The War in Ukraine, European context and the Minsk II "ceasefire": Putin's power-play

A year ago, the "Euromaidan" protests in Ukraine against the pro-Russian Yanukovich government culminated in a mass shooting in the centre of Kiev, followed by the flight of Yanukovich himself. Since then, Ukraine has been the centre of a 21st-century power-play between the West and Russia.

While some people thought that such games of power, for control of "spheres of influence" were relegated to the European history books, the reality is that, in some ways, the ideological battles that dominated the twentieth century were themselves a historical aberration.
The twentieth century was unique in finding new methods to create mass human suffering, but it was also unique in finding "isms" to use as justification. The First World War was not, despite the use of modern warfare, any different from the pan-European wars of succession that occurred during the 18th century, in terms of the basic human causes. Like most wars, the First World War was sparked by nationalism (Serbian nationalism, in that case) but quickly spiralled out of control to include all other major European "players". The Balkans was the source of the conflict, but the Balkans had been the source of various European conflicts for nearly half a century prior to the First World War. Some people forget that.

"Right, where were we?"

The crisis in Ukraine has been a proxy war for the last eight months. The historical region of Ukraine has been a bone of some contention for at least the last two hundred and fifty years, ever since the Russians conquered the Crimea, creating the region now famously known as "Novorossiya".

The collapse of the Eastern Bloc saw the ideological battles that had dominated Europe (and the world) for most of the twentieth century come to a close. In that sense, with these aberrant ideological conflicts over, the "historical clock" was wound back to 1913, and old historical grievances were "re-discovered". Across the former Soviet Union and former Communist Eastern Europe, ethnic and nationalistic causes that had been on ice for the best part of a century, began to rapidly heat up - in some cases almost instantly. This explains why the wars in former Yugoslavia should perhaps be better seen almost as continuations of the First and Second Balkan Wars that immediately preceded the First World War: once Communism collapsed it was almost a case of: "right, where were we?"...

We could therefore re-phrase Francis Fukuyama's famous quote about the end of the Cold War being not so much the "end of history", but the "resumption of history".

This explains why the territory of modern-day independent Ukraine, itself a creation of the internal politics of the Soviet Union, found itself in an awkward geopolitical position. In effect it is - like Belgium, but much bigger - a country with two linguistic halves, and likewise with people looking in different directions. This was Communism trying to put history to one side for the sake of centralising authority - a very deliberate policy of divide and rule. This was carried out all across the various "republics" of the Soviet Union, including, for example, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan (which explains the inter-ethnic conflict that occurred there some years ago).
In Ukraine, these issues were put on the back-burner during the nineties government of Kuchma, and it was only when the pro-West, "pro-democracy" opposition became more vocal that the problems with Moscow started, ten years ago.

Putin's playground

That is the context. Ukraine is a power-play, and it is clear that Vladimir Putin doesn't want to "let go" of Ukraine. For the past year, people have been trying to fathom the psychology of Putin, and what he is hoping to achieve. Does he want to occupy Ukraine? Does he want to divide Ukraine? Does he want to create a geographical "Greater Russia"?
By now, it seems evident that he does not want to invade every neighbouring country that has a (small) Russian-speaking population. Comparisons with Hitler are unhelpful, crude and very wide of the mark. Vladimir Putin's mind is made of different stuff - he is much more the calculating opportunist, with Ukraine conveniently serving as his "playground". In essence, he does whatever he thinks he can reasonably get away with. And because he has (rightly) calculated that no-one in the West will seriously want to stand up to him militarily, this is why he sends troops and hardware into Eastern Ukraine.

This was evident back when there was the war with Georgia in 2008. No-one in the West wanted to intervene militarily. It was the diplomatic intervention of France's Sarkozy that helped bring the conflict to a close, and prevent the possibility that Russia would drive its tanks all the way to Georgia's Presidential Palace in Tblisi.
The efforts of Merkel and Hollande in "Minsk II" are noble, but pitiful by comparison. By now, Putin knows that no-one will stop his actions in Ukraine. While the sanctions are hurting Russia, Putin is able to turn this domestically into a "blame the West" action; thus, whatever the West does, Putin wins.

With Ukraine, Putin is really the "puppet-master", able to dictate events. His hope, we assume, is that by dragging out the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, it destablises and destroys the popularity of the Poroshenko government, until he is removed from power, one way or another. Who replaces him is up to debate, but as long as the war continues, and the "Donbass" remains out of Kiev's control, Putin has a mill-stone to hang around the Kiev government's neck, preventing it from ever being truly independent.

"Mr Freeze"?

The result of the Georgia war was a "frozen conflict" in the two break-away regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. These are now effectively Russian satellites, and since then the then Georgian President, Saakashvili, has gone and been replaced by one who happens to be more amenable to Moscow. Georgia no longer seriously talks about joining NATO or the EU - and even if they did, no-one in the West would ever take up the proposition.

Putin created the "Eurasian Union" to rival the EU. Indeed, it was this institution that Yanukovich had originally agreed to join in late 2013, that was one of the reasons for the protests in the first place. This Russia-centred economic association is another of Putin's power-plays. Initially with just two other members - Belarus and Kazakhstan - it now also includes Armenia, and is likely to include Kyrgyzstan in the near future.
The latter two are both economically reliant on Russia as much of their population are migrant workers in Russia, but also have ethnic problems of their own (Kyrgyzstan's mentioned earlier). Armenia has been locked in a "frozen conflict" with its neighbour Azerbaijan over Armenia's occupation of Karabakh for more than twenty years.

Obviously, this issue pre-dates Putin's rise to power, but the situation in Georgia does not, with the 2008 war seen as a "resolution", and effectively a method of keeping Georgia under Moscow's thumb. With the two "occupied territories", no-one in the West will touch Georgia's status with a barge-pole.
Ukraine now resembles the situation in Georgia, except that Ukraine is a far bigger country, and is part of Europe. With Russia's annexation of Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine locked in warfare over the status of the "Donbass", Ukraine's economy is in free-fall. Ukraine is literally paying the price for going against the Kremlin. As mentioned earlier, having the mill-stone of the Donbass War around Ukraine's neck is Putin's way of keeping the country from escaping Russia's orbit.

Having plucked Ukraine's prize fruit, Crimea, from under their noses, Putin is now clamping a ball and chain around Ukraine's feet, in the form of an unresolved conflict in the "Donbass".

The Ukraine Crisis: Russian Reasons; Ukraine as the "new Bosnia"?

The "Ukraine Crisis" gradually escalates day by day. Like a time-clock, there is the daily drip-drip of new events that make the spiral of escalation slowly swirl down ever deeper. The capture and parading of OSCE monitors by the separatist "government" of Donetsk over the weekend, followed by the shooting, only today, of Kharkov's mayor, adds more tension and psychological game-play to the power-play that is Ukraine.

The separatist East of Ukraine is becoming more and more a lawless territory, where "law" is instantaneously prosecuted at whim. The deaths of ethnic Ukrainians in the Donetsk "oblast", as well as the rule of the land by "men in black", make the place appear as a legal black hole, effectively out of legal reach of the Kiev government, and only listening to the words of the Kremlin.

The Kiev government has its forces in the region, but they are hamstrung by the wish to avoid civilian casualties in any military action. As I've said before, they're damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

Exactly how the Kremlin would want it.

If you stand still, you're dead

Again and again we get back to the motivations that have spurred Putin into this course of action. First of all, there is the historical perspective: the view that over the twenty years since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has been betrayed by the initial good-will it gave to the West, feeling encircled. Seen in this light, Putin's "aggression" has been compared to Hitler, and obtaining Crimea his own "Sudetenland".

But this is a false narrative, as convenient as it may be. The truth is more subtle: Putin is a consummate "chess player" at geopolitics, and (like another contemporary authoritarian, Turkey's Erdogan) is a ruthless opportunist. The outside world is naturally keen to see Putin's actions in Ukraine as based solely on irridentism and "revanchism". While this is partly true, the reasons for this are purely opportunistic.

It is more effective to see Putin's actions as a response to the internal political changes that have happened within Russia in the last five years. The financial crisis was the impetus for the liberal opposition to begin to get seriously organised, resulting in the anti-government protests at the end of 2011. But the problem with the liberal opposition (in some ways like the secular opposition in Turkey) is that it is too centred on the big cities, and failed to represent the views of the masses in the hinterland.

Although it is a simplification to say that Putin's popularity comes from "real" Russians, it is true that in some ways the real "opposition" is cultural and nationalistic, not Western-leaning liberals. Putin's "revanchism" appeals more to the instincts of rising numbers of the far-right, as well as to the innate conservatism and historical sympathies of everyday Russians. His actions in Crimea and Ukraine speak more of Putin's view of how Russians feel about Russia's prestige, less than his own.

It is his image with his supporters and the far right that Putin is really paying attention to when he thinks about how to react to the West's courting of Kiev.

Seen this way, his "aggression" in Crimea and Ukraine is a way of restoring popularity at home and mollifying the baneful influence of the nationalist far right. The Ottoman Empire lasted as an imperial force for five hundred years, but the height of its power was when it was expanding, reaching its zenith under Suleiman the Great in the 16th century. After he died, the body politic stagnated, and there were no more gains, only losses of territory, leading to the empire's slow death.
In the same way, Putin views the power of Russia. Putin sees Russian assertiveness in the "near abroad" as a strategy to maintain power. Seeing Russia as an intrinsically unstable state (given the geography, amongst other factors), the only way to prevent its collapse is if the government keeps moving forwards; the war with Chechnya was an example of the start of reversing the near-terminal decline of the nineties. The war in Georgia in 2008 was a way to cement the prestige of the Putin regime. Now that the financial crisis has led to another shaking of the Kremlin's power-base, the events in Ukraine are an opportunity to continue this process.

By standing still in the nineties, the Russian body politic came close to death; Putin has now demonstrated that he has definitively learnt those lessons.


The "new Bosnia"?

Russia has said that it has no wish to dismember Ukraine. Technically, they may be telling the truth, but the reality is that what Putin may ultimately be looking for is a kind of "Dayton Accord" for Ukraine.

Present-day Bosnia is ruled as a highly autonomous nation-state. While it has a functioning central government, the vast majority of its everyday affairs have been passed on to the two autonomous governments; that of the "Respublika Srpska", and the Bosnian-Croat alliance. This arrangement came about only after several years of brutal civil war. Since the "Dayton Accord", the Bosnian Serbs (who make up nearly half the population) have ruled their own mini-statelet; being part of Bosnia, but there being little doubt on the ground that their allegiance lies more towards Belgrade than Sarajevo.

Putin's ultimate aim, if not for a full annexation of "New Russia" (the historical name for the South and East of present-day Ukraine), will be along these lines, but preferably minus all the horrible bloodshed. The "referendums" in those areas in a couple of weeks are simply in place to rubber-stamp this process, to present a fait accompli to Kiev and the West on the ground. Once these "referendums" are done with, the onus then lies on Kiev to accept "the will of the people" and a constitution that meets the wishes of Moscow.

It has been clear so far that there is little that the Kremlin is not capable of; they simply make liberal use of what the Americans would have called "plausible deniability". Invasion would be too crude an instrument for a Kremlin so full of former KGB agents; much more satisfying to use cloak-and-dagger tactics. Any illegal acts in the east of Ukraine are pinned on "fascists" trying to provoke civil war; the Kremlin then dismisses any link to violent acts by the separatists, saying that they are the actions of Ukrainian nationals, and thus the Kremlin has no control over them. Thus it pins the blame back on to the weakness of Kiev.

So far, this strategy has worked brilliantly.

How long will it take for the West to realise that they have "lost" Ukraine, and to make a deal with Putin?


  

Putin, Erdogan, and the new authoritarianism of the 21st century

I wrote last year about some of the differences between the cultures and politics of the East and West. As I said back then:

"Easterners may well therefore look at the current economic and ideological malaise in the West as being a direct result of their "freedom". What a Westerner considers freedom, an Easterner could instead call "weakness", or "moral degradation". The USA is currently struggling economically; the UK is moribund; the Eurozone has become a German economic protectorate. So while the East is prospering because it has found a formula that marries Eastern authoritarianism with Western elements of Capitalism, the West is failing (and getting comparatively poorer) because of weaknesses in the structure of its ideology."

The current "Ukraine Crisis" looks like a test case of these two ideologies and perspectives. It is the countries of the East and the developing world that look at what Vladimir Putin is doing with implicit approval, or at best, transparent indifference.

This attitude even extends into Europe. The rise of nationalism in Europe in recent years is married with an attitude of hostility to an out-of-touch bureaucracy in Brussels. Nigel Farage in the recent European debates in the UK was able to clearly articulate the view of many Britons who are tired of EU expansion for the sake of it, sabre-rattling in affairs that are far from our shore (as the Ukraine Crisis has shown), and European intransigence of the self-determination of various movements across the continent. And that's before even getting on to the effect European migration has had on the European economy. In many ways, the EU is ruled more like the bygone Austria-Hungary than any contemporary organisation or pseudo nation-state.

Managing democracy

Both Vladimir Putin and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan have shown themselves to be masters of "managed democracy".

I wrote last year about how these two contemporary authoritarian leaders compare to some of Europe's earlier faces. Both leaders came to power on a wave of popular support after an economic crisis: in Russia, it was after the 1998 default led to an economic breakdown, and Putin's rise to power the following year; in Turkey, it was after an inflationary crisis destroyed the reputation of the established secular parties that led to Islamist AKP coming to power in 2002.

Since those two leaders have come to power, they have held a firm grasp of the art of politics. In recent years, with the "Gezi Park" protests that started in Turkey last summer, and anti-Putin protests of late 2011, both Putin's and Erdogan's hold of the popular will has looked far shakier than ten years ago. But what has to be remembered is that, in both cases, Putin and Erdogan presided over an almost unprecedented economic expansion in their countries, that lasted until the financial crisis. It was this surge in living standards that explained their popularity. While the liberals of Turkey and Russia decried the creeping authoritarianism that was apparent from the first few years, the people who lived outside of these circles felt either untouched by it, or never cared. Not for the first time, people in the East were more than willing to sacrifice personal freedoms for the sake of economic gains. In the West the attitude is that both personal freedom and economic freedom go together to create socio-economic progress; in the East, the opposite view prevails.

With Russia's "United Russia" party, and Turkey's AKP, these two authoritarian leaders were able to create a "managed democracy" that applied Western PR techniques (such as accusing the opposition of going against progress and wanting to "turn the clock back") as well as gathering as broad a coalition of support as possible.

When the financial crisis started to bite, that's when the strategy for both Putin and Erdogan began to be refined.

"One Of Us"

The financial crisis didn't initially have a huge effect on either of Putin's or Erdogan's support, perhaps due to the amount of good-will that had been stored up by the unprecedented growth in both their countries. Their support base was able to cut them considerable slack.

In Russia, things only seriously started to turn against the "big tent" approach for Putin when he announced his candidacy for the presidential elections of 2012. When that happened, and the financial crisis finally started to seriously eat into Russia long "oil boom", Putin faced his first serious signs of dissent in December 2011. This made him re-make "United Russia" into a party of low populism, using the renaissance of the power of the Russian Orthodox Church, and appealing to the innate distrust and hostility towards the values of the West.
In this way, the members of "Pussy Riot" were almost a gift sent from God, validating all the Kremlin's propaganda about Russia's liberal opposition being a group exclusive to the swanky parts of Moscow, with values alien to most Russians, and never venturing into "real Russia" over the Volga or the Urals. Putin's thousands of miles of travel across Russia are as much a way to give the impression of standing up for "real" Russia, instead of the perceived narrow perspective of the Moscow or St Petersburg liberals.
And again, with the onset of the Ukraine Crisis, this is another almost God-sent opportunity for Putin to decry as another Western plot to demasculate Russia's influence, allowing him to ride of a wave of popular nationalism. For Putin, ruling Russia is about him, or who else? Only Vladimir Putin is truly "one of us", he wants Russians from Vologda to Vladivostok to think. Russia may be corrupt and inefficient, but could anyone else do things better?

In Turkey, Erdogan's popularity began to wane gradually after the financial crisis. The ineffectiveness of the secular opposition perhaps allowed Erdogan to think he was almost untouchable; there is little to suggest otherwise. His government passed progressively more authoritarian laws, neutering the historic power of the military so that it was full of AKP yes-men, as well as the judiciary, and making journalism a career where it was dangerous to criticise the Prime Minister too openly. As a result of this, Turkey had the highest number of journalists in jail in any developed country. Journalists didn't get killed, like in Russia; they were simply thrown in prison instead.
This all came to a head with the dispute over "Gezi Park" in May 2013. Like Putin, Erdogan, after initially being unsure about how to act, followed the same strategy as Putin, calling his opponents Western puppets. In a more incendiary manner than Putin, however, the result of the "Gezi Park" protests has been a radical polarisation of society between secularists and AKP-minded Islamists. While the opposition in Russia has been quite effectively marginalised by its own flawed strategy, the Turkish opposition has shown itself to be more ingenuous. This has resulted in a harsher, more polarising strategy from Erdogan. His rhetoric, like that of Putin, comes from low populism (with a whiff of Islamic values). The AKP is popular in the working-class suburbs of the major cities and the regions of Turkey, especially in the East. A similar point could be made about Putin's "United Russia". The corruption scandal that emerged in Turkey in December last year was seen by his supporters as another example of a Western conspiracy.
So far, Erdogan's "divide and rule" strategy has worked well, following from successful recent local elections. The talk of Turkey's role in Syria has led some in the opposition to fear that, like Putin, Erdogan may also want to flex his muscles...

The new role model?

Nationalism and authoritarianism has always been an ideology based on the root of populism. The rise of nationalism in Europe is seen as a rejection of the "metropolitan liberalism" of the ruling establishment, be that in Westminster, Brussels, or Paris. The politics of UKIP, for example, are clearly populist, as well as seeming economically libertarian. They are Britain's newest "working class party", as unlikely as it may seem. The same can be said of the FN in France, or many of the other nationalist parties in the European parliament. After creating a "liberal consensus" across Europe, the EU establishment has itself created the conditions for authoritarian nationalism to thrive; this form of populism is seen by many as the only effective way to oppose the status quo.

Putin and Erdogan have shown themselves to be "role models" for nationalist parties in Europe. Dismissing the "establishment" in Europe or Westminster as out-of-touch with the concerns of everyday people, nationalists across Europe look at the actions of Putin and (to a lesser extent) Erdogan with envy. "Intellectualism" and "bleeding heart liberalism" is increasingly scoffed at across Europe.  It's no wonder that the likes of Nigel Farage have a sneaking admiration for Vladimir Putin's gall in Ukraine: he is showing them how authoritarianism is done.

The Ukraine Crisis: The Crimean Strategy in The "Donetsk People's Republic"

Vladimir Putin is enjoying himself.

I talked back in late February about the "Russian Gambit" in Ukraine. Today, that "gambit" looks to be nearly fulfilled on the ground. After taking the "low-hanging fruit" of Crimea a month ago, and allowing a few weeks to pass, now the next "act" of this piece of political theatre is afoot.

Last weekend, pro-Russian forces (who clearly look like Russian special forces without insignia) took over strategic buildings in Donetsk and Lugansk in the east of Ukraine, close to the Russian border. Those two provinces then declared their "independence" in local parliaments filled with pro-Russian figures. On Friday, an ultimatum set by the Kiev government came and went without action to repel the "rebel" forces from their positions. On Saturday and Sunday, more "pro-Russian forces" took control of strategic buildings and police stations in a network of towns across the region, effectively making the region beyond Kiev's control. With the local police either siding with the "protesters" or just going home, this region of South-eastern Ukraine is de facto no longer controlled by Kiev.

Yesterday saw the first casualties so far of the crisis on Ukraine's "mainland", when Ukrainian special forces attempted to retake Slavyansk; after a firefight that caused one fatality and a number of casualties on both sides, the Ukrainian forces withdrew.

It's Crimea all over again, the nightmare scenario for the interim government in Kiev.

The Crimea Strategy

Perhaps years in the future, historians will look back on how Putin handled the "Ukraine Crisis", and say that he effectively created a template for how to annex a country from the inside out, without using a conventional army to invade.

The "strategy" runs as follows:
1) Secretly infiltrate special forces as civilians.
2) Foment unrest and a crisis of legitimacy in the country's government.
3) Special forces, dressed in anonymous-looking fatigues, take control of a strategic building or two, such as the local parliament.
4) An "emergency session" of the said parliament is convened, filled with supportive "politicians".
5) The "politicians" vote for a referendum on the status of the said area from the offending government.
6) Cue crowds of supporters who swarm outside the parliament.
7) Man barricades and take weapons if necessary to defend against possible counter-attack by offending government.
8) Carry out a propaganda war against those supporting the offending government against the "human rights" of the supporters.
9) Territory becomes part of nation (or client state) with minimum of fuss.

The "Crimea Strategy", if you disregard the moral question, represents a brilliant piece of tactics and political theatre. For the poor government on the receiving end, in this case, the interim government of Ukraine, there is little they can do. If they do nothing, Russia wins. If they fight back, Russia wins.

This is what Putin doubtlessly calculated back in late February, when his ally, former president, Yanukovich. fled Kiev. It's worth remembering that back on that weekend when Yanukovich first fled Kiev for the eastern heartland of his support, the "Donbass" region that has now unilaterally declared its "independence", briefly (for a few hours) considered the same thing back in late February. From what it's possible to gather, after talking to Putin, Yanukovich changed his mind at that time.

A war of opportunism

Perhaps Putin thought it was the wrong time, and wanted to get as much political mileage out of the chaos? He wanted to choose when to strike, rather than have it forced upon him. Taking Crimea was pure opportunism; dividing Ukraine in two and taking the choice parts (the industrial heartlands, plus whatever can be easily "got" - as far west as Odessa?) looks like a more carefully-planned event, made necessary by the reality on the ground.

Since the annexation of Crimea, a propaganda war has been raging by Russia on Ukraine and her western allies. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum and annexation of Crimea a month ago, there were similar (doubtlessly orchestrated) calls for "referendums" in the eastern regions of Ukraine. These passed, to replaced by a number of plots to undermine the Kiev government by undercover (Russian) agents; these were discovered and foiled, but included seizing control of the parliament in Kiev and other, similarly ambitious plans. In the days just before the seizing of the buildings in Lugansk and Donetsk just over a week ago, another plot in Lugansk was also foiled; the seizures in Lugansk and Donetsk may well have been simply accelerated by this.

Now the "Crimea Strategy" is in full swing in the "Donbass". The apparent "lull" in the three weeks between the Crimean referendum and the first military occupations in Donetsk and Lugansk now looks more like the necessary "interval" between acts in Putin's power-play. The speed that undercover Russian forces have taken over so many strategic buildings in towns and cities across the south-east of Ukraine (an area considerably larger than Crimea, with a much bigger population), indicates that they would have needed time to properly "recon" the area, using willing locals to help them, while the political moves helped to mask the real military strategy. The thousands of Russian troops across the border look more like stage props; their effect more psychological, and a useful distraction from the real plan.

In other words, the timing of this second part of the "power-play" is unlikely to have been a coincidence.

What's next?

Some have suggested that Putin's ambitions may even extend as far as annexing Finland. While this looks wide of the mark, the main reason that advocates of this idea give is that, like Sweden, Finland is not a part of NATO, and was part of Russia up to the First World War (Lenin arrived in St Petersburg on an internal train from Helsinki). As Putin is getting a great deal of kudos from the average Russian for turning back the clock on twenty years of Russian "retreat", there is little incentive for him to stop just yet.

Something indicates that stirring up the idea of "recovering" Finland may be just causing mischief, but as said as the start, Putin is enjoying himself. Sergei Lavrov also seems to be a master in the art of diplomatic double-speak and semantics. Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine, Lavrov has said; similarly, it regards the borders of Ukraine to be sacrosanct. Well, this all depends on your definition of an "invasion", and Russia's opinion of the borders of Ukraine are meaningless if it encourages Ukrainians in the east to redraw them for themselves, like in the "Donbass".

More intriguingly, there is the matter of Moldova and Transnistria, a strip of land populated by ethnic Russians that makes up most of the border between Ukraine to the east and Moldova proper to the west. This is a self-declared independent state that hosts a number of Russian "peacekeepers", making it effectively a Russian military protectorate, albeit separated from Russia by the wide expanse of Ukraine. Transnistria's "president" has asked for the region to be joined with Russia. So far, Russia's response has not been publicly forthcoming.
The motivations for having this strip of land as a de facto part of Russia are more strategic than anything else, as well as a strong stamp of Russia's influence on the region. Moldova recently started talks with the EU, just like Ukraine has; the stumbling block is Transnistria, whose economy is dependent on smuggling. The Kremlin therefore has good reason to enjoy raising merry hell in Moldova. The question is: how to bridge the gap between the Russo-phile "Donbass", and the hundreds of kilometres of the rest of (mostly ambivalent) southern Ukraine, that divide it from Transnistria?

Might that call for another use of the "Crimea Strategy" further along the Black Sea coast; in Odessa, for example? This city has a long Russian history, and has quite a high number of ethnic Russians, compared the the regions between it and the South-east of Ukraine.

One last point: Kaliningrad. This Russian Baltic enclave, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania, may now be getting more of Putin's attention because of NATO's moves to increase its military presence in the area. In Putin's psychology, NATO's actions may be considered a provocation on the military viability of this Russian territory. Might this also backfire badly for NATO in the future?

The Farage and Clegg Europe debates: when UKIP became "the unofficial opposition"

It's clear that when Nick Clegg offered to debate Farage on TV about the EU, he knew he had nothing to lose politically, and everything potentially to gain. If he had shown that he clearly had the better arguments and reasons for Britain's part in the EU, he reasonably thought this would burst some of the momentum for Farage's populism and UKIP's support, as well as boosting the LibDem's credibility and political support. With LibDem support so low, Clegg felt there was little to fear from his party's position becoming any worse.

Such a strategy was always very risky, and we saw that it backfired badly. We will only know how badly it has backfired when the European and local elections happen in May.

Clegg's strategy was always going to be very risky, but there was another factor that he maybe had forgotten about. Clegg and Farage represent parties that have directly opposite views on the EU. As these parties are neither of the "big two", the event had been cast as comparatively "safe" for both Labour and the Conservatives. But what was clear from Farage's stance was that he was casting UKIP (correctly) as the only "real" anti-establishment party on the issue of Europe. Both Labour and the Conservatives agree with the LibDems on the fundamental idea of Britain being in the EU; Labour and the LibDems point of view is essentially the same; the Conservatives' official view only differs on the detail, not the premise.
In this sense, Clegg's decision to call for the debates with Farage (and Clegg's two "defeats") was also calling for a show-down between the pro-EU (status quo) establishment of the "big three" against the anti-establishment UKIP. The "establishment" lost.

Losing the plot

The establishment lost the argument against Farage because they have lost the ability to see beyond the confines of Westminster. They no longer represent a point of view that matches closely with that of the ordinary voter; instead, they talk with other "politicos" and like-minded journalists who, like many of them, have been to public schools, lead a very cocooned lifestyle, and have no personal experience of what effect on the labour market the EU's free movement of labour has had on Britain.

The establishment's perspective of what effect the EU has had on the internal labour market is the same as what it is for many employers. The free movement of labour is great for employers because it means they can hire East Europeans, thus bringing down their overheads. As Farage pointed out, it is a disaster for the white working class, who are undercut by East Europeans. As I wrote in an article late last year:

"The rise of UKIP in recent times has been a result of the (correct) perception that the mass influx of East Europeans to The UK has brought about a labour crisis for some parts of the "native" population.
The government has blamed the freedom of movement around the EU for this, which is accurate, but fails to mention that it is also part of the government's intention. Much of UK PLC's "shareholders" (British and foreign investors) are strongly pro-EU because it helps them to lower wages by using workers from elsewhere in the EU (from Southern Europe as well as Eastern Europe).
At the same time, however, British people are far less likely to have linguistic ability compared to foreigners. Lulled into a false sense of security by the government, the electorate were led to believe that their economic stability would last forever because English is "the world's language". Now the UK government blames their own electorate for not taking advantage of the EU's freedom of labour mobility by not bothering to learn foreign languages.

It is not surprising that some people are left feeling "betrayed" by their own government"

 The white working class have felt abandoned in recent years, since the financial crisis and the influx of EU workers from Eastern and Southern Europe. On paper, a Briton has the same freedom of movement (to get a job) as any other EU worker, but because the government has never seriously encouraged Britons of the utility of learning other European languages, comparatively few of them can take advantage of the right to look for work elsewhere in the EU. You can blame Brits themselves for this, but the government also has a large hand to play in this, and has fed Britons with a feeling of complacency about the stability and security of the home-grown labour market against the threat of a "foreign invasion".

Due to this inadvertent "linguistic handicap", the British worker cannot look for jobs across the EU in the same way. Back in the 'eighties, many manual workers left Britain to work in Germany (the "Auf Weidersehn, Pet" effect). but that opportunity has now been taken up by East Europeans. In this way, a British worker therefore is unable to have as much labour mobility within the EU as many other Europeans; everyone in Europe knows of the utility of speaking English, but this is only really useful within the British Isles. Europeans in general are also far more motivated to learn another European language, be it German, or French, or whatever. Britons aren't, partly due to government education policy.

So what does the average British employee get out of being in the EU, compared with his mainland European counterparts? On this evidence, very little.

A detached elite

The rise of nationalism in Europe is the most noticeable effect of the financial crisis within the EU; nationalism is now at its greatest resurgence since the 1930s. Britain in no different. Like many other Europeans, Britons now also see that many powers have been transferred to an unaccountable elite in Brussels, and that the main beneficiaries of the EU seem to be employers and large corporations, not ordinary people. I've mentioned in a recent article the curious historical comparison of the modern EU and the former European power, Austria-Hungary: both multi-lingual political projects that seemed to work well for a while, before a combination of factors brought the house crashing down.

In the debate with Nigel Farage, Nick Clegg predicted that ten years from now the EU will probably be the same as it is now. In April 1914, the Austro-Hungarians probably felt the same way. While it is absurd to make direct comparisons with a hundred years ago, the Ukraine Crisis is in some ways a sign of the foolish hubris of the European elite, as Nigel Farage rightly said. His words may have been better-chosen, but many Britons would agree with him that the EU walked into the Ukraine Crisis with its eyes closed. Putin is simply reacting according to his (sovereign) interests, and considers the Ukraine to be "his backyard". That is simply political reality. It is pure foolishness for European politicians to think that the EU could really extend from the Atlantic to the Urals, as Cameron has advocated in the past. But Cameron for one has a long history of behaving like a political fool. 

Nick Clegg seems like all the other members of the EU establishment, and those in Westminster that support it: out of touch with the everyday reality of life, and an unconvincing advocate of his own ideas brought about by years of complacent consensus of Europe. When put up against someone like Nigel Farage, they fall back on old stereotypes about the perils of "xenophobia" and "extremism"; ideas that seemed convincing before the financial crisis, but now look hopelessly out-of-date. When that fails, they talk about the apocalyptic consequences of not being in the EU, which also look frantically over-done. 

This is why Nigel Farage is winning the argument. This is why the political establishment, of all three main parties, have right to be very worried. The chances of the UK really leaving the EU may be over-estimated, but the damage that UKIP is doing to their credibility, is not.

Putin's psychology: is he really the "new Hitler"?

Following Putin's annexation of Crimea and the Russian-inspired unrest in Ukraine following the February "revolution", there has been lots of talk of Putin as the "new Hitler". For this reason, it's worthwhile to look at that comparison in more detail, to see how much it stands up to scrutiny.

The "new Hitler" theory

To give this theory a better standing, it also makes sense to compare Nineties Russia with Weimar Germany. To a large extent, this historical comparison rings true.

The effect of the Cold War on Russia/the Soviet Union was politically, socially and economically similar to what the Great War had on Imperial Germany.

After the Great War, Imperial Germany was constitutionally ripped apart (by losing its imperial status and converted to a republic), with some of its territories hacked off to create (or re-create) other nation-states. In the decade following the Great War, Weimar Germany went through two economic collapses, both stemming from Western influences; one immediately following the empire's destruction (about repayment of war compensation), and another following the Great Depression, around ten years later.

 After the Cold War, the Soviet Union began to collapse in on itself, in a similar manner to what happened to Imperial Germany, its constituent former "SSRs" broke away into independent nation-states, leaving Russia proper as a republic. At the mercy of the triumphant Western powers, Russia went through economic "shock therapy", resulting in massive inflation and a destruction of living standards. For the rest of the nineties (like Weimar Germany in the 1920s), Russia was ruled by a weak government, resulting in rampant corruption and the selling-off of assets to various new "oligarchs". The Russian default of 1998 created another economic meltdown, socially comparable to what Germany experienced after 1929. As the social and economic conditions in Germany were ripe for someone like Hitler to seize power, the same could be said for Russia in 1999. All it needed was the right man.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Adolf Hitler as young men were both products of their respective governments.
Hitler was a man happy to fight for his native Austria in the Great War, and thus was emotionally bound to his government and what it stood for; he was devastated by its dismemberment, searching for a new purpose, an explanation, and someone to blame. To the first point, his answer was to restore the "Reich" that had just been wiped out by the Western allies; to the last point, his answer was the Jews.
Putin was a Soviet careerist, making good on his dreams as a youngster to work for the KGB; when the Berlin Wall came down, he was working in East Germany. Similarly, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Putin was searching for a new role, eventually getting Yeltsin's attention and nomination as Prime Minister in 1999, as Russia was still fighting its way through the effects of the default of the previous year.

According to this angle on Putin, advocates of this theory argue that Putin now represents the biggest threat to Europe and Western stability since Hitler, because he wishes to restore Russia to greatness, in effect turning the clock back twenty five years, and the de facto restoration of the Soviet Union.

But there are other very important factors to consider, that make this above theory too simplistic, and largely erroneous.

The Stalin template

I've written before about how Stalin came to power, and the lengths he was prepared to take to keep hold of it. Stalin lives long in Soviet mythology, more because of what advances he achieved in the economy and living standards while he was in power.
Putin no doubt knows all about how Stalin came to power, and ruled the Soviet Union for thirty years until his death. Hitler's motivation to power was to gain revenge on his perceived enemies and to dominate Europe. Stalin's motivation was much more simplistic: the amoral pursuit of power. Stalin couldn't really be said to have an "agenda" beyond his own advancement and preservation; and at this, he was ruthlessly successful and cunning to achieve it. Similarly, while Hitler used the Nazis to dominate Europe military as a geo-political goal, Stalin's domination of Eastern Europe was almost accidental. Stalin was simply in the right place at the right time to advance his interests in Europe in the best way he saw fit. In this way, Stalin could be called a ruthless opportunist, not a megalomaniac like Hitler.

Looking at things in this perspective, Putin's psychology and motivation is more comparable with Stalin than Hitler. While both Hitler and Putin's young careers and outlook came from their governments, both Stalin and Putin's childhoods were similar in more ways.
Hitler was a introverted and socially-awkward youth and young man. Stalin was a brat as a child, getting into fights, hanging out with kids some years older than him, and not taking school seriously; Putin, born and raised in Soviet Leningrad (St Petersburg), was the same. With Stalin, it was discovering Communism as a teenager that straightened him out to an extent and gave him a purpose; with Putin, it was the KGB.

Putin's psychology is therefore bound with the paranoia of the mind of a former spy-master, as well as the cunning of a ruthless opportunist.
It is clear that Stalin is much closer to the template that Putin follows; Stalin, after all, ruled the largest country in the world for half of his lifetime like a "mafia Don", made it second only to the USA, a nuclear power and entered the space race; the fact that he also killed tens of millions of his own people (many more than Hitler) in order to do it, was only a detail to Stalin.

Putin's rise to power, and the manner of holding on to it, follows the same pattern as Stalin. Like Stalin, Putin is in reality an unconvincing speaker; he has used the "cult of personality" like Stalin in order to create a "Putin myth". This serves both to boost his image, but also to boost the image of Russia in Russians themselves; in the same way that "Stalin was the Soviet Union", "Putin is Russia". If Putin is seen as strong, then so, by extension is Russia.

Putin has used ruthless (if modern) methods to achieve and hold power internally; while Stalin killed millions to achieve it, Putin uses modern, legal (but no less politically ruthless) methods. After gaining the financial support of the oligarchs to become Prime Minister and President, he quickly destroyed the power of those same oligarchs who dared to think of themselves as his superior; similarly, the media was brought into line using ruthless methods; newspapers and TV stations being discredited, closed down; people who persisted in displeasing the Kremlin (after stubbornly not getting the message) had a habit of dying in mysterious circumstances or being fatally mugged. And so on.

A clash of civilisations

Like Stalin, Putin's approach to foreign affairs is guided by self-interest and opportunism. Putin's reaction towards the Ukraine Crisis is exactly that: a reaction. There is little indication that there has ever been a long-term plan to restore the "glory of Russia" like some modern-day Hitler, wanting to dominate Europe. Putin simply sees world and Russian affairs through the idea of "spheres of influence"; Stalin thought in a similar way. Stalin occupied Eastern Europe because the opportunity presented itself; Putin has done the same thing with Crimea.

Putin is reacting towards the Kiev government in the way he is because he feels politically threatened by its existence, and the precedent it sets. Stalin got the Soviet Union involved in the Spanish Civil War for similar reasons: he feared the spread of Fascism throughout Europe, and the threat it potentially posed to his position; Putin's support for Yanukovich and the rights of Russian-speakers in Ukraine is framed through his own self-interest. His motivations are far from benign, of course; like Stalin, he has already declared that he is perfectly willing to do whatever is necessary in Ukraine. If, after non-military options have been exhausted, that means invading, so be it. Putin has no moral qualms about his actions; the main thing that guides his actions are their beneficial convenience. War is inconvenient, until it becomes the only method to achieve an aim.
Western fears of him pushing his tanks as far west as Moldova, and fears of aggression in the Baltic States, may be over-stretched in the latter, but not in the former. For Putin, it is simply a matter of what is the most convenient geo-political arrangement for his interests in Europe.

No doubt, Putin would smile at the thought of being compared to Stalin; this is precisely what he would like people to think. For older Russians, Stalin represents stability and strength; his amoral ruthlessness is a side-issue. This issue about how Russians view their government puts it at the direct opposite to a Westerner. A Westerner fears a strong government, because of the West's culture of liberal individualism; a Russian fears a weak government, because of a Russian's desire to feel protected. This fundamental difference in perspective is what marks the emergence of a "clash of civilisations" between an Eastern and Western mentality and world-view.
This also explains why Putin continues to champion "conservative" values against Western immorality, and why his opportune nationalism is him pushing at an open door.

In the same way, Erdogan in Turkey is championing traditional Islamic values. Both Putin and Erdogan are natural authoritarians who have played a very cunning same over the last ten years to preserve and extend their power.
They follow a number of other authoritarian European figures in the last hundred years, and are simply the modern version of an old style of politics.

The Ukraine Crisis: Crimea's referendum, Putin's power-play, and Russian irridentism

The Crimean "referendum" has been damned in the West as a sham, and its merger with Russia as nothing more than a military annexation, but it's clear that the West has been out-foxed by Vladimir Putin, yet again.

I've described in a previous article about Putin's perspective on the "revolution" in Kiev. In simple terms, "regaining" Crimea was opportunism gained from the position of the new and weak Ukrainian government. The West supported a "coup" against Putin's ally, Yanukovich, so Putin then supported a parliamentary coup in Crimea a few days afterwards. Crimea's new prime minister, Sergei Aksyunov, prior to the events in Kiev, was a non-entity in Crimea, with a history as a former gangster and smuggler in "Transdnistria", the internationally-unrecognised (pro-Russian) statelet on the eastern side of the Dniestr in Moldova, along Ukraine's western border; after unidentified armed men took control of Crimea's parliament, he was nominated as the new prime minister, and promptly declared Crimea's unilateral independence, to be confirmed in a referendum later on. In other words, Crimea has become the latest appendage of what has been called a "Mafia State", appropriately ran by a former gangster.

The Ukrainian game

Russia's behaviour since the new interim government was established in Kiev shows a consistent pattern: provocation, propaganda and psychological terror. This follows the same behaviour that led to the Georgia war in 2008; Russia provoking, Georgia rising to the bait, only to be hammered, leaving Putin's gambit successful. The 2008 war left Georgia's semi-detached regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia permanently out of their grasp and firmly in Russia's control, even if not recognised by the rest of the world.

Putin's view of the government in Kiev is both ambivalent and mocking. He is ambivalent due to the worrying precedent that the "revolution" represents to his control over Russia, and the real concern he has that it could spread to Moscow.
To that end, he treats the interim government as though it doesn't really exist, using the language of legitimacy and the fear of fascism to breed anti-Ukrainian propaganda in the Russophone sphere. The Russian media is full of exaggerated coverage of violence in the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, and the "provocative" behaviour and words of the new Kiev government.

At the same time, Russia's acts appear as everything short of full-on war: Ukraine is Putin's psychological game on a grand scale; "prodding" Ukraine's military (like with Georgia's in 2008) time and time again, using a wide variety of methods, to see if they will react, and therefore justify war; creating an atmosphere of fear and anticipation in Ukraine through military manoeuvres, provoking Ukraine's government to mobilise its forces, obligating Russia to do the same, and bring the situation closer to war; instigating violence in the east and south of Ukraine, to display the impotence of the Kiev government in controlling its own people, while at the same time blaming Kiev for the violence.

Putin is the puppet-master in this psychological power-play, manipulating events, toying with Kiev's government, while at the same time gaining adulation at home. And that doesn't even begin to deal with Putin's play with the West, as the master chess player, as well as an expert poker player of the West's impotence.

The return of the irridentism menace

I've compared these events to those of 1914 before. Politicians often prefer to play events according to the last war, which is why Western comparisons to a "new Cold War" are understandable, if inaccurate. Similarly, wilder comparisons of Putin's behaviour to that of Hitler are also far off the mark.

While some of Putin's tactics might resemble those last used by the Soviet Union, and why Putin's behaviour might seem similar to the cold-blooded fanaticism of Hitler, Putin's motivations seem more similar to those of Serbian nationalists that justified the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in late June, 1914. Serbian nationalists in the early twentieth century were obsessed with the "restoration" of Serb lands to the Serbian state. These people said that wherever there were Serbs, that was Serbia; borders and other ethnicities were irrelevant. Many in the Kremlin seem to have the same view about Russians.
In this way, Russia in 2014 is far similar to Russia in 1914: irridentism fuels the Kremlin's "near abroad" strategy. Whether this is a means to an end - stability and power throughout the Russian-speaking world, and an effective restoration of the Russian Empire - or a genuine cultural belief, is immaterial. The evidence suggests that Putin's interest in Russian irridentism is simply one of cynical convenience and opportunism: a means to project power at home by increasing it abroad.

The cultural clock is turning back to a hundred years ago. Serb nationalists are in Crimea, projecting their irridentist faith just like in 1914. At the same time, now Poland has rediscovered its historical (Catholic) links to Lithuania and Ukraine, by planning a joint military brigade of the three countries forces (against Russia). This last development is the most worrying for the West. As I mentioned in a previous article:

"While the rest of Europe and America may dismiss some of their fears as paranoia, the fact that there are a large number of East European countries in NATO means that the number of variables increases accordingly. If Russia decided to invade Ukraine, it is unclear what the reaction of Eastern Europe (especially Poland) would be; history and emotion are two very powerful motivations that can make governments and statesmen do irrational things"

It was always the reactions of the Eastern European countries that would be most likely to drag the rest of NATO into the ultimate nightmare confrontation with Russia. A similar point can be made about Turkey, and its cultural and historical ties to the Crimean Tatars.

No, this is no "new Cold War": it's potentially much more serious than that. To learn more about the history, it's better to look back to the continental situation one hundred years ago, or that during the many European wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Looking around the world, China is an acquiescent (if awkward) companion to Russia's world view; India's role has been to firmly sit on the fence. While Europe and the USA appear united, no-one is sure how long that will last if (or more accurately, when) their sanctions on Russia are returned in kind. Meanwhile, centuries of historical forces are returning to the European theatre, with no-one having any idea where things will lead; we may all have modern technology, but we're are as infallible and complacent as a hundred years ago.

All it needs is a spark.

(Update, Tuesday, 18 March

Vladimir Putin gave a speech to grant Crimea into Russian rule proper, using this as another opportunity to emphasize his angle on events, the "legitimacy" of Crimean independence, using Western precedents as in previous speeches, while calling into question the legitimacy of the Kiev government and his concerns at the "instability" in Ukraine towards Russian speakers; at the same time, he makes claims of Russia's non-aggression while simultaneously questioning the stance of Kiev.
With exquisite timing, shortly after the conclusion of this speech and the formal inclusion of Crimea into Russia, Russian troops storm a Ukrainian base in Crimea, resulting in shots being fired, and a soldier killed. Russia claims that the victim was one of Crimea's "self-defence forces", while Ukraine says it was a Ukrainian serviceman shot by the Russians.

Is this the spark to the next "act" of Putin's power-play?

Also, I mentioned in the above article about the planned joint brigade of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, which would doubtlessly be seen by the Kremlin as a provocation, and a method of informally including Ukraine into NATO's orbit. This is an example of NATO being callously and dangerously used as a vehicle for centuries-old historical issues, as western Ukraine belonged to Poland-Lithuania until the late 18th century; something I alluded to previously (see the last couple of paragraphs in the linked article).

Turkey is similarly using historical and emotional links to Crimea's Tatars, as Erdogan is reported to today have threatened Putin with closing the Turkish straights to Russia if violence against Tatars escalates. Such an act could only be considered tantamount to war by Putin if carried out.
Poland and Turkey are showing themselves to be the "weak points" in NATO in regards to Russia. Like in 1914, it was the Balkans that provided the spark to a European war; it is Poland and Turkey's reaction to Russia's actions in Crimea and Ukraine that could provide a domino effect that drags in all of NATO.)

The Ukraine Crisis: Understanding Europe's "proxy battleground"

Although the "Ukraine Crisis" cannot be called a "war" in the sense of being as a "shooting war", in almost every other manner, it is a war.

Russia has been using "war" strategies against Ukraine for ten days already: surrounding Ukrainian bases and holding their soldiers effectively hostage in their own bases; attempts to storm Ukrainian bases and ships in Crimea have been neutered by the Ukrainian blockading themselves in and preventing Russian soldiers from the chance of boarding their ships; even more aggressively "war-like" tactics have included blockading Sevastopol's harbour that the Russian Black Sea fleet share with Ukraine's naval headquarters; another Ukrainian naval base in an inlet elsewhere in Crimea has been blockaded even more aggressively, by scuttling mothballed Russian ships in the bay, trapping those Ukrainian naval ships inside the bay. Shots have been fired at a Ukrainian military observation plane passing by the "border" between Crimea and Ukraine proper.
In the meantime, Russia has been steadily building up its forces in Crimea. For what purpose? They already have had effective military control of the peninsula for a week. Are they preparing for the next part of the campaign?

Europe's chessboard

With the status of Crimea now effectively settled by a Russian fait accompli, Putin's "chess game" enters its next phase. As one business insider put it last week, while Russia may have Crimea, the rest of Ukraine is still very much "in play". This revealing expression tells you all you need to know about the maturity and mentality of some the European and American "players" involved in Ukraine's future.

The path that led to this current crisis was begun back in November last year. The EU offered Yanukovich a deal that was very much "take it or leave it"; or more exactly, Ukraine was squeezed between a rock and a hard place: to side with Europe or with Russia. Unwilling to spurn his Russia ally, Yanukovich turned down the EU and took the politically "safer" option of a sweetened deal from the Kremlin. It was then that "Euromaidan" movement began, and a three-month long campaign that involved right-wing fascists led to shootings and Yanukovich's flight to Russia. The West had won, or so it seemed.

Using the chessboard analogy of Europe versus Russia, the "Ukrainian revolution" was a case of "knight takes bishop". Russia reacted almost at once; after initially appearing to retreat, the Crimea annexation was taking away a highly-prized "chess piece" of Ukraine's that was deep in Russia's "half" of the board. The Russian "knight" takes the Ukrainian "rook". The Kiev government's position still looks shaky and vulnerable, while Russia has a more dominant position, and looks to assess its next move.

Both Europe and Russia appear to be moving their pieces around the "Ukrainian chessboard", but there seems little real room for manoeuvre: for both sides there is a lot at stake. Europe has invested a lot of time and energy into the current situation in Ukraine, while Russia cannot afford to "lose" the country to Europe. The situation in Ukraine looks destined to be either a stalemate where both sides agree they cannot "win" decisively and reach some kind of face-saving agreement, or Russia decides to go for the "nuclear" option (i.e. invades Ukraine proper), and then all bets are off. But whatever the outcome will be, it will not be a simple one; Europe has opened a can of worms that could have far-reaching consequences.

The EU's drive to the east brought it inevitably into Russia's "near abroad", and to the current situation where Europe finds itself deep into Russia's "side" of the "chess board". Europe can hardly be surprised at Russia's reaction to its conspicuous flaunting of its "wares" to Ukraine. A temporary respite seems to have occurred, as both Europe and Russia wait and see what the effects of the Crimea "referendum" on 16 March will be. After that date, things could get very messy.
Whatever apparent respite there is now, may only be temporary, and entirely illusory: the players are still moving their pieces on both sides, and tensions below the surface are as high as they have been. There are reports of violence in the east of Ukraine, strongly promoted by the Russian foreign ministry; very convenient for Russia to use these events as a justification to enter Ukraine proper for the sake of restoring order. Last week, Russia changed the law to make it much easier for any Russian-speaking person to get Russian citizenship. The equivalent of this would be if the USA made it very easy for any native English-speaker to get US citizenship, for the purposes of extending its "soft power".

No doubt, the Kremlin has a longer-term aim in mind here; less the restoration of the Soviet Union and a "new Cold War "(there are no Communist ideologues in the Kremlin), but the the restoration of the "glory" of Russia, and dominance over the regions once controlled by the former Russian Empire. Accelerating the path to citizenship for people across Russia's "near abroad" creates the rationale for coming to the aide of any of its aggrieved citizens in neighbouring countries, and changing "soft power" to "hard power".

A crisis of complacency

I've written before about the parallels to the current crisis and that which followed the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on 28 June, 1914.
While no-one in the West is talking about war with Russia if they invade Ukraine, it should be remembered that neither was anyone talking about a general European war in the immediate aftermath of the events in Sarajevo.

What is odder is that while the rhetoric of the West is far from bellicose, its actions seen from a Russian perspective look highly-threatening, and yet the West cannot see that. Talk of sanctions is one thing; movements of NATO's airborne assets to close to the Russian border is quite another. Similarly, while the West's rhetoric towards Ukraine has been strongly supportive of the new government in Kiev; the danger here is that the inexperienced (and politically-immature) government reads phrases as "unconditional" Western backing as a green light for Kiev to start a military campaign against Moscow. In the same way, Moscow may also (more correctly) interpret such Western talk as nothing but words, giving Moscow the tacit assurance that any military action in Ukraine will meet with only diplomatic reactions.

In this sense, we're very, very far from out of the woods yet, even if the story seems to be dropping off the leading headlines of Western media due to the impression of a hiatus in the crisis. Going back to 1914, it's worth remembering that it was a month before Austria reacted by declaring war on Serbia due to its indirect involvement in the assassination. It was another ten days after that before all the major European powers were militarily involved. The "July Crisis" of 1914 that led to the Great War took nearly six weeks to reach the point of no return; it was more than three weeks before Austria even sent an ultimatum to Serbia.

This "crisis" has only really existed for two and a half weeks; two weeks ago was when Yanukovich first fled Ukraine and the opposition took the initial steps to try and form a government. While no-one it the West is even contemplating "war", there are also a lot of variables to factor in; possibly even more than in the initial crisis in that summer of 1914.
In Crimea itself, there are the Tatars, whose reaction to joining Russia is an unknown quantity. Might a flash-point there have a cascade effect of encouraging other Muslim countries to come to their aid? Turkey's unpredictable Prime Minister (who himself is embroiled in scandal - and in need of a helpful distraction?) has made some statements that Russia could read as being unhelpful at best.  
There is the reaction of the other East European countries. Some of them have a personal experience of Russia, and have no wish to see themselves become "another Ukraine". While the rest of Europe and America may dismiss some of their fears as paranoia, the fact that there are a large number of East European countries in NATO means that the number of variables increases accordingly. If Russia decided to invade Ukraine, it is unclear what the reaction of Eastern Europe (especially Poland) would be; history and emotion are two very powerful motivations that can make governments and statesmen do irrational things.
The Baltic States, too, would feel themselves in a bind, hemmed in between Russia and the sea. They have already put pressure on NATO to bolster their forces; the chances that this could be interpreted as a direct threat by Russia is large.

In short, the Ukraine Crisis has re-opened issues and emotions in Europe that have laid dormant since the end of the First World War, let alone the "Cold War".
Western Europe and the USA are now beginning to realise that historical forces have been unleashed in "battle for Ukraine"; forces that, in their complacency, they did not even begin to comprehend. The next time, perhaps they should read a history book first.

The Ukraine Crisis: Putin's psychology, and the failure of the West

Since the Russian military annexation of the Crimea began in earnest last Friday, Russia has been slowly tightening its grip on the peninsula; taking control of Ukrainian military assets, and surrounding Ukrainian military garrisons and its navy. The Russian noose has been getting ever tighter day by day, making the Ukrainian military units a hostage in their own bases and ships, with nerves getting ever more frayed as time passes.

Tuesday evening saw a seemingly alarming escalation, with reports of an ultimatum, giving Ukrainian units until the following morning to surrender.While this "deadline" passed without incident and the Russian military manoeuvres over the border finished on Wednesday, events and the stand-off hang by a thread. There are daily disturbances in the cities of the east and south of Ukraine.

What is going on?

Putin's psychological game

I've talked before about my theory of the "Russian Gambit":

"What are Russia's intentions? While accepting a de facto split of Ukraine on the ground (at least in the short term), accepting it de jure would be another matter, and we know that Russia follows the line that the opposition now in power in Kiev is engineered by fascists that have come to power through a violent coup. On Saturday, having fled Kiev, Yanukovich may well have asked for Russian protection for a Russian-speaking eastern and southern rump state. But the Kremlin may have explained their own motivation, based on their analysis of the opposition: to allow the opposition a taste of power in Kiev (while having no control of the east), playing a waiting game for the disparate opposition to violently turn on each other, allowing Yanukovich and his party to return to power in Kiev soon afterwards, with Russian help or not, depending on the situation."

Putin's press conference yesterday gave more weight to this ruse.
In it, he spoke of Yanukovich still being the legitimate president, even though he accepted that he had no real future in Ukraine. Putin talked of there being "no-one to talk to in Kiev", as there was no legitimate government; the only plan worth mentioning was the one that Yanukovich signed (agreeing to some form of all-party coalition, and elections in December). As the opposition has reneged on that deal (as Putin saw it), it seems clear that the planned elections in May would only be "legitimate" to the Kremlin if they voted in Yanukovich's "Party Of The Regions"; if not, then there surely would be no hope of a thaw in relations between Kiev and Moscow in the foreseeable future.

Putin gave the impression of being happy to cause as much political mischief as possible to the "interim government" in Kiev as long as they (or indeed any future "fascist" elected successor government) existed. At the moment, this has included the pro-Russian party being in effective control of the east and south of Ukraine, not recognising the Kiev government, and causing regional instability. On top of that was mood of casual harassment of Ukraine's sovereignty by the Russian military; air incursions, patrolling close to the border, and so on. If there was no government in Kiev as Putin saw it, then Moscow was within its rights to move almost at will across Ukrainian territory. Then there was the economic punishment, with the threat to Ukraine's gas supply, its nuclear energy, and many other financial instruments that could be used and payments withheld. In short, Putin would make the Kiev government's existence a living nightmare; everything short of out-and-out war. This would continue to be psychological torture for Kiev, and for the whole of Ukraine.

The Crimean land-grab was a piece of convenient opportunism, from the Kremlin's point of view, righting a "wrong" that has been done by the ethnic Ukrainian Soviet leader, Khruschev, during the Cold War. Crimea had been ethnically Russian since Stalin purged it of Tatars in the Second World War, and had been a key part of Russian territory since the late 18th century.

Putin's motivations are more internal than external: he cannot allow the Kiev government to exist with impunity as it would send a fatal message to his own standing at home, and give encouragement to the pro-Western opposition. The effective annexation of Crimea was an act of opportunism; nothing more. His "gambit" in Ukraine is about securing a friendly government there; nothing more. How he achieves that depends more on the actions of Kiev. It would be more convenient that he not use the military to achieve it, but Putin has no moral qualms about using it if he feels he has no other choice. That was the underlying message from his press conference.

The political game continues, as Putin and his adept foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, twist the West's logic of foreign intervention in unto itself, while making an art-form of the apparent barefaced lies about the situation on the ground in Crimea. In the meantime, the West looks on at a nightmare largely of its own making.

The West's nightmare scenario

The road to this crisis came partly from creating some awful geo-political precedents. The Kosovo War of 1999, and the Iraq war of 2003 were both US-led military engagements without UN support that led (either indirectly or directly) to regime change. While both situations were very different, under different administrations, and provoked very different moral responses, they both followed the same precedent: military unilateralism that could skirt international law (i.e. through the use of the UN).
Furthermore, it was hard in Moscow to dispel the feeling that Russia was being encircled economically and militarily, by the EU and NATO; the American use of military bases in Central Asia as part of its "War On Terror" can't have helped either.

Putin duly took note of this. Russia has historically always been protective of its right to intervene to protect its interests in its "near abroad": the Russian equivalent of the "Monroe Doctrine". In this way, the West's accusation of Putin starting a "new Cold War", while easy to throw, is a misleading comparison. Other Western politicians (such as even Hillary Clinton), have accused Putin of behaving like a "new Hitler". Again, while it is tempting to make the comparison, this also an exaggeration: he has no wish to overwhelm Europe. Russia has been the largest nation on earth for well over a century, and Putin has made Russia one of the world's leading economies.
The fall of the Soviet Union (and loss of Russian territory and prestige) may be compared historically with Germany's punishment at the end of the First World War; even the twenty-year period of transition to German/Russian military "aggression" matches. In this sense, Hillary Clinton's comparison of Putin to Hitler makes some sense, though it is too simplistic an analogy.
This is no "new Cold War". There is no "ideological war" as twenty years ago; also, we are no longer living in a bipolar world, but nowadays one of various "power blocs" and key players (more on that in a moment). A better historical comparison is to the period of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with imperial powers (or these days, "neo-Imperial powers") re-learning their historical roles in the world after the chaotic period between the First World War and the end of the "Cold War".

The wider precedent that the West has created stems from a) the precedent of military unilateralism, and b) allowing countries to cross artificial "red lines" with impunity. The example of Syria last year was critical. Together, these two signals are fatal to Western prestige and respect across the world; the West is hypocritical to accuse others of acting aggressively in their one interests, and in any case, no-one believes that the West have the moral courage to act against anyone.

Kim Jong-un is probably making note of this.

But that is only one of a number of effects that the West's reaction to the "Ukraine Crisis" may have.

The talk of a "new Cold War" may be overblown, but the real change that this crisis is likely to bring about is the hardening of "power blocs" that have been forming over the last ten years: by this I mean the waning power of the USA in comparison to that of China; the EU becoming more of a "inter-national grouping" for the sake of economic and military influence; the role of Russia as a power balancing its interests between that of China and the others; and the rising influence of smaller players such as Brazil, and regional players like the Arab states (GCC) and Turkey.
In other worlds, "multilateralism" may be now definitively fading, being replaced by a world power unilateralism, last seen in the decades prior to the First World War. The West's influence is fading; the East's is rising. The lack of appetite for intervention in the West may now be seen as a "weakness" in the dominant nature of democracy, while the East has no such political inhibitions to hold back its wishes.

The split between the West on the use of sanctions also seems to be opening rifts between those East European countries that had recently joined the EU and NATO (or both), and what Donald Rumsfeld once called "Old Europe"; the original members of the EU. The USA seems to be taking the side of the East Europeans, already making promises to be a more conspicuous guardian of its new NATO allies along the Russian border. In this sense, historic differences between Eastern and Western Europe, their different perspectives and motivations, are coming to the surface after decades (even centuries) of slumber. The divergent attitudes towards Russia of the UK and Germany compared to Poland, Hungary, the Czechs and Lithuania are now plain to see. This may put huge strain on a united European front towards Russia. Putin will also be watching this issue closely.

No-one in Europe has any real clue what will come of the new government in Ukraine, but the far-right, nationalist elements are hiding in plain sight. One unintended consequence of the EU so conspicuously supporting "fascistic" elements is the damage it does to its own reputation (it has already given masses of political ammunition to Russia); it also may encourage further support for the far-right all across the member-states of the EU itself.
That would be a real nightmare for the EU.

Any sanctions on Russia, as Putin smartly pointed out, can be returned in kind by Russia. The economic effect of this across the globalised market is uncertain; the only thing that does seem certain is that this will create more uncertainty about the future of open multinational trade, and therefore may tip the world into another recession.

Lastly, Obama has been receiving sharp criticism from the right, that now his chickens have come home to roost. In effect, Obama has created a "neo-isolationist" policy since the end of the Bush administration. Apart from Libya, the military has disengaged from Iraq and Afghanistan, and there is little appetite for any other conflict for the remainder of Obama's tenure. This "weakness" in foreign policy can potentially open things up in the 2016 elections: it would be a reverse of the 1940 election between the "isolationism" of the Republicans at the time, and the interventionist tendency of Roosevelt's Democrats.

The word on people's lips these days is "appeasement".

(Update Thursday, 6 March

In the last twenty-four hours, the USA has ramped-up its rhetoric on sanctions, as well as making explicit orders to increase its air-force assets to Lithuania, as well as reminding Russia that a US navy vessel will soon be entering the Black Sea.
This escalation of pressure by the USA seems to be aimed at reversing the more mealy-mouthed statements of the last week on the Ukraine crisis. This may be aimed at a) the critics at home, and therefore nipping in the bud any perceived foreign policy weakness ahead of the elections later this year, and in 2016, and b) the explicit support for the Eastern European nations in NATO against the perceived threat of Russia.
In other words, there is now a clear divergence between a "pacifist" and cautious Western Europe unwilling to harm its Russian assets, and a "militant" Eastern Europe, supported by the USA.

This can only lead to the "Balkanisation" of Eastern Europe now becoming widened to the conflicting motivations of Eastern and Western Europe, and now the USA and Russia are now involved in a longer-term "proxy war" of influence over the European continent.
In many respects, this is less the clock has turning back to the "Cold War" politics of the past, but more to the similar form of conflicting "alliances" and "agreements" that existed in 1914)

The Ukraine Crisis: Europe versus Russia, and parallels to 1914

In a previous article about the now rapidly-escalating, ten-day old Ukraine crisis I asked:

"What on earth are the EU doing so conspicuously supporting a government of uncertain designs and unstable character, that was brought to power with the help of a fascist militia? It looks for all the world that the EU has seriously lost the plot"

The reasons for such marked support for the "revolutionaries" of the Euromaidan at first don't seem obvious. While the fascist-style extremists who supported the forceful change of government are in a clear minority, their existence is beyond doubt. And while the fact that Yanokovich government was deeply corrupt and used bullets to suppress dissent in its final days is also beyond doubt, it still leaves the EU and the USA in a very uncomfortable place politically.

European emotions

So, why did the EU come out so strongly in the opposition's favour?

For all the talk of Ukraine being a "European nation", the reality is that the territory as it exists today is on a clear cultural divide between East and West. For historical reasons, the north and west are largely Ukrainian-speaking, with the south and east Russian-speaking; the former looks to the west, the latter to the east. This divide goes back hundreds of years, and I don't need to go into the details. Since independence, this divide has been political as well as cultural, with the national elections see-sawing between Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking victors.

The many EU and Western pronouncements in favour of the Ukrainian opposition's desire to be a "European nation" sound more emotional than rational, certainly when you look at facts on the ground. It is this lack of rationalism to the political reality that has made the new Kiev government's ardent Western support so dangerous. Regardless of the supposed support for the Ukrainian-speakers of Ukraine for their country to side with Europe, this ignores the contrary wishes of their Russian-speaking compatriots; in other words, it is rule by majoritarianism rather than by considered consent. It also smacks of Western hubris, but I'll come to that point in a moment.

The EU has been expanding to the east for the last decade. I wrote before about Russia's perception of Western encirclement; paranoid or not, this is the psychology that exists in the mind of many Russians. Bringing in the former-Communist Eastern Europe and Baltic States into the EU may have seemed like a natural progression of the EU to gather together all historic "European nations" into an economic club, but such hazy and emotional ideas are not the stuff of hard-headed and sensible politics.

In the same way the founding of the Euro currency was based as much (if not more) on emotional ideas as economic reality; the price of that "emotionalism" is being felt in Southern Europe now. The Euro as a currency was implemented without the proper checks being put in place on all its member states. It was implemented as a piece of European hubris, at a time of emotional idealism.
So the EU's support for bringing Ukraine into the fold smacks of the same type of emotional hubris; European policy decisions based on emotion than on rationalism. We've been there before, but more about that later.

Economic "lebenstraum"

There is another important point to mention; an economic motivation for European support for Ukraine. Apart from the emotional arguments, having a Western-oriented Ukraine fast-tracked into signing EU treaties (and the eventual aim of joining the EU fully), introduces large economic and labour-market opportunities to Europe.

The admission of the group of East European countries (Poland in particular) into the EU provided a boon for business; a pool of cheap labour from these new member states enabled European businesses to bring down labour costs, allowing them to save a great deal on salary overheads. I've mentioned this point about "UK PLC": how Britain's establishment and business sector in instinctively pro-Europe because it saves them so much money on labour costs.

This point is true across all of the EU. In this way, the financial crisis, on top of the free movement of low-wage East Europeans across the EU, massively brought down costs to the large employers. A larger pool of unemployment is therefore economically useful (provided it doesn't affect productivity), as it allows employers to dictate terms.
After bringing in Poland (itself with a population the size of Spain), Ukraine would be the final step in this process, with a population even bigger than Poland; with the European east providing a seemingly limitless supply of cheap labour for the rich corporations of the West.

No wonder some commentators compare corporations to fascists; seen in this light, Eastern Europe and the EU's "drive to the east" (once fantasised about by Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany) is seen in similar terms to the Nazis.
To the Russians, this is a very old tale, being re-hashed for the 21st century.

One more point to mention, which is relevant to this expansion: what happened to Turkey? If Ukraine, why not bring in Turkey?

Turkey's bid to enter the EU was never popular with the "big two", France and Germany. The main reason was said to be cultural: Turkey was a Muslim country, so would be difficult to fit in with "Christian" Europe. Another reason was its size, with a population the same as Germany's, it would act as huge counter-weight to Franco-German dominance (though now the dominance is clearly just German); this was also a reason why Britain was a big fan of Turkey's entry to the EU.

There is another, very economic, reason why Turkey's bid has floundered. Turkey's economy is strong, in many ways modeled on that of Germany's. Turkey has a strong manufacturing sector of its own, and while its own workforce, like Ukraine's, would bring down costs to European employers if they entered the EU labour market, Turkey's large manufacturing-sector economy would be a clear rival to Germany and (to a lesser extent) France, not to mention Italy. This would be very bad news for the big European corporations.

Ukraine is a good candidate for EU in the long-term because all it really has to offer is its own workforce; its factories cannot hope to compete with Europe. This explains why the EU and the IMF are so interested in dividing up Ukraine's assets like a post-war victor. By contrast, Turkey's economy could be a real rival. So it is also for this (very economic) reason why the EU is shining on Ukraine's European future, while forgetting about its one-time plans for Turkey.

Parallels to 1914

Europe's siding with the new Kiev government in then, on one hand emotional, and on the other economic, but in both ways is a sign of dangerous hubris.

The expansion of the EU in the last decade has therefore seen a sort of "Balkanisation" of Eastern Europe into pro-European and pro-Russian camps. On the Russian side, there is only Belarus and Ukraine left; the rest are all firmly in the European economic camp. In the years leading up to the First World War (and especially following the Balkan Wars of 1912-13), the Balkans was divided up into camps supporting either Russia or Austria. So the parallels are there to see.

Putin's recent desire for a "Eurasian customs union" to rival the EU makes sense when seen in this light. It is a way to hold on to his remaining allies. So Ukraine's decision to side with Moscow and not Brussels in December was pivotal.

What's often forgotten about the "July Crisis" following Franz Ferdinand's assassination is that no-one truly wanted a European war. The alliances in place were purely defensive in character, and in the diplomatic period between Franz Ferdinand's death in late June an the outbreak of European war in early August, no-one in the European capitals thought that a general conflagration was a serious possibility. Everyone thought that everyone else was bluffing. Because crises in the years prior to that had never led to a serious escalation, everyone believed it would be equally impossible this time around.

While Russia (and to a lesser extent, France) have a lot of the blame for escalating the crisis beyond being a war between only Austria and Serbia, it has always been Germany that has received the most blame historically.

Coming back to the present day, we can see that Russia's military annexation of the Crimea is Putin's reply to the pro-European opposition taking power in Kiev. Russia's military seem to be on the verge of an invasion of Ukraine proper. As Putin considers the government in Kiev to be usurpers, he feels he has the right on his side; furthermore, he clearly believes that the West will do nothing.

Here we are back again to the dangerous game of bluff that led to the First World War. Because the West did nothing against his war against Georgia in 2008, Putin believes the same will be true now. While it is easy to understand why he would think that, Ukraine is not Georgia, for a number of reasons.
As said before, the Europeans feel they have some kind of stake (emotional and economic) in Ukraine's future; the USA also has a stake in the Ukraine crisis, both politically and strategically. Furthermore, Russia has thwarted American plans over Syria and other issues in recent years, so the mood in Washington seems like one of "thus far, and no further". That doesn't bode well for a quick resolution.

For Russia and Putin, Ukraine really is a "line in the sand" issue. Now that Ukraine has issued a mobilisation of its forces, it has also cited an agreement from 1994 that Russia and the USA signed to protect Ukraine's territorial integrity and her nuclear assets, imploring for Western support.

This sounds ominously like when the different European powers cited various alliance treaties, leading to war.

The reaction of Europe and the USA will be key. It was emotionalism and calling each other's bluff that led to war a hundred years ago. It looks like those in power have yet to learn those lessons.