Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

A few weeks after the meltdown at Vilnius, Putin received Yanukovych in Moscow to celebrate his apparent triumph over the EU. It was an enormously expensive victory: Russia promised to purchase US$15bn in Ukrainian eurobonds and to cut the gas price for Ukraine by more than US$130 per thousand cubic metres, or roughly one-third. At a press conference following the meeting, Putin said, ‘To reassure everyone: we did not discuss the issue of Ukraine joining the Customs Union.’[20] Having pushed for full Ukrainian membership of the Customs Union several years earlier, Russia now was prepared to pay a high price just to block the EU agreement and keep the door open for the future.

Yanukovych’s calculus remains murky. Perhaps he never intended to sign the AA and simply wanted to garner as many concessions as possible from Russia.[21] A less cynical take is that he did want to go ahead with the AA – until Moscow made it clear that there would be a price to pay for doing so and the EU refused to pick up the tab. Despite the crudeness of Yanukovych’s horse-trading, his predicament was ultimately a product of zero-sum jousting between Russia and the EU, which led them to pose a binary choice to his country. Kyiv made plain that it did not want to choose, but was ignored. Even its public call for trilateral talks went unanswered until much later.

Russia’s victory was short-lived. Yanukovych returned from Moscow to find a large crowd occupying Kyiv’s central Maidan nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), the epicentre of the Orange Revolution in 2004. A group first gathered there in the days following Vilnius to protest Yanukovych’s about-face on the AA. But neither that agreement, a highly technical, 2,100-page document that mostly covers distinctly uninspiring subjects such as fishery regulations, nor even a desire to join the EU (supported by only 37% of the population at the time), would have produced the crowds that subsequently emerged.[22] Had Yanukovych allowed those small, peaceful demonstrations to run their course, they would probably have petered out and the protesters returned home. However, his interior ministry moved to disperse the crowd forcefully; the riot police were particularly hard on students camped out on the square. The scenes of brutality inspired more than 500,000 people to take to the streets the next day. Despite the multitude of EU flags on display, the focus of the protests was now on ousting Yanukovych.

In the subsequent weeks, the government and a far-right nationalist vanguard among the protesters, who, unlike the peaceful majority of the diverse crowd, had taken up firearms, Molotov cocktails and improvised weapons, escalated the violence. As pandemonium unfolded in Kyiv, Russia and the West, reverting to type, sought to influence events to gain advantage in their contest over Ukraine, with both geo-economics and geopolitics now in play. The Kremlin pushed Yanukovych to crack down harder on the protesters. Its hand could be detected in a packet of repressive laws he rammed through parliament in mid-January, many of them modelled on analogous Russian legislation.

US and EU leaders and diplomats met with and called Yanukovych and his senior ministers dozens of times to urge them to compromise with the Western-leaning opposition and avoid mayhem on the Maidan. US officials were deeply involved in trying to forge a settlement to the crisis; a leaked recording of a conversation between two of them exposed an effort to pick which opposition politicians would sit in a new government. The officials tried to seal the deal, which in the end fell through, before Russia had time to react.[23] Given that the recording was, in all likelihood, made and leaked by Russian operatives, it is safe to assume that the Kremlin believed the US was mounting another regime-change operation, that is, regional geopolitics as usual. Brussels tried to take advantage of the pro-EU leanings of the protesters, mounting a rearguard action to give Yanukovych another chance to sign the AA (on the premise that doing so would satisfy the crowds), and this time dangling the financial assistance it had denied him two months earlier.[24]

Another settlement-that-wasn’t