If you want to read some of the conspiracy theories fueling Russian
thought these days, here are a couple for you:
I have clipped a few paragraphs from several news items,
with links below them. Gives a bit of
insight into where things are at.
In Russia, which has made the accusation of fascism in other
countries a central tenet of its foreign policy, there freely exist
organizations which do not hide their openly nationalistic and xenophobic
nature.
Today’s reality is that fascism, Nazism and patriotism in
contemporary Russian society are now one and the same. State propaganda
skillfully manipulates many foreign nationalist movements (even very minor
ones), accusing entire countries and peoples of fascism, without showing the
‘grateful’ viewers of Russian state television, the people who march throughout
Moscow with swastikas and Nazi salutes.
Putin’s regime is oppressive
at home and imperialist abroad. Power is concentrated in the hands of Russia’s
dictatorial leader, who routinely violates human and civil rights and quashes
all opposition, while legitimizing his rule by appealing to Russian dreams of
erstwhile glory and great-power status and systematically engaging in military
adventures in supposed defense of Russian minorities in Russia’s “near abroad.”
Putin’s cult of personality centers on his hyper-masculine image as a tough
leader willing and able to stand up to real and imagined internal and external
foes.
Western hopes of resolving
the Russo-Ukrainian war in eastern Ukraine by means of negotiations are
therefore misplaced. Whatever Putin agrees to—even Ukraine’s agreement never to
seek NATO membership—will be at best a temporary retreat from his expansionist
foreign policy. And Putin’s choice of countries to pressure is large, extending
from the Baltics to Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine to Armenia,
Azerbaijan, and Georgia to the five Central Asian states. Russians or Russian
speakers inhabit all these states and can, in principle, be used to justify
Moscow’s strong-arm tactics.
President Putin said
Ukraine's army was operating against Ukrainian national interests by seeking to
contain Russia.
"In
effect, it is no longer an army but a foreign legion, in this case NATO's
foreign legion, which does not of course pursue the aims of Ukraine's national
interests," said the Russian president.
"The statement that
there is a NATO legion in Ukraine is nonsense," Mr. Stoltenberg said.
"There is no NATO legion, the foreign forces in Ukraine are Russian."
The NATO chief also urged
Russia to stop providing backing to rebels, saying hundreds of pieces of
advanced weaponry including tanks, heavy artillery and armoured vehicles had
crossed the border.
The Soviet doctrine was based on the assumption that world
revolution would eventually prevail everywhere. That there is no such
millennial vision under Putin poses natural limits to Russian expansion. On the
other hand, it is difficult to envisage an abdication of the present
rulers—unless they will be assured (as Boris Yeltsin was) that they will not be
prosecuted after their resignation—for instance, with regard to the fortunes
amassed while in power.
It is also true, however, that
certain ominous genies have been let out of the bottle in Russia’s current
consolidation of power. The conspiratorial views, now encouraged, can easily
turn in the wrong direction—namely, against the government. The rising Russian
nationalism is also a double-edged sword: in addition to being against the
West, chauvinism could find domestic targets such as the national minorities
and the millions of guest workers in Russia.
The state of mind of the ruling Russian elite is at present
one of great agitation; the fact that Russia has many nuclear weapons is
mentioned virtually every week. Marxism-Leninism has been abandoned and
replaced by a strange mixture of abstruse assertions and theories—such as
neo-Eurasianism. The invocation of a Russian manifest destiny and the specific
Russian spiritual values said to be greatly superior to Western decadence is very
impressive. But how great is the distance between this and Russian realities?
Self-criticism has not been in
fashion in Russia for a long time: Whenever something goes wrong, it must be
the fault of the West. There is the widespread and profound belief in all kinds
of conspiracy theories, the more outlandish the better and more popular. This
mind-set is not at all funny in the age of weapons of mass destruction.
There is the loathing of the
West, and especially of America, and there is the orientation toward a close
alliance with China, seen in Moscow as an alliance of equals, as if there could
be equality when the population of one partner is ten times as large as the
other’s and its GNP five times larger. The Russian leadership has persuaded
itself that all Beijing wants is the liberation of Taiwan. Great are the powers
of self-deception.
The German government called the most recent Russian moves
into eastern Ukraine “incomprehensible,” but they’re perfectly comprehensible
if one keeps a record of what has happened since the Crimean invasion. When the
latest Russian advances into Ukraine occurred, the new foreign policy chief of
the European Union, Federica Mogherini of Italy, urged moderation, saying that
the West can’t let the peace process break down because it will be so difficult
to start it again. But what peace process was she speaking about? As a recent Wall Street
Journal editorial pointed out, “Putin has never stood
down”—not in Chechnya in 1999, when he used the Chechen war to take power; not
in Georgia in 2008; not in 2012, when he whipped up anti-Americanism and
domestic repression to crush his own anti-government street protests; and so
far not in Ukraine. He will stand down only if and when he is forced to do so.
Far from being a partner in
peace negotiations, Putin has demonstrated a fierce and obsessive
anti-Americanism. The Washington
Post editorial
page was on the mark in its characterization of his speech in
Valdai in October: “a poisonous mix of lies, conspiracy theories, thinly veiled
threats of further aggression, and, above all, seething resentment toward the
United States.” Putin exceeded even his own standard of bombast the following
month when he said, “When a Russian feels he is right, he is invincible.”
Without Western resolve, any negotiations with Russia can
yield only temporary solutions that change nothing. The Kremlin is ultimately
interested in dictating terms, but not in keeping them, just like it was not
interested in keeping the cease-fire agreed upon in Minsk following the August
escalation. Showing the world that Russia can make rules at will and then break
them with impunity seems to be the current modus operandi in the Kremlin.
In 1992–94, sensing a growing threat of border revisionism from
Russia, Ukrainians pushed hard to have their neutrality guaranteed, much like
Finland in 1948 and Austria in 1955, by the West and Russia. At the time they
were negotiating security assurances in exchange for surrendering the nuclear
weapons inherited from the Soviet Union. Ukraine wanted these guarantees
formalized in an international treaty that would commit its guarantors (read:
the West) to impose sanctions and provide aid should Ukraine come under threat
(read: by Russia). The West balked at undertaking any binding security
commitments toward a new and little understood country.
Thus, the security assurances
granted in the Budapest Memorandum in exchange for Ukraine’s accession to the
nuclear nonproliferation treaty as a nonnuclear weapons state (signed by the
US, the UK, and Russia at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe
summit on December 5, 1994) only reiterated existing multilateral commitments
found in the UN Charter and the CSCE Helsinki Final Act, but guaranteed nothing
and imposed no costs for violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine,
neutral or otherwise.
The EU Association Agreement
with Ukraine, due for signature in November 2013, would have changed none of
that. Mired with expansion fatigue and careful not to provoke Russia, Brussels
offered Ukraine the agreement not as membership-lite, certainly not as a path
to NATO but rather as a consolation for the lack of a more substantive
engagement. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin, for whom NATO expansion
became a favorite casus belli, said nothing of NATO when he pressured Yanukovych out
of signing the EU deal. Instead, he simply stated that Ukraine’s economic alliance with the EU was not
in Russia’s interests because its market would be flooded with cheaper,
better-quality European goods.
In March 2014, after the Crimean annexation was a fait accompli and the Kremlin
began to stir trouble in southern and eastern Ukraine, Ukraine’s then acting Prime
Minister, Arseniy Yatseniuk, in a clear signal to Moscow, declared that Ukraine would
not seek NATO membership. Had Ukraine’s strategic neutrality been Russia’s true
objective, this would have been the time for Kremlin to sit down at the table
and commit Yatseniuk’s pledge to paper.
Yet, despite this very real
opportunity to stop NATO expansion at Ukraine’s doorstep, Moscow was not
interested. Instead, the Kremlin declared that it does not recognize the
“fascist junta” in Kyiv and moved to effectively violate the very neutrality
into which it had forced Ukraine in the first place.
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| Location of ethnic Ukrainians |
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