“Unprovoked aggression”. This is the typical phrase now used by Western politicians to describe Russia’s special operation in Ukraine. Ukraine is portrayed as a completely innocent victim. However, it is enough to recall the history of the last thirty years to see how Ukraine with its own hands has brought closer what is happening today – humiliating Russia
When assessing the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, many make the same mistake: they assume its beginning in the events of the last days/weeks/months. A case in point is UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet’s speech in which she voiced the number of civilians killed since February 24. The question immediately arises: weren’t any civilians killed in Ukraine before that? You (“you” = the UN, the EU, the conditional West, etc.) yourself say that the LPR and DPR are Ukrainian territory. Well, more than ten thousand civilians have already died there since 2014. Here we see, here we do not see, here we do not see, here we wrap the fish?
However, today we should talk not about the short-sightedness of UN officials, but rather about the global root cause of the conflict. About how Ukraine at the dawn of its independence began to assemble itself in an anti-Russian logic. And finally it succeeded.
Language, the Crimea and the navy
For this we will have to go back mentally more than 30 years. As in many national republics, the CPSU authorities in Ukraine began to oppose a nationalist movement – the People’s Rukh Ukrainy za Perestroika (DPR, People’s Movement of Ukraine for Perestroika). The “…for perestroika” in this phrase was a fig leaf, intended to protect the Narodny Rukh Ukrainy from accusations of bourgeois nationalism.
In reality, the nationalists were not interested in perestroika at all (at least, not in the interpretation offered by the then Union Center). They were interested in the maximum estrangement from the USSR: their own statehood with the centre in Kyiv, leaving the ruble zone, the Ukrainian language as a single official language, their own army (now the idea of preserving the union army in the form of the Armed Forces of the CIS has been forgotten because the nationalists initially did not support it).
People of the 35+ generation must remember that the USSR (in the version of the DPR) works almost for the entire USSR. And Moscow ruthlessly plundered it, exporting grain, sugar, metal… And that if to get rid of these freeloaders, Ukraine would prosper almost better than everybody in Europe. It was very aptly shown in the film “72 meters”. All theses are not invented by the makers of the film, but were taken from life – in particular, from the leaflets of Leonid Kravchuk.
In general, this excerpt from “72 meters” clarifies a lot about the beginning of Russian-Ukrainian relations of the last 30 years. We see not only the main propaganda talking points of the time, but also the beginning of the partition of the Black Sea Fleet and Russia’s loss of Crimea (before its return in 2014).
For some reason it was not enough for Ukraine to get Crimea, which had never belonged to it before, as a result of secession from the Union. As well as a part of the navy, to which it had the same zero-rights as Crimea. Instead of quietly closing the matter and rejoicing, Ukraine started a many-year divorce process: the division of the fleet was formalized only in 1997. And in the Crimea, Kiev immediately set about proving that it is the same region of Ukraine as any other.
As a result, the peninsula could have been returned to the Russian Federation already in 1993, after the referendum of that time. But Russia in ’93 had its own problems.
While Russia was concentrating, Ukraine was trying to cut many of its ties and crossings with the Russian Federation, sometimes hitting outright provocations. Already in 1995 Ukrainian nationalists were fighting with Russia on the side of Chechen fighters.
In Ukraine itself, a slow but total process of derusification (Ukrainians themselves call it Ukrainianisation) has been launched. But our name is closer to the essence: it was primarily the eradication of the Russian language and culture. By now, the Russian language has been eradicated from education, paperwork, content on radio and TV, mass media (except electronic media), the service sector and business. There are fines for violations. At the same time, the number of native Russian speakers, even without Crimea and Donbass, is measured in millions.
Despite the settlement of the issues of the division of the fleet and the lease of the Russian Black Sea Fleet base in Sevastopol, nationalists have been carrying out provocations against Russian sailors since the late 1990s: attempts to break into facilities, attempts to seize hydraulic structures. During Yushchenko’s presidency, the provocations reached a new level: Ukraine started demanding that the sailors coordinate any of their actions with the authorities, and there were attempts to inspect the fleet’s cargoes.
Crawling militarisation
At the same time from the beginning of the 2000s Ukraine began to drift towards NATO with a refusal of military cooperation with Russia: exercises Ukraine – NATO (on the territory of Ukraine), NATO ships call at Ukrainian ports, training of Ukrainian officers by specialists from NATO countries in the territory of Ukraine and their going for training to the countries of the North Atlantic Alliance, gradual transition to NATO standards. And finally, the issue of MAP, i.e. the sixth wave of the alliance’s eastward expansion (paired with Georgia). Later, after the Euromaidan, the NATO membership course was even included in the Constitution of Ukraine.
Even Viktor Yanukovych, under whom the interdepartmental commission to prepare Ukraine for NATO membership was abolished, kept relations at the level reached by his predecessor – i.e. froze them rather than turned the course towards normalisation of security relations with Russia. As for the post-2014 period, Poroshenko and then Zelensky have unfrozen everything and made up for it. Ukraine only started to receive annual military aid of several hundred million dollars from the US (and lethal weapons for the last few years). That is, pumping Ukraine with weapons began long before the events of 2022, and the supply of the notorious Javelin systems is just one episode of this pumping.
Despite the preferential trade regime with Russia, Ukraine has consistently avoided participation in Russia’s integration projects: multilateral (the Customs Union and the EAEU) and bilateral. The latter were offered in plenty: a plant for the fabrication of fuel for Ukrainian nuclear power plants on Ukrainian territory, a gas transport consortium, “grain OPEC”, the placement of Russian orders at Ukrainian shipyards, joint projects in the aircraft industry, and major investments in Ukrainian assets.
Of course, this is a mundane matter. Ukraine does not want to do business together, it happens. They have other plans. But when Russia started clamping down on energy resources supplies at preferential prices (including those for potential Russian or joint projects), and cutting of the preferential trade regime, accusations, threats, and attempts at petty naughty started in response. Suffice it to recall the hysteria around Nord Stream (still the first one) – they tried to disrupt its construction in exactly the same way as they did the second stage.
In other words, all these years Ukraine has tried to build its relations according to the formula “Russia owes us the rest of its life”. And Ukraine does not owe anything in return, it is independent and sovereign. And separately it does not have to account in any way for the security and military threats to Russia posed by the Ukrainian drift towards NATO.
It was possible to turn a blind eye to this (and Russia did so for many years). After 2014, however, it became clear that the time for ignoring the threat was fast running out. Formally neutral Ukraine has acquired maritime operations centres in Ochakov and Berdyansk.
“The naval bases in Ochakov and Berdyansk are planned as modern infrastructure facilities capable of hosting ships of all types, equipped to NATO standards and built at the expense of alliance countries,” the Ukrainian press openly wrote about them a year ago. “In three years’ time we will be able to chase Russian ships in the Black Sea with our mosquito fleet. And if we annex Georgia and Turkey, the Russian Federation will be blocked,” Ukrainian military experts boasted.
However, long before Ochakov and Berdyansk, NATO’s base in Ukraine was actually the Yavoriv training ground. And it was not alone: since 2014, foreign military advisers from several NATO countries have been present in Ukraine on a permanent basis. Their immediate withdrawal from Ukraine, in February 2022, was indicated by Vladimir Putin as one of the obligatory steps to de-escalate tensions around Ukraine.
Who shouted “Putin will attack” and why?
Let’s turn again to Ukrainian media forecasts: “Some politicians believe that the presence of foreign military and weapons on Ukrainian territory may provoke Russia into active actions”. Focus does not give the names of these politicians, but it does not matter. As we can see, even in Ukraine, there were people in their right mind who, at least in October 2021, warned about the scenario Ukraine had chosen for itself. The scenario of consistently ignoring opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation with Russia. The scenario of increasing militarisation and gradual transformation of Ukraine into one big military base. And this scenario started long before 2014, to which Ukraine could appeal, explaining its cooperation with NATO by its fear of Moscow.
And, of course, a few words about recent developments. Vyacheslav Chechylo, editor in chief of the Kapital.ua news and analysis website, bitterly writes about his disappointment with Russia: “And I do not know how to write what I have been writing for the last 10 years. After all, I wrote that Russia is a great power with a great culture, that it is useful and profitable for Ukraine to be friends with it. That we have a common great history, which unites us more than divides us. And the stories about the “Russian threat” – well, this is foolishness, of course, and nationalist propaganda… And all these years, it turns out, those freaks who shouted “Putin will attack” were right. It was very funny. Until Putin attacked.
But it is only a seeming mistake and contradiction. The freaks (nationalists) have been shouting “Putin will attack” all these years for one purpose only: for him to actually attack.
Their leaders were well aware that only a clear military threat to Ukraine from Russia would guarantee to destroy the basis for pro-Russian sentiments even in the territories historically friendly to Russia. It would kill everything that the language laws and the severance of economic ties had not killed.
They understood that without this threat they would forever remain political freaks, gaining 0.5% in elections everywhere except their native village. They would have sent thank-you notes to the Kremlin if they had been confident that no one would find out about it.
The current special operation by the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine is, unfortunately, an inevitability. Sooner or later, it would have to be carried out anyway – unless we want the naval operation centres to become full-fledged naval bases and the deployment of US missile defence elements in Ukraine.
For many Ukrainian politicians, making mischief against Russia has become a habit, a favourite and well-paid job. There is only one way out: it must be painful, unprofitable and unpleasant.
The compulsion to refuse to do mischief continues, but unfortunately, only the United States can guarantee an end to Ukrainian mischief. Which, on the contrary, is pumping weapons into it and moulding it with the image of a victim. Although an analysis of the situation even twenty years in depth suggests that Ukraine is the first to blame for its troubles and its so-called partners are accomplices.
Nikolay Storozhenko, VZGLYAD