From The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder, 2018) p196-7
In some respects, Russia did lose in its war in Ukraine. No memorable case for Russian culture was made by the peoples of the Caucasus and Siberia journeying for hundreds or thousands of kilometers to kill Ukrainians who spoke Russian better than they did. The Russian annexation of Crimea and sponsorship of the “Lugansk People’s Republic” and “Donetsk People’s Republic” did complicate Ukraine’s foreign relations. Even so, the frozen conflict was a far cry from the “disintegration” of Ukraine discussed in Russian policy papers and the massive expansion suggested by “Novorossiia.” Ukraine fielded an army while holding free and fair elections, Russia fielded an army as a substitute for such.
Ukrainian society was consolidated by the Russian invasion. As the chief rabbi of Ukraine put it: “We’re faced by an outside threat called Russia. It’s brought everyone together.” That overstatement suggested an important truth. For the first time in Ukrainian history, public opinion became anti-Russian. In the 2001 Ukrainian census, 17.3% of the inhabitants of the country identified themselves as ethnically Russian; by 2017, that figure had fallen to 5.5%. Some of that drop was a result of the inaccessibility of Crimea and parts of the Donbas region to the survey. But the bulk of it was the result of the Russian invasion. An invasion to defend speakers of Russian killed such people by the thousand and induced them to identify as Ukrainian by the million.
By invading Ukraine, annexing Crimea, and shooting down MH17, Russia forced the European Union and the United States to respond. The EU and U.S. sanctions were a rather mild response to Russia’s announced intention to remake “the world order,” as Lavrov put it; but they did isolate Russia from its major partners and deepen Russia’s economic crisis. Putin pretended that China was an alternative; Beijing exposed Russia’s weakness by paying less for Russian hydrocarbons. Russia’s power rests upon its ability to balance be- tween the West and the East; the invasion of Ukraine made Russia dependent on China without forcing the Chinese to do anything in return.
Russia’s Eurasian ideologists claimed that the United States planned to steal Russia’s resources. Antyufeyev, for example, presented Russia’s war in Ukraine as a defensive campaign to prevent the United States from stealing Russia’s natural gas and fresh water. ‘This reflected a healthy imagination rather than familiarity with American energy production. Indeed, this attention to resources seemed like a displacement. It was Russia’s neighbor China, not the United States, that lacked natural gas and fresh water. By claiming that international law did not protect state borders, Moscow opened the way for Beijing, when and if it so desired, to make a similar argument about the Chinese-Russian border. Almost everyone lost in the Russo-Ukrainian war: Russia, Ukraine, the EU, the United States. The only winner was China.
ON AUGUST 29, 2014, the day when Lavrov compared Russia’s war against Ukraine to a computer game, Russian and European fascists and extreme-Right politicians gathered on territory seized from Ukraine to simultaneously deny and celebrate the ongoing Russian invasion.
Sergei Glazyev opened an international conference in Yalta under the heading of “anti-fascism.” He was (according to the program) joined by fellow Russian fascists Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov. The guests were the leaders of Europe’s extreme Right: Roberto Fiore from Italy, Frank Creyelman from Belgium, Luc Michel from Belgium, Pavel Chernev from Bulgaria, Marton Gyéngyés from Hungary, and Nick Griffin from Great Britain. Russian and European fascists considered founding an “Anti-Fascist Council.” They denied the Russian invasion of Ukraine, though they were meeting in a city Russia had annexed; they denied that Russia was still fighting in eastern Ukraine at the time, though featured guests included Russian military commanders who had left the battlefield to be present.
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