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The Overextension of Sovereignty: How states have dampened opposition to annexation

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by Andrew Scanlon

Kremlin Dome of Senate. Photo Credit: iStockPhoto.

In the twenty-first century the calculation that war is too costly to pursue in the conventional manner has kept large scale inter-state conflict from occurring. States are no longer willing to send tanks rolling across borders to invade neighboring countries. The military, economic, and political cost/benefit analyses simply do not justify those actions in the present state of international relations. Yet, this does not cure a state’s appetite to expand its control in favor of pursuing its national interest. However, it does shift the strategy used to expand its presence. The use of proxies to engage on behalf of a state has been documented in conflicts such as the ongoing war in Yemen. A number of states utilize this strategy to pursue plausible deniability. An alternative method to mollify the international community over aggressive actions has been increasing in prevalence – extending sovereignty over peoples or structures outside of their present jurisdiction in order to more forcefully justify the aggressor’s presence. By over-extending their claim of sovereignty, these states attempt to shift the perception of their actions from aggressors to defenders and dampen any possibility of a united front willing to confront their activities. We have seen this strategy play out in Crimea and eastern Ukraine under President Vladimir Putin in 2014, and more recently in the South China Sea and the Himalayas by President Xi Jinping.

The Russian case in Ukraine

The Russian Black Sea Fleet’s continued access to naval bases in warm-water ports in Crimea and Russia’s support for the fiercely pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych were national interests, but a traditional military incursion into Ukraine would have triggered costly consequences. Instead, Vladimir Putin began using rhetoric related to the protection of ethnic Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Following violence in Kiev, Putin declared that “We understand what worries the citizens of Ukraine, both Russian and Ukrainian, and the Russian-speaking population in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine… we retain the right to use all available means to protect those people. We believe this would be absolutely legitimate.” After mass protests in Kiev and the formation of pro-Russian separatist militias in Ukraine, Putin used the doctrine of Protecting Nationals Abroad (PNA) as justification for sending military supplies to separatists and deploying “little green men” into Crimea and eastern Ukraine. But many of these people Putin claimed to protect were not citizens, but merely ethnic Russians or Russian-speaking peoples. Whether the doctrine of PNA is lawful or simply tolerated, its traditional application has been to citizens, not foreign nationals with ancestry to the state utilizing the doctrine. Nevertheless, in 2019, Putin issued a decree allowing close to 3.5 million people living in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donbass and Luhansk to obtain Russian passports and brings Putin’s actions closer to those previously allowed by the international community.

Putin did not stop at protecting ethnic Russians. He also used historical claims to justify retaking territory. In a speech to a joint session of parliament asking for the formal annexation of Crimea, Putin professed “All these years, citizens and many public figures came back to this issue, saying that Crimea is historically Russian land and Sevastopol is a Russian city. Yes, we all knew this in our hearts and minds”. Russia’s relinquishing of Crimea to Ukraine, in the process suffering a ‘historical wronging’, and its subsequent use as a rationalization to retake territory followed the framework of previous annexations. A number of international leaders compared the move to Hitler’s annexation of Sudetenland in 1938. The UN General Assembly has adopted resolutions urging Russia to withdraw military forces from Crimea and supplies from going to eastern Ukraine. A certain amount of backlash was inevitable following the annexation of territory, but Putin would have been naïve to believe that there would have been silence after such a move. However, other than remarks by world leaders and a number of U.S. and EU economic sanctions, Putin has been relatively free to pursue his interests in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. His use of the PNA doctrine and historical sovereignty over territory allowed him to keep the conflict, and ensuing fallout, below a level of escalation consistent with traditional military invasions.

China’s Mountain and Sea Strategy

While Russia has used the PNA doctrine as justification for interference into neighboring countries, China has used infrastructure. In the South China Sea, the Nine Dash Line asserted by China encompasses vast majorities of the sea that extend far beyond the usual exclusive-economic zones given to each state as a result of the United Nation’s Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Chinese explanations for this broad claim are based on historical use of the sea by China dating back thousands of years. In modern times, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s Navy (PLAN) has been constructing artificial islands in the South China Sea since 2013, allowing them to issue claims of sovereignty over disputed territory. In April, China created two new administrative districts in the South China Sea. This month, China drafted a new law that would expand the Chinese Coast Guard’s ability to enforce its sovereignty over the islands, permitting them to destroy foreign construction on islands claimed by Beijing and fire weapons on foreign ships.

China has now duplicated this strategy on land. In recent weeks, China completed the initial construction of a new village where the borders of India, Bhutan, and China meet in the Himalayan Mountains. This came after a June border clash in the Ladakh region of the Himalayas, near Kashmir, that resulted in the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese casualties. The new Chinese village is reported to be constructed within the territory of Bhutan, just south of the Doklam Plateau. Bhutan and China have been engaged in territorial disputes for nearly 35 years, much of which is focused on the western regions of Bhutan. The Doklam plateau is strategically significant for India’s continued access to its eight northeastern states, as well as their land borders with Bhutan and Myanmar. Under Chinese control, they would have the ability to block this access. The new Chinese village may only be the first in a series, much like the artificial islands, that would give China anchor points to protect the ‘sovereignty’ of Chinese territory or peoples.

These anchor points are core components to the strategy of Chinese expansion. States, including Australia, Japan, Vietnam, and Malaysia, are concerned with a resurgent China, its brazen aggression, and the potential of forceful annexation of territory. These fears present a major diplomatic challenge to China’s longer-term strategy. [[i]] Therefore, China has attached rhetoric to provocative actions in an attempt to alleviate concerns over their rise, engaging in a “rhetorical trap”. China has used rhetoric such as ‘China’s peaceful rise’ to assuage fears over actions that would otherwise seem more hostile. The rhetoric emphasizes the protection of sovereign entities, instead of engaging in military conflict on existing territory of sovereign states. This rhetoric has typically been utilized around actions in the South China Sea, but Beijing may begin using similar terminology regarding its efforts in the Himalayas.

Both the Russian and Chinese strategies are aimed at expanding territorial control without the stigma or risk of conventional conflict over existing territory, structures, or peoples. This shifts the conflict from a conventional military one to a more hybrid model that incorporates higher levels of rhetoric and international public opinion. Both the Russian and Chinese approaches try to build a framework that give them a defensive right to use force instead of an aggressive seizure of territory. While these strategies have allowed Russia and China to extend their ambitions over neighboring territories, how long will it take for their neighbors, and world leaders, to effectively respond to these enigmatic strategies… if ever?

 

[i] For more on the diplomatic challenges facing China in Asia over their renewed presence as a great power, Anisa Heritage and Pak K. Lee (2020) use an international order perspective to analyze the tension in the South China Sea, available here.

Andrew Scanlon is a MSc candidate in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh and an External Representative at Strife. Prior to postgraduate studies, he completed is B.A. in Political Science from the University of Dayton. During his undergraduate, Andrew worked for the Ohio Attorney General’s office and in the United States House of Representatives. His areas of research interest includes blockchain and its use as a tool for diplomacy, the impacts of the conflict in the South China Sea on the current international order, and international political economy.

Russian and British Imperial Policies towards Ukrainian and Welsh

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by Daria Platonova

The Ems Edict of 1876 banned the use of the Ukrainian language in print (Image credit: Mozok)

In 2014, language came to the forefront of politics in Ukraine for the second time since 2012 and with far serious consequences than before. After the flight of President Yanukovych on 21 February 2014, the new Ukrainian government provisionally repealed the 2012 Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law that granted Russian, among other minority languages, the status of the regional language in the east of Ukraine where it was most widely spoken. This had meant that Russian could be used at courts, schools, and businesses as the regional language in the east. People of the eastern cities and towns, such as Donets’k[1] and Kharkiv, took to the streets, protesting against the repeal with the slogans “Russian is our language”. Many appealed to Russia for help.

Radicals such as Donetsk Republic (a radical movement calling for the secession of the Donbas from Ukraine), who called the former President Viktor Yushchenko’s (2005 – 2010) language policies of Ukrainisation “the genocide of Russian speakers”, came to the forefront of the protest movement in Donets’k. The fact that the interim President Oleksandr Turchynov vetoed the repeal of the language law on 28 February 2014 and the new government pledged to revise its language policies failed to register with the people in the east, and the protests continued. These protests later morphed into an insurgency, with the help of Russian non-state actors, and led to the eventual secession from Ukraine of two regions, Donets’k and Luhans’k, in May 2014. The local elites in Donets’k lay the blame for these developments on Kyiv who, to them, pursued “incorrect policies” towards the east. In this article, I draw attention to somewhat more far-fetched but no less significant historical events. I present a comparative review of Russian and British imperial policies towards Ukrainian and Welsh respectively to demonstrate that empires would often suppress native languages in the public sphere in order to promote their lingua francas (most commonly spoken languages), for a variety of reasons.

Many Ukrainian nationalists, such as Ivan Dziuba, and the generations of Ukrainian writers since decried Russian imperial and later Soviet policies of russification which suppressed the use and development of Ukrainian. They emphasise how these policies damaged the development of Ukrainian identity. In the 21st century, language in Ukraine became a plaything of various political forces, such as the Party of Regions, who would often campaign with a promise to make Russian the official language of Ukraine, only to renege on their promises once in power. By contrast, President Yushchenko (2005 – 2010) pursued consistent policies of Ukrainisation, making Ukrainian the official language of the public sphere and all levels of education, which was used as a negative campaign ploy by the Russophone Viktor Yanukovych in his presidential election campaign before he was elected President in 2010. I argue that when it comes to the language policies in the Russian Empire, it was not alone in suppressing local native languages.

Ukrainian in the Russian Empire

In the second half of the 19th century, the Russian imperial bureaucracy began to target the Ukrainian or Little Russian language and Ukrainophiles (the promoters of the Ukrainian culture and language), such as Mykhailo Drahomaniv, systematically. Alexei Miller has written extensively on the origins, successes, and failures of these policies. Thus, in 1863, the Russian imperial bureaucracy issued the so-called Valuev circular, which aimed at curbing publications in Ukrainian intended for primary mass reading, including textbooks and religious texts. It also prohibited primary education in Ukrainian. Miller and other historians such as Olga Andriewsky trace the origins of the circular to the political situation in the Russian empire, such as the Polish Uprising of 1863 and Russia’s defeat in the Crimean war.[2] Valuev himself thought of the Ukrainian language as “a Polish tool in the struggle against the Empire”. The makers of the circular argued that the language “has never existed and, despite all the efforts of the Ukrainophiles, “still does not exist“.

Miller traces the origins of the second significant legislation, the Ems edict or ukaz, to the concern about the “manifestations of Ukrainophile activities, such as book publications in the Little Russian (malorusski) dialect (or Ukrainian)”. One of the explanatory notes to the edict that was finally issued in 1876 tellingly says, “The emergence of literature among Latvians can be considered as safe for the unity and integrity of Russia. On the contrary, it would be the greatest political imprudence to allow a separation of 13 million Little Russians by the means of giving the Ukrainian dialect the status of a language of high culture”. Further, the note maintained the central role of the Little Russia in the Russian-Polish conflict, saying “if the Little Russia becomes Polish again, the present greatness of the Russian state would be in grave danger”. The Ukrainophile movement was consequently labelled “the brainchild of the Austrian-Polish intrigue” that endangered the unity and integrity of Russia.

Hence, according to the Ems circular, the publication of literature in Ukrainian, with the exception of ancient texts and works of fine literature, was circumscribed; literary imports from abroad were forbidden; Ukrainian literature was now completely under control of the Chief Directorate on Publications. Miller shows how the imperial bureaucracy sought to minimise the grammatical and orthographical differences between Russian and Ukrainian. Other parts of the edict prohibited elementary instruction in Ukrainian as well as led not only to the closure of the Ukrainophile Kyiv Geographical Society but also the immediate exile of Ukrainophiles Drahomaniv and Chubinskiy. Thus, between 1896 and 1900, the Kyiv censorship committee forbade 15% of Ukrainian publications every year, compared to 2% of publications in other languages. Russian remained the language of administration, economy and mass communication. This was particularly true in the great cities of Kyiv and Odessa.

Welsh in the British Empire

In his book on the Ukrainian question, Miller notes that in France and Britain similar assimilatory processes took place over the 19th century and early 20th century, but there were no attempts to restrict minority-language publications through censorship. Assimilation was practised primarily through schools and in the workplace. In fact, in the 18th century, elementary education in Welsh flourished. Yet, by the 19th century political instability (Jacobin revolts) hit the schools hard. By the early 20th century, like Ukrainian, Welsh became associated with peasantry, working classes and, above all, urban disorder and political instability. In the industrial south-east (almost a mirror image of the rural Ukraine), there was a large “unstable” working-class population. Many of them were not Anglicans and most of them did not speak English as their first language. In 1800 – 1, there was a revolt over food prices, and massive demonstrations against wage cuts took place in 1816. Overall, riots were endemic in the 19th century in Wales. After one such riot, called the Newport Rising in 1839, the failure of the authorities to identify the instigators was attributed to the language barrier.

In 1847, the government inquiry into the state of education in Wales led to the publication of the so-called “Blue Books” in which “the Welsh were portrayed as ill-educated, poor, dirty, unchaste and potentially rebellious”, while the Welsh language was described as “the great evil”. Evans writes that the Welsh language and Nonconformity were made to carry most of the blame for the poor state of Wales. The books paved the way for government and state intervention in education so that by 1870 a wholly English system of instruction could be applied to Wales under Forster’s Education Act of the same year. The Reports also reduced the self-confidence of Welsh people and created in many quarters a strong sense of national inferiority.

In the 1850s and 1860s, Evans writes that “there occurred a massive cultural and political shift … and the Welsh were encouraged to forget their past with its passion for poetry, legend and history. The new emphasis was on practical knowledge, industriousness, progress, the language of success and the Victorian ethos of self-improvement”. Schools and parents became resistant to the introduction of Welsh because it prevented further integration with England and career success. Thus, a Welsh-speaking Anglican clergyman, the Revd Shadrach Pryce, considered the Welsh language to be useless in educational terms. Many were of the view, for example the rector of Merthyr Tydfil Revd Daniel Lewis, that the introduction of Welsh in the schools was dangerous and undesirable: “the language is a spoken one; it has really no body of literature of its own”, except for “very feeble poetry”. This is eerily reminiscent of the key Ukrainophile Mykhailo Drahomaniv’s remark that if Ukrainian was to become the chief language of instruction in Ukraine, the pupils would be put on the literary “St Anthony’s diet”.

By the early 20th century, due to the rapid urbanisation, English became “the language of advancement and promotion”, just as Russian was in the Russian Empire. Pupils at schools were learning English and its enforcement became associated with physical punishments, such as the infamous Welsh Knot. Smith writes,

“Welsh was not accorded any status as a medium of official business, nor the language of genteel society, nor of the expanding commercial and industrial world, and neither was it the language of academia and learning. Indeed, the domain of the Welsh language was increasingly limited to domesticity and religious worship, and it was regarded as a hindrance rather than an advantage to personal advancement and social progress”.

Thus, according to the calculations of E.G.Ravenstein, 71.2 per cent of the population of Wales was able to speak Welsh in 1871. By 1901, this figure was slightly less than half of the population . According to J. Southall’s Wales and Her Language published in 1892, Welsh was becoming disused and many children were becoming ashamed of their native tongue. Smith concludes that the opposition to the Welsh language reflected underlying social attitudes rather than any specific language policy. In contrast, the Russian imperial government pursued specific language policies towards Ukrainian, as later did the Ukrainian government towards the official language of the country and other languages.

Conclusion

In the 21st century, language remained an important issue in Ukraine and it became entangled with politics. This has deeper historical roots as the Ukrainian language was also a deeply political issue for the Russian bureaucracy in the Russian Empire. Two edicts forbade publications for mass reading in Ukrainian and instruction in the language. It was deemed that the development of Ukrainian endangered the Russian Empire as it was associated with “Polish intrigues”. Similarly, Welsh language became associated with the “unstable” working classes and urban riots in the British Empire. Publications in Welsh were not forbidden as such, but the language was gradually suppressed in schools. English became the language of career advancement and increasing urbanisation. In both empires, the lingua francas became unassailable by the minority languages by the early 20th century. By the time of its independence, the Ukrainian government therefore faced with the legacy of the Russian imperial policies towards Ukrainian the impact of which it persistently strove to override.

[1] I have used the Ukrainian spelling in line with the established academic practice.

[2] Olga Andriewsky, “The Russian-Ukrainian discourse and the failure of the Little Russian solution, 1782 – 1917” in A. Kappeler et al., eds. Culture, Nation, and Identity: the Ukrainian-Russian encounter

Daria is a PhD student at King’s College London. Her research focuses on violence and the unfolding of conflict across several regions in eastern Ukraine, 2013 – 2014. She also leads one of the Causes of War seminars in the War Studies Department. Prior to joining King’s, she worked as a teacher. She graduated with a degree in History from the University of Cambridge in 2011. Her broader interests include European history, war studies, and interdisciplinary methods.

Raising and Losing Children in the Donbas War

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by Daria Platonova

The Gorlovka Madonna, depicting mother and child as the innocent casualties of war (Image credit: ОЧИЩЕНИЕ/VK)

Child suffering is a largely neglected aspect of the war in Donbas. According to a recent UNICEF report, of the 3.4 million people in need of humanitarian support in eastern Ukraine, sixty per cent are women and children. Andriy Parubiy, speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament, reported that 68 children had been killed and 186 wounded since 2014. Another report cites 199 dead and 500 wounded children, with approximately 10 thousand children living in the conflict’s ‘grey zone’ and being endangered daily.

Yet, analysts and reporters rather focus on ceasefire violations, the ‘Normandy format’ of the peace talks, or the so-called ‘special status’ granted to non-government-controlled areas of the region. In fact, in an interview with Hromadske.tv, the Ukrainian Internet television station, a father of two children affected by the conflict said, ‘I have no idea what the state thinks. I have never heard the word “children” from them’.

The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is responsible for monitoring the conflict’s ceasefires since 2014. It frequently reports on injuries sustained by children in both government and non-government-controlled areas. For example, a report from October 2019 reads: “The [OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM)] followed up on reports of a boy injured from the explosion of a hand grenade in Sontseve (non-government-controlled, 55km south-east of Donetsk) on 12 October. On 14 October, at Donetsk Regional Clinical Trauma Hospital, medical staff told the SMM that a nine-year-old boy had been admitted on 12 October with an injury to his left hand caused by detonation, as result of which he had to have four fingers amputated.” The report also cites five children having been injured from a hand grenade on 28 September in Chornohorivka (formerly Krasna Zoria), a non-government-controlled area 51km south-west of Luhansk.

The Eastern-Ukrainian Centre for Civic Initiatives has been monitoring child participation in governmental and non-governmental armed formations across the region. Over a period of three months in 2016, based on open sources and interviews, the monitoring group registered 41 individual cases of recruitment of children into armed formations.

The case of the deaths of 23-year old Kristina and her daughter, 10-month old Kira, during the bombardment of the public square in Horlivka (also known by its Russian name Gorlovka) on 27 July 2014 has received the most attention. Since then, pictures of “Gorlovka Madonna” have been circulating on both Ukrainian and Russian social media (more so on the latter). Kristina’s mother Natalia gave an extensive interview to the Ukrainian Internet newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda on 9 June 2016. She is understandably angry at the cynicism displayed by both sides in the conflict in using her daughter’s death to promote their ideological agendas. Below I have translated excerpts from her interview.

‘We could not believe; nobody believed, that they would bomb us in broad daylight… [Natalia was urging her daughter Kristina to leave for Kyiv]. On 27 July, the town was simply blasted. Shells were exploding. “Grad”/”Hrad”  (a multiple rocket launcher used by both the Ukrainian government and Donetsk People’s Republic formations) was shelling the town centre.  According to the official estimates, more than twenty people died next to my children. I then read about a woman in a report: she simply covered her child. Her husband stayed alive, but she died. I learnt about this later. But at the time, I simply refused to believe what was going on.

[Recalling the experience of searching for Kristina and Kira during the bombardment] I was gripped by terror; I was looking for my children. I was running to the square, shouting and crying for them. I then ran into the bomb shelter looking for them. The people inside were then not letting me out from there. I don’t know how long I remained there, possibly two hours. There was no light. The place was not ready for the shelling. I was shouting: Where are my children? Kira and Kristina?”. Somebody forced me to sit down on a bench asking me whom I was looking for. I said “a girl with a baggy and a small child”. They promised me to find out. Then they sent a paramedic to me who injected something into me and said: “you are making everybody stressed out here”.

Then someone came to me and said: “your children are alright; the baby has a scratch on her hand”. They lied. I calmed down a bit but couldn’t sleep. They were letting people out from the bomb shelter; I ran into another one. And there I saw… children were lying after operations; there were paramedics, holding their drip bags. There were very few children. I could not see Kira or Kristina there. I then ran to the accident and emergency point asking about my children. They said they brought someone in but by a different surname. I was shaking, the paramedic shouting. And then someone said to me “they are in the mortuary.”

Later, endless phone calls began. People were telling me to go to the mortuary. I still refused to believe. In the mortuary, the paramedic showed me my girls. “You are lucky”, she said. I couldn’t understand why I was lucky. When they use “Grad”, people are simply being torn into pieces. But my girls still had their faces intact. And they said that’s why I was lucky…. On 27 July, when all of this happened, I still had to make a few phone calls. Kristina then said to me “while you are calling, we will go out. We will catch up with you later”. I was then looking out of the window and calling everyone asking to take us out [from Horlivka]. [Kristina and Kira] crossed the road, walked down to the square. I then finally reached someone who promised to take us to Slavianogorsk. We had to wait. I then called Kristina to tell her the good news. And I heard how she said to Kira “we are going to leave with grandma tomorrow”. That was her last phrase…”.

Natalia blames the governments of Ukraine, Donetsk People’s Republic and Russian Federation for not investigating the deaths of Kristina and Kira in the bombardment. The case has since been taken up by the European Court of Human Rights. The experience of children and their parents in the Donbas highlights the horrifying aspects of the ongoing war and the general humanitarian catastrophe that has engulfed the region since 2014.

Daria is a PhD student at King’s College London. Her research focuses on violence and the unfolding of conflict across several regions in eastern Ukraine, 2013 – 2014. She also leads one of the Causes of War seminars in the War Studies Department. Prior to joining King’s, she worked as a teacher. She graduated with a degree in History from the University of Cambridge in 2011. Her broader interests include European history, war studies, and interdisciplinary methods.

The Road to Oligarchic Peace: Comparing the Nashville Conventions of 1850 and the Severodonetsk Congress of 2004

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by Daria Platonova

During the Orange Revolution, the people of Ukraine spontaneously took to the streets in what would become known as the country’s “first” Maidan (Image credit: WikiMedia/Sirhey).

In March 1850, following a compromise motion on slavery tabled by Henry Clay in the US Congress and the debates that ensued John Calhoun, a statesman from the slave-holding state of South Carolina, threatened the “aggressive” North with southern secession if it continued to encroach upon the rights of the South in relation to slavery. He said: “If you, who represent the stronger portion, cannot agree to settle [the questions] on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace.” This statement was followed by two Nashville Conventions in Tennessee at which the southern states debated the Compromise and the potential for secession. In the end, moderation prevailed.

Fast forward a century and a half and in a different country, in 2004, regional deputies took a more radical action than their American counterparts in a series of congresses held in eastern Ukraine and proposed the secession of the east, after mass protests erupted in Kyiv in a phenomenon known as the Orange Revolution. Like Calhoun in America, during the Severodonetsk Congress (Luhansk region) on the 28 November 2004, the chairman of the Donetsk regional council, Borys Kolesnikov similarly couched his message to the deputies in the language of rights: the people of the East exercised their constitutional right to elect Yanukovych, and neither the Ukrainian Parliament nor Viktor Yushchenko could violate it.

After a decade, both countries were plunged into war.[1] In this article, I argue that a comparison between the secessionist endeavours in the United States and Ukraine indicates that, to put it very broadly, internal wars are not caused by some primordial animosities and differences between ethnicities (the so-called “ancient hatreds”). Rather it is the breakdown of an “oligarchic” peace that accounts for internal wars. Here, the different sectional, political and economic interests are held more or less in equilibrium. In this regard, it are especially the compromises that are made between elites that accounts for internal wars.  Indeed, elite compromise is an essential part of a peace process.

On the surface, Ukraine in the post-Soviet period and the United States in the mid-19th century evolved as quintessential “divided societies”. The South in the US was largely agricultural. Slavery, as an economic system, naturally encompassed nearly every aspect of life, and therefore had an undeniable impact on culture and politics of the South. The North, by contrast, was industrialised, with no toleration for slavery. The historian Kenneth Stampp describes the differences between the two sections of the US in the following terms: these were “Southern farmers and planters… and Northern merchants, manufacturers, bondholders, and speculators.” The historian Lee Benson describes the United States at that time as “bicultural,” although there are debates whether the South was a truly distinctive “civilisation”.

The post-Soviet Ukraine developed along the lines of a divided society as a result of its turbulent history: as in America, similar regional divisions existed between the agriculture and services-dominated West and the industrialised East. In Ukraine, the divisions were reflected not only in the political economy of the different regions but also in voting behaviour, the use of Ukrainian and Russian languages, and opinions on the political situation.

In the US, the vital interests of the South were periodically threatened by the North. The two parts of country therefore existed in an uneasy union. In Ukraine, similarly, there were tensions between the West and the East, with the East often resisting the Ukrainisation campaigns (the introduction of the Ukrainian language), showcasing a higher inclination towards Russia, while the West of the country sought closer ties with the European Union and NATO.

In the United States, the pressure to abolish slavery in the South had been building up for a long time. The North criticised the institution of slavery and issued legislation limiting economic growth there. After the Mexican-American war (1848), the major issue facing the Union was whether slavery should be permitted on the new territories. A Compromise was devised by Clay which allowed certain territories to decide the slavery issue for themselves, while entrenching the existing rights of the South to their property in slaves. Continuous debates were held in the Congress for the next several months, with the aim of averting a simmering crisis. Calhoun and the “fire-eaters” (as the radical group of Southerners were called) however argued that the continuing “Northern aggressions” were threatening the state of the Union. The Nashville Conventions inspired by Calhoun were therefore expected to be radical undertakings to demonstrate the unity of the southern states to the North and put pressure on it to ceased its aggressions.

The two Nashville Conventions held in June 1850 and November 1850, however, were by all means moderate. There were some radical Southerners present but, in the end the delegates adopted a “wait-and-see attitude”. They condemned Clay’s Compromise and also the Compromise that was enacted by the Congress in September 1850, issued calls for an extension of the Missouri Compromise Line to the Pacific Ocean, and agreed to meet again. In essence, the Conventions were held in order to demonstrate to the North that the South could act as a single front. In doing so, conflict was avoided.

It can be argued that the reason why the moderates prevailed in America was because the Compromise did not threaten the prevailing “oligarchic peace.” In other words, the Compromise did not endanger the representation of the South in American politics.  As McPherson writes: “California… did not tip the balance in the Senate against the South”. The South still wielded a lot of power in the country. Henry Wilson goes on to write on the power of the South: “They had dictated principles, shaped policies, made Presidents and cabinets, judges of the Supreme Court, Senators, and Representatives”.

In Ukraine, galvanised by the dissatisfaction with the incumbent President Leonid Kuchma’s rule and the outrage at the fraudulent election of his chosen successor Viktor Yanukovych to the Presidency, people in Kyiv and Ukrainian regions took to the streets on that 22 November 2004. These gatherings came to be known as the Orange Revolution. In response to the pickets of the Ukrainian Parliament by the competing candidate from the West Viktor Yushchenko, and the recognition of Yushchenko as president in western Ukraine, the disgruntled deputies in the eastern regions organised a series of congresses attended by delegates from almost all across those regions. They proposed radical actions to tilt the balance back in favour of the East and to force the Parliament and Yushchenko to recognise the unalienable right of eastern Ukrainians to choose their own president. Accordingly, on the 26 November, the deputies of the Kharkiv regional council supported the creation of the South-Eastern Autonomous Republic. The Kharkiv governor Evhen Kushnaryov ruled that no budgetary transfers were to be made to the centre. The regional council deputies proposed to concentrate all power in the regional council and on the 27th of November, the council refused to recognise the central government.

Similar developments took place in other regions. On 28 November 2004, the Donetsk regional council decided to hold a regional referendum in December on granting the Donetsk region a status of an autonomous region within the “Ukrainian federation”. On the same day, the famous “separatist” congress was held in Severodonetsk in the Luhansk region. Following the Congress, a union of all regions was created and the chairman of the Donetsk regional council Borys Kolesnikov was chosen as its head. Kolesnikov proposed to create a “new federal state in the form of a South-Eastern Republic with the capital in Kharkiv,” if Yushchenko won the presidential election.

However, as in America, the conflict was avoided and, in the end, moderation prevailed. Again, the talks between the opposing camps of Yushchenko and Yanukovych carried on through the crisis period. The election results were cancelled, a new election day was agreed, and, most importantly, the two competing sides agreed to a major amendment in the Ukrainian constitution. Like Clay’s compromise, Kuchma’s amendments to the Ukrainian Constitution appeared to save the day. The Constitution was to divide the executive (Hale) and grant more power to the Prime Minister and Parliament. This ensured that Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, despite now going into opposition, could still wield enormous power in Ukrainian politics. Hence, in the elections of 2006 the Party of Regions won plurality in Parliament and Yanukovych came back as Prime Minister. Yanukovych’s Donetsk clan continued to play an important role in politics.

The historical experience of the US before the Civil War demonstrates that when compromises between elites are made and some deeply entrenched elites are still able to stay in power, a conflict can be avoided. With the election of Abraham Lincoln on the 6 November 1860, it can be argued that the elite compromise ceased to work for the South. In the case of Yanukovych, he fled in February 2014 and left the dominant network of the Party of Regions and its members in disarray. It follows therefore that wars are not caused by primordial ethnic hatreds but by the break down of elite compromises.

[1] This is not a place to discuss whether the war in Ukraine is a civil or any other kind of war. This discussion would merit another article altogether.

Daria is a PhD student at King’s College London. Her research focuses on violence and the unfolding of conflict across several regions in eastern Ukraine, 2013 – 2014. She also leads one of the Causes of War seminars in the War Studies Department. Prior to joining King’s, she worked as a teacher. She graduated with a degree in History from the University of Cambridge in 2011. Her broader interests include European history, war studies, and interdisciplinary methods.

Feature – Shabiha in Syria and Titushki in Ukraine as Elements of Authoritarian Control

by

by Daria Platonova

15 July 2019

“Titushki” on their way to Mariinskiy Park (Image credit: Unian)

Introduction

Incumbent authoritarian regimes[1] can use a variety of tools to protect the status quo and their hold on power. Among those tools is the deployment of groups of armed civilians to disperse political protest that threatens to dislodge the regime and disrupt that status quo. A comparison can be drawn between the Syrian Shabiha and Titushki in Ukraine as elements of the regimes’ responses to political protest. Shabiha in Syria was a complex phenomenon described in most general terms as numbers of pro-Asad[2]  individuals who attacked anti-government protestors from March 2011, at the start of the Syrian uprising, and then became “pro-state … militias, which acted in an auxiliary capacity to government forces”.

Titushki in Ukraine were groups of individuals reportedly hired by state actors, including local elites, to attack Euromaidan protestors[3] in Kyiv and Ukrainian regions from November 2013 to January 2014. In this article, I demonstrate the similarities and differences between the provenance of and the deployment purposes of Shabiha and Titushki. Through this comparison, I argue that the systematic use of these groups is in function of the regime’s strength and the ruler’s expectations about the regime’s viability.

The similarities between the regimes of Yanukovych and al-Asad

The attempts made by Viktor Yanukovych to introduce an authoritarian regime in Ukraine resembles Bashar al-Asad’s consolidation of an already existing authoritarian regime which he inherited from his father, Hafez al-Asad. Both presidents cultivated a patronage system based around a specific minority group. Yanukovych relied on the Donetsk clan, originating from his home region of Donetsk, and the political-economic conglomerate of the Party of Regions, also originating from Donetsk.

Similar processes of over-concentration of patronage took place under Asad, who came to rely on “Alawi familial, tribal and communitarian base” and, specifically, on the Asad-Makhlouf family clan. Like Asad, who increasingly surrounded himself by an increasingly narrow clique of supporters, Yanukovych later in his presidency drew upon the support of his real and metaphorical family.

File photo of Syrian President Bashar Assad, right, with his brother Maher, left (Photo credit: AP)

Both presidents recognised the importance of the security service in maintaining their regimes, with Asad inheriting a vast security apparatus and a strong army from his father. Yanukovych attempted to build a strong security force, appointing his supporters to the key position of the Head of the Security Service of Ukraine and investing heavily in a special police force Berkut.

Bashar al-Asad followed arising challenges to his regime through by imprisoning challengers and severely restricting and repressing civil society. In Ukraine, Yanukovych imprisoned his key rival, Yuliya Tymoshenko, from a competing network of Batkivshchina Party, while exercising increasing control over the Ukrainian media and opposition groups. Viktor Yanukovych’s rule was the ultimate culmination of the domination of eastern Ukrainian forces in Ukrainian politics, which, on the surface, created an expectation that the regime was going to stay. Asad’s strong reliance on the Alawite minority inherited from the three-decade long rule of his father created similar expectations.

We would therefore expect that if in Ukraine the regime was truly authoritarian, as described by many analysts, it would have responded to the challenge of the Euromaidan similarly to how Asad responded to the Syrian uprising, that is: with severe and more or less systematic repression. However, how Shabiha and Titushki were deployed demonstrates that the regime in Ukraine was not truly authoritarian. The major flaw in the regime was that it did not believe in its own durability.

Shabiha in Syria

The Shabiha who came to prominence in March 2011 started as Popular Committees – volunteer vigilante groups originating in Latakia and Homs, who wanted to keep their neighbourhoods free from anti-government protestors. Not unlike Titushki in Ukraine, they consisted of volunteers “who were often unemployed young men” and were initially armed with basic equipment such as sticks. Similarly to Titushki, the motivations to join these Popular Committees and then Shabiha varied widely. Nakkash documented motivations ranging from pragmatic-economic concerns to strong feelings of hostility towards the Sunni community.

However, as Asad’s regime was much more cohesive and held strong expectations about its own durability compared to Yanukovych’s regime, shabiha became one of the key elements of Asad’s strategy to salvage the regime. As Michael Kerr argues, the regime’s “civil war strategy was simply to survive, militarily, at any cost”.

Thus, throughout the province of Homs at least, Shabiha quickly came to be used strategically and systematically by Mukhabarat (security service) to prevent anti-regime mobilisation throughout spring to summer 2011. They were involved in killing protestors from the start, such as on 26 and 27 of March 2011 in Latakia and Baniyas. It was reported that Shabiha were numerous numbering 10,000. Shabiha later morphed into “armed paramilitary group or militia with links to the army, the secret service or the Ba’ath Party”.

Families gathered around bodies of victims killed by violence that, according to anti-regime activists, was carried out by government forces in Tremseh, Syria (Photo credit: AP)

In contrast to Titushki, Shabiha came to be strongly identified with the state in Syria. Lund, for example, writes on shabiha formations as being directly sanctioned and legitimised by the state when the protests began in March 2011: “the state encouraged the formation of local gangs, often composed of Alawis or other minority groups that felt threatened by the Sunni-dominated uprising”. Not only that, Shabiha came to be identified with the wealthy business owners in the local communities. Nakkash writes on a proud owner of a real estate business, in charge of about 200 Shabiha, who stated that “they “should be thankful for what I am doing”.

As the protests evolved into an insurgency, Asad’s regime mobilised a vast array of minorities, such as Christians and Shi’a, into Shabiha militias. The sheer diversity of pro-regime militia movement and the advent of the “National Defence Forces” drawing on shabiha demonstrated that, through a systematic and open recruitment and deployment of Shabiha, the regime created strong and durable expectations about itself.

Titushki in Ukraine

The use of Titushki in Ukraine demonstrated a highly unsystematic and reactive nature of Yanukovych’s regime. As mentioned above, Titushki were groups of young men, reportedly hired by the government to disperse Euromaidan protests. They were named after Vadym Titushko, a professional athlete, who was hired to and eventually prosecuted for attacking journalists in Bela Tserkva, near Kyiv, in May 2013.

Titushki were often members of local boxing and fight clubs, and it was reported that coaches and entire clubs participated in the attacks on the Euromaidan, especially in Kyiv. Titushki not only dispersed protestors but also damaged their equipment and vehicles. Like their Syrian counterparts, there were those who held strong Anti-Maidan convictions and considered Euromaidan protestors to be “traitors and hooligans”.

Vadym Titushko in Kyiv, 18 May 2013 (Photo credit: Umoloda)

Here however the similarities between Shabiha and Titushki end and reveal the fatal flaws in Yanukovych’s regime. The major flaw of the regime was the lack of belief in its own durability. Unlike in Syria, where Shabiha came to consist of a broad variety of minorities, Titushki in Ukraine were groups of young unemployed people who were easily coopted due to their lack of employment. Reports claimed that titushki were being paid for attacking Euromaidan protestors because many of them were unemployed. According to these reports, some were paid 100 US dollars per day, with an additional fare for beatings.

In Ukrainian regions, such as Kharkiv region, Titushki were deployed to intimidate protestors rather than kill them, which signified that the regime seriously questioned its repressive capacity. Cataloguing of Euromaidan protests using opposition and pro-government press in Kharkiv and Donetsk cities indicates that the deployment of Titushki was highly unsystematic compared to what was taking place in Syria. In Kharkiv, half of the Euromaidan protests were followed by Titushki attacks; in Donetsk, this number was even less.

If in Syria, the attacks were deadly from the start, in Ukrainian cities, followed a gradually more violent trajectory, which however never became systematically deadly: in Kharkiv, for example, first, Titushki attacked property of the Euromaidan protestors, then the groups of “unknowns” – a label which often described Titushki – attacked individual organisers, and then they began attacking entire groups of protestors using more sophisticated equipment. In Donetsk, most Euromaidan protests were followed by verbal attacks and highly unsystematic violence by Titushki. All this was taking place before the Titushki attacks in Ukrainian regions suddenly tapered off in late February 2014, just before Yanukovych’s flight. Additionally, Titushki were not as well-equipped as their Syrian counterparts.

Finally, as if to demonstrate that the regime was afraid of itself and unsure of its own survival, it is impossible to trace with certainty who hired Titushki at the regional level. In Kharkiv city, there was only indirect evidence implicating the incumbent supporters of Yanukovych, the mayor Hennadiy Kernes and the governor Mykhailo Dobkin. For example, they issued a number of ambiguous statements, endorsing Titushki, but there is no systematic evidence that they hired them. Only after the “Russian Spring” protests were in full swing, the Ministry of the Interior of Ukraine released some evidence that titushki were hired by a local oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko. This was after Kurchenko fled Ukraine.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that if an authoritarian regime is truly authoritarian, one of the elements of political protest control, such as the use of armed civilians, should be systematic, violent and clearly linked to the state. Through the comparison between the use of Shabiha in Syria and Titushki in Ukraine, I have demonstrated the true nature of Yanukovych’s rule and questioned whether it was truly authoritarian. More specifically, I have shown that the highly unsystematic deployment of Titushki and their unclear links with the state actors demonstrate that Yanukovych’s regime either did not believe in its own viability or failed to implement the lessons of the Orange Revolution. In this way, one can characterise Ukraine as a highly fluid polity where no regime can truly stabilise itself.

Daria is a PhD student at King’s College London. Her research focuses on violence and the unfolding of conflict across several regions in eastern Ukraine, 2013 – 2014. She also leads one of the Causes of War seminars in the War Studies Department. Prior to joining King’s, she worked as a teacher. She graduated with a degree in History from the University of Cambridge in 2011. Her broader interests include European history, war studies, and interdisciplinary methods.

[1] While the authoritarian nature of Bashar al-Asad is not in doubt, we can consider Viktor Yanukovych’s regime as a regime with authoritarian tendencies. Hafez sought to build an authoritarian state – Kerr, intro 10, History of autocratic rule there 174, adaptable autocrats

[2] I used the standardised spelling of Asad, instead of Assad, as found in Kerr, M. and Larkin, C. (eds) The Alawis of Syria: War, Faith and Politics in the Levant (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2015).

[3] Euromaidan was at first a political protest against Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the EU Association Agreement. It later evolved into a general protest against Yanukovych’s government demanding its resignation.