Foreign Policy Blogs

2017 Protests in South Africa (Reuters)

New hope is blowing across the African continent against the backdrop of toppled heads of government and state in South Africa and Zimbabwe and a rejuvenated government that is pursuing ambitious reforms in Ethiopia. Other recent examples of transitions from long-sitting governments have also played out in Burkina Faso and The Gambia where the sitting presidents’ ambitions to remain in power (beyond their constitutional mandates) sparked a popular uprising in the former, and a military intervention by regional forces in the latter.

However, with this new dawn comes growing risks of instability and conflict which threaten to derail any attempts at moving the region towards more inclusive democracy and lasting peace; gains which could eventually facilitate better development prospects for the ordinary population, most of whom were not even born when their presidents took office.

Angola, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Uganda are all countries where the incumbents have held power since at least the 1980s. All of their leaders oversee authoritarian regimes; two of them took power by force, while the other two succeeded governments with dictatorial tendencies.

Aristide Zolberg, an influential U.S.-based academic on migration, who passed away in 2013, warned early on, in the post-colonial context, that liberation struggles could quickly translate into civil conflict. This was due to the inability of new governments to move their countries in the direction of national unity and integration and ensure a trajectory of progressive socioeconomic development. Instead, local elites have in many places across post-colonial Africa simply replaced the former patronage networks that were in place under European colonial powers.

A number of aged leaders across Sub-Saharan Africa are now nearing their natural end. In addition, all four governments are dependent on rents and revenue from crude oil and gas extraction. Although Angola holds the second-largest proven commercial reserves on the continent after Nigeria, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea together produce almost 400,000 barrels per day (bpd). To join the club, Uganda discovered commercially viable oil reserves in 2006 and is expected to produce 230,000 bpd when production is at full capacity, likely after 2020. Despite their natural resource wealth, their societies remain highly unequal.

In Angola, José Eduardo dos Santos stepped down as head of state and relinquished his chairmanship of the ruling party earlier. In his departing speech, he admitted to making ‘mistakes’ during his rule of almost 40 years, a tenure which has been characterized by the centralization of power and national wealth. This fact underscores dos Santos clan’s control of the country’s wealth and political power. His successor, former general João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço, has promised to clamp down on corruption. At the same time, Lourenço has hit out at Portugal in relation to accusations since 2012 by Portuguese prosecutors that Manuel Vicente, a former vice president and current advisor to the incumbent president, has committed acts of bribery and money laundering.

Cameroon’s president, Paul Biya (in office since 1982) is increasingly under pressure to bring back stability to the far-northern regions, where the Nigerian Islamist terrorist group, Boko Haram, has terrorized the local population for years, as well as to the south-western Anglophone regions of Northwest and Southwest, where a secessionist political movement last year took up arms against the central government. Accusing the Francophone authorities in the capital Yaoundé of ethnic discrimination and attempting at reducing their cultural autonomy within the federation, the Anglophone  ‘Ambazonia’ (a term used locally to describe what was formerly known as the Southern Cameroons) independence movement could be one of Biya’s toughest tests so far.

With Biya being the only candidate with a realistic chance of winning the presidential election in October—thanks to his patronage networks and the continued dominance of his ruling RDPC party—the prospect of instability once Biya eventually vacates office can only increase. While it is pretty clear that Biya will still be Cameroon’s leader, the lack of apparent successor and the likely power vacuum that will emerge means there is a real stability risk in Cameroon.

Although the quality of GDP data across Sub-Saharan Africa is often limited, Biya’s Angolan and Equatoguinean counterparts will leave behind a somewhat better legacy. In Equatorial Guinea, per capita GDP has increased from USD208 in 1979 to USD8,333 (compared to Cameroon’s GDP per capita which has remained stagnant at just over USD1,000), making it the highest income country of the continent. But despite this apparent success, 76.8% of Equatorial Guinea’s population continues to live in poverty, while political elite figures such as the president’s son and vice president, Teodoro ‘Teodorin’ Nguema Obiang Mangue, lives in opulence. Obiang Mangue has been investigated by both U.S. and French authorities for embezzlement and money laundering; and last October, a court in Paris sentenced the vice president in absentia to 3 years in prison, with EUR30 million in fines for laundering EUR150 million between 1997 and 2011.

Finally, in Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni is entering his 34th year in office and has removed a 75-year age limit on presidents in the constitution, which means that he could run for another term in 2021. Meanwhile, many are suspicious that he is slowly promoting his son to be his heir, particularly after he was promoted as a special advisor last January. However, Museveni’s authority has also come under increased pressure from musician-turned-politician, Robert Kyagulanyi (more commonly known by his stage name Bobi Wine) who is appealing to Uganda’s young population, which is increasingly frustrated by Museveni’s regime and possibly, dynastic ambitions.

Angola, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Uganda are now approaching critical inflection points where the liberalization of strategic sectors of the economy could bring about new opportunities for better wealth distribution. However, this also carries significant risks of fueling corruption in some of the world’s worst-ranking countries, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (2017). Equatorial Guinea ranks at 171 (out of 180); Angola at 167; Cameroon at 153; and Uganda is the best ranked at 151.

The longevity of these governments means that local elites have benefitted from patronage for many years, and the end to such revenue streams is likely to motivate some actors into more unpredictable actions, such as taking power by force. This could, in turn, fuel local armed strife between competing groups, exacerbating the security situation in the various jurisdictions.

As tired old post-colonial local elites leave the stage one by one, the question to be asked is what will replace them? Will it simply be new local elites, equally focused on self-aggrandizement and creating networks of patronage? Or will it be a new breed of leaders, young, charismatic and genuinely committed to inclusivity and socioeconomic development?

While staunch criticism has been directed against all these four governments, one cannot but admit they have all emerged out of extremely challenging contexts. Most of their experiences carry similarities, but the mixed performance of their recent governments should also be taken into account when attempting to understand their countries’ future trajectory. Where power networks have been more opportunistic, and where wealth has been spent carelessly, instability risks are likely to continue growing.

While maintaining sustainable growth is problematic, it is likely that more diversified economies will be more resilient to short-term shocks, most likely as a result of regime changes. This is the challenge facing many parts of western Africa’s Atlantic coast. Its outcome will determine whether the region embraces new hope or descends deeper into instability and conflict.

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Egyptian SA-6 Units from the 1973 War

The 1973 Sinai War was likely the most precarious conflict in the Arab-Israeli Wars. Much of the battle was supplemented by American and Soviet Cold War technology that matured in the Vietnam War and was used to brutal effect over the deserts of Sinai. Weapons systems like the stationary SA-2 missile and SA-3 missile kept a line of defense for Egypt along the Suez Canal. US Forces were very familiar with the SA-2 as it has caused tremendous damage to American aircraft in the Vietnam War. In Egypt in 1973, ground forces were heavily defended by a new SA-6 missile system, one that was mobile, more technologically advanced and carried more projectiles linked to a mobile radar network. The SA-6s lead Egypt through some of its biggest gains in battle until it was unable to cover ground forces while expanding into the Sinai desert.

The following years lead to techniques and technical improvements in defeating Anti-Aircraft systems, especially the SA-6. Drone technology and other methods to confuse tracking radars overwhelmed many radar system operators and allowed for successful strikes into opposing territories. Various techniques may have recently lead to a Syrian SA-5 missile battery firing on a friendly Russian IL-20 in error as the dated radar system on the SA-5 could not determine the origin of a friendly Russian reconnaissance plane in that incident. More modern systems like the SA-11 BUK that shot down a Malaysian Airlines flight over Ukraine a few short years ago seems to have unintentionally targeted the airliner, and it is still not clear whether or not it was due to an unsophisticated radar or extreme negligence by the crew of the SA-11. With the loss of the 15 member crew of the IL-20, the Russian military in Syria has finally decided to install the S-300 missile system in Syria, a similar system that was sold recently to Iran after many years of sanctions blocking the sale of the advanced missile system to the Iranians.

While the S-300 seems to be under lock and key of Russian forces at the moment, the 49 piece weapons system that include radar units will be up and running in Syria by the end of October according to Russian sources. This means that there will be a few active radars as well as several batteries of missiles, 4 missiles on each unit including equipment to rearm units, linked to the networks of mobile radar units. The effectiveness of the S-300 is a great improvement on that of the SA-5 and SA-6, and it is more likely that the radar would have been able to determine with more accuracy the origin of the IL-20. While a sensible and trained crew is required to avoid another incident like one that occurred with the SA-11 BUK, the use and application of the S-300 units as a political tool could have severe consequences in the region.

One notable effect of the S-300 is that in the wrong hands it could track and likely shoot at aircraft coming from many Israeli air bases, and may even be able to target Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport as well. The S-300 radar could likely track and shoot into the Mediterranean where many commercial air routes pass through to the Middle East and over Greece, Cyprus and Turkey. While stable relations between all parties in the region and Russia being an assumed inevitability at the moment, it is hoped that more radical elements would not be able to use an S-300 system to increase the likelihood of conflict in the region, especially acts that would target civilians. Memories of the Korean Airlines flight that was shot down in the 80s over Eastern Russia as well as the very fresh memories of the Malaysian Airlines flight shot down by a SA-11 over Ukraine would assume Russian responsibility for any tragic results with these systems in the region. While Mutually Assured Defense may decrease conflict in a region with the application of advanced defense systems, it could also become a tool of horror in the wrong hands.

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Vice President Mike Pence’s Remarks on the Administration’s Policy Towards China. Hudson Institute

Recently, Vice President Pence unveiled a litany of concerns with China, ranging from alleged Chinese interference in U.S. elections, to continued trade frictions, to persecution of minority religious groups within China, to cyber concerns, to provocative military encounters in the South China Sea.  Whichever refrain is used, “The gauntlet has been thrown down.” (medieval) or “The Rubicon has been crossed.” (ancient), there is no turning back from this point in U.S.-China strategic relations. Many in China will simply view Pence’s speech as mere confirmation of the U.S.’s desire to safeguard its global hegemony by containing China outright through a new Cold War. Unfortunately, this containment will also extend to the wisdom and sagacity of the American people.

Yet More Political Interference?

Pence’s sermon was short on actual U.S. policy towards China, much less strategy. Perhaps the highlights were allegations of Chinese interference in U.S. elections. Really? Where have we seen this before? Placing a paid advertisement in a local newspaper outlining how a U.S.-China trade war will be detrimental to all parties concerned (similar to placements by U.S. allies) does not constitute a “whole-of-government” approach by China to influence U.S. elections a month, two years, or even twenty years from now. If China, a country recognized globally for its historical strategic culture, were to truly adopt a “whole-of-government” approach on anything, the results would not be so mediocre as a paid advertisement in a local newspaper.

Additionally, the U.S. can not claim Russian (and now Chinese) interference in U.S. domestic political affairs while at the same time frowning upon the diplomatic choices of sovereign Latin American states within its own backyard, namely to recognize Beijing and not Taipei as the sole legitimate government of China. This hypocrisy is even more pronounced given that the U.S. is now criticizing others for the very same decision that it made itself years ago.

A Heart Attack Isn’t That Bad

Publicly, China has stated that it is open to further talks with the U.S. to resolve the trade dispute. However, realistically (and certainly according to more hard-line elements within China) China really has zero incentive to negotiate with the U.S. right now on any one issue since it knows that the U.S. really has problems with China on a myriad number of other issues. Seeming progress on any one issue will be immediately torpedoed due to perceived intransigence by China on the other issues. This is a “whole-of-issue” approach by the U.S., a.k.a., containment.

Forcing states to choose between competing trade agreements was a contributing factor in the Ukraine Crisis, with the choice being laid out for Ukraine as either EU membership or EEU membership, but not both. Instead of figuring out a way for the U.S.’ new BUILD initiative to work alongside China’s BRI to satisfy the infrastructure demands of the Indo-Pacific region, the stage is set for a new Cold War here as well. Lost in the current allegations of BRI projects being a form of “debt diplomacy” are the previous insistent demands by the U.S. that China become a “responsible stakeholder” and help shoulder the burden of global economic stability and growth.

The global economy is a highly complex, fluid, and interdependent system, much like the human body. Even at this stage of medical development, no doctor can truly claim to know exactly how the human body works. The only certain effect of any disruptions to the heart of this international trading system (the Asia-Pacific, not North America) is that it will be both wide-reaching and catastrophic. Yes, a heart attack is survivable in theory. That doesn’t mean that one should knowingly take actions to increase the risk of having one.

“Unsafe, unprofessional, and aggressive”

Deliberate conflation of military versus civilian “freedom of navigation” maneuvers aside, it’s plainly not in China’s interests to disrupt civilian trade flows in the South China Sea, as the U.S. claims. Any disruption here would hamper China’s own economic growth, thereby endangering the true source of legitimacy China’s government has with its own people. Whether by Chinese design or not, any attack on China will, in effect, be an attack on the entire global economy. China’s not going to back down, just like the DPRK didn’t back down over its missile development amidst regional U.S. military exercises.

The U.S. has, on numerous occasions, stated its intent to “Fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows and our national interests demand.” The problem here is that the U.S. is not the only state with legitimate national interests and the Russian s-400 system illustrates this vividly. Hypocrisy over sanctioning China for the purchase of this system, but not India, is self-evident. At least India has not been sanctioned yet, as the deal was just only recently finalized.

India has a long tradition of non-alignment, whether it’s called strategic autonomy or having a multi-vectored foreign policy, and will pursue its interests as a great power as it sees fit, especially within its own region. Right now, it’s in its interests to hedge against China and this latest weapons acquisition is symbolic of that desire. Moreover, it’s in both the U.S.’ and Russia’s national interests to have India serve in a balancing capacity against China in the eventuality of worsened (or in the U.S.’ case, much worsened) relations with China. The point is that states, especially great powers, are going to have their own proprietary interests whether the U.S. recognizes them as legitimate or not. This rule is also going to apply whether a state is a democracy or not.

“Love me when I’m gone.”

Americans are presently being conditioned (manipulated) to accept a long-term deterioration in U.S.-Chinese ties, with increasing concordant political, economic, and military risks as well. However, three modern examples illustrate why this may not be the best course of action.

The U.S. has only ever come to blows with China in the Korean War. Here, the U.S. miscalculated and underestimated Chinese resolve when it came to their territorial integrity, literally right on their border. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world was witness to how an outside superpower military presence interfered with a local superpower’s regional hegemony. Even in this instance only sound judgment, prudence, and coolheadedness helped avert nuclear catastrophe.

Granted, Iraq is only a regional power, not a global superpower like China or the Former Soviet Union. Additionally, Iraq’s neighborhood hasn’t been the locus of global economic activity for about two thousand years, whereas the Asia-Pacific (with China at its core) is poised to hold this spot not only now, but for the foreseeable future as well. However, the U.S. is still dealing with the unintended consequences of The Iraq War, namely the formation of ISIS  and the relative strengthening of Iraq’s rival, Iran. What, pray tell, might be the unintended consequences of the new Cold War with China?

Cue the music video.

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TOPSHOT – US President Donald Trump arrives for a political rally at Charleston Civic Center in Charleston, West Virginia, on August 21, 2018. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP)MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

Many Americans feel that the Arab world has a negative opinion of US President Donald Trump and would very much like for the Democrats to succeed in the upcoming US mid-term elections. However, this perception of the Arab world is very misleading and does not tell the whole story for there are Arabs who do support Trump and wish for a Republican victory.

It is true that the Arab Youth Survey that was conducted after Trump was elected claimed that 49% of young Arabs consider the US under President Trump to be an enemy. However, if one speaks to the Arab elites and Arab pro-democracy activists that are not hostile towards the State of Israel, one gets the impression that there are a number of Arabs who in fact support President Trump. For example, both Egyptian President Abdul Fattah El Sisi and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia consider Trump to be a “true friend of the Muslims.” Furthermore, neither Sisi nor Bin Salman are the only Arabs who feel this way.

Massad Abu Toameh, an expert on Palestinian affairs in Jerusalem, is supporting the Republicans in the upcoming mid-term elections for he considers Trump’s deal of the century to be the only proposal of its kind that brings innovative and creative ideas to the table for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “There is a one-time opportunity to create peace in the region between Israel, the Arabs and its surrounding neighbors. I believe that it is best that the Americans stick with this president. They are the ones supporting the people and not the so-called Palestinian and Arab leadership. Now, we have a future to look forward to.”

While Abu Mazen and Jordan’s king do not like Trump’s deal of the century, the majority of the descendants of Palestinian refugees prefer to stay where they are. Abu Toameh noted that there are Palestinians who are even selling their UNRWA refugee cards so that Syrians can get admitted into Europe: “You cannot be a refugee living in Palm Beach, Florida. This whole thing with UNRWA has to stop.” In Abu Toameh’s view, the fact that UNRWA has not rebuilt Gaza is a huge scandal and Jerusalem is not such a big deal. He noted that many East Jerusalemites are anyways applying for Israeli citizenship because they witness the corruption that occurs on a daily basis within the Palestinian Authority. Abu Toameh claimed that only Trump had the courage to recognize this reality: “We need someone strong like Donald Trump.”

Palestinian human rights activist Bassem Eid believes that at the end of the day, only Israelis and Palestinians can make peace with one another. In his view, the Americans cannot really affect the final outcome of a peace deal. However, at this critical juncture in history, right before Trump is about to announce his deal of the century, Eid very much does not want for Trump to be weakened following the results of these mid-term elections: “I am supporting the Republicans so that there is stability and that things can step forward.”

However, not all Arab pro-democracy advocates are pro-Republican. Syrian human rights activist Aboud Dandachi is not taking a side in these mid-term elections. However, he hopes whichever US political party takes over the US Congress will continue to apply pressure on the Palestinian Authority: “The Palestinians should know that this time there is no waiting for an American president in the hopes that the next one will fulfill their fantasies of a right of return and other hardline positions.”

Furthermore, Lebanese Christian writer Fred Maroun is greatly concerned about the anti-Israel positions taken by some Democratic candidates and how the Republican Party has moved to the far right, which has led to a rise of more than one Neo-Nazi candidate: “It is very surprising to me as a non-American that a country as large and diverse as the US would only have two parties. This model worked fairly well when both parties were moderate but as both parties become extreme, we are missing the stability and consistency that the US used to provide in terms of world leadership.”

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada. Some people think there’s a special place in hell for him.

Canada is the United States’ second largest trade partner after China. While issues exist, it is not a problematic partner. President Trump, however, has imposed economic sanctions on it, has threatened more sanctions, and singled it out for special condemnation in his rhetoric. A high point in the latter regard came when Peter Navarro, the president’s trade adviser, claimed there was “a special place in hell” for people like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Navarro, of course, later apologized for this, presumably because it sounded so silly.

“National security” is the stated reason for these sanctions, as it is for sanctions the administration has imposed on other countries. The principal reason for invoking national security is that it permits the administration to bypass the World Trade Organization and its complex rules, procedures, and standards for fairness. (In the process, the administration threatens to undermine the trade system that the United States helped forge to strengthen global growth and stability, but that is a separate topic.) The administration faces no real need to justify that decision, and so it has made no real effort to do so. Could such an argument be made?

A National Security Argument for Not Relying on Allies

The national security reference has been met with considerable derision because allies, by definition, do not pose a threat, but that, in and of itself, is not really a complete answer. There can be valid reasons for not relying on allies for goods that would be required in times of war.

For argument’s sake, let’s say we rely on South Korea for a substantial portion of steel. Steel is something that we would need to produce airplanes, tanks, howitzers, cartridges, etc. in time of war. We would not expect South Korea to cut off our steel supply for malicious reasons, but:

• What if the war in question occurs in Korea? Then the supply would be cut off despite Seoul’s intentions.

• What if the war occurs between the United States and China, and China fills the Pacific Ocean with submarines capable of sinking ships arriving from South Korea? That would also be a substantial threat to supply.

• What if ships are simply not available in adequate supply when they are most needed? During World War II, the United States rationed sugar, among other items. This curtailment of the civilian sugar supply did not occur because it was a vital war material needed for troops in combat. Just the opposite. It was curtailed because it was a low priority. While some sugar from cane growers in places like Louisiana and Florida and from sugar beet growers mostly in midwestern and western states was available, other normal supplies from places like Hawaii, Cuba, and Brazil required ships for transport and the ships were being commandeered for convoy duty (where, in many cases, they were sunk by submarines). Steel today would be a much higher priority than sugar was then, but keep in mind as well that the number of U.S.-flagged ships is infinitely smaller now than it was in the 1940s and there would be competing claims on them.

Yes, a national security argument can be made for avoiding reliance on overseas allies for the supply of vital war materials. To be sure, this would not be not without costs and could be considered misguided in terms of value trade-offs. Despite what Trump thinks, trade policy and treaties do not affect trade deficits as much as this country’s high spending rate, its low saving rate, its ability to attract foreign capital, and the role of the dollar as an international currency do. The anticipated increases in the budget deficit resulting from recent tax cuts and spending hikes will likely lead to worsened—not improved—trade deficits regardless of Trump actions on trade. Moreover, trade barriers worsen competitiveness, favor producers over consumers, and create jobs in some sectors of the economy only by destroying them in other sectors. Still, an argument could be made on the basis of national security if that is your priority.

But Canada?

Yet none of the national security argument applies to Canada, our Number 1 supplier of foreign steel! Canada is no more inaccessible than Minnesota or Upstate New York. Supply routes from Canada are no more vulnerable to disruption than any route within the United States. Canadians are highly unlikely to cut off supplies for malicious reasons—as long as we do not keep kicking them in the shins for no good reason. Overall, the administration’s reliance on national security to justify its trade policy is specious, but with regard to Canada it is downright absurd.

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People walk past a statue of Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin during celebration of his 145th birthday at the Lenin Hut Museum at Razliv lake, outside St.Petersburg, Russia, Wednesday, April 22, 2015. (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)

Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism. By Charles Clover. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.

 

The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia. By Mark Bassin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016.

 

Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe-Russia Relationship. Edited by Marlene Laruelle. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.

 

Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir. By Anton Shekhovtsov. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017.

 

“The ideas of [Lev] Gumilev are today capturing the masses.”

President Vladimir Putin, at Astana, in June 2004[1]

 

Cas Mudde recently observed that “[p]opulist radical right parties are the most studied party family in political science.”[2] While the interest of social researchers for ultra-nationalist political groups and networks – not only parties – in the West has indeed risen markedly during the last quarter of century, this cannot be said, to the same degree, about the East-Central European and especially post-Soviet far right. There exists, to be sure, a certain body of scholarly literature on these objects now too.[3] Yet, many details and circumstances of the emergence and development of relevant extremely right-wing groupings in such countries as Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Romania as well as especially Serbia and Ukraine still remain to be explored, contextualized, and interpreted.[4]  This is in spite of the fact that some of these parties were temporarily included in their countries’ coalition governments.[5]

With regard to the largest post-Soviet country, the situation is somewhat better, but essentially similar. Whereas Russian contemporary ultra-nationalism was an understudied field in the 1990s, there is today a formidable circle of Russian and Western researchers studying the various permutations of Russia’s extreme right.[6] But even this growing community’s rising output is so far insufficiently differentiated, voluminous and balanced to cover the whole variety of radically anti-Western tendencies in Russian politics, intellectual life, mass media, youth culture, and society at large. Worse, Russian right-wing extremism studies has, during the last 25 years, been dominated by non-tenured researchers[7] – above all, Marlene Laruelle, Aleksandr Verkhovskii and the late Vladimir Pribylovskii – who managed to produce the sub-discipline’s seminal texts while being busy with raising the funds to do so.[8] Various donors, among them the Norway Research Council at Oslo or Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs at New York, have recently provided grants to more deeply investigate Russia’s escalating nationalism. A number of tenured and non-tenured scholars across the world have decided to devote parts of their time to following the Russian extreme right. Yet, there appears to be no major political science chair or think-tank program – apart from Verkhovskii’s small SOVA monitoring center in Moscow[9] – that has post-Soviet Russian ultra-nationalism among its main designated research fields.[10]

As the four studies under review here illustrate,[11] the institutional under-development of Russian right-wing extremism studies is unfortunate. Certain Manichean ideas, informal extremist networks and industrious agents of the radical right – among them those calling themselves “Eurasianists” including, for instance, Vladimir Putin’s (b. 1952) official advisor Sergei Glaz’ev (b. 1961)[12] – have infiltrated Russian mainstream politics, ministerial bureaucracy, foreign affairs, higher education, Orthodox churches, think-tanks, mass media, (un)civil society and cultural diplomacy.[13] In view of Russia’s role in world politics, nuclear arsenal, military adventurism, challenging geography and declining economy, the political and social impact of the post-Soviet far right should thus be of concern to the West (and other world regions). Yet, the sub-field has so far – to significant degree – been driven by publications emerging from short-term grants, hobby research, and side jobs of academics and journalists also concerned with other duties than investigating the Russian far right. The condition of the sub-discipline Post-Soviet Russian Right-Wing Extremism Studies (postsowjetische russlandbezogene Rechtsextremismusforschung) is better than it was twenty years ago, when its state of play was reviewed, for the first time in English.[14] Yet, it is still not adequate to the increasingly broad variety, growing political impact, and rising international interconnectedness of its objects.

To be sure, the nature of the “Putin System” can still not be informatively classified as “fascist,” as some observers – with typically over-stretched concepts of generic fascism – have suggested.[15] While being nationalistic, anti-liberal and leader-oriented, the current Russian regime lacks a sufficiently palingenetic drive towards a political, cultural and anthropological revolution to be meaningfully equated to Mussolini’s or Hitler’s reigns.[16] So far, Putin’s rule remains similar to that of other so-called “oligarchic” (and not ideocratic) orders of most post-Soviet countries. In political science terms, this means that, while Russia’s current regime has become less hybrid and more authoritarian, its functioning remains determined by patron-client relationships, machine politics, nepotistic dynasties, clan-like networks and informal exchanges rather than ideological prescriptions. The main purpose of its patronalistic or neopatrimonial mechanisms is rent-extraction, preservation of power as well as privileges, and sometimes plain theft instead of pursuing transcendental goals.[17] However, to the degree that Putin’s government is, because of various economic factors, losing its earlier performance-based legitimacy, it is increasingly turning to charismatic and ideological forms of self-legitimation. At this point, Russia’s rich tradition of illiberal nationalist thought enters the stage.[18] Although it plays, so far, an instrumental rather fundamental role for the “Putin System,” elements of right radical rhetoric – i.e. conspiracy theories, leader-cult, anti-Americanism, messianism, nativism, irredentism, clericalism, homophobia, fortress-mentality, law-and-order slogans etc. – have become part and parcel of Russian official statements, foreign policies and public discourse.[19] Arguably, they are starting to assume a life of their own.

Two particularly intriguing bodies of thought within the larger assembly of modern Russian anti-Western ideas are classical Eurasianism, as developed in the 1920s and 1930s,[20] and post-Soviet so-called “neo-Eurasianism.” In fact, the latter is, to some degree, a misnomer. It contains some theoretical similarities with, and partly constitutes a functional equivalent to, classical Eurasianism. Yet, post-Soviet neo-Eurasianism, partly inspired by Lev Gumilev (1912-1992), and principally shaped by Aleksandr Dugin (b. 1962), is not a continuation or elaboration, but rather a reformulation and sometimes falsification of older Eurasianist outlooks.[21] Both classical and neo-Eurasianism build upon 19th-century Russian anti-Westernism including the Slavophiles of the 1840s-1850s, Nikolai Danilevskii (1822-1885) and Konstantin Leont’ev (1831-1891). Yet, their main inspirations, geographic foci and eventual aims differ. Classical Eurasianism was a sophisticated ideological, cultural and theoretic construct developed by some of the most remarkable Russian émigré  scholars after the October Revolution, among them, Nikolai Trubetskoi (1890-1938), Petr Savitskii (1895-1968), Lev Karsavin (1882-1952), Roman Iakobson (1896-1982), Georgii Vernadskii (1887-1973), Georgii Florovskii (1883-1979), and Petr Suvchinskii (1892-1985).[22] Based on a variety of academic approaches and considerable empirical research, the Eurasianists believed that they had located a third continent between Europe and Asia that is neither European nor Asian. They were actively seeking and thought to have found various historical, geographical, linguistic and other characteristics of the territory of the Tsarist and Soviet empires that led them to allege the existence of a separate Eurasian civilization different from – what they saw as – the “Romano-Germanic” culture of Central and Western Europe. Eurasian civilization is illiberal, non-democratic and anti-individualistic, the Eurasianists asserted; it should thus be kept separate from both European civilization and supposedly universal-humanistic ideas. With such a vision, classical Eurasianism was remarkably similar to the concurrently emerging so-called Conservative Revolution of the Weimar Republic.[23]

 

While Duginite neo-Eurasianism is also outspokenly ideocratic and particularistic, it has far less academic clout than classical Eurasianism, is heavily conspirological, and often simply plagiarizes ideas from international anti-Western thought.[24] Rather than developing classical Eurasianism, neo-Eurasianism is a hybrid, drawing primarily on 19th and early 20th century mystical geopolitics, the German Conservative Revolution, European National-Bolshevism, British Satanism, the French New Right, Italian neo-Fascism, Integral Traditionalism, and some other non-Russian radical intellectual as well as political movements.[25] To readers of Western anti-liberal thought, Dugin’s basic idea may thus sound familiar: World history’s basic conflict is that between collectivistic and traditionalist Eurasian land-powers (tellurocracies), on the one hand, and individualistic and liberal Atlantic sea-powers (thalassocracies), on the other. The hidden war of their contemporary leaders – Russia vs. America – is currently entering its Endkampf (final battle) and will involve a Russian domestic as well as the world’s geopolitical revolution. In Dugin’s fluctuating outlook (recently re-labelled, by him, as “the fourth political theory”[26]), the extension of “Eurasia” is less clear than in classical Eurasianism, and may also embrace other territories than the former Tsarist/Soviet empire, including continental Central and Western Europe, various Asian countries, or even entirely different parts of the world, if they decide to adhere to tellurocratic and traditional values. Both the largely Western sources of neo-Eurasianism and its geographic flexibility became major reasons that Dugin and his various organizations were well-positioned to participate not only in interconnecting the EU’s and Russia’s radically nationalist scenes, but also in linking some representatives of Putin’s regime to the Western far right.

Each of the four studies reviewed here breaks new ground in one way or another, and will become basic reading for those interested in the post-Soviet Russian extreme right. While they sometimes contain flaws in terms of conceptualization, terminology and composition, all of them are rich on empirical detail, do close process-tracing, and conduct pertinent comparisons. They complement well some older important monographs and collected volumes on post-Soviet Russian ultra-nationalism by, for instance, in chronological order, Wayne Allensworth, Peter Duncan, Stephen Shenfield, Viacheslav Likhachev, Vadim Rossman, Vladimir Shnirel’man, Thomas Parland, Anastasia Mitrofanova, Marlene Laruelle, Alexander Höllwerth, Stefan Wiederkehr, Verkhovskii, and Galina Kozhevnikova et al.[27]

Charles Clover, formerly Financial Times correspondent at Moscow, has produced, with his Black Wind, White Snow, a very readable descriptive survey of classical and neo-Eurasianism. His study combines results of several years of archival research, participant observation and in-depth interviews in Russia with an enviable literary talent. Clover’s gripping story of the zigzags in the development of Russian Eurasianism reads often like a novel. Based on a broad variety of primary sources (manuscripts, letter, conversations), he tells numerous revealing episodes and empirical details not yet outlined in the scholarly literature. Clover brilliantly sketches the transmutation of Eurasianism from an obscure intellectual movement among Russian emigres in interwar Europe into a major paradigm of post-Soviet international relations, intellectual discourse and political interpretation, as expressed in the name of the recently established “Eurasian Economic Union.”[28] This book is, perhaps, unique to the discipline in that it manages to be a well-written general overview of, and excellent introduction to, Eurasianism, yet also constitutes – because of the various fascinating short stories it contains – profitable reading for the specialist.

Such an outstanding text could have been brought though to its readership in a less confusing set-up. Its publication with a top university press suggests that it is an academic study – which it is not. It may have been more effective and reached a wider readership as a paperback with a major commercial publisher. Also, the book’s subtitle does not reveal the text’s focus on classical and neo-Eurasianism. Instead, it suggests that it deals with some “new” Russian nationalism while it is, in fact, about a familiar variety of the old imperial Russian tradition. “New nationalism” has been a phrase recently used, within the scholarly community, to designate non- or, at least, less expansionist Russian far right trends that are more ethnocentric, introverted, exclusive as well as partly racist – and thus often, at least, implicitly anti-Eurasian.[29] Still, Clover’s investigation stands out, because of its comprehensiveness and insights, as a major publishing event in contemporary Russian area studies.

The same can be said, for different reasons, about Mark Bassin’s in-depth exploration of The Gumilev Mystique. Whereas Clover sheds novel light on some already researched episodes in contemporary Russian nationalism, Bassin opens an entirely new chapter in the study of the Russian far right, with his magisterial monograph on one of the insufficiently appreciated, yet important trends in the post-Soviet history of social thought and public discourse. His book is not the first academic text on its topic,[30] but it provides the first comprehensive account of the intellectual biography, social impact, international reception and political significance of the controversial historian and self-ascribed “Eurasianist” Lev Gumilev (1912-1992), son to the famous Russian poets Nikolai Gumilev (1886-1921) and Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966). Filling a glaring gap in post-Stalinist Russian area studies, Bassin has written the definitive investigation into one of the most prolific and consequential Soviet writers on pre-modern Russian as well as Central Asian history, and Russia’s major theorist of ethnogenesis.

The classical Eurasianists referred, in the rationalization of their political theory, to social, cultural and geographical research. In contrast, Gumilev boldly mixes in his writings arguments from the humanities with questionable insights from the natural sciences, above all biology. Gumilev’s often fancy ideas and novitistic (or pseudo-innovative) concepts about the natural character of ethnoses (or ethnic groups) had and have considerable influence on the worldview of late and post-Soviet students, intellectuals and researchers, especially in such disciplines as history, anthropology, geography and international relations. His voluminous writings have contributed to the emergence of such specifically Russian social science sub-disciplines as political anthropology, civilizational studies, ethno-politology, geopolitics, and culturology.[31] After the break-up of the USSR, Gumilev’s influence has been rising constantly in spite of his fantastic assertions about the course and laws of human history.

Gumilev presents world history as a cyclical process of the birth, rise, fall and disappearance of ethnoses. Being naturally secluded groups, ethnoses enter alliances with similar other ethnic groups and form larger unions called “super-ethnoses.” At the same time, according to Gumilev, ethnoses are in constant danger of becoming “chimeras,” if they are infiltrated, subverted and eventually destroyed by alien, parasitic groups – not the least, by Jews. Most infamously, Gumilev has speculated, in pseudo-scientific fashion, about the role of cosmic energy or solar emissions (as well as resulting micro-mutations in human beings!) in the outbreak of – what he calls – “passionarity,” within ethnic groups under such impact from outer space. Passionarnost’ is, perhaps, Gumilev’s most popular ear worm frequently used in post-Soviet intellectual discourse nowadays. It means something like certain human beings’ heightened ability to absorb energy and their resulting drive towards transformative action undertaken by the passionarii (“passionarians”), on behalf of their native communities.

Bassin not only deals extensively and brilliantly with Gumilev’s quixotic theories, but outlines also the various confrontations, adaptations, interpretations and utilizations they have encountered in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, in- and, sometimes also, outside Russia. He deals especially revealingly with Gumilev’s various quarrels with Soviet social scientists and Russian ultra-nationalists. While both were initially rather skeptical, these two groups eventually adopted large parts of the Gumilevian conceptual framework, with this or that caveat.

Both Clover’s and Bassin’s revelations about Gumilev’s connections to the late and post-Soviet Russian elite, like the indirect link to the temporary “prime-minister” of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic Aleksandr Borodai (b. 1972), are especially fascinating.[32] Like Clover, Bassin points out the important role of Gumilev’s friendship to the last speaker of the Soviet parliament and August 1991 putsch supporter Anatolii Luk’ianov (b. 1930).[33] On the other hand, Bassin does not mention, also like Clover, the writings, role and impact of the political theorist Aleksandr Panarin (1940-2003). A once prominent professor at Moscow State University’s Faculty of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Social and Philosophical Studies of the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Philosophy, Panarin was one of the few Russian experts on the French New Right, helped making, in the late 1990s, both classical and neo-Eurasianism acceptable within Russian academia, and, towards the end of this life, joined Dugin’s abortive Eurasia Party.[34]

A more general omission in Bassin’s otherwise comprehensive and flawless survey concerns Gumilev’s role in, and impact on, the post-Soviet history and social studies teaching of teenagers and students on the secondary, under-graduate and post-graduate levels. At several points, Bassin indirectly mentions the issue, for instance in connection with the new Eurasian University named after Lev Gumilev in Astana, or when pointing out that one of Gumilev’s major books – Ot Rusi k Rossii (From the Rus to Russia) – was recommended by the Ministry of Education as a text for the high school curriculum of the Russian Federation (p. 222). Yet, he does not treat Gumilev’s pedagogic influence as deeply as, for instance, the debates around Gumilev among Soviet academics. That is unfortunate for two reasons. First, the use of certain books and articles by Gumilev in universities and even high schools is presumably one of the main reasons for the surprising respect that the anti-Western, often amateurish and sometimes anti-Semitic texts of Gumilev enjoy among the Russian public. Gumilev’s high visibility and social rank distinguish him from, for instance, the also anti-Semitic writer and renowned mathematician Igor Shafarevich (b. 1923).[35] Second, there exists already a nascent sub-direction, within Russian nationalism studies, that focuses on the social impact of anti-Western and extremely right-wing ideas via post-Soviet higher education.[36] It would have been intriguing to see what relative role Gumilev’s writings play in social science and humanities curricula of various secondary and tertiary education institutions in Russia and other countries.[37]

The increasing relevance of the latter is illustrated by Vadim Rossman’s informative paper “Moscow State University’s Department of Sociology and the Climate of Opinion in Post-Soviet Russia” in Laruelle’s original collective volume Eurasianism and the European Far Right. Rossman deals here above all with Aleksandr Dugin’s activities at Russia’s most prestigious higher education institution – the capital’s Lomonosov University. Like almost all contributions to Laruelle’s new paper collection, Rossman’s detailed chapter deals with a hitherto largely neglected, yet important new topic in post-Soviet studies.

Laruelle contextualizes her collected volume’s purpose in an introductory essay called “Dangerous Liaisons: Eurasianism, the European Far Right, and Putin’s Russia.” The book’s empirical part starts with Anton Shekhovtsov’s outline of the beginnings of Dugin’s relationship to the West European New Right in 1989-1994 and ends with Shekhovtsov’s report on Western far right election observation missions in the service of the Kremlin. Jean-Ives Camus illustrates Dugin’s close relationship to France. Giovanni Savino revealingly surveys Dugin’s various connections in Italy. Nicolas Lebourg outlines the “difficult establishment of neo-Eurasianism in Spain.” Vügar İmanbeyli sketches the fascinating rise and temporary fall of Dugin’s networks in Turkey. Umut Korkut and Emel Akçali provide glimpses into Hungary’s flirtation with Eurasianism. Sofia Tipaldou details the Greek Golden Dawn’s transnational links.

Laruelle’s edited volume is best read in combination with Anton Shekhovtsov’s forthcoming study Russia and the Western Far Right.[38] This voluminous monograph deals not only with post-Soviet affairs, but also the Soviet period – namely the 1920s and 1950s when the Kremlin already had some secret contacts with West European right-wing extremists. While Laruelle’s volume details primarily connections between Russia’s extremely anti-Western Eurasianists and the Western far right, the principal focus of Shekhovtsov’s volume is the paradoxical collaboration of the Soviet and Putin regimes with various Western ultra-nationalists, and especially, during the last years, with those in Austria, Italy and France. While Moscow was after World War II and today still is loudly “anti-fascist,” it has – in a variety of situations – not hesitated to contact, support and utilize extremely right-wing extremists for various foreign and domestic purposes. Recently, this has included employing far-right commentators for propaganda and disinformation purposes in Kremlin-controlled mass media, or engaging Western fringe politicians as guests to manipulated elections in the role of foreign observers who legitimize, for Russia’s domestic audience, engineered polls, including pseudo-referenda, with affirmative public statements.

Shekhovtsov underlines the motivational ambivalence of the intensifying collaboration of the Kremlin with the Western far right – a dualism that reflects the Janus-like character of Putin’s cynical and postmodern, yet also sometimes fanatical and archaic regime. On the one hand, Moscow behaves pragmatically when, in its capacity as a kleptocracy, it tries to establish as many as possible links to influential Western mainstream politicians and businesspeople, without regard to their political views or ideologies. The Kremlin only turns to various radicals in the West to the degree that it cannot build close relationships within the establishment in the respective countries, and when it can instead get access – sometimes via middlemen like Dugin – to alternative political circles. Moscow then also supports these often populist and nationalist forces as its allies and as troublemakers in the EU and Atlantic alliance.

On the other hand, however, Moscow’s growing international isolation and intensifying contacts with the far right, within and outside Russia, are also ideologically driven, and feed back into the self-definition of the regime. As an autocracy in need of  consolidation, Putin’s regime is being naturally drawn – both domestically and internationally – to groups whose ideologies support illiberal policies and undemocratic practices. The far right groups, in turn, profit from public alignment to the world’s territorially largest country and a nuclear superpower. The result have been, as Shekhovtsov outlines, constantly deepening relationships between Russian officials and Western far right activists since the mid-2000s.

One reason that Russian society, in spite of its deep-seated anti-fascism, accepts the growing interpenetration between the far right and Russian government is the spread, authority and discourse of neo-Eurasianism. Some elements of this pan-national, yet also ethno-centrist ideology of radical anti-Westernism – above all, its Russian exceptionalism and geopolitical Manicheanism – have made deep inroads into Russian intellectual life, higher education and mass media, over the last 25 years, i.e. already before Putin came to power in summer 1999.[39] The idea that Russia is a civilization that is not only separate, but also opposed to the West has today approached something close to cultural hegemony in Russian society. Dugin – who entered Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list in 2014[40] – has played his role in that war for the minds of the Russians.[41] Yet his impact is, as Shekhovtsov indicated elsewhere,[42] sometimes overestimated, while that of Gumilev is, as Clover’s and Bassin’s studies illustrate, not sufficiently appreciated, in the West.

To be sure, Gumilev died shortly after the break-up of the Soviet Union whereas Dugin then only began his political career by way of making far right acquaintances in the West, and impressing his Russian fellow ultra-nationalists with ideas and concepts borrowed from abroad. Although Dugin is today a member of Russia’s establishment, he remains nevertheless an odd figure, because of, among other eccentric announcements, the explicitly pro-Nazi positions he voiced in the 1990s, when still being part of, and mainly addressing, Russia’s lunatic fringe.[43] In contrast, Gumilev’s post-mortem acclaim and the enormous print-runs of his books developed against the background of his broad acceptance as one of Russia’s major historic thinkers of the 20th century. Moreover, as Bassin notes, “[c]ontemporary theoreticians of the European New Right such as [two of Dugin’s major interlocutors in the West] Alain de Benoist [b. 1943] and Robert Steuker [b. 1956] are well aware of Gumilev’s ethnos theory and clearly appreciate its resonance with their own views […].” (p. 313)

 

Clover’s and Bassin’s deep explorations of Eurasianism, Gumilev and neo-Eurasianism highlight some of the historical-ideational background of the Putin regime’s turn to the right after Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004.[44] Laruelle’s and Shekhovtov’s volumes detail various expressions, mechanisms and implications of this momentous shift. These four books illustrate that – at least, in the context of research into Russian intellectual life, party politics, public discourse and foreign policy – investigations into contemporary far right ideas and actors are not any longer a niche activity within political science. Rather, Russian right-wing extremism has become a topic central to the study of post-Soviet domestic politics, international relations, and security affairs.

 

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Leonid Luks and Jeffrey C. Isaac provided useful feedback on a draft of this article. It was first published in Perspectives on Politics.

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[1] Rossiiskaia gazeta, 18 June 2014, https://rg.ru/2004/06/18/astana-anons.html (accessed December 7th, 2016).

[2] Mudde 2016.

[3] E.g.: Mudde 2005; Minkenberg 2010, 2015.

[4] Umland 2015.

[5] Minkenberg 2017.

[6] Umland 2009d.

[7] Some of the main tenured scholars in the field were or are John B. Dunlop (Hoover Institution), Alexander Yanov (City University of New York), Valerii Solovei (MGIMO), Pal Kolsto (University of Oslo), Peter J.S. Duncan (University College London), Stephen Hanson (College of William & Mary), Veljko Vujačić (European University of St. Petersburg) and Mark Bassin (Södertörn University at Stockholm).

[8] See, among other publications: Lariuel’ 2004, 2007a, 2007b, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2009d, 2015; Laruelle 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2016a, 2016b; Kozhevnikova, Shekhovtsov & Verkhovskii 2009; Mikhailovskaia, Pribylovskii & Verkhovskii 1998, 1999; Papp, Pribylovskii & Verkhovskii 1996; Pribylovskii & Verkhovskii 1995 & 1997; Verkhovskii 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2014; Verkhovsky 2000, 2002; Pribylovskii 1995a, 1995b, 1995c; Likhachev & Pribylovskii 2005.

[9] Arnold 2010; Umland 2012.

[10] For a while, the Chair for Central and East European Contemporary History of the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt in Bavaria focused, under Professor Leonid Luks, on the study of, and publishing about, Russian radical right-wing tendencies. During the last years, it produced, among other publications of such kind, eleven special issues of the Russian-language journal Forum for Contemporary East European History and Culture, on pre-revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet anti-Westernism (Antizapadnye… 2009-2015). Yet, this Eichstaett Chair was closed in summer 2014.

[11] Important recent monographs or collected volumes not included in this review are, in alphabetical order: Arnold 2016; Bassin et al. 2015; Bassin & Suslov 2016; Blakkisrud & Kolsto 2016; Brown & Sheiko 2014; Griffiths 2017; Kriza 2014; Ostbo 2015; Suslov 2016; Verkhovskii 2014; and Zakharov 2015.

[12] Aslund 2013. Some recently leaked telephone conversation records demonstrate that Glaz’ev played a central role in organizing secessionist unrest in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, as well as in preparing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, in February-March 2014. See Umland 2016. Glaz’ev is linked to Russia’s extreme right via – among other connections – the Izborsk Club of rabidly anti-Western intellectuals. See Laruelle 2016b.

[13] Various illustrations may be found in the above and below listed texts, and in, among others: Arnold & Romanova 2013; Gorenburg, Pain & Umland 2012a, 2012b; Hagemeister 2004; Mathyl 2000, 2011; Mey 2004; Moroz 2005; Rogachevskii 2004; Stepanov 2011; Torbakov 2015; Umland 2002a, 2002b, 2006, 2008, 2009b.

[14] Umland 1997. See also Umland 2002b.

[15] E.g. Motyl 2016. For a critique of Motyl’s earlier similar statements, see, among others, Umland 2009d, 2015.

[16] On how to define and interpret fascism, see the extensive discussion by various comparativists and further references in: Griffin et al. 2006.

[17] Dawisha 2014; Hale 2015; Gel’man 2016.

[18] See, for instance, on Putin’s rediscovery of the Russian proto-fascist émigré thinker Ivan Il’in (1883-1954): Barbashin & Thoburn 2015; Snyder 2016.

[19] E.g. Eltchaninoff 2016.

[20] Bassin et al. 2015; Lariul’ 2004; Laruelle 2008a; Liuks 2009a; Schlacks & Vinkovetsky 1996; Shnirel’man 1996; Wiederkehr 2007.

[21] Viderker 2010.

[22] Some of them, to be sure, after participating in its formulation, later retracted from Eurasianism – perhaps, most explicitly so Georgii Florovskii in his 1928 essay “The Eurasian Seduction” in Sovremennye zapiski 34: 312-346. I am grateful to Leonid Luks for pointing this out to me.

[23] Baissvenger 2009; Liuks 2009b; Luks 1986. Although both intellectual movements were developing at the same time in inter-war continental Europe, there was only little interaction between them.

[24] Among the early treatments of Dugin in Western languages were: Allensworth 1998; Hielscher 1992, 1993a, 1993b; Laqueur 1993; Mathyl 1997/1998; Tsygankov 1998; Umland 1995; Yanov 1995.

[25] Griffin et al. 2006; Höllwerth 2007, 2010; Ingram 2001; Lariul’ 2009c; Laruelle 2006, 2008a, 2015; Luks 2000, 2002, 2004; Sedgwick 2004; Senderov 2009a, 2009b; Shekhovtsov 2009a, 2009b; Shekhovtsov & Umland 2009; Sokolov 2010a, 2010b; Umland 2004, 2009a, 2009e, 2014; Vafin 2010.

[26] Cucută 2015.

[27] In order of their publication: Allensworth 1998; Duncan 2000; Shenfield 2001; Likhachev 2002; Rossman 2002; Shnirel’man 2004; Parland 2005; Mitrofanova 2005; Laruelle 2008a, 2008b, 2009a, 2009c, 2012; Höllwerth 2007; Wiederkehr 2007; Verkhovskii 2005, 2006, 2007, 2014; Kozhevnikova et al. 2009.

[28] On the distinction between Dugin’s and Putin’s Eurasianisms, see Umland 2014.

[29] Laruelle 2010; Blakkisrud & Kolsto 2016.

[30] E.g.: Ignatow 2002; Kochanek 1998; Lariul’ 2009b; Naarden 1996; Shnirel’man 2009; Shnirelman & Panarin 2001; Viderker 2012.

[31] Scherrer 2002.

[32] On the context of Borodai’s activities in Eastern Ukraine, see Mitrokhin 2015; Laruelle 2016a.

[33] On the context of Gumilev’s friendship with Luk’ianov, see O’Connor 2006.

[34] Lariul’ 2009d; Ostbo 2015, 112; Peunova 2009; Tsygankov 2013.

[35] On Shafarevich, see Dunlop 1994; Znamenski 1996; Horvath 1998; Berglund 2002.

[36] E.g.: Tsygankov 1998; Scherrer 2002; Müller 2008; Sokolov 2010; Miuller & Trotsuk 2011; Sainakov & Iablokov 2011; Umland 2011; Mäkinen 2014.

[37] Clover deals in his book with Dugin’s lectures at the Russian General Staff Academy already in the 1990s, i.e. before Dugin entered Russia’s political establishment and “systemic radical right.” On the distinction between the systemic and non-systemic radical right under Putin, see Arnold & Umland 2017.

[38] Published within the “Fascism & the Far Right” book series edited by Nigel Copsey and Graham Macklin. See also Khokk 2015 and Polyakova et al. 2016.

[39] Dunlop 2010; Höllwerth 2010; Laruelle 2004, 2009b; Mathyl 2002, 2003; Mitrofanova 2005, 2009; Pakhlevsa 2011a, 2011b; Parland 2005; Shekhovtsov 2009a, 2014; Stepanov 2009; Umland 2002a, 2009c, 2010;

[40] Above-mentioned Aleksandr Borodai – a disciple of Gumilev – also made it, along with Putin, into this list’s Agitators section. See “A World Disrupted: The Leading Global Thinkers of 2014.” Foreign Policy. http://globalthinkers.foreignpolicy.com/ (accessed December 7th, 2016).

[41] Yanov 1995.

[42] Shekhovtsov 2014.

[43] Umland 2006, 2009e. See also Khel’vert 2013.

[44] Horvath 2012.

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Imran Khan, elected on his good looks and apparent disagreement with the status quo, was going to bring with him sweeping change, transforming the country into what he called “Naya Pakistan,” or “New Pakistan”. His two-decade-long journey to the premier house in Pakistan has not gone unnoticed. After losing the last national elections in 2013, he becried the rigged elections until a week before the current elections. His party sued everyone imaginable, held long drawn-out demonstrations that drained the country, both economically and emotionally..

This election cycle was different. While foreign media covered his ties with the Pakistan Army, media in Pakistan was banned from covering anything that hinted towards these ties, or spoke against Khan’s policies (and used the Fake News Trumpism). While he famously has appealed to the youth of Pakistan based on his previous life as a playboy turned cricket superstar, he has also appeased the militant-right and joined forces with them to establish his government. An example of his washy manifesto are the blasphemy laws, a topic of controvery in Pakistan any given day of the week, but something that is played on most during election cycles. Khan has famously backed the laws, which have been used as a tool to further opress minorities, especially Christians and Ahmedis.

Ahmedis are a minority in Pakistan, whom the government had declared “non-Muslim” in 1974. Since, their community has silently served in the Pakistani army without the hope of promotion or overt praise, they have built our economy without the appreciation that should come with it and have won Pakistan its only Nobel Prize in physics, without as much as a nod. Yet, they continued to live in the land that is their home, and continue to serve selflessly. One such individual is Dr. Atif R. Mian, an economist and professor at Princeton University. He was recently asked to serve on an economic advisory council for Khan, which he gracefully accepted. The right wing extremist factions within Pakistan immediately criticized Khan for appointing a “non-Muslim” and wanted him removed. To their credit, Khan and his party stuck with their decision – for a whole two days.

Dr. Mian has since been “asked” to remove himself from the council, which he has done. Khan and his government have given no further explanation for their action. His avid supporters believe this would not be a battle worth fighting, as religious extremists had threatened violence. In his inaugural address, Khan made a strong statement about Pakistan being the country of the poor and the weak and that he would stand with them. He mentioned the women, children and minorities that needed specific protection and opportunities, and that his government would provide those. Yet, two days into a decision that would prove beneficial for the country, the govenrment has given into the threats of out-lawed factions, sending a clear signal as to who is in charge.

While his govenrment may be on a path to planting ten billion trees, it has already established a rule by terrorists. What’s so naya about this Pakistan?

 

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http://www.quiz-maker.com/QINY3IR

 

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Russian President Vladimir Putin visits a polling station during a parliamentary election in Moscow, Russia, September 18, 2016. REUTERS/Grigory Dukor – RTSO8SI

Western comments on Russian domestic and foreign affairs have, during the last years, become more and more gloomy. Among other topics, this pessimistic discourse (to which I too have contributed) features Putin’s neo-imperial plans for the post-Soviet area, the many varieties of post-Soviet Russian ultra-nationalism, the fragility of the geopolitical grey zone between the Kremlin-dominated sphere on the one side and NATO in the other, Moscow’s subversion of the foundations of the world’s nuclear non-proliferation regime (via its attack on the nuclear-weapons-free NPT signatory Ukraine), the catastrophic scenario of a full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war, the grave repercussions of such a new escalation for the whole of East-Central Europe, and the continuing Western naivety with regard to the origins, nature, functioning and aims of the current regime in Moscow.

To be sure, arguments like these have been and are still necessary to be made as they are, so far, insufficiently salient in Western mass media. Yet, it may also be time for developing in parallel a different approach to Russia’s future. At least that is what recent history and the aftermath of the Cold War’s end suggests.

How we lost Russia

In 1991, the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union opened an unexpected window of opportunity for the creation of a comprehensive, cooperative and stable European security and economic order. A major reason that this fortunate chance has been missed was that the Western community of experts on Eastern Europe had, even as Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was slowly turning into a full-scale revolution, not foreseen such an outcome. Most observers kept focusing on the USSR’s remaining imperfections – until the Soviet state did not exist anymore.

The West had, before this event, not developed a clear understanding of, and coherent plan for, a situation in which the Russian communist regime would disappear, and an independent Russia would embark on the road to gradual Westernization. Most analysts would have regarded such a scenario as idle fantasy before 1991. As a result, during the 1990s, Western policies towards the new Russian Federation were formulated ad hoc, largely uncoordinated between the various actors involved, and without a clear vision of what Eastern Europe’s future structure should eventually look like.

It is true that various steps towards a rapprochement with Russia and cooperation with the newly independent states were taken by this or that national Western government and international organization, such as the IMF, G7, Council of Europe or NATO. Yet, there was little appreciation of the uniqueness of the world-historic opportunity on the table, and the enormous stakes involved in getting this critical moment right. Instead of being guided by historic sensitivity, coherent strategy and appealing teleology, Western approaches towards the post-Soviet world were characterized by spontaneity, complacency and hesitancy. The more sustained approaches, like the EU’s Strategic and Modernization Partnerships with Russia, were only introduced, in in 2003 and 2008 respectively, i.e. after the “Putin System” had started to take shape – and when it was thus already too late. We are now paying the price for this grave geopolitical omission of Brussels, Berlin and Washington.

This was in contrast to the West’s behavior vis-a-vis post-fascist West Germany, in the 1950s, that was treated remarkably differently from the post-imperial Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Although the Germans had, only a few years before, to be defeated, in a world war, and remained for many years excluded from the United Nations, the Federal Republic that emerged in 1949 was swiftly integrated into the major new Western institutions. In 1951, West Germany became a member of the European Coal and Steel Community, in 1955 of NATO, in 1957 of the European Economic and Atomic Energy Communities, and in 1958 of the European Parliamentary Assembly. In spite of much good will on the side of the EU and US towards Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, nothing even remotely reminiscent of this course of action vis-à-vis the young FRG happened in Western policies towards the young Russian Federation after the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. Somewhat predictably, Russia – reminding the decline of German democracy after World War I – eventually returned to its imperial and autocratic traditions, under Putin.

Today, there are reasons to believe that we may, nevertheless, sooner or later again be offered a chance to draw Russia into the Western community of states, and that it may make sense to already now prepare for such an optimistic turn of events. A positive agenda for a post-Putinist Russia could itself become a factor of its realization, and get us away from permanent repetition of doomsday scenarios. Moreover, for a prophecy getting the chance to become self-fulfilling, it needs to be stated, in the first place. A vision of how a future non-imperialist and democratic Russia could be gradually integrated into the Western community of states could, as such, become an instrument for Russian democrats, European diplomats, Western politicians and international civil society in their furthering of such a scenario.

Yet, there is, so far, little thinking about a completely different Russia and how to bring it about, in the West. As in the 1980s, the recent past is seen as the prime or even only analytically sound guide to the future. Anything beyond either mere extrapolation of the present, or some even more grim prediction for the future appears as day-dreaming. Putin’s regime as well as its drummers in and outside Russia are themselves setting this agenda: All we can get from Moscow, so the story goes, is either accommodation or confrontation. At worst, instead of the current aggressive kleptocracy, a still more dangerous Russian fascist ideocracy could be in the wings. The Kremlin’s projection of Russian power, intransigence and unpredictability is finding fertile ground in a Western analytical culture characterized by cautiousness, skepticism and pessimism. Yet, how likely are a continuation or escalation rather than relaxation or dissipation of the current tensions in Russian-Western relations?

Why a new window of opportunity may open again

To be sure, Moscow’s relations with the West may have to get first worse before they get better. Before it eventually self-destroys, Russia’s unviable kleptocratic order might have to go through big convulsions and a period that would be very risky for everybody involved – perhaps, even for the whole of humanity. Yet, chances are that sooner or later Russia will turn again to the West and be ready not only for resumption of its pre-Putinist political course and relationships to the West. There may even emerge the chance for a start of Russia’s all-out integration into Western economic and security structures. Such a turn of events may not only mean a second future opportunity to create a “common European home,” as once envisaged by Gorbachev. The very prospect of such a fundamental redefinition of Russian-Western relations and the transcendence of Europe’s current division via Russia’s gradual inclusion into the West can and should be itself seen as a mean to bring about that future.

The fundamental challenge to the continuing existence of Russia’s domestically kleptocratic and internationally aggressive regime, during the coming years, is a toxic combination of two trends that even clever leadership in the Kremlin may not be able to handle at once. First, unless the price of crude oil shoots up again, the non-competitiveness and underperformance of Russia’s current socio-economic order will become ever more obvious. With every year, the pie that can be divided between Russia’s various rent-seekers will get smaller. The concurrent loss of Russia’s relative economic dynamism, international weight and foreign influence will become ever more visible and depressing to Russia’s elite. The Eurasian Economic Union may become either irrelevant or even collapse. The financial burden of sustaining Russia’s various formally or informally annexed territories and satellite regimes may become unbearable. Unless a major non-Western economic power like Japan or China starts perceiving Russia not merely as a trading partner and raw materials provider, but as a close political friend to be actively supported and integrated with, the lack of Russia’s economic prospects on its own will become increasingly obvious to educated Russians.

A resolute, charismatic and widely accepted ruler may, to be sure, be able to compensate, during a long period of time, for the various problems this creates for the stability of the current Russian polity. Yet, for biological, constitutional and political reasons, it is not entirely clear how long Putin will be able to provide such leadership, and whether his patronalistic regime can arrange for an orderly transfer of power to a suitable successor. Until 2024, the end of Putin’s fourth term as president, the leadership issue may not yet become urgent. But already today, the question that everybody in Russia’s clientelist system is asking her- or himself is: What comes afterwards?

Certainly, Putin can, in 2024, put again a seat-holder in place, like he did with Dmitry Medvedev who was his palliative regent in 2008-2012. Yet, the chances of Putin coming, in 2030, back as a fully accepted leader at the age of 77 are unclear. Russia had, in its Soviet incarnation, already once experienced a gerontocracy during Leonid Brezhnev’s, Konstantin Chernenko’s and Yuri Andropov’s rule in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Russian people only know too well what such rule by old men eventually leads to.

Therefore, the likely change in the presidential office in 2024 (or before) may, by many within Russia’s leadership, be already regarded as a rather consequential one. The president to be put in place after Putin’s fourth term could be also his long-term successor as Russia’s real future leader. With Putin likely to start his gradual departure from politics already in 2024, if not earlier, the stakes of this profound change will thus be much higher than the transfer of the presidency to Medvedev in 2008.

At least, such calculations and speculations are probably now being made by many holders of power, privilege and property in Moscow. They probably, even more so than Western observers, wonder what Putin’s slowly approaching departure means for their future and security, and how they should behave to survive this switch – both metaphorically and literally. The spectacular bizarre arrest, unfair trial and eventual long-term imprisonment of Minister of Economic Development Aleksei Ulyukaev in 2016-2017 has increased the stakes of the upcoming leadership succession. It has turned the question of who will be Russia’s next ruler and how stable this new regime will be into an existential issue even for the members of Putin’s innermost circle.

All this creates already now volatility in the system – a tendency that will likely increase and may turn into a serious, potentially democratizing conflict between various factions of Russia’s elite. A smooth succession from Putin to a new leader and preservation of the current authoritarian order would, perhaps, be possible under conditions of dynamic socio-economic development, as Russia was experiencing during the early and mid-2000s. Yet, the simultaneity of economic stagnation and momentous political transition makes the task of replacing – without meaningful and open-ended democratic elections – the current charismatic leader with a sufficiently accepted alternative figure difficult. Accumulating repercussions of past blunders by the Russian leadership, such as the accidental shooting of a Malaysian passenger plane over Eastern Ukraine in July 2014, or the effects of future mistakes of a Kremlin increasingly cornered by various pressures from within and outside Russia, such as new sanctions measures by the US, may further increase the speed of decline of the current regime.

What the sooner or later resulting destabilization of Russia’s political regime implies internationally is difficult to predict. Most analysts tend to foresee either a nevertheless high continuity and reconstitution of the current order, with a new leader, or a worsening of the situation via, for instance, a further radicalization and even fascisticization of the current system. Yet, both of these scenarios would leave the current Russian socio-economic contradictions and imperfections in place or make them even more salient as a result, for instance, of an escalating trade war with the West.

Given Russia’s far-going inclusion into the world economy, inability to become autarkic, and continuing close economic ties with the West, a course or regime change in Moscow may thus eventually lead to a renewal of the rapprochement with the West started in the late 1980s. While it is so far unclear how and when exactly a Russian pro-Western turn would come about, it is – at least, in the long run, if not already in the mid-term future – not unlikely. Both the unavailability of other sustainable geoeconomic options for Russia as well as the cultural affinity of most Russians with European traditions will sooner or later drive the Kremlin back into the arms of the West. Once that happens, the West should – unlike in 1991 – already have a comprehensive plan of action in the drawer.

How the West can further a pro-Western Russia

A crucial precondition for Russian-Western reconciliation will be Russia’s disengagement from its various expansionist adventures in Eastern Europe and the Southern Caucasus as well as its cooperation in other world regions, such as the Middle East. The Kremlin would have to abolish its proxy regimes in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and the Donets Basin as well as reverse the annexation of the Crimean peninsula – the later issue being the thorniest one. Russia’s redefinition as a liberal democratic and territorially saturated nation-state rather than revanchist imperial and paranoid anti-Western power would have to start from inside. Yet it can, should and may even have to be supported from outside, in order to be successful.

In particular, the EU and US could indicate to the Russians the advantages of giving up their irredentist claims in the former USSR. The West should thus already now announce a comprehensive agenda for a far-going association with, and partial incorporation of, Russia that would go beyond mere restoration of previous cooperation schemes under former Russian Presidents Yeltsin and Medvedev. Such a plan could be part of a larger package for a novel type of partnership that would link a withdrawal of Russian regular troops and irregular units (agents, mercenaries, volunteers, adventurers et al.) from currently occupied territories, on the one side, with an offer of gradual Western integration tackling humanitarian, economic and security issues, on the other.

Not only could a re-democratizing and post-imperial Russia re-enter the G7 turning it into the G8 again, reset its Strategic and Modernization Partnerships with the EU, reestablish fully its joint council with NATO, and resume its OECD accession negotiations interrupted in 2014. The EU’s current projects within its Eastern Partnership (EaP) initiative could become templates for a far more intense and much deeper affiliation between Brussels and Moscow than before 2014. Depending on whether the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) survives or not, the EU could propose either the Russian state alone or all members of the EEU a number of partial integration schemes that would include them into a Wider Europe and let them participate to one degree or another in Western political processes as well as non-political life.

In particular, modified versions of the Visa Liberalization Action Plans and Association Agreements that the EU has been implementing, over the last years, with Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova could be also offered to Russia and its current allies. After Moscow’s adoption of a number of necessary laws and implementation of preparatory regulations, Russian citizens could, in a first step, be granted the right to travel visa-free within the Schengen Area. The US could consider to offer Russia, after adequate preparation, an inclusion in its visa waiver program, and Electronic System of Travel Authorization.

The conclusion, in a second step, of an EaP-type Association Agreement that includes a deep and comprehensive free-trade area (DCFTA) with Moscow could do two things at once. First, it would lay out a concrete path for how Russia can gradually become part and parcel of the EU’s economic and legal space. Second, such an Agreement would reconnect with each other the post-Soviet economies of Russia (and possibly other EEU members) with those of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova who are already implementing DCFTAs with the EU. It would thereby address a major point of critique regarding the current integration into the EU of the associated Eastern Partnership economies – namely, that they are being thereby gradually disconnected from their traditional markets and partners in the former Soviet Union.

The geopolitically most far-reaching proposition that Brussels and Washington should make to Moscow already now is to jointly start implementing a Membership Action Plan leading Russia eventually towards an accession to NATO, as a full member state. Russia’s gradual preparation for, and eventual inclusion into, the North-Atlantic alliance would, as in the case of an EU Association Agreement, help to solve two salient issues simultaneously. It would, first, locate Russia in the world’s most powerful security alliance and thereby help to alleviate the historically deep-seated angst of foreign invasion, in the Russian collective soul – a major reason for the current instability in world politics. It would, second, erase the Russian-Western quarrel around previous NATO enlargements and the possible accession of further post-Soviet countries to the Alliance.

Russia’s eventual entry into the North-Atlantic alliance could be part of a grand bargain for Eastern Europe and the Southern Caucasus that combines a full Russian denouncement of irredentism, with a resolute Western embrace of Moscow. One could imagine a major international act within which NATO would sign concurrent accession treaties with Russia, Ukraine and Georgia, as well as, perhaps, other post-Soviet countries. Abkhazia and South Ossetia would return under Tbilisi’s official control, Crimea and the Donets Basin, if it continues to remain occupied, under Kyiv’s official control. Within such a scheme, some of the currently illegal Russian troops and agencies on Georgian and Ukrainian soil may be even able to remain in the previously formally or informally occupied territories of Ukraine and Georgia. Via Russia’s accession to NATO they would turn into allied structures supporting rather than threating Georgian and Ukrainian security.

No question: Fancy schemes like this may look now like wild speculations. Some will regard them as unserious fantasy. Yet, the geopolitical constellation of the post-Soviet space has become unusually complicated. It may be impossible to overcome them without designing, publishing and implementing some unheard-off plan.

A self-fulfilling prophecy?

The usefulness of a new visionary Western agenda for “another Russia” – such has been the name of one of Russia’s main opposition associations – would not only lie in the fact that it may become possible to be implemented should a radically different constellation in Eastern Europe eventually emerge. Developing such plan today would provide an instrument to promote such a post-Putinist change itself. One of the reasons for Moscow’s increasingly aggressive posture in world politics and current erratic search for foreign allies is the deadlock in the development of Russia’s international embeddedness, after the annexation of Crimea.

In spite of the Kremlin’s eager promotion of the idea of a “multipolarity,” Russia is economically too weak to become itself a self-sustaining pole in a competitive multi-polar world and instable geopolitical environment. Its current partnering with China, Turkey, Iran and other non-Western powers will remain of a limited nature as it will only occasionally lead to win-win situations for all sides involved. The Russian cultural affinity with, and geopolitical orientation towards, Europe will not only remain latent, but sooner or later become prevalent again.

As times goes by, Ukraine’s and other post-Soviet republics’ continuing integration into the West will become an increasingly attractive role model for Russians too. The unsustainability of Russia’s kleptocratic order and illiberal policies at home as well as the overreach of its revanchist behavior and neo-imperial posturing abroad will become more and more visible to the Russian elite and population. By formulating and publicizing an alternative view of Russia’s geopolitical future, the West can help to hasten a change of course in Moscow, and should prepare itself for the moment when the tipping point is finally reached.

[These ideas was first presented, as a brief statement, at the “Europe’s Strategic Choices” conference organized by Chatham House and the Kiel Institute for Security Policy in Berlin, on 7 December 2017 Various versions of the article were earlier published in, among other outlets, Focus Online, Open Democracy, The European, Raam op Rusland, Eurasia Review, Gefter.ru, Zerkalo nedeli and Die Welt.]

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Russian IL-20 four engine aircraft

A Russian four engine IL-20 naval reconnaissance aircraft was shot down seemingly by accident over Syria by Syrian air defense. While initial reports lack significant details, early information seem to point out that due to a possible Israeli missile attack, Syrian air defense was targeting incoming missiles or planes and locked on the IL-20 by radar. Information suggests that an S-200 missile brought down the plane, known to NATO as a SA-5 Gammon, the S-200 while effective, is a system developed during the Cold War era and has limited capabilities due to its age. From the 14 or 15 member crew, there were no survivors.

While newer missile system like the Pantsir and TOR have more advanced equipment to correctly determine the origin and design of aircraft being targeted, systems like the S-200 may be linked with radar systems that could date as far back as the 80s or even 70s era systems. While more modern systems like the BUK-M1 have shot down planes that were misidentified as recently as the Malaysia Airline flight over Ukraine a few short years ago, the coordination and training of several forces operating over Syria along with Western allied and Russian and Syrian air arms was established in order to avoid incidents like those that took place with the downing of the IL-20. Why an old S-200 missile can accidentally down an older IL-20 airplane with modern radar and a coordinated air defense system is puzzling, a tragedy for all involved.

The origin of the IL-20 is an innocent one, being developed as a 1950s era Soviet airliner, the IL-18. The IL-20 likely was in the area working as an airborne radar and detection system or perhaps was the IL-22 or IL-38 version that track naval and submarine activity. With an aircraft such as the IL-20 operating as a known radar and early warning system asset, a coordinated air defense with Russia and Syrian forces and systems should have been keenly aware of the IL-20, as the IL-20 would have been in direct and constant contact with all air assets in the area.

The IL-20 having its origins as a 1950s airliner also possesses some characteristics that should have made it evident on radar that it was not a missile or even a fighter plane. The IL-20 has four propeller or turboprop driven engines, is somewhat large and would have been moving fairly slowly. The radar for the S-200 likely would have been able to determine that it was not a plane that offered significant threats to its target and should have been cautious as it looked more like an airliner or other civilian aircraft.

Using the S-200 to target missiles also deserves some analysis. While an S-200 was able to shoot down one Israeli aircraft this year, to use a rather large and heavy anti-aircraft missile like the S-200 to target incoming cruise missiles seems like it would be quite ineffective. With most of the strikes coming into Syria being cruise or other air-to-ground missiles, an S-200 would likely have not hit any of the main missile threats, despite claims about the performance of the S-200. With most of the actual aircraft being at a fair distance from the targets, an S-200 would be best used on targets that are lower risk than threats it needs to handle. So while a fighter jet might be shot down and an IL-20 certainly would have no protection, individual missiles would require a more effective system and missile than the S-200.

The loss of lives is certainly a tragedy, and almost certainly an error or a malfunction. It is only hoped that a peaceful resolution in Syria can remove the situation where errors like these can ever occur again.

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Due to the intense religious persecution that they face, increasingly minorities are forced to flee the Muslim world.

As time progresses, the Islamic world is becoming more and more homogenous. Fewer and fewer non-Muslims who have lived amongst Muslims since antiquity are choosing to remain in their ancestral homeland. The trend began with the establishment of the State of Israel. After Israel became a country, around one million Jews were compelled to leave the Arab world. Following the Iranian Revolution, many Persian Jews followed in their footsteps. Now, numerous non-Muslim minority groups including Christians, Hindus, Mandeans, and Bahais among others are following in the footsteps of the Mizrahi Jews. The question remains, why?

In Bangladesh, both Christians and Hindus are systematically persecuted. Not too long ago, there was a report that 8 Christian women were assaulted and beaten after a militant group attacked their home. Furthermore, sources within Bangladesh claim that a Hindu temple was vandalized and the Hindu gods were desecrated recently. In another instance, it was reported that a Hindu girl was raped and the girl’s father’s life was threatened. When the mother went to report the incident to the police, she was sexually assaulted, stripped naked and threatened into dropping the case. And according to the World Hindu Struggle Committee, a minority was recently beaten up for refusing to participate in a political rally and the Awami League has proven themselves hostile towards Hindus who seek to run for political office. Given this situation, the World Hindu Struggle Committee claims that an increasing number of Christians and Hindus are fleeing Bangladesh, moving either to India or the Western countries.

For members of the Bahai faith in Yemen, the situation is quite dire. According to the US State Department, the Houthis in Yemen have been persecuting members of the Bahai faith. Amnesty International reported that a member of the Bahai faith was given the death sentence at the beginning of this year for allegedly communicating with Israel. They claimed that six other Bahais were also detained merely for practicing their faith. According to social media reports, there are still Bahais in Houthi prisons merely for being Bahais and no other reason.

Due to experiencing such persecution in Yemen, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries, most members of the Bahai faith today live in India, Kenya and the US. Even though the Bahai faith was founded in Iran, the Bahai faith’s international headquarters is located in the State of Israel, as the Iranians destroyed many of the historic Bahai shrines within the country in a manner that is reminiscent of the destruction of the Buddhist statues by the Taliban in Afghanistan. To this day, Bahais are not recognized as a legitimate faith in Iran and are denied the right to study in university, to work and to enjoy any semblance of basic human rights.

The Bahais are not the only faith persecuted by the Iranian regime. The Mandeans, just like the Bahai, are denied the status of a protected faith in Iran. According to the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, Mandeans are systematically murdered and raped within the country due to the fact that the Iranian government considers them to be infidels. They claim that the Iranian courts have ruled that raping Mandean women and girls is part of their purification process and therefore, violators receive impunity. Furthermore, the report claimed that Mandeans are also not allowed to touch food in the markets due to the belief that they are unclean. Due to experiencing such persecution, many Mandeans have immigrated to Canada, the US, Australia and the European Union. In fact, Mandeans were among the group of Iranian political refugees that Trump denied entry into the US.

Given such persecution, minority Hindus, Christians, Bahais, Mandeans and members of numerous other minority faiths originating in the Muslim world have found that if they want the freedom to continue practicing their faith and to live dignified lives, they have no other choice but to leave their ancestral homelands and to immigrate to democratic countries. For this reason, it is of pivotal importance that the Trump administration admits not only Christians but all other religious minorities from the Islamic world into the United States because these religious groups have no other way of surviving and thriving as a people since the radical Islamists have deprived them of any other opportunity to live a good and free life in their native lands.

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FILE PHOTO – A group of disputed islands, Uotsuri island (top), Minamikojima (bottom) and Kitakojima, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China is seen in the East China Sea, in this photo taken by Kyodo September 2012. Mandatory credit. REUTERS/Kyodo/File Photo 

Beijing’s expanding military presence in the South China Sea (SCS) continues to attract the world’s attention. Tensions over the ownership of islands and the legitimacy for building artificial ones escalate, with some outsiders also joining the battlefield, including the U.S. and Japan. However, the dispute over SCS pales in comparison to the crises that happened in the East China Sea (ECS) around a decade ago, when a hot war between China and Japan seemed imminent. Today, the tension on the ECS has cooled down, but the dispute remains unsolved.

History of the Dispute on the ECS

The center of the dispute is the contested ownership of a group of islands – called Senkaku by the Japanese, Diaoyu Dao by the Chinese, and Diaoyutai by the Taiwanese (SDD) – extending to the water surrounding the islands, because the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea gives countries the right to claim Exclusive Economic Zone 200 nautical miles beyond the coastline.

The dispute occurred after the Second World War.  Under unconditional surrender, Japan needed to return all occupied territories taken from other countries. However, the Japanese government contended that it did not take SDD from the Chinese since it is unmanned. On the Chinese side, both Beijing (People’s Republic of China) and Taipei (Republic of China) claim that SDD should be returned to China after Japan was defeated. Both governments regard themselves as the legitimate government of China, although Beijing is internationally recognized.

The peak of the dispute was reached around a decade ago and started with a purposed breakthrough. In 2008, both China and Japan signed an agreement on joint development of the ECS’s natural resources. However, the cooperation ended following critiques of the Chinese government for betraying national sovereignty.[i] The atmosphere over the ECS then became increasingly dangerous. The first crisis occurred in September 2010 when Japanese coast guards detained the crew of a Chinese fishing boat near SDD.[ii] Beijing fiercely protested this action and arrested four Japanese in Hebei Province, accusing them of trespassing in a military installation.  In late September, though Japan released all detained Chinese prisoners, neither side became softer on the dispute. The crisis reached a second peak in 2012 when the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, decided to nationalize SDD from the private owner. Beijing and Taipei protested fiercely against the proposal.  In July, Japan recalled its ambassador in China.  On August 15, the victory over Japan day, people from mainland China, Hongkong, and Macao boarded a Hongkong boat to land SDD and were detained by the Japanese coasts guard. 2 days later, Japan deported those who boarded SDD.  Following these events, both China and Japan (with the U.S.) launched military exercises on the ECS, further worsening the situation.[iii]

Since then, the tensions over the ECS have gradually cooled down but some conflicts continue to occur. In 2013, Beijing declared the East China Sea (ADIZ) where all planes need to report to the Chinese authority, overlapping with the ADIZ claimed by Japan. In mid-2014, a Japan Self-Defense Force surveillance plane entered the overlapped ADIZ and Chinese fighter jets intercepted it. While military conflicts have virtually disappeared, some other small friction remains. For example, in this March, Chinese Foreign Ministry complained about some controversial clauses regarding SDD in a proposed Japanese history textbook.

Incentives Behind Assertiveness

A common reason for all involving governments to be assertive to varying degrees is the rise of nationalism. For example, in China, the Communist Party shifted its focus from the communist ideology to the economy and nationalism after crashing demonstrating students in 1989. The government launched the Patriotic Education Campaign, which aims at raising public awareness of “the century of humiliation” when China was bullied and invaded by foreign countries. The primary target is Japan, which invaded China in 1931 and occupied a huge portion of the nation until 1945. As expected, the campaign greatly raised anti-Japanese sentiment in China. For instance, in 2005, Japan’s petition for a permanent membership in United Nations Security Council joined with the controversial clauses in history textbooks triggered protests across China. Also, from 2008 -2012, anti-Japanese demonstrations spread throughout the country.

In Japan, public attitudes toward the disputes with China are mixed, but nationalism is more active with government backs those movements. Defeated in WW2, many Japanese views the punishment on Japan as “victor’s justice” and the current Abe administration is trying to make Japan a normal country again. (Under the Peace Constitution, Japan now can only engage in defensive wars.) The most controversial events are the visits to Yasukuni Shrine by Japanese prime ministers. The Yasukuni Shrine became a disputed place since it enshrines some war criminals during WW2 who were accused and executed by the international court. Every time when Japanese politicians visit the shrine, Beijing and Seoul protest intensively. Japanese nationalists view critiques made by the Chinese and Koreans as insults to their national heroes, so they also protest against the Chinese and Koreans.

For Taiwan, the nationalist movement does exist but seems to be less active than in the other two countries. Taiwan, officially called The Republic of China, also claimed SDD and its surrounding waters. However, the government and people are less interested in such dispute as Taiwan has enjoyed a good relationship with Japan since WW2. Although Japan colonized Taiwan for more than half a decade and its brutal colonial rule still has some negative effects, many people prefer to the colonial period as they hate Kuomintang’s autocracy more. Additionally, both Japan and Taiwan were supported by the U.S. to counter the expansion of Communism. Still, nationalist movements have gained certain support from the government and the public. For example, in September 2012, Taiwan deployed 8 Coastal Guard ships near SDD, which were later dispelled by the Japanese.[iv]

The Road to Cooling Down

In August 2012, President of ROC, Ma Ying-jeou announced the East China Sea Peace Initiative, calling for a peace settlement of the ECS dispute and more cooperation. Beijing has not responded to this initiative so far. However, Japan eagerly responded to it and signed an agreement with Taipei about fishing in the ECS in 2013.

Also, the overheating of nationalism triggered deep concerns by Beijing. Although Beijing uses nationalism as a pillar of its legitimacy, it fears to be criticized as not nationalistic enough. During the crises in 2010 and 2012, protests across China were accompanied by numerous reports of riots, including attacks on Japanese companies, factories, Japanese brand cars, and their owners. Such violence challenged the government as it faced the dilemma of whether or not to support these so-called “patriotic” troublemakers. The government chose to crack down them because it not only wanted to continue the negotiation with Japan but also to try to protect its international image and keep foreigners and their investments in China.

Another essential factor that contributed to peace would be the limitation of natural resources under the ECS. In the very beginning of the dispute, Japan claimed that China (both mainland and Taiwan) raised the dispute over SDD only after the discovery of natural gas and some other resources under it. However, it turned out that the gas field is not so promising. For Beijing, the quantity of gas reserves there is not that big, only about 24 billion cubic meters. (Annual consumption of natural gas in China is around 200 billion cubic meters.) Japan also does not count on the gas field under the ECS. In addition to the concern over limited reserve volumes, the far distance between the field and Japan’s mainland made the cost to transport gas incredibly high.

Security is another concern for all three participants, as all parties prefer stability in the region. Japan, since WWII, has been the de facto controller of SDD, which is under the coverage of the U.S-Japan defense treaty. (Although the U.S. claims that it does not support any particular country over the dispute, it will protect every territory under Japan’s administration (including SDD).)[vi] If China attacks SDD, the U.S. will need to defend Japan and a new World War may become reality. Besides, the ECS dispute is only one of several flashpoints: the others include the Taiwan Strait, North Korea, and the South China Sea. All three issues involve China and the U.S. and are related to each other. The escalation of any tensions regarding these issues may trigger chain effects, bringing East Asia and even the world into dangers.

To maintain the stability in East Asia, disputing countries use diplomacy to ease the tensions. One remarkable achievement is the resuming of High-level Consultations on Maritime Affairs between China and Japan in September 2014. (The latest one was hosted this April.) Although they did not solve the territorial dispute, the two sides decided to cooperate on other issues such as fighting against smuggling, human trafficking, piracy, and protecting the environment.

The Way Out

So far, the tension of the ECS has cooled down. Also, cooperation and negotiations continue to make progress. However, the cooperation is mostly bilateral: either between Taipei and Tokyo or Beijing and Tokyo. Besides, another event like detaining Chinese citizens by Japanese authorities near SDD may again obstruct the cooperation on the ECS and even escalate to a diplomatic or even military crisis. Thus, all sides should try to have a trilateral conference at least about some innocuous topics and establish a well-functioning communication mechanism to prevent the escalation of any potential crisis. In addition, all parties, especially China and Japan, should closely monitor the nationalistic movement, which will definitely hinder future cooperation. The international community should also help to maintain the current status quo and do not stir troubles in the region. A stable East Asia would be the basis for solving the dispute on SDD in the future.

[i] Mark J. Valencia, The East China Sea Disputes: History, Status, and Ways Forward, Asian Perspective 38(2014), pp.191

[ii] Valencia, pp.194

[iii] Valencia, pp.195

[iv] Dennis V. Hickey, Taiwan and the Rising Tensions in the East China Sea, Asian Survey, Vol.54, Number 3, pp.504

[v] Paul O’ Shea, How Economic, Strategic, and Domestic Factors Shape Patterns of Conflict and Cooperation in the East China Sea Dispute, Asian Survey, Vol.55, Number 3, pp.555-556

[vi] Sheila A. Smith, Japan and the East China Sea Dispute, pp.4

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Egyptian Jewish activist Levana Zamir believes that Trump’s next move will be to set up an international fund to compensate both Jewish and Arab refugees from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.

In recent days, US President Donald Trump has taken a number of steps in favor of the State of Israel. Firstly, he relocated the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Afterwards, he cut off funding to UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority without exempting US aid to Palestinian hospitals. And in recent days, Abu Mazen announced that the deal of the century includes the Palestinians being offered a confederation with Jordan, an idea that was rejected by the Hashemite Monarchy and which Abu Mazen was also not too enthusiastic about. Now, the US Department of Education on Civil Rights will be investigating how anti-Israel groups have promoted anti-Semitism at Rutgers University. After taking all of these pro-Israel steps, one must ponder, what unconventional step will Trump take next on the Israeli-Palestinian front?

Between 1948 and the 1960’s, approximately one million Jews were either compelled to flee the Muslim world or suffered from a wave of anti-Semitic violence that prompted them to leave their homes in the Muslim world. Some Jews in countries like Iraq and Egypt were outright expelled. Others in places like Morocco were not expelled but nevertheless suffered intense anti-Semitism that made it impossible to continue living there. As Moroccan Jewish activist Dina Levin explained, “The Jews had no protection. Arabs used to throw stones at us but if Jews did the same in return, they would be imprisoned. The Arabs did not give us a good life. In Morocco, there was a verdict that Jews could not walk with shoes outside of the ghetto. It existed for 400 years.” Furthermore, after the State of Israel was established, what was a horrific situation became even worse. There were a series of pogroms and outright massacres against Jews across the Arab world. In places like Iraq, many Jewish women were raped during these pogroms.

Given that there were two groups of refugees from 1948 and not one, Egyptian Jewish activist Levana Zamir is advocating that Trump’s next move should be to set up a special fund in order to help Jewish refugees from Arab countries and also the descendants of Palestinian refugees to receive financial compensation. According to her, supporting such a compensation fund goes hand and hand with cutting off funding to UNRWA: “They hope in the UNRWA schools that they will have the right of return ASAP and it is only temporary for them. UNRWA is helping them to continue as refugees instead of doing what we did, to leave the camps, to study and to work. Most of the UNRWA money goes to munitions and other things.”

“We began with this more than a year ago by speaking to MK Anat Berko,” Zamir noted. “She was the first to hear from us to stop UNRWA for we have the same rights as them. We asked her to speak out for an international compensation for us and the Palestinian refugees instead of having the world support UNRWA. She asked the Israeli Minister of Agriculture about our compensation. He told her that I am sending a letter to Bibi to talk to him about it. Now, Bibi declared we are going to ask UNRWA to stop all of their budgets for all Palestinian refugees. We are doing things but slowly. The next step will be an international fund that will give money to both groups of refugees. It won’t go to the PA but straight to them, the people.”

Both Zamir and Levin are strong supporters of Trump’s efforts to establish peace, believing that it is the only way forward due to the realism it espouses. According to Levin, “We cannot be in a situation where there is no one to turn to. If not, the situation is wild. The problem is that they were raised with hatred and it is hard to make peace. The children who grow up on hate cannot love us. You cannot be sure about them. That is the danger. But we must try.” Yet Zamir indicated that even though it is hard, Trump’s deal is the only game in town and therefore everyone must invest all of their efforts in it: “We cannot go back to Egypt. Even as tourists, they do not give everyone visas. We for sure cannot go to Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, etc. It was a disaster for the Jews from the Arab states. We got nowhere else to go.”

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What are the origins of the armed conflict that has been raging in eastern Ukraine since 2014? Which role did Russia play in the emergence and escalation of the originally unarmed confrontation, in the Donets Basin (Donbas), after the victory of the Euromaidan revolution? When, how and to what degree exactly did Moscow get involved? Which relative weight did local sources of the conflict compared to the impact of foreign factors, i.e. the Kremlin’s covert actions in Ukraine? These and similar questions are not only academic topics hotly debated in Ukraine and the West. The way one answers them has also far-reaching implications for Western thinking, policies and diplomacy with regard to Russia and Ukraine today and tomorrow. Since 2014, an array of new evidence and research has emerged that helps clarifying the picture.

New Evidence about the Pre-History of the War in the Donets Basin

For instance, in late 2016, Russia-watchers were intrigued by a leak of emails sent and received by the office of Vladislav Surkov, an official adviser to President Putin, responsible for Russia’s policies towards Ukraine and the Moscow’s satellite states in northern Georgia. The Surkov Leaks then renewed the discussion of Moscow’s involvement in the pseudo-civil war and emergence of “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine. These leaks confirmed once more that the armed conflict in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas is, to large extent, a Kremlin project. It is merely one part of Moscow’s broader policy of undermining the Ukrainian state after the victory of the Euromaidan revolution in February 2014.

Yet, while the Surkov Leaks provided important additional documentation, they do not alter, in principle, our understanding of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. They confirm with novel details and support with empirical proof earlier mainstream interpretations of the nature of the armed conflict in the Donbas as a covert Russian invasion of Ukraine. Two months before their release, another leak had, however, provided evidence that questioned earlier interpretations of the genesis of the tensions in eastern and southern Ukraine. They deal with the prehistory of the events that eventually led to the start of the still ongoing low-intensity war in the Donets Basin, in April 2014.

In August 2016, Ukraine’s General Procurator published a video tape containing illustrated and annotated audio recordings of a number of conversations between Sergey Glazyev, one of Vladimir Putin’s official Advisers within the Administration of the President of Russia, and several pro-Kremlin activists located or living in Southern and Eastern Ukraine. These dialogs were recorded in late February – early March 2014. They vividly illustrate Moscow’s covert support for anti-governmental protests in Ukrainian Russophone regions following the victory of the Revolution of Dignity on 21 February 2014. The tapes reveal the involvement either of the Russian state itself, or of, at least, a significant fraction with the Kremlin, in the initiation, coordination and financing of separatist meetings, demonstrations, pickets and similar actions on Crimea as well as in various regional capitals in Ukraine’s eastern and southern parts immediately after the victory Revolution of Dignity.

Putin’s advisor Glazyev, for instance, on 1 March 2014 informs his interlocutor Anatoliy Petrovich in the south-east Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia: “I have an order to raise everybody, to raise the people. People should gather on the square [of Zaporizhzhia] and demand to turn to Russia for help against the Banderites [derived from the name of Stepan Bandera – a war-time Ukrainian ultra-nationalist who fought against, among others, Soviet power and was killed by a KGB agent at Munich in 1959]. Specially trained people should throw out the Banderites from the regional council’s building. Then they should arrange a meeting of the regional council, create a regional executive committee, give it executive power and subordinate the police to this new executive. I have direct orders from the leadership [of Russia] – to raise the people in Ukraine wherever we can. That means we have to bring people to the streets, as we did in Kharkiv. According to this example! And as soon as possible! Because, you see, President [Putin] has already signed a [presidential] decree. The operation has already began, there is information that the troops are already moving out. What are they waiting for? We can not do all this with [military] force. We use force only to support the people – nothing more! But if there are no people, what support can there be?”

While the tapes became a big issue in Ukrainian media and caused an angry reaction in Moscow, they have so far been largely ignored by Western newspapers and think-tanks. Mostly, they were – if at all – mentioned only en passant in reports about Ukraine of that time, by European and American journalists and researchers. Their Russian contents were, to be sure, quickly translated into English and annotated with supplementary information by the Ukrainian analytical website UA Position. Yet, only few observers – for instance, Halya Coynash of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, or Brian Whitmore, then at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and today at CEPA – made, in August 2016, these tapes special topics of their analyses of the Kremlin’s start of its hybrid and proxy war against Ukraine. Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder and Virginia Tech geographer Gerard Toal have since mentioned the Glazyev Tapes in their recent seminal monographs on the confrontation between Russia, Ukraine and the West.

The Significance of the Tapes for the Interpretation of the Conflict

The low attention to the Glazyev Tapes, in the international analysts’ community, may have been partly due to the fact that the Ukrainian General Procuracy office has still not published the raw recordings out of which the annotated public tapes were composed. Some may suspect that the published records were tampered with, or/and that they do not reveal the full story of the events they are supposed to illustrate. It is, however, unlikely that these recordings are fakes or doctored. The published conversations are interactive and made by interlocutors whose voices can be easily ascribed to persons, on the basis of their audible statements recorded in video material published elsewhere. The Kremlin would have probably published proof for any manipulations, had they taken place. Nor has there been any other public questioning of the genuineness of these audio documents.

The continuing international inattention for the Glazyev Tapes was and is surprising. If they are indeed authentic, the Glazyev Tapes should modify our understanding of the origins, dynamics and nature of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The most important aspect of the Glazyev Tapes is arguably not their contents. What is remarkable about these conversations is the time of their recording in late February – early March 2014, i.e. several weeks before the post-Euromaidan civil conflict in eastern and southern Ukraine turned into a pseudo-civil war in the Donbas.

Until the publication of the Glazyev Tapes, the prevalent interpretation of the roots of the Russian-Ukrainian War was that Moscow intervened – with, first, largely paramilitary and, later, increasingly regular military forces – into an escalating confrontation between pro-Kyiv and pro-Moscow Ukrainian citizens of the Donets Basin. To be sure, few serious observers ever doubted the Kremlin’s crucial role in turning these initially unarmed – though often already violent – confrontations on the streets of the east and south Ukrainian cities into a putatively civil war by late spring 2014. Yet, there was and is still a debate among Ukrainian and foreign observers of these events about the character of the pro-Moscow protest actions that had preceded, and supposedly led to, the escalation of armed violence.

Even many “russocentric” interpreters of the confrontation in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas conceded that the cultural-regional differences between Ukraine’s russophone east and south, on the one side, and ukrainophone west and bilingual center were the predominant cause of the tensions in such Russian-speaking cities as Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk or Odesa, after the Euromaidan. The post-revolutionary anti-Kyiv grass-roots activities of many Russian-speakers in Ukraine – such was the story – led to their confrontation with the new pro-Western and nationally oriented leadership that came to power as a result of the Revolution of Dignity. The local tensions, so it seemed, led to a conflict in the Donbas that the Kremlin eventually felt – depending on the interpreter’s preferences – obliged, forced or convenient enough to intervene in.

To be sure, the evidence contained in the Glazyev Tapes does not nullify the factor of Ukrainian inter-regional strains (not a particularly unique characteristic of Ukraine, in any way) in the emergence of the Donbas conflict. In fact, the conversations published do not concern the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, but other regions in russophone Eastern and Southern Ukraine. One can only infer from these recordings that similar Russian mingling was happening in the Donbas too, and that the now documented early-on involvement of the Kremlin in certain locations is merely the tip of a far larger iceberg.

The Glazyev Tapes could, in fact, be seen as strengthening the argument about the relevance of regional differences within russophone Ukraine – an old theme in post-Soviet sub-national studies. They indicate that Moscow was engaged in a broader attempt to destabilize the largely Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, but was only able to instigate a pseudo-civil war in the Donets Basin. Russia’s informal influence was, however, not strong enough to do so in other eastern and southern regions in which Glazyev with his local partners, as the tapes illustrate, actively supported secessionist tendencies. The leak could be thus read as evidence for earlier interpretations emphasizing the crucial role of specifically regional factors in Ukraine’s break-up.

Yet, the time of the recording and documented depth of Glazyev’s involvement in these Ukrainian events also support a different narrative. They imply that Russia was by no means merely an additional third actor or late intervening factor when the protests turned massively violent and led to the first armed skirmishes, in April 2014. Rather, the Glazyev Tapes indicate that Moscow had been already entangled in the still largely unarmed protests across eastern and southern Ukraine immediately following the victory of the Euromaidan, in late February and early March 2014 (if not before). The recordings suggest that the Kremlin had been behind, at least, some separatist activities several weeks before the actual war started. Yet, Moscow’s clandestine pre-war activities remained remarkably unsuccessful in mainland Ukraine, in late February and early March 2014. Surprisingly, the distinctly weak Ukrainian state – just shaken by a full-scale revolution – was still strong enough to resist Russia’s clandestine non-military assault on its sovereignty and integrity, at that point. The only partial exclusion, in late February 2014, was of course Crimea where – as we already know – Russian special forces without insignia had played, however, a crucial role in starting the secession process.

The genealogy of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict appears, after the publication of the Glazyev Tapes, somewhat different than before. It looks now as if Moscow or, at least, a part of the Russian leadership was, in late February 2014, starting a comprehensive attempt to annex not only Crimea, but also large chunks of mainland southern and eastern Ukraine, i.e. to create a Novorossiia (New Russia). Yet, in order to do so, pro-Russian local activists had first to produce some legal or/and political pretext for an official Russian military intervention. An employment of Russian troops abroad had just been made (domestically) legal by a special Federation Council resolution adopted on 1 March 2014 granting the President of Russia the right “to use Russian military forces in Ukraine to improve public and political situation in that country” (– a right revoked in June 2014). Yet, for the Russian public and international audiences, it still needed a weighty justification for such plain expansionism coming from inside Ukraine. To this purpose, an – at least seemingly – official document or particularly grave political event would first have to appear in the respective Ukrainian region up for invasion, and to provide some basic fodder for the Kremlin propaganda machine. Such an initial move in this or that Ukrainian region could have then been spun by Russian media as providing sufficient legitimacy for preparing and conducting an armed “humanitarian” intervention by Moscow on Ukrainian territory – and to finally annex the occupied areas either formally or informally.

This scenario materialized more or less on Crimea. Glazyev’s conversations with the Russian imperialist politician Konstantin Zatulin and Crimean pro-Russian separatist Sergey Aksyonov, on the tapes, illustrates some of the particulars. Yet, even in Simferopol, the crucial session of the Autonomous Republic’s parliament that initiated Crimea’s secession had to be assembled and made to vote with the help of Moscow’s paramilitary forces, as one of their members, notorious Igor Girkin (“Strelkov”), detailed in a later interview. Something similar – as the Glazyev Tapes indicate – was also tried or, at least, intended in Kharkiv, Odesa and other cities. Yet, the hoped-for Ukrainian calls for Russian help did not come about as planned, during the first few weeks after the Euromaidan. The following “civil war” that only began more than a month later in the Donets Basin was seemingly merely Moscow’s Plan B. It may have been an altogether improvised scenario that spontaneously grew out of the initially unarmed, yet abortive subversion of the Ukrainian state by Russia-directed activists, in late February and early March 2014. More revelations and research will be necessary to fully verify, further specify and properly document this course of events.

Still, the Glazyev Tapes now provide first direct evidence for what earlier empirical research – by, among others, Nikolay Mitrokhin, Viacheslav Likhachev and Anton Shekhovtsov who focused on the Russian far right’s role in the Donbas – had already indicated. At least one important circle within the Kremlin was already actively fanning the East Ukrainian social conflict several weeks before it was replaced by a covert Russian paramilitary invasion. Whereas Mitrokhin, Likhachev and Shekhovtsov emphasized the ultra-nationalist ideological motivations of the Russian or Russia-supported activists in Eastern Ukraine, the Glazyev Tapes illustrate the financial remuneration that the Kremlin or a faction within it provided to the pro-Moscow “anti-fascists.”

How the Tapes Help Clarifying Two Paradoxes of the Donbas Conflict

To be sure, one could have suspected something like this already before the Glazyev Tapes were published. There had been two obvious contradictions in the “ukrainocentric” narrative of the origins of the conflict in the Donbass: First, comparative regional studies have emphasized some peculiarly “uncivil” traits of society in the Ukrainian Donbas. Ukraine’s easternmost population has been characterized as relatively more pro-Soviet and patriarchal than people in many other Ukrainian regions. After Ukraine’s assumption of independence in 1991, the Donbas’s crucial social, political and economic structures were, moreover, largely captured by the semi-criminal Donetsk clan and its political wing, the Party of Regions. Against this background, it was, in spring 2014, remarkable how well and sudden the most Soviet-nostalgic sections of the Donbas’s society managed to seemingly self-organize a large anti-governmental protest without much (official) help from the dominant regional Donetsk clan. Even before the Glazyev Tapes appeared, this story – implicit in the civil war narrative of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict – looked, at least, incomplete.

Second, while the pre-conflict Ukrainian Donbas was characterized by certain cultural pathologies, it still had a functioning and structured socio-political life. Like any other modern populated region in the world, the Donets Basin had, before Russia’s covert intervention, a multitude of established and interlinked political, industrial, educational, cultural and other institutions with formal heads, informal leaders and regional celebrities known to all or large parts of the Basin’s citizenry. Yet, when the Donbas “uprising” started in spring 2014, not a single widely known local dignitary seems to have visibly taken part in it – not to mention, led it. Although the Donbas had – like any other society – regionally prominent politicians, journalists, doctors, entrepreneurs, writers etc., apparently none or very few of the Luhansk and Donetsk notabilities chose to become, if not a leader, then at least an open participant of the 2014 so-called “Russian Spring.”

The only prominent Ukrainian politician ever officially involved with the putative insurrection in the Donets Basin was Oleg Tsaryov, a notorious member of Ukraine’s pre-Euromaidan parliament (who had, during the uprising of winter 2013-2014, tried to deport approximately three dozen foreigners, including myself, from Ukraine). Tsaryov became for a while the speaker of the joint and by now defunct Novorossia joint parliament of the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics. However, Tsaryov is not from the Donbas, but from the neighboring Dnipropetrovsk oblast – perhaps, the country’s most staunchly pro-Ukrainian russophone region. Instead, the leaders of the Donbas putative uprising and so-called “People’s Republics” were either Russian citizens, like the prolific ultra-nationalists Igor Girkin or Aleksandr Borodai, or hitherto un- or little known representatives of the Donbass – some of them, like the first Donetsk “People’s Governor” Pavel Gubarev, also Russian ultra-nationalists. (Gubarev had been a member of Russian National Unity, a Russian neo-Nazi organization that uses the swastika as a symbol and was involved in the “Russian Spring” in the Donbas.)

The Glazyev Tapes contribute to explaining the reasons for these two contradictions, i.e. the low social capital and civic under-organization of the rebellious region, and the absence of the Donbas’s regional notability in the leadership of the uprising. The allegedly popular insurrection in eastern and southern Ukraine was from its beginning in late February 2014 an undertaking meticulously guided and heavily supported from Moscow. The Russian Spring in the Donbas did thus not need an active local civil society. As political leadership and resources were provided by Moscow, an involvement of regional dignitaries was not necessary for the rebellion to happen.

Implications of the Glazyev Tapes for the Minsk Agreements

This interpretation should not only modify public narratives of the “Ukraine Crisis,” but also have repercussions for the Western approach to the Minsk Agreements. In particular, the West should re-consider its insistence on Ukraine’s soon fulfillment of the political parts of the Minsk Agreements. Not only is it obvious that Ukraine was forced to accept enormous political concessions to Moscow against the immediate background of extremely bloody Russian military offensives, shortly before or during the negotiations of the various Minsk Agreements in September 2014 (Ilovaisk) and February 2015 (Debaltseve).

The Glazyev Tapes also illustrate that the social rationale for far-reaching new political rules in the Donbas envisaged in the Minsk Agreements – a considerable reduction of Ukraine’s sovereignty, in the currently occupied territories – is slim. A popular Western interpretation of the concessions to the separatists in these Agreements had been that the mere fact of an, at least, initially grass-roots insurgency in the Donbas should be somehow reflected in its future status. Yet, the Glazyev Tapes illustrated, in 2016, that the entire East Ukrainian uprising had from its start not been as popular a phenomenon as it had earlier seemed. If one acknowledges the Russian involvement in, and imperial rather than local dimension of, the seeming insurgency, then the apparent compromise in the Minsk Agreements assumes a different notion.

The Minsk compromise appears now not any longer as a result of Ukrainian and Western consideration of certain peculiarities of the Donets Basin. Rather, a future special status of the currently occupied territories looks, after publication of the Glazyev Tapes, as a strange reward for the partial successes that Russia had in fueling otherwise weak separatist tendencies in eastern Ukraine following the victory of the Euromaidan. Ukraine has been undergoing a general decentralization drive since 2014 – a development unrelated to the Minsk process and a direct result of the victory of the Revolution of Dignity.  A special status for the currently occupied territories, as foreseen in the Minsk Agreements, is thus redundant.

All regions of Ukraine are currently or will soon be acquiring new rights, additional responsibilities and greater autonomy. If the now Moscow-controlled territories return under Kyiv’s control, they would sooner or later also benefit from general Ukrainian decentralization. It is less the Donbas’s specific regional interests than the partial successes of Russia’s secret subversion efforts that has found their way into the texts of the three deals between the Ukrainian government and the separatist pseudo-republics in Minsk. The West should treat the questions of whether, when and how Kyiv needs to implement the respective domestic political articles of the Minsk Agreements accordingly.

[Earlier versions of the article were published by Open Democracy, Geopolitika.lt and the ECFR.]

The post The Glazyev Tapes, Origins of the Donbas Conflict, and Minsk Agreements appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

When President Donald Trump announced on 8th May that the United States would not be a party to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran deal, anymore, it was easily predictable that new tensions between Tehran and Washington will emerge soon. It didn’t take long for the European Union to voice its regret over President Trump’s decision and say in an unequivocal manner that Trump’s unilateralism won’t mark the premature death of the Iran deal, signed and sealed only three years ago.

Britain, France and Germany issued a statement in which they reiterated their continued commitment to the JCPOA as long as Iran abides by its nuclear commitments. They said Europe will honor the terms of the Iran deal and encourages trade and business with Iran. It was then when the advent of a gap in the US-EU relations was noticeable.

In phone conversations with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, the leaders of the three countries gave assurances that Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal would not be translated into the demise of the agreement, signed in July 2015.

However, it isn’t difficult to conclude that the fulfillment of one of President Trump’s main campaign promises is a lethal blow to the foundation of a deal, which according to Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, was so meticulously negotiated that there were lengthy discussions and debates between the interlocutors over each of its words. The document runs to 109 pages, including five annexes and is an intricate and detailed roadmap for collaboration between Iran, the United States, the European Union, China and Russia and finally the United Nations Security Council on the prospects of Iran’s nuclear program. The Iran nuclear deal is endorsed by the UN Security Council Resolution 2231, specifying the restrictions Iran voluntarily imposes on its nuclear program in return for the removal of all nuclear-related sanctions it was subjected to by the six countries involved in the negotiations and the Security Council itself.

The departure of one of the main signatories of the agreement, followed by the enforcement of new sanctions against Iran, however, means a lot of things, including disappointment for those who believed Barack Obama’s commitment to diplomacy and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s overpowering of hardliners at home, translated into the signing of the nuclear deal, were the first steps in a long walk to a lasting Iran-US reconciliation which even Donald Trump couldn’t thwart.

Even if the European countries, China, Russia and the traditional clients of Iran’s oil in Asia such as India, Japan and South Korea continue doing business with Iran under the shadow of harrowing US sanctions and even if the nuclear deal is salvaged through day and night efforts and diplomacy by the remaining parties, it’s undeniable that the psychological effect of the new sanctions imposed 6th August cannot and will not be alleviated and the international community’s relations with Iran will always be marred with fear of US penalties over business with a country which the Trump administration is apparently fully committed to bring to its knees. Unless anything changes in the White House or unless Iran is back to talks with the United States, Iranians shouldn’t wait for any good news as their country becomes a pariah state shunned by partners and rivals and isolated on the international scene.

For a number of reasons, Trump’s decision in pulling out from the nuclear deal with Iran and imposing new sanctions will lead to serious complexities in the future of Iran-US relations and make any rapprochement and reconciliation implausible or hard to achieve. Iran has said no to new negotiations with the United States even as its economy is collapsing with the first bites of the sanctions.

The demands put forward to Iran by the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as the US government’s preconditions for the improvement of relations with Iran, sound impossible to be granted by the standards of the Iranian government. The granting of these requests mean forgoing the quintessential and prototypical footing of the 1979 revolution: exporting the revolution. Maybe, situation in the future will be such that Iran forgets about its ideological ambition of exporting its revolution in the Middle East and to its neighbors, but for the moment, Trump’s antagonistic attitude hasn’t convinced the authorities in Tehran to come back to the negotiation table and it goes without saying that the geopolitical dynamics of the Iranian society are fundamentally different from North Korea, so it’s not possible to expect Iran to give in to pressure easily even when it’s conspicuously suffering.

The new round of US sanctions which target the Iranian people and statesmen alike will be complemented by additional measures shortly when the second phase of sanctions will be triggered on November 5. The first round of sanctions renders three major contracts between Iran and aircraft manufacturers Airbus, Boeing and ATR for the delivery of 230 commercial airplanes to Iran null and void and even cancels deals for $852 million worth of pistachio export and $424 million in carpets export.

Even if the sanctions imposed by President Trump, who warned the world countries boldly to stop doing business with Iran or they will have their US trade ties compromised, aren’t examples of human rights violation – they directly affect the livelihoods of millions of Iranians, including patients in need of imported medicine, they have a clear message. Forty years after the Iranian revolution and the cutting off of diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States, the two countries aren’t on a promising path to rapprochement and reconciliation and continue making the proponents of diplomacy and peace even more disappointed, rendering the mending of their flawed relations more difficult for the future Iranian and American governments.

The post Trump Sanctions: The Latest Disappointment for the Advocates of Iran-US Reconciliation appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

[Translated from Ukrainian, by VoxUkraine.]

The Kremlin media’s well-known narrative of a supposedly almost unanimous support among Crimea’s population as well as of the allegedly profound historical justification for the annexation has many supporters not only in Russia, but also among numerous Western politicians, journalists, experts, and diplomats. Often, these commentators consider themselves – in distinction to “idealistic” defenders of international law – as geopolitical “realists,” or even – in contrast to their overly emotional colleagues – as more “balanced” observers. To yet greater extent, this problem is relevant for the discourse of the various German and other so-called Russland- or Putinversteher (Russia/Putin-understanders), meaning those publicists interested in Eastern Europe who consider themselves as exceptionally empathetic interpreters of the Russian “soul.” Based on their ostensible deep knowledge of Russia’s nature, past and destiny, the Russland-/Putinversteher typically expose considerable understanding and voice elaborate justifications for the Kremlin’s current foreign policies (Heinemann-Grüder 2015).

In many cases, the various apologetic narratives of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea ignore, however, the fact that the Russian propagandistic preparation, secret service operation and military intervention that led to Crimea’s transition had started already in late February 2014, if not earlier (Головченко & Дорошко 2016; Центр глобалистики «Стратегия XXI» 2016; Дорошко 2018). Not only many Russian, but also certain Western narrators of Moscow’s takeover of the Ukrainian peninsula flippantly or purposefully omit or downplay the fact that Crimea’s actual occupation by Russian troops had occurred already several days before the alleged “declaration of independence” by the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (hereafter: ARC) and city of Sevastopol on March 11, 2014, and the Kremlin’s official inclusion of these territories into the Russian Federation on March 18, 2014.

Yet, Russia’s military takeover of the Ukrainian Black Sea region prior to the various pseudo-legal acts on Crimea in early spring 2014 is an – if not the most – important facet of this rapid change of borders. The switch of real political control over the peninsula from Kyiv to Moscow had already been accomplished within the three weeks before the completion of the official process of Crimea’s official secession and formal incorporation into the Russian Federation. The entire transition processes had become possible only after a distinctly sudden and initially hidden, yet resolute seizure of the peninsula by Russian regular troops, irregular forces and local proxy groups, at the end of February and in early March 2014 (Березовець 2015).

Not only Moscow’s unapologetic military occupation of the peninsula, but also the following official course of Crimea’s separation from Ukraine and annexation to Russia grossly violated a number of fundamental international legal norms as well as certain provisions of the Constitutions of Ukraine, Crimea and even the Russian Federation itself. These facts are already well established and relatively thoroughly covered in the relevant Western and Ukrainian scholarly legal literature (e.g.: Allison 2014; Heintze 2014; Luchterhandt 2014a, 2014b; Marxsen 2014, 2015; Peters 2014; Behlert 2015; Bílková 2015; Grant 2015; Singer 2015; Nikouei & Zamani 2016; Zadorozhnii 2016; Czapliński et al. 2017). What has been lesser discussed so far are various political circumstances of the so-called “referendum” organized by the Kremlin on March 16, 2014 that also cast considerable doubt on the claim – still surprisingly popular among many Western politicians, journalists and diplomats – that the vast majority of the Crimean population had been craving for “reunification” with the Russian Federation, as well as on the assertion that there were supposedly weighty historical reasons for Moscow’s land-grab.

The ambiguous results of the “referendum”

Oddly, one of the most critical early assessments illustrating the doubtfulness of the “referendum’s” officially announced results was made by three representatives of the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights (hereinafter Human Rights Council), one of Vladimir Putin’s official consultative bodies (Бобров 2014).[1] A member of this authoritative Russian institution had made a private visit to Crimea in mid-April 2014. Based on his observations and conversations during this informal trip, as well as on other reports, three members of the Human Rights Council published an unofficial report on the Human Rights Council’s website (Бобров 2014).

In this statement, the three reputed activists claimed that, according to the estimates of “practically all interviewed experts and residents,” the percentage of Crimeans who took part in the “referendum” in the ARC was not 83.1%, as reported by the Crimean authorities that had fallen under Kremlin control, but rather somewhere between 30% to 50%. In the estimation of the three Russian human rights defenders, the annexation was supported not by 96.77 % of the alleged participants of the “referendum,” as reported by the Moscow-directed Crimean authorities, but by only by 50% to 60% of the Republic’s voters (Бобров 2014; Peters 2014).

The latter figure roughly corresponds to the average results of various surveys on the accession of Crimea to Russia held on the peninsula prior to the annexation.[2] The critical assessment of the alleged results of the voting held on Crimea on March 16, 2014, by three members of the Russian Human Rights Council, is supported by a brief statistical analysis, by Aleksandr Kireev, of the dynamics of the officially reported turnout for the pseudo-referendum (Киреев 2014). The suspicious attendance data presented by Kireev suggests a likely large-scale falsification of voting results. The conclusions of the informal report submitted by the Russian human rights defenders go in the same direction as an even lower estimate of Crimean voter turnout, by the Mejlis (council) of the Crimean Tatars, the executive organ of the peninsula’s indigenous population’s representative body.[3]

Based on these estimates, it would appear that only less than a third of Crimea’s population may have actually casted its votes for acceding to Russia. This would seem to be the case even if one factored in a probably higher turnout and stronger support for the annexation, in the city of Sevastopol, the base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. The likely overall and rather low approximate percentage of Crimean votes cast for the annexation is not sufficient to even partially justify such a significant change of borders in post-Cold War Europe. Moreover, the report by the Russian Human Rights Council quoted political experts in Crimea who reported to them that “residents of Crimea voted rather for terminating, as they put it, ‘the terrible corruption and the use of force by the thieves from Donetsk’ [installed in republican offices, by Yanukovych’s administration in 2010-2013 – A.U.] than in favour of accession to Russia” (Бобров 2014).[4]

Why polls carried out later cannot legitimize the “referendum”

According to the last relevant pre-annexation poll in mid-February 2014, i.e. a few days prior to the start of Crimea’s occupation by Russian soldiers without insignia, 41% of the respondents in the ARC, i.e. excluding the city of Sevastopol, supported then the merger of Russia and Ukraine into one state – such was the question posed by the Ukrainian sociological service (KIIS 2014). This result roughly matches the average results of earlier polls concerning a possible accession of the peninsula to Russia (Podolian 2015). In stark contrast to numerous pre-annexation polls, various opinion surveys conducted after the seizure of the Black Sea peninsula by Russia, seem to be demonstrating nothing less than doubling of popular support for Crimea’s inclusion into Russia. Ever since the annexation in March 2014, among Crimean residents, the share of those supporting the peninsula’s incorporation into the Russian Federation has been usually higher or even considerably higher than 80%.[5] For the following reasons, the seemingly unambiguous results obtained after the annexation operation are, however, of only limited significance to an interpretation of the events that took place on Crimea, in early 2014 (Sasse 2017).

First, the results of recent polls should be – at least, partially – considered in light of the extremely aggressive anti-Ukrainian defamation campaign conducted by pro-Kremlin TV and radio channels as well as Russian newspapers – the only mass media sources available to Crimeans since March 2014 (Fedor 2015). Second, some interpretations of more recent polls, according to which the vast majority of respondents on Crimea support the annexation, do not take sufficiently into account a tendency among voters to opt for following earlier paths of development once they have been freely or forcibly chosen, and to support the respectively current status quo. Decisions expressed in popular polls are affected not only by voters’ ideological preferences, but also by other factors such as social conformism, psychological inertia, collective pressure, and strategic calculation.

Weighty choices are often made, to one or another degree, path-dependently. They – consciously nor not – consider the possible severity, inconveniences and risks of changing a previously embarked upon political direction. Polls – especially, on such fundamental issues as statehood, borders and security – thus reflect not only the narrowly defined political positions of respondents. They also express many voters’ inclination to try maintaining the present state of affairs and their desire to preserve public concord. An example for the effects of this psychological mechanism was the referendum on Scotland’s independence, also conducted in the year 2014. In this – in distinction to the Crimean pseudo-referendum – fully legal, properly prepared and universally accepted plebiscite, eventually 55.3% of a population, of which about 84% consider themselves Scots and where separatist tendencies have always been strong, voted against independence of their region from the United Kingdom.

Interestingly, prior to 2014, voters’ general preference for maintaining an acceptable status quo had starkly “pro-Ukrainian” consequences on Crimea. Despite unquestionably strong pro-Moscow sentiments among many ethnically Russian Crimeans already prior to the Kremlin’s propagandistic preparation of the annexation, there had been a relatively high level of political stability on the peninsula, over the previous 20 years (Sasse 2014). This was a result of, among others, the mentioned partial dependency of human beings’ preference for continuing the previously chosen path and for supporting any current order, as long as it does not contradict the fundamental interests of the people in question.

At least, that seems to be the implication of a series of in-depth interviews conducted by British political scientist Eleanor Knott (2018), within her field research on Crimea, several months before the start of the Euromaidan. Knott’s investigation revealed that Crimeans with strongly and otherwise unanimously pro-Moscow views, when being asked “either/or” questions about where Crimea should belong, replied surprisingly conformist and non-separatist. In these interviews, taken on Crimea in 2012-2013, even radically pro-Russian respondents opted to preserve the peninsula as a part of Ukraine and did not demand its annexation to the Russian Federation (Knott 2018). This, at first glance, unexpected preference among pro-Moscow Crimeans was, probably, no indicator of substantive sympathy for the Ukrainian state. Instead, it reflected these ethnic Russians’ desire to preserve stability, predictability and peace in their home region.

Thirdly, some observers, who refer to sociological research conducted on Crimea after the annexation, underestimate or even entirely ignore the real or perceived risks that potentially pro-Ukrainian or simply non-pro-Moscow respondents run and are afraid to run when answering questions about their desired status for Crimea. Oppositional Crimeans on the occupied peninsula need to have, since March 2014, considerable courage and resoluteness to express their views openly. They will have to be ready to do so in spite of – rightly or wrongly – anticipating possible persecution against themselves and their close ones (family, friends, colleagues) as a result of voicing their doubts about the annexation in front of strangers, i.e. the more or less anonymous interviewers from (supposedly) sociological services. Political positions that may be dangerous to articulate today on Crimea include doubts about the legitimacy or/and legality of the Russian annexation, regrets about the political detachment of the peninsula from Ukraine, or an approval of a return of the peninsula under Kyiv’s control. Given the new political and legal situation in this Black Sea region, since the start of its occupation in late February 2014, pronouncing such sentiments or even expressing mere sympathy for Ukraine can lead to all kinds of problems.

After being annexed by Moscow, the Black Sea peninsula has become one of the European regions with the highest levels of limitations of basic political and civil rights (UNHCR 2017). Since 2014, disapproval of the so-called “reunification” of Crimea with Russia has become increasingly stigmatized by pro-Kremlin media and the externally installed new authorities on Crimea. In a – probably, often anticipated – worst-case scenario, expression of such a position can have serious consequences for respondents if, for instance, the survey is wiretapped or simply staged by Russia’s special services – dangers that many citizens of Crimea are, probably, well aware of.

Since 2014, the notoriously rigid so-called “anti-extremist” and “anti-separatist” Russian laws are being applied on Crimea, in order to suppress political opposition. Moscow and its local representatives continually persecute dissent on the peninsula. This is especially the case with regard to pro-Ukrainian members of the Crimean Tatar minority. Sometimes, it concerns simply sympathizers of Ukrainian symbols and culture (Halbach 2015; KHPG 2016-2018).[6] For these and similar reasons, the consequences of political criticism of the annexation, remorse about the separation from Ukraine, or a recognition of Crimea as belonging to the Ukrainian state, remain unpredictable for respondents to sociological polls.

To be sure, the situation on Crimea today is very different from that in the Soviet bloc, before the mid-1980s. Under totalitarianism, countless official polls and votes had been seemingly indicating ridiculously high public support for the communist leaders and regimes until shortly before they were toppled in popular uprisings. Fear of unpredictable future repercussions of expressing political dissent is, presumably, today much lower on Crimea than during Soviet times. Yet, such dreads probably do exist among many pro-Ukrainian-minded, Moscow-critical or simply neutral Crimeans these days. Hence, it seems likely that some or even many of them either refuse to participate or do neither fully nor honestly express their opinions in polls about the status of the peninsula.

One should thus be cautious about post-annexation research results on political attitudes of Crimeans. This scepticism even applies to those surveys conducted by well-known Western opinion polling institutions working on the peninsula, since 2014. In conclusion, post-annexation survey data have only limited value for assessing the real popular support for Russia’s seizure of Crimea, before Moscow began its systematic preparation and swift implementation in early 2014.

 

The curious course of the “referendum”

Looking back at the events of spring 2014, there are other reasons questioning the pseudo-referendum’s result and cautioning against a lenient attitude towards official Russian interpretations of Crimea’s annexation. The “referendum’s” preparation, procedure, media coverage, and ballot were so manifestly biased that this poll can serve as a textbooks example for manipulation of voting. The date of the “referendum” was changed twice in a short period of time. The residents of Crimea had neither the time nor the opportunity to discuss openly, freely and critically the alternatives they would have to choose from during the approaching popular vote on March 16, 2014 (Podolian 2015).

Before the referendum, the OSCE, therefore, publicly refused to send observers to the “referendum” and stated: “International experiences […] showed that processes aiming at modifying constitutional set ups and discussions on regional autonomy were complex and time consuming, sometimes stretching over months or even years […]. Political and legal adjustments in that regard had to be consulted in an inclusive and structured dialogue on national, regional and local level.”[7]

These conditions were not met. Thus, not only the OSCE, but all other competent international governmental and non-governmental electoral monitoring organizations refused to send their representatives. Instead, the Kremlin invited several dozen representatives of foreign radical and, in most cases, marginal political groups. These guests were later presented to Russian TV viewers as “international observers” that approved of the legitimacy and orderliness of the “referendum” (Shekhovtsov 2014, 2015; Coynash 2016).

That was in spite of the visually documented fact that the vote happened under conditions of tangible psychological pressure caused by demonstrative presence of Russian soldiers without insignia – the notorious “little green men” or, in Kremlin parlance, “polite people” – as well as of armed pro-Moscow irregulars from various Crimean and Russian paramilitary groups. It was also strange that among the alternatives offered in the “referendum” there was no option to vote for a simple preservation of the existing status quo, that is of the then valid Constitution of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea adopted in 1998 (Giles 2014). Instead, Crimean voters had two options, each offering to change the legal status of Crimea – either annexation of the peninsula to the Russian Federation, or a return to some older constitution of the ARC from 1992. Both of these ballot options, moreover, were phrased ambivalently – and arguably, to some degree, absurd.

“Russia,” the All-Russian Empire and the Russian Federation

The first option in the pseudo-referendum promised Crimeans a “reunification of Crimea with Russia” (vossoedinenie Kryma s Rossiei). However, as anybody with elementary knowledge of East European history and geography would know, Crimea had never been part of a “Russia” separate from much of the dry territory of the post-Soviet Ukrainian state to which the peninsula has belonged since 1991. Most of modern continental Ukraine was, just like Crimea, a part of, first, the Tsarist Empire, and, later, the Soviet Union. Those two states were, apparently, meant by the word “Russia” in the 2014 “referendum.”

The Kremlin was here playing with terminology in that it purposefully abused the multiple connotations of the word “Russia.” The term “Russia” can denote, depending on the context, the Tsarist Empire, the (politically irrelevant) Russian Republic within the USSR, the Soviet Union as a whole, or the post-Soviet Russian Federation. Despite the primitiveness of this and other similar verbal games in relation to Ukraine (“fascism,” “putsch,” “separatists,” “civil war,” etc.), such manifest manipulations of the meanings of key terms continue to affect many Western observers.

Crimea belonged from 1783 to 1917 to the All-Russian Empire, but this former “Russia” does obviously not correspond to the modern Russian nation state (Furman 2011). Much of the dry territory of modern Ukraine, and not just Crimea, once belonged to both, the Tsarist and Soviet states – as did the territory of almost the entire modern Russian Federation. Both post-Soviet republics, the Russian Federation and independent Ukraine, are thus successor states to the “Russia” with which Crimea was promised “reunification” in the pseudo-referendum of 2014.

In the West, many still do not seem to fully understand that the Crimean peninsula was never part of a mythical Russian nation state existing separately from most of today’s mainland Ukraine. The only land-based connection between Crimea and the territory of – what is today considered – “Russia,” in imperial and Soviet times, were the southeastern dry lands of today Ukraine. This was also the area of the Tsarist Empire via which Catherine the Great took control over Crimea, in the late 18th century, deploying, moreover, many Ukrainian-speaking soldiers in this operation. The larger part of left-bank Ukraine, i.e. its mainland eastern and southern parts, as well as right-bank Kyiv had belonged to the Tsarist Empire already before Catherine’s capture of Crimea. The larger part of right-bank Ukraine, i.e. today mainland central, southwestern and western Ukraine, was attached to the Tsarist Empire within a few years after Crimea’s annexation, between 1783 and 1795, as a result of the so-called second and third partitions of Poland, as well as after a victorious war against the Ottoman Empire.

For these and other reasons, Crimea could not have been detached from the Russian Federation that had only emerged in 1991. Accordingly, it could not be “reunited” with it in 2014. In 1991, Ukraine in its entirety, including the Black Sea peninsula belonging geologically and historically to it, departed from “Russia,” i.e. the Soviet empire. An even partial acknowledgement of Moscow’s historical justification of the 2014 annexation amounts to a recognition of Russian imperial irredentism as an ordering principal for the post-Soviet world. This, in turn, would entail an acceptance of Russian claims to many more lands outside the current Federation. Some of these territories had become parts of the Tsarist Empire, at about the same time as, earlier than, or even much earlier than, Crimea.

It is true that ethnic Ukrainians never dominated Crimea’s population – neither after the accession of the peninsula to the Tsarist Empire in 1783, nor after its inclusion into the Soviet Union in 1922, or after Ukraine’s independence in 1991. Yet, by the end of the 19th century, the ethnic group still constituting the relative majority of residents of the peninsula were the indigenous Crimean Tatars, most of whom are today strongly pro-Ukrainian. Only later, during the 20th century, ethnic Russians became, first, the relative and, later, the absolute majority within Crimea’s population. This was a result of the Tsarist and Soviet regimes’ brutal demographic engineering of the peninsula, i.e. the purposeful settling of Eastern Slavs on Crimea, as well as the systematic eviction, deportation, suppression and, partly, annihilation of the Crimean Tatars as well as other non-Slavic ethnic minorities of the peninsula.

Contrary to widespread public perception in Russia and the West, today’s predominantly “Russian” demography of Crimea is thus a fairly young historic phenomenon. Moreover, it is, to considerable degree, the result of Moscow’s mass violence against Crimean Tatars as well as other non-Russians on Crimea. The historical connection of Crimea to the post-Soviet Russian Federation – and not to today Ukraine, favoured by most Crimean Tatars – is fragile for other reasons too.

Under Tsarism, Crimea belonged to the All-Russian Empire’s Tauric Gouvernement (Tavriya) from 1802 to 1917. This large administrative district encompassed not only the Black Sea peninsula, but also a significant part of southeastern mainland Ukraine, connected to Crimea through the Isthmus of Perekop. The dry part of the Tavriya province was demographically larger than Crimea, and its population consisted predominantly of Ukrainians or “Small Russians,” in Tsarist imperial terminology (Головченко & Дорошко 2016, 75). According to the population census of 1897, the entire Tauric Gouvernement, i.e. Crimea and the mainland part to the north of the peninsula, had approx. 1.4 million residents. Of them, about 0.4 million were Russophones, and about 0.6 million were Ukrainian-speakers.[8] Of the then circa 0.55 million inhabitants of the Tauric Gouvernement’s peninsula, 35.5% were Crimean Tatars, 33.1% were ethnic Russians, and 11.8% were ethnic Ukrainians.[9] Thus, the Tsarist-Tauric period of the Crimean past, that lasted for over 100 years, establishes an administrative-historical connection of the peninsula with the territory of present-day continental Ukraine as well as with the pro-Ukrainian Crimean Tatars rather than with the modern Russian Federation or nation.[10]

Crimea’s past as a part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) in 1921-1954 is often referred to by Russian supporters and Western apologists of the annexation. Yet, not only should this period be contrasted to the following longer period of Crimea’s belonging to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR) in 1954-1991. Neither the RSFSR, although it had briefly existed already before the foundation of the USSR in 1922, nor the UkrSSR, although it was – unlike the RSFSR – an official member of the UN since 1945, were recognized independent states.

Moreover, the by far largest and most violent as well as murderous change of population on the peninsula falls into the RSFSR period of Crimean history. In 1944, Stalin ordered a brutal mass deportation of Crimean Tatars as well as several other minorities from the peninsula to Central Asia (Crimea’s relatively significant German minority had been deported by force, already in 1941). As a result of this purposeful ethnic cleansing, a significant part of the native population of Crimea perished, and, only then, the ethnic Russians became an absolute majority on the peninsula.

Having once been the predominant ethnic group on the peninsula, the Crimean Tatars today comprise, according to different statistics, about 10-12 % of Crimea’s population. Their geopolitical preferences have been principally shaped by their ruthless repression by Moscow since 1783, Stalin’s mass deportation of 1944 as well as their later return to the peninsula and reintegration into their homeland, i.e. into the late UkrSSR and post-Soviet Ukraine. Crimean Tatars’ views on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict are also heavily informed by the cult of Stalin in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia (Magocsi 2014; Беліцер 2016; Hottop-Riecke 2016). These and similar historical experiences of Crimean Tatars and their organizations explain their staunch support for the sovereignty and integrity of the post-Soviet Ukrainian state, and their predominant consent to a return of Crimea to Ukraine (and much weaker demand for an independent Crimea). The pro-Ukrainian position of the Crimean Tatars and history of their deportation came briefly to the attention of a wider European public through the victory, for Ukraine, of the Crimean Tatar singer Jamala, with her song “1944,” in the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest (Wilson 2017, 15).

Developments during Crimea’s Soviet period can thus hardly be used as historical arguments in favour of the 2014 Russian annexation. They have limited relevance for current affairs, since they refer to episodes within the history of a highly centralized former empire. The Soviet Union was a totalitarian state where the inclusion of Crimea into the RSFSR in 1922, and the economically motivated transfer of the peninsula from the RSFSR to the UkrSSR in 1954 had largely administrative purposes and only little political meaning (Jilge 2015).

Moreover, there were several cases of territorial transfers, within the USSR, that put under question the logic of the annexation’s apologists’ reference to the 1954 shift.  For instance, during a change of administrative boundaries inside the young USSR in 1925, the UkrSSR had lost, to the benefit of the RSFSR and Belarusian SSR, territories larger than the territory of Crimea it gained in 1954 (Головченко & Дорошко 2016, 91). Nevertheless, until 2014, no representative of the Ukrainian political elite had put forward any official territorial claims to neighbouring countries based on these facts or with reference to the numerous pre-revolutionary maps where the territory of “Ukraine” exceeds – partly, by far – the territory of the post-Soviet Ukrainian state. Such historical narratives, megalomaniac views, and irredentist plans remained the prerogative of extreme and marginal political movements in Ukraine, as in most countries, before the Russian aggression. Only after the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war, mainstream public Ukrainian rhetoric concerning, for example, Russia’s southern Kuban region has, in response to the sudden claims by the Kremlin, become more provocative.

The post-Soviet leadership of Russia, despite many political disputes concerning the peninsula and especially Sevastopol, had never officially questioned Crimea’s inclusion into post-Soviet Ukraine, until 2014. Notwithstanding numerous unofficial political announcements by Russian politicians and some revanchist declarations of the Russian parliament after 1991, post-Soviet Russia formally and repeatedly affirmed the peninsula’s belonging to the Ukrainian state in several treaties and agreements (Kuzio 2007). The two legally most important documents, in which Moscow has recognized Crimea as part of Ukraine, are the tripartite 1991 Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusian Belavezha Accords on the dissolution of the USSR, and the bilateral 2003 Russian-Ukrainian Border Treaty. Both agreements were ratified by the Russian and Ukrainian parliaments in accordance with due procedure and signed by the respective Presidents of Russia and Ukraine. An official press release from the Russian Presidential Administration on Putin’s signing of the law on the ratification of the border agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2004 says: “The administrative border existing between the RSFSR and the UkrSSR at the moment of the collapse of the USSR was taken as the basis [of the treaty], in accordance with the [border’s] determination in the relevant state legal acts.”[11]

The unclear alternative to annexation in the “referendum”

The second option in the pseudo-referendum of March 16, 2014 offered Crimeans a return to the ARC’s constitution of 1992. Yet, its wording was even more confusing than that of the first option and its promise of a “reunification” of the peninsula with “Russia.” The paradox of the second question of the “referendum” was that, during the year 1992, two relatively different versions of the ARC’s Constitution had been adopted by the Republic’s Supreme Council.[12] Deliberately or not, it was left unclear, in the 2014 “referendum,” which of these two alternative republican basic laws the question actually referred to. The voters were simply asked: “Are you for the restoration of the 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Crimea and for the status of Crimea as a part of Ukraine?”

It remained uncertain to the public, media and voters, however, exactly what constitutional text of 1992 the ballot’s second question had in mind. Was the “referendum’s” question offering a return to the more “confederative” version of the Crimean Constitution of ​​May 1992, or a re-introduction of the somewhat later, yet significantly changed and more “federative” version of the Constitution adopted in September 1992? The paradox was that both 1992 versions of the Constitution had established Crimea as a “part of Ukraine,” as formulated in the “referendum.” In the May 1992 version of the Constitution, Article 9 stated that Crimea “is included in the state Ukraine” (vkhodit v gosudarstvo Ukraina).[13] In the significantly modified September 1992 version of the Constitution, this assertion was additionally supported in Article 1, by the phrase that Crimea lies “within Ukraine” (v sostave Ukrainy).[14] Although both 1992 versions of the Constitution thus saw Crimea as belonging to Ukraine, these two texts departed in many other ways from each other, and defined the status as well as institutions of Crimea differently.

Had the majority of Crimeans opted for this second choice during the “referendum,” the newly created satellite government in Simferopol could apparently have chosen from the two different versions of the 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Crimea, at its own will. The Moscow stooges in, and not the population of, Crimea could have decided which text of the Crimean Constitution would have been adopted. There is a suspicion that the “referendum’s” strangely ambivalent second question was deliberately put in vague terms instead of offering the, for these types of referenda, usual option of a simple preservation of the status quo (Giles 2014). Perhaps, this, at its core, incomprehensible alternative to supporting a plain annexation was designed to increase the likelihood of choosing the first, much clearer option – full inclusion into the Russian Federation. In March 2014, the alternative put before Crimea’s residents was not so much a choice between Russia and Ukraine than one between a clear and blurry future.

The historical facts and political information listed in this article are neither unusual, nor secret or new.[15] They and some similarly revealing aspects of the noteworthy events of February-March 2014 are common places in today Ukraine. They are well-known to regional experts at Western universities and think-tanks, as well as to Eastern Europe specialists in European governments, political and civil organizations.

Nevertheless, many Western observers who do not hesitate to voice publicly comments on the past, annexation and future of Crimea do not seem to know or, worse, are choosing to ignore some or even most of the mentioned facts. Instead, many of them, at least, partially follow the Kremlin’s apologetic narrative for the annexation: A, perhaps, somewhat bent referendum ultimately led to a change of borders which (allegedly) was overwhelmingly demanded by Crimeans, and which corrected some (mythical) historical injustice.

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Footnotes

 

A different version of this article was initially written for German readers and published in the open political science journal Sirius: Zeitschrift für Strategische Analysen. It was then translated, edited and modified by VoxUkraine, in Ukrainian, Russian, and English.

[1] For a list of some of the earliest relevant comments by critical Western experts on the pseudo-referendum, see: Podolian 2015, 122-128.

[2] An incomplete review of some relevant surveys can be found, in English, here, and, in Russian, here: Илларионов 2018.

[3] A short summary may be found here in English.

[4] See also: Wilson 2017.

[5] Some relevant quotes, sources and other information on this issue may be found here.

[6] «Скоро начнут сажать за мысли об Украине» – из крымских сетей // Крым.Реалии, 5.5.2018.

[7] OSCE Chair says Crimean referendum in its current form is illegal and calls for alternative ways to address the Crimean issue // ОSCE, 11.3.2014.

[8] Первая всеобщая перепись населения Российской Империи 1897 г. Распределение населения по родному языку, губерниям и областям // Демоскоп Weekly

[9] Some relevant data and sources may be found here.

[10] “Ukrainian historians [furthermore] point to a long history of earlier engagement [before 1783], with local Ukrainian Cossacks having a more intimate interaction with the peninsula than the northerly Muscovite state.” Wilson 2017, 4-5, with reference to: Смолій 2015. See also: Громенко 2016.

[11] President Vladimir Putin signed a law ratifying the Treaty between Russia and Ukraine on the Russian-Ukrainian State Border // President of Russia, 23.4.2004.

[12] For some more elaboration, see: Умланд 2016.

[13] Constitution of the Republic of Crimea // Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, 6.05.1992.

[14] Law of the Republic of Crimea “On Amendments to the Constitution of the Republic of Crimea” // Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, 25.9.1992.

[15] For more information in English, see: Transitions Online 2015.

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