Tag: Putin

The study of history is so crucial in understanding global affairs and international relations that it is unthinkable for any practitioner in the field not to be solidly grounded in the study of history. This is why graduates of history are in high demand in the ministries of foreign affairs in civilised countries. They are what are called generalists as distinct from those who may specialise in economic, legal, commercial or scientific areas of foreign relations.

The happenings in Russia and Ukraine in recent times can only be understood if one has a solid background in Russian history. It is a truism in international relations that national interests are permanent while the means to protecting this national interest may vary from time to time and from personalities to personalities. Right from the time of Peter the Great, the Romanov Czar of Russia (1672-1725) to the present day, Russia has always had territorial ambition of being both a European and Asiatic power.

Europe, stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, has always been as important to Russia as the Siberian wilderness stretching up to Viladivistock. One of the enduring interests of Russia whose Baltic ports are frozen almost half of the year is to have an all year round warm water ports on the Black Sea. It has also been the policy of enemies and opponents of Russia to keep the Russian navy frozen in the Baltic for at least half of the year. It is in this respect that one can understand the Crimea crisis of recent times. Russia fought France and Great Britain and Ottoman Turkey over the Crimea in 1856 and succeeded in maintaining her hold on Sebastopol. Depending on how far back in history one wants to go, Russia’s influence in the Crimea has always been a reality.

This reality itself came out of Russia’s superior weapons over the Ottoman Empire because the indigenous population of the Crimean, the Tartars are a Turkic people as well as Muslim in religion with allegiance in the distant past, to the sublime Porte, that is the Ottoman Sultan. International relations is of course a study in power relations. The decline of the Ottoman Empire, the proverbial sick man of Europe changed the fortune and ownership of the Crimea forever. This is how the world has been forced to recognise Russian suzerainty over the Crimea.

The Crimea was of course part of the old Soviet Union and when in 1954 Nikita Kruschev transferred the Crimea to Ukraine, it was merely an internal administrative restructuring, because at that time, the demise of the Soviet Union was unthinkable. Of course when the Soviet Union collapsed in1994 and Ukraine became one of the successor 15 republics of the Soviet Union, what was an internal restructuring then took on a permanent form with Crimea becoming part of an independent Ukraine in spite of the fact that 60 percent of the population was Russian. This did not pose a serious problem because the rights of the Russian navy were recognised and protected.

This status quo sufficed at that time because nobody ever thought that Russia and Ukraine could ever come into conflict. In 1994, the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia put pressure on Ukraine to hand over the nuclear weapons on its soil for de-commissioning with the proviso that the independence of the country would be guaranteed by these great powers. The Ukrainians gladly did this in exchange for economic assistance.

The dissolution of the old Soviet Union into 15 republics left millions of Russian speakers in the new republics stretching from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and to other states in the Caucasus. Even though the Soviet Union has disappeared, the new rulers in the Kremlin still hanker after the Old Russian imperialism to the extent that it sees itself as protector of Russians wherever they may be in the former Soviet Union.

To prove this, Russia went to war with Georgia in 2008 to protect Abkhazia. Recently, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov made a wild and dangerous declaration that any attack on Russians anywhere would be seen as an attack on the motherland. This is a rather dangerous doctrine because if Russians are attacked say in Nigeria or the United States, Russia then would attack in retaliation? This was not a well thought out declaration before it was made. It is understandable for Russia to want Russians to be protected in the successor states of the former Soviet Union. The Russian annexation of the Crimea is totally illegal in international law but may have been justified on the basis of self-determination because the ethnic Russians who constitute the majority of the people in the Crimea voted to join Russia.

The danger in this is if the ethnic Russians in all the other territories of the former Soviet Union were to do the same, the entire map of Eastern Europe may have to be redrawn. Pro-Russian rebels in eastern and southern Ukraine have since held a referendum to join Russia following the precedence of Crimea. If this were to be allowed, Ukraine will be reduced to the size of the territory occupied by ethnic Ukrainians.

This certainly will not be in the interest of  Russians because it will permanently alienate the new Ukraine from Russia and history will be repeating itself of a Ukrainian enemy state of Russia somehow similar to the Ukrainia created by the Nazis as in 1941 during the Second World War led by such fascists like Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko and Kost Levitsky. The violation of Ukrainian sovereignty by Russia could not have been done without risk if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons. The unexpected consequence of this is that countries like Iran and others that have nuclear weapons ambitions as a deterrent against big power intervention would be difficult to persuade to give up their ambitions. This unintended consequence of the Russian action would have long lasting effects on global politics.

There is also the feeling in the west of succumbing to Russian threat and a repetition of the appeasement policy towards Adolf Hitler leading to the outbreak of the Second World War. This is why NATO has decided to beef up the security of its member countries including the three small Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia that were formerly part of the Soviet Union and now member states of NATO. NATO has also in recent times, even if in a token form, sent troops to Poland.

The world is entering a dangerous phase, a re-enactment of the cold war when huge amounts of money were spent on military expenditure in order to maintain some kind of military balance as a condition for global peace. The only good thing in what is going to be a new arms race is that it is not ideologically driven. Nevertheless, geopolitics and nationalism could be as dangerous driving forces as ideological division.