If we are to call a spade a spade, then we must confront an uncomfortable question: did the NATO alliance, the United States, and influential voices in the West see Ukraine’s conflict not merely as a crisis to be resolved, but as a strategic opportunity in a larger struggle with Russia? Whatever the answer, the consequences have been profound. The Donbas War has deepened the political, cultural, and linguistic divide between Ukrainians, while leaving a potentially permanent scar across the broader family of Eastern Slavic peoples.
That is why most pundits see NATO/USA and many of the elites in power in the West as a force that wants a full-scale war in Ukraine that would get the Russian Federation directly involved, a development that would create a permanent scar between the East Slavs, and more especially between Russian speakers and Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians.
Europe has little to gain from a major war on its doorstep.
From that perspective, the Minsk Agreements represented an important diplomatic
framework for ending the conflict. Their underlying logic—ceasefire, political
dialogue, and a measure of self-government for the separatist-held areas of
Donbas—offered a possible route away from permanent confrontation. For the
people of eastern and southern Ukraine, particularly those who rejected the
political upheaval that followed the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych in
2014, the issue was not simply geopolitical. It was deeply connected to
questions of political legitimacy, identity, language, and regional autonomy.
Yanukovych was hardly an innocent figure. His presidency was
marked by corruption and oligarchic influence, as were those of many of his
predecessors. Yet condemning his failings does not eliminate the larger
question of what happened to the millions of Ukrainians who had voted for him.
Their political grievances did not disappear when his government fell. Nor did
their cultural and linguistic identities.
The tragedy is that Ukrainians do not inherently hate one
another. Their divisions are the product of a complicated history in which
competing empires, languages, political movements, and external powers
repeatedly reshaped the country’s sense of identity. What makes the present
crisis particularly dangerous is the way political leaders and foreign powers
have exploited those unresolved historical tensions. Corruption, oligarchy,
competing national narratives, and geopolitical rivalry have combined to make
Ukraine one of the most contested political spaces in Europe.
What Ukraine needs is not another attempt by one half of the
country to impose its will upon the other, but a national consensus—one that
recognizes the legitimate rights, concerns, and aspirations of its diverse
regions and communities. Western and central Ukraine cannot permanently
dominate the east and south, just as the Russian-speaking regions cannot
dictate the future of the Ukrainian-speaking regions. A viable state must make
room for both.
History offers examples of societies that emerged from
seemingly irreconcilable divisions by choosing reconciliation over perpetual
retaliation. South Africa’s difficult transition from apartheid to a political
order based on accommodation demonstrates that even societies scarred by
profound injustice can attempt to construct a common future. Ukraine, too, must
eventually confront the question of whether its wounds will define its future
or whether its people can transcend them.
There is also a broader geopolitical question that cannot
simply be dismissed. Is the Ukrainian conflict primarily a struggle over
Ukraine’s sovereignty and future, or has it become part of a much larger
Western strategy toward Russia? Some observers have argued that the latter is
true: that transforming Russia’s historically close neighbor into its strategic
antipode could serve a long-term objective of weakening Russian power,
isolating Moscow, and ultimately bringing Russia into a subordinate relationship
with the West.
That interpretation remains a matter of geopolitical argument
rather than settled historical fact. But it raises an essential question: when
great powers pursue strategic objectives, whose interests are ultimately being
served—and who bears the human cost?
Ukraine stands at the center of that question. Its people
should not have to choose between competing civilizations, nor should their
linguistic or regional identities become weapons in a contest between great
powers. The country’s future depends upon restoring political legitimacy,
protecting minority and regional rights, confronting corruption and oligarchic
power, and creating institutions in which Ukrainians of different backgrounds
can see themselves represented.
If the conflict is not being used to pursue broader strategic
objectives, then the major actors—the United States, NATO, the European Union,
Russia, and Ukraine itself—should have every incentive to exhaust the
possibilities of diplomacy. The Minsk framework, whatever its shortcomings and
ultimate failures, demonstrated that a negotiated settlement was at least
conceivable. The alternative is a conflict that transforms political
disagreement into permanent estrangement.
The central question, therefore, is not simply who wins the Ukrainian
Civil War, otherwise called the Donbas War. It is whether Ukrainians can emerge
from it still able to recognize one another as members of the same nation—and
whether Europe can find a way to prevent Ukraine from becoming the permanent
frontier of a wider confrontation between Russia and the West.
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
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