Is President Obama Trying to Break Vladimir Putin’s Political Back in Ukraine?

[For readers who have not done so already, I urge them to take 10 minutes and 49 seconds of their time to listen to the Paet/Ashton a.k.a. “snipergate” phone call.  It is not only a useful corrective to the laboriously constructed and misleading pushback now slowly working its way through the Western press, including the dubious accusation by the Ukrainian government that the snipers were Russian (which, perhaps inadvertently, supports the call’s contention that Yanyukovich was not responsible and, therefore, his ouster was improper); it also give a clear picture of the split between the Maidan activists and the rather unattractive cabal of pro-Western technocrats, oligarchs, and thugs who piggybacked on the Maidan demonstrations and vaulted into power with the help of the EU and the United States.  In particular, Ashton’s palpable impatience with the whole sniper issue and her single-minded focus on cobbling together the IMF package is worth noting.  The Maidan activist quoted by Paet is Olga Bogomolets, the “Mother Teresa of the Maidan” in the Daily Beast’s hyperbolic phrasing.  Subsequent to the release of the tape she has made a couple of equivocal statements that have been seized upon as rebuttals but, when more closely examined, fall somewhat short.  Bogomolets is perhaps unwilling to give aid and comfort to the Russian narrative on snipergate, especially while Russian is violating Ukrainian sovereignty in Crimea.  She is also a major political factor and has even been mentioned as presidential timber.  Indications are Bogomolets' preferred candidate, according to Paet--Petro Poroshenko, a.k.a. the “Chocolate King”, seventh richest man in Ukraine, and apparently a “clean” oligarch—will win the May 25 presidential election and try to steer the new government in a direction more to the liking of the Maidan activists.]

According to media reports, President Obama seems to be going all in on getting the Russians to back down over Crimea.

The White House readout of a recent telephone call between President Obama and China’s Xi Jinping recorded that the US president said that “preserving the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Ukraine was his “overriding objective” [emphasis added].  

It is somewhat eyebrow raising that President Obama seems to have turned Crimea into his own personal crusade, especially since a large segment of world and informed opinion is ready to kiss off Crimea as Putin’s to take.

Perhaps President Obama is using Nixon’s “madman” theory i.e. communicate to the Russians that the president might do something crazy bad if they don’t negotiate.

Another possibility is that President Obama is genuinely eager to push Putin to the wall, confront him, humiliate him, and defeat him, and shatter Russian pretensions in Eurasia.

Maybe Obama believes this is his Kennedy moment, his Cuban missile crisis, his opportunity to face down the Russians, rebuke the geopolitical handwringers, and demonstrate the supremacy of American power.

Indeed, before the Crimea adventure it was Putin, not Obama, who looked weak in Ukraine. 

Persuasive reports indicate that Putin let Yanyukovich flounder, then urged him to sign the February 21 EU-brokered transition agreement that would have paved the way for an earlier presidential election, and then was completely wrongfooted by the sudden installation of a new regime totally free of Russian influence.

And Putin’s move into Crimea was largely defensive, in my opinion, recognizing that the new regime in Kiev, pro-US, anti-Russian, and with a strong Ukraine-chauvinist component, would probably try to consolidate its power and popularity by evicting the Russians from their naval base at Sebastopol.

The same elements that point to Russian determination over Crimea—the weakening of Russian power and Putin’s personal prestige if the Russians are humiliated—might also be incentives for the Obama administration to escalate the crisis.

After all, the direct costs to the United States of a catastrophic confrontation in the Ukraine are relatively minor, and I have a feeling that President Obama’s advisors are telling him that Russia is a paper tiger, and Putin’s power will crumble if the US pushes back.  Indeed, the idea that Russia is teetering toward political, economic, and social collapse and needs only a strong shove to push it into the abyss i.e. rebirth as a meek and tractable member of the global liberal-democratic camp seems to be an article of faith among US foreign policy poobahs.

And President Obama did make the rather interesting decision to put Victoria Nuland—a confrontational regime-changenik whose husband, Robert Kagan, is a hard-core neo-con—in charge of the Ukraine brief.

In my personal opinion, as his presidency inches towards its terminus, President Obama has decided to wipe that “You won the Nobel Peace Prize, wimp” sneer off the world’s face.

Maybe the president has decided to even scores in his last two years, and doesn’t want to see his antagonists like Assad, Putin, and Maduro smugly seeing him off with a condescending pat on the rump come Inauguration Day 2017.  Maybe his advisors are telling him that he can avoid lame duck humiliation only by being more aggressive in his foreign policy, by getting out front with more confrontational policies that force equivocal allies to line up behind the United States.

In any case, the US has been markedly more aggressive in its approach its biggest foreign policy botch of Obama’s second term, Syria.  In response to the chemical weapons red line humiliation, the United States seems to be more interested in imploding Syria by supporting insurrectionists than it is in pushing forward the increasingly ridiculous Geneva process.  

The United States has also become more pro-active in attempting to manage the cat-herding dynamic of empowered but less capable allies taking on China that it set in motion with the “pivot to Asia”.

And there’s Venezuela, where the United States is now openly supporting a Ukraine-style process by which it demands that the government bestow legitimacy and political traction on the protesters confronting it in the streets (and thereby void the election outcome that the United States found displeasing without the risk and inconvenience of a new election).

And in Ukraine, it looks to me that the United States and Victoria Nuland may have been instrumental in blowing up a transition process that would have conceded the lead to Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin in the establishment of a new government.  The new Ukranian government might be deficient in key areas of legitimacy, finances, access to the good offices of Russia for trade, financial assistance, and favorable gas pricing, and terminally estranged from much  of its Russian-speaking minority, but as an effort in imperial crotch-hefting it served notice on the EU as well as Russia that the United States was more interested in calling the shots than behaving like a peer interlocutor of European bureaucrats and Russian authoritarians.  In passing, I might as well point out that the point of the F*ck the EU speech was that Victoria Nuland had no interest in seeing Angela Merkel’s preferred opposition leader, Vitali Klitschko, enter the government at the expense of her beloved “Yats”, Arsenyi Yatsenyuk.  And of course, after the EU-brokered agreement collapsed in a hail of bullets, Yats is in and “Klitsch” is out.

I am hoping that the truth behind President Obama’s confrontational posturing is a little more mundane: that Russia does not intend to annex Crimea, President Obama knows it, but wants the undeserved credit for resolutely entering the den of the Russian bear and giving his testicles a mighty twist.

According to the much-maligned but often interesting and informative RT (full disclosure: I was interviewed on an RT show a couple times), the speaker of Crimea’s Supreme Council stated that, even if the outcome of the March 16 referendum is pro-independence, Crimea would prefer to stay autonomous (the second choice on the referendum is to return to an early 1990s constitution that gave Crimea an even higher degree of autonomy in Ukraine than it enjoyed, well, until the current Russian shenanigans).

And the Europeans clearly have no interest in enlisting in a serious sanctions crusade against Russia, let alone a hot war.

So perhaps the West will content itself with half a loaf in Ukraine (actually, the 90% that isn’t Crimea) and Russia will exercise de facto suzerainty over Crimea while it ostensibly remains part of Ukraine.

And the United States, claiming victory over Russia in Ukraine, will be emboldened to make further mischief elsewhere.

Is Putin Crimea Coup Reaction to a Nulandized Kiev Government...

...that might have intended to evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet?

The coup in Kiev was a loss for Putin, but doesn’t look like much of a win for the U.S., Europe, or Ukraine.

What we see in Ukraine today is the messy consequences of a clumsily executed regime change strategy.

Clumsy, because somehow it excluded pro-Russian forces in Ukraine that make up about half of the country.

And clumsy because it blew out of the water an EU-brokered transition deal by which Yanyukovich and his party would have stayed in the government and Russia would have supplied $12 billion to help Ukraine ride out its major economic difficulties.

With Russia excluded, Putin was welcome to imagine the worst, including an attempt by the Ukraine government to install anti-Russian administrations in the eastern provinces and Crimea...and the possibility that an anti-Russian government in Kiev, liberated from EU geopolitical and energy qualms, might give priority to a key Pentagon and US foreign-policy priority: evicting the Russian Black Sea Fleet from its base at Sebastopol.

Russia operates its Black Sea Fleet at Sebastopol under a lease that expires in 2042.  That lease extension was negotiated by Yanyukovich two years ago in return for favorable gas pricing.  By doing so, Yanyukovich overturned the policy of the previous administration (Viktor Yuschenko) which had stated its desire to eject Russia from Sebastopol.  

With an anti-Russian revolutionary government in power in Kiev, it would not be unreasonable for Russia to expect that the new government might move against Russian interests in Crimea.

So, in my opinion, rather than wait for the Ukrainian government to stabilize itself in Kiev and think about adventures in the east, Putin acted first and forcefully in Crimea, which happens to be the most securely Russian part of Ukraine.

Crimea didn’t become part of the Ukrainian SSR until 1954, when Krushchev decided to transfer it out of the Russian SSR.  And in 1992, Crimeans voted in a referendum for independence, which the Ukrainian government refused to acknowledge.  However, Crimea was allowed a very high degree of autonomy in its government.  Russia operates in Crimea under a SOFA arrangement allows them to position 11,000 troops there.

About half of the population is still ethnic Russian and pro-Russian politicians have, presumably in coordination with Moscow, secured most of the local government organs and national government military installations without bloodshed.

Russian soldiers have been assisting, but I think to paint the local seizure of power in Crimea as simply a Russian occupation is mis-representing the situation.

It’s a political initiative with significant local support that has gone smoothly because of the overwhelming military force Russia can bring to the assistance of pro-Russian Crimean politicians.  The unkindest thing you can call it is a pro-Russian coup or putsch very similar to the anti-Russian coup or putsch recently implemented in Kiev, but one that's neater, better executed, and with a lower dingbat quotient.

As to where Crimea might go, the possibilities look like 1) autonomy 2) independence 3) annexation by Russia.

Independence or annexation appear unlikely to me.  There is a sizable and politically well-organized population of Crimean Tatars who suffered horribly at the hands of Stalin both before and after World War II, and I doubt Russia wants to take the risk of trying to detach them from Ukraine.

I think the most likely Russian objective is for the government in Kiev to confirm a very high level of autonomy for the Crimean government, give up on trying to have any effective central government civil or military organs in the province, and abandon the idea that it can effect the expulsion of Russia from the Sebastopol base. 

Beyond that, the Russians have stated repeatedly that they want the EU transitional accord implemented at the national level, but I have a feeling at this point this is merely a bargaining position.  Bringing openly pro-Russian political figures back into the central government doesn’t seem possible now.

The US did not play a particularly glorious role in this mess.

It would be disingenuous for the Obama administration to claim that it has not intervened in Ukraine.

The full extent of US meddling is unclear, but US support for the pro-EU political movement, verbally, through the implementation of sanctions, and through the extensive network of US-affiliated regime-change NGOs such as CANVAS, was unambiguous.

The Obama administration apparently gave a free hand to Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.  Why Ms. Nuland occupies a position of influence in the Democratic Obama administration is something of a puzzle; prior to her elevation to assistant secretary she had served in a rather modest capacity as a State Department spokesperson.  However, she is married to Robert Kagan, a well-known neo-conservative and co-founder of PNAC, whose writings President Obama professes to admire.

In any case, Nuland was on the ground in Ukraine during the upheaval, talking up the demonstrations and famously visiting the Maidan protesters in December to distribute bread and biscuits in a photo op.  She also made the famous “Fuck the EU” remark in a telephone strategy session with the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt.  

The substance of that phone call was quickly pushed aside to celebrate Nuland’s straight-talking feistiness.  But what was most notable (and presumably the reason that Russian intelligence intercepted and released the phone call) was that Nuland was calling for the EU to be sidelined because it was not being sufficiently aggressive on the issue of threatening pro-Russian figures with sanctions.  Also, Nuland wanted Arsenyi Yatsenyuk, not Vitalyi Klitschko, to serve as the main pro-Western figure in any new government setup.

In the phone call, she tells the US ambassador to Ukraine that the US is going to go through its man at the UN, Jeffrey Feltman, to get a Dutch diplomat, Robert Serry, appointed as a special emissary to Kiev.  (Serry did go to Kiev, but his role was challenged after the appearance of the tape and another UN diplomat, Jan Eliasson, is apparently now in charge of UN outreach on Ukraine).

Apparently, again, this was to remove the initiative in Ukraine negotiations out of the hands of Germany and the EU.

It was also reported that in December Nuland had threatened one of Yanyukovich’s key supporters, the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov (who controlled forty delegates in parliament), with sanctions against his Western interests if the Yanyukovich government used violence against protesters.

Remarkably, after a truce was declared, as AP reported, protesters led by hard-right shock troops asserted “the truce was a ruse”, attacked police, and snipers opened fire, precipitating a political crisis.  Although EU representatives supervised the negotiation of a power-sharing agreement the next day, the protesters rejected it, Yanyukovich’s supporters abandoned him, and he fled.  

As to why the US might be willing to blow up the EU deal, I—and perhaps V. Putin—am inclined to speculate that Victoria Nuland, in allegiance to her neo-con roots, aggressively midwifed the birth of a Kiev government that was simultaneously pro-US, anti-Russian, and non-EU-oriented, and would therefore be more amenable to facilitating a cherished US objective—evicting the Russian Black Sea Fleet from Crimea.

This contingency might have affected Putin’s decision to employ forceful methods to secure Crimea and pre-empt any inclination by the new Kiev government to fiddle with the status of the Russian base, even at the expense of a sizable diplomatic and security crisis.

Maybe there was no conspiracy to blow up the EU initiative, maybe the protesters attacked spontaneously, but the end result was the same.  The explosion of violence compelled Yanyukovich's oligarch backers to withdraw their support in order to protect their precious overseas swag, the EU agreement was stillborn, and pro-Russian forces disappeared from the Ukrainian parliament.  Yatsenyuk became Premier and Klitschko was left on the outside looking in, very much as the US and not the EU wanted it.  

But Yanyukovich, instead of getting slowly sidelined during the transition, was impeached with enough haste and legal loose ends that he can plausibly assert that he was not properly removed from office and the Kiev government is illegitimate—a position that the Russians have happily endorsed, and which provides ample justification for Russia to disregard the 1994 Budapest Agreement, which is supposed to mandate non-interference in Ukraine’s domestic affairs.

To my mind, Ukraine politics is generic skullduggery by both sides, with the United States perhaps holding the edge.  

Nevertheless, the United States seems to have underestimated the Russian response to inserting a viscerally anti-Russian government in Kiev, one that immediately passed a law (since revoked) outlawing the use of Russian as an official language, while its supporters went on a spree of Lenin statue-toppling to demonstrate their disdain for Russia.  Remarkably, the US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul resigned just at the time the Yanukovich government fell and it would be expected that the US would want a steady hand on the diplomatic tiller.

What amazes me is the widespread desire to turn this rather sordid escapade into a “good vs. evil” “US vs. Russia” cage match.  It began even before the Crimea crisis with disregard for the fact that the protesters, instead of standing up against tyranny, were simply trying to overturn an election whose results they didn’t particularly like.  It continued with the uncritical valorizing of the protesters in Maidan, who relied on some unsavory neo-Nazi extreme right Ukraine chauvinists to serve as shock troops in violent attacks upon the police.

Before the coup it was openly acknowledged that the purpose of the Euromaidan movement was to repudiate Yanyukovich’s decision to reject an EU agreement and bring Ukraine into the Russia-led Customs Union—and the unrest was justified on grounds that, once Ukraine entered into the Customs Union, its pro-Russia/anti-EU orientation would be irrevocable.  

But after the coup, despite the fact that the new government relies on a slate of fantastically rich oligarchs both at the national and local level to sustain its rule, Western commentators immediately spun the coup as a popular uprising against a kleptocratic regime.

I can only imagine that the purpose was to deny Russia a basis for claiming that its interests in a rather important bordering state had been trampled on by an anti-Russia putsch, and that it had a legitimate interest in interfering.

But the proper riposte to corrupt officialdom is to vote the bastards out, not overthrow them.  Whenever I hear the “klepper” defense, I am immediately suspicious of the advocate employing it.

What is, in reality, some thankfully bloodless local geopolitical jostling in Crimea is now spun by AP and Reuters as the biggest crisis since 9/11.  And it seems a lot of people are thirsting for it, as if we don’t have enough crises in the world.  It seems America needs monsters to fight, and if they don’t exist, we invent them.

The Russians aren’t helping, either.  In order to bolster their case for a rollback to the EU transition agreement, the Russian ambassador to the UN brandished a letter from Yanyukovich purportedly asking for Russia to intervene militarily.  Presumably, this allows Russia to describe its Crimea intervention as legal and support the validity of the Feb. 21 agreement as an alternative to the coup.

Nevertheless, I think moderation will prevail.

The Germans have already inserted themselves in mediation between Russia and the West.  Apparently, the UK is against meaningful sanctions.  De facto, Kiev may have to resign itself to almost total loss of central government control in Crimea, but Crimea will probably remain autonomous and part of Ukraine.

Thanks to the crisis with Russia, Ukraine is enjoying the collateral benefit of being able to sideline the unruly and sometimes intimidatingly violent street protesters in the name of national unity against an outside threat.  Russia will probably not egg on the pro-Russian demonstrators in the other eastern provinces, but will retain the right to intervene on their behalf.  

I expect the US will affirm its global leadership by coordinating campaign for West to symbolically punish Russia by withdrawing from G8 meeting in Sochi, and enjoy negotiating an onerous IMF agreement with its chosen instrument, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk (or, as Nuland familiarly calls him, “Yats.”)   

And, if Russia cannot be prevailed upon to honor its commitments for the $12 billion dollars and raises the price of gas sold to Ukraine to genuine market levels, the EU and US can play the blame game for the economic hardship that Ukraine will suffer under the onerous IMF package currently under preparation.

Putin can console himself with the observation that he is not chained to Yanyukovich, apparently an ineffectual and unloved client, and Russia's obligation to pony up $12 billion for Ukraine's rescue can be honored "in the breach".  And if Crimea becomes completely autonomous, Russia's $90 million or so in annual rent for the Sebastopol base will not be lining the pockets of Putin's enemies in Kiev.

In passing, I would like to address one of the hoariest canards of the Ukraine crisis: that Russian would recapitulate its actions of 2008, when it invaded Georgia.  This assertion has been made by Reuters, AP, and I think quite a few others.

The facts—internationally recognized facts, I should say—was that Georgia used the occasion of the Beijing Olympics to launch a carefully planned invasion to recapture the breakaway province of South Ossetia—which was at the time autonomous under a truce agreement negotiated by Russia, Georgia, and the Ossetians in Sochi in 1993.  The Georgians massed 12,000+ troops against 1000 Russian peacekeepers and a few hundred Ossetian militia.  Georgia had apparently not anticipated a Russian intervention, and its forces were completely routed when the Russians indeed counterattacked.

Hopefully, the Georgia parallel will stand up in one regard: that the Russians promptly withdrew from Georgian territory after their objectives were met.  And they did not annex South Ossetia; they allowed it to declare independence instead.