The phrase, spoken by President Viktor Yanukovych following the initial protester-police violence on Dec. 1, has subsequently been used on occasion by both sides in relation to the long-simmering conflict over the future direction of Ukraine that has escalated sharply over the past 11 weeks.
Ukraine’s internal division between those who want the country to go west to Europe and those who hope to restore a historical union with Russia has reached a breaking point that could lead to a Syrian-like scenario of tens of thousands of deaths, the destruction of one of Europe’s finest capital cities, and a massive outflow of refugees into the EU. With so much riding on a peaceful resolution to the standoff, it is unhelpful to try to paper over this fundamental difference in world-view with broad-brush platitudes such as “We are all Ukrainians” or “The EuroMaidan is not about an East-West choice, it’s about changing the system.”
No less of an authority than former US President Bill Clinton recently tweeted out his support for the aspirations of the EuroMaidan protesters and “a united Ukraine”. While Clinton’s statement was obviously well-intentioned, Ukrainians in the opposing pro-EU and pro-Russian camps are currently looking about as united as Israelis and Palestinians.
The cold, hard fact is that a Ukrainian civil war, an outcome that must be avoided at all costs, is too close for comfort to becoming reality. And with the goal of avoiding war in mind, all negotiating options need to be placed on the table. This includes a scenario which is highly unpopular with just about everyone: a division of Ukraine into two sovereign countries. One of these countries would obviously comprise the western and central provinces and would be put on a fast track to EU membership, while the other, made up of the southern and eastern provinces, would presumably join Moscow’s Eurasian Union. We have all seen enough Ukrainian electoral maps to know where the new border will be.
Two fully sovereign Ukraines would be a completely different concept from the “federation” which Ukraine’s Communists and the pro-Russian wing of the Party of Regions having been clamoring for. The federation idea is a gimmick aimed purely at weakening the power of Kyiv, splitting part of Western Ukraine off into a kind of “fourth Baltic republicm” and eventually subjugating central Ukraine to the major southeastern Russian-speaking cities.
A separation of Ukraine into two independent halves would certainly be a “bad peace” that is fraught with its own set of risks and would precipitate a host of nuts-and-bolts problems across the spectrum of business and politics. However, all parties with a stake in the situation need to ask themselves whether, if it allows the European continent to avoid a “good war” in the name of preserving Ukrainian unity that would almost certainly involve Russian military intervention, a peacefully negotiated two-state solution and its attendant complications are too high a price to pay.
The main problem driving the confrontation today is that the two opposing sides consistently favor ideology over pragmatism and utterly refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of their opponents’ point of view. With their ultimatums that Ukraine remain a single country, each side is implicitly demanding that the other surrender unconditionally.
Meanwhile,Yanukovych sits somewhere in the middle, with no ideological anti- or pro-European agenda, but rather with a focus on preserving his power using whatever strategy is available to him. It would be foolish to believe that the departure of Yanukovich, a relative moderate in the Party of Regions compared to openly Ukrainophobic politicians in the east/south such as Kharkiv Oblast governor Mikhail Dobkin, is going to make this deeply-rooted conflict simply disappear.
The pro-European Union Ukrainians have repeatedly used four faulty arguments to propagate their thesis that Ukraine can only move to the EU as a whole, within its current borders:
1) In a December 1991 referendum, eastern/southern Ukraine voted for independence from the Soviet Union by a margin of some 80 percent in favor; this proves that a majority of eastern Ukrainians supported a European orientation for Ukraine.
REBUTTAL: Unfortunately, the 1991 referendum, while an important milestone in Ukrainian history, is irrelevant to today’s crisis, as it is clear now that people in the East/South were simply voting against the status quo of the USSR and not for any future strategic direction of the country.
2) Citizens from all regions of Ukraine, including the east/south, are active participants in the EuroMaidan. Therefore, Ukrainians’ preference for the EU over Russia is a nationwide phenomenon.
REBUTTAL: While there are certainly some pro-EU protesters from the east/south, and a few sizable EuroMaidan demonstrations have taken place in that part of the country, token representation in the protests is not what counts. In a democracy, what counts is the electoral math, and the pro-EU movement simply does not have the votes to claim hegemony over the East/South. It is not even close. Those who insist otherwise are doing more harm than good to Ukraine’s pro-EU cause.
3) The EuroMaidan is not about choosing Russia or the EU, but is actually an anti-corruption movement. In polls, a majority of eastern Ukrainians consistently state that they oppose corruption, so this proves that they support the EuroMaidan.
REBUTTAL: The high-minded observers who say that the EuroMaidan doesn’t have an anti-Russian character obviously haven’t spent much time on Independence Square over the last couple of months. As for corruption, well, how many people in any country have ever said that they are in favor of it?
4) Polls show that in a national referendum, a majority of Ukrainians nationwide would choose the EU over Russia’s Eurasian Union.
REBUTTAL: While this is true, the problem is that the majority is not sufficiently convincing, with the percentage gap only in the single digits. If eastern Ukrainians were to vote 70 percent-30 percent in favor of Russia (a fair estimate given the numbers I have seen from reputable polling organizations such as Razumkov Center), it looks highly unreasonable from a democratic advocacy point of view to demand that the east/south be dragged along to Europe with the west/center.
Moving to the other side of the barricades, the most enthusiastic eastern Ukrainian proponents of membership in Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Union project are less likely to present a specific argument for why Ukraine should stay out of the EU, than they are to smash your camera lens or firebomb your car if it has a license plate from one of the Western provinces. Still, there are three notable pseudo-arguments (or, to put it less charitably, trashy propaganda memes) that are often featured on Russian state television broadcast into the east/south:
1) Ukraine’s pro-European protesters are extremist, anti-Semitic neo-Nazis.
REBUTTAL: Undeniably, the radical element is a matter of concern for Ukraine’s pro-EU opposition. There are some rough customers manning the EuroMaidan barricades, a small number of whom may openly support fascist ideology, and the ritualistic chants of “Bandu Het!” (Down with the bandits!) can hardly be interpreted as a pro-democracy slogan. But the really big numbers of the EuroMaidan – the hundreds of thousands of people who poured out into Kyiv’s streets back in December – are, by and large, tolerant and politically moderate citizens who simply see Europe as offering a better future than Russia. Moderate, pro-economic reform nationalism is a much bigger threat to the Kremlin’s plans for Ukraine than is the far right, and Vladimir Putin has surely lost more sleep over the urbane prospect of Ukrainian energy sector liberalization than he has from the Svoboda Party’s Stepan Bandera marches.
2) The EU is doomed to a future of bureaucratic gridlock, endless anti-austerity upheaval, and economic decline; thus Ukraine’s economic prospects in a Russia-led union would be much brighter.
REBUTTAL: Those who believe that the far higher living standards in the EU compared to Russia are only temporary, might also be interested in purchasing a stake in the soon-to-be constructed bridge that will connect Siberia with the Alaskan coast.
3) Eastern Ukraine has all the country’s industry and makes all the money; the west/center of the country produces nothing but potatoes and buckwheat, and would never survive without the east.
REBUTTAL: This ridiculous claim implies that eastern Ukraine has been generously subsidizing Kyiv and Western Ukraine for the last 20 years. However, most of the money made by eastern industry stays in the hands of the oligarchs who control it; relatively little makes its way west/central Ukraine, or for that matter, to ordinary citizens in the east itself. With an average wage of less than 200 euros per month, West/Central Ukraine would appear to have little to lose economically from cutting its ties with the East and a lot to gain from higher wages in Europe, an opening of the EU market to Ukrainian goods, and a much-improved regulatory environment for small and medium-sized business.
Complaints are bound to arise from geopolitical hawks that an endgame which cedes the southeastern half of Ukraine to Russia’s sphere of influence would be a strategic defeat for the West. However – in addition to asking the rhetorical question “Is something better than nothing?” – I would argue the opposite: that bringing Kyiv, Lviv, and the rest of West/Central Ukraine irrevocably into the democratic European family after more than two decades on the fence would mark a major triumph for Euroatlanticism and, more importantly, for the fearlessly committed pro-European Ukrainians who have invested so much in making this dream happen.
And this point brings us to one of the dirty little secrets of Russia’s neo-imperialists: they aren’t all that interested in Eastern Ukraine, which they view, largely correctly, as never having left the “Russkiy Mir” (the Russian cultural/psychological universe) despite the fall of the USSR. What the Kremlin really covets is the crown jewel of Kyiv along with the rest of Central Ukraine, a region where enormous gains have been achieved in Ukrainian national consciousness and language use in the post-Soviet generation, thereby inflicting considerable distress on the Russian chauvinist soul. In this sense, the geopolitical significance of West/Central Ukraine is greater than that of the east/south.
Instead of worrying about the opposition to Europe coming from the east/south, the pro-European camp should focus on exploiting the broad and deep consensus for the European direction in Ukraine’s west/center. This consensus gives the EuroMaidan movement a decisive instrument of leverage which it has thus far failed to take advantage of, largely because it is wasting its resources in fighting what is, at least for now, a losing battle for the hearts and minds of Eastern Ukraine.
Eventually, of course, the anti-European electoral majority in the southeast is likely to shrink, as older Sovietophile voters die off and are replaced by a new generation of more open-minded young people. It might not take too many years of these younger Eastern Ukrainians watching their former compatriots moving freely around Europe before they start to question whether their own visa-free travel to Minsk, Omsk, and Vladivostok is fully up to par with their aspirations.
To conclude, most of the arguments I have heard for maintaining Ukraine in its awkward post-Soviet configuration, from both sides of the conflict, are emotional rather than rational.
Perhaps discussing the sobering prospect of a divorce as a last-ditch alternative to the horrors of civil war will prompt the combatants to take more conciliatory positions than those they have espoused up to this point. Maybe the language of endless ultimatums will transform into something more along the lines of compromise and tolerance. But if not, the solution should be the same as for a bad marriage: if you can’t make it work, end the relationship, split up your possessions, and go your separate ways.
Will Ritter is a freelance journalist living in Kyiv.
