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.

Where Have You Gone, Iron Man?

Just in case you thought the cumbersome structure of the EU precluded prompt tit-for-tat in a trade war, via Reuters:

The European Union has renewed anti-dumping duties on ironing boards imported from China for a further five years, but lifted corresponding tariffs on the product from Ukraine.

The extension, announced on Tuesday, follows an appeal by three EU iron board makers against the potential ending of measures taken in 2007. They contended that Chinese producers in particular would resume dumping, selling at below cost or fair market price.

The EU market for ironing boards is worth around 100 million euros (86.0 million pounds), a tiny fraction of the 290 billion euros of goods imported from China, but the extension of measures is a further irritant to Chinese producers and the Beijing government.

EU-China trade tensions are high. The EU last month began imposing duties on imports of solar panels from China, worth 21 billion euros in 2011, prompting Beijing to launch an investigation into EU wine.

For ironing boards, Chinese producers had a 40-45 percent share of the EU market, with annual sales of some 10 million boards, but this fell to 15-20 percent in 2011 after duties were imposed.

The notice in the Europe Union's official journal on Tuesday said the Chinese were still undercutting the prices of EU makers by 20 percent.

It concluded that a repeal of anti-dumping measures would result in increased Chinese exports at dumped pricing levels.

For Ukraine, with single producer Eurogold Industries Ltd, its share of the market actually rose to 10 from 8 percent, even with duties, principally because Chinese competition eased.

Duties were originally set in 2007 at 9.9 percent for imports from Ukraine and up to 38.1 percent for those from China. In 2010 the EU cut the Ukraine tariff to 7.7 percent and introduced a new top rate for Chinese producers of 42.3 percent.

I particularly enjoy the supernatural predictive powers of the EU, which knows for certain that the Chinese makers will start dumping as soon as the 42.3% tariff--which has been in place for over five years--comes off.

Who can Chinese ironing board manufacturers and free market capitalists turn to in their time of need?

Iron Man, of course!

Housekeeping Note:

Frequent visitors to China Matters will notice that the blog now looks different.  Rest assured, China Matters does not worship blindly at the altar of useless novelty.  It transpired that Google, with its usually thoughtfulness, had quietly degraded support for the original Blogger templates to the point that the post archiving function no longer worked properly.  Therefore, I gritted my teeth and upgraded to a new template and will tweak the content as time permits.  I don’t know if people who follow the blog consider it necessary or desirable to have their avatars displayed at the bottom of the page.  If there are any concerns or suggestions please e-mail me and I will deal with the matter…in mid-August, when I get back to blogging after a trip.

Another Boltonian Policy Bites the Dust?

With the departure of John Bolton and (most of) his cabal from the State Department, there has been an orgy of making hay while the sun shines e.g. quickly executing policy and personnel initiatives that would have been 86’d by the moustachio’d one and his White House cohorts if they still held power.

And it’s not just Condi Rice and her realists who are frantically reaping the harvest.

France has pitched in, calling for the ancient and anachronistic EU arms embargo against China to be lifted (from The Nation [Pakistan], Arms embargo against China unjustified: France, March 20, 2007, h/t to Antiwar.com for the article):

The European Union’s arms embargo on China is no longer justified and should be lifted, France’s defence minister said on Monday, adding that this did not mean Paris wanted to start selling weapons to the Chinese.

The arms embargo has no technical justification because French and EU regulations are already more restrictive than what’s in the embargo, Michele Alliot-Marie told a news conference in Beijing....

The embargo only concerns the EU and hasn’t stopped other countries from supplying weapons and components to China, Alliot-Marie said at the end of her China visit...

The political justification for the embargo is based on criticisms on the part of the EU over certain human rights issues, she said, without saying what those were. But the same countries accepted that China get the Olympics even though the criteria for getting the Olympics are the same as the embargo. Their logic is inconsistent, the minister added, without elaborating.

The embargo was instituted in 1989 in response to the Tian An Men massacre, cutting off arms sales to China until its human rights behavior achieved more civilized standards.

Since then, if China has done a bad job of moving forward, the world has done a good job of moving back.

Viewed in the context of an unprovoked invasion of Iraq by the democratic and civilizing powers of the West and Japan that has cost upward of 500,000 Iraqi lives, the Tian An Men massacre, while not a walk in the park, does not justify an arms embargo approaching its second decade.

In fact, in 2005, with China, with a fifteen-year record of reasonably good international behavior and recognized as a politely enthusiastic handmaiden to President Bush’s GWOT (Global War on Terror), Beijing (end the EU) entertained genuine hopes that the embargo would be lifted.

However, the Taiwan issue flared up again and, in a worrying sign that the politics of containment, confrontation, and regime change were designed for application beyond the Middle East, John Bolton and his allies in Japan lobbied vociferously and effectively for maintaining the embargo.

In fact, the looming Boltonian plans for China was one of the inspirations for the creation of this blog, and in one of my first posts in April 2005, I wrote on Bolton’s efforts related to the EU arms embargo as follows:

Quote

...the EU’s retreat from lifting the arms embargo [is] no doubt China’s sorest disappointment:

Beijing was certain early this winter that a European Union arms embargo against China would be lifted (a move ardently opposed by the Pentagon). But last week, the EU said it no longer had a consensus to lift. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, in a frank interview with German media, even mentioned a possible need for a form of containment of China, until its social, political, and military direction became clearer.

Getting the EU to back away from lifting the arms embargo was one of John Bolton’s major achievements, accomplished with the help of a House of Representatives resolution and intensive lobbying of the European powers by both the United States and Japan—something the Chinese are well aware of.

John Bolton’s Feb. 25, 2005 speech in Tokyo laid out the position for and rationales for America and Japan’s joint approach to quarantining China, including scuttling the EU’s plans of lifting the arms embargo:

Similarly, we are having discussions with other governments about existing arms embargoes against China and about our concerns that others--such as the EU [European Union]--may lift their embargoes and thereby negatively impact the security of America, and its friends and allies in the Asia-Pacific region....

I expect the Europeans beat a retreat on lifting the arms embargo when they realized that America’s post-9/11 engagement with China beyond the most cosmetic gestures is dead. Rather than try to welcome China’s post Tian An Men return to full membership in the family of nations with a few juicy arms deal, it was better to back off and avoid getting tangled up in another U.S. scorched earth foreign policy crusade.

Those with long memories will recall that the sanction regime against Iraq was weakening because of European indifference and impatience before the Bush administration stepped in with its anti-Saddam campaign and made it clear that it would not permit Saddam’s Iraq to regain the measure of legitimacy and protection under international law that status as an unsanctioned, member-in-good-standing of the nation-state club bestows.

With that background, it must be especially disturbing to China that the U.S. wants to maintain an explicit sanction and embargo regime against China, with the implication that China is prone to devious, dangerous pariah-state behavior that the leadership and force of the United States-and Japan-- is needed to check.

Again, from John Bolton’s speech in Tokyo:

The second reason we oppose the lifting of the EU arms embargo against China was very well stated by our friend Foreign Minister Machimura, when he noted that "We are against a lifting of the arms embargo. The matter of the lifting of the arms embargo is one of great concern not only for Japan but for the security of East Asia as a whole."

Our respective government’s positions on resolving the Taiwan-China Cross-Strait issue are well-known. Suffice it to say, though, we are concerned that any measures that allow China to significantly improve its coercive capabilities could make fostering a peaceful resolution of this issue less likely. We concur with Foreign Minister Machimura that it will contribute to regional instability.

Moreover, as I highlighted above, no adequate mechanism currently exists to prevent China from transferring technology and lethal weaponry to other, less stable regions of the world, including rogue states, or to use it for the purposes of internal repression.

Endquote

If the embargo is lifted, China may feel a greater sense of security because it has access to European arms.

But it will be more relieved to know that, with the defection of the EU, US efforts to maintain internationalized sanctions against China have crumbled and Beijing is free to step off the US sanctions--regional sanctions—UN sanctions—interdiction and destabilization escalator that John Bolton had designed for it.