In Crimea, Russia Moves to Protect its Deep Interests

Ukrainian military tanks remained inside the Perevalnoye military base in Crimea on Monday. The base now belongs to Russia. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

N.Y. TIMES, DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

With a single diesel-electric submarine and a hodgepodge of other aging vessels, Russia’s rickety Black Sea Fleet would be no match for the United States’ Sixth Fleet, based in Italy, which boasts the latest in seaborne military technology and has been running drills nearby.

Still, the legendary Russian fleet, whose headquarters have been here since 1783, is within a day’s sailing of the Mediterranean and remains crucial to the Kremlin’s ability to exert strategic influence in the Middle East and beyond.

Safeguarding this maritime muscle may well have been one reason President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sent armed forces to seize Crimea. But is it possible that the Sevastopol base is just the most concrete manifestation of Russia’s deep interests in Ukraine that the United States and its NATO allies either ignored or forgot as they tried to bind it more tightly with the West?

 For years, Mr. Putin has complained about the West moving unilaterally to reorder the Continental balance of power — promoting Western capitalism and democracy — with little indication anyone was heeding his concerns. Its courting of Ukraine, apparently, was a step too far, prompting Mr. Putin to risk sanctions and the worst conflict since the Cold War to make clear that Washington and its friends do not call all of the shots anymore.

 

The annexation here, and the Russian troops still massed on the border of eastern Ukraine, seem a clear and sharp message from Mr. Putin that the future of Ukraine and the broader region, especially Moldova and Georgia, which are also being courted by Europe, will not be decided by the West alone.

 

“For 23 years after 1991, Russia has been treated consciously or subconsciously as defeated in the Cold War,” said Dmitry Kosyrev, a writer and political commentator with the RIA Novosti news agency in Moscow. “Russia has not accepted this mentality. We have something to say. We have not only interest, but experience. We are not a defeated country in the Cold War; we are something separate like India, like China.”

 Mr. Kosyrev added, “Not talking to us, not accepting our point of view, that’s exactly what brought Europe and the United States to the crisis in Ukraine.”

The Obama administration and European leaders, of course, insist that it is Russia and Mr. Putin who acted aggressively and unilaterally, refusing to hear the view of Ukrainian citizens who took to the streets of Kiev in November after the president at the time, Viktor F. Yanukovych, broke his promise to sign political and trade accords with the European Union.

The contest for influence in Ukraine, long torn between Russia and the West, stretches back much further than last autumn. It is part of a wider tug-of-war that the West had dominated since the fall of the Soviet Union, drawing into Europe’s fold not just former Eastern bloc nations like Poland and Bulgaria, but the ex-Soviet republics — Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — in the Baltics.

 

Mr. Putin and many Russians believe that the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev had received assurances that the NATO alliance would not extend beyond a reunited Germany. They consider it a betrayal that NATO now includes the Baltics, reaching Russia’s borders — a point that Mr. Putin stressed in his speech announcing the annexation of Crimea. “They have lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed us before an accomplished fact,” Mr. Putin said. “This happened with NATO’s expansion to the East, as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They kept telling us the same thing: ‘Well, this does not concern you.’ That’s easy to say.”

Mr. Putin has been maneuvering for some time to thwart what he views as American unilateralism in global affairs, especially after what he has said were serious mistakes in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria. But only in the Syria case, Mr. Putin’s supporters say, did Russia gain footing, outmaneuvering President Obama with a proposal to disarm President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons.

In the case of Ukraine, Mr. Putin had been waging a battle for months to prevent Mr. Yanukovych from signing accords with the European Union, wielding a mix of threatened trade sanctions and the enticements of fiscal aid — precisely the economic tools that the West views as the preferred way to conduct geopolitical combat in the 21st century.

 Last summer, Russia blocked Ukrainian imports at the border for stepped-up customs inspections, and issued a series of threats of debilitating trade sanctions. Mr. Putin personally conveyed those threats to Mr. Yanukovych, who ultimately told European leaders he could not sign the accords. In the contest for Ukraine, Mr. Putin thought he had won with soft power.

After protests broke out in Kiev in late November, and Western leaders moved aggressively to revive the political and trade agreements, Mr. Putin once again reached into his economic arsenal, offering Ukraine $15 billion in credit assistance along with discounts on Russian natural gas. By his view, the West had refused to accept Russia’s fair victory.

Crimeans have been given a month to expressly state that they want to stay Ukrainian -- or they will automatically become Russian citizens, although they still have to obtain passports

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2587699/Shots-fired-Russian-troops-seize-naval-base-Crimea-Ukrainian-flag-flying-annexation.html#ixzz2wwa5fGwB
 

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Andrew S. Weiss, who worked on Russia issues in the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush and is now vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Mr. Putin’s actions were logical, even if not compatible with Western interests, in seeking to destabilize Ukraine rather than allowing it to fall into Europe’s sphere of influence.

 “There is a very straight line rational strategy at work here,” Mr. Weiss said.

Mr. Weiss also said that Europe repeatedly refused to hear Russia’s concerns, effectively forcing a conflict by insisting the trade deal with Europe was incompatible with joining Russia’s customs union, a trade bloc it formed with Belarus and Kazakhstan. Europe also resisted three-way talks with Russia and Ukraine.

“In some ways the E.U. has taken maximalist positions with the Russians and acted as if they were surprised that Russia took offense or got angry,” Mr. Weiss said.

Defying West, Putin Signs Treaty to Annex Crimea

N.Y. TIMES

President Vladimir V. Putin reclaimed Crimea as a part of Russia on Tuesday, reversing what he described as a historic injustice inflicted by the Soviet Union 60 years ago and brushing aside international condemnation that could leave Russia isolated for years to come.

In an emotional address steeped in years of resentment and bitterness at perceived slights from the West, Mr. Putin made it clear that Russia’s patience for post-Cold War accommodation, much diminished of late, had finally been exhausted. Speaking to the country’s political elite in the Grand Kremlin Palace, he said he did not seek to divide Ukraine any further, but he vowed to protect Russia’s interests there from what he described as Western actions that had left Russia feeling cornered.

 ...His remarks, which lasted 47 minutes, were interrupted repeatedly by thunderous applause, standing ovations and at the end chants of “Russia, Russia.” Some in the audience wiped tears from their eyes. He denounced what he called the global domination of one superpower and its allies that emerged. “They cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presenting us with completed facts,” he said. “That’s the way it was with the expansion of NATO in the East, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They always told us the same thing: ‘Well, this doesn’t involve you.’ ”

He recited a list of grievances — from the Soviet Union’s transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian republic in 1954, to NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders, to its war in Kosovo in 1999, when he was a little-known aide to President Boris N. Yeltsin, to the conflict in Libya that toppled Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011 on what he called the false pretense of a humanitarian intervention.

People in Simferopol, Crimea, watched an address by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday. Credit Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

He said that the United States and Europe had crossed “a red line” on Ukraine by throwing support to the new government that quickly emerged after Mr. Yanukovych fled the capital following months of protests and two violent days of clashes that left scores dead.

Mr. Putin, as he has before, denounced the uprising as a coup carried out by “Russophobes and neo-Nazis” and abetted by foreigners, saying it justified Russia’s efforts to protect Crimea’s population.

....He justified the annexation using the same arguments that the United States and Europe cited to justify the independence of Kosovo from Serbia and even quoted from the American submission to the United Nations International Court when it reviewed the matter in 2009.

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 While his actions, which the United States, Europe and Ukraine do not recognize, provoked renewed denunciations and threats of tougher sanctions and diplomatic isolation, it remained unclear how far the West was willing to go to punish Mr. Putin. The leaders of what had been the Group of 8 nations announced they would meet next week as the Group of 7, excluding Russia from a club Russia once desperately craved to join.

People stood in line outside a bank in Simferopol on Tuesday. Banks have been imposing severe restrictions on withdrawals. Credit Uriel Sinai for The New York Times

Certainly the sanctions imposed on Russia ahead of Tuesday’s steps did nothing to dissuade Mr. Putin, as he rushed to make a claim to Crimea that he argued conformed to international law and precedent. In his remarks he made clear that Russia was prepared to withstand worse punishment in the name of restoring a lost part of the country’s historic empire, effectively daring world leaders to sever political or economic ties and risk the consequences to their own economies.

Mr. Putin, the country’s paramount leader for more than 14 years, appeared to be gambling that the outrage would eventually pass, as it did after Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008,...

 Mr. Putin’s determined response to the ouster of Ukraine’s president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, last month has left American and European leaders scrambling to find an adequate response after initially clinging to the hope that Mr. Putin was prepared to find a political solution — or “off ramp” — to an escalating crisis that began with the collapse of Mr. Yanukovych’s government on the night of Feb. 21.

Within a week, Russian special operations troops had seized control of strategic locations across Crimea, while the regional authorities moved to declare independence and schedule a referendum on joining Russia that was held on Sunday.

Even as others criticized the vote as a fraud, Mr. Putin moved quickly on Monday to recognize its result, which he called “more than convincing” with nearly 97 percent of voters in favor of seceding from Ukraine. By Tuesday he signed a treaty of accession with the region’s new leaders to make Crimea and the city of Sevastopol the 84th and 85th regions of the Russian Federation.

For First Time, Kremlin Signals It Is Prepared to Annex Crimea

Demonstrators waved Russian  flags as they gathered in Red Square in Moscow on Friday, in support of a delegation of Crimean lawmakers who visited Russian legislators. Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press

 N.Y. TIMES

 Russia signaled for the first time on Friday that it was prepared to annex the Crimea region of Ukraine, significantly intensifying its confrontation with the West over the political crisis in Ukraine and threatening to undermine a system of respect for national boundaries that has helped keep the peace in Europe and elsewhere for decades.

Leaders of both houses of Russia’s Parliament said that they would support a vote by Crimeans to break away from Ukraine and become a region of the Russian Federation, ignoring sanction threats and warnings, from the United States and other countries, that a vote for secession would violate Ukraine’s Constitution and international law. The Russian message was yet another in a series of political and military actions undertaken over the past week that outraged the West, even while the Kremlin’s final intentions remained unclear.

 As new tensions flared between Russian and Ukrainian forces in Crimea, the moves by Russia raised the specter of a protracted conflict over the status of the region, which Russian forces occupied last weekend, calling into question not only Russia’s relations with the West but also post-Cold War agreements on the sovereignty of the nations that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union.

An anti-government protester holds an Ukrainian national flag as he walks in front of a roadblock in Kiev's Independent square

The developments underscored how quickly the crisis has evolved. Earlier this week, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had said he did not foresee the possibility of the Crimean Peninsula becoming part of Russia. But on Friday, Russia’s parliamentary leaders, both strong allies of Mr. Putin, welcomed a delegation from Crimea’s regional assembly and declared that they would support a vote to break away from Ukraine, now scheduled for March 16.

The referendum has been denounced by the fledgling national government in Kiev, which said it would invalidate the outcome and dissolve the Crimean Parliament. President Obama has also rejected the referendum, and the United States government announced sanctions on Thursday in response to Russia’s de facto military occupation.

Russia denounced those sanctions in a blunt rejoinder on Friday evening, posted on the Foreign Ministry website....

 The Russians also sent menacing economic signals to the financially ailing interim central government in Kiev, which Russia has refused to recognize. Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly, which supplies Ukraine with most of its gas, warned that it might shut off supplies unless Ukraine paid $1.89 billion owed to the company.

 

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 Valentina I. Matviyenko, the chairwoman of the upper house of the Russian Parliament, the Federation Council, compared the planned referendum in Crimea to Scotland’s scheduled vote on whether to become independent from Britain. She did not mention that the national government in Britain had agreed to hold a referendum, while the Ukrainian government has not.The speaker of the Russian lower house, Sergei Y. Naryshkin, echoed Ms. Matviyenko’s remarks. “We will respect the historic choice of the people of Crimea,” he said.

 Their assertions came a day after Crimea’s regional assembly voted in a closed session to secede from Ukraine and apply to join the Russian Federation, and to hold a referendum for voters in the region to ratify the decision....In another telling sign of Russian government support, the Crimean delegates were cheered at an officially sanctioned rally in central Moscow that was shown at length on Russian state television, with songs and chants of “Russia, Moscow, Crimea.”....

 Even if the referendum proceeds, it was unclear what would happen next, given the wide gap between the positions of Russia and the West — most notably between Mr. Putin and Mr. Obama, who spoke for an hour by phone on Thursday night.

According to the White House, Mr. Obama urged Mr. Putin to authorize direct talks with Ukraine’s new government, permit the entry of international monitors and return his forces to the bases that Russia leases in Crimea. 

 

In a statement, the Kremlin offered a starkly different account of the phone call, emphasizing Russia’s view that the new government in Kiev had no authority because it was the result of what Mr. Putin called an anticonstitutional coup last month that had ousted Viktor F. Yanukovych, the pro-Kremlin president.

The official Russian account of the phone call went on to say that the current Ukrainian leadership had imposed “absolutely illegitimate decisions” on the eastern and southeastern regions of the country, where pro-Russian sentiment is widespread. “Russia cannot ignore appeals connected to this, calls for help, and acts appropriately, in accordance with international law,” the statement said.

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 In Kiev, anti-Russian sentiment was hardening. The Right Sector movement, a nationalist group that was important in the deadly protests last month that drove Mr. Yanukovych from power, announced that its leader, Dmytro Yarosh, would run for president. Andriy Tarasenko, chairman of its local branch, also said the group was prepared to fight, in Crimea and elsewhere, “if the Kremlin tramples on us further.”

With Washington and Moscow trading heated accusations of hypocrisy on the issue of respecting state sovereignty, validating Crimea’s secession would carry pointed political risks for Mr. Putin, given longstanding demands for independence from Russia by its own similarly autonomous republics in the Caucasus, including Dagestan and Chechnya.

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 The West, which has insisted that the Ukrainian people are entitled to decide their future without interference from Russia, faces similar challenges as it seeks to explain why the people of Crimea should not necessarily decide their own fate.

The United States and its European allies typically support self-determination, but have opposed independence for regions within their own borders, like Scotland in Britain or Catalonia in Spain.

As the Ukraine Debate Rages, Both Sides are Getting it Wrong

Troops under Russian command fire weapons into the air in Lubimovka, Ukraine. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

JONATHAN FREEDLAND, THE GUARDIAN

In debates about affairs far away, "both" seems to be the hardest word. Ukraine has been a case in point, the discussion reduced to a slanging match of binaries, each side hurling false dichotomies at the other – insisting that every aspect of this unfolding crisis can be reduced to an either/or choice, when in fact the truth very often comes down to both.

So one side loudly condemns Russia for its armed incursion into Crimea, thereby violating Ukrainian sovereignty. What hypocrisy, cry their opponents. How dare the west criticise Russia when the US, Britain and its allies invaded Iraq 11 years ago. That's the choice. Either Russia is in the wrong or the west is in the wrong. You can't have it both ways.

Nationalists hold torches during a march in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv on Jan. 1, 2014, as they mark the 105th anniversary of the birth of Stepan Bandera.(Photo: Yuriy Dyachyshyn, AFP/Getty Images)

Except you can. It's perfectly possible for a westerner to oppose both Russia's action in Crimea and the invasion of Iraq – indeed, to oppose both for the same reason: as unmerited violations of sovereignty. Admittedly, that might be tricky for John Kerry, given his Senate vote in 2002 giving George W Bush the authority to use military force against Saddam Hussein – a record that should have given him pause before denouncing Vladimir Putin for acting "in a 19th-century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext".

But it's silly to throw the Iraq precedent back at Barack Obama. He is president of the United States, in part, because he opposed the 2003 invasion. It was his stance on Iraq that helped him defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. You can condemn Obama if you like over Libya or the continuing US drone warfare, but the specific example of Iraq does not make his position on Crimea hypocritical. It makes it consistent. To ignore that fact, to hold the current administration responsible for the sins of its predecessor – as if Obama and Bush are simply the interchangeable faces of permanent US power – is to ignore the cardinal principle that in democratic societies governments change. Perhaps not in Russia, where Putin has been in charge since Bill Clinton was in the White House – but in the democratic world, that's how it works.

Members of the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army rallied in Kiev in December 2013. (Reuters/Gleb Garanich)

That's far from the only empty choice offered up in the Ukraine debate. One camp slams the crudity of Putin's lies and deceits – his press conference this week recasting him as a Kremlin version of "Comical Ali", hilariously defying the facts as he insisted that the Russian troops everyone could see with their own eyes in Crimea were in fact Ukrainian civilians who had popped to the local fancy dress shop to stock up on Russian military uniforms. His charmingly retro claim that Russian forces had been invited into Ukraine by the latter's ousted president – just as Soviet troops were invited into Hungary in 1956 and invited again into Czechoslovakia in 1968 – had one commentator suggesting Putin had lost his mind.

Standing against them is the opposing camp, which urges you to look instead at the new forces ruling Ukraine. This camp notes the influence of far rightist groups Svoboda (which traded originally under the historically resonant name of the Social-National party of Ukraine) and the Right Sector, now rewarded with seats in Ukraine's government, and of the fascistic paramilitaries patrolling the streets of Kiev wearing swastika armbands and parroting anti-Jewish slogans. They alert you to the torch-lit parade of ultra-nationalists commemorating Stepan Bandera, hailed a hero of Ukrainian independence despite his wartime collaboration with the Nazis.

Valery Sharifulin/ITAR-TASS/Corbis The opposition leader Vitali Klitschko attending a protest rally in Maidan square, Kiev, December 16, 2013

Yet it should be possible to face the truth of both these situations, to condemn Putin's de facto dictatorship in Moscow and to be appalled by the presence of fascists in a 21st-century European government in Kiev. Yet too often the warring camps close their eyes to one even as they denounce the other. This goes not only for commentators and pundits, slugging it out online and on air; John Kerry and European Union foreign ministers should realise that it would not undermine their stance against Russian interference in Ukraine if they were to condemn the racist thugs who played a role in the Maidan uprising and have won a slice of power. It is possible to hold both positions at once.
Indeed, to do otherwise is to deny that reality is always stubbornly, maddeningly complex. Take the question of antisemitism, which has become a battleground in the war of words over Ukraine – with Putin casting himself as the defender of the besieged Jews of that country. It is quite true that Svoboda's leaders once claimed Ukraine was ruled by a "Moscow-Jewish mafia" – quite something, given that Jews make up an estimated 0.15% of the country's population – or that they lambasted the Ukrainian-born actress Mila Kunis as a "dirty Jewess". True too that synagogues have been on the receiving end of Molotov cocktails and that one communal leader was frightened enough to suggest that Jews get out of Ukraine for their own safety.

Yet it's also true that young Jews were themselves active in the Maidan protests, even forming their own combat group against the now-ousted government. True too that when Jewish leaders asked Kiev's new authorities for protection for key community buildings, they got it instantly. Nor can one ignore the Jewish leaders who believe some of these antisemitic attacks were performed by pro-Russian provocateurs, bent on discrediting Kiev's new masters, just as one cannot dismiss Thursday's letter to Putin from the Ukrainian Jewish leadership, telling the Russian president to back off and accusing him of both exploiting the issue of antisemitism and hypocrisy, given his country's own record.

Photo by Gleb Garanich/Reuter

Nothing, in other words, is as clear as the antagonists and their cheerleaders abroad would like. It is true that Crimea was part of Russia until 1954, and that it is a quirk of history that it is part of Ukraine – and yet also true that to invade it still breaches international law. Just as it is true that the Russians have not fired a shot in anger, while the invasion of Iraq left hundreds of thousands dead – but that doesn't make Putin's action OK.

It used to be said of Tony Blair that he came to prefer foreign affairs to matters domestic because they afforded a moral certainty missing at home. I've written before of the way some outsiders follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as if it were a clash of two rival football teams, mine always right, yours always wrong.
But the world is not like that. It is rarely black v white. It usually requires us to hold two apparently contradictory thoughts in our head at once. Life is not either/or. It is both.