Russia's 2022 War Against Ukraine and

the EU’s Foreign Policy Reaction:

Context, Diplomacy, and Law Luigi
Lonardo
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Russia’s 2022 War
Against Ukraine and
the Foreign Policy
Reaction of the EU
Context, Diplomacy,
and Law
Luigi Lonardo
 Global Foreign Policy Studies

Series Editors
Karen E. Smith
Department of International Relations
London School of Economics and Political Science
London, UK
Kai He
Centre for Governance and Public Policy
Griffith University, Nathan, QLD, Australia
Cameron G. Thies
James Madison College, Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, USA

Editorial Board Members

Karin Aggestam
Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Dewi Fortuna Anwar
Indonesian Academy of Sciences
Jakarta, Indonesia
Amnon Aran
City, University of London, London, UK
Klaus Brummer
Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Eichstätt, Germany

Feliciano de Sá Guimarães
Universidade de São Paulo
São Paulo, Brazil
 Erin Kristin Jenne
Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

Juliet Kaarbo
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Hiro Katsumata
Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

Mingjiang Li
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore, Singapore

Honghua Men
Tongji University, Shanghai, China

Candice Moore
University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, South Africa

Özgür Özdamar
Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

Leticia Pinheiro
Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Rajesh Rajagopalan
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
 Jorge A. Schiavon
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE)
Mexico City, Mexico

Arlene Beth Tickner

Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, Colombia
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 Luigi Lonardo

Russia’s 2022 War

Against Ukraine and
the Foreign Policy
Reaction of the EU
Context, Diplomacy, and Law
Luigi Lonardo
University College Cork
Cork, Ireland

Global Foreign Policy Studies

ISBN 978-3-031-18693-6    ISBN 978-3-031-18694-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18694-3

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022

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 Я тот, кого никто не любит;
Я бич рабов моих земных,
Я царь познанья и свободы,
Я враг небес, я зло природы,
[…]
Люблю тебя нездешней страстью,
Как полюбить не можешь ты:
Всем упоением, всей властью.
Бессмертной мысли и мечты.

‘[I am the one] whom no one loves; who lives for lashing
His earthly slaves with furious beat,
The king of freedom and cognition,
Heaven’s foe, and nature’s own perdition
[…]
I love you with no earthly passion,
Such love that you could never find:
With rapture, in the towering fashion
Of an immortal heart and mind’
Lermontov, The Demon
Translation by C. Johnston

добрым людям в Украине и в России

 Preface

I wrote this book because it was impossible not to. The topic falls squarely
within what I teach and research professionally at university, and I wanted
others, that is, people other than my colleagues, to be aware of my
thoughts. The book is addressed to a broad readership. This is because I
hope that my reflections could be of some help to the non-specialist inter-
ested in the EU’s position vis-à-vis this war. The aim of the book is to offer
my views on what I consider to be some important themes in the relation-
ship between the EU, Russia, and Ukraine, at a time when the latter is
marred by war.
This is not an academic book, in the sense that my primary goal is not
to present and support an original contribution to scholarship on the
topic. Instead, I conceive this as a book with an informative, synthetic
character touching upon several disciplines. While I have tried to be rigor-
ous in the selection of my sources and balanced in the assessment—distin-
guishing where possible facts from (my) interpretation—this book is not
neutral because I think that, while it is too early to pass definitive judg-
ments on the ultimate responsibilities, in this war there is a clear aggressor
and a clear victim. This is why the book’s title refers to a Russian war
against Ukraine.
The book has a personal cost: I love Russia and I know that writing this
book means forfeiting the chance to go anywhere near there for the fore-
seeable future.

ix
x PREFACE

I am grateful to Anne-Kathrin Birchley-Brun at Palgrave Macmillan for

believing in this project and to Rubina Infanta Rani for the editorial assis-
tance. My heartfelt thanks go to Gavin Barrett, Gustav Schaldemose, and
Peter Van Elsuwege for their generous endorsements of the book.
I am also grateful to Luis Catão, Andrea Chiarello, Mike Han, Yuliya
Kaspiarovich, Viacheslav Morozov, Roman Petrov, Davide Sardo and
Melis Yasat for the exchange on these themes. Occasionally, I have incor-
porated their comments; occasionally, I have maintained my position
against their advice, so they are by no means responsible for the views
expressed in the final product.
I am happy to acknowledge that some of the material presented in sec-
tion 3 of Chap. 4 was originally published as part of my article ‘Weapons,
Humanitarian Assistance, Sanctions: A Legal Analysis of the EU’s
Immediate Response to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine of 2022’ (2022)
47, European Law Review. Some paragraphs are reproduced with permis-
sion of Thomson Reuters, while others have been simplified and updated.
For the sake of consistency, I have used Russian proper names (and
transliterations) throughout, even when there is a Ukrainian version.
Where possible, I have tried to reference sources available in English, and
I preferred not to overburden the text with a scholarly apparatus as it
ought to carry for an academic readership. All the quotations from Putin’s
speeches are those found on the website of the Government of the Russian
Federation: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts.

Cork, Ireland Luigi Lonardo

August 2022
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 The
 Context: The EU and Ukraine Between Slavophiles
and NATO15

3 EU
 Diplomacy: Foreign Policy Response to the War and
Future EU-Russia Relations39

4 Law:
 The Use of Force, EU Sanctions, and Assistance to
Ukraine61

Conclusion81

Index83

xi
 Abbreviations

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

CSDP Common Security and Defence Policy
ECHR European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights
ECJ European Court of Justice
ECtHR European Court of Human Rights
EEAS European External Action Service
EPF European Peace Facility
EU European Union
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
FSB Federal Security Service
GC General Court
GDP Gross Domestic Product
HR High Representative for the Union Foreign Affairs and Security Policy
ICC International Criminal Court
ICJ International Court of Justice
KGB Committee for State Security
KLA Kosovo Liberation Army
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
SVR Foreign Intelligence Service
TEU Treaty on the European Union
TFEU Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union
UN United Nations
UNSC United Nations Security Council
US United States
USSR Union of Soviet Social Republics, Soviet Union
WW1 First World War
WW2 Second World War

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract The purpose of this book is to provide some information on the

context of the war, as well as to offer an assessment of the way the EU
reacted to the conflict. The war waged by Russia against Ukraine is a
defining moment for Europe, as the strong emotional reactions and
momentous strategic as well as political consequences witness. This book
advances two interrelated key arguments. First, the reaction of the EU was
shaped by two long-existing constraints: military dependence on the US
and NATO, and energy dependence from Russia. The second argument,
which follows from the first, is that the reaction of the EU to this shocking
war is not revolutionary in terms of its political and legal structure, despite
EU rhetoric.

Keywords Russia • Ukraine • 2022 war • EU foreign policy •

Strategic autonomy

1.1   Why 24 February 2022 Is a Defining Moment

in the History of Europe

On the morning of 24 February 2022, Russia launched coordinated mili-

tary attacks in the territory of Ukraine. The Russian president, Vladimir
Vladimirovich Putin, defended them as a ‘special military operation’

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
L. Lonardo, Russia’s 2022 War Against Ukraine and the Foreign
Policy Reaction of the EU, Global Foreign Policy Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18694-3_1
2 L. LONARDO

necessary to protect Russian security against a possible NATO expansion,

and to protect the Russophone population in the Eastern Ukrainian region
of the Donbass against oppression by the government in Kiev. On the
same day, the Heads of State and Governments of the EU styled the attack
as ‘aggression’. In the later days and months, the EU reacted by adopting,
against Russia, the heaviest sanctions in its history; by providing Ukraine
with macro-financial assistance (including by financing the Member States
to transfer weapons to Kiev); and by offering significant humanitarian sup-
port to Ukraine. The purpose of this book is to provide some information
on the context of the war, as well as my assessment of the way the EU
reacted to the conflict. Its object is not a detailed narrative of the war, but
commentary and interpretation. It advances two interrelated key argu-
ments. First, the reaction of the EU was shaped by two long-existing con-
straints: military dependence on the US and NATO; and energy
dependence on Russia. The second argument, which follows from the
first, is that the reaction of the EU to this shocking war is not revolution-
ary in terms of its political and legal structure, despite EU rhetoric sug-
gesting that it is so. The introduction provides a minimum of background
information and sets out the key themes of the analysis that will be devel-
oped throughout the chapters.
That the topic deserves careful attention is justified by the fact that the
war waged by Russia against Ukraine is a defining moment for Europe.1
Its consequences may be analysed from several perspectives. I focus here
on the emotional, strategic, and geopolitical ones as they are, I think, the
most consequential.
Let us consider emotions first. For many in the EU, the war generated
a belief that they are on the right side of history. It triggered in Ukrainians
and many others in Europe fear, anger, and an enthusiasm to fight back.2
The need to act quickly to counter the invasion, associated with the
urgency created by these emotions, accounts for a strong reaction which
appeared to be conceived in haste rather than to be the result of lengthy
deliberation (this is only appearance, at least as far as sanctions as con-
cerned: the EU had them “ready” even before the war). Strong emotions
are felt on the other side as well. I will try to show that the Putin’s

1
In this book, the unqualified word ‘war’, refers to the military operations launched by
Russia on 24 February 2022. When I refer to the war in the Donbass started in 2014, this is
specified.
2
Elster (2022).
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

shocking acts were motivated by desperate wishful thinking, by (self-)

deception, and by idle interest, each contributing in proportions I am
unable to determine. These include the initial decision to attack Ukraine
and the choice to continue with a full-scale invasion even when, after the
initial hours of the conflict, the Russian army had failed to achieve what
was probably its primary objective: to remove Zelensky. The choice,
announced by Putin in late September 2022, to call up reservists also
responds to the same logic. As power and strength decline, paranoia may
increase, together with the claims of victimisation and the desire to be
respected voiced by the Russian president purporting to express the feel-
ings of Russians.3
Turning to strategic considerations, the invasion shows all the limita-
tions of the post-Cold War reordering of political space in Europe. The
war is aimed at coercing Ukraine into a Russian sphere of influence,
while forcing NATO, the EU, and the US to face their responsibilities for
their activities in, and vision for, the post-Soviet space.4 Land acquisition
by conquest, already witnessed with the annexation of Crimea in 2014,
the threat of nuclear war, and mobilisation of army reservists threw Europe
back to the darkest hours of the twentieth century. The challenge to the
EU and the US is not limited to a territory; it is ideological. Russia pro-
poses itself as the corrective to a dystopian, corrupted, decadent West.
With the aim of carving out this role for his country, Putin acts firmly
within the tradition of Slavophilia.5 The rejection of the unipolar world
was expressed by Putin already in 2007, when he manifested his vision
with a historic speech delivered at the Munich Security Conference. On
that occasion, Putin lamented the double standards and the unilateralism
of the West, which bypassed the UN Security Council (where Russia has a
permanent seat and the power to veto binding decisions) when it

3
The last words of this tragedy are not yet written, but it seems to be going in the opposite
direction of the last words of Sophocles’ Antigone: ‘boasts of arrogant men/bring on great
blows of punishment/so in old age men can discover wisdom’.
4
These are discussed at greater length in Chap. 2.
5
This is discussed in Chap. 2.
4 L. LONARDO

intervened militarily abroad.6 In Russia, new military doctrines, and, from

2008, a major army reform, followed.7
The war has momentous political consequences within the EU and its
immediate neighbourhood. It has already resulted in important policy
shifts and accelerated existing trends. Three days after the beginning of
the war, the German Chancellor Scholz announced a major turn in his
country’s foreign policy,8 as part of which it doubled its defence budget.
This was because the Russian invasion was a watershed (Zeitenwende, in
German) in the history of the continent. In the words of the EU Strategic
Compass, a policy document adopted in March 2022, the war is a ‘tec-
tonic shift in European history’.9 There were three new applications for
EU membership (Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova). Sweden and Finland
decided to join NATO, thus abandoning their historical (but by now
largely symbolical) neutrality. Economically, people in Ukraine and Russia
have been affected, as well as hundreds of millions more abroad who
depend on the global wheat market and on Russian energy.
As I mentioned, the first argument of the book is that the EU’s reaction
to the war was due to two long-existing constraints: military dependence
on the US and NATO and energy dependence on Russia. Since the EU as
such does not have an army, and is only in the course of developing its own
defence, NATO is largely responsible for ensuring security on the conti-
nent. Nobody in the EU wanted to take on Russia alone, despite some
Member States having significant military capabilities. As the US had
already declared—a stance which did not change even after the mid-term
elections of November 2022—that they would not intervene militarily,
this is likely to have shaped the EU’s response: direct military intervention

6
This is discussed in Chap. 4. On 24 February, the day the war started, Putin mentioned
explicitly the interventions in Kosovo (1999), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), and Syria.
7
These prepared the Russian army for asymmetric warfare (following the Chechen wars of
the 90s, and to avoid a scenario such as the US disaster in Afghanistan) (Gareev, 1998). To
simplify a more complex matter, this entails that the Russian army is divided, commanded,
and moved unlike other traditional armies. The seizure of Crimea being an example of a suc-
cessful operation for the purposes of the newly adopted doctrines. The destabilisation in the
Donbass was next. Replacing Zelensky in the first hours of the war should have been another
success story: it did not happen and as a consequence, in the context of a more ‘traditional’
campaign, the Russian army showed how outdated and cumbersome it actually was. Faulty
or outdated electronic equipment, uncoordinated movements due to clumsy chains of com-
mands, and so on.
8
Scholz (2022).
9
European Union (2022, p. 14).
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

could not be the answer. Most likely, some Member States would have not
fought for Ukraine regardless of the US position, but the initial willing-
ness of the Polish to provide military support to Ukraine, and subsequent
retraction in order not to ‘expose the alliance to any risk’ by making deci-
sions independently (as a senior Polish official said10) shows that military
dependence did play a role in the decision not to fight militarily against
Russia. Energy dependence creates an important asymmetry in EU-Russia
relations. In February 2022, the symbolic move of to ‘halt’ the gas pipe-
line North Stream 2 (which would have brought gas directly from Russia
to Germany) underscored the urgent imperative of derussification of
energy imports. But while the EU rushes to find alternatives, Ukraine is
paying the price.11 The second argument of the book is that, as a result of
the constraints presented in the first argument, the reaction of the EU to
this shocking war is not revolutionary in terms of the EU’s political and
legal structure. In contrast to EU institutions’ rhetoric, the EU’s response
is not legally unprecedented, neither in the instruments adopted nor in the
actors involved. Nevertheless, sanctions appear now to be leading to a new
phase of European integration, where foreign policy serves as a ‘labora-
tory’ for testing solutions that will spill over into other policy areas. Even
though not revolutionary, in sum, the EU’s reaction contains constitu-
tional experiments, namely innovative features concerning EU energy
policy, anti-disinformation policy, and even criminal legislation.
The book also argues that the EU lacked a strategic vision to overcome
these two constraints, despite the declared intention to do so. On the
intentions: since the creation of a European Security and Defence Policy
in the 1990s, many countries in the EU have aspired to be militarily more
independent from the US (while others did or do not: for example, respec-
tively, the UK and Denmark). The desire for a ‘strategic autonomy’ is
increasingly acknowledged in EU rhetoric (especially after Brexit, the
Trump presidency, and the general decline of Atlanticist feelings in
Europe), but has not been achieved. We do not know what form it would
take (a European army? And what exactly is an army, anyway?) nor how it
would work in practice. Also, the EU has made reducing energy depen-
dence a priority, or at least ensuring security of supply. Nonetheless, derus-
sification of energy imports has not yet been achieved, neither by limiting
free trade (via a screening mechanism for foreign direct investment) nor

10
Tilles (2022).
11
Pavlenko (2022).
6 L. LONARDO

by the green transition (increasing reliance on renewable sources). As the

EU is forced to emancipate itself from dependence on Russian energy, it
will incur extra costs with political effects still unknown. On the vision for
the future: the key challenge will be to envisage an EU strategy for where
(and how) to ‘place’ Russia in the international system. Will the future of
security in Europe include Russia as an ally, as a (reluctant) partner, or not
at all? I will argue that Russia’s participation in the security of the conti-
nent is in the EU’s best interests. It is hard to avoid the impression that
Ukraine is fighting for the rest of the continent. Meanwhile, the EU pro-
vided Ukraine with finances, the Member States provided it with weapons,
and NATO also provided intelligence information, not to mention
resources and training in the past decades. US President Biden presented
this as a war between ‘democracy and autocracy’. Ukrainian President
Zelensky is playing the part of the moral leader of the democratic world.
Ultimately, the EU needs a vision for post-Putin Russia, one that avoids
humiliating it while still maintaining accountability, respecting its own
fundamental values, and operating within international law. It is suggested
that it will be necessary to integrate Russia in a European geopolitical
block: a new order of security in Europe cannot succeed without Moscow’s
cooperation.

1.2  The Roots: Ukraine and Russia, Putin’s

Regime, the War
The conflict has causes that are complex, both proximate and remote in
time, and the object of fierce debate even among professional historians
(to say nothing of politicians). Knowing something about the relationship
between Russia and Ukraine, as well as about the current state of Russian
political organisation, helps setting a context for the conflict, a context on
which Chap. 2 focuses. For that reason, this section summarizes for the
reader what I consider to be some salient features of the recent history of
Ukraine and how that history relates to Russia’s; and I also raise some
important points about contemporary Russia and its relations with the EU.
Ukraine has been a multi-ethnic country without clear geographical
frontiers throughout most of its history. For example, very roughly speak-
ing, present-day Ukraine’s eastern part was for long part of the Russian
empire, and the western part was part of the Polish-Lithuanian state, then
Austro-Hungary, then Poland. Crimea was Ottoman, then Russian, then
again Ottoman, and today it is inhabited by a significant minority of Tatars
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

(who had arrived there long before the formation of the Ottoman empire),
and even a small number of Greek-speakers. Ukrainian élites ‘gained’
national consciousness in the nineteenth century, even though they were
torn between Tsarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Ukrainians
tried and failed to set up an independent state, more than once, between
1914 and 1921. The closest thing to an independent state was the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which became part of the USSR in
1922, with Crimea being transferred to Ukraine in 1954. It is during this
period that Ukraine achieved the borders it had when it gained indepen-
dence, on 24 August 1991. In the decades that followed independence,
Ukraine looked for its identity: for example, would it be a western
European country, an eastern European one, both, neither? It joined the
NATO Partnership for Peace in the 90s, thus profiting from training and
interoperability for its military. It kept close ties with Russia and its econ-
omy. By the 2010s, Ukraine’s main trading partners were the EU and
Russia: both counting for one third of Ukraine’s foreign trade. After the
2004 enlargement of the EU, the EU established a policy (the European
Neighbourhood Policy) to build closer ties with its ‘new’ neighbours
(Polish, Slovakian, and Hungarian membership of the EU meant that the
latter now bordered with Ukraine). The Ukrainian President Yanukovich
decided in November 2013 not to press ahead with a trade treaty between
Ukraine and EU, after years of negotiations. Pressured by Moscow,
Yanukovich steered the country in a pro-Russian direction, triggering the
Euromaidan protest movement. Despite the extremely harsh repression by
government forces, the protests, which lasted over three months and were
concentrated in Kiev’s Maidan Square, led to the deposal in February
2014 of the president. He was replaced by a pro-Western provisional gov-
ernment until the election in May 2014 of Poroshenko. The formation of
a government with ties to the United States and Europe is probably what
provoked a harsh reaction from Moscow: in March 2014, Russia seized
and annexed Crimea; it also supported pro-Russian groups present in the
eastern regions of Ukraine, notably in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and
Lugansk People’s Republics in the Donbass. As a result, the European
Union and the US adopted economic sanctions against Russia and against
Crimean politicians. A war in the Donbass, the region of eastern Ukraine
with a Russophone majority, started. Two ceasefires were agreed (the so-­
called Minsk agreements, as they were negotiated in Belarus) in 2014 and
2015—but they did not bring an end to the Donbass war. According to a
Russian government investigation in 2014, Ukrainian authorities gave
8 L. LONARDO

orders to destroy the Russophone population in Donetsk and Lugansk12

These accusations have been repeated often ever since.
From an external perspective such as mine, it seems that Putin’s regime
is a one man show run by the President, supported by the siloviki (people
who work in a state organisation that has the right to use force against
people), a group of conservative individuals who mostly share Putin’s
background as former KGB agents. During the Yeltsin’s years, they seized
control of Russia and now reside in key ministries, or in rough equivalents
of the Russian CIA and FBI. Among these there are Alexander Bortnikov
(head of federal security services, FSB), Sergey Naryshkin (head of foreign
intelligence services, SVR), and Sergey Shoigu (defence ministry). The
fact that they come from the secret services is significant. Their power at
home, and their influence abroad, seems to me predicated upon careful
collection, analysis, production and utilisation of information, and thus
depends on intelligence gathering. The control of public opinion or the
silencing of opposition leaders is the kind of activity in which they seem to
have proven successful, and I discuss more about this in Chap. 3. Here, it
is worth saying that cracks are beginning to open in the regime. In
September 2022, some elected representatives called for Putin’s resigna-
tion. In the same month, the president’s choice to call up army reservists
sparked protests among common people. My prediction is that if Putin’s
repression of internal dissent is not strong enough, protests could morph
into a revolutionary movement. Be that as it may, since Moscow has fallen
into the hands of these siloviki, from the early 2000s, EU-Russia relations
have increasingly deteriorated. The turning point was the war in Georgia
in 2008. For the first time after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that
conflict put the two entities on a trajectory of conflict. Bilateral relations
have deteriorated further since the conflict in Syria, where the EU’s and
Russia’s position differed sharply, and of course since Russia’s annexation
of Crimea, a move widely regarded as illegal by the international commu-
nity, but predicated, so Russia claims, upon popular will (a large majority
of Crimeans voted to be part of Russia in March 2014). Border change
through military conquest in Europe had been outlawed since the Helsinki
Final Act of 1975. This was an historical agreement between all European
and Atlantic countries, including the US and the Soviet Union. In the

Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, The Investigative Committee

12

Opened a Criminal Investigation Concerning the Genocide of Russian-Speaking Population

in the South-East of Ukraine (29 September 2014) [in Russian] https://sledcom.ru/news/
item/523738/.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

EU’s narrative, Russia’s violation of such a basic principle of international

relations is unacceptable and marks a watershed moment in the mutual
relationship between the two blocks. Russia’s intelligence services have
since conducted disruptive actions, including within the EU. Another
silovik, Nikolay Patrushev, is largely rumoured to be the mastermind
behind Alexander Litvinenko’s poisoning in London in 2006 (in Europe,
this only contributed to the perception of Putin as a James Bond villain
who orders its secret agents to conduct ‘spectacular’ operations in order to
destabilise the world order). Russia increased its military presence around
Ukrainian borders, in Crimea, and along the Black Sea from 2021, as it
felt Ukraine was being lost to the West.
In the lead up to the invasion, Western intelligence warned about
Russian intensions (which the Russia repeatedly denied). The US even
leaked classified documents showing Russian troop movements along the
Ukrainian eastern border to prevent fabricated pretexts. Putin views
Ukraine’s independence as an aberration in history. For him, Ukrainians
are Russians. The Donbass is waiting to be united to Moscow once again,
like Crimea did, to finally break away from a genocidal, US-imposed
regime in Kiev. This rhetoric intensified in February 2022. Kiev was
regarded as a threat to Russia’s brethren in the Donbass. On 21 February,
upon recognition of the Republic of Donetsk and Lugansk, Putin reaf-
firmed that Ukraine ‘is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and
spiritual space’. A ‘genocide’ (his word) is taking place in Ukraine, ‘only
because these people [in the Donbass] did not agree with the West-­
supported coup in Ukraine in 2014 and opposed the transition towards
the Neanderthal and aggressive nationalism and neo-Nazism which have
been elevated in Ukraine to the rank of national policy’. Further, for
Putin the country is a direct threat to Russia’s security. The 2021 Military
Strategy of Ukraine ‘sets the goal of involving foreign states in our coun-
try’. He goes on to affirm that Ukraine is acquiring nuclear weapons,
allowing NATO troops on its territory. Russia cannot stay idle: it ‘has
every right to respond in order to ensure its security. That is exactly what
we will do’.13 The war started on 24 February 2022. ‘They have deceived
us—was Putin’s justification—or, to put it simply, they have played us’.14
This was not the entire justification. Russia tried to argue that, as a matter

13
All quotations are from the Speech of 21 February 2022, available at http://en.kremlin.
ru/events/president/news/67828.
14
Speech of 24 February 2022 available at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/
news/67843.
10 L. LONARDO

of international law, its invasion was justified both as self-defence against a

threat, and as humanitarian intervention to halt the genocide in the
Donbass, acting upon an invitation by the People’s Republic of Donetsk
and Lugansk. Several months into the war, it has become one of attrition,
on a relatively reduced front, with fighting in the areas of Kherson,
Zaporozhye, and the Donbass. Russia has failed to block Ukraine’s access
to the sea, as Odesa’s port is still partially operational. Ukraine has even
begun a successful counter-offensive in the east. Perhaps, the war will be
won by the side whose economy can sustain the effort. Short of a NATO
military back-up, it is vital for Ukraine to be supported economically by
the EU and militarily (including through intelligence sharing) by the
US. Equally vital for Russia is to keep its economy running, avoid a crash
that would be politically devastating, and resist the economic asphyxiation
that international sanctions are trying to force. Winter 2022–2023 will
probably be decisive. If the rest of Europe can stop buying Russian gas, it
might inflict a severe blow to the belligerent party (even though it comes
at a great cost for European consumers). On the other hand, if Europe
cannot survive without Russian energy, if India or China support Moscow,
and Central Asian countries continue to help Russia circumvent interna-
tional sanctions, Ukraine might not resist. But even then, it is unclear what
a victory for either side would look like. Zelensky’s triumphalist rhetoric
demands the pre-2014 border. This appears chimerical. In the future, the
harshest fights will be on the strips of land connecting the Crimean penin-
sula to mainland Ukraine. This may happen in few months or in few
decades. Russia’s war to block NATO expansion has resulted in an increase
of NATO membership, in strong anti-Russian feelings in Europe, and in
three new requests to join the EU (including by Ukraine). The decision to
call up reservists shows that Russia is nowhere near to a successful (from
its perspective) end of this war.

1.3  The Structure of This Book

Narratives on the war clash. The EU insists it is an ‘unjustified and unpro-
voked aggression’.15 Russia agrees that there was provocation: but it was
NATO’s, with Moscow being a victim. How can there be so diametrically
opposed narratives? Addressing some of the answers that were given to
this question, Chap. 2 contends that it is important to know the broader,

15
European Union (2022, p. 17).
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

historical context of the region. To understand it, two debates (which

should, in fact, be studied together more often) are surveyed: the quarrel
between Slavophiles and Occidentalists (also known as Westernizers) in
nineteenth-century Russia, and the debate on NATO enlargement in the
1990s. Slavophiles believe that the country’s future development could
not be based on the decadent and corrupted example of (Western) Europe;
it had to draw, instead, on the distinctive features of Russia: originality
(samobytnost), autocracy (samoderzhaviye), nationhood (narodnost), and
(but this was more controversial) Orthodoxy. Occidentalists, instead,
believed that Russia’s development could only take place if the country
mimicked European nations. Russia had to become a modern constitu-
tional democracy, abolish slavery, and embrace a capitalist economy. That
debate pivoted around the great themes of Russian history and of the
russkiy mir (Russian world): geography, Christian Orthodoxy, a central-
ised state, and multi-ethnicity. This chapter shows how Slavophile ideas on
nationhood and geopolitics shaped Putin’s thinking on identity and
Realpolitik, the two pillars of Russian foreign policy. NATO developed
more or less in direct contrast to the assumption on which Russian geo-
politics is based. It happened with the doctrine of proto-containment,16
and then of containment (the strategy of helping financially and militarily
the countries bordering under the threat of Soviet influence, in order to
prevent the spread of communism). Containment provided the rationale
for the establishment of NATO as a purportedly defensive transatlantic
alliance including Western Europe and West Germany after WW2. This
doctrine was abandoned at the latest after the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991. The Clinton administration called the new strategy the enlarge-
ment doctrine, and NATO admitted new members in the 1990s (Hungary,
Czech Republic, and Poland), penetrating deep into ex-soviet space. This
enlargement generated resentment and fear of being surrounded in Russia,
emotions used to reinforce a narrative of victimisation. With the Bucharest
Summit Declaration of 3 April 2008, NATO agreed that Ukraine and
Georgia ‘will become members of NATO’, but the plan (to which Germany
and France were very opposed) was not acted upon (it was ‘yes, but not
yet’ kind of compromise between countries in favour and countries against
the new membership). The EU never designed an explicit Russian strategy
worthy of the name: it simply followed, implicitly, the US enlargement
doctrine. The EU (and NATO) and Russia are now competing for the

16
To use the word of US historian Harper (1996).
12 L. LONARDO

political control of countries further east, Belarus and Ukraine.17 Belarus

is de facto controlled by Russia, which now even has a military presence
there. Belarusian President Lukashenko is providing essential territorial
and logistical support to the Russian operations in Ukraine (even though
I doubt that the majority of Belarusians supports this). In fact, while the
EU did not formally adopt the doctrine of enlargement and push back,
first presented by the Clinton administration after the collapse of the
Soviet Union, it did penetrate, economically, culturally, and politically,
deep into post-Soviet space (with the 2004 enlargement and the European
Neighbourhood Policy). Were the EU (and the US and NATO) innocent
bystanders? Or were they scheming and malicious actors? Or was this reac-
tion by Russia simply an unforeseeable, disproportionate consequence of
the West’s policies? Or was the war due to something else? Probably, his-
torians will have to decide, for they will benefit from hindsight, time for
research, and material we do not have access to.
Chapter 3 analyses the principles guiding EU diplomacy in this context.
The Chapter argues that while the EU does not have a ‘Russia strategy’,
meaning an explicit, long-term vision or ‘philosophy’ of its relations with
Russia, the implicit strategy is premised on enlargement—not on contain-
ment. A survey of the major EU strategic documents reveals a contingent
tactic rather than a clear strategy. Due to the above-mentioned constraints,
the EU chose an indirect confrontation with Russia. Support to Ukraine
was accomplished through support in international institutions, sanctions
against Russia and Belarus, financial support directly to Kiev and indirectly
through Member States (this included facilitating a transfer of lethal weap-
ons from Member States to Ukraine, the EU’s first), and humanitarian
aid. A final, special form of support is the largely symbolic (at this stage)
beginning of the process for bringing Ukraine within the EU. The EU
also created an ‘Energy platform’ in March 2022, a voluntary mechanism
for coordinating infrastructure use, negotiating with the international
partners and preparing for joint gas and hydrogen purchases. The EU
must have a long-term vision for Russia, including post-Putin Russia. But
that presupposes a united front in the EU or a way to impose one, which
to my knowledge do not exist. China is the only country with some lever-
age on Russia, at the moment, but it will be vital to avoid pushing the two
countries into each other’s arms (while China is abstaining from too direct
involvement in this war, relations with the EU and the US are increasingly

17
For the geopolitics of EU foreign policy, see Lonardo (n.d.).
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

strained also due to what the West perceives to be China’s illegitimate ter-
ritorial ambitions in its neighbourhood). It is also not desirable to humili-
ate Russia even if it loses the war: it is a common-sense strategy, and not
observing it has repeatedly failed.
While discussion of legal issues has been pushed to the background by
the violence of war, it still deserves a chapter, for two interrelated reasons.
First, because Putin’s world vision is also driven by disappointment with
international law’s (mis)uses. In his narrative, whenever the US (and
NATO) fought wars without UNSC authorization, they evaded the inter-
national security system established after WW2 (the UN), excluding Russia
from the decision-making process. Second, and opposite to the above, law
matters because for the EU Russia’s reliance on international law is entirely
in bad faith. The EU (and allies) claim they follow rules, while Russia does
not. In this narrative, Russia opposes a power-based and prestige-based
view of international relations to the EU’s vision of a rule-based order.
The EU, in fact, is based on the rule of law and all its actions, including its
foreign policy, must respect that principle. In this confrontation, it
becomes clear that law is not only a technicality, but is elevated to a foun-
dational, defining element of international relations. Chapter 4 recalls the
debates on the legality of the wars waged in the 1990s and early 2000s and
with which Putin takes issue and then discusses legal aspects of the EU’s
reaction to the war and how this has not affected the EU’s legal and politi-
cal structure—but might do so in the future.

References
Elster, J. (2022). What motivates soldiers to fight, Asks Jon Elster – PRIO Blogs.
Available at «https://blogs.prio.org/2022/03/what-­motivates-­soldiers-­to-­
fight-­asks-­jon-­elster/».
European Union. (2022). A strategic compass for security and defense.
Gareev, M. A. (1998). If war comes tomorrow? The contours of future armed conflict
(1st English ed.). Frank Cass.
Harper, J. L. (1996). American visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George
F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson, 1. (Paperback ed.). Cambridge University
Press.
Lonardo, L. (n.d.). EU common foreign and security policy after. Between Law and
Geopolitics (Springer).
Pavlenko, O. (2022). Ukraine paying the price of EU’s energy dependency on Russia
| View, euronews. Available at «https://www.euronews.com/2022/03/29/
ukraine-­is-­paying-­the-­price-­of-­europe-­s-­energy-­dependency-­on-­russia-­view».
14 L. LONARDO

Scholz, O. (2022) ‘Policy statement by Olaf Scholz, chancellor of the Federal

Republic of Germany and member of the German Bundestag, 27 February
2022 in Berlin’.
Tilles, D. (2022). Poland “does not envisage” sending fighter jets to Ukraine despite
Blinken remarks. Notes From Poland.
 CHAPTER 2

The Context: The EU and Ukraine Between

Slavophiles and NATO

Abstract The chapter traces the narratives on the origin of the war to
two, interrelated debates. These are the quarrel between Slavophiles and
Occidentalists in Russian modern history and the contrasting perspectives
on the desirability of NATO’s enlargement in the 1990s. Slavophiles
maintained that Russia has a distinctive, and highly worthy, culture: it is
original, autocratic, and should not mimic the West. Putin is influenced by
a crude form of these ideas. The contrasting perspectives on NATO
enlargement posits either that it is a beneficial development for European
security, founded on voluntary membership, or, on the other hand, that it
is a provocative and indeed humiliating move for Russia to penetrate the
post-Soviet space, with membership from central and eastern European
countries. The reason why the two debates are linked is that NATO is an
expression of doctrines developed also in direct response to long enduring
Slavophile ideas. The chapter then situates the EU, and its relations with
Ukraine, in this context.

Keywords Occidentalism • Slavophilism • NATO enlargement • Putin

ideology

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 15

Switzerland AG 2022
L. Lonardo, Russia’s 2022 War Against Ukraine and the Foreign
Policy Reaction of the EU, Global Foreign Policy Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18694-3_2
16 L. LONARDO

2.1   Introduction
It is March 2022. Three weeks have passed since the beginning of what he
keeps insisting is a special military operation. In Moscow’s Luzhniki
Stadium, awash with the tricolour and the letter Z there are 95,000 peo-
ple, and about the same number is cheering outside (according to Russian
sources). Something is about to begin: the Kremlin soberly refers to it as
a concert. It is a rally to celebrate the annexation of Crimea eight years
earlier, a feast that quickly turns into a celebration of the war in Ukraine.
It does not matter that the official capacity of that stadium is 81,000; that
other reports say that the enthusiastic crowds were paid to attend; that old
people are recorded on video stating they were forced to be there. The
celebration is a powerful symbol for a powerful nation. The central stage
is adorned with the official title of the event, ‘for a world without Nazism’,
even though, with different flags, the scene could be taken from Leni
Riefensthal’s 1935 Triumph des Willens. Then, he appears. The crowds
shout: Vla-di-mir, Vla-di-mir. It is a one-man show (whether live or pre-­
recorded, we do not know). The need to be perceived is everything. What
counts for Putin is to speak to his true Russia, to the ‘deep nation’ (a
concept on which I shall return1): ‘we’ is the key word, which includes
Vladimir Vladimirovich, the rest of Russia, and of course the Ukrainians of
Crimea, who chose to get ‘back to their historical roots’2 with the referen-
dum of March 2014. With that referendum, Sevastopol and Crimea chose
to be part of the Russian Federation. ‘We have not had unity like this for
a long time’. The hashtag: we don’t abandon our own. The West does not
understand us. They will fear us. They will see us now. As he explained the
need to de-nazify a country with a President of Jewish origins, Putin wore
a $14,000 Italian puffer jacket. That jacket alone costs more than the aver-
age yearly salary of those listening to him in the stadium. Before the 18
March, the day of celebration, the ministry of education had circulated a
video to Russian schools giving Russia’s version of the events surrounding
the ‘Crimean spring’ (a day of celebration for the inhabitants of Sevastopol,
in this narrative).
What counts for Putin is, of course, also the external audience, which
he was addressing in a masterfully staged ceremony. It is again the need to

1
I borrow the phrase from Vladislav Surkov, former Deputy Prime Minister and close
political advisor of Putin – even though the notion has been around for much longer in
Russian discourse (Surkov 2019).
2
This and later citations are from Putin speech of 18 March 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/
events/president/transcripts/68016.
 2 THE CONTEXT: THE EU AND UKRAINE BETWEEN SLAVOPHILES AND NATO 17

be recognised. If you cannot recognise me, I will make you fear me. Then
you will be forced to see me. If you, West, hear nothing else, then you will
hear my threats. Look everyone, Russia is behind me. The narrative is
clear: history mandates that Ukraine is part of Russia. Ukrainian national-
ism is the aberration, the enemy against which Crimea and Sevastopol ‘put
a firm barrier’. Theirs was the right choice. For Putin, there is no doubt
about the course of history: ‘The fact is we know what needs to be done
next, how it needs to be done, and at what cost—and we will fulfil all these
plans, absolutely.’ For ‘the West’—Russians have a word for that, zapad,
which indicates collectively Europe and the United States—this celebra-
tory rally marks the powerful return of Soviet aesthetics. It is Andropov’s
funeral all over again, only this time it is someone else’s funeral they are
celebrating—and instead of Chopin marcia funebre, they had Polina
Gagarina singing a classic of Soviet rock (Kukushka by Kino, a group
whose rough equivalent in the ‘West’ is Joy Division). Other singers also
intervened, as well as Olympic athletes, the editor-in-chief of RT (the
Russian outlet whose European branches were sanctioned by the EU for
spreading war propaganda), the spokesperson of the Minister of Foreign
Affairs Lavrov, Maria Zakharova, and even a soldier who lost his son in
Ukraine.
The show of 18 March 2022 provides an accurate reflection of Russia’s
political manoeuvre, of Putin’s necessity to justify to a domestic audience
the imperative he uses for the international arena. Soviet exceptionalism
encircled by hostile surroundings, the recipe of Putinism.3 The ‘concert’
in fact showed a certain obsession with the key themes—territorial exten-
sion and control over natural resources, nationalism, multi-ethnicity—rep-
resenting the main continuities that have shaped Russian history. It is
important to understand what the motivation for the conflict is, as pre-
sented in official Russian discourse. That discourse concerns primary
nationalistic ideology, but also a mixture of naïf-geopolitical thought
rooted in a self-perception of Russia’s place in the world.4
For this reason, this chapter summarises scholarship on two important
historical developments: the quarrel between Slavophilia (slavianofilstvo)
and Occidentalism (zapadnichestvo) in Russian modern history, and the
contrasting perspectives on the desirability of NATO’s enlargement in the
1990s. It is contended they facilitate a fuller understanding of the public

3
Sharafutdinova (2020).
4
For a - now slightly outdated - intellectual biography of Putin see Hill and Gaddy (2015).
18 L. LONARDO

motivations for the conflict, because this chapter intends to show that a
crude version of Slavophilia influences Putin’s vision for Russia. Even
though they are usually not studied together, the two controversies are
actually linked, and inextricably so. The reason they are linked is that
NATO is an expression of doctrines developed also in direct response to
long enduring Slavophile ideas. Ukraine is caught, geographically and cul-
turally, between Russian exceptionalism or particularity (samobytnost) and
the western ‘Russia anxiety’.5
The chapter does not argue that the narratives of either side are factu-
ally accurate (there are historical studies documenting how Russian narra-
tives are motivated by rhetoric rather than in historical accuracy6). The
chapter assumes that history matters because it is perceived by the main
actors to be at the origin of the conflict. Following an illustration of those
two quarrels, the chapter situates the EU and Ukraine in this context.
Both Ukraine and the EU depended heavily on Russia for their energy
supply: this fact conditioned the EU’s response to the war. The purpose of
this chapter is not to discuss history, but to provide some basic informa-
tion, and my reflections, on the context of the war.

2.2  Russia: From Tsarist Empire

to the Russian Federation

The first thing to know about Russia is that it is big. This obvious state-
ment is still a good starting point, because it enables to develop on two of
the main continuities that have shaped Russian history. The fact that
Russia is big has do with geography, something that plays a crucial role also
in Russia’s self-perception. The fact that Russia is big also means that there
are several ethnic groups living in it: Russia is a multi-ethnic country. In
the Russian language, this is immediately clear: there is a word for ‘ethnic
Russian’ (russkiy), and a word for ‘citizen of the Russian Federation’ (ros-
sianin). Not all russkiye are rossianie, and the vice-versa. Think about this
fact: people such as Trotsky, Stalin, Gogol, Asimov, were not ‘ethnic
Russians’ even though they were born in the Russian empire (or in the
Soviet Union). Even Putin, whose policy is over-nationalistic (and we will
see in what sense), recognises the multi-ethnicity of the country. It is, after
all, clearly spelt out in the Constitution (which is, for Putin, a legacy of the

5
Smith (2019).
6
Weiss-Wendt (2020).
 2 THE CONTEXT: THE EU AND UKRAINE BETWEEN SLAVOPHILES AND NATO 19

weakness of the Bolsheviks): we, the multi-ethnic nation of the Russian

Federation, united by common fate on our land…
The key question of the russkiy mir, what Russia is (or should be), and
who the Russians are (or should be), has been asked, throughout history,
at least ever since the quarrel between Slavophiles and Occidentalists in
modern Russian history,7 and especially during the Tsardom of Nikolai I
(1825–1855). In a nutshell, the debate, which flared up over the legacy of
the great Tzar Piotr the first (usually known in English as Peter the Great),
concerns the distinctiveness of Russia, its relationship with ‘Europe’, and
the best way forward.8
Slavophilia was a philosophical, literary, and later political movement
born in the nineteenth century. Even though, as any philosophical cur-
rent, it hosted a wealth of diverging positions, its hallmark feature was the
research for, and appreciation of, the distinctive character of Russian cul-
ture. Russia is a Slavic nation, original and different from the European
countries, and it is characterised by strong originality (samobytnost) and
the triad identified by Uvarov, then minister, in a famous 1832 letter to
Nikolai I: Orthodoxie, autocratie, nationalité (et oui, he wrote to his Tsar
in French). The movement that stressed the separation between Russia
and Europe communicated ‘in that refined French in which our grandfa-
thers not only spoke but thought’ (as the incipit of War and Peace reminds
us). It also did not disdain drawing from German idealism and romantic
aspirations in order to build its intellectual framework (such as the idea
that each nation has its own specific ‘genius’ or Geist: the very word narod-
nost being inspired by the German Volkstum). The Tsar Piotr was wrong:
by trying to modernise the country by mimicking Western powers, he led
Russia in wrong direction.
Occidentalism developed, in contrast, by emphasising the need of
learning from Europe. The only thing that united Westernisers (as they are
sometimes referred to in English) was looking at Europe – or the West – as
the model, with positions varying greatly on how to follow that
model. Some Occidentalists were radical reformists. They hoped for the
end of Tsarist autocracy and for the instauration of a constitutional democ-
racy which would enable the flourishing of a capitalist economy, even
though they would not use this term. In general, Occidentalists were
highly critical of the Orthodox church. Not only Piotr was going in the
right direction: he did not lead Russia far enough down that European road.

7
Murawiec (2000).
8
Niqueux (2016).
20 L. LONARDO

All of the above, is, of course, a very schematic simplification, painted

with a very thick brush: nearly all of these themes were controversial even
within the same ‘camp’ (such as, the role of Orthodoxy for Slavophiles),
with each thinker expressing nuanced or contradictory positions (such as
those of Karamzin on the enlightenment), not to mention positions that
evolved, sometimes significantly, over time (such as Dostoyevsky’s).
That debate pivoted around the great themes of Russian history: geog-
raphy and multi-ethnicity. The key features of the Tsarist empire at the
time—multiethnicity, geopolitical ambitions, administrative develop-
ments, and even the ‘position’ of Poland and Ukraine—keep resurfacing,
as we saw, in today’s political rhetoric. History is in fact at the basis of any
ideology of national conscience, as affirmed by the historian George Mosse
in his seminal study of European culture.9
On the first continuity, geography, one of the greatest historians of the
Russian empire contends that it ‘determined the paths of Russian expan-
sion. Rivers created corridors of expansion that channelled Russia’s
advance along clear paths and determined its political, strategic, and com-
mercial objectives’.10 Russia’s first railway, the 27 km to Tsarskoye Selo, was
built in 1837 (as the name of the destination implies ‘the Tsar’s village’,
the railway had no industrial value but only recreational purposes). Before
that, rivers were the highways of Russia: as I mention later, the beginnings
of the Rus of Kiev (the first “state” of the Slavs) were due to the Dnepr,
and as far as modern-day Russia is concerned, it is impossible not to men-
tion that the Dnepr river and the Volga river both originate in the Valdai
hills, a fact that (painting with very broad strokes in order not to enter in
a delicate historiographical debate11) permitted exchanges between the
Slavic populations of those regions as well as the others living there. The
development of what would become the Russian empire proceeded by
progressive conquest of the Volga and affluents: thus was founded Nizhniy
Novgorod, then Kazan was conquered, and from there south to the
Caspian and east into the remoteness of Siberia. It is not necessary to fall
into the trap of geographical determinism to see that Russia has no fron-
tière naturelle on the west (it is unclear where ‘Europe’ ends and ‘Russia’
begins, if it makes sense to consider them separate entities), and that in the

9
Mosse, Mosse (1988).
10
LeDonne (1997, p. xiv).
11
Wilson (2022).
 2 THE CONTEXT: THE EU AND UKRAINE BETWEEN SLAVOPHILES AND NATO 21

south (Ottoman empire) and the east (China and Japan) the Russian
empire has always had powerful enemies. The obsession with territorial
expansion to secure borders is a constant. ‘If I could live 200 years, the
whole of [Germanic] Europe would be brought under Russian rule,’
Catherine II is reported to have said, ‘I shall not die before I have ejected
the Turks from Europe, broken the insolence of China, and established
trade relations with India’.12 Catherine’s dream to conquer, eventually,
Constantinople—to which Moscow, the third Rome, was after all the spir-
itual heir13—led her to get one step closer to modern-day Turkey, and
conquer Crimea, with its important harbour on the Black Sea. Slavophile
ideas later flourished on this geographical background. One stream of it
was pochvennichestvo, the return to the native soil, a fashionable idea
among Dostoyevsky and his entourage, including Strakhov, who insisted
on it during the Polish rebellion of 1863, on which more below. One
particular stream is of interest here, Eurasianism. Since the West is old,
corrupted, and irreversibly bound to failure, the young Slavic nation can
provide a much needed corrective. In geopolitical terms, this means that
the future of Russia is in unification of the vast mass of land of the Eurasian
continent (and countering this Russian geopolitical assumption was at the
origin of the US Cold War strategy of containment, mentioned below14).
Reading Dugin, Putin’s ideologue (or perhaps it is the other way round),
does not leave much to imagination. ‘The spatial logic of the history of
Russian statehood is unambiguously revealed. This logic can be summa-
rized as expansion to the natural borders of northeast Eurasia, Turan, with
the prospect of extending its zone of influence beyond its boundaries,
perhaps on a planetary scale’.15 It is a totalising explanation which belongs
to a past century. It goes by the name of Eurasianism, an ideology defended

12
Quoted in LeDonne (1997, p. xvi).
13
Catherine was so keen on Greek culture that she had her son name his own children with
Greek names (such as Nikolaj and Alexander, who would both become Tsar).
14
Harper (1996).
15
Dugin (1997) in the translation available at https://agdugintranslate.gitbook.io/foun-
dations-of-geopolitics/part-2-modern-geopolitical-theories-and-schools-second-half-of-
the-twentieth-century/chapter-6-neo-eurasianism
22 L. LONARDO

in the 1997 Foundations of Geopolitics by Dugin.16 By the year 2000, Putin

would state that ‘Russia has always perceived of itself as a Eurasian coun-
try’. Russian generals are keen on geopolitics, a subject taught at the
General Staff Academy.
Let us now turn briefly to the other defining feature: multi-ethnicity.
Russia has always been a multi-ethnic country, at least since it conquered
the Tatar Kazan khanate almost 500 years ago. The Empire was more
obviously multi-ethnic, as the purely selective examples of the next sen-
tences intend to show, with no aim of being exhaustive of the many cul-
tural, linguistic, and ethnic groups living in the territory. Together with
Finland, the Baltic countries were part of the Russian empire until 1917
(the three Baltic countries were also annexed to the Soviet Union in 1940
pursuant to the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact). Northern Caucasus is
part of the Russian federation and comprises among others ethnically, lin-
guistically, and religiously heterogeneous Chechnya, North Ossetia,
known in Western Europe for incidents with Moscow, and Dagestan.
Southern Caucasus consists instead of three independent countries which
were part of the Soviet Union. Two are traditionally Christian countries
Georgia and Armenia (the latter tends to be politically close to Russia);
and Azerbaijan, which is a country with a Muslim population that speaks
a Turkic language (and many ethnic minorities). In present days Russian
Federation, the Russian ethnicity is like a wedge separating Finno-Ugric
populations on a continuum from the Sami in Norway to the Komi and
Udmurts in central Asia. Further in Siberia, Kazakhs, Tatars, and Tungusic
people populate the majority of the enormous country.
The victory against Napoleon was a decisive moment for the formation
of a Russian nationalist consciousness. Historian Pogodin announced in
1841 that the ‘European period’ of Russian history was now overtaken by

16
In that book, Dugin attributes the development of the ideology to Savitsky (1895–1968)
and Gumilyov (1912–1992): ‘From [Savitsky’s] works, an entirely new vision of political
history is formed, in which the Eurasian East acts not just as barbaric lands on the periphery
of civilization (equivalent to Western civilization), but as an independent and dynamic center
of ethnogenesis, culture, political history, state and technical development. The West and its
history are relativized, the Eurasian culture and the constellation of Eurasian ethnic groups
are revealed as a multidimensional and completely unexplored world with its own scale of
values, religious problems, historical laws, etc.’ (Dugin, 1997 chapter 6.1, in the translation
available at https://agdugintranslate.gitbook.io/foundations-of-geopolitics/part-2-mod-
er n-geopolitical-theories-and-schools-second-half-of-the-twentieth-centur y/
chapter-6-neo-eurasianism)
 2 THE CONTEXT: THE EU AND UKRAINE BETWEEN SLAVOPHILES AND NATO 23

the ‘national period’.17 But, despite the name, Slavophiles did not actually
love all Slavic people: they were markedly filo-Russian. This manifested
itself forcefully with the support of some Slavophiles to the repression of
the Polish insurrection of 1863. Khatkov a journalist who had previously
been close to Occidentalists, wrote that ‘There is in Russia one dominant
nationality, one dominant language, developed by centuries of historical
life’: other ‘tribes feel their oneness with it, in the union of state and
supreme power in the person of the Tsar’.18 The Polish rebellion also
brought the attention of the empire to the quest for nationhood of
Ukraine, whose élite was made up by Russians (Bulgakov), Poles
(Antonovych; Stravinsky), Germans (Johansen), Jews (Lev Bronstein, bet-
ter known as Trotsky; Hirsch Apfelbaum, better known as Zinoviev), but
where a feeling of being distinctively Ukrainian was taking shape among
the intelligentsia. This process also included the development of a literary
language: first with the goliardic Kotliarevsky, then, secretly, with Taras
Shevchenko, with outlets quickly censored by the Tsar (few decades ear-
lier, Gogol had chosen to write in Russian instead; and so would Bulgakov,
who was Kievan but ethnic Russian; whereas Mike Johansen would switch
from Russian and German to Ukrainian after WW1). The thought of
nationalist champion and fervent Slavophile Nicolai Yakovlevich
Danilevsky, who published on Russia’s national distinctiveness in his 1869
book Russia and Europe: A look at the cultural and political relations of the
Slavic world to the Germanic-Romance, was shown to be at the origin of
Putin’s vision.19 Danilevsky, an eminent writer of the second generation of
Slavophiles, contended that Russia—unlike European empires—did not
acquire territory through conquest but only through collective explora-
tion of vast lands. ‘Finnish, Tatar, and Samoyedic tribes are predestined to
merge with the historical ethnos they are surrounded by, to become assim-
ilated… They have no right to political independence’.20 Note that what is
implied in all of this is not merely the subordination of ethnicity to state-
hood (or dynasty, as we saw in Khatkov, or Party: an idea that resurfaces in
Putin’s 2014 article on the national question, discussed below), but the
subordination of other ethnicities to the ‘historical ethnos’ (an idea which
resurfaces in the political rhetoric of the Russian regime since the 18

17
Погодин (1846, p. 359).
18
Катков (1897, pp. 100–101).
19
Yanov (2012).
20
Quoted in Yanov (2012).
24 L. LONARDO

March Crimean referendum). With the assassination of Alexander II (the

reformist Tsar who abolishes slavery) and the Tsardom of Alexander III
(1881–1894), a nationalist reaction made Slavophilia, de facto, the ideol-
ogy of the empire.
But it is not just multi-ethnicity or geography what makes Russia’s dis-
tinctiveness (or ‘self-being’, which is, indeed, the literal translation of
samobytnost). There is another crucial feature which, while only indirectly
linked to the war in Ukraine, sheds light on Putin’s domestic audience: the
existence of a ‘deep nation’, a theme loved and exalted by Slavophiles, and
on which Putin’s regime still tries to capitalise. It manifests in the juxtapo-
sition of Slavophiles and Occidentalists, but also of aristocracy and serf-
dom, of French and Russian language, of St Petersburg and Moscow, of
Christianity and Paganism. To use the popular expression of the film
director Andrei Konchalovsky, this duality is part of the ‘Russian genome’.21
One Russia is educated, rich, European, multilingual; the other is rural,
poor, nationalistic, and deeply religious or spiritual. Gogol’s Petersburg’s
Tales represents a caricature of that Petersburg and the people who live
there (‘with wide sideburns, wearing three-cornered hats—Western style’).
The other Russia is Tolstoy’s peasants (Gogol had not spared them either,
in Mirgorod). It is the characters in Zvyagintsev’s films (the last frame of
Loveless shows a woman wearing Russia’s tracksuit on a treadmill: a power-
ful and suggestive image). It is also the villagers of the Belarusian Nobel
laureate Aleksievitch’s Second Hand Time. Even Kennan, an US diplomat
we shall encounter again later, considered that while Tsars embraced mod-
ernisation, their subjects did not: when Tsardom ended and Moscow
became capital again, Russians ‘shed their westernized upper crust as a
snake sheds its skin […] with all the weakness of backwardness and all the
strength and freshness of youth’.22 A ‘cultural genome’ exists only in the
self-perception, which the official narrative tries to reinforce, of part of the
population. But it is true that Russian intellectuals have for centuries hesi-
tated between looking at the West and following their own path.
This discussion of geography and multi-ethnicity leads us to an article
published by Putin in 2014. It was a piece on the Nezavisimaya Gazeta
(when he was ‘candidate’ to the presidency). The piece was titled ‘Russia:
national question’. It shows the enduring influence of some of the
Slavophile positions surveyed so far. First, samobytnost: Russia is a unique

21
Кончаловский (2015).
22
Quoted in Gaddis (2011, p. 150).
 2 THE CONTEXT: THE EU AND UKRAINE BETWEEN SLAVOPHILES AND NATO 25

country, with an original culture derived from its distinctive historical

development (‘Russia’s state development is unique’). Second, the myth
of the Russian peasant and narodnost: ultimately, even though multi-­
ethnic, Russia is unitary and the state is superior to group particularities
(‘there is no need for anyone living in Russia to forget their religion or
ethnicity. But they should identify themselves primarily as citizens of
Russia and take pride in that’). This version of the russkiy mir is what was
defined as ‘genetically modified conservativism’,23 a form of assimilation
overcoming ethnic distinctions, or, even without assimilation as first goal,
conservativism welcomes cultural diversity provided that ethnic Russians
are ‘first among equals’.
That position would evolve further, adding a firm step toward mono-­
nationalism.24 Putin’s main domestic audience, the deep nation, is ethnic
Russian. The crude version of Putin’s Slavophilia is mono-ethnicity com-
bined with geopolitical Eurasianism. This is where Ukraine comes back
into the picture. The ethnic, nationalistic (in the sense of russkiy) turn of
Putin can be traced back to when on 18 March 2014, commenting the
referendum in Crimea, Putin used the word russkiye to refer to Crimea,
Sevastopol, and Kiev. Ever since, in writings and in speeches, the regime
has left little doubt as to where those cities should belong. As far as EU
Member States are concerned, this nationalist turn is what worries Latvia
and Estonia, who host significant minorities of ethnic Russians. There is
an often-quoted sentence of Putin, uttered in 2005: ‘the fall of the Soviet
Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’.
Ethnic Russians whose family used to live within the Tsarist Empire (and
later in Soviet Republics) were now ‘abroad’. The Russian’s regime anxi-
ety only increased when some of the former Soviet Republic started orbit-
ing around—and indeed even joined—the other side. Worse still: those
countries are becoming rich. Poland’s 5-year GDP growth average is over
10 times higher than Russia’s. The ‘younger cousins’ in the EU now study
in Paris without visa, fly anywhere they want with Ryanair, and probably,
when they do so, they reach the airport with brand new, eco-friendly cars.
As Marx said, it is the comparison in growth rate what generates ‘dissatis-
faction’, at least in the international elite of the big cities in European

23
Jonson et al. (2017).
24
Blakkisrud (2016).
26 L. LONARDO

Russia. But this comparison is something that even Russian middle class
will be unable to ignore after the sanctions imposed by the EU in 2022.25
Putin’s public discourse leaves no doubt: Ukraine was a part of the
Empire, ‘entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik,
Communist Russia’,26 and should come back there. The hallucinated
speech of 21 February 2022 provides Putin’s version of the historical nar-
rative, which establishes a link between the failures of having a multi-­
ethnic Soviet Union with the threats posed by Ukraine’s proximity to
NATO. In Putin’s simplification, the creation of national state entity
within the Soviet Union was Lenin’s preference, codified, after his death,
in the 1924 Soviet Constitution. This was counterintuitive and artificial:
‘why was it necessary to appease the nationalists, to satisfy the ceaselessly
growing nationalist ambitions on the outskirts of the former empire? What
was the point of transferring to the newly, often arbitrarily formed admin-
istrative units—the union republics—vast territories that had nothing to
do with them? Let me repeat that these territories were transferred along
with the population of what was historically Russia.’ It was a mistake due
to the weakness of Lenin’s newly formed government. The Bolsheviks
would accept anything to stay in power and get out of WW1, including
making territorial concessions to nationalists and to foreign countries (in
his 1917 poem Hail Ukraine, the Finnish Eino Leino wrote the line ‘with
you in the storm are Finland and Poland, and maybe Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania’). Not even comrade Stalin would redress the situation: ‘it is a
great pity that the fundamental and formally legal foundations of our state
were not promptly cleansed of the odious and utopian fantasies inspired
by the revolution’. The same fatal mistake was made in 1989. The authori-
ties of independent Ukraine then ‘began by building their statehood on
the negation of everything that united us, trying to distort the mentality
and historical memory of millions of people’. Their proximity to the West
was only in their own interests, not that of the people. The US-financed
nationalists who took power in 2014 ‘have unleashed a persecution, a real
terror campaign against those who opposed their anti-constitutional
actions’. Plus, Ukraine is acquiring nuclear weapons, hosting NATO
troops, and preparing to join NATO. The regime has no shame in

25
Marx and Marx (1976) ‘although the enjoyments of the workers have risen, the social
satisfaction they give has fallen in comparison with the increased enjoyments of the capitalist,
which are inaccessible to the worker’.
26
This and later quotations are taken from Putin speech of 21 February 2022.
 2 THE CONTEXT: THE EU AND UKRAINE BETWEEN SLAVOPHILES AND NATO 27

mobilising the classic topoi of the Slavophiles’ thought, or of anything

nationalist really, provided it supports the war’s cause. Hence, the narra-
tive of WW2 as an act of heroism of the Red Army who freed the world
from Nazism (as if they did not have an alliance with the Nazis, the
Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact). Philological or historical accuracy is not a
concern of political narratives. It is perception that matters. Not what hap-
pened, but how we remember it. Occasionally, the other side also incurs in
the instrumentalization of culture, probably due to anger (if not hatred):
it is the phenomenon of Pushkinopad, the ‘fall of Pushkin’, meaning the
destruction, in Ukraine, of statues of the Russian national poet.

2.3  NATO Enlargement in the 1990s

The enlargement in NATO membership in 1999 (when Czech Republic,
Poland, and Hungary joined the organisation) is also a particularly deli-
cate development. It entailed that those countries of the former Warsaw
Pact would now cross the dividing line, the ‘iron curtain’, the wall that
had literally separated communist East from capitalist West.27 It was part
of an important ‘reordering of political space’ in Europe,28 which in fact
included not only NATO membership, but also membership in the
Council of Europe (the organisation protecting fundamental rights in
Europe),29 and eventually in the European Union. This section focuses on
the issue of contention, NATO, rather than the other organisations.
Ukraine did not join NATO but, in 1995, it joined the Partnership for
Peace, even though dialogue and cooperation had started already in 1991.
The Partnership for Peace meant that NATO supported Ukraine in build-
ing capabilities and interoperability.
Two main historiographical perspectives can already be singled out on
the enlargement, even though not all archival material is available. Those
who favour the enlargement praise how NATO managed to guarantee
security and democracy in Europe, including Eastern Europe: indeed,
NATO’s mission of keeping ‘the Americans in, the Russians out, and the
Germans down’ (as the first NATO secretary general, Lord Ismay, put it)

27
East Germany joined West Germany immediately after the fall of the Berlin wall. It was
also integrated in the European Community. With the agreement of the Soviet Union, it also
joined NATO as part of the unified country.
28
Scott (2011).
29
With the following new membership in the early 90s: Hungary (1990), Poland (1991),
Bulgaria (1992), Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania (1993)
28 L. LONARDO

was achieved successfully. Others, in the West as well as in Russia, were

against this enlargement or consider it to be the proximate historical cause
of the current war. They see it as an unnecessary humiliation of Russia, as
it pushes Western military structures deeply in post-Soviet space (and,
since the further enlargement in the early 2000, right at the border with
Russia), posing a threat to Russian security.
The first perspective stresses how the choice to apply for NATO mem-
bership was a free one. Not acknowledging it amounts to a denial of
agency of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. In fact, it is semanti-
cally a stretch to use the phrase ‘NATO enlargement’, as if it was a con-
quest, an unstoppable advance. If the US and NATO constitute an
empire—which is pretty much only a matter of definition—then they are
an ‘empire by invitation’, to use the famous phrase of Norwegian historian
Geir Lundestad.30 In an influential 1986 article, Lundestad details how
Western Europe’s government invited the economic and military presence
of the US in the period 1945–1952, and that public opinion in Western
Europe was largely supportive of such presence. The same appears to be
true in the case of the enlargement of the 1990s, with citizens being over-
whelmingly in favour of their country joining NATO.31 Rather than an
enlargement, it was an admission of new enthusiastic members. Proponents
of the enlargement consider it beneficial to the alliance and to security on
the continent: in a 1995 NATO study on the topic, it was said that
‘enlargement will contribute to enhanced stability and security for all
countries in the Euro-Atlantic area’. This was due to the habit of consulta-
tion and cooperation within the alliance, the promotion of good neigh-
bourly relations, extending the benefits of common defence. As of 2022,
public opinion in the EU is overwhelmingly on this side of the historio-
graphical debate, meaning that Europeans believe Russia (and not NATO)
to be mainly responsible for the outbreak of the war.32
The second perspective considers the enlargement ill-advised. Poking
the Russian bear was folly, and NATO was the culprit33 of the 2014 annex-
ation of Crimea, and it is also ‘not an innocent bystander’34 in the 2022
war. Enlargement in the 1990s was the disgraceful result of ‘hybris,

30
Lundestad (1986).
31
Mareš and Šmídová (2000).
32
Krastev and Leonard (2022).
33
Mearsheimer (2014).
34
Friedman (2022).
 2 THE CONTEXT: THE EU AND UKRAINE BETWEEN SLAVOPHILES AND NATO 29

wishful thinking, and liberal idealism’.35 The US had won the cold war,
both economically and ideologically. So, pushing the alliance deep into
post-Soviet space was an unnecessary humiliation which triggered legiti-
mate security concerns for Russia. To be clear, this is not an exclusively
Russian camp. There are people—and prominent scholars—in the West
who argue these positions. The US historian Gaddis, who is one of the
most prominent scholars on the Cold War, wrote in 1998 the following
words: ‘Some principles of strategy are so basic that when stated they
sound like platitudes: treat former enemies magnanimously; do not take
on unnecessary new ones; keep the big picture in view; balance ends and
means; avoid emotion and isolation in making decisions; be willing to
acknowledge error. And yet, the Clinton administration’s single most
important foreign-policy initiative—NATO enlargement—somehow
manages to violate every one of these principles. Perhaps that is why his-
torians so widely agree that NATO enlargement is ill-conceived, ill-timed,
and ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.’36
In fact, Russia contends that the US passed from a doctrine of contain-
ment to one of enlargement, and laments that this was in breach of a
promise made, verbally, to the Soviet Union. The doctrine of containment
originates in a ‘long telegram’ sent by an American diplomat, George
Kennan, to President Truman. The key assumption of containment is sim-
ple: ‘the Soviet Union’s self-generated problems would frustrate its ambi-
tions if the West was patient enough to wait for this to happen and firm
enough to resist making concessions’.37 Containment is defensive and has
a political, strategic, and military dimension. Politically and strategically, it
meant avoiding the further expansion of communism. By 1948, commu-
nist parties had achieved, either democratically or not, positions of power
in virtually all central and eastern European states.38 Containment meant
securing the countries bordering with central and eastern Europe, through
financing them, intervening more or less directly in their political life, or
indeed inviting them to join NATO, to avoid them going communist. The

35
Walt (2022).
36
Gaddis (1998).
37
Gaddis (2011, p. 196).
38
With the important exceptions of Greece and Turkey, which were immediately co-opted
into NATO also due to their strategic position: Turkey controls one of Europe’s choke
points, the Bosporus, connecting the black Sea—thus, Ukraine—to the Mediterranean. In
military strategy, a choke point is a strait with a narrow width, where only a limited number
of ships can pass at a time.
30 L. LONARDO

doctrine of containment is an early Cold War strategy of the US. US rela-

tions with the Soviet Union would later become less tense: it was the so-­
called détente. After the Cold War, in a 1993 address to the UN General
Assembly, the newly elected Clinton explained that ‘our overriding pur-
pose must be to expand and strengthen the world’s community of market-­
based democracy’.39 As Kissinger sums up, containment was overtaken by
enlargement, or at least by post-containment.40 But this post-Cold War
enlargement, entailing a penetration in, and a degree of political influence
on, post-Soviet space was, for some, nothing less than a provocation.
Putin’s words: ‘I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have
any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring
security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation
that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against
whom is this expansion intended?’.41 Kennan himself had expressed a simi-
lar view. Then 94-year-old, in 1998 he commented ‘I think the Russians
will gradually react quite adversely [to NATO expansion] and it will affect
their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this
whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.’42 Kennan hit the tar-
get: there was no reason whatsoever. It is perhaps an inherent contradic-
tion to have NATO (born to keep “the Russian out”) up and standing
when NATO was not needed (because the Russians were already keeping
themselves out). Or at least we now know they might have kept themselves
out, and Kennan and Gaddis certainly thought so in the 1990s. A way to
see this (a crude, simplified way no doubt) is to state that, through the
NATO enlargement, the US kept an enemy alive (Kavafis’ poem Waiting
for the barbarians ends with the lines ‘Now what’s going to happen to us
without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.’)
On the promises made to the Soviet Union, again Putin: ‘what hap-
pened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of
the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even
remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was
said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr.

39
(Address by President Bill Clinton to the UN General Assembly, n.d.; and later his national
security advisor Tony Lake - ‘From Containment to Enlargement’ 9/21/93 · Clinton Digital
Library, n.d.).
40
Kissinger (2014, p. 317), Del Pero (2022).
41
2007 Munich speech, available at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/
transcripts/24034.
42
Friedman (1998).
 2 THE CONTEXT: THE EU AND UKRAINE BETWEEN SLAVOPHILES AND NATO 31

Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact
that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory
gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guar-
antees?’. The rejoinder to this is that NATO has always had an ‘open door’
policy. Each state decides of its own foreign policy, and its allies. Article 10
of NATO’s founding treaty, states that ‘any other European State in a
position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the
security of the North Atlantic’ can apply for membership. There was never
a promise not to take on new members, even though it is true that the
US’s position expressed in 1990 (that East Germany would join the alli-
ance but NATO would move ‘not one inch’ further east) then changed
after the Soviet Union broke down in December 1991.43 Declassified
materials shows that in 1997 Clinton refused an offer for a verbal agree-
ment, with Yeltsin, that no former Soviet Republics would join NATO.44
In 2008, NATO members agreed, and publicly declared, that Ukraine and
Georgia would eventually become NATO members, even though the plan
was never implemented. Germany was strongly against the choice, whereas
the US (with the Bush administration in its final months) and central
European countries were in favour. With hindsight, the 2008 NATO dec-
laration seems to me a mistake on the part of the Alliance, because it made
a promise to Ukraine that NATO did not keep, while at the same time
giving Russia a pretext to denounce further NATO ‘expansion’.
Some also contend that the role of the US and US intelligence in the
various colours revolutions was to orchestrate and finance anti-Russian
movements (Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, Kirghizstan in 2005, the
failed blue revolution in Belarus in 2006, and the Euromaidan in 2013).

2.4   EU and Ukraine

In the post-Cold War, Ukraine became the political—and then, tragically,
literal—battleground for Russia’s foreign policy. Having ‘lost’ to the West
first the outer layer securing the Warsaw Pact (Finland and Austria, who
joined the EU in 1995), and then the second layer (Poland, Czech
Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and the Baltics), only the inner layer of
Belarus and Ukraine was left as close allies of Russia. This was so until

Sarotte (2021, pp. 1–2).

43

Declassified Documents Concerning Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Clinton Presidential

44

Records 2015–0782-M-2. https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/57569

32 L. LONARDO

2013, when Ukraine went close to signing an international agreement it

had negotiated with the EU. This is when the recent history of the conflict
begins. This section outlines the framework of the relationship between
the EU and Ukraine, and then it considers the developments which led
from the Maidan protests of 2013—following the decision not to sign the
agreement with the EU—to the annexation of Crimea, and the proclama-
tion of the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbass in
2014, to the mobilisation and invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The relationship between the EU and Ukraine takes place in the con-
text of the European Neighbourhood policy (ENP). The ENP was the
result of a compromise between giving attention ‘to the East’ and ‘to the
South’: to the new neighbours the EU acquired as a result of the ‘big
bang’ enlargement of 2004 (the greatest, in absolute and relative terms, in
the history of the EU). As a policy, the ENP merges as different countries
as Morocco and Belarus, Ukraine and Israel, and since 2004, after the so-­
called Rose Revolution in Georgia, also countries of Southern Caucasus.
Russia decided not to be part of this new ‘neighbourhood’, an EU policy
which guarantees significant financial benefits for the participating non-
­EU countries (Morocco being the recipient of the largest sum in absolute
terms). The one-size-fit-all approach of the policy was predicated on the
same rationale of enlargement, but without this perspective: the EU estab-
lishes conditionality with a view to bring closer those countries economic,
political, and administrative systems, but without any promise of member-
ship (except for the Western Balkans45). This partially changed with the
war against Ukraine, which was a game changer also in this respect:
Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia presented a formal request to join the
EU. After the June 2022 European Council, there are seven recognised
candidates for membership of the European Union: Turkey (applied in
1987), North Macedonia (2004), Montenegro (2008), Albania (2009),
Serbia (2009), Ukraine (2022), and Moldova (2022). Bosnia and
Herzegovina is a ‘potential candidate’. This means that the Commission is
in bilateral negotiations to finalise accession: the process is largely political
and it is discussed, in relation to Ukraine, in the next chapter.
The EU has agreements in place with the countries of the ENP. These
treaties are meant to facilitate trade and free movement of people, as well
as, more generally, bringing the EU and the neighbouring country closer
to each other in terms of political cooperation, cultural exchanges, and

45
Juncos (2018).
 2 THE CONTEXT: THE EU AND UKRAINE BETWEEN SLAVOPHILES AND NATO 33

even in security and defence. They are usually negotiated by the European
Commission and the foreign ministry of the third country. This is what
happened with the Association Agreement between the EU and its
Member States, and Ukraine, which was negotiated between 2011
and 2013.
The agreement did not have a smooth genesis. Its negotiations were
slowed down, or even stalled, due to the EU’s concern for the anti-­
democratic drift of Ukraine. The trial of the former prime minister, Yuliya
Timoshenko, for example, had been perceived as politically motivated. By
the end of 2013, however, the parties had agreed on a text which was
ready for signature.
A crisis ensued when, in November 2013, President Viktor Yanukovych
decided not to sign the agreement with the EU—a decision that, the
Ukrainian government would later reveal, came after pressures from
Moscow.46 Over the next three months, increasing numbers of demonstra-
tors occupied Kiev’s squares, demanding both a review of the failure to
reach an agreement with the EU and the resignation of the government
and president. Violence erupted again in January 2014, when the parlia-
ment passed a law restricting the freedom to demonstrate. Amid escalating
clashes, pro-EU protests and failed attempts at mediation between the
opposition and European foreign ministers, in February 2014 the govern-
ment resigned, and President Yanukovich was deposed and fled. Oleksandr
Turchynov, former head of Ukraine’s intelligence service, was appointed
president. A temporary government led by Prime Minister Arseniy
Yatsenyuk was then formed in Kiev, not recognised by Russia but sup-
ported by the West. One of the new government’s first actions was to vote
for the release of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, return to the
2004 constitution, and hold an early presidential election on 25 May
2014. In response, Russia launched a military operation in Crimea, while
at the same time pro-Russian groups occupied the local parliament and
called for a referendum on 16 March to secede from Ukraine and join
Russia. After 96.77% of voters voted in favour, Russia unilaterally annexed
the territory without the consent of the Ukrainian government, in an
action widely considered illegal by the international community.
A conflict also began in the Donbas. On 1 March 2014, the city council
of Donetsk called for a referendum on the future of the region; in April
2014, the protests against Kiev had escalated. In response, the Ukrainian

46
Putin Fears Ukraine-EU Deal (n.d.).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
was an hour giving orders and dispatching men to the planters, even
twenty miles off, for assistance.
For a week thereafter, day and night, I fairly lived on horseback at
the levee, superintending the repair work in place of my absent
husband and our inefficient overseer. Each planter affected by the
crevasse came, or sent an overseer with a force of slaves, who
worked in hour shifts, to their waists in the water, driving piles and
heaping sand bags. As the shifts changed the men were given a
dram and hot soup or coffee, and sent to a huge bonfire nearby to
dry themselves.
Another time I landed from a boat at the witching hour between
midnight and dawn. The boat’s bell and whistle sounded to attract
some light sleeper. By the time I was fairly ashore a glimmering light
of a lantern was seen. I was escorted to the house by the coachman,
but if any other negro had responded I should have felt quite as safe.
Mammy Charlotte was supreme in the domestic department. The
little cupbearers from the quarters reported to her for the “dreenings”
of the coffee pot or the left-over soup. The visitor by the library fire
called to her for a glass of wine or a “finger” of whisky. I called
Charlotte to ask what we were going to have for dinner. She was the
busy one, and every plantation had just such a mammy. Charlotte
and I belonged to the same church. When there was a vacant seat in
the carriage Sunday morning she was called to occupy it.
One of our neighbors, that a New Englander would call a “near”
man, owned a few acres adjoining ours, but too remote from his
plantation to be advantageously cultivated. He would not fence his
property nor work his road, nor keep his levee in repair (it was just
there we had the crevasse); however, it afforded good pasturage for
Uncle Billy’s cow, and for us, a supply of mushrooms. Billy’s nets and
lines supplied us with shrimp and fish, small catfish that William
cooked à la pompano, not a poor imitation of that delectable Gulf
dainty. I heard Charlotte berating Billy for not bringing in some more
of those fine shrimp, when he knew, too, there was company in the
house. Imagine my consternation at Billy’s reply, “Dey done gorn; dat
ole drowned mule is floated away.”
 Col. Hicky was our nearest neighbor, on Hope estate. When the
dear old man was eighty and I was twenty-five we were great chums.
He never passed in his buggy if I was visible on the lawn or porch
without stopping for a chat. There was frequent interchange of
neighborly courtesies. He had fine large pecans, and we didn’t; we
had celery and he didn’t, so there was much flitting back and forth of
baskets. If we were having an unusual occasion, like the dinner my
husband gave in honor of Messrs. Slidell and Benjamin, when they
were elected to the United States Senate, a big basket came from
Hope estate. Didn’t the dear old gentleman send a capon turkey
which was too big for any dish we had, and didn’t we have to borrow
the Hicky dish?
Col. Hicky had a birthday dinner, when he was eighty-two, and a
grand dinner it was, to be sure. Sam Moore—I never knew just who
he was, or why he was so essential at every function—sat at the
host’s right. The Colonel was too deaf to hear all the bon mots, and
Sam interpreted for him, and read in a loud voice all the toasts, some
of which were very original and bright. Anyone remembering Col.
Winthrop, or better still, Judge Avery, can understand there was no
lack of wit and sparkle in any toast they might make.
 XXVII
PEOPLE I HAVE ENTERTAINED

I imagine all of us have read “People I Have Smiled With,” or,

“People I Have Known,” but not many are writing about “People I
Have Entertained.” Rocking away the remnant of a long and varied
life, I find myself dreamingly entertaining guests who are long since
departed to the “House of Many Mansions,” guests who came and
stayed, and went, some of whom I had never seen before, and some
I never heard from after, but there are guests and guests, as every
housewife knows. Particularly country house guests come, whose
city houses are not open to what a neighbor of mine calls “trunk
visitors.” In the days of which I write, every house, especially every
plantation house, had a conspicuous latch string outside the door. I
amuse my grandchildren with tales of the varied assortment of
visitors I had “befo’ de war,” just as I had conjured to rest their
mothers and fathers when they clamored to be told again about the
gentleman who brought his own sheets and coffee pot, or the lady
who wanted to pray all the time. I feel I am telling these tales for the
last time. They don’t point a moral, for no guest can do to-day, nor
will hereafter, the things some of my guests did, let us think, in the
innocence of their hearts.
The first visitor I recall when I was a bride in my new home, was a
distinguished, eccentric, literary man, a bachelor, and a Creole, brim
full of cranks and kinks, but a delightful conversationalist withal.
Before he arrived I knew he was coming from a visit to an adjacent
parish where his great heart had been touched by the witchery of a
young girl. With his Sancho, the Don Quixote had been storming the
citadel, and to continue the simile he struck a windmill, and so was
put to flight. Now he was accepting my husband’s invitation to rest,
and salve his wounds at our home. I was amazed when my
housemaid told me he had not only brought his valet, but his own
linen sheets and his coffee pot! I understood then why he was not an
acceptable suitor. Linen sheets and the coffee pot would scare any
prospective housewife. When I knew what a blunder he had
committed, I confess to little sympathy in his discomfort. That old
gentleman died full of honors and deeply lamented, in New Orleans,
a few years ago.
Mrs. Breckinridge was our guest, while her husband was vice-
president. The presidential candidates, almost forgotten now, were
Buchanan and Breckinridge. She was active and eager to have her
husband mount to the top of the ladder of preferment, and did no
little engineering in his behalf that winter. Mrs. Breckinridge was
charming, a delightful visitor, a relative by marriage to us, but so
remote, that if she had not been so lovely and the vice-president so
distinguished, the dim connection would never have been thought of.
Her aspirations were not realized, and he was tail to another
presidential kite, that could not be made to fly. We did not meet Mrs.
Breckinridge after that long visit, and the last time I saw her husband
he was a fleeing Confederate general in Havana, without
incumbrance of any kind, so he was not our “trunk visitor.”
During the early fifties a planter from Bayou Lafourche bought a
plantation on the Mississippi River, fully five miles from us, and on
the opposite side of the river, as well. My husband, in his
grandiloquent flamboyant manner, invited him to bring his family to
our house to stay till their lares et penates were settled in their new
home. The man, in the same grandiloquent, flamboyant style,
accepted. When I asked how many there were in the family, my
hospitable husband replied that he only heard mention of a wife. In
due time a little Lafourche packet, with ever so much turning and
backing, blowing of whistle and ringing of bells, as if to announce a
surprise (which it certainly did), ran out a plank at our levee, and a
whole procession walked that plank and filed up the path to the
house. I looked from an upper window, and counted the guests as
they marched up, in twos and threes: A man and his wife, her aged
mother and brother, four boys, ranging from three to ten years, and a
darky with the baby in arms!
 One guest room had been made ready, but three additional
chambers were at once put in commission. By the time wraps had
been removed and fresh fires made all over the house—it was mid-
winter—I was ten times more breathless than my unexpected crowd.
Every day for over a week the man and his wife were conveyed to
their new home in our carriage, and there they stayed from morn to
dewy eve. The aged grandmother was left in my special care. She
was unable to cope with the untrained boys, as, indeed, all of us
were. The uncle had rheumatism or something that confined him to
his bed most of the time. So the boys were left to their own devices,
to gallop in and out of doors, from the muddy garden to the Brussels
carpets, all hours of the day. The baby squalled, and the nurse
spanked it, and I didn’t care.
One stormy day the boys found occupation indoors that was very
diverting. They extracted every button from a tufted, upholstered
chair in the library, the one their grandmother most affected, and with
hairpin and nail, scratched hieroglyphics all over a newly-painted
mantel, till it looked like it had been taken from some buried city of
Egypt. Thank goodness! Visits don’t last forever. In the course of
time the family moved into the new home, and gave a house-
warming ball within the next week—vive la bagatelle!
Reading with great interest a newly published book, “The Circuit
Rider’s Wife,” brings vividly to mind a visitor we once had. She was
one of the sweetest and loveliest of women. She was a Methodist,
the only one in a wide acquaintance I ever met, who claimed to have
“the gift of sanctification.” I do not believe one possesses the power
within oneself to resist sin, nor do I mean to inject religious views
and doctrines in these remarks about “People I Have Entertained,”
but I do say, if there ever was a really sanctified woman it was this
Mrs. Abe Smith of Mississippi. She was our guest one short, happy,
glorified week. She read her Bible chapter to us every morning, and
prayed with and for us all day long, if we wanted, and we generally
did, for surely she had the gift of prayer. I never listened to such
uplifting prayers as dear Mrs. Smith could utter; her very voice was
an inspiration. She was highly connected and highly cultivated and
had a vocal training that comprised very intricate music, but with
“The Coming of the Lord” she confined her voice entirely to psalms
and hymns. Her mission was to pray and sing, but no doubt when
the harvest was waiting, in some meeting house, she could exhort
with an eloquence equal to the most earnest itinerant in the pulpit.
We had one strange glorification and sanctification, but it was
interrupted by the coming of a Methodist preacher, who claimed to
having sought, in vain, the gift of sanctification. The last few days of
lovely Sister Smith’s visit were spent in the library with closed doors,
wrestling with the halting soul of Brother Camp.
These were the expiring days of the old “Peace which passeth
understanding.” After that came the war, which sorely tried the heart
of the glorified woman, and she proved faithful to her gift of
sanctification even unto the bitter end....
One November day I entered my library with an open letter of
introduction in my hand, to say to the young man, placidly warming
himself at the fire, that the letter was not meant for my husband, who
was not at home, but for his brother. He replied he understood the
brother was not in Louisiana, and he took the liberty of transferring
the introductory epistle to the next of kin. He was a young doctor,
threatened with lung trouble, who had come South to spend some
time in somebody’s sugar house. I frankly told him that our sugar
house was not by any means a suitable place for an invalid, but (I
glanced out of the door and saw his vehicle had departed and his
trunk was on the porch) I would be pleased to have him remain my
guest until my husband returned to see what could be devised to
further the invalid’s plan. Northern and Western people, who never
had been in a sugar house and inhaled the warm fumes of boiling
cane juice, night and day, and incidentally submitted to the
discomforts of an open building, not intended for sleeping quarters,
thought that the treatment, as they chose to call it, was a cure for
tuberculosis. My guest found himself quite comfortable, and
remained in our home five months. Nothing more was said about
sugar house treatment. By spring, like a butterfly, he emerged into
the sunlight, strong and well and ready to fly to pastures new, which
he did. We did not even hear from that doctor again. He was a
physician in good practice in Galveston during the war, and told Gen.
Magruder he thought he had met us years before!
Every planter in my day entertained strangers who came and
went, like a dream. Some were grateful for their entertainment, some
did not so much as write “bread and butter” notes, after their
departure.
Queer, inquisitive folks lighted upon us now and then. I recall a
party of Philadelphians who arrived at the adjacent town with a note
of introduction to the president of the bank. They said they wanted to
visit a plantation and see the working thereof. That hospitable
husband of mine happened to be passing; he was called in and
introduced to the party, and he invited them for the whole of the next
day. They came, they saw, I don’t know if they thought they
conquered. We thought so, for they were on a tour of observation.
They were delightfully informal and interesting people. We
accompanied them to the canefield—the negroes happened to be at
work quite near the house—into some of the cabins, the infirmary,
where they were surprised to find not one inmate, into the nursery
where the babies were sleeping in cribs, and the older children
eating mush and molasses. They had to taste the food, had to talk to
the granny about her babies, had to ask after her health. Meeting a
negro man, walking as brisk as anybody, with a hoe over his
shoulder, they had to inquire as to his condition, and must have been
surprised to hear what an awful misery he had in his back. They had
to see where the plantation sewing, and the cooking, were done. I
began to think before it was all over we were superintendents of
some penal institution and were enduring a visit from the committee
of inspection. However, they were very attractive, naïve visitors,
surprised at everything. After luncheon, waited upon by a negro boy
on a broad grin—it was all so very funny to him—they took their
departure, and my husband and I had a merry laugh over the
incidents of the day. It was rather an interesting interlude in our quiet
life, and remoteness from the abolition storm that was hovering over
the land.
All the people I entertained were not queer. We had a house full
always of gay, young people, young girls from the North that were
my schoolmates in New Haven, girls who were my play-mates, and
the friends of my young ladyhood in New Orleans, fresh, bright,
happy girls, who rode horseback, sang and danced and made merry
all through the house. All are gone now. Only the sweet memory of
them comes to me in my solitary day-dreams.
 XXVIII
A MONUMENT TO MAMMIES

Let us have a memorial, before the last of us who had a black

mammy passes away. We who still linger would love to see a granite
monument to the memory of the dear mammy who fostered our
childhood. Our grandchildren, indeed our children, will never know
the kind of mammies their ancestors were blessed with.
I know of two only of the old stock of nurses and housekeepers
left. They were grown women when Sherman marched through
Georgia, destroying their old homes, laying waste the land, and
Butler sat down in New Orleans, wreaking vengeance on their
hapless masters, and scattering their little bands of servants to the
four winds. These two mammies I wot of remained with their own
white folks. The Georgia one lived in a family I visited, a faithful old
woman, doing her utmost to fill a gap (and gaps were of constant
occurrence) in any branch of household duty. Mammy was a
supernumerary after the children grew up, but when the new-fangled
housemaid swept her trailing skirts out of the premises, mammy
filled her place till another of that same half-educated sort came.
When cook flared up and refused to do her duty in the way to which
she was called, mammy descended into the deserted kitchen.
One day I overheard the son of that family, who was about to start
to a Northern college, say: “Mammy, put on your Sunday black silk; I
want you to go down the street with me; I am going to have your
picture taken.” “What fur, son?” “I want it with the rest of my family to
put on my bureau at college.” “Lord! son, you ought’en to hav’ my
black face to show to dem Yankees; den you’ll tell ’em I’se your
mammy.” However, the pleased old darky, as black as her Sunday
silk, had her picture taken just like “son” wanted. I have a copy of it
now. God bless her!
 A family from the extreme South comes every summer to a quiet
place in Connecticut and brings mammy to take care of the little
ones. I doubt if they feel they could come without her. Mammy is
pure black; no adulterated blood under that skin—black, flat-nosed
and homely, but the children adore her, and she “makes them mind,
too,” she proudly tells you. Every boarder in that big house knows
mammy, but I doubt if one of them knows her name; I do not. It
warms my heart to shake hands with those two remnants of a dear
past civilization, the only two I ever met.
When a child I made frequent visits to my cousin, Judge Chinn’s
plantation, in West Baton Rouge. I believe that hospitable house has
long since vanished into the river, with its store of pleasant
memories. How I always, when I arrived there, had to run find
mammy first thing, and how she folded me in her warm embrace and
delighted my ears with, “How dis chile do grow.” Every visitor at that
grand, hospitable home knew mammy. She always stood back of the
judge’s chair, and with signals directed the young girls how to wait at
table. She managed after the children grew up, married and settled
(some of them settled, Creole fashion, in the home nest too) that
whole big and mixed household, where another generation of babies
came to claim a portion of her love and care. Nobody thought to go
to the judge or his wife for anything. “All applications,” to use an
office phrase, “made to mammy.” She was always ready to point the
way or to help one through it.
Casually meeting Mrs. Chinn and inquiring of the various members
of her family that from long absence I had lost sight of, “And
mammy,” I said. The dear old lady burst into tears. Mammy had died
holding the hand of the sorrowing mistress, her last words, “My work
is done. I tried to do my best,” and God knows she did.
We had a mammy in my mother’s house when I was a wee little
thing, and we children loved her right along all the week till Saturday
night, when the ponderous woman brought the big washtub upstairs
and two pails of hot water. We hated mammy then, for she had a
heavy hand and a searching eye, and a rough wash rag full of
soapsuds. Not a fold in the ear, nor a crease in the plump body
escaped her vigilance. I really think we were glad when we outgrew
need of her assistance at those dreaded Saturday night’s baths, and
she went to other little lambs, in pastures new.
When I went a bride to my husband’s home, Charlotte, his old
mammy, met us and proudly escorted us within doors, where were
fresh flowers and a blazing fire (it was long past midnight, and
dreadfully stormy too), and every comfort prepared and ready for
“the coming of the bride.” I felt then and there mammy would be a
comfort for me and a real help, and so she proved, in all my sunny
life in the plantation home and in the dark days of the war, too. My
Mammy Charlotte had complete charge of everything about the
house. She had been thoroughly trained by my husband’s mother.
She made the jellies and the pickles, the ice cream, the cakes, doing
a little of everything to make our home comfortable and happy. And
often she remarked that no one in the house did more and had less
to show for it at night than she did. That is a truth about many
households, one does all the neglected things, and picks up all the
loose threads. Guests were made to understand if they required
anything, from a riding horse to a fresh stick on the fire, from a mint
julep to a bedroom candle, they had only to call Charlotte. She was
never beyond the reach of a summons, day or night. She was
mammy to all the children of the house, and all the other children
that floated in from other people’s houses. It was Mammy Charlotte
who hurriedly secreted the spoons (!) when a Federal cavalry
company came prancing down the road toward our gates. It was
mammy who ran to my bedside to whisper, “Don’t you get skeered,
they does look like gentlemen;” and after they had taken a drink of
water and trotted off again it was mammy back to say, “It’s all right;
they didn’t say nothin’ ’bout spoons.” Even at that early date and that
remote spot from Butler’s headquarters the matter of spoons had
been so freely and laughingly discussed that the sable crowd of
witnesses that surrounded every household must have taken the
idea that collecting spoons was “the chief end of man.”
I pity the little ones of to-day with no black mammy of their very
own to cuddle them to her warm bosom and comfort them, and tell
them funny rhymes about “The Monkey and the Baboon’s Sister,” to
make them forget their griefs in a merry laugh. The high-falutin’
nurses they have now, here to-day, gone to-morrow, without any
anchorage in our hearts and homes, are not and never could be
made mammies like we of threescore years and ten were blessed
with.
Who of us that lived within a day’s journey of Col. Hicky but
remembers his Milly, the mammy of that grand, big household? The
dear Colonel lived to see great-grandchildren grow up, and Milly
mammied at least three generations at “Hope Estate.” She was a
famous nurse. Mind you, this was decades before trained nurses
arrived on the stage. How many of us remember how tenderly and
untiringly Milly nursed some of our invalids to health! Her services
were tendered, and oh! how gratefully accepted. With a sad heart I
recall a sick baby I nursed until Milly came and put me to bed and
took the ailing child in her tender arms. For two days and nights unto
the end she watched the little flickering spark.
When Mr. Sidell removed his family to Washington after his
election to the United States Senate, I traveled in their company
several days. The children had their colored mammy to care for
them. She had been raised in the Deslonde family, a trusted servant.
I was struck with the system and care with which she managed her
little charges from Mathilde, a girl in her teens, down to baby Johnny.
She lived with them during those troublous times in Washington, she
accompanied the family to Paris, and I presume died there. Always
dressed in a neat calico gown, a fichu and tignon, even in Paris she
did not alter her dress nor wear another headgear than her own
bandana. There’s a mammy to immortalize!
Then let us raise a monument to the mammies of the days that
were. Quickly, too, before the last one of us who were crowned with
such a blessing shall have passed away “’mid the shadows that flee
in the night.”
 XXIX
MARY ANN AND MARTHA ANN

The story of Mary Ann and Martha Ann and the red bonnet has
been so often retold to my children and grandchildren that every
detail has been retained, and in its completeness as I give it here, it
is a bit of authentic family history “dressed up” as its hearers love it.
“What kin we do, Ma’y Ann? I dun hear Miss Liza talkin’ ’bout it
agin, and ’lowin’ it got to be found.” The two little negroes sat under a
wide-spreading pecan tree that scattered its shade and its late
autumn nuts over the grassy lawn of a spacious Southern mansion.
They crouched closely together, heads touching, voices whispering
and faces turned to the river road, their scanty linsey skirts drawn
tightly over little black legs, so that no searching eye from the broad
veranda could spy them. Mary Ann looked anxiously around, and,
drawing her knotty, kinky head closer still to Martha’s softer locks,
whispered: “Marm Charlotte gwine to clean out de L, and you know
she’ll go in dat room fust thing.”
Marthy sprang back with dilated eyes.
“Ma’y Ann, it carnt stay dar; it’s gotten to cum outen dar, oh Lordy!
What did you put it dar in the fust place fur?”
“I didn’t put it dar.” Ma’y Ann’s eyes flashed. “You fotch it dar your
own self, unner your apern; you sed it was yourn and Miss Ellen giv
it to you.”
Marthy sprang to her feet. “Miss Ellen never giv me nothin’ in her
whole life.” She shook her clenched fist in Ma’y Ann’s face, then
burst into tears. The stolen conference, like many another that had
preceded it, was opened in a spirit of mutual conciliation, but as the
interview progressed and interest waxed, the poor little negroes
became fierce in their alarm, fast losing sight of the turpitude of the
deed committed in common in the over-mastering anxiety of each
one to shift the entire blame on the other.
“Hush, gal, set down; I hear Marm Charlotte dis bery minit; she
mustn’t kotch me under dis here pecon tree agin. I was down here
yisterday, tryin’ to dig a hole where we’s settin’ now! I want ter berry
de rotten thing. Marm Charlotte kotch’d me here, and she ax’d what I
doin’ and I ’low’d I was gitten pecons fur de turkeys, and she
’sponded she low’d ter tell me when to feed de turkeys.”
Marthy Ann slowly resumed her seat, taking care to get well
behind the pecan tree. She was nervously sobbing, “She’s kept me
—a—lookin’ fur it—till I feared to go in—our—room—feared to find it
—a settin’ on de baid—Oh, Ma’y Ann, what made you take hit?”
Ma’y Ann’s eyes flashed fire. She was of the heroic sort, and by no
wise melted by Marthy’s lamentations and tears.
“I didn’t take hit; you tuck hit, and you know you did; you’s de
biggest rascal on de place. You does a thing, den you goes whinin’
and cryin’ ’bout hit. I does a thing, I jist ’sponds fur hit and sticks hit
out.”
Marthy wiped her eyes on the linsey skirt and tried to imbibe some
of her companion’s courage.
“Well, Ma’y Ann, you put it whar tis and ghostes cum out ev’ry
night and ties me wid de long, red strings.”
“No ghostes cum arter me,” said Ma’y Ann, bridling up. “Dat shows
you put it dar your own self.”
“We ain’t got no time ter talk and fuss; we got ter find a place to
put hit now. God knows it cums atter me ev’y night, and las’ night de
debbel had it on, Ma’y Ann. I seed him; he jist strutted all around de
room wid it on his haid and de ribbons was tied to his horns.”
“Oh, Lordy, Marthy, is he got hit now?” The terrified child sprang to
her feet and gazed distractedly up the tree. “Marthy, we kin fling hit
up in dis tree; won’t de debbil let hit stay in de crotch?”
The strained eyes eagerly searched for a sheltering limb that
would catch and conceal the thing, the ghost of which would not lay,
day or night. Marm Charlotte had never relaxed in her search, in
bureaus, and armchairs, behind hanging dresses, in the big cedar
chest, among the blankets, upon top shelves, in old bandboxes, in
trunks, over bed testers, downstairs in china closets, among plates
and dishes, under parlor sofas and over library bookcases. Ma’y Ann
and Marthy Ann had no rest. They made believe to search the
garden, after the house had been pulled to pieces, going down
among the artichoke bushes and the cherokee rose hedge that
smothered the orchard fence, wishing and praying somebody might
find it in one of those impossible places all torn by squirrels or made
into nests by birds.

Christmas, with its turkeys and capons fattened on pecan nuts, its
dances and flirtations in the wide halls of the big house, its weddings
and breakdowns in the negro quarters, had come and gone. The
whirr of the ponderous mill had ceased; the towering chimney of the
sugar house no longer waved its plume of smoke by day nor
scattered its showers of sparks by night. Busy spiders spun nets
over big, dusty kettles, and hung filmy veils from the tall rafters.
Keen-eyed mice scampered over the floors and scuffled in the walls
of the deserted building whence the last hogshead of sugar and
barrel of molasses had been removed, and the key turned in the
great door of the sugar house. Tiny spears of cane were sprouting
up all over the newly plowed fields. Drain and ditches were bubbling
over, and young crawfish darting back and forth in their sparkling
waters. The balmy air of early summer, freighted with odors of
honeysuckle and cape jessamine, and melodious with the whistle
and trill of mocking birds, floated into the open windows and doors of
the plantation dwelling. The shadowy crepe myrtle tree scattered
crimpy pink blossoms over the lawn. Lady Banks rose vines
festooned the trellises and scrambled in wild confusion over the roof
of the well house, waving its golden radiance in the soft, sunny air.
Cherokee and Chickasaw hedges, with prodigal luxuriance, covered
the rough wooden fences, holding multitudes of pink and white
blossoms in thorny embrace, and sheltering the secret nests of
roaming turkey hens and their wild-eyed broods.
“Well, Levi, you’se dun your job, and it wus a big one, too.”
“Yes, William, I whitewashed as much as ten miles o’ fencing, and
all de trees in de stable lot, besides de cabins and de chicken
houses.”
“Ten miles o’ fencing,” replied William doubtfully. “I didn’t ’low dere
wuz dat much on de whole plantation. Why, dey call hit ten miles
from here to Manchac, and ’bout ten from here to Cohite.”
“I mean ten miles in and out; about five miles one side de fence
and five miles de odder.”
“Oh! that-a-way,” said William dubiously. “Charlotte, give Mr.
Stucker another dodger.”
The speakers were two negro men, one in the shirt sleeves and
long apron that betokened the household cook, the other in the
shiny, shabby “store clothes” of the town darky. They sat at the
kitchen table, in front of a window commanding a view of newly
whitewashed fences and trees. Etiquette required that William
should play the rôle of host, on this, the last morning of the
whitewasher’s stay. Charlotte had laid the cloth and placed the
plates and knives for two, and served the fried bacon and hot corn
dodgers to Mr. Levi Stucker, a free man, who had a house of his own
and a wife to wait on him and in view of this dignity and state was
deemed entitled to unusual consideration.
“Lemme ask you, Charlotte,” said Stucker, carefully splitting his
dodger, and sopping the hot crumbs in the bacon gravy, “is you
missed ary thing outen de yard on dese premises? Caze I heard
dem two little gals havin’ a big talk in dat room next to me last night;
you knows dat’s a mighty weaky boardin’ ’tween dose rooms and a
pusson don’t have to listen to hear. I bin hearin’ ’em movin’ ’bout and
a whisperin’ most ginerally every night when dey ought most likely to
be asleep. Las’ night a old owl was a squinchin’ on dat mulberry tree
by de winder, and de shutter hit slammed. Dat woke dem gals up; it
was atter midnight; dey was skeert, one on ’em begin to blubber and
sed de debbil was dar to kotch ’em. From de way dey talked—(but it
was mystifyin’, I tell you)—I ’lowed in my mind dem gals had stole
somethin’, I couldn’t gather what, fur dey didn’t name no specials,
but sure’s you born dey’s up to somethin’, and skeered to death
’bout its bein’ foun’ out.”
Charlotte stopped on her way to the frying pan with widening eyes
and uplifted fork, and listened attentively, with an occasional jerk of
the head toward William.
“Jist tell me,” pursued Levi, “if you ’low dose gals to have de run of
de quarters, caze dey gits mischief in dere heads if dey run wid
quarter niggers.”
“No, sir,” responded the woman emphatically, “dey never goes
down dar; I’m keerful ’bout dat—onreason’ble keerful; no, sir, if I was
to let ’em have the run o’ dat quarter lot dere would never be a cold
biskit nor a cup o’ clabber in dis house de minit atter you put ’em
outen your hands. No, sir, Mr. Stucker, if old Hannah, or ary of de
sick niggers down dar wants anything from dis house dey got to
send one of their own little niggers wid de cup or de pan, and I
pintedly gives ’em what’s needed; dere’s nuff work for Ma’y Ann and
Marthy Ann ’bout dis house ’dout dey visitin’ at de quarters and
waitin’ on quarter niggers. I bet, dough, dey’s bin in some mischief I
ain’t had time to ferret out.”
After a pause she continued, “And you say you think dey done
stole somethin’?”
“Yes,” answered Stucker, pushing back his chair and rising from
the table; “yes, I understand somethin’ of dat natur’, if you has
missed ary thing.”
“We did miss dat currycomb what William comb his har wid; it was
a bran new, kinder stiff one, and he missed it last Sunday,” replied
Charlotte.
“Dat jist fallen outen de winder, it warn’t lost,” interrupted William,
who had been watching for a favorable opportunity to join the
conversation.
 “Yes, dem spawns foun’ hit outdoors, when I tole ’em I’d skin ’em if
it wasn’t perjuced,” said Charlotte, turning to William, who thereupon
relapsed into acquiescent silence.
“It warn’t no currycomb dey was talkin’ ’bout last night,” said
Stucker, jerking first one leg then the other to free his shaggy
breeches of dodger crumbs.
“Jist hold on a minit,” said Charlotte, stepping to the kitchen door
and shouting, “Ma’y Ann and Marthy Ann, whar’s you?”
“Here I is, ma’am, I’s comin’, yes ’em,” was responded from an
upper porch, and the two little darkies scuffled down the back stairs.
“Jist you two run down to de orchard whar I kin see you all de
time, hear me? All de time, and look fur dat Dominiker hen’s nest. I
hear her cacklin’ down dar, and don’t neither of you dar’ cum back till
you find it. If you cum back ’fore I call you, I’ll pickle you well. Run!”
Two little guinea blue cotton skirts whisked through a gap in the
rose hedge and emerged in the deep grass of the orchard, before
Charlotte turned back into the kitchen, satisfied they were at a
distance, and still under her observation. Levi Stucker meanwhile,
having carefully tied his two weeks’ earnings in the corner of his red
cotton handkerchief, and shared his last “chaw” of tobacco with
William, swung his bundle from the end of his long whitewash pole
and departed, with the shambling, shuffling gait of the typical
Southern negro.
“I’m gwine upstairs, William, and I’ll ramshackle dat room till I find
out what’s dar,” said the woman. She slowly mounted the stairs,
down which the two culprits had so lately descended with flying feet,
and turned into a small room on the servants’ gallery. She glanced
around the bare apartment the two little negroes called their own.
There was a battered trunk against the wall with a damaged cover
and no fastening of any kind, a rickety chair and a bed. Charlotte
tore the linsey dresses, homespun petticoats and check aprons from
nails behind the door, shaking and critically examining each article.
In the trunk she found remnants of rag dolls and broken toys and bits
of quilt pieces that had been their playthings for time out of mind.
There were no pockets to examine, no locks to pry open. “Dey don’t
need no pockets to carry dere money in, and no locked up trunks fur
dere jewelry,” Charlotte always said. It was her habit to go in and out
their room freely, to see that it was kept in some kind of order and
the bed regularly made up. The door of the room was always open,
and no means afforded for securing it on the inside. Notwithstanding
these precautions of Charlotte, who practically accepted the doctrine
of infant depravity, there was a mystery concealed in that room that
at intervals almost throttled the two little negroes, and, strange to
say, with all the woman’s vigilance, had slumbered months within
sound of her voice. She rapidly threw the clothes on the window sill,
turned the trunk inside out and pushed its battered frame into the
middle of the floor.
Nothing now remained to be searched but the plain unpainted bed.
It was neatly made up, the coarse brown blankets securely tucked in
all around. Charlotte whisked that off and dragged after it the cotton
mattress which rested on a “sack bottom,” secured by interlacing
cords to the bed frame. There was revealed the hidden secret!
Crushed quite flat and sticking to the sacking, long under pressure of
the cotton mattress and the tossing and tumbling children, what trick
of dainty beauty lay before her? It was so crumpled and smothered,
torn and ragged, soiled with fleeces of cotton lint that had sifted
through the bed seams, and covered with dust and grime that but for
glimpses of its original form and color here and there it would never
have been recognized. Charlotte snatched it out and fled to the
porch to see if Ma’y Ann and Marthy Ann were still down in the
orchard. There they lay, prone in the soft grass, happy as only
children, and black ones at that, can be. Four little ebony legs kicked
up in the air, and the sound of merry shouts reached Charlotte’s ear.
“You’ll fly dem laigs to sum purpose yit, fur I lay I’ll git Marse Jim to
giv you a breakdown dat’ll make dem laigs tired,” she said to herself.
“You jist lay dar,” she muttered, as she descended the steps. “You
needn’t waste your time (it’s a awful short one) lookin’ for aigs dat de
ole Dominiker ain’t never laid yit.”
 The deep window of the library was wide open, the sash thrown up
and an easy lounging chair drawn to the veranda, on which reposed
the towering form of the planter, lazily smoking a cigar, and looking
off upon the broad, swift river at a passing steamboat, floating so
high on its swelling waves that its deck was almost on a line with the
top of the grass-covered levee. Its passengers, thronging the
“guards” in the fragrance of a fine morning, seemed almost near
enough to the spectator on shore to respond to a friendly nod of the
head. The delicate lady of the mansion sat silently within, also
watching the passing boat.
“I see some one waving a paper from the Belle Creole. I believe
that’s Green. Yes, he has tied a handkerchief to his crutch, and is
waving that.”
The planter rose as he spoke and stood for a moment for a better
view. “Here, give me something, quick, to wave back at him.”
At this critical moment Charlotte appeared on the scene. “This will
do,” he exclaimed, catching the velvet wreck from the astonished
woman’s grasp and tossing it aloft, holding it by the long strings.
“Lord! jist see Marse Jim wid dat bonnet I dun foun’, dat you lost
’fore grinding time, Miss Liza, and whar you spec it was? Right onder
Ma’y Ann’s bed.”
“My bonnet! for pity’s sake, only look at it. Look!”
“It don’t look much like a bonnet. It’s more like a red rag to make
the turkeys gobble,” replied the master, disdainfully, throwing it to
Charlotte.
“My bonnet I paid Olympe twenty dollars for, and never wore it but
once; see the satin strings! And just look at the cape at the back!
And the feather poppies!”
Charlotte straightened herself up, holding the crumpled bonnet
and turning it around to show its proportions. It was of the
“skyscraper” shape, made on stiff millinette, that is more easily
broken than bent. Mashed sideways, it showed in its flattened state
as much of the satin lining as of velvet cover.