Photo: Armed men in military fatigues block access to a Ukrainian border guards base. (AFP: Genya Savilov)
What protesters in Kiev see as a movement for freedom and prosperity looks to Moscow like a hybrid US/German empire reaching into the Russian sphere of influence, writes Matt Fitzpatrick.
In 1783, Catherine the Great annexed the Crimean peninsula to Russia and established a naval base at Sevastopol. Thereafter, it became the seat of the Russian Black Sea fleet, which has clung on to this warm water naval outpost ever since, give or take some short term occupations by the Western victors of the Crimean war in the mid-nineteenth century and the Nazis during World War II.
Russia's current deployment of troops to buttress the pro-Russian elements of the population in Crimea looks like blatant Russian aggression. There is some truth to this. Russia has repeatedly signed agreements with Ukraine guaranteeing its territorial integrity. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Russia explicitly pledged not to use force against Ukraine except in self-defence. So too Article 3 of the 1997 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between the Russian Federation and Ukraine explicitly stated that both would observe the territorial integrity and inviolability of the borders of the other.
Since then, however, Russia, and in particular Putin, have repeatedly pointed out in international fora that Russia views a pliant Ukraine as a necessary condition for Russian security. As the world saw with Georgia in 2008, Russia is happy for independent states to exist on its doorstep, but these states must not join the Western security pact aimed at Russia: NATO.
Given their 1994 and 1997 assurances, Russia appears to have broken its obligations to Ukraine in international law. They may seek to exploit the wriggle room afforded by Point 6 of the Budapest memorandum, which offers a startling escape clause. Contrary to reporting in today's Daily Mail in Britain, the Budapest Memorandum does not oblige the UK and the US to intervene to forcibly throw the Russians back. Point 6 of the treaty simply states "Ukraine, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom ... and the United States of America will consult in the event a situation arises that raises a question concerning these commitments." Both Barack Obama and David Cameron have held long telephone discussions with Vladimir Putin since the recent crisis began, so consultation might be said to have occurred (after a fashion).
From the Russian perspective, Article 1 of the 1997 Treaty also insisted upon the "strategic partnership and cooperation" of Russia and Ukraine. While this is far from an ironclad commitment to join any formal Russian-led enterprise (such as Putin's recently mooted Eurasian Union), it does suggest a tacit understanding by the Ukrainians of Russian interests in the region. This is to say nothing of the naval base agreements for the Crimea. For the Russians, Ukraine's NATO aspirations clearly jeopardise this commitment to a strategic partnership.
A broader view of Russia's strategic position is also worth keeping in mind. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has determinedly pinned Russia back further and further to the east, with its Cold War satellite states in Central Europe now all under the NATO umbrella, to the extent that it is Latvia and Lithuania who have called NATO together to discuss the present crisis. What prior to 1989 was called "containment of the Soviet menace" has since been an incremental push to deny Russia any influence in its immediate region. Not content with peeling off ex-Soviet territories, NATO and the EU have denuded Russia of all its remaining buffer states. All that remain are Ukraine and Georgia.
In geostrategic terms, Russia is not interested in having either the German-dominated EU or US-controlled NATO directly outside its borders and it is willing to overstep the bounds of national sovereignty to ensure this doesn't happen. This is not new imperial thinking. Having had to fight for its existence against Germany twice in the first half of the twentieth century, the Soviets hung on grimly to a raft of buffer states in Eastern Europe for almost half a century. For the first time since the Wehrmacht was turned around at Stalingrad, Russia faces real frontier friction with the borderlands of an expanding EU and NATO. What for the protesters in Kiev is a vehicle for freedom, liberty and prosperity looks to Moscow like a hybrid US/German empire reaching into the Russian sphere of influence and towards the Russian border.
US and European plans to push the EU towards Ukraine via 'associational' status look like a provocation to Putin. Even worse from the Russian perspective were the moves towards Ukraine joining NATO, which were managed in 2010 by the installation of a pro-Russian president in Yanukovych. In lieu of any diplomatic or political option for preserving its centuries long primacy over Ukraine, Russia will fight to defend its position in the Crimea against further NATO or EU encroachments.
Initially, the Crimea was key to Tsarist Russia's attempts to subdue the Ottoman Empire and expand its south-western territorial holdings towards the Mediterranean. During the Soviet era, particularly after WWII, the Black Sea fleet was a southern bulwark against NATO. In the post-Cold War era, it has served as a staging post for Russian military actions in the region, most notably in the 2008 war against Georgia. The Russians now rent the site from the Ukrainians, with their current lease lasting until 2042. As one Russian admiral said a couple of years ago, however, Russia intends to be there forever.
Russia's current invasion of Crimea is aimed not at expanding and creating a new Russian Empire, but rather at preserving the last remnants of the last one. Although there is the chance that the Crimea will be incrementally absorbed if a political agreement with the new political leadership in Kiev cannot be found, the adage in Moscow presently is "informal empire when possible, formal imperialism when necessary". Like in the 2008 conflict with Georgia, Russia is seeking to preserve a threadbare system of peripheral states that has been placed under enormous stress in the past 25 years from an expanding European Union and NATO. Even if they agree to allow a rump Ukraine under revolutionary Kiev to move westward, the price will be Crimea.
Matt Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor in International History at Flinders University. View his full profile here.
Preserving the last remnants of Russian empire - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
