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, the so called ‘Donbas’, where two de facto states where proclaimed creating a frontline of fighting between rebels and Kiev around the major industrial center, Donetsk, a traditional provider of major steel work for Russia. Ukrainian political infrastructure was evaporated, and intra-state conflict became immanent.
Intra-state conflict
Between 2014 – 2021 the death toll for the conflict in Ukraine was around 14.000 killed in action. After the interim government of Turchynov, Kiev became ruled by an elite surrounding a wannabe oligarch, Poroshenko, who was unable and apparently quite unwilling to lift government out of the state of plutocracy, which led to Ukraine approaching total corruption after elections in 2019 gave victory to a young plutocrat, Zelensky, who had staged himself as a president who could fight corruption in a TV-show; in fact he had no clue about how to transform a corrupted state into a viable entity. When the Biden administration stepped in to openly support Ukraine in balancing Russia, from April 6, 2021, the Ukrainian leadership, soaked in mafia scandals, while being by and large irrelevant in terms of effect on governance, were unable to meet Russia at the negotiating table with a consistent attitude and was invaded on 24. February 2022. The account of events from Kiev, who pictured themselves as a caseless victim of events unfolding was that Ukraine was invaded by an imperialist power. For us, Ukraine breaks down between 2003 and 2014 leading to a standoff between Washington and Moscow. The Russians interest and intent, we approach in the post named The Putin Doctrine, but from 2014, Kiev and its armed forces, backed by USA and its NATO allies, had prepared itself militarily to embark on conflict with Russia and in the end ignored the demands and threats from Moscow, who wanted a stop for NATO expansion towards its borders and sounded the usual grievances over USA/NATO involvement: Russia demanded that Ukraine should stay neutral to the tensions between Washington and Moscow and that Washington should attend to Russias concerns. The result became an escalation of the conflict by invasion that came to the level of outright war, as the Ukrainian army provided apt resistance and heroically embarked on successful counteroffensives against the arguably strong, but clumsy looking Russian military machine. Here is an account of the current situation concerning the potential for a settlement by negotiation presented from the point of view of Jeffrey Sachs an astute observer of Ukraine / Russian / USA relations.
Interstate conflict and its interpretations
For 2022, the death toll is estimated to become counted in numbers above 200.000 casualties. The Ukrainian Question, both in terms of posing the question: ‘how shall Ukraine sustain independence?’ and in terms of providing an answer: to settle Ukraine’s geopolitical positioning, is central to obtaining political stability in southeastern Europe. The discourse prevailing in most western countries, portrays Ukraine as subject of a sudden onslaught on February 24th 2022. In the discourse prevailing in Russia, Kiev is jeopardizing Ukrainian independence by suppressing the eastward bound ethno-political groups, while escalating the situation through military buildup and Kiev thus affiliating itself with NATO, an organization that Russia understands as formed against Kremlin and its rulers. In large parts of ‘The Rest,’ the attack by Russia on Ukraine is understood as Russia defending itself against ‘The West,’ and both in India and China, as well as in Brazil and Nigeria, we see reluctance to succumb to the narrative posited by Washington and Brussels, that the war in Ukraine is the result of an imperial ambition in Kremlin to ‘erase a sovereign state’ and subject its territory under The Russian Federation. ‘The Rest’ has simply seen too many attacks on ‘sovereign states’ by USA and its NATO allies over the last 30 years to appreciate, that in this case, the discourse is simply reversed, because the invasion was performed by NATOs adversary. Of course, such discursive discrepancies influence the polarization of Global Polity along the cleavage elite vs. mass.
Global Polarization
In our take on The Ukraine Question, we note that exactly this discursive standoff has entailed increased unity amongst the polities in the NATO alliance, but also that Europe is now left with an open scar of the sort, International Politics scholar John Mearsheimer warned about in his The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, from 2001, since the situation has arisen where NATO and Russia, ‘both armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons,’ have a frontline of direct confrontation. Russia suffers greatly in this process, due to the heavy economic sanctions that are imposed on Russia by USA, EU, U.K., and their allies and proselytes, a result which was immanent from the outset and obviously the interest of distinct elites in Washington. Unexpectedly, at least for many observers, Russia has been the subject of silent adoration from Beijing and distinct admiration from others, respecting Russia for not having succumbed to pressure from Washington, standing its ground in the face of what Russia claims to perceive as an existential threat to its security, despite the threat of sanctions and staunch military support from NATO to Ukraine. The dynamics of the war fuels global polarization along the main cleavage in The Geopolitical Pyramid. As of 21st of January, 2023, The Ukraine Question is yet unsettled. As global polarization became more intens, each side took a bite of Ukraine; that further escalated tensions and intensified global polarization, and now Russia and NATO have dug deep in. What tricked this spiral of events?
From infra-polity issues to intra-polity conflict
When Ukraine settled its written constitution in 1996, it balanced its inter-structural issue by claiming neutrality from alliances, returning its nuclear arsenal to Moscow, and leasing Sevastopol to Russia. This balance became disturbed as events unfolded. In the Post-Soviet space, the geo-economic infrastructure is in many aspects intact. Concerning critical infrastructure, most of the major roads, sewers, and electrical installations are still intact after the Soviet breakdown. The challenge of building a new political infrastructure in Ukraine was nevertheless huge and polarization quickly undermined centralization of power, whereby distribution of power from Kiev became hampered. Endemic corruption led to interposition of local power brokers leaving the polity in plutocracy without means of political or economic development. The economy was dominated by barter trade both on micro and macro scale with police and bureaucracy serving plutocratic interest. In plain English: A polity with a miniscule GDP, a fragmenting justice system, and a low level of economic development has little chance of surviving without firm centralization of government and a reconstituted political system. As mentioned above this situation led to polity division: Writ large, half of the country saw the solution to be a system like the one invoked in Russia, to be invoked in Ukraine under Yanukovych; others wanted a system molded on the polities in the EU. The latter option was totally utopian, but nevertheless heralded by many political elites, like the ones behind the ‘orange revolution’. Finally, in 2013 political issues came to sustain polity divisions that finally led to the ousting of the elected president, the breakdown of the written constitution, undermining of the balancing inherent to the social contract, and thus intra-state conflict: outsting Yanokovych in a coup d’état or revolution or whatever we call it, simply meant, that there was no prospect for the eastward leaning to stay in Ukraine, since they did not even have a chance to vote for someone they believed in. Victor Yanokovych was of modest descent, had to battle his way through his youth, and was quite recognizable for many Ukrainians. Now there were only plutocrats without political leverage on the ballot.
From intra-state conflict to proxy war
After the coup d’état of 2014, the political infrastructure was radically undermined and the disenfranchised supporters of the former president, turned their backs at Kiev and received military support from Russia. In Ukraine, Russia sustained military presence in Crimea and aided mobilization in the new small, proclaimed republics in Donbas. Talks were held in Minsk without appeasement of the frontline. Kiev had shut down the water supply to Crimea in 2014. Russia constructed a bridge across the strait in the Azov Sea, that was opened in 2018, leading to escalated tension in the Azov Sea. NATO expanded its training activities and influx of weapons to support Ukraine in the conflict, throughout the period 2014 – 2021, hence fueling fear amongst Russian elites and ignoring grievances expressed by Kremlin for decades. Intra-state conflict had turned into a proxy-war type situation, where major powers were filling the power vacuum on the vast territory designated to Ukraine.
NATO vs. The Russia Federation
The breakdown of Ukraine happened during rising tensions between the major regional power Russia and USA as the leader of the military alliance NATO. In 2008, Russia, having reasserted itself as a stable political entity communicated at a meeting in Bucharest, that it watched the expansion of NATO around the turn of the millennium with concern and would perceive further enlargement of NATO into Georgia and Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia. When Georgia sought to reassert its sovereignty in South Ossetia, Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. From the Russian perspective, the invasion of Ukraine on 24th of February 2022 is to be understood as a similar enterprise with a similar motive of sustaining fragmented sovereignty as a bulwark against NATO membership, see The Putin Doctrine. The training of Ukrainian troops by NATO-countries and the inflow of weapons was perceived by Kremlin as de facto NATO enlargement into Ukraine; having their expressed grievances and threats ignored, Russia invaded. From NATOs perspective, Georgia and Ukraine are sovereign entities in a global legalistic order with rights to choose affiliation and with full autonomy in the international system of states hence may choose to seek membership in the military alliance at will.
War and sanctions
The different countries in the NATO alliance have pursued different paths in developing their relations with Kremlin. Russia seeks to settle The Ukraine Question throughout 2021 and end up exercising pressure by building up troops at the border, while Kiev embraces Washington. Tensions prevail throughout winter 2021/2022. When Russia finally delivered on its threat to invade, NATO countries, led by the superpower confiscated 300 billion $ of Russian assets and imposed economic sanctions, while enforcing political unity between EU countries and between USA and its allies. Russia still wishes NATO influence out of the Black Sea area; Washington insist that negotiations shall commence from the point of departure of pre-2014 borders. As predicted since 1990ies, Crimea, and Russian access to the peninsula, is still contested. In the end, the inability of NATO to accommodate the concerns voiced by Kremlin led to polarization and enemy-construction between Russia and ‘The West’. What followed was already anticipated by Mearsheimer, Huntington, et al.
Prospect and conclusion
Priorities Kremlin: Russia is focused on access to a warm seaport in Sevastopol, protection of the undeterminable but substantial ethno-political group named ‘Russians in Ukraine’ and on securing that there is no NATO presence in Ukraine. List of preferences Russia: 1) Geopolitical neutralization of Ukraine + annexation of held territories in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson + eventual Russian expansion towards Kiev or/and Odessa 2) low intensity conflict + no prospect for Ukrainian NATO membership due to fragmented sovereignty, see The Putin Doctrine, 3) high intensity interstate conflict => war 4) Ukraine in NATO.
Priorities Washington: Concerning the prospect for Ukraine, USA is focused on weakening Russia in reference to discourse on ‘Democracy vs. Autocracy’ -> political unity of ‘West’ by common enemy unites => metus hostilis. List of preferences USA: 1) Weakened Russia, western unity (see Autocracies vs. Democracies and The Taiwan Question), and Kiev control of pre-2014 territory with NATO presence, 2) high intensity conflict to reconstruct territorial integrity pre-February 24th, 2022 + open ended sanctions on Russia from EU and other allies, 3) low intensity conflict + sanctions on Russia + battling eventual Russian expansion towards Kiev or/and Odessa, 4) Kiev ceasing control over annexed regions in peace settlement.
Evaluation: NATO is approximately 100 times stronger than Russia, but Russia perceives Ukraine as its sphere of influence and interference by NATO there, as an existential threat to Russia, whose capitol Moscow is relatively nearby. Ukraine has energized its national unity, while reconstructing its security apparatus; NATO has resurrected an enemy, vital to its internal coherence, aligned with the aim of weakening The Russian Federation. Russia is undoubtedly weakened, not least, since its conventional warfare apparatus has displayed severe difficulties fighting against a well-equipped, high tech nationalist force in Ukraine.
Outcome: That any side will reach their number one priority, and thus each other’s fourth priority, is unlikely in the short term (0 - 7 years), due to both parties being willing to match each others effort hence the respective second and third priorities reveal the opportunity gap for the short range prospect. A central point for our global perspective is that Russia will have to reorientate, since ‘The West’ has now constructed Russia as its enemy and EU and USA have invoked sanctions that undermines economic development in Russia. We shall elaborate on this perspective in the following posts The Putin Doctrine, A Pragmatic Partnership, Ukraine Revisited, and ‘Autocracy vs. Democracy.’