There has been a very consistent pattern of rhetorical atmospherics among prominent Russian officials promoting the notion that they have been threatened by the encroachment upon their border of the sinful West with its democratic ideals. The rhetoric would not have been alien to Otto von Bismarck 150 years ago when he lamented having to confront Russians with their ‘unpredictable stupidity.’ The messaging, however, has been largely, if not wholly, intended for consumption by the Russian populace which, sadly, either believes the nonsense regurgitated by state media, or is obliged to simply tow the line as they have been apt to do for centuries. Putin has made use of an undercurrent of Russian nationalism conflating it with the nation’s spiritual faith, to recall its historic struggle most recently against Nazi Germany. The struggle now, as Putin wishes to have Russia see it, is to save itself from Ukraine, a hitherto unknown bastion of neo-Nazism apparently only known to him, which has also chosen to align itself with the West and its assumed pervasive decadence. The shrill and anger of the delivery is meant to obscure the absurdity of the message but falls short for those who understand its intention.
Putin’s real focus, of course, has been much simpler. He would prefer a contiguous land corridor for Russia through eastern Ukraine connecting it with Crimea in order to retain a strategic military site that includes a major naval base with access to the Mediterranean Sea. His problem centers around the fact that a sovereign nation, Ukraine, lies in the way. That same nation also, in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s words, is an ‘important space on the Eurasian chessboard’ which Putin must straddle to retain some authority on both sides. There has been a protracted effort to Russify the eastern part of Ukraine, in particular, with promotion of Russian migration into this space and, over the past decade, the establishment of a separatist movement which has now magically become a cause célèbre for Putin.
In his opening rhetorical salvo preceding the outbreak of his war upon Ukraine, Putin said the following:
“Despite all of this, in December 2021 we once again made an attempt to agree with the United States and its allies on the principles of ensuring security in Europe and on the non-expansion of NATO. Everything was in vain. The US position did not change. They did not consider it necessary to negotiate with Russia on this important issue for us, continuing to pursue their own goals and disregarding our interests.”
Putin has reframed the situation in eastern Europe into one that does not take into account the reluctance of those nations of the old Warsaw Pact to reenter a Russian sphere of repression that would threaten their sovereignty, self-determination and national well-being. The very visible brutal suppression of free-will in several Warsaw Pact nations during the Soviet era, their wholesale economic decline and restrictions upon cultural expression over four decades are embedded within their respective national memories. It was not that NATO forced itself upon these same nations; rather, it was the option of securing a strategic defensive alliance against the possibility of falling victim to yet another Russian authoritarian regime that caused them to join the list of NATO members. Russian professed victimhood shouldn’t take priority over the welfare of neighboring nations. As a reminder, NATO remains a defensive organization and it is not for Russia to decide which sovereign nation may choose to join the organization.
Putin’s more immediate justification for launching the assault upon Ukraine went as follows:
“About the situation in the Donbas. We see that the forces that carried out a coup in Ukraine in 2014, seized power and are holding it through sham electoral procedures, have given up on the peaceful settlement of the conflict. For eight years, for eight long years, we have done everything possible to resolve the situation by peaceful, political means. All was in vain.”
The 2014 ”coup” that Putin repeatedly refers to was, in fact, a decision by the Ukrainian Parliament calling for new presidential elections when the previous pro-Russian president, Victor Yanukovych, chose to desert his post and flee to Russia at the time of the Euromaidan Protest. Ironically, the protest was instigated by Yanukovych reneguing on his electoral promise to join the European Union (E.U.) after being called to a meeting with Putin in which he was provided an offer he couldn’t refuse.
The “forces” that carried out the “coup” presumably had to do with the United States and its involvement in providing support for democratic institutions including guidance regarding the proper conduct of the electoral process. There was no U.S. funding of political parties nor any meddling in the procedural aspects of elections unlike what was apparent from the Russian side. Its agents had infiltrated Ukrainian government offices during the previous administration and the pro-Russian Party of Regions in Ukraine had been provided Russian support in its electoral bid. The new elections in 2014, certified as fair by international observers, denied Russia its preferred candidate and placed Petro Poroshenko as Ukraine’s president. He went on to sign an E.U. association agreement and he was succeeded, in another fairly executed election, by Volodymyr Zelensky in the election of 2019.
Soon after the 2014 presidential election, Russian paramilitary operatives quickly moved into Crimea and “spontaneous” well-orchestrated, pro-Russian protests broke out. Administrative buildings were overtaken, in what truly could be now labeled a coup, culminating in the illegitimate annexation of the territory by Russia. A similar process took place in eastern Ukraine resulting in the creation of the self-proclaimed independent Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Thus, Putin achieved by force what he could not do by political machinations. A protracted armed conflict arose over the latter separatist regions with Ukraine’s efforts to retain control.
Putin’s lament over the “eight long years” of personal struggle in which “everything possible to resolve the situation by peaceful, political means” was attempted actually amounted to separatist (i.e., Russian) demands that Ukraine abandon its sovereignty over their “republics” by granting them “special status.” Such legislation would provide a Russian proxy veto power over Ukraine’s foreign policy and ultimately would not guarantee a future attempt at secession. As 2021 came to an end, so did Zelensky’s trust in Russia’s intentions leading to abandonment of the Minsk II Agreement, It was now left to Putin to undertake a definitive military action to secure what he wanted in the end.
Putin now surprisingly wields the authority of the United Nations (U.N.) Charter to unleash his “special military operation”:
“In this regard, in accordance with Article 51 of Part 7 of the UN Charter, with the approval of the Federation Council of Russia and in pursuance of the treaties of friendship and mutual assistance ratified by the Duma on February 22 with the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic, I decided to launch a special military operation.”
After first attempting to legitimize the proclamation of two separatist independent republics that in the eyes of the U.N. were considered still within the sovereign territory of Ukraine, Putin manufactured the impression of a “coup” brought on by foreign influence and went on to invade a sovereign nation on this pretense using the authority of the U.N. Charter. The audacity of this level of gaslighting could only draw global disbelief which, with the exception of a few like-minded authoritarian regimes, it did.
Putin concludes by making it clear that his avowed goal is to seek a demilitarization and denazification of a nation that has never posed a threat to Russia and whose democratically elected government is led by a Ukrainian Jew whose family members were victims of the Holocaust:
“The purpose of this operation is to protect people who for eight years now have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime” . . .”To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.”
It’s difficult to appreciate what Putin means by “humiliation” when separatists in the Donbas, supported by Russian paramilitary elements since 2014, have been conducting an armed campaign in contravention of the Minsk II Agreement. The claim of “genocide” perpetrated by Ukraine upon ethnic Russians, of course, is unfounded although it did telegraph the magnitude of the atrocities subsequently committed by Russian military and paramilitary forces, particularly after their invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The notion that a nuclear-armed Russia felt compelled to “demilitarize” Ukraine which had given up its nuclear arsenal in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 stands out for particular ridicule even before considering the relative sizes of conventional arms between the two countries.
Finally, a nationalist sentiment has resided in Ukraine since the days of the Russian Empire and was given greater impetus during the Soviet era when an established partisan movement reacted to the Stalinist genocide of Ukraine in the 1930s. Elements of this movement continued to fight against Russian influence in Ukraine throughout the 20th century into the 21st. Ukrainian ultranationalists in the present day actually comprise about 2% of the population. They have come to the fore since 2014, again in response to Russian intimidation, the most notable of these being the Azov Battalion that defended against the Russian siege of Mariupol this past year.
The Russians have played a long narrative of attempting to dehumanize Ukrainians by referring to them as Nazis in reference to their opposition to the Soviet regime in the course of the world war and beyond. The distortion of history by Russian propaganda never acknowledges Stalin’s alliance with Hitler at the outbreak of the war and his participation in the invasion of Poland nor does it acknowledge that Ukraine suffered the brunt of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union losing more of its population than any other nation.
It would be best for Putin to look about him and recognize a far greater ultranationalist presence within his own enterprise. Some of these actually do refer to themselves as Nazis. A Russian paramilitary group, Rusich, was formally founded in St. Petersburg in 2014 and participated in armed activity in the Donbas in 2014-15. The Russian Imperial Movement, founded also in St Petersburg in 2002, has provided paramilitary training to neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Europe. It has been designated a “global terrorist organization” by the U.S. Members of its Imperial Legion were also embedded within the Donbas in 2014-15. The Wagner Group, is a Russian private mercenary company founded by self-proclaimed Nazis, Alexey Milchakov and Yan Petrovsky, and funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch. This group seems to have no professed ideology; rather, it is a criminal entity with right-wing extremist tendencies and it is both armed and provided training facilities by the Russian Ministry of Defense. In fact, 80% of its troops in Ukraine have been recruited from prisons. It has been involved worldwide in contractual services with mostly African and Latin American government clients and as an actual military unit in both Syria and Ukraine. The U.S. Treasury Department has now properly designated it as a “transnational criminal organization” committing atrocities wherever they have been deployed.
Former Russian president (2008-12) and prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, who since 2020, has been deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia is considered a contender once more for the presidency should Putin accidentally fall from a balcony. He certainly ranks as one of the most entertaining of the particles in Putin’s immediate orbit for his colorful language, misinformed rhetoric and ultimately as a caricature of Russian chauvinism. One of his more notable internet deliveries likened the war in Ukraine to a sacred battle with Satan and reminded all who chose to read his message that “Kyiv is a large Little Russian city within the Russian Empire in which people have always thought and spoken in Russian.” He refers to Ukrainians in his recent holiday message as “crazy Nazi drug addicts.”
These pronouncements need little clarification because they are so overtly absurd but they do point to a common theme in current Russian rhetoric and that is to think of Ukrainians as “Little Russians,” somehow a lesser being, a peasant stock, who speak a bastardized form of the Russian language. In reality, from an ethnolinguistic perspective, the territory of Ukraine was actually within the original geographic core of the Slavic homeland that extended from present-day central and eastern Poland, southern Belarus into northwestern Ukraine, not Russia. Medvedev’s view of Russian history, as scripted by Putin in his essay on the topic in the summer of 2021, is rooted in the belief that it simply evolved from a region originally centered in Kyiv and was forced to move northward in the 13th century by the Mongol invasion of that time. Ukrainian history, in fact, remained in place where it was and still is, continuing to evolve into its present form in the succeeding centuries. It gained its identity as a nation not as a territory occupied by “Little Russians,” as the Russian Empire chose to refer to Ukrainians, but through a long history of struggle against tyranny. The process of attempting to Russify Ukraine, since the 18th century, into something it is not has met with failure. If there is a nation that requires belittling, it is Russia as it has broken the laws of civil society and the bonds of human decency.
Copyright @Kost Elisevich, MD, PhD 2023. All rights reserved. Any illegal reproduction of this content will result in immediate legal action.
