Europe-Asia Studies

ISSN: 0966-8136 (Print) 1465-3427 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceas20

Russia–Ukraine Crisis: The Blame Game,

Geopolitics and National Identity

Taras Kuzio

To cite this article: Taras Kuzio (2018): Russia–Ukraine Crisis: The Blame Game, Geopolitics and
National Identity, Europe-Asia Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2018.1443643

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2018.1443643

Published online: 04 Apr 2018.

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 EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2018.1443643

Review Article
Russia–Ukraine Crisis: The Blame Game,
Geopolitics and National Identity

TARAS KUZIO

Neil Kent, Crimea. A History. London: Hurst & Co, 2016, ix + 224pp., £20.00 h/b.
Chris Kaspar de Ploeg, Ukraine in the Crossfire. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2017, 353pp.,
$23.95 p/b.
Gerald Toal, Near Abroad. Putin, The West, and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017, xx + 387pp., £19.99 h/b.
Samuel Charap & Timothy J. Colton, Everyone Loses. The Ukraine Crisis and Ruinous
Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia. London: International Institute for Strategic Studies,
2017, 212pp., £13.99 p/b.

RUSSIA’S ANNEXATION OF CRIMEA AND HYBRID WAR IN THE EASTERN Ukrainian region of the
Donbas (comprising the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasti) led to an almost unprecedented surge
in the publication of think-tank papers, journal articles and books on Ukraine. Ukrainian
studies centres in North America, which traditionally focus on culture and history, have
not participated in this wave of new publications, written by scholars working in the fields
of Russian and Eurasian studies, political science, international relations, and security and
military studies.
The majority of scholars writing on the crisis do not seem to have followed the advice
they impart to their graduate and doctoral students: to use a majority of primary sources in
their research and undertake fieldwork in the country under study. Most of the writing on the
crisis has instead relied upon Western secondary sources. One reason for this is that political
science in the United States, unlike area studies in the United Kingdom and Europe, is
weakly endowed with fluent speakers of relevant languages. Nationalism studies is also poorly
represented in US political science, as the great majority of scholarly journals on nationalism
are Britain-based. Additionally, one would assume that scholars of Russian and Eurasian

© 2018 University of Glasgow

https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2018.1443643
2 TARAS KUZIO

studies would seek to use primary sources from Ukraine; this has not been the case either. This
shortcoming is surprising, as lack of knowledge of Ukrainian is not a hindrance to reading,
watching and listening to the Ukrainian media: leading Ukrainian publications have Russian
and Ukrainian pages, the majority of print media are in Russian, and three (Korrespondent,
Fokus and Novaya Vremya) of Ukraine’s five weekly political magazines are published in
Russian. Media access, due to the internet, is easier than it was in Soviet times. Scholars have
nevertheless continued to use primary sources from the Russian Federation and there are few
recent examples of the use of even Russian-language sources from Ukraine.1 This weakness
is surprising, as the websites of the Ukrainian government, president and parliament are in
both Russian and Ukrainian.2
As a consequence of these research shortcomings, scholarship can only take a one-
dimensional approach to the crisis. Scholars writing about the crisis often cite President
Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, overlooking statements by President
Petro Poroshenko and various Ukrainian prime ministers. In Near Abroad, Gerald Toal cites
the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, on two occasions and Poroshenko only once.
In Everyone Loses, Samuel Charap and Timothy J. Colton at least cite Poroshenko on four
occasions but report more often the views of Russian leaders. A book written about a conflict
in Russia that did not cite the Russian president would be inconceivable.
Unwillingness to travel to the Donbas war zone is perhaps understandable; the absence
of fieldwork in largely Russian-speaking eastern and southern Ukraine is not. Interviews in
eastern and southern Ukraine would have also illuminated the views of Russian speakers,
traditionally prone to stereotyping as ‘pro-Russian’ by Western scholars and journalists
writing about Ukraine. The alleged repression of Russian speakers following Euromaidan
revolutionaries coming to power in the third week of February 2014 was the main argument
used by Putin to invade Crimea and unleash a barrage of propaganda and an information war
against what he referred to as a ‘putsch’. The failure of Putin’s Novorossiya (New Russia)
project in Ukraine’s eight eastern and southern oblasti brings out the importance of interviews
with primary sources on the ground. Ukrainian opinion polls available on the internet are
useful to researchers; nothing is nevertheless more illuminating than talking to people in the
midst of a conflict. Conflicts and wars throughout history have speeded up the crystallisation
of national identity. By not doing fieldwork, scholars have missed an intellectually rewarding
opportunity to research a crucial moment in the remaking of Ukrainian national identity and
Russian–Ukrainian relations.
Of the four books under review here, Kent’s history of Crimea is the most balanced.3 He
writes of ‘[t]he unique situation of Crimea at the geographic crossroad of Eurasia continuing
to define its identity’ (p. 2). De Ploeg’s work, common to much of the scholarship on the
crisis, blames the promotion of democracy by the United States and the European Union for

  1The only Ukrainian source used in Sakwa’s book (2016) is the English-language Kyiv Post.
  2The official Russian-language pages of the websites of the Ukrainian president, parliament and government
are available at: http://www.president.gov.ua/ru; http://iportal.rada.gov.ua/ru; and http://www.kmu.gov.ua/
control/ru, accessed 19 December 2017.
  3Also worth noting is Magocsi (2014), published two months after Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
 REVIEW ARTICLE 3

provoking Russia into reacting.4 Toal, and Charap and Colton strive to be balanced in their
criticism of Western policies towards Russia and Eurasia and of Russian military aggression
against Ukraine.
The only historian amongst the authors reviewed here, Kent lucidly traces the history of
Crimea from its time as a Tatar Khanate and Ottoman vassal state, although the relationship
between the Crimean Tatars and the Ottomans has always been contentious, as Crimea was
the only region of the Ottoman Empire with autonomous status. As an ally of the Ottomans,
Crimean Tatars conducted numerous raids into the Ukrainian steppes that carried off an
estimated one million people into slavery. At other times, the Tatars were allies of Ukrainian
Cossacks fighting the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which suffered three major defeats
in the mid-seventeenth century. Kent’s historical overview continues right up to Russia’s
annexation of the peninsula from Ukraine in spring 2014. Kent’s history of Crimea has
significant ramifications for national identity, historical myths and national stereotypes in
the contemporary Russia–Ukraine crisis (Plokhy 2000). Wars and conflicts over Crimea and
the strategically significant port of Sevastopol play an important role in Russian national
identity; in particular, the Crimean war of the 1850s, when Tsarist Russia was defeated by a
French–British–Ottoman alliance, and the Great Patriotic War, when the Soviet army defeated
the Nazis.
Kent repeats the widely held view amongst Western historians of Russia and many
Russianists that the ‘reunion’ of Crimea and Russia returned the peninsula to its ‘natural’
home, as does De Ploeg who writes, ‘Indeed, Crimea has been a part of Russia for 170 years,
much longer than its history as a Ukrainian province’ (p. 117). Kent describes Crimea as the
‘Cinderella of the Ukrainian state’ (p. 150).
But who then are the ‘native peoples’ of Crimea and when do we start the clock ticking,
1783 or earlier? If we start from when Russia annexed Crimea, then applying this framework
to North America would lead to European settlers who landed in 1607–1608 in Virginia and
Quebec being classified as the ‘native peoples’. Russia claims a right to sovereignty over
Crimea in two ways. First, because the region remained part of the Tsarist Russian empire and
the Russian SFSR within the USSR for a longer period than it was part of Soviet Ukraine. A
second logic has gained prominence in Russia since the launch of Russkii Mir in 2007 and the
1,020th and 1,025th anniversaries of the adoption of Christianity by Kyiv Rus in 2008 and
2013 respectively, when Putin travelled to Ukraine to participate in celebrations organised by
the Russian Orthodox Church and its Ukrainian affiliate, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In
November 2016, a 17-metre monument to Kyiv Rus Grand Prince Volodymyr the Great was
unveiled in Moscow.5 In this second logic, the Russian Orthodox Church and Putin persistently
highlight the eternal ‘fraternal’ bonds of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians stretching
from Kyiv Rus to the present. Ukraine as the origin of ‘Russian’ civilisation was clearly laid
out in Putin’s 18 March 2014 speech to the State Duma and Federation Council welcoming
Crimea’s accession to the Russian Federation. Putin described Crimea as part ‘of our shared
history’ and the location where Volodymyr was baptised, which ‘predetermined the overall
basis of the culture, civilisation and human value that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine

  4Another example of a book seeking to ascribe blame on Western policies towards Russia is Sakwa (2016).
For a critical discussion of the apportioning of blame on the West and Russia see D’Anieri (2016).
  5Volodymyr (Vladimir) ruled Kyiv Rus from 980 to 1015. The first reference to Moscow is 1147 as a minor
town on the western border of the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal.
4 TARAS KUZIO

and Belarus’.6 Putin’s renewed emphasis on the unity of the three eastern Slavic peoples and
thus Ukraine’s destiny as lying within Russkii Mir therefore predated the 2014 crisis.
Kent writes, ‘There is no doubt that the majority of the population of Crimea supported
joining the Russian Federation’ (p. 160). In the absence of opinion polls and fieldwork, how
can such a claim be independently verified, especially when the official referendum result
of 97% would have to mean most Tatars and Ukrainians (who together numbered 36.3%
in the 2001 census) voted in favour? A leak from the Russian presidential Council on Civil
Society and Human Rights gave only a 30% turnout, with 15% in support of union with
Russia (Gregory 2014). Kent’s statements about the popularity of Sergei Aksyonov are hard
to believe as Russia Unity won only 4% in the 2010 Crimean elections and also on the basis
of Aksyonov’s alleged links to organised crime (his nom de guerre was ‘Goblin’). Therefore
Russians, often backed by Western historians, view themselves as the indigenous people of
Crimea, whereas Tatars and Ukrainians believe that the Tatar population has the greatest
claim. In a foretaste of their future post-Soviet alliance, Ukrainian dissidents took up the
cause of the Crimean Tatars, the most famous of whom was the highly decorated Soviet
General Petro Grigorenko.
Russian, Tatar and Ukrainian historical myths cloud competing claims to Crimea to this
day, as seen in two historic episodes. On 18 May 1944, after Soviet forces had re-occupied
Crimea, 288,000 Crimean Tatars, together with 40,000 Armenians, Bulgarians and Greeks,
were deported to Uzbekistan and to the Udmurt and Mari autonomous republics in the RSFSR.
The autonomous Crimean republic was abolished on 30 June 1945. Its dramatically reduced
population came to be dominated by ethnic Russians (numbering 58.3% in the 2001 census),
which remains the case to the present day. Crimea was also important to the Soviet nationalities
policy of the Russian–Ukrainian ‘fraternal brotherhood’, as Crimea was transferred in 1954
on the symbolically important 300th anniversary of the reunion of Ukraine and Russia in the
1654 Treaty of Peryaslav. Kent could have offered more details as to the reasons behind the
Soviet government’s decision to transfer Crimea to Soviet Ukraine. Russia’s annexation of
Crimea 60 years later is viewed by Ukrainian nationalists as undermining the basis for this
‘fraternal brotherhood’ (Kuzio 2017a).
The Crimean oblast’ was upgraded to an autonomous republic in 1990 within Soviet
Ukraine on the eve of the disintegration of the USSR; unfortunately, Kent’s account of
this development is confusing. Independent Ukraine inherited an autonomous Crimea and
Sevastopol; their sovereignty was contested by Russia under both presidents Boris Yel’tsin
and Putin, with a growing Tatar minority demanding to be constitutionally defined as the
indigenous people. By 1997–1998, the Crimean separatist threat had been peacefully dealt
with and Russia and Ukraine signed a treaty recognising their border.
The roots of the current crisis can be traced in the emergence of the Party of Regions after
Leonid Kuchma left office and the 2004 Orange Revolution. The section of Kent’s book dealing
with this and other recent political events is the weakest. Kent confuses the Party of Regions,
Putin’s United Russia and Prime Minister Aksyonov’s Russia Unity party. In 2005, the Party of
Regions signed a cooperation agreement with United Russia and Konstantin Zatulin brokered
an alliance between the Party of Regions and Crimean Russian nationalist–separatist parties

  6‘Address by President of the Russian Federation’, 18 March 2014, available at: http://en.kremlin.ru/
events/president/news/20603, accessed 19 December 2017.
 REVIEW ARTICLE 5

for elections held in Crimea between 2006 and 2012.7 As a consequence, Crimean Russian
nationalists re-emerged from their marginalisation under former President Kuchma. In 2008,
the Party of Regions, Ukrainian communists and Crimean Russian nationalists were alone
in Eurasia (outside Russia) in supporting the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia
using the argument (repeated in the case of Crimea in 2014) that what was good for the former
Yugoslav province of Kosovo was good for other former autonomous regions. The following
year, the expulsion of two Russian diplomats accused of backing separatists led to the lowest
point of Russian–Ukrainian relations and a vitriolic open letter from then President Medvedev
to President Viktor Yushchenko (Medvedev 2009). Only small opposition parties led by Boris
Nemtsov, Grigory Yavlinsky and Garry Kasparov opposed the annexation of Crimea and
Sevastopol, while Aleksei Naval’nyi,8 Russia’s most popular opposition leader, supported the
annexation (as did Mikhail Khodorkovsky). Throughout the Yel’tsin presidency, the Russian
parliament made territorial claims and Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov provided technical and
financial support to pro-Russian forces on the ground, financially assisted in the building of
accommodation for Black Sea officers and was the main advocate of Russian irredentism
towards Crimea and Sevastopol in the Federation Council, which led to his being banned from
entering Ukraine (Kuzio 2010). Ukrainians, on the other hand, including nationalists, have
been willing to fight for the Donbas but not for Crimea, which does not play the same role
in Ukrainian historical mythology and national identity as it does in Russian (Kuzio 2014).
The thrust of De Ploeg’s book is revealed by the titles of his chapters, which are overtly
critical of Ukrainian nationalists and Western policies, clearly pointing to an ideologically
driven rather than scholarly book. Ukraine in the Crossfire is a reflection of a curious similarity
of views between leftwing critics of US foreign policy and centre-right realists who are the
most ardent advocates of a robust defence of US national interests (Mearsheimer 2014; Menon
& Rumer 2015). Leftwing critics and realists deny agency to Ukraine and small countries to
determine their future, which in their view should be decided by the great powers.
The selection of facts used in the books on the crisis is important. Charap and Colton
(pp. 88–9), for example, in discussing Putin’s speech to the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest,
focus on his threats against future NATO enlargement to Georgia and Ukraine.9 The authors
also ignore Putin’s discussion of Ukraine as an artificial entity and his questioning of Ukraine’s
sovereignty over eastern and southern Ukraine eight years before he revived the Tsarist
concept of Novorossiya. Russian nationalists, from the 1970 samizdat document ‘A Nation
Speaks’ written by dissidents who signed themselves ‘Russian Patriots’ (Joo 2008)10 through to
the well-known dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn11 and President Putin, have contested

  7‘Ukraine: The Russia Factor in Crimea–Ukraine’s “Soft Underbelly”’, US Embassy Kyiv, Wikileaks, 7
December 2006, available at: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06KYIV4489_a.html, accessed 19 December
2017.
  8Naval’nyi’s 2018 election programme does not call for the withdrawal of Russian forces from Crimea
and the Donbas and includes no condemnation of Russian military aggression against Ukraine. See
https://2018.navalny.com/platform/, accessed 23 January 2018.
  9‘Text of Putin’s Speech at NATO Summit (Bucharest, April 2, 2008)’, available at: https://www.unian.info/
world/111033-text-of-putins-speech-at-nato-summit-bucharest-april-2-2008.html, accessed 19 December 2017.
10
Russian Patriots, ‘A Nation Speaks’, Survey, 17, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp. 191–99; and Radio Liberty Arkhiv
Samizdata, Doc. No. 590.
11
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘Rebuilding Russia’, 1990, available at: http://www.solzhenitsyn.ru/proizvedeniya/
publizistika/stati_i_rechi/v_izgnanii/kak_nam_obustroit_rossiyu.pdf, accessed 23 January 2018.
6 TARAS KUZIO

Ukraine’s sovereignty over eastern and southern Ukraine on historic and linguistic–cultural
grounds (Horvath 2011; Coalson 2014; Kuzio 2017b, pp. 33–84).
De Ploeg (pp. 36–68), in line with leftwing critics of US foreign policy, loves conspiracies,
four of which he sees as being at the centre of the crisis. The first is that the Euromaidan
was a US-backed conspiracy, with Ukrainian nationalists dominating the ranks of protestors
and heavily influencing Ukrainian politics. In fact Ukraine’s far right has one of the lowest
levels of support in Europe and did not win sufficient votes to enter parliament in the October
2014 elections. President Poroshenko is a centrist oligarch whose Solidarity party was one
of five parties that merged in 2000 to launch the Party of Regions, after which he shifted his
allegiance to Yushchenko. The second is that the snipers who killed Euromaidan protestors
were Ukrainian nationalists, not Berkut Ministry of Interior special forces. This conspiracy
theory was promoted by Russia until recently, when it was replaced by a new conspiracy
myth of Georgian snipers.12 The third is that ‘Ukrainian nationalists’ are to blame for the 2
May 2014 fire in Odesa that killed 48 protestors, 42 of whom were pro-Russian activists.
The fourth is US and NATO leadership of Ukraine’s military strategy. De Ploeg writes, ‘It
seems reasonable to suggest that Ukraine’s war strategy is heavily influenced by Washington’
(p. 226). All four conspiracies are promoted by Russia’s information war, about which a
lot has been written (especially by Western think-tanks) but without integrating previously
published research on Soviet active measures, dezinformatsiya and anti-nationalist ideological
campaigns by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Ukrainians seeking a future for their
country outside the Tsarist empire, USSR and Russkii Mir have been castigated with different
names—‘Mazepinists’ (followers of Hetman Ivan Mazepa who allied Cossack Ukraine with
Sweden and were defeated by Russia in 1709), ‘Petlurites’ (followers of Symon Petlura who
commanded the army of the 1917–1921 Ukrainian People’s Republic), ‘Banderites’ (followers
of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalist leader Stepan Bandera in the 1940s and 1950s),
‘traitors’, ‘agents of Western imperialism’ and ‘fascists’—during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries (Kuzio 2017b, pp. 85–117).
The stereotype of a divided Ukraine on the verge of disintegration has been with us since
the first half of the 1990s, leading to faulty analyses and conclusions, which continue to be
present in writing about the Russia–Ukraine crisis (De Ploeg, pp. 12–20). Putin warned NATO
in 2008 that Ukraine was an artificial and failed state, two denigrations that are staples of
Russian nationalist thought.
Scholars need to move beyond the common but simplistic depiction of Ukraine as a
Russian-speaking east at loggerheads with a Ukrainian-speaking west; it is wrong to describe
‘eastern’ and ‘western’ Ukraine as uniform entities. Orthodox parishes constitute four out of
Ukraine’s seven western oblasti, for example, while the Donbas had, up to the 2014 crisis, as
many Protestant as Russian Orthodox parishes. The majority of Russian Orthodox (officially
registered as Ukrainian Orthodox) parishes are to be found in western and central, not eastern,
Ukraine. Crimea is very different to its neighbouring southern Ukrainian regions and the
Donbas is different to the remainder of eastern Ukraine. Toal (p. 234) provides polling data
showing overwhelming negative views of Putin in eastern and southern Ukraine, reflecting the
collapse of support for the Soviet myth of the ‘fraternal peoples’, but positive views in Crimea.

12
‘Alternative Peace and Harmony’, EU Disinformation Review, 30 November 2017, available at:
https://euvsdisinfo.eu/alternative-peace-and-harmony/, accessed 23 January 2018.
 REVIEW ARTICLE 7

Russian–Ukrainian disputes over Crimea did not begin in February 2014 but were present
throughout the post-Soviet era—and not just with the ‘nationalistic’ Yushchenko. It took
President Yel’tsin four years after Kuchma was elected on a moderately pro-Russian platform
to travel to Kyiv to sign an inter-state treaty that recognised the Russian–Ukrainian border.
Russia’s relations with the even more pro-Russian Yanukovych were also difficult and
although he implemented all of the demands in President Medvedev’s August 2009 open
letter (Medvedev 2009), Russia charged Ukraine the highest gas price in Europe throughout his
presidency. The strained relations that eastern Ukrainian Presidents Kuchma and Yanukovych
had with Yel’tsin and Putin respectively shows how Russia’s relationship with Ukraine had
deep and unresolved problems that came to the surface in 2014.
The concept of a Novorossiya stretching from Kharkiv through the Donbas and along
southern Ukraine was always therefore doomed to fail, as was the idea of a ‘land bridge’
from the Russian border east of Mariupol to Odesa. Putin wrongly believed that the ‘artificial’
Ukraine in spring 2014 needed only a small push and it would disintegrate, as Russian speakers
in Novorossiya, fearful of Ukrainian nationalists coming to power, would support union with
Russia. However the Novorossiya project failed completely, particularly in the two crown
jewels of Odesa and Kharkiv (the latter was mistakenly included by Putin as part of the
Tsarist Novorossiya guberniya). In addition, half or more of Ukrainian military and security
forces fighting in the Donbas are Russian speakers,13 in a development that undermines
the description of the conflict as a ‘civil war’ (de Ploeg, pp. 123–36) between Ukrainian
and Russian speakers (Wilson 2016). The highest number of deaths of the 3,531 recorded
casualties of Ukrainian security forces (army, national guard, Security Service, Ministry of
Interior, border guards) are from eastern-southern Ukraine (1,218), followed by central (1,522)
and western Ukraine (791). By far the highest number of deaths was of security forces from
Dnipro (Dnipropetrovs’k), an oblast’ neighbouring the Donbas (see Figure 1).14
The Azov National Guard regiment, which is often criticised as a far-right nationalist unit,
is mainly composed of Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainians, including people from areas of
the Donbas controlled by Russian proxies. In describing the Donbas conflict as a ‘civil war’,
leftwing critics and realists claim that Ukrainian nationalists are ‘Dismantling Russophone
Ukraine’ (the title of one of De Ploeg’s chapters). Of the books reviewed, only Toal uses
Ukrainian sociological data; one reason why other scholars perhaps do not is because the
data could provide different conclusions to the ones they seek. Only a small minority of
Ukrainians (5%), for example, believe Russia intervened in Crimea and the Donbas because
of the violation of the rights of Russian speakers, the ostensible reason given by Putin for the
former and his explanation for Ukraine’s ‘civil war’ in the latter. Eight to ten times as many

13
Language is not an issue for Ukrainian soldiers. Two examples of my fieldwork included a Russian-
speaking Ukrainian from Poltava (nom de guerre ‘Sever’), who was a paratrooper in the Zhitomir-based
95th Air Assault Brigade and had fought at Donetsk airport where the media nicknamed them ‘Cyborgs’
because of their bravery in holding out for 242 days. See the trailer for the December 2017 film ‘Cyborgs’ at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka5t9Zs_H88, accessed 23 January 2018. Another Russian speaker from
Trans-Carpathia (nom de guerre ‘Fagot’), who when I interviewed him was commander of the second company,
15th battalion, 128th brigade and had been fighting in the Donbas for three years, is half Ukrainian and half
Hungarian. He is currently a deputy commander of a tank battalion with the rank of Major. Interviews with
‘Sever’, Kyiv, 12 March 2016 and ‘Fagot’, Avdyivka, Donbas, 12 May 2016.
14
Figure 1 is a map of casualties by oblast’, prepared for the project ‘Knyha Pam’yati Polehlykh za Ukrayinu’.
An interactive version of the map is available at: http://memorybook.org.ua/indexfile/statbirth.htm, accessed
24 January 2018. The memorial book is a project of the Centre for Documentation, Ukrainian Helsinki Union
for Human Rights, headed by Oleksiy Bida, a journalist who fled Luhansk.
8 TARAS KUZIO

FIGURE 1. UKRAINIAN CONFLICT: NUMBER OF CASUALTIES BY Oblast’ OF ORIGIN

(AS OF 27 OCTOBER 2017).
Source: Knyha Pam’yati Polehlykh za Ukrayinu.

Ukrainians believe Russian intervention was to prevent Ukraine leaving Russia’s sphere of
influence (46.2%), Russia’s inability to accept Ukraine as an independent state (42.5%) and
Russian opposition to Ukraine’s European integration (42.3%).15 Only 16.3% of Ukrainians
view the conflict in the Donbas as a civil war while 59.5% see it as Russian-supported
separatism and a war between Russia and Ukraine.16
Additionally, viewing the conflict as a ‘civil war’ conveniently allows De Ploeg and
others to downplay Russia’s military support for hybrid war in the Donbas. Debate over
Russia’s invasion of Crimea has centred on whether it was an ‘improved annexation operation’
(Charap & Colton, p. 128) or a plan that had long been on the shelf, then dusted off in
response to the Euromaidan in Kyiv and implemented. The origins of the Donbas conflict
pose ‘serious structural challenges for scholarly analysis’ (Toal, p. 238): whether to discuss
Russian intervention early on during anti-Maidan protests (January–February 2014) or after
Igor (‘Strelkov’) Girkin and his Russian spetsnaz invaded Ukraine (mid-April 2014). Pro-
Russian protests in Novorossiya were not bottom-up and armed revolt was only made possible
by ‘armed provocateurs’ (Toal, p. 239) from Russia whose mission was to transform largely
unarmed protests into armed separatism. By July–August 2014, after the shooting down of
the Malaysian airliner MH17 with the death of 298 passengers and crew, artillery attacks from
Russia into Ukraine (Case 2016), and invading Russian forces, Russia’s military intervention
could no longer be questioned.
Russian nationalists blame Putin for allegedly ‘betraying’ Novorossiya by not repeating
the Crimean operation of Girkin’s spetsnaz preparing the ground for Russia’s annexation of
the territory. In reality, the project failed because Ukraine’s Russian speakers are Ukrainian

15
Special issue on Ukrainian–Russian relations, Nationalna Bezpeka i Oborona, No. 8–9, 2015, pp. 63, 69,
available at: http://razumkov.org.ua/uploads/journal/ukr/NSD157-158_2015_ukr.pdf, accessed 19 December
2017.
16
Special issue on Russia’s hybrid war, Nationalna Bezpeka i Oborona, No. 9–10, 2016, pp. 45, 47, available
at: http://razumkov.org.ua/uploads/journal/ukr/NSD167-168_2016_ukr.pdf, accessed 19 December 2017.
 REVIEW ARTICLE 9

patriots with an identity grounded in civic terms (such as English-speaking Scots, Welsh or
Irish). Russian identity in contrast, is ethnic with a strong emphasis placed on language and
culture. Putin has repeatedly described Russians and Ukrainians as odin narod (one people),
with eastern Slavs understood as being the same as the ‘Russian’ people.17 Russian speakers
(compatriots) are assumed to be pro-Russian and pro-Putin, supporting the civilisation choice
of living in Russkii Mir rather than in Europe.
Toal’s book, which includes four chapters on Georgia and two chapters on Ukraine that were
presumably added as the crisis unfolded, is critical of both the liberal and realist analyses of
the crisis: ‘Both rest on superficial conceptions of geopolitics’ (p. 21). The former USSR, Toal
writes, is not a region whose only choices are between freedom and empire. Toal believes there
is a need to bring into our analyses ‘nationalising states’, national minorities, counter-reaction
from pro-unionist forces, colour revolutions, and NATO and the EU, thereby integrating
domestic with foreign factors (realists ignore the domestic environment). Toal’s book shows
a better understanding of the failure of Novorossiya. The crisis, as understood by Russian
nationalists and Putin, was caused by a part of ‘Russia’ (that is, Ukraine) attempting to break
away from ‘Russia’; indeed, Russian nationalists such as Girkin have described Ukrainians
as the real ‘separatists’ (Kuzio 2017b, pp. 81–2). If Toal had expanded this brief discussion of
Russian–Ukrainian conflicts over national identity, his book would have provided an original
analysis of the main underlying driver of the crisis.
Toal points out that the European Union and NATO have never offered membership to
Ukraine. Nevertheless, he writes, ‘Concern over the future of Russia’s presence in Sevastopol
was reasonable’ (p. 215) implying that a Ukraine on course to join NATO would have ejected
Russia from its naval base. He criticises the ‘legal fetishisation’ (p. 28) of territorial integrity
and the liberal (and EU) promotion of universal values. Meanwhile, realists are criticised by
Toal for attributing agency to only great powers with small states subordinate to the ‘grand
bargains’ made above their heads. Toal writes, ‘Not everything is about the game of state
power politics, as realists understand it’ (p. 33). Putin and US President Donald Trump would
think otherwise. Russia believed that relations would improve (and support for sanctions
would collapse) if realists and nationalist populists were to come to power in the 2016 US
presidential elections. Ironically, President Trump’s support for a realist great power approach
to relations with Russia is welcomed by De Ploeg and other scholars and journalists on the
left because it would re-set US–Russian relations and end the democracy-promotion agenda
associated with liberal internationalism. However the reset failed before it started, as had two
earlier ‘resets’ under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama in 2001 and 2009–2010
respectively. Russia rejects the right of Ukraine to choose its geopolitical orientation and in
seeking Trump’s election, ‘Russia wanted the deal clinched by the great powers and imposed
on Ukraine’ (Charap & Colton, p. 131). Instead of a ‘grand bargain’, the West made demands
on Putin and, following an outcry against Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections, the
US Congress voted unanimously for new and tougher sanctions in summer 2017 and launched
personalised sanctions against individual Russian elites in January 2018. Russian–US relations
are at their lowest point in decades and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the level
of ‘Russophobia’ in the West is higher than during the Cold War.18
17
This was again repeated by Putin at his 14 December 2017 annual press conference, available at:
http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2017/12/14/7165538/, accessed 19 December 2017.
18
‘Lavrov Says Western “Russophobia” Worse Than During Cold War’, RFERL, 22 January 2018, available at:
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-lavrov-russophobia/28989014.html, accessed 23 January 2018.
10 TARAS KUZIO

Charap and Colton point out that Putin’s expectation of dominance in Eurasia is nothing
new; this had also been promoted by Yel’tsin, who supported various forms of integration
with former Soviet republics. Charap and Colton do not support the thesis that after the Rose
and Orange Revolutions, Russia became a ‘counter-revolutionary’ actor with an ‘authoritarian
promotion agenda’ (pp. 77, 78). Toal, and this reviewer, would disagree. Toal writes that
the crisis has been ‘years in the making and reflects a deepening alienation of Putin’s inner
circle from Western political and security institutions’ (p. 208). Putin adopted increasingly
nationalistic and anti-Western xenophobic rhetoric following the 2003–2004 Rose and Orange
Revolutions, the launch of the EU’s Eastern Partnership for post-Soviet states in 2009, the
failure of the US–Russian reset in 2010–2011, and Russian anti-presidential protests in 2011–
2012. Putin’s response to the Eastern Partnership was to launch a competing CIS Customs
Union that Ukraine would join under Yanukovych following his re-election in January 2015,
the same month it transformed into the Eurasian Economic Union. Democratic revolutions
in Georgia and Ukraine and Russian protests were viewed not as authentic actions but as
Western-financed conspiracies directed against Russian national interests. Similarly, Putin
viewed the overthrow of Yanukovych and coming to power of what he termed ‘fascists’ and
‘anti-Semites’ as Western subterfuge to undermine his plans for Eurasian integration. In
Russian nationalist thought, Ukraine is one of three peoples which emerged from the eastern
Slavic brotherhood of Kyiv Rus and their age-old fraternity naturally underpins Russkii Mir
and the Eurasian Union.
As is common in think-tank publications, Charap and Colton formulate policy proposals.
They believe the West and Russia should both acknowledge their mistakes. NATO and the
European Union should desist from enlarging into Eurasia, and Ukraine and Georgia should
seek a ‘guarantee of status neutral’ (pp. 181–82). The CIS Customs Union (since 2015, the
Eurasian Economic Union) should not expand. Charap and Colton insist this does not mean
acceptance of Russia’s domination of its neighbours or a ‘grand bargain’ and believe the West
should demand the right for states to decide where they wish to integrate, including into the
EU’s Eastern Partnership. Russia should be persuaded that it does not need a Eurasian sphere
of influence to be treated as a great power. The West should stop making demands on Russia
and instead seek compromise through mutually beneficial negotiations. Russia should respect
the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its neighbours and withdraw from areas where
sovereignty is not disputed; that is, they refer to the Donbas but not Crimea.
Although intellectually interesting, these proposals have sadly little likelihood of being
implemented. From 2010, Russia began to oppose EU enlargement into Eurasia (in addition
to its traditional hostility to NATO) and did not differentiate between EU membership and the
EU Eastern Partnership, which provides integration but not membership. Charap and Colton
themselves provide the reasons for the unlikely implementation of their proposals when they
outline Russia’s objectives in Ukraine remaining the same as in the February 2014 agreement
negotiated by the EU, Yanukovych and the Ukrainian opposition (p. 131). Putin’s long-
standing goal of a federalised Ukraine with the Russian-controlled Donbas given autonomy
and holding veto powers over Kyiv’s domestic and foreign policies is a non-starter for any
Ukrainian president. Charap and Colton believe Ukraine and Georgia can only have their
territorial integrity restored if they reject the goals of NATO and EU membership (p. 166). In
the early 1990s, Russian hybrid warfare manufactured frozen conflicts in Azerbaijan, Moldova
and Georgia, before NATO enlargement became a goal for Georgia. NATO membership has
 REVIEW ARTICLE 11

never been a goal of Azerbaijan and Moldova. It is debatable whether Russia’s intervention
in Moldova and Georgia in the 1990s was ‘productive’ and ‘necessary’ (Charap & Colton,
p. 58) to end bloodshed that Russian-supplied proxies initiated in the first place.
The four reviewed books provide a variety of perspectives on the Russia–Ukraine crisis.
Kent provides a welcome addition to the sparse literature on Crimea, although his writing on
the current politics of the region could be improved and updated. The books by De Ploeg, Toal,
and Charap and Colton, as do others not under review, suffer from an unwillingness to apply
the same rigorous academic standards on the use of primary sources and fieldwork to their
research and writing that scholars demand of their postgraduate students. De Ploeg’s book is
representative of an influential body of leftwing critics of US foreign policy that, together with
realist accounts, blame the West for the crisis. Toal, and Charap and Colton seek to provide
balanced criticisms of the West and Russia, although only Toal succeeds in this endeavour.

TARAS KUZIO, Non-Resident Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced
International Relations, Johns Hopkins University, USA. Email: taraskuziophd@gmail.com.

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