Jakarta Post, Indonesia
Dec 15 2004

Dividing the Ukraine, Putin’s imperial dream

Vytautas Landsbergis, Project Syndicate

To divide a people in order to conquer them is an immoral strategy
that has endured throughout recorded history. From Alexander the
Great to Stalin the Cruel, variants of that strategy have been used
to keep nations in thrall to the will of an emperor.

We are now seeing this strategy at work again as President Vladimir
Putin stealthily seeks to restore Kremlin supremacy over the lands
treated as “lost” when the USSR imploded in 1991. In so overplaying
his hand in Ukraine’s recent election, however, Putin clearly
revealed to the world his neo-imperialist designs.

In the wake of the euphoric mass protests in Kyiv, Russia’s president
has since said that he can work with whatever government Ukraine’s
people choose. These are mere words, for in mind and action Putin
does not want anyone to rule Ukraine that he has not put in place. No
price is too high to achieve that end, so traditional threats about
dividing Ukraine have been used.

I speak as someone who has been on the receiving end of Russian
imperialist designs. When Lithuania and then the other Baltic States
— Estonia and Latvia — which were occupied by Stalin early in World
War II, seized their opportunity for freedom in 1990-1991, the
Kremlin did not sit on its hands. It knew that the rest of Russia’s
colonies — the so-called “Soviet republics” — would want to follow
the ungrateful Baltic countries into freedom.

Although Russia’s rulers were by then communists in name only, they
didn’t hesitate to reach for the old Leninist recipes. They began to
foster and incite splits and confrontations. They stoked supposed
resentments among different national or ethnic communities based on
Lenin’s idea that even small groups of villages could demand
territorial autonomy.

Note the word “territory.” The demands were never about normal
cultural autonomy as a means of continued identity and supposed
self-protection. Only territorial autonomy, it seems, would do.

This way, minorities become easily manipulated majorities. Divide
enough, stoke enough resentment, and a nation becomes nothing more
than a ruined society within a national territory. Arm some of these
manufactured minority structures so that they can demand autonomy at
the barrel of a gun, and you get the kind of chaos the Kremlin can
use to reassert its control.

Fortunately, Lithuanians — as well as Estonians and Latvians —
understood this game. It failed also in Crimea when Russia sought to
deploy its old strategy of divide and rule there in 1991. But these
defeats did not inspire the Kremlin to abandon the basic strategy. On
the contrary, Russia’s imperial ambitions persisted, and persistence
has paid off.

Around the Black Sea, Russia has called into being a series of
artificial statelets. Georgia and Moldova have both been partitioned
through the creation of criminal mini-states nurtured by the Kremlin
and which remain under its military umbrella. Indeed, in the very
week that Putin was meddling in Ukraine’s presidential election, he
was threatening to blockade one of those statelets, Georgia’s
Abkhazia region, after it had the temerity to vote for a president
the Kremlin did not like.

Moldova has been particularly helpless in the face of the Kremlin’s
imperial designs. A huge Russian garrison remains deployed in
Transdneister, where it rules in collaboration with local gangs.
Proximity to this lawless territory has helped make Moldova the
poorest land in Europe. To the east, Armenia and Azerbaijan were
pushed into such bloody confrontation at the Kremlin’s instigation
that the only way for them to end their ethnic wars was to call in
the Russians — as in Transdneister — for a kind of “Pax Ruthena.”

Now Ukraine’s people may face a similar test after supporters of
Viktor Yanukovich threatened to seek autonomy should the rightful
winner of the country’s presidential vote, Viktor Yushchenko,
actually become president. Who can doubt that the hand of Russia is
behind this? Would Moscow’s mayor Yuri Luzkhov, a loyal creature of
Putin, have dared to attend the rally where autonomy was demanded
without the sanction of the Kremlin’s elected monarch? Indeed, Putin
openly claims this part of Ukraine as a Russian “internal matter.”

It is to be hoped that Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens, having
witnessed the economic despair — and sometimes the bloodshed —
caused by the Kremlin’s manufactured pro-autonomy movements, will
realize that they are being turned into Putin’s pawns. The test for
Viktor Yushchenko and his Orange revolutionaries, as it was for
Lithuania’s democrats in 1990-1991, is to show that democracy does
not mean that the majority suppresses any minority. Lithuania passed
that test; I am confident that Viktor Yushchenko and his team will do
so as well.

But Europe and the world are also being tested. Russia is passing
from being the Russian Federation of Boris Yeltsin to a unitary
authoritarian regime under Vladimir Putin and his former KGB
colleagues. Europe, America, and the wider world must see Putin’s
so-called “managed democracy” in its true light, and must stand
united against his neo-imperialist dreams.

The first step is to make Russia honor its binding commitment to the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, as well as to
the Council of Europe, to remove its troops from Moldova and Georgia.
Any plans to “defend” Yanukovich and the eastern part of Ukraine by
military force must be confronted.

Vytautas Landsbergis, Lithuania’s first President after independence
from the Soviet Union, is now a Member of the European Parliament.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress