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

Ukraine, the central battleground, has been hit the hardest. It has lost control over the Crimean peninsula and over a population there of more than 2m.[1] Pro-Russian Crimeans might have rejoiced in their new-found freedom from the Ukrainian government; the euphoria was short-lived. The peninsula’s status as a subunit of Russia is internationally unrecognised, hotly contested by Western states and ergo reversible. The most draconian of the US and EU sanctions, and probably the most lasting, have been imposed on economic interaction with Crimea. They are as stringent as those once levied on Iran: not only are Western firms forbidden from investing or trading, but even Russian firms that conduct business in the US or EU are effectively barred from operating there.[2] Budgetary injections from Moscow have been offset by rampant inflation caused by the Ukrainian blockade on exports to Crimea, the cutting off of irrigation water for agriculture, and blackouts following the severing of electrical lines on the Perekop isthmus joining the peninsula to the mainland.[3] Along with these economic challenges, the OSCE reports that the ‘human rights and fundamental freedoms’ of Crimeans are being abridged.[4] Amnesty International documents widespread abuses by the Russian authorities, including ‘a series of abductions and torture of their critics’ and an ‘unrelenting campaign of intimidation’ against independent media and groups speaking for the Crimean Tatars, the Muslim minority population that was deported by Stalin and spent more than 40 years in exile.[5]

The takeover of Crimea was bloodless, but the fighting in the Donbas, as noted in the Introduction, has claimed approximately 10,000 lives. Some 1.8m Ukrainians have been displaced internally, while nearly 1.1m have registered as refugees in Russia.[6] This latter number significantly understates flight to Russia since by all accounts most Ukrainians who did so have not gone through the formal registration process, preferring simply to find work or shelter with relatives.

The humanitarian impact goes beyond the tragedies of death and displacement. The UN, the OSCE and human-rights groups have documented widespread violations in the conflict zone committed by the Russia-backed rebels and by the Ukrainian government and paramilitary forces. ‘Both the Ukrainian government authorities and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine’, report Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, ‘have held civilians in prolonged, arbitrary detention, without any contact with the outside world…. Most of those detained suffered torture or other forms of ill-treatment.’[7] The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has reported ‘a pattern of cases of [the Security Service of Ukraine] detaining and… torturing the female relatives of men suspected of membership or affiliation with… armed [separatist] groups’.[8] No less repugnantly, separatist forces have ‘imposed an arbitrary system of rules, established a network of places of deprivation of liberty where detainees are tortured and ill-treated, and cracked down on dissent’ in areas under their control.[9] The term ‘Donetsk basement’ became synonymous in 2014 and 2015 with makeshift subterranean prisons and torture chambers, where those suspected of pro-Maidan sympathies or other heretical views were held incommunicado.[10]

The lives of many rank-and-file Ukrainians in the conflict zone have been turned upside down by all that has happened. In government-controlled stretches of Donetsk and Luhansk, where livelihoods had depended on ties with the provincial capitals now under rebel control, economic activity has contracted steeply. And the tightening of the security regime at the line of contact has made crossing it an exorbitantly time-consuming activity, with queueing often taking 24 hours or more. In mid-2016, OHCHR stated that ‘Ukrainian authorities have often run afoul of the principle of non-discrimination through adopting policies that distinguish, exclude, and restrict access to fundamental freedoms and socio-economic rights to persons living in the conflict-affected area.’[11] Within the separatist territories, shortages of goods, and black markets, wage arrears and lawlessness are among the hardships of daily life. Since the start of the conflict, separatists have taken over at least 50 state-owned mines and looted Ukrainian- and foreign-owned businesses.[12]