Russia’s president writes his Ukrainian counterpart an insulting letter

 

AFP

 

RUSSIA marked the first anniversary of its war with Georgia with a verbal salvo against Ukraine. Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, wrote Viktor Yushchenko, his Ukrainian counterpart, an open letter with a familiar litany of complaints: Ukraine was supplying arms to Georgia, complicating the life of Russia’s Black Sea fleet (which is based in Sebastopol, a Ukrainian port), signing treacherous pipeline deals with the European Union, kicking out Russian diplomats and falsifying joint Soviet history.

Less familiarly, Mr Medvedev posted a special video blog to publicise his letter. Dressed in ominous black, and overlooking the Black Sea with two military boats on the horizon, Mr Medvedev said the Kremlin would not be sending its new ambassador to Kiev.

It took Viktor Yushchenko several days to reply. His response was measured: Ukraine had done nothing illegal towards Georgia; had the right to choose its friends; was entitled to its own view of history and its language; and had repeatedly asked the Kremlin to remove some of its diplomats involved in non-diplomatic work.

But Mr Medvedev was not interested in what Mr Yushchenko had to say. He wanted to register Russia’s hand in Ukraine’s presidential election due on January 17th. That election is of almost as much importance to Russia as it is to Ukraine itself. In the previous presidential election, Russia backed Viktor Yanukovich, the Russian-friendly prime minister at the time. He lost badly and so did Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president and now prime minister, who had rushed to congratulate him.

The Kremlin fears making the same mistake twice. But this time, in insulting Mr Yushchenko, it is kicking someone who it thinks is certain to lose anyway. It is also laying down rules which it implies the next president must respect if he or she is to be accepted in Moscow. The ability to influence Ukraine’s policy is seen by Russia as a test of its resurgence.

To show the range of options for reintegrating Ukraine into its “sphere of privileged interest”, Russia recently dispatched Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, on a tour of Ukraine. “When I walked through huge crowds of people, chanting ‘Kirill is our patriarch’, I understood that our great spiritual unity …has become a basic value which cannot be shaken by politics,” he told a doubtless grateful Mr Medvedev on his return.

As the war in Georgia showed, the Kremlin has other means of persuasion at its disposal. On August 10th, a day before the video blog, Mr Medvedev announced new, simplified rules for using Russian military force outside the country to protect Russian citizens and defend units stationed abroad.

A full-blown military conflict with Ukraine seems unlikely but is no longer unthinkable. (Two years ago a war between Russia and Georgia seemed equally unlikely.) Andrei Illarionov, once an adviser to Mr Putin and now a fierce critic, says the key factor is not whether Russia has the military capacity for a confrontation with Ukraine, but that aggression towards the neighbours has become a way of life for the Kremlin. In the past decade, Russia has managed to alienate almost all the former Soviet republics, even undemocratic Belarus. Trade wars and energy cut-offs have become standard policy responses.

Of all the neighbouring republics, Ukraine remains the largest and most important. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish-born American national security adviser, once wrote: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine, suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.” It is far from clear, even now, that Russia has fully accepted Ukraine’s sovereignty. At a NATO summit in Bucharest last year Mr Putin reportedly told President George Bush, “You understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state!”

Unlike Georgia or the Baltic states, which had longer traditions of running their own affairs, Ukraine has had little experience of statehood. “In the last 80 years of the 20th century we declared our independence six times. Five times we lost it,” Mr Yushchenko pointed out in a recent interview.

Ukraine’s politicians and voters seem to be leaving the country vulnerable again. According to a recent poll, more Ukranians think their own government is the biggest security threat to their country than believe Russia is. Corruption and squabbling inside the ruling Orange coalition have paralysed governance. The majority of presidential decrees do not get implemented. Since June Ukraine has not had a defence minister. Its economy contracted by 18% in the second quarter of the year.

“People have lost any respect for their own state,” says Yulia Mostovaya, an influential journalist in Kiev. National ideals have been discredited by cynicism and the corruption of ruling politicians tainted by shady gas deals with Russia. Meanwhile the version of order projected by Russia’s television channels looks increasingly popular (more than 90% of Ukranians say they feel positive about Russia, whereas 42% of Russians see Ukraine as an enemy).

Few leading Ukrainian politicians publicly rebutted Mr Medvedev’s insult to Mr Yushchenko. Most used it as yet another opportunity to kick him. “We have reached a critical point, a point of bifurcation,” says Anatoly Gritsenko, Ms Mostovaya’s husband, a former defence minister and one of the presidential candidates. “Either Ukraine is going down, towards disintegration, or it will start recovering. But the current unstable situation cannot last.”

Russia’s own situation may not be entirely stable and its current rulers may be tempted to provoke a conflict with Ukraine to consolidate their position. One thing looks increasingly certain: the relationship between Russia and Ukraine will be a worry for European security.

 

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