Yes, Putin is evil. It is he who attacked Ukraine. But as a result of what? We suggest discussing the answer to this question.
For would have Putin attacked us if we were a strong and consolidated state with a professional political leadership, an army, a steadily-growing economy, and high living standards?
The infantilism of a post-Soviet state, on the one hand, and the greed and cheek of “red factory managers,” on the other, triggered degradation at all levels of life in Ukraine, while clans began to run the show in the living space of a young state. According to the well-known researcher and The Day’s contributor James Mace, “it is the Ukrainian SSR that won independence” in 1991. Post-Soviet transformations were the first challenge for the Ukrainian authorities. They failed to respond to it, for they were busy doing other things.
“The oligarchic clan system, established during the Kuchma presidency, undermined the foundations of Ukraine’s national security. Its essence was that the state resource was divided among the main groups which ignored national security and marauded all across Ukraine instead of caring for its destiny. I wrote after the 1999 elections that a bomb had been planted under Ukraine’s foundation. Spin masters began to structure this country, the authorities were applying social administration techniques and began to use nefarious schemes and resort to political manipulations.
“While strong authoritarian regimes were established in the post-Soviet space, Ukraine still had a weak and unbalanced government. Ukraine seemed to be an ‘artificial state’ to Putin and thus provoked aggression against itself,” says Maksym ROZUMNY, Doctor of Political Sciences, chief of the political strategies department at the National Institute of Strategic Studies.
At some moments Ukraine could have veered off the course that led it to a collapse. In the view of Viktor NEBOZHENKO, political scientist, director of the sociological service Ukrainian Barometer, there were two such moments at the initial stage, when it was relatively easier to correct the situation. “The first mistake was dismissal of Yevhen Marchuk as prime minister and the then secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, for he was able to seriously reinforce the military-political power of Ukraine. When Kuchma was getting rid of Marchuk as presidential candidate, he was doing everything very clearly as befits one who wants to monopolize power. Marchuk trusted the agreements and sacrificed his political prospects in order to do his utmost to strengthen Ukrainian security. But Kuchma violated those agreements,” Nebozhenko says. Another misused opportunity was the Strait of Kerch border conflict. “After what had happened, we did not even dare change the structure of military districts and station some troops on the eastern border. And it was possible then to form a new army, for there was an economic growth at the time. But, instead, the authorities continued to loot and, hence, ruin Ukraine’s defense capability,” Nebozhenko says.
Worthy of special mention in the analysis of Ukrainian contribution to the war are communists, a classic fifth column, the aggressor’s allies at a time when the most dramatic decisions were made for Ukrainian statehood. It is President Leonid Kuchma who brought them back to Ukrainian politics in connection with the 1999 elections. And very recently, when courts began to handle Communist Party ban suits, the second president said this party did not need to be banned, for it would eventually die a natural death. For this reason, we printed what we think is a symptomatic photo by Dmytro Larin on the first page to illustrate the subject of Ukrainian contribution to the war.
Yet, despite all the efforts, Kuchma’s system malfunctioned. An unconstitutional attempt to reelect the president for a third term, the Kuchmagate, a suspicion of ordering the murder of journalist Heorhii Gongadze – all this provoked such a grave political crisis that the people, squeezed in the grip of oligarchic clan plunder, finally burst into the Maidan. The Ukrainians rose in revolt against the system under the slogans “Bandits to prisons!” and “We are many together.” But the interests of those who stood on the Maidan square and on the stage came into a contradiction. And, as a result, the attempt to change the rules of the game in this country was thwarted.
“After 2004, Ukraine entered a period of political turbulence which was, to a large extent, a product of provocation. The 2004 constitutional changes looked rather strange – they resembled an ultimatum. Why was it only possible to ride out the political crisis if the parliamentary-presidential system was adopted? The calculation was simple: it will be very difficult to form a strong government and pursue a consistent policy under this system of power. That was another, institutional, ton of explosive under the Ukrainian state’s foundation – to unbalance the governmental machine in this kind of a state, it is enough to cause the president and the prime minister to quarrel,” Rozumny says.
At the same time, Russia had already begun to seriously prepare an offensive. “During the Yushchenko presidency, Russia resorted to aggressive rhetoric against Ukraine and launched ‘gas wars.’ The Russians began to take a hostile attitude to our state,” Rozumny points out.
What did official Kyiv do in response? Nothing. Experts say Ukraine had a chance during Yushchenko’s presidency to revive the subject of NATO membership which Kuchma had “buried” in July 2004 not without Vladimir Putin’s assistance. But this was not done.
“In spite of his pro-Western attitudes and a conflict with the Russian leadership, president Yushchenko was partly playing up, in terms of spin, to the then Russian president Medvedev who opposed the Ukrainian ‘nationalistic’ president. Besides, traveling abroad throughout the year 2005 and winning applause in all Western parliaments, Yushchenko failed to spell out clear-cut reasons for closer cooperation with NATO. Diplomats complained at the time that Ukraine’s president was talking more about the Holodomor (which was right but somewhat out of proportion) than about the North Atlantic Alliance. He was more interested in the domestic humanitarian matters and a victory over his opponents inside Our Ukraine than in the threat that the NATO entry delay may pose. And the blame lies not so much with Putin, who ran off the handle in Bucharest in 2008, as with Ukraine because it failed to find diplomatic instruments and approaches to the West,” Nebozhenko says.
“Political rivalry and instability also had a negative effect on the country’s defense capability. It is the flabby and decrepit Ukrainian elite that bear the blame for this,” Nebozhenko says about the years of Yushchenko’s presidency. “The trouble of our elite is unserious attitude to state institutions. Everything could be easily arranged by way of personal pledges and bribes. There was almost no difference between law-enforcers, bureaucrats, the media, oligarchs, and political parties.”
After all, President Yushchenko brought back into politics his opponent Viktor Yanukovych who was in a deep knockdown after the Orange Revolution. Then roundtables, conferences, etc., suddenly began.
“The ‘Orange team’ was also to blame for the coming of Yanukovych to power, for it lacked unity to ward off the revenge of pro-Kremlin forces. Also guilty is our society which, instead of working to transform the system of government after the Orange Revolution, went home and laid all the blame for failures at the door of political leaders,” says Volodymyr VIATROVYCH, Ph.D. in history, director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
ACCORDING TO ANDRII LYSENKO, SPOKESMAN OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE COUNCIL’S INFORMATIONAL AND ANALYTICAL CENTER, ONE UKRAINIAN SERVICEMAN WAS KILLED AND FOUR WOUNDED IN THE DONBAS HOSTILITIES ON OCTOBER 8-9 IN SPITE OF THE SO-CALLED CEASEFIRE / REUTERS photo
All that occurred from then on looked like a flood of the Kremlin’s special operations that were possible to a large extent due to the absence of strategically-minded people in the Ukrainian governmental circles.
“The oligarchic clan-based way of governance and social organization exhausted itself at a certain stage,” Rozumny says. “This had happened a little earlier than the Euromaidan began. This was proved by such concrete events as receipt of a Russian loan to bridge the budgetary gap that emerged in the 4th quarter of 2013. That system of embezzlement in fact ceased to exist before the end of 2013 and the sellout of Ukraine.”
The special operation known as “2008 gas crisis” went down smoothly. Ukraine signed a shackling agreement that undermined its economy for years to come. The attempts to shake off the yoke by way of “buttering up” the Kremlin with the Kharkiv Accords laid the groundwork for the annexation of Crimea.
“The Kharkiv Accords is a classic example of surrender which shows all the signs of a special operation. The participants of that event say they were going to visit aviation plants, take a tour of Kharkiv, and meet the public. But they were suddenly put into cars, carried to an office, and shown documents to be signed. This usually happens in the case of surrender or when the ruling top of one country is the object of a special operation on the part of another,” Nebozhenko says.
Meanwhile, the clumsy judicial case against prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the signer of the shackling agreement, ended up with a trap for its perpetrators – a trap they failed to pull out of. All this went on against the backdrop of a continuing plunder of national resources that had been exhausted in the past 15 years of the oligarchic clan system, absolute indifference to the improvement of both external and internal institutions of power, and complete lack of information for the grassroots. All this ended up with an explosion, the Maidan, and, finally, a war.
“Lawlessness, which has dominated in this country up to now, and absence of order encourages people to seek some other forms of this order either inside or outside the country. One part of Ukraine saw this opportunity in Europe, the other in the ‘heavy hand’ of Putin,” says Oleksandr SOLONTAI, an expert at the Institute of Political Education. “It is the Kuchma and Yanukovych regimes that did their best to provoke aggression.”
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“But the Ukrainian authorities still go on doing rather provocative things. The laws on the Donbas and on a free trade in Crimea are the proof of this. Surprisingly, the occupied regions are receiving these conditions at a time when it is necessary to moderate the tax climate, liberalize the economy, broaden the authority of the local government, and decentralize the government in mainland Ukraine.
“Therefore, the main goal of our government today is to begin as soon as possible to carry out reforms and change the present-day setup which continues to ruin our state. The absence of reforms may kindle a new, even armed, domestic conflict, which will allow Putin to seize some more regions of Ukraine,” Solontai says.
COMMENTARY
Serhii VYSOTSKY, political observer, Liga.net:
“We’ve been trying to play up to the people who were our enemies and slowed down our economic development. The oligarchic capitalist setup, in which the government is the distributor of benefits and consumer of the corruption-based rent and the president is an arbiter of oligarchic capitalist relations, has led this country into a domestic political and foreign economic deadlock. The absence of reforms and modernization allowed Russia to make an attempt to swallow our state, which in fact resulted in the Maidan.
“It was much easier to share the corruption-based rent with Russia because our oligarchs and politicians spoke with their Russian counterparts in the same language. It is the language of the black money that circulated as part of gas, barter, and other schemes. The latter were devised by Lazarenko and then Tymoshenko and Kuchma via Itera and RosUkrEnerho which ruled the roost until 2009. In 2010, when the Kharkiv Accords were signed, Yanukovych in fact sold the country out. Then the association with the EU was dropped in exchange for a $15-billion bribe and a promise to reap a 30-billion benefit. Yanukovych further planned to sell out Ukraine’s defense production sector to Russian enterprises.
“Once the Maidan tried to call into question the benefit of corruption-based schemes with Russian and laid down the European vector of Ukraine’s development, Russia responded by going to war.
“Ukraine has made no attempts to build a civilized state in the past 23 years – beginning with Kuchma’s policy of multi-vectored approach and Yushchenko’s patriotic rhetoric which did not hinder Russian industries and oligarchs to go on swallowing Ukrainian property, and ending with Yanukovych who began to sell the country piecemeal to Russia.
“The people who could change the direction of this country’s development were being ousted from the ruling elite. The dominant system in Ukraine envisaged that the only value of a bureaucrat’s chair was the amount of bribes it could fetch. The more money the bureaucrat could bring to his deputies, the more valuable he was. Accordingly, this goal and value did not fit in with the logic of the state’s development. Yevhen Marchuk is a classic example, when the Pinchuk-Kuchma capitalist clan ousted a state-minded person in the 1999 elections by way of ‘passing the ball’ to the communists and other corrupt politicians.
“Our authorities are to blame for all this. And should they go on in the same spirit, this will stir up a new Maidan and revolution, which will put violent change of the elites on the agenda.”
