Since long before the recent protests, Western journalists have presented Ukraine as a country teetering on an East-West split. This model is inaccurate, as it suggests a battle pitched between Europe and Russia that has never been fought. More importantly, in neglecting Russia’s long history as Ukraine’s colonizer, it overlooks the core issue at hand: Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination and national sovereignty.
The backdrop of this struggle traces back to Ukraine’s now-infamous 2004 presidential election, where electoral results were unscrupulously rigged by Viktor Yanukovych, the candidate favoring pro-Russia policies. A massive peaceful protest dubbed the Orange Revolution forced the government’s hand, and the elections were redone. Viktor Yushchenko then assumed the presidency. His administration has since been regarded largely as a failure; the economy was not structurally reformed and corruption remained widespread.
The image of a faltering Ukrainian government was also bolstered by heavy-handed Russian political maneuvers, which cultivated influence in Ukrainian affairs and put enormous economic and political strain on Kiev. When Yushchenko was elected, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that “Ukraine should think twice about any such embrace of the West.” What happened during the next few years made this a well-founded threat. The Ukrainian economy shrank by over 20 percent from 2008 to 2009 — largely because of punitive stoppages of natural gas through Russian pipelines. For Russia, the resource has been a perfect political bludgeon; the state is virtually the sole provider of natural gas for nine Eastern and Central European countries. One telling statistic demonstrates the political power captured in the so-called Ukrainian-Russian “Gas Wars”: In 2003, 28 percent of Ukrainians expressed their belief that good relations with Russia were of paramount importance, but in 2008, after the Gas Wars, this number had almost doubled to 51 percent. It is hardly surprising, then, that 2010 witnessed the reelection of Yanukovych — the very same pro-Russian politician whose rigged election drove Ukrainians into the street for the Orange Revolution.
Russian manipulation of Ukraine is nothing new. Gas prices shot up tenfold during a standoff over nuclear warheads in 1992. Then in 1993, Russia offered to forgive Ukraine’s gas debt for the modest price of total Russian control of the Sevastopol fleet on the Black Sea. Russia has repeated these tactics as recently as 2006 and 2009, years of Ukrainian elections. The same tactics were evident in a $15 billion aid package proposed in 2013 that is qualified strictly on who governs Ukraine.
Without considering decades of Russia’s hardball economic tactics, the West will continue to misapprehend Ukraine’s opposition. Protesters don’t represent a singular Western faction leveraging political interests against an Eastern one. Nor do Eastern sympathizers necessarily appraise a geopolitical alignment with Russia as beneficial or productive. Rather, Russia has employed tough economic and political strategies to tie Ukraine down. When Ukrainian politicians sympathetic to Russian interests attempted to quell protests by offering the opposition a chance for representation in the government, the opposition turned it down. It’s not a seat in the capital that protesters demand, but a Ukraine free from Russian marionette strings.
Russia’s economic hegemony means that even without its preferred politicians in power, it still looms large over Ukrainian borders. At the beginning of the protests, Russia bared its teeth, recalling its ambassador from Kiev and questioning the legitimacy of interim president Oleksandr Turchynov. Russia clamped its jaws around Ukraine’s southeastern region of Crimea at the beginning of March, sending troops across the Ukrainian border. Russia’s aggression surpassed posturing to become a vigorous display of colonialist aspirations towards Ukraine. Kiev quickly warned Russia that further aggression would cause a full-blown war between the nations and called for backup from NATO. After the initial invasion, Washington was swift to contact and threaten Putin, and NATO began to talk up their response, but President Barack Obama was nevertheless criticized for his meek approach to the crisis. At press time, a Western military response looks less than likely.
The West can barely contend with Russia for influence, nor has it often seemed to try. During Ukraine’s long history of gas conflicts, the West has been largely unwilling to discuss taking actions that would actually make them a player in protecting Ukraine against Russia’s economic maneuvers. In November, after Yanukovych refused an EU free trade deal under Russian pressure, the body’s reaction was essentially a shrug. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s muted comment on the talks was only: “Unfortunately, not all expectations were fulfilled.” Hints of a combined U.S.-Europe aid package followed, but Europe’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, was quick to note that they would not be entering a “bidding war” with Russia. The EU was quick to dismiss the protesters’ cause after their proposed deal was shot down. Yet when the protests achieved major results, the West somehow managed to portray the moment as its victory.
How can the West participate in a game it doesn’t understand? A critical failure of the East-West fallacy is its inability to contextualize Ukraine’s internal conflict in a post-colonial narrative. The West makes no clear cultural distinction between Ukrainians and Russians and understandably so, given the long history of Ukrainian repression. Soviet crackdowns of Ukrainian opposition (in the 1930s and 1970s) involved explicit discouragement of the use of the Ukrainian language. This was part of a pattern of activity that included the mass killings of the Ukrainian avant-garde of the 1920s — the would-be producers of Ukrainian culture. In addition, because Russia has long been the cultural epicenter of Eastern Europe, Eastern Europeans would go to Russia if they wanted a full education. Cultural producers were drained away from native cultures and added to the Russian canon. Take the Ukrainian Mykola Hohol, who left for Russia as a young man and would go on to publish the first great Russian novel as Nikolai Gogol. Because Westerners use “Soviet” interchangeably with “Russian,” the work of former satellite states is still ascribed to Russia, allowing the Soviet Union to stifle these countries in perpetuity.
The result is a homogeneous ex-Soviet culture primed for Western consumption. Russia’s cultural dominance permeates even the language with which the Western media views Ukraine. Ukraine’s capital is referred to with the Russian “Kiev” by the American press, rather than the Ukrainian “Kyiv.” And Americans frequently refer to Ukraine as “the” Ukraine, likely derived from the Russian pronoun that denotes its object as a region — not an independent country with a separate identity. Culture and rhetoric matter, forming the basis for Western understanding of Ukraine’s identity and politics. The West’s relatively quiet onlooking as Russia strong-arms Ukraine through economic policies represents a passive endorsement of Russian geopolitics, but its even subtler participation in the cultural erosion of Ukraine actually represents a willing one. Like the Gas Wars, culture serves as a powerful tool that the Russian Federation uses to bolster its widespread influence upon Ukrainian political, economic and cultural apparatuses.
So far, the West has not done nothing — just nothing that has had a significant effect. After Yanukovych fled the capital, the West triumphantly entered, despite its period of absenteeism, and declared itself a mentor in a revisionist history, sending in Ashton to negotiate the future of Ukrainian nation-building. A diplomat is less than what protesters in Libya or Egypt ever received. Naively, the EU re-proposed its free trade deal, confident it had ousted Russian influence. NATO and the United States have yet to commit to concrete action in the face of military aggression from Russia. While the international community does not remain wholly oblivious to Ukraine’s current violence and instability, they have not — and cannot — address the core issues, which reside more in Ukraine’s imprisonment under Russia’s political and economic thumb than in their own struggle for reform in those areas. Even if a Western aid package is eventually produced, aid is a good solution, but only to a temporary problem.
Ukraine has been defined, more than anything, by suffering. From the mass starvation of the Holodomor to Chernobyl to today’s hellish turmoil, a pessimistic prediction could basically claim the country’s entire history as a precedent. Yet Ukrainians have been defiant of their seemingly impossible situation, with a steadfastness that belies hope and conviction stronger than the West seems to comprehend. The image of a Ukraine looking westward is a tremendous belittlement of the country’s struggle. Russia should not project its empire onto Ukraine, nor should the West project its own narratives. Escaping the jaws of Russia is a feat that has eluded Ukrainians for centuries. If the West is unwilling or unable to help them in this latest conflict, they can at least recognize the story for what it is. It is not an archetypal myth of democrats versus despots, but the narrative of a country struggling with its own history, identity and pain.
Art by Andrew Stearns