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

Ukrainian politics have also become more polarised and rife with extreme discourse and behaviour. National identity, it is true, has been vigorously contested ever since the country’s independence in 1991. Divergent visions of culture, history and language set apart many in the south and east from those in the west and centre. Given the highly centralised nature of the Ukrainian government, those in charge in Kyiv have always had the power to impose their views on the rest of the country. Before 2014, though, factionalism and disorganisation within the Verkhovna Rada and executive branch prevented any single part of the country from locking in total dominance. The Maidan Revolution marked a qualitative shift in this regard. As noted above, far-right nationalists were the armed vanguard of the uprising, and the post-revolutionary government was dominated by representatives of western portions of the country. Support for the Maidan movement was minimal in the south and east. One public-opinion survey in February 2014 showed that only 20% in the east (including the Donbas) and 8% in the south (including Crimea) sympathised with the Maidan protesters; this figure was 80% in the west and 51% in the centre.[19] The south and east have been increasingly marginalised since the revolution. The Party of Regions, the political machine prevalent there from the late 1990s onward, fell apart after Yanukovych’s fall, while the Communist Party of Ukraine, the other major party with support there, was banned by a Kyiv court in September 2015. The annexation of Crimea excluded 2m southerners from the polity, and the Donbas war disenfranchised those in rebel-held territory and also the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Ukrainians and residents of districts near the line of contact where martial law has been invoked. In the first year of the warfare in the east, most front-line troops were not from regular army units but paramilitary volunteer battalions, some of which had abrasively nationalist leanings; one featured the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel on its banner.[20]

In government-controlled areas of the east and south, popular turnout in the 2014 parliamentary election was significantly lower than in the west and centre. This helped produce a parliament with a large declaratively pro-Western majority and inclined some to the conclusion that Ukrainians themselves had profoundly changed their views. It turns out that the quantity of votes cast for such parties was approximately the same as it had been for all previous elections; what had changed was the total number of votes due to low turnout in the south and east.[21] The presence of armed far-right volunteer battalions and their televised public humiliation of candidates who had been members of the Party of Regions (some of them dumped unceremoniously into rubbish bins in front of TV cameras) cultivated a climate of fear.[22] Several prominent figures associated with the party were murdered in 2015, including an outspoken pro-Russian journalist.

At the time of writing, far-right nationalist figures serve as speaker of the Rada (and thus first in the presidential line of succession) and in senior positions in the interior ministry. The historian who directs the official Institute for National Memory is a nationalist ideologue; he was the author of a ‘de-communisation’ law that has led to the renaming of thousands of streets, towns, villages and even major cities. Implementation has maximised the law’s divisiveness. For example, Moscow Avenue in Kyiv has been renamed Stepan Bandera Avenue in honour of the mid-twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist who allied with the Nazis against the Red Army. Bandera’s name is anathema to millions of Ukrainians, particularly in the south and east of the country, and to many Poles and Jews who associate him with wartime atrocities committed by nationalist groups.

Beyond the empowering of ethno-nationalists, Ukrainians on both sides of the line of contact make a habit of dehumanising one another. To many rebels, the government in Kyiv is a ‘fascist junta’ and all of its supporters ‘Banderites’. In Kyiv, as one Western journalist observed in 2014, empathy has also been notable by its absence: