Chapter 27 The Price of Freedom
Bohdan Solchanyk came to Kyiv from Lviv by train early in the morning of February 20, 2014. A twenty-eight-year-old historian, sociologist, and budding poet, he taught at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and was working on a doctoral dissertation on electoral practices in Ukraine with an adviser at the University of Warsaw.
Solchanyk was not on a research trip when he stepped onto the pavement of the Kyiv railway station on that cold day in February. Elections were not taking place in Kyiv: revolution was. He had dreamed about it back in 2008, when he wrote the poem “Where Is My Revolution?” in which he expressed his generation’s disappointment with promises made during the Orange Revolution of 2004 but never fulfilled.Now a new revolution had come to Ukraine, with hundreds of thousands of people once again pouring into the streets of downtown Kyiv in late November 2013 to demand reform, the end of government corruption, and closer ties with the European Union. Solchanyk felt that his place was among the protesters in Kyiv. February 20 marked his fourth foray into the revolution, which turned out to be his last. A few hours after his arrival in Kyiv, sniper fire killed Solchanyk along with dozens of other protesters. In death, he would become one of the “Heavenly Hundred” — more than one hundred protesters killed in Kyiv in January and February 2014. Those killings ended twenty-two years of generally nonviolent politics in Ukraine and turned a dramatic new page in its history. The democracy peacefully acquired in the final days of the Soviet Union and the independence won at the ballot box in December 1991 would now require defense not only with words and marches but also with arms.
The events leadins up to the mass killings of protesters on the Maidan began in February 2010 with the victory of Viktor Yanukovych, the main target of the Maidan protests of 2004, in the presidential elections.
The new president began his tenure by changing the rules of the political game. His ideal was a strong authoritarian regime, and he tried to concentrate as much power in his own hands and those of his family as possible. He rewrote the constitution by forcing parliament to cancel the 2004 amendments and yield more power to the presidency. Then, in the summer of 2011, he put on trial and jailed his main political opponent, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, for signing a gas deal with Russia that was harmful to the Ukrainian economy. With power concentrated in his hands and the political opposition silenced or intimidated, Yanukovych and his appointees focused their attention on the enrichment of the ruling clan. In a brief period, Yanukovych and the members of his family and entourage accumulated huge fortunes, transferring up to $70 billion into foreign accounts and threatening the economic and financial stability of the state, which by the autumn of 2013 found itself on the verge of default.With the opposition crushed or co-opted, Ukrainian society once again pinned its hopes on Europe. Under President Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine had begun negotiations with the European Union on an association agreement, including the creation of a free economic zone and visa liberalization for Ukrainian citizens. The hope was that, once signed, the agreement would save and strengthen Ukraine’s democratic institutions, protect the rights of the opposition, and bring European business standards to Ukraine, reining in the rampant corruption spreading from the very top of the state pyramid. Some oligarchs, fearing the growing power of the president and his clan and wanting to protect their assets by establishing clear political and economic rules, supported the EU association agreement. Big business also wanted access to European markets and dreaded the possibility of being swallowed by Russian competitors if Ukraine were to join the Russia-led Eurasian Customs Union.
Everything was ready for a signing ceremony at the EU summit in Vilnius scheduled for November 28, 2013.
Then, a week before the summit, the Ukrainian government suddenly changed course, proposing to postpone the signing of the association agreement. Yanukovych went to Vilnius but refused to sign anything. If the European leaders were disappointed, many Ukrainian citizens were outraged. The government had broken promises given throughout the previous year, dashing hopes for a better European future. Those were the feelings of the men and women, mainly young, who camped out on the Maidan, Ukraine’s Independence Square, on the evening of November 21, after the government announced its refusal to sign the agreement. Yanukovych’s aides wanted to put an end to the protests as soon as possible in order to head off a new Orange Revolution. On the night of November 30, riot police brutally attacked the students camping on the Maidan. That was the one thing Ukrainian society was not prepared to tolerate. The next day, more than half a million Kyivans, some of them parents and relatives of the students beaten by the police, poured into downtown Kyiv, turning the Maidan and its environs into a space of freedom from the corrupt government and its police forces.What had begun as a demand to join Europe turned into the Revolution of Dignity, which brought together diverse political forces, from liberals in mainstream parties to radicals and nationalists. Once again, as in 2004, the protesters refused to leave the streets. In mid-January 2014, after weeks of peaceful protest, bloody clashes began between police and government-hired thugs on the one hand and protesters on the other. The violence reached its peak on February 18. In three days, at least seventy-seven people died — nine police officers and sixty-eight protesters. The killings caused a sea change both in Ukraine and in the international community. The threat of international sanctions forced members of the Ukrainian parliament, many of whom were concerned that the sanctions would affect them as well, to free themselves from fear of presidential reprisal and pass a resolution prohibiting the use of force by the government.
On the night of February 21, with parliament against him and the riot police gone from downtown Kyiv, President Yanukovych fled revolutionary Kyiv. The Maidan was jubilant. The tyrant was gone; the revolution had won. The Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Yanukovych, appoint an interim president, and install a new provisional government headed by the leaders of the opposition.
The protests in Kyiv surprised political observers, as they presented an unusual case of mass mobilization inspired by issues of foreign policy. The protesters wanted closer ties with Europe and opposed Ukraine’s accession to the Russia-led customs union.
Russian aspirations to dominate Ukraine were an important factor in the protests on the Maidan. President Vladimir Putin, who had led the Russian government since 2000, first as president, then as prime minister, and then again as president, had gone on record characterizing the collapse of the USSR as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. Before returning to the presidential office in 2012, Putin proclaimed the reintegration of post-Soviet space as one of his primary tasks. As in 1991, that space was incomplete without Ukraine. Putin wanted Yanukovych, whom he had supported in the presidential elections in 2004 and 2010, to join the Russia-led customs union — the basis for a future, more comprehensive economic and political union of the post-Soviet states. Yanukovych had made concessions to Russia by prolonging the Russian lease of the Sevastopol navy base for twenty-five years, but he was not eager to join any Russia-led union. Instead, in a failed attempt to counterbalance growing Russian influence and ambition, he edged toward association with the European Union, preparing to sign the agreement.
Russia responded in the summer of 2013 by initiating a trade war with Ukraine and closing its markets to some Ukrainian goods. Moscow used both sticks and carrots to stop Ukraine’s westward drift. Among the carrots was the promise of a $15 billion loan to save the cash-strapped and corruption-ridden Ukrainian government from imminent default.
The first tranche of that money arrived after Yanukovych refused to sign the EU association agreement. But the protests on the Maidan changed the Kremlin’s plans. According to an investigation conducted later by the Ukrainian security service, the snipers who opened fire on the Maidan and killed dozens of people on both sides of the divide, leading eventually to the ouster of President Yanukovych, came from Russia. In early February 2014, a suggestion to take advantage of the internal Ukrainian crisis in order to annex the Crimea, then destabilize and eventually annex parts of eastern and southern Ukraine to Russia, was making its way through the Russian presidential administration. Judging by subsequent events, the proposal did not languish in obscurity. According to President Putin, he personally made a decision to “return” the Crimea to Russia at a meeting with his political advisers and military commanders on the night of February 22, 2014.Four days later, on the night of February 26, a band of armed men in unmarked uniforms took control of the Crimean parliament. Under their protection, Russian intelligence services engineered the installment of the leader of a pro-Russian party, which had obtained only 4 percent of the vote in the previous parliamentary elections, as the new prime minister of the Crimea. Then Russian troops, along with mercenaries and Cossack formations brought from the Russian Federation at least a week before the start of the operation, blocked Ukrainian military units at their bases with the assistance of locally recruited militias. As the new Ukrainian government struggled to take control of the police and security forces previously loyal to Yanukovych, the Kremlin sped up preparations for a complete takeover of the peninsula by hastily organizing a referendum on its fate. The new government of the Crimea cut off Ukrainian television channels, prevented the delivery of Ukrainian newspapers to subscribers, and unleashed propaganda for the separation of the Crimea from Ukraine.
Opponents of the referendum, many of them belonging to the Crimean Tatar minority, were intimidated or kidnapped.In mid-March 2014, the citizens of the Crimea were called to polling stations to vote for reunification with Russia. The results of the Moscow-endorsed referendum were reminiscent of Brezhnev-era polls, when the turnout was reported as 99 percent and the same figure was given for the percentage of voters supporting government candidates. It was now claimed that 97 percent of voters had supported the unification of the Crimea with Russia. In Sevastopol, local officials reported a pro-Russian vote amounting to 123 percent of registered voters. The new Crimean authorities declared the total turnout to be 83 percent, but according to the Human Rights Council attached to the office of the Russian president, less than 40 percent of registered voters had taken part in the referendum. On March 18, two days after the referendum, Vladimir Putin called on the Russian legislators to annex the Crimea as an act of historical justice, undoing part of the damage done to Russia by the disintegration of the USSR.
The Ukrainian government in Kyiv did not recognize the referendum but was in no position to do much about it. It ordered its troops to withdraw from the peninsula, unwilling to risk war in a country still divided by the political turmoil of the Revolution of Dignity. The Ukrainian army, underfunded for decades and with no experience of warfare, was no match for the Russian Federation’s well-trained and equipped troops, who had fought a prolonged war in Chechnia and mounted the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. Kyiv was also busy trying to stop Moscow’s destabilization of other parts of the country. The Kremlin demanded the “federalization” of Ukraine, with the provision that every region would have veto power over the signing of international agreements. Russia did not just want the Crimea; it was trying to stop Ukraine’s movement toward Europe by manipulating local elites and populations in the east and south of the country.
If Ukraine refused to follow the Russian “federalization” scenario, there was another option: the partition of the country by turning eastern and southern Ukraine into a new buffer state. A Russian-controlled polity called New Russia was supposed to include Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv, Kherson, and Odesa oblasts, allowing Russia overland access to the newly annexed Crimea and the Russian-controlled Transnistria region of Moldova. It did not look plausible, as in April 2014 only 15 percent of the population of the projected New Russia supported unification with Russia, while 70 percent were opposed. But the southeast was not homogenous. Pro-Russian sentiment was quite high in the industrial Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where 30 percent of those polled supported unification with Russia, and low in Dnipropetrovsk oblast, where supporters of Russia accounted for less than 7 percent of the population.
Russian intelligence agencies initiated the destabilization of Ukraine from the Donbas in the spring of 2014. The Donbas stood out as one of the most economically and socially troubled regions of Ukraine. Part of the rust belt of the Soviet Union and then of Ukraine, it had received huge subsidies from the center to support the dying coal-mining industry. Donetsk, the main regional center, was the only major Ukrainian city where ethnic Russians constituted a plurality — 48 percent of the population. Many citizens of the Donbas were attached to Soviet ideology and symbols, with monuments to Lenin (largely demolished in central Ukraine in the course of the Revolution of Dignity) emblematizing the region’s Soviet identity. The government of President Yanukovych came to power and held it by mobilizing its eastern Ukrainian electorate, stressing its linguistic, cultural, and historical differences from central and especially western Ukraine. It claimed that the regionally dominant Russian language was under threat from Kyiv, as was the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War, allegedly in jeopardy from proponents of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in western Ukraine. While the linguistic divide and opposing historical memories indeed drove a wedge between Ukraine’s east and west, politicians exaggerated the differences far beyond their actual importance in order to win elections. Such political opportunism created fertile ground for Russian intervention in Ukraine.
Paramilitary units often trained and financed by the Russian government and close to the Kremlin oligarchs showed up in the Donbas in April 2014. By May, they had taken control of most of the region’s urban centers. The ousted President Yanukovych used his remaining political ties and substantial financial resources to help destabilize his home region. Gangs in the pay of the exiled president attacked supporters of the new government in Kyiv, while corrupt policemen helped them by supplying names and addresses of potential victims. The local elites, led by Rinat Akhmetov, a business partner of the ousted Yanukovych and Ukraine’s richest oligarch, played along, hoping to shield themselves from the revolutionary changes coming from Kyiv by turning the Donbas into something of an appanage principality under the flag of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics, which corresponded to the two oblasts that constituted the industrial region of Donbas. They miscalculated and by the end of May had lost control of the region to Russian nationalists and local activists, who launched an antioligarchic revolution. As in Kyiv, people in Donetsk were fed up with corruption, but many in the Donbas oriented themselves on Russia, not Europe, and hoped not for a corruption-free market economy but for a Soviet-era state-run economy and social guarantees. If the protesters on the Maidan saw their country as part of European civilization, the pro-Russian insurgents imagined themselves as participants in a broader “Russian World” and their war as a defense of Orthodox values against the advance of the corrupt European West.
The loss of the Crimea and the turmoil in the Donbas, as well as Russian efforts to destabilize the situation in Kharkiv and Odesa, led to a new mobilization of Ukrainian civil society. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians, many of them participants in the Maidan protests, joined army units as well as new volunteer formations and went to fight the Russia-led insurgency in the east. Since the government was able to supply the soldiers only with weapons, volunteer organizations sprang up all over Ukraine, collecting donations, buying supplies, and delivering them to the front lines. Ukrainian society was taking up the task that the Ukrainian state was not in a position to perform. Between January and March 2014, according to data from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, the share of those who supported Ukrainian independence jumped from 84 percent to 90 percent of the adult population. The share of those who wanted Ukraine to join Russia fell from 10 percent in January 2014 to 5 percent in September. Even most of those polled in the Donbas saw their region as part of the Ukrainian state. The percentage of “separatists” wanting either independence or union with Russia grew from under 30 percent to more than 40 percent of those polled in Donbas between April and September 2014 but never reached a majority, giving most pro-European Ukrainians hope of retaining those territories but also pointing to future problems in forming a common national identity.
In the presidential election of May 2014, in a show of political unity, Ukrainian voters gave a first-round victory to one of Ukraine’s most prominent businessmen and an active participant in the Maidan protests, forty-nine-year-old Petro Poroshenko. With the end of the legitimacy crisis generated by the ouster of Yanukovych, Ukraine was ready to stand up to both open and covert aggression. In early July, the Ukrainian army achieved its first major success — the liberation of the city of Sloviansk, which had served as the headquarters of the best-known Russian commander, a former lieutenant colonel of military intelligence, Igor Girkin (Strelkov). In a desperate attempt to stop the Ukrainian advance, Russia began to supply the insurgents with new armaments, including antiaircraft missiles. According to Ukrainian and American officials, one such missile shot down a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 with 298 people on board on July 17, 2014. The victims came from the Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia, Britain, and a number of other countries, giving the Ukrainian conflict a truly global character.
The tragedy of the Malaysian airliner mobilized Western leaders in support of Ukraine, leading them to impose economic sanctions on Russian officials and businesses directly responsible for the aggression. It turned out to be too little, too late. In mid-August, as the two Russian-backed separatist people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk found themselves on the verge of defeat, Moscow stepped up the offensive and sent regular troops into battle along with mercenaries. The Kremlin saved the self-proclaimed republics from collapse but failed to realize its original plan of creating a New Russia — a Russian-controlled polity extending from Donetsk in the east to Odesa in the west that would provide a land bridge from Russia to the Crimea. Russia also failed to stop Ukraine from enhancing its political and economic ties with the West. With Ukraine refusing to accept any loss of its territory or give up its goal of political, economic, and cultural integration with the West, with Russia refusing to let Ukraine leave its sphere of influence, and with the West concerned about the threat to international order but divided over the best strategy to check growing Russian ambitions, the war in eastern Ukraine turned into a prolonged conflict with no end in sight.
By the end of spring 2015, the war in the Donbas had claimed close to 7,000 lives; more than 15,000 people had been wounded, and close to 2 million had had to flee their homes. About 4 million people found themselves trapped in no-man’s-land as the unrecognized Donbas republics began their descent into the political, economic, and social abyss of a frozen conflict. Is this not too high a price to pay for the prospect of European integration? Perhaps so. But at stake for Ukraine and most of its people in the current conflict are the values that they associate with the European Union — democracy, human rights, and the rule of law — and not just potential membership in the union per se. Also at stake is the independence of their country and the right of its citizens to make their own choices regarding domestic and foreign policy. For centuries, such values and ideas have inspired people all over the world to pursue freedom for themselves and their nations.
Ukraine faces the enormously difficult task of reforming its economic, political, and legal systems while defending its integrity and sovereignty, but there is growing hope that it can succeed. That hope is based above all on the ingenuity and determination of the Ukrainian people. In the summer of 2015, the Ministry of Economic Development released a video promoting Ukraine to foreign investors. It emphasizes the country’s traditional strength: agriculture. Ukraine, which possesses 33 percent of the world’s rich black soil, is also the world’s second-largest exporter of grain. But even more impressive is its intellectual potential. Ukraine’s literacy rate now stands at a staggering 99.7 percent. It is arguably the fourth best-educated nation in the world. Every year, its universities and colleges produce 640,000 graduates. Of these, 130,000 major in engineering, 16,000 in IT, and 5,000 in aerospace, making Ukraine the software engineering capital of eastern and central Europe.
For Ukraine, Russian aggression raised fundamental questions about its continuing existence as a unified state, its independence as a nation, and the democratic foundations of its political institutions. No less important are questions about the nature of Ukraine’s nation-building project, including the role of history, ethnicity, language, and culture in the forging of Ukraine’s political nation. Could a country whose citizens represented different ethnicities, spoke (often interchangeably) more than one language, belonged to more than one church, and inhabited a number of diverse historical regions withstand not only the onslaught of a more militarily powerful imperial master but also its claim to the loyalty of everyone who spoke Russian or worshipped at an Orthodox church?
Russian aggression sought to divide Ukrainians along linguistic, regional, and ethnic lines. While that tactic succeeded in some places, most of Ukrainian society united around the idea of a multilingual and multicultural nation joined in administrative and political terms. That idea, born of lessons drawn from Ukraine’s difficult and often tragic history of internal divisions, rests on a tradition of coexistence of different languages, cultures, and religions over the centuries.