Not Just a Crimean Crisis

On March 1, 2014, the Russian parliament approved President Vladimir Putin’s request for military force in Ukraine. Putin justified the need for such intervention by pointing to the “extraordinary situation” in Ukraine and the “danger to the lives of Russian citizens, our compatriots, and the personnel of the military contingent of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”

But the actual military intervention began days earlier, after a plea from Sergey Aksyonov, the newly appointed Prime Minister of Crimea—voted into power by the quorum-less Crimean parliament at gunpoint.

Unidentified gunmen, who we now know to be special units of the Russian military, seized governmental buildings in Simferopol, Crimea’s capital. The scenario is sadly familiar to past Russian special operations in Moldova and Georgia aimed at breaking away parts of these post-Soviet countries.

In his request to the Federation Council, Putin did not identify any actual facts of ethnic tensions in Ukraine that could threaten the lives of Russian citizens in the Crimea, or in Ukraine generally. No acts of ethnic violence occurred that could possibly justify a foreign military intervention. Another popular perception is that Putin invaded Ukraine to protect Russian speakers from violence on the part of the far-right groups, or to ensure their rights for cultural and linguistic self-realization. These justifications are similarly ungrounded.

Considering the flimsy evidence for events that could reasonably have “provoked” Russian aggression, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine appears groundless and both legally and ethically untenable. Many were disturbed by the attempted repeal of a symbolic law honoring the Russian language by the new Ukrainian parliament, but the untimely move was actually vetoed by Ukraine’s acting President, Oleksandr Turchynov. The Russian language is under no threat in Ukraine. Ukraine remains highly saturated with Russian-language publications and programming on television.

Instead, as a number of renowned scholars have emphasized, the radicalization of the Ukrainian protest movement occurred in response to violence against peaceful protesters by the government of the former President Viktor Yanukovych.

Most importantly, both Ukrainian and Russian speakers are citizens of Ukraine. In the past years, and especially during the Euromaidan protest movement of the last three months, Ukrainians of all ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds have demonstrated that Ukraine is united in building a free and open society governed by the values of liberal democracy. To be a Ukrainian today does not mean being a speaker of Ukrainian (in fact, most Ukrainians are bilingual and easily switch between the two languages), or to be of ethnic Ukrainian background.

Today, the Ukrainian political nation is built around basic human rights and freedoms, governmental accountability, and equal access to the country’s resources for all members of Ukrainian society. In the past months, this has been the core of the protests in their struggle against the political system established by Yanukovych. Evidently, Putin perceives this democratic yearning as a threat to his own power in an increasingly authoritarian Russia.

But Russian aggression does not just threaten Ukrainian sovereignty—it also deeply threatens the nuclear non-proliferation regime that underpins modern international relations. In 1994, in a decision unprecedented for any existing nuclear-weapon state, Ukraine agreed to abandon its nuclear arsenal, at the time the world’s third largest. In exchange, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Russian Federation promised Ukraine security assurances in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 that specifically promised to refrain from the use of force and to safeguard Ukraine’s borders.

Today, many political analysts miss the point that, if the international community fails to find effective ways to exert pressure on Russia to stop aggression against Ukraine, we could face the dismantling of the global system of security established since the end of the Cold War and the nullification of the greatest achievement of the U.S.-Russia “reset”—the international non-proliferation regime.

Under what premises can the U.S. or the members of the international community credibly ask Iran, North Korean, India, and Pakistan to scrap or limit their nuclear programs, if the Non-Proliferation Treaty does not guarantee the territorial integrity of the signatory states, which are brazenly violated by another signatory of the treaty?

Future build-ups of conventional and nuclear arms would await us all, and so would the specter of another global war. In Crimea, more than Ukraine is at stake.

Oleh Kotsyuba is a Ph.D. candidate in Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard. He is online editor of Krytyka, an intellectual journal in Ukraine. Nadiya Kravets holds a Ph.D. in politics and international relations from Oxford. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Ukrainian Politics and Society.