By Matthew Dal Santo
The next pawn in the Eastern Europe chess game - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Photo: Pro-Russian militants drive towards Donetsk airport on May 26, 2014. (Reuters: Yannis Behrakis)
Outside the walls of the Kremlin, no one knows the reason for its apparent acquiescence in Eastern Ukraine. But the elaborate dance for control of Europe's borderlands isn't over - Russia's next move will likely be in the forgotten yet significant satellite state of Transnistria, writes Matthew Dal Santo.
An uneasy quiet hangs over Eastern Ukraine. It's not for want of bloodshed, Tuesday's shoot-out between Ukrainian regular forces and rebel paramilitaries for control of the main regional airport at Donetsk having left 50 people dead, their numbers drawn mostly from the pro-Russian separatists who had seized the terminal on Sunday. Rather, people in Eastern Ukraine have been left wondering about the elusive purpose for which this blood has been shed.
Removed for treatment to local hospitals, Chechen mercenaries lie reportedly among the wounded. One way or another, the money that brought them to Ukraine must have come from Russia. But if Russia has had a hand in this week's violence, so far at least Ukraine's bloody recapture of the airport has elicited but the gentlest of rebukes from the Kremlin.
Even in failure, an operation that in its first hours bore a disturbing likeness to the seizure of airports, highways and police stations by Russian forces in Crimea in March could usefully have provided the pretext for Russia to send over the border the 40,000 soldiers it's had stationed along Ukraine's eastern border since February (and promised three times to withdraw).
Instead the rebels' failed seizure of Donetsk airport looks increasingly like the actions of desperate local commanders who didn't get the Kremlin's memo that the invasion was over - the forlorn last stand of a confected rebellion deserted by the only man capable of converting its stated aspirations into anything like a concrete political or institutional settlement, Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Donbass is on its own, Putin seems to be saying. The fighting, the homespun referenda, the chest-thumping declarations of independence, the defiantly neo-Soviet 'People's Republics' of Donetsk and Lugansk, the wounded and the dead themselves, have all been for nothing.
What has brought about this change in Putin's calculations? Sanctions? According to the IMF, $US100 billion will have fled the Russian economy before the end of the year. The German-brokered negotiations? Behind the scenes Berlin has been working hard to bring the two sides together. A quiet word from China's Xi Jinping? Beijing might covet Russian gas (and has probably enjoyed watching Putin poke a stick in the West's eye), but it's also allergic to separatist movements of any hue. Or is this just a judo-style feint, as latter-day Kremlinologists have been wont to surmise, pointing out Putin's known love of the Japanese martial art?
Photo: An icon of Jesus lies among blood-soaked shattered glass near Donetsk airport. (Reuters: Yannis Behrakis)
Outside the walls of the Kremlin, no one knows. Besides, it's increasingly clear that Russia has other fish to fry.
Russia will probably make its next move in this elaborate dance for control of Europe's borderlands not in the industrial cities of Ukraine's east but on its far south-western flank in a Russian-backed satellite state known (to those who know of it) as 'The Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic', or Transnistria. The right bank of the River Dniester, it represented just over 200 years ago the high water mark of the 'New Russia' Catherine the Great carved out of formerly Turkish lands on Europe's southern steppe (though Russian armies added a bit more when they rolled back Napoleon).
Some 250 miles long and an average 15 miles wide, the enclave remains a handy piece up Moscow's sleeve in a duel for influence in Europe's south-eastern corner.
A part, de jure, of the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova, Russian-leaning Transnistria broke away from mainly Romanian-speaking Moldova in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the result of a row over language rights that foreshadowed those that would break out with special strength in the Baltics and, more recently, in Ukraine. By all accounts, a post-Soviet dystopia of concrete apartment blocks, kleptocrats and Kalashnikovs, it's an outpost of empire on the edge of the Balkans whose autonomy a thousand or so Russian soldiers still defend.
Until a few weeks ago, it was largely forgotten by most in Europe.
Then, the same weekend (May 10-11) that the inhabitants of two other newly declared, pro-Russian 'People's Republics' headed to the polls in Donetsk and Lugansk to vote on (implicitly Russian-backed) independence, and Vladimir Putin flew triumphantly in to review the fleet in his new Crimean conquest, Russian deputy prime minister Dimitry Rogozin travelled to Transnistria's capital at Tiraspol to celebrate Victory Day with Moscow's comrades on the Dniester. On the way home, he was detained by Moldovan police on the runway in Moldova's capital Chisinau - Transnistria, unfortunately, doesn't have an airport of its own. He was said to be carrying with him a clutch of petitions from Transnistrian patriots for a Crimea-style return to the Russian Motherland.
Moscow threatened economic retribution: Moldova's economy remains heavily dependent on remittances from Moldovans working in Russia; the export of wine, apples and other agricultural products; and big imports of Russian gas.
Yet the Kremlin left Transnistria's appeal for patriotic reunion unrequited, just as it coyly batted aside the affections of the pro-Russian movement in Donetsk and Lugansk. Like Donbass in Ukraine, Transnistria seems more useful to the Kremlin as a part of Moldova than as a fully-fledged territory of the Russian Federation.
Photo: Pro-Russian separatists speak with local residents during a rally in Donetsk on May 25. (Reuters)
At least, that is, for the time being. The European Commission announced earlier this month that it would go ahead with inviting Moldova (and, for good measure, Georgia) to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union on June 27. Never mind that it was the prospect of Ukraine's signing the same kind of agreement late last year that raised Russia's ire and led, by twists and turns, to the shoot-out at Donetsk on Tuesday.
Though it seems reckless that Brussels could even contemplate, at this stage, the courtship of yet another former Soviet territory, if Russia hopes to repeat in Moldova the trick it played in Ukraine, time's running out. With parliamentary elections forthcoming, and Moldova far from united behind the government's EU push, Moscow is probably hoping the implicit threat of Russian intervention that Transnistria represents will help pro-Russian parties scrape over the line. The Kremlin knows that even signed agreements have to be ratified and implemented.
If they don't, and Moldova races forward to embrace a new European destiny, Moscow can still go ahead and recognize the petitions from Transnistria it has so far ignored - or at the very least recognise the satellite's full independence from its Moldovan parent, as it did with South Ossetia after its war with Georgia in 2008. After all, it seems unimaginable that, having fought tooth and nail to prevent independent Ukraine from sliding further towards the West, Moscow would consent to losing to Brussels what is, to all intents and purposes, already a ribbon of Russian territory.
Why do such millstones matter?
So long as Moscow keeps a toehold in Transnistria, it holds in reserve a useful lever over Odessa, Ukraine's second city and major port less than 70 miles away by highway and widely billed as a top priority among Russia's strategic aims in Ukraine. Since the outbreak of the crisis in March, General Breedlove, NATO's top commander in Europe, has worried aloud about Russian movements in and around Transnistria and what they might spell about Russian intentions elsewhere, especially regarding Odessa.
Founded in 1792, Odessa made Russia, for the first time in its history, a Balkan power. Crossing the Dniester, Russian armies could harry Turkey's European provinces - holding out, under the guise of a common attachment to Orthodoxy and a shared Slavic identity ('Pan-Slavism'), the prospect of liberation to their mainly Christian subjects. Moving north, they could intervene, often decisively, in the affairs of central Europe, as they did in 1849 when Tsar Nicholas I restored Austria's ancient Habsburg dynasty to a throne from which the Hungarian revolution threatened to drive it. Despite its name, the Crimean War opened in 1854 with Russian troops driving south into the Turkish provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia (today's Romania).
Nostalgia for dominance in the Balkans isn't just history. When asked to justify Russia's annexation of Crimea, Putin never fails to invoke Kosovo, whose statehood Russia has never recognised. Exhibit A in Russia's never-ending campaign to prove the extent of Western perfidy, Kosovo also symbolises Russia's inability to defend its interests in the Balkans.As the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, St Petersburg courted Romania, Bulgaria and, most fatefully, Serbia in an effort to outflank Austria-Hungary and Germany for markets and influence in the Balkans. Had the tsar not tied a Eurasian empire of some 175 million to tiny Serbia - caught as it was by then in a death struggle with Austria - the shots that cut down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo wouldn't have led to a general European war in the summer of 1914. In the Second World War, Stalin sent the Red Army on a long detour through Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary that wasn't strictly necessary for victory over Germany in order to guarantee Soviet domination after the war.
Photo: Ballots are cast in the eastern Ukrainian town of Dobropillya on May 25, 2014. (AFP: Dimitar Dilkoff)
It's a humiliation Moscow would dearly love to right. In Transnistria, then, Russia keeps a deposit on its comeback as a power in the Balkans.
After all, if the Ukraine crisis has taught us anything, it is that the Kremlin still views Europe through the lens of hard-headed realpolitik, with NATO its competitor for power and influence. Only in Europe's south-east corner can Russia still hope both to woo still non-aligned and traditional Russian allies like Serbia and Montenegro, and cajole torn or struggling NATO and EU members Hungary, Bulgaria, and Slovakia, whose increasingly illiberal politics often chime with Moscow's and whose economies are among the most dependent on Russian gas in Europe. Even the troubled Greeks have been coy in their criticism of Russia's Crimea gamble.
NATO has fretted most about what the Kremlin's machinations in Ukraine mean for former outposts of empire in the Baltic, but Russian grand strategy under both the tsars and the Soviets had a southern as well as a northern leg. And Russia has neither given up its claim to being a Balkan power, nor its historical role as patron of the southern Slavs. Certainly, Romania, which shares a language and a long border with Moldova, is worried about Russia's de facto return to the neighbourhood.
What does this mean for Donbass?
Its value to the Kremlin lies above all in the federalisation plan Russia hasn't given up imposing on Ukraine and whose virtue, from the Kremlin's point of view, lies primarily in the possibility it holds for Russia to carve out friendly sub-states, à la transnistrienne, in those areas of greatest interest to it, including Odessa and the Balkan dream it, with Transnistria, stands for.
A decade ago, Working Dog's Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch penned a series of 'Jet Lag Travel Guides'. Among them was a guide to the fictional Eastern European nation of Molvanîa, which was in the book's words, 'untouched by modern dentistry'. For the past 25 years, it's been easy to poke fun at Transnistria and places like it. But from Tiraspol to Donetsk and Lugansk, and Sukhumi in the Caucasus (where unrest broke out yesterday, which locals look to Russia to quell), the nostalgic neo-Soviet satellites that have risen up in Europe's borderlands are pieces in a deadly geopolitical game. Not since the end of the Cold War has Europe looked like such a chess board.
To return to the airport, this isn't the end of Ukraine's ordeal; it's just a hiatus.
Matthew Dal Santo is a freelance writer and foreign affairs correspondent. He previously worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. View his full profile here.
