In flagrant defiance of Ukrainian sovereignty, Russia has invaded, occupied, and is preparing to annex Crimea. The ire these actions have provoked in the West is acute, with voices on both left and right vying to appear more upset. From Warsaw to Washington governments stand in their unity of condemning Moscow’s actions.
Yet is all this justified? Our media has painted a stark dichotomy between the “bad” Russians and the “good” Ukrainians. But we must not place halos on the new Kiev government too quickly.
On February 22 the Ukrainian Parliament voted to impeach the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in answer to the cries of impassioned protestors. They certainly did not have the constitutional authority to make such a move: 328 of 449 members of parliament voted to have him removed, but Article 111 of the Constitution demands three quarters of the constitutional composition — 337 votes — to make this decision. They did, however, have the support of Kiev’s police.
As pro-Westerners took over the functions of government, they reversed many of the president’s policies. The new government rejected Russia’s billions in loans and appealed to the West for financial help instead. And most controversially of all, it made Ukrainian the sole official language of the republic, disappointing the country’s eight million Russophones.
Understandably, many in the Russophone-dominated Ukrainian East felt robbed of their election, and politically marginalized. That separatist feelings should arise in places like Crimea, under such circumstances, should not surprise anyone.
If the majority of people in a smaller region want to leave the country, do they need the permission of the whole country to do so? One could easily make a credible moral case for either side of this dispute. On the Crimean issue, the West’s answer is clear: national integrity trumps minority self-determination.
But we do well to remember that we have often been on the opposite side of this argument. In 1999, NATO used military intimidation to force Serbia to allow for de facto autonomy in the Albanian-populated Kosovo region.
Nearly a decade later, in 2008, Kosovo’s local government opted to officially declare independence. This decision carried the strong approval of the local Kosovor population and virulent condemnation of Serbia’s national population (not to mention their Russian allies).
The two scenarios are, of course, not entirely analogous. The threat posed by the Serbs in 1999 against the Kosovor population, used by the West to justify intervention, was genuine (although nonexistent by 2008). The threat posed by the Ukrainians against Russophones in places like Crimea used by Putin to justify occupation is largely imaginary.
Yet the parallels are too similar to ignore. At the moment, the West may be treating Ukraine’s national integrity as sacrosanct, and the aspirations of Crimean locals as irrelevant, but this seems to be more out of interest than principle.
