Ukraine could have bridged East and West. Instead, corruption, nationalism, and Western meddling left it broken
There is one feeling I often recall from having lived and worked in Ukraine – to be precise, in its most nationalist, full-of-itself city, Lviv – for a total of five years in the 2000s: Thank God, at least there’s no violence!
That is what I, some other foreigners, and quite a few Ukrainians, too, were thinking and even saying then. The country was politically and even culturally polarized, extremely corrupt, and a sham ‘democracy’ even more fake than most of the rest.
It was dominated and bled dry by a greedy, hypocritical, and – despite all the cheap talk, the pious singing-of-anthems-hand-on-heart, and the cheesy peasant braids and stitched shirts – deeply unpatriotic establishment of typically post-Soviet turncoats, thieves, liars, and sell-outs. There was no rule of law, the courts were a bad joke, and the police was a racket.
And yet, while the usual business-crime complex took its toll and there was the occasional state murder of a journalist, there was no large-scale violence. There was bitter grumbling galore, including about Crimea, all the time. But there was no civil war – as the almighty US intelligence services had infamously as good as predicted in the even darker 1990s – and no one was reaching for a gun either to leave an unbearable country or keep others in it by force.
While the Americans were busy thinking about the possibility – and perhaps opportunities – of Ukrainians killing each other in large numbers, their British cousins were considering another kind of doom. For them, more than three decades ago, the most interesting question was whether Ukraine and Russia would go to war, specifically over Crimea. There, British spooks back then warned with unusual honesty, “most of the population is Russian,” and things might become less than cordial if Kiev didn’t watch its steps.
And here we are now: On the 35th official anniversary of its existence outside the former Soviet Union, Ukraine has become the sum of all fears, much worse than even its pervasively corrupt, brutally unfair, and de facto lawless pre-2014 version. It is now ruled by its worst, most corrupt, and most authoritarian and bloody regime ever – hands down – under Vladimir Zelensky and his cronies. They steal, embezzle, and launder piles of dirty money as if there’s no tomorrow, which, to be fair, there really probably isn’t for them, at least not in Ukraine.
They literally hunt and, in effect, sell their subjects as cannon fodder, so that they can profit and the West can have its slaughterhouse war against Russia, in an insane, evil, and futile attempt to eliminate Moscow as a power to be reckoned with. This is the reality of “busification,” and nothing remotely like it happened before Zelensky and his accomplices took over. Those who do not readily submit to being treated as combat cattle regularly die mysteriously from ‘falls’ or maybe just blowing their nose.
The Ukrainian mass media have never been remotely clean, objective, or reliable. But the zombified and self-zombifying propaganda machine created under Zelensky is unprecedentedly awful. Those who openly resist the national brainwashing are incarcerated by kangaroo courts, tortured, and killed.
Or consider basic demography: Ukraine’s real population has almost halved since the end of the Soviet Union, and the future looks even worse. And while part of this catastrophe is due to the current war, much of it has been produced by the ceaseless class-war-from-above of injustice, exploitation, and hopelessness that Ukraine’s ‘elites’ have waged on their own subjects for a third of a century while blabbing sanctimoniously about nation this and nation that.
And the results of all these horrors? They are abysmal even on their own perverse terms. Just look at the map: Crimea is gone and so are substantial portions of Ukraine’s post-Soviet east due to a combination of regional rebellion, Kiev’s cack-handed, violent attempts to stomp it out, and a war with Russia. All of this could have been avoided.
Yet it was not. Indeed, Ukraine’s short post-Soviet history is, among other sad things, a record of at least sleepwalking and, more frequently, proactively provoking this twin catastrophe. But Ukrainians – or rather their rotten establishment – did have plenty of help in getting it so wrong. Take, for instance, the mean-spirited and asinine obsession with suppressing the Russian language to eradicate Ukraine’s windfall advantages as a mostly bilingual country of Russian and Ukrainian speakers.
That perverse and self-harming pursuit – recalling Freud’s hunch about nationalism as neurosis – was obstinately cultivated by both a narrow-minded but hyperactive and arrogant minority of ukrainier-than-though nationalists at home and descendants of run-away World War II nationalists, mass murderers of Poles, and Nazi collaborators from the West who were eager to infest post-Soviet Ukraine with their hoary bigotry.
Personally, I remember being naïve enough back then in the 2000s to ask Lviv acquaintances why Ukraine couldn’t just codify its own variant of Russian (comparable to the way American English is different from British English) and also promote Ukrainian (I know both languages, as it happens), and then focus on actually important matters. Blank stares were the answer, at best.
Ironically, well into the current war, there was a short news blip about someone in Ukraine having discovered the same obvious idea. How catastrophe can concentrate the mind and how sad that even now, after an estimated 1.5 million battlefield casualties, such pragmatic thinking is still a minority taste: Kiev’s policy is simply to double down on a daft campaign to win the lexicon while losing the war.
Entitled, patronizing exile nationalists projecting their selfish tunnel-vision fantasies on, and throwing their Western hard currency at, desperate people freshly shell-shocked by ultra-predatory ‘transition’ capitalism were one noxious outside influence vitiating Ukraine’s post-Soviet trajectory. But it was far from the only one. Indeed, as time went on, the West as a whole – its politicians, intellectuals, and mainstream media – became ever more interested in and vastly detrimental to Ukraine.
To be fair, the first yet already extremely harmful steps the West took to, ultimately, ruin Ukraine had very little to do with it: When Washington decided – not once but repeatedly – to cheat and humiliate Russia and break clear promises not to expand NATO eastward, it was first Germany, then multiple Eastern European countries that were at the center of attention, but not Ukraine. Yet, ironically, even while neglecting it, the West’s reckless expansion already set the stage for phase two of putting Ukraine in the crosshairs.
That was reached in 2008, when, at an infamous summit in Bucharest, the high and mighty of the West, led by the indispensably destructive US, artfully maneuvered Ukraine into the very worst position imaginable: by making a promise of NATO membership for Ukraine sometime in the future, they inevitably poked Russia in the eye once too often. By keeping the reckless promise vague, they left Ukraine completely exposed, as if baiting Moscow to intervene. The whole mad scheme took willfully ignoring the clear warnings issued by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Munich one year before and multiple equally explicit warnings produced by not Russians but widely acknowledged Westerners such as George Kennan and, back then, even William ‘Bill’ Burns.
Georgia shared this fate – lethal promises, no back-up – with Ukraine. And yet even after a short war there quickly demonstrated that this time Russia would stand its ground and defend its basic national security interests, the West stayed its course in Ukraine.
Indeed, it doubled down on it. If only the West had dropped Ukraine the way it dropped Georgia in 2008, many Ukrainians would still be alive and the country would have lost none or far less territory. Instead, the West got involved ever more deeply, offering a poisonous EU association agreement and the shaping a regime-change coup in 2014. After that, it bound Ukraine so closely into official and black-ops NATO structures that formal membership looked increasingly irrelevant, while helping Kiev sabotage the last realistic chance to return to peace and avoid large-scale war, the Minsk II agreement of 2015. Meanwhile, demagogic public intellectuals, such as Tim Snyder and Anne Applebaum did their worst to pour oil into the fire by a mix of silly nationalism-by-proxy and nasty Russophobia.
Finally, the West almost nonchalantly refused to seriously consider Moscow’s, as it turned out, last pre-February-2022 offer to return to substantial diplomacy and compromise. Once the war had greatly escalated, the West sent Britain’s most evil clown to kill an excellent opportunity to make peace quickly produced by the Istanbul talks of spring 2022.
Since then, since locking Ukraine into a devastating, perfectly unnecessary, and futile yet deliberately provoked war to weaken Russia, things have only gotten worse and worse, and there seems no end in sight. Indeed, as a remarkably sane former German general has just explained, Kiev is still eager to drag all of Western Europe (at least) into an open shooting war with Russia. In Europe, many establishment figures seem all too willing to go along. Ukraine has become the outstanding example of how the West risked and then destroyed the opportunities of the post-Cold War period. Ukraine could have been a prosperous country profiting from links to both East and West. Instead it’s a ruin.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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