Crimea 2014: the West’s ‘terrible mistake’. Was it the first? War in Ukraine, two years after 2022
A hoarding opposite the Russian embassy in Berlin, February 2023 © James Rodgers
This latest post is an article I wrote for a special issue of Baltic Rim Economies, published in February 2024 to mark the second anniversary of the escalation of Russia’s war on Ukraine. You can read the full publication, including my article, from the link above.
IT WAS A MOMENT that defined Ukrainian nationhood. In the late summer of 1991, I stood among a crowd in Kiev (as the Ukrainian capital was almost always referred to then) as they watched the flag of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist republic being taken down from its place on top of the building that housed the verkohvna rada, the parliament. The crowd cheered. From time to time, they broke into patriotic song. The biggest cheer was a response to the appearance of the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag, so familiar today, rising to replace the Soviet one, and flying above the city the west now knows as Kyiv.
For me, a young tv news producer, that day journalism really did offer a front row seat as history was made. It was not my first assignment to the Ukrainian capital. I had been there a few weeks previously to cover the visit of President George H. W. Bush. It was the final leg of what would prove to be the final visit of a president of the United States to the Soviet Union, which, by the end of the year, had ceased to exist.
Bush’s visit was notable then for the way it seemed to suggest that Ukraine enjoyed a separate identity in the eyes of the United States—but the speech disappointed Ukrainian nationalists because it did not offer Washington’s support for Ukrainian independence. The New York Times’ columnist, William Safire, derisorily dubbed it ‘Chicken Kiev’. What was less well known at the time, and has much more bearing on the last ten years, is the fact that the Kremlin was opposed to Bush’s trip to Ukraine going ahead at all, with Gorbachev, in the words of the historian Serhii Plokhy, ‘having done his best to block the visit.’ As Vladislav Zubok wrote—adapting a Biblical metaphor Plokhy had originally used to describe Yeltsin’s leading the Russian Federation out of the Soviet Union–of the situation later that year, as the end of the Soviet Union approached, ‘No one in Moscow could imagine that the Ukrainian Ark would leave the Soviet-Russian dock—and sail without sinking immediately.’
Graffiti on the wall of the Russian Embassy, London, March 2022 © James Rodgers
In short, it is a departure that no late Soviet, or post-Soviet, occupant of the Kremlin could ultimately countenance, even if they appeared grudgingly to go along with it. It took Vladimir Putin to make that point with military force, annexing Crimea ten years ago, and supporting those forces in eastern Ukraine who were ready to take up arms to defy the Kyiv government.
Putin used the techniques that the Kremlin had been working on since Chechnya’s attempt at winning independence from the Russian Federation in the 1990s. In our 2021 paper, ‘Russia’s rising military and communication power, from Chechnya to Crimea’ my co-author Dr Alexander Lanoszka and I argued that since the first Chechen war, ‘Russia has developed its military and media policies in a coordinated manner: learning from its mistakes and failures as it went along, and becoming more efficient each time.’ We cannot claim to have foreseen the escalation of Russia’s war in Ukraine that was to follow the year after our paper was published, but it did fit the pattern of what we had observed going before: not only in Chechnya, but especially in Russia’s war with Georgia in the summer of 2008. Intervention—intervention that determined the outcome—in the Syrian civil war the following year also fitted the pattern: lessons learnt in one place, methods refined, then applied in another.
If this pattern existed, though, why did the collective West not formulate a more robust response to the annexation of Crimea? The then British prime minister, Boris Johnson, wrote in March 2022—shortly after Russia’s escalation of its war in Ukraine—that the West had made a ‘terrible mistake’ in letting Putin ‘get away’ with the annexation of Crimea. It is a sentiment that has been echoed many times since. We can never know for certain that the war would have been averted had the response have been stronger. The EU, which then included the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada all imposed sanctions, after all.
Perhaps the mistakes with Russia did not begin with Crimea, but much earlier. The 1990s are remembered in Russia as a chaotic decade during which Russia was weak on the international stage. The Putin administration has always been content with this interpretation, using it to portray what followed in a favourable light. In the West, the Yeltsin era has tended to be seen as one of economic hardship, yes, but also political freedom.
The Kremlin’s actions during the events of October 1993, and in the two Chechen wars, suggest a different interpretation is possible. For domestically the Kremlin was extremely strong on dissent: not flinching from using military force against opponents, or to enforce claims of sovereignty over territories that sought self-determination. While the West may indeed have made a terrible mistake in March 2014, it was perhaps not the first in interpreting post-Soviet Russia’s ambitions, and determination to achieve them.
