Ukraine: What If They Win?

 

The Battle of Orsha, 1514, when Ukrainian and Lithuanian troops under Prince Kostyantyn Ostrozky stopped the westward advance of the Moscovites, from Serhii Plokhy's Lost Kingdom: The Quest For Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation, 2017.

Isaac Chotiner's New Yorker interview on the Ukraine counter-offensive with the war researcher Marina Miron—not one of his diabolical ones, when he utterly destroys the subject without their knowing it's happening—roused a lot of spite anyway, with her singularly lame-sounding comparison of the Ukrainian forces' situation, in whatever territory they succeed in taking back, to that of the American forces in Iraq around this time 20 years ago:

I’m referring back to Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. operation in 2003. The toppling of Saddam Hussein—the military part—had gone well. But the reconstruction part and governance itself was lacking, and that created a power vacuum. This is something that I think will also be needed in Ukraine once the Ukrainian troops hold those territories. They will need to hold those territories, and they will have to rebuild those territories.

I can imagine that the Russians who rule those territories have done quite a lot of psychological operations to sway the population, which speaks Russian and which is ethnically closer to Russia, to basically not mind being ruled by Russia, just as in Crimea. 

There was the question of what it means to be "ethnically close", and the question of whether linguistic affiliation is really such a vital issue—do we in the US want to be occupied by British troops? Does Ireland? A lot of people in Taiwan speak Mandarin—should that make it easier for Beijing to take over? Also, ethnic Ukrainians are substantial majorities in both Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts anyhow.

I suggested a Putinian argument for how to construct an analogy that might work:

Backed by an unholy alliance of France and Spain. If they take the rest of North America poor England will be totally surrounded.

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) June 18, 2023

Then there were, you know, the empirical facts, going back as far as 1991:

And the Crimea results are distorted by huge numbers of migrants from Russia attached to the naval base

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) June 18, 2023

I'm especially keen on the Crimea question, as some readers may remember. 

The Ukrainian bit of the Don basin in Donetsk and Luhansk (the river Don itself is all on the Russian side of the border) is part of the homeland of the Don Cossacks, Orthodox Christians from a long time back, allies of the Russian Empire since the time of Ivan the Terrible (later 16th century), and favored (thanks to their military service to the Tsars from the Siege of Kazan' to the Battle of Borodino and after) with a certain amount of independence while the empire lasted, and the territory has seen centuries of Russian peasants settling there (the family of the great Stalin-era novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, who got a Nobel prize for his narratives of Don Cossack life, were poverty-stricken Russian migrants). The indigens of Crimea, in contrast, are the Crimean Tatars, Muslims since time immemorial, and treated as enemies by the Russian state for almost that long, particularly since the Russian conquest of Crimea under Empress Catherine II in 1783, since which the peninsula has served chiefly as a naval base, controlling the Black Sea, and generally (of course) the non-Russian and mostly non-Cossack population.

So that while under the collectivization program of Putin's favorite tsar, Iosif Dzhugashvili-Stalin, the Don Cossacks and their Russian neighbors were treated as badly as the Ukrainian "kulaks" to their west, which was horrible beyond belief, Crimean Tatars were actually treated worse, in an actual genocide:

Almost immediately after retaking of Crimea from Axis forces, in May 1944, the USSR State Defense Committee ordered the deportation of all of the Crimean Tatars from Crimea, including the families of Crimean Tatars who had served in the Soviet Army. The deportees were transported in trains and boxcars to Central Asia, primarily to Uzbekistan. The Crimean Tatars lost 18 to 46 percent of their population as a result of the deportations 

The survivors were able to start returning to Crimea after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, and did so, welcomed by the new independent Ukraine; 25 years later, the Russian re-occupation and "annexation" of the territory drove thousands of them right back out (along with the sailors of the Ukrainian Navy, whose primary base it had been). But the ethnic-Russian population of Crimea remains, as it has been for 240 years, troops of an occupying army and their suppliers. In my view, if there is any exchange of territory in a settlement between Russia and Ukraine, it's OK to give some Donbas territory to Russia, but all Crimea must belong to Ukraine (in the interest of the indigens and also of the freedom of the seas). 

Meanwhile, the populations of Donbas continued to prefer Ukraine up through the last possible polling in 2019, and there's really no reason to suppose "annexation" has changed their minds now that honest poll taking has been rendered impossible.

As the historian Serhii Plokhy told Isaac Chotiner in February 2022, weeks before the war started,

In the [Revolutionary] period, the idea of a Ukrainian nation and a Ukrainian revolution was basically about ethnicity, even though there were many minorities on the territory, including Russians and Poles, and many of them viewed the idea of Ukrainian independence with suspicion. But, by 1991, the idea of a nation and its connection to language and culture had changed. The Ukrainians were now imagined more as a civic nation in the making. The big industrial cities by that time were speaking Russian, and support for independence was more than ninety per cent in December of 1991. Ethnicity mattered and language mattered, but they were secondary. The majority of every region was for independence.

I think Miron is Russian herself (Marina is a common Russian name, and a bio says she's fluent in Russian, Spanish, and German but "near fluent" in Ukrainian), and may have difficulty conceptualizing the inherent pluralism of Ukrainian nationhood, which we've discussed here before, the thing that makes it so very different from Russia, but I think the main thing is that her field is "war studies", the science of moving people around as if they were inanimate objects, and it works with a fairly crude idea of what people are like on the inside. The way in which Sunni-Shi'a conflicts were a problem for overwhelmingly Christian US troops in Iraq is not at all comparable to the way Russian-Ukrainian conflicts might be a problem for an army of ethnic Ukrainian and (many) ethnic Russian troops occupying a territory of ethnic Russian and (many) ethnic Ukrainian inhabitants.

When she says, 

The potential danger is that the liberation of the Donbas by the Ukrainians might not necessarily be perceived the same way by those who are living under Russian rule. And, again, the Russians are quite good at conducting psychological and information warfare to insure the allegiance of that population to Vladimir Putin.

she is alluding to how Putin's magic works on Russian people in Russia, and maybe Belarusian, not Chechens (who must be ruled by abject terror under the savage dictator Putin installed over them) or Uzbeks or Georgians and Armenians. Ethnic Russians in Ukraine, especially those raised with the memory of Stalin, may be less susceptible to his charm (obligatory to note that the Jewish president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the ethnic-Ukrainian ex-president Yuliya Tymoshenko were both brought up in the Russian-speaking community). Not to mention that, as noted above, ethnic-Ukrainians are still the majority in Donbas.

At the same time, I don't think it's smart to dismiss Miron's ideas out of hand: we don't actually know what is happening. We can assume that Russian intelligence has worked since 1991 to create a belief structure in which ethnic Russians in Ukraine feel they have suffered from discrimination or unkindness, as they have (with some justification) in Estonia or Lithuania or Georgia, just like Hitler's complaints about the Czech bullies mistreating unassuming Sudetendeutschen who really didn't mean any harm. They were doing it in 2014. We can also assume that since the occupation began the occupiers have created Soviet-style networks of informants telling tales on each other of disloyalty or disrespect, as they have in Russia itself since Putin's accession to power. If/when Ukraine forces really succeed in driving the invaders out, the makings of an anti-Ukraine resistance will certainly be there.

It seems to me she is absolutely right about this, based on what actually happened in Donbas between 2014 and 2022:

We could go back to what it was before, essentially, maybe with higher levels of violence, but I don’t think that it will end very quickly. That would be very favorable for Russia because there will be contested areas and contested borders, and that will pose an obstacle to Ukraine joining nato. nato has regulations—and this was the case with Georgia back in 2008—that you have to have clearly defined borders.

And it really needs to be thought about. With or without the Russian army, this is likely to be a very long process.