Nowhere is this more true than in the current crisis in Ukraine.
The West demonstrated inconsistency in recognizing a regime in Kyiv that came to power through the unconstitutional, violent, foreign-orchestrated EuroMaidan Revolution and coup d’état with only about 30 percent popular support, and virtually all of that from western and central Ukraine, and yet failing to recognize the right of self-determination of the peoples of Crimea to reunify with their fatherland Russia, to whom they belonged since before the United States came into existence, with close to 90 percent popular support.
Apparently, just as we Orthodox Christians will never recognize Kosovo as a state independent of Serbia, the West will need some time to accept the reunification of Crimea with Russia.
To resolve the current crisis in Ukraine, it is first necessary to acknowledge the process by which the current boundaries of Ukraine were formed.
To begin, Kyivan Rus – the predecessor of the modern East Slavic nations of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus – was founded by East Slavic tribes and Scandinavian traders in the 9th Century.
Russian czars added the lands in central Ukraine in the 17th to 20th Centuries; Vladimir Lenin, the lands of Novorossiya in eastern and southern Ukraine in the 1920s; Josef Stalin, the lands of Galicia in western Ukraine in the 1940s; and finally, Nikita Khrushchev, the peninsula of Crimea in the 1950s.
In my report “Economic Integration of Russia and Ukraine” submitted to the governments of the Russian Federation and of Ukraine in 2011, I recommended “Ukraine’s geopolitical support of Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization; Russia and Ukraine’s joint building of a Common Economic Space or joint establishment of a Free Trade Agreement with the European Union; and Ukraine’s subsequent accession to the Common Economic Space, or joint establishment of an FTA, with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.”
I warned against Ukraine independently entering into the EU association agreement with a deep comprehensive free trade agreement, which had only about the same level of popular support in Ukraine as did joining the Customs Union and eventual Eurasian Union. I also advocated that Ukraine move to federalism and subsidiarity – the principle that decisions should be made by the least centralized competent authority, which surprisingly is a principle of the administrative models in both the Orthodox Church and in the EU.
My warnings were not heeded and now Ukraine’s economic and trade relations with its largest investor and trading partner, Russia, have deteriorated; subsidized gas and cheap credits have been exchanged for market rate gas and promises of IMF loans with socially disastrous conditions; de-industrialization has resulted in drastically lower gross domestic products, corporate profits, and tax revenue to the state; becoming a raw materials appendage to the West has not replaced the lost economic output from de-industrialization; and even the mainstay economic sector of agriculture is collapsing.
In short, the current government of Ukraine has taken a nation that was once ranked 13th in the world as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1989, a nation with G20 economic potential, a nation with close to 50 percent of the former USSR’s industry and military-industrial complex, a nation in which the USSR and Russia had invested close to $100 billion, a nation that is one of only nine countries with a civil aviation industry and one of only seven countries that regularly launches satellites, a nation with more than one-fourth of the world’s fertile black soil, a nation with more than enough energy and mineral resources for self-sufficiency – and somehow managed to turn it into sub-Saharan Africa.
We are now getting dangerously close to the point of no return.
If the Minsk II peace agreement holds, and Ukraine implements the requirements of the agreement specifically related to the special status of the Donbas and decentralization of administrative functions, and, further, Ukraine restores its economic and trade relations with Russia, Ukraine can begin the long process of reconciliation and rebuilding.
If the Minsk agreement fails, Ukraine will continue along the path of economic collapse and disintegration as a state, likely resulting in the Yugoslavian scenario wherein Ukraine is divided up into several semi-autonomous states with borders close to the individual regions before they were added to Ukraine.
The longer the civil war continues, and the more civilian casualties incurred in the Donbas, the harder it will be to reconcile this region with the EuroMaidan Kyiv regime.
Pro-independence sentiment is growing not only in the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, but also in the Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, and Odesa oblasts – that is, in the entire region of Novorossiya.
In western Ukraine, the Hungarian minority in the Transcarpathia region are suffering from the economic crisis in Ukraine, and are also at increasing risk of separation from Kyiv.
The Ukrainian Civil War, like all civil wars, will end in one of three ways:
(1) Kyiv’s military, with the help of nationalist militias like Right Sector and the various volunteer Battalions, defeats Novorossiya’s military.
(2) Novorossiya’s military defeats Kyiv’s military, and takes control of the central government in Kyiv.
(3) Novorossiya determines that it cannot defeat Kyiv militarily, and Kyiv determines that it cannot completely eliminate pro-independence forces and sentiment. Then, the parties agree to an enduring peace agreement.
Russia is under considerable pressure not to allow #1 because of the extremely high number of civilian casualties among the ethnic Russia population in eastern Ukraine being inflicted by pro-Kyiv forces.
Russia cannot intervene in support of #2, even though this is the goal of some Novorossiyans.
Russia and the EU have been advocating #3, but the US and Kyiv have not yet accepted this proposition.
In the past, I have been described as being “acceptable to both Russians and the West.”
Therefore, when the crisis erupted in Ukraine, it was not surprising that various stakeholders encouraged me to try to serve as a peacemaker.
Accordingly, on May 30, 2014, I wrote a letter to Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk in which I conveyed “my availability to serve in an advisory capacity to help de-escalate the political and geopolitical crisis facing Ukraine at the moment, to reconcile all the parties to the conflict within and outside Ukraine, and to restore diplomatic and economic relations among Ukraine and all its neighboring countries.”
My offer stands.
Bernard Casey is the former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, serving from January 2014 through November 2014.
