The announcement of a new state called Malorossiia (Little Russia) in the Donbas represents the latest example of Russian aggression against Ukraine. But it also embodies another Russian act of aggression or probe against the West and international order more generally.
It certainly represents aggression against Ukraine because it means that Russian forces control another part of Ukraine, just as they control parts of Georgia and will use their clients, so-called separatists, who are wholly dependent upon and subordinated to Moscow, to proclaim a state on the basis of ethnic discrimination against them.
And, at some future point, when it suits Russian President Vladimir Putin to do so, his government will incorporate those territories and peoples living upon them into Russia as is also happening now in Georgia.
This technique of fabricating a government composed of allegedly victimized ethnic or national representatives of a neighbouring people nationality go back to the czars but were hallmarks of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin’s solution to Russia’s “nationality question” after 1917. Certainly this tactic featured prominently in Stalin’s rearrangement of the map of Eastern Europe in the 1940s.
But beyond the historical continuity with the czars and Soviet power, this latest action also clearly tells us Moscow’s real thoughts about Ukraine.
Malorossiia (Little Russia) was the czarist and vernacular Soviet or Russian word for Ukraine and its residents.
It signified the enduring and still current Russian belief that Ukraine and its people are merely misguided and inferior Russians who have no right to an independent existence as a state or as a culture.
As the émigré historian George Vernadsky observed, “Russian liberalism stops at the border with Ukraine.”
Moscow’s view: Ukrainian state can’t exist
Putin shares this outlook and has frequently said that we are one blood with Ukraine, i.e. they are Russians. And it clearly represents Moscow’s view that no Ukrainian state can be allowed to exist.
So if invasion fails, then Moscow must resort, as it has to economic and information warfare, terrorism, and constant military probes to subvert and even destroy the Ukrainian the state from within.
In this context the new announcement of Malorossiia is not only made in Moscow, it builds on previous Russian actions to institute ethnic cleansing and the economic rape of Crimea and to give licenses and other official documents like birth certificates from the Donbass official status as Russian documents, a precedent it has followed in the occupied parts of Georgia after 2008 as well.
Although Putin has for now blocked granting the residents of the Donbas full Russian citizenship because of the huge economic and political costs to Rusia of doing so; he clearly engineered this decision to probe how far he could go now against Ukraine and the West while leaving himself room to pursue other options if this blows up in his face.
But this announcement also amounts to a probe against the West. It reflects Moscow’s realization that the Donald J. Trump administration neither can nor will make unilateral concessions to Russia, that Europe, for all its antagonism to Trump, is becoming a real political if not eventual military entity, that sanctions will not be lifted, and that nobody will pressure Ukraine into surrendering to Moscow’s terms.
The recent renewal of sanctions, coupled with NATO’s ongoing reinforcement, reflects the failure of Russian policy and success of Western resistance. This probe is, therefore, an attempt to intimidate or coerce the West into accepting that it can have a détente with Russia only on Russian terms even as it leaves open the possibility of what would be only a temporary Russian retreat.
Nevertheless, this is an open act of aggression against the West, a challenge to European unity and integration and an effort to force Europe to sacrifice Ukraine to Russia and demonstrate that Moscow can do as it pleases and that Europe and Washington cannot and will not do anything about it. Thus the same program we see in regard to Georgia and the rest of the Caucasus is at work, namely an effort to make clear to these states that they cannot hope to challenge Russia or rely on the West who will do nothing for them while Moscow can do as it wants to them with impunity. Therefore they should simply accept Russian hegemony as matter of fact and stop trying to move to the West or infect their peoples and Russia with the virus of democracy.
At the same time, such actions also underscore the hollowness of Russian protestations that it espouses a multipolar world order based on the sovereignty of states and the primacy of the United Nations and international law.
The only sovereignty Moscow recognizes or respects is its own. It certainly does not believe itself to be bound by law, domestic or international. Neither does it consider itself obliged to follow UN resolutions that are against its interests. Instead, as Condoleezza Rice wrote a decade ago, the doctrine of multipolarity leads to a world based on force where the strong do what they can and the smaller states suffer what they must accept. i.e. a world ruled by unbounded force.
Indeed, Russia’s continuing resort to force in its peripheries expresses many important truths about the nature of Putin’s regime. First, it shows that the resort to war to resolve political rivalries continues to be the regime’s logical conclusion to the denial of post-Soviet states’ sovereignty and the aspiration for territorial and imperial aggrandisement. Indeed, empire or what one might call imperial circuses has become the raison d’etre of the Putin regime since it cannot and will not give its people bread.
Imperial aggrandisement and adventures reinforce the narrative of Russia’s greatness and condition of being surrounded by enemies while also fortifying the notion of Putin as a powerful statesman whom the West fears and Russia as a similarly great and feared power. But this not merely a cynical propaganda ploy. The regime actually believes it is in a state of long-term multi-dimensional war with the West even though no shots are being fired by the two sides. Thus Russia acts as if it is and considers itself to be at war with NATO not just the United States.
Indeed, On Jan. 18, 2005, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov told the Academy of Military Sciences, the official institutional locus of systematic thinking about contemporary war that, there is a war against Russia under way, and it has been going on for quite a few years. No one declared war on us. There is not one country that would be in a state of war with Russia. But there are people and organizations in various countries who take part in hostilities against the Russian Federation.
Therefore, the war against Ukraine is a front or part of the larger war against the West and the same may be said as well for Georgia and the information wars unleashed by Russia against the U.S. and Europe.
And from Moscow’s standpoint this is a war for its survival as a great power since Putinism cannot survive except as an empire or neo-imperial hegemon in Eurasia. Thus increasingly the state has to be optimized for war and psychologically kept in a state of controlled mobilization for the regime to survive. But empire—the deliberate abridgement of subject peoples’ sovereignty and territorial integrity – means war, even protracted war. So the logic of its own policies must lead Russia into endless conflict with its neighbours in the anticipation that it can one day break them through a combination of military threats and psychological warfare. The current campaign against Ukraine, employing IW, economic warfare, terrorism, nightly shelling, and intimidation by threats of force perfectly captures that mélange of instruments of power that Moscow feels it must regularly display to prevail.
What must be done
To counter Russia’s strategy and this latest act of aggression it is imperative that a unified multi-dimensional Western strategy takes shape beyond what has already been achieved. In the military sphere it is clear what needs to be done. A stronger, more robust NATO (not just American) conventional deterrent must be permanently based in the Baltic States, Poland and Black Sea states like Romania and Bulgaria on top of these countries’ indigenous forces to deprive Rusia of the illusion that it can wage a short war or intimidate its neighbors into submission. To support those forces NATO must also build a sustainable infrastructure. Third, given the ongoing violation of every arms control treaty by Moscow, NATO must reach a new consensus on the role that nuclear weapons will play in its strategy. Without prejudicing the outcome, this debate must be held because Moscow has shown its willingness to use nuclear intimidation as a regular feature of its policy and strategy and has violated every arms control treaty since 1990 except for the New START treaty. And at current procurement rates it will surpass that treaty’s totals in 2018. Therefore NATO must formulate and execute a new strategy to deny Russia the fruits of these treaty violations and to negate its strategy of brandishing and possibly using its nuclear weapons as a means to control escalation and inhibit NATO replies at every step of a crisis.
Fourth, it is long since time for the U.S. and its allies to provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs to defend itself against Russian forces’ daily violations of the Minsk agreements, not to mention this latest aggression. Not only does doing so show our support for Ukraine, resist this latest encroachment, and enable Ukraine to defend itself without having to rely on the U.S. to do so as was implied in the 1994 Budapest agreement from which we shamefully walked away, this policy, in tandem with the foregoing recommendations, imposes mounting costs upon Russia as does the extension and even expansion of the sanctions as now called for in the Senate’s legislation. While that legislation may need amending to pass it ought to be passed. It should not only extend and expand sanctions, it should also strike at Moscow’s financial networks that are the carriers of Russian subversive activities abroad. We have seen from our own experience how urgent it is for Russia’s elites, who are consumed by greed and venality to be able to exploit Western financial opportunities and how far Russia will go to overturn the Magnitsky law and sanctions. Therefore those opportunities must be closed off to them by expanding and extending the sanctions, raising the costs to them, and using the new “Global Magnitsky law” to identify and punish more corrupt Russian leaders and their henchmen.
Moreover, that strategy should accompany the expansion of European terminals and interconnectors as well as U.S. infrastructure and exports of gas, especially LNG, to Europe. This too imposes costs on Russia for it also deprives Moscow of basic revenues it sorely needs and that furnish the basis for its attempts to subvert, corrupt, and undermine governments and socio-political institutions across Europe. Finally, these steps need to be carried out in tandem with a substantially upgraded information strategy targeting Russia and Russian speakers so we can bring home to Russians the extent of their own officials’ corruption and readiness to gamble with their sons’ lives by throwing them into wars to salvage the wrecks of empire. In other words, NATO and its members, acting individually and collectively should carry the information war into Russia to strike at what Putin fears most, the domestic front, and show Russians the true cost of Putin’s adventures and criminality.
As we have observed, Russia believes itself to be at war with the West and has acted accordingly for over a decade. The new announcement about “Malorossiia” is only the latest probe in this multi-dimensional and generally non-kinetic war (except for Ukraine). We should understand that pace Trotsky, while we may not be interested in war, war is interested in us and act accordingly. The French have a saying “a la guerre comme a la guerre,” ( in war you act as if you are at war) It is long since time that we recognize the truth of our situation and act accordingly for only then can we and our allies help restore peace and security, not only in Europe but elsewhere because other potential aggressors will see what happens to Russia and draw the appropriate conclusions. For if we do not react with sufficient vigor, resolution and dispatch, this will not be the last Russian probe, nor will other would-be aggressors desist from making their own probes against what has been shown to be a Western world that will not defend itself. Ukraine’s war is also our war too and understanding that dictates a response that should bring home the costs of that war to its aggressors, not its victims.
