Tags
The dueling narratives in Crimea appear to pit ethnic security against western freedom, i.e., Crimea’s Russians belong with Russia and Ukraine, so far, can go to hell.
— Russia for Russians and Russian Security in Crimea —
However, the apparent basis for Ukraine’s recent revolution appears to have been resistance to Russian domination associated with Putin’s kleptocracy, which was then signaled in the person of Viktor Yanukovych by way of his excessively self-aggrandizing spending — or, alternatively, by his setting the example of the “new nobility” assembled by “men of respect”, but, perhaps, for himself either rejecting what he might have had to do to hold his position or simply not having the power to hold it.
— Russia for Russians and Russian Security in Crimea —
vs
— Putin’s Russia and Piratical Government in Ukraine —
Discussion of the recent Russian annexing of Crimea often seem to revolve around the legality and propriety of Putin’s initiative and not around Putin’s character. However, the imbroglio, from the intimations of revolution forward, has been about the character projected by Russia’s president’s leadership. From the new Russian Security State, one that features FSB staffing at a higher level per capita than ever achieved by the KGB to state-controlled media, from cooperation and support of the Assad-Khamenei axis, which support appears to have transformed legitimate “Arab Spring” challenge into a blood bath, to the $52 billion development effort to produce the Olympic Games at Sochi, the tone set has been that of piratical control.
If one has wished for Russia to attend to Syria as within its sphere of influence and to do so in the most aboveboard and humanitarian way, that wish may be dismissed with the chain of dictatorship having by now been made appallingly clear (and so I have made “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” a BackChannels trope).
In the Russian projection, Crimea has been made to look like its about simmering ethnic animus and divided loyalties across a large constituency.
Look again.
Look again at the mansions and hunting lands acquired by Viktor Yanukovych: Crimea, by extension, turns out an argument about the validity of dictatorship, and not necessarily Putin’s dictatorship alone.
Yesterday, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen noted of President Putin the following:
Russian nationalism is an indigenous force, and Russian grievance is somewhat the same. But another leader may not have fanned either one. A non-Putin, in fact, may not have felt either emotion so intensely. Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and now the prime minister, probably would not have seized Crimea. Nothing about him suggests otherwise. He is no Putin.
But Putin is. The tautology has become plain. The reformer has become the uber nationalist and expansionist.
If there’s a basis for arguing the assertion untrue, one wonders what it might me. In fact, I’d go further and suggest that Cohen’s “uber nationalist and expansionist” is more than that: Putin would seem to be the dictators’ dictator, the standard bearer of a class.
# # #
BackChannels 