Putin's Wars полностью

In an editorial Le Monde wrote at that time that the treaty on the Union State between Yeltsin and Lukashenko “emphasizes in the first place the permanent desire of the Kremlin to gather around it the former Soviet republics, at least the Slavic ones. Everything suggests that Ukraine will be next to bear the brunt of the Russian pressure: already dependent of her ‘big brother’ for her energy, she finds herself surrounded on three sides by Russian garrisons.”^[15] This commentary was, indeed, farsighted. The objective to bring Ukraine back in its orbit would become the overriding motive behind the Kremlin’s policies in the next decade. The choice facing Russia in 1997 was the choice between becoming a “normal,” democratic nation state, living in peace with its neighbors, or becoming—again—an empire. In the crucial year, 1997, the Founding Act with NATO pointed in the direction of the former, the Union Treaty with Belarus toward the latter. It was as though both initiatives mimicked the Russian coat of arms: the double-headed eagle whose heads face in two opposite directions. It was clear from the beginning that these two strategies could not be reconciled. As soon as 1994 Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: “In not being an empire, Russia stands a chance of becoming, like France or Britain or earlier post-Ottoman Turkey, a normal state.”^[16] He added the warning: “If not openly imperial, the current objectives of Russian policy are at the very least proto-imperial. That policy may not yet be aiming explicitly at a formal imperial restoration, but it does little to restrain the strong imperial impulse that continues to motivate large segments of the state bureaucracy, especially the military, as well as the public.”^[17] Brzezinski’s caution was certainly justified. It was shared by the Russian liberal politician Yegor Gaidar, who was Yeltsin’s prime minister from June 15, 1992, to December 14, 1992. Referring to the years 1918–1922—when the Red Army, in only four years, reconquered most of the lost tsarist territories—he wrote: “Russia is unique in restoring a failed empire.”^[18]

Putin’s project for a Eurasian Union is the Kremlin’s latest attempt to reintegrate the post-Soviet space. According to Jeremy Smith, a professor of Russian history at the University of Eastern Finland, “It is less clear what economic advantages Russia gains from the Union, given that so much of its trade is orientated to Europe, China, and elsewhere.”^[19] According to Smith, “this has fuelled the suspicion that the whole project is a way of enhancing Russian regional hegemony and, in the most alarmist interpretations, moving toward the recreation of some form of the USSR. . . . Critics of the project maintain that, like the European Union, pressures for political integration will follow close upon the heels of economic integration, with the major difference that there will be a clear hegemonic power, Russia, dominating the Union.”^[20] One must add here one important reservation: the project of the Eurasian Union was not launched to recreate the Soviet Union, and the objective is not to reintegrate the Central Asian states into Russia proper. Its real and overriding objective is preventing Ukraine from establishing closer relations with the European Union and NATO, bringing this country definitively and irreversibly back into the orbit of its Slavic “brother country” Russia. This objective is openly admitted. Fyodor Lukyanov, for instance, a prominent Russian political scientist, wrote in a comment on Putin’s Eurasia article: “The paradox of the Eurasian Union is that its primary goal is not Eurasia. Its most desired object is Ukraine.”^[21] Lukyanov considered membership of Ukraine—a country of 45 million—an economic necessity to make the Eurasian Union work. He also mentioned that “the growth of xenophobia [in Russia] . . . means that building an integrationist unification with the Central Asian countries will be accompanied by increased tensions. Ukraine is, in this sense, the ideal partner, together with Belarus, in as much as it immediately brings a sense of ‘Slavicness’ to the created structure.”^[22] Lukyanov spoke further, tellingly, of an “attempt to bring together what is profitable [the Slavic countries] and dissociate oneself from ‘ballast’ [i.e., the Central Asian countries].”^[23]

The Kremlin’s Obsession with Ukraine