Diplomacy & Crisis News

Managing the impacts of climate change requires a fundamentally different approach from the way most policymakers currently think about the issue.

Joint military exercises have kept the relationship strong despite Trump, but that could soon change.

World leaders have never really trusted each other—but the president's behavior undermines American foreign policy anyway.

In a country where even the anti-corruption prosecutors abuse their power, it's hard to say who the good guys are.

The diversity problem predates this administration, but some State Department officials fear it’s getting worse.

The increase reflects a shift in focus away from counterterrorism and toward possible conflict with China or Russia.

https://www.quiz-maker.com/Q60HXPX

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Cette recension a été publiée dans le numéro de printemps de Politique étrangère (n°3/2018). Frédéric Ramel propose une analyse de l’ouvrage de Fabrice Argounès, Théories de la puissance (CNRS Éditions, 2018, 232 pages).

À l’instar de la sécurité, la puissance est l’un des concepts les plus discutés en relations internationales. L’ouvrage de Fabrice Argounès offre ici une série de repères pour l’appréhender dans le contexte actuel. Structuré en quatre parties – les dimensions conceptuelles, les approches théoriques, le statut et les modalités de différenciation dans le système international (petits, moyens, grands, émergents), les nouveaux acteurs et terrains d’expression de la puissance –, il propose une réflexion qui prend les traits d’un décentrement. La puissance n’est pas seulement question de mesure des arsenaux militaires des États. Confier la préface de l’ouvrage à Bertrand Badie constitue d’ailleurs un indice : appréhender la puissance ne peut plus reposer exclusivement sur des références réalistes et occidentales.

L’ouvrage présente trois qualités indéniables. La première réside dans le panorama bienvenu qu’il établit en vue de se frayer un chemin dans la littérature académique. La deuxième tient à l’usage éclairant d’une série d’encadrés qui illustrent de façon originale et percutante le renouvellement des formes de puissance, des jeux vidéo aux célébrités. La troisième correspond au déplacement qu’opère l’auteur en montrant les recompositions à l’œuvre, tant au sein des organisations intergouvernementales que dans les interactions au cœur des conflits armés contemporains. Il ne s’agit pas là d’une idée nouvelle, mais le mérite de Fabrice Argounès consiste à actualiser tant la vitalité que l’incarnation concrète de cette thèse.

La lecture invite à quelques discussions de fond. La tendance à l’exhaustivité, qui fait tout l’intérêt de l’ouvrage sur le plan didactique, ne permet néanmoins pas d’appréhender l’ensemble des références dans le domaine. Ainsi, le passage sur l’hégémonie ne s’appuie pas sur la définition initiale de Thucydide ; celui sur le tournant pratique se restreint à l’approche de Bourdieu ; ou le développement consacré aux théories critiques ne convoque ni Michael Williams ni Thierry Balzacq. Plus surprenant : certaines figures de la puissance « décentrée », comme les lanceurs d’alerte, n’apparaissent pas dans la quatrième partie. Par ailleurs, la dimension technologique ne semble pas ici constituer un des paramètres structurants pour penser la puissance, qu’il s’agisse du nucléaire ou des neurosciences, et plus généralement de l’augmentation des capacités humaines. Ces éléments offrent pourtant autant de ressorts de puissance dont il faut repérer la robustesse, voire le devenir, dans les configurations guerrières à venir. Enfin, la puissance est aussi et surtout affaire d’images, ce que Fabrice Argounès ne reconnaît que partiellement. Il incorpore bien les représentations, notamment via les cadres libéraux et constructivistes. Mais les images ne sont pas seulement mentales. Elles peuvent être prises au sens littéral : du corps d’Aylan sur une plage turque aux photos des décapitations de l’État islamique en passant par les exactions sur les prisonniers irakiens à Abou Ghraib. La puissance n’échappe pas à l’abord visuel, lequel rime avec intégration des émotions.

À condition de s’émanciper des catégories classiques en relations internationales, qui la décrivent selon des critères essentiellement militaires, la puissance maintiendra « sa place de choix » dans le domaine. L’ouvrage de Fabrice Argounès livre incontestablement des moyens utiles pour mener cette analyse.

Frédéric Ramel

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For Washington, space security depends at least as much on international cooperation as it does on national dominance.

Egyptian Jewish activist Levana Zamir believes that Trump’s next move will be to set up an international fund to compensate both Jewish and Arab refugees from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.

In recent days, US President Donald Trump has taken a number of steps in favor of the State of Israel. Firstly, he relocated the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Afterwards, he cut off funding to UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority without exempting US aid to Palestinian hospitals. And in recent days, Abu Mazen announced that the deal of the century includes the Palestinians being offered a confederation with Jordan, an idea that was rejected by the Hashemite Monarchy and which Abu Mazen was also not too enthusiastic about. Now, the US Department of Education on Civil Rights will be investigating how anti-Israel groups have promoted anti-Semitism at Rutgers University. After taking all of these pro-Israel steps, one must ponder, what unconventional step will Trump take next on the Israeli-Palestinian front?

Between 1948 and the 1960’s, approximately one million Jews were either compelled to flee the Muslim world or suffered from a wave of anti-Semitic violence that prompted them to leave their homes in the Muslim world. Some Jews in countries like Iraq and Egypt were outright expelled. Others in places like Morocco were not expelled but nevertheless suffered intense anti-Semitism that made it impossible to continue living there. As Moroccan Jewish activist Dina Levin explained, “The Jews had no protection. Arabs used to throw stones at us but if Jews did the same in return, they would be imprisoned. The Arabs did not give us a good life. In Morocco, there was a verdict that Jews could not walk with shoes outside of the ghetto. It existed for 400 years.” Furthermore, after the State of Israel was established, what was a horrific situation became even worse. There were a series of pogroms and outright massacres against Jews across the Arab world. In places like Iraq, many Jewish women were raped during these pogroms.

Given that there were two groups of refugees from 1948 and not one, Egyptian Jewish activist Levana Zamir is advocating that Trump’s next move should be to set up a special fund in order to help Jewish refugees from Arab countries and also the descendants of Palestinian refugees to receive financial compensation. According to her, supporting such a compensation fund goes hand and hand with cutting off funding to UNRWA: “They hope in the UNRWA schools that they will have the right of return ASAP and it is only temporary for them. UNRWA is helping them to continue as refugees instead of doing what we did, to leave the camps, to study and to work. Most of the UNRWA money goes to munitions and other things.”

“We began with this more than a year ago by speaking to MK Anat Berko,” Zamir noted. “She was the first to hear from us to stop UNRWA for we have the same rights as them. We asked her to speak out for an international compensation for us and the Palestinian refugees instead of having the world support UNRWA. She asked the Israeli Minister of Agriculture about our compensation. He told her that I am sending a letter to Bibi to talk to him about it. Now, Bibi declared we are going to ask UNRWA to stop all of their budgets for all Palestinian refugees. We are doing things but slowly. The next step will be an international fund that will give money to both groups of refugees. It won’t go to the PA but straight to them, the people.”

Both Zamir and Levin are strong supporters of Trump’s efforts to establish peace, believing that it is the only way forward due to the realism it espouses. According to Levin, “We cannot be in a situation where there is no one to turn to. If not, the situation is wild. The problem is that they were raised with hatred and it is hard to make peace. The children who grow up on hate cannot love us. You cannot be sure about them. That is the danger. But we must try.” Yet Zamir indicated that even though it is hard, Trump’s deal is the only game in town and therefore everyone must invest all of their efforts in it: “We cannot go back to Egypt. Even as tourists, they do not give everyone visas. We for sure cannot go to Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, etc. It was a disaster for the Jews from the Arab states. We got nowhere else to go.”

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Créée en 1936, Politique étrangère est la plus ancienne revue française dans le domaine des relations internationales. Chaque vendredi, découvrez « l’archive de la semaine ».

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L’article « Le désarmement après le traité de Versailles » a été écrit par le journaliste Thomas Genevey dans le numéro 1/1967 de Politique étrangère.

Une étude récente sur le désarmement et le contrôle de l’Allemagne de 1919 à 1927 appelle l’attention sur cet épisode quelque peu oublié de l’entre-deux guerres, dont il n’est pas inutile, avec un certain recul, de méditer les enseignements.

I. L’exécution du traité et l’opposition au désarmement (1919-1921)

Les circonstances sont connues. Dans l’esprit du Président Wilson, le désarmement devait être, sous la garantie de la Société des Nations, un des fondements de la paix. Sans doute commençait-il par l’Allemagne : mais ce n’était là que le prélude d’un désarmement général dont le principe était affirmé dans l’article 8 du Pacte. En refusant la ratification du Traité, l’entrée des États-Unis dans la Société des Nations et la garantie promise à la France, le Congrès devait laisser aux Européens, et en particulier à la France, la responsabilité de la conduite du désarmement. Or, on sait à quel point les idées de Clemenceau et de Foch différaient de celles de Wilson.

L’institution et le fonctionnement des organes de contrôle ne pouvaient qu’envenimer des relations déjà tendues entre les Alliés victorieux et une Allemagne qui ne se sentait pas vaincue. « La guerre n’est pas finie » disait Foch au général Nollet en lui confiant la direction de la commission interalliée de contrôle ; et le général von Cramon, chef de la mission de liaison allemande, mission qui allait devenir l’instrument de l’« anticontrôle », estimait, lui aussi, que la guerre n’était pas finie. De fait, si les hostilités étaient arrêtées, une petite guerre allait naître. Les contestations surgirent aussitôt sur la durée du contrôle, sur son mode d’exécution, sur les moindres détails de procédure ou de protocole.

Dès le début, le désarmement se présenta sous le double aspect des effectifs et du matériel.

La réduction massive des effectifs de l’Armée de terre à partir de l’armée mobilisée devait aboutir au bout de trois mois à une armée de 200 000 hommes et en définitive, le 31 mars 1920, à une armée de 100 000 hommes, uniquement constituée de volontaires, la conscription étant abolie. Les effectifs de la police, sans être numériquement fixés par le Traité, étaient limités par référence à ceux de l’année 1913.

Cependant la situation troublée de l’Allemagne, l’insécurité qui régnait à ses frontières de l’Est, et, ajoutons-le, l’empreinte laissée par quatre années de guerre sur la génération des combattants avaient fait proliférer des unités paramilitaires de choc ou de police. Que l’on se reporte par la pensée à ces années troubles : le désarroi de l’opinion, la faiblesse du IIe Reich, les difficultés économiques portaient déjà en soi tous les germes de l’hitlérisme. Ce n’était pas seulement la Reichswehr qu’il s’agissait de démobiliser, mais aussi ces ligues, ces sections de protection, ces gardes civiques, ces corps francs dont les uns étaient plutôt gênants pour le gouvernement allemand, mais dont les autres lui étaient fort utiles pour maintenir l’ordre et asseoir son autorité contestée. Aussi, à peine le Traité de Versailles était-il signé que le gouvernement allemand demandait la révision des clauses relatives aux effectifs. En même temps, une action clandestine s’efforçait de tourner ces mêmes clauses, que ce fût sous l’impulsion discrète de la direction de la nouvelle Reichswehr, ou à l’initiative d’éléments isolés de l’armée, agissant de concert avec les corps francs et les ligues. Le gouvernement légal désavouait cette action ; peut-on dire qu’il la réprouvait ? Les organisations illégales se dressaient bien en quelque sorte contre lui, et c’est au détriment de son autorité qu’elles gagnaient de l’influence en symbolisant l’esprit de résistance en face de la position officielle, celle de l’exécution du Traité. Mais leur action venait appuyer celle du gouvernement dans le sens d’une atténuation des conditions de Versailles. De ces organisations, celles qui trouvaient le plus de faveur auprès des dirigeants du IIe Reich étaient les formations de gardes civiques, sortes d’auxiliaires de police où se fondaient des groupes d’auto-protection, de combattants du front, et que les autorités régionales avaient organisées pour assurer l’ordre public. Leur maintien en sus des effectifs autorisés pour la Reichswehr et pour la police fut refusé par la commission de contrôle.

Selon le Traité de Versailles, la réduction des armements devait se dérouler parallèlement à la réduction des forces, pour aboutir le 31 mars 1920 à un niveau final correspondant aux forces armées autorisées à cette date. Les excédents devaient être livrés aux Alliés ou détruits. On sait comment la flotte livrée à Scapa-Flow fut sabordée.La livraison et la destruction des armements terrestres et aériens ne se prêtaient pas à semblable coup de théâtre. Les difficultés allaient venir du désarmement industriel qui devait maintenir les armements de la nouvelle Reichswehr dans les limites autorisées.

D’un côté, le désarmement exigeait le démantèlement des usines de guerre ; mais, de l’autre, toute atteinte au potentiel économique de l’Allemagne, demeuré intact après la défaite, réduisait d’autant la capacité de production sur laquelle les Alliés comptaient prélever les réparations en nature prévues dans le Traité. Entre les usines d’armement et les autres, la frontière est souvent imprécise. En Allemagne, comme chez tous les belligérants, toute l’industrie avait été plus ou moins convertie à l’effort de guerre. Fallait-il donc étendre le démantèlement à l’extrême limite, au risque d’aggraver un chômage déjà critique, et de provoquer une crise économique et sociale ? C’est aux couches laborieuses de la population qu’allaient se heurter les agents du contrôle et ceux qui passaient pour leurs complices, les organes de liaison allemands. En même temps, chez les Alliés, des divergences se faisaient jour entre la commission des réparations et la commission de contrôle, la première tendant à freiner, la seconde à accélérer le désarmement de l’industrie. Ces conflits internes furent largement exploités par l’Allemagne. Finalement, le point de vue économique l’emporta ; ce fut le bureau de liquidation des matériels de guerre, à Berlin, section de la commission des réparations, qui reçut la responsabilité du désarmement industriel ; il fut aussi admis que la « suppression » des moyens de production d’armes et de munitions, prévue à l’article 168 du Traité, ne s’étendrait qu’aux moyens de fabrication non reconvertis aux fabrications pacifiques.

Ce même article 168 faisait aux puissances alliées l’obligation de désigner limitativement les établissements qui seraient autorisés à fabriquer du matériel de guerre au profit de la Reichswehr réduite. Il y eut à ce sujet d’interminables marchandages. A la fin de 1920, on envisageait une liste de sept usines : en 1926, on devait en admettre trente-trois.

Force était aussi de corriger certaines dispositions inutilement rigoureuses du Traité de Versailles. L’article 171 interdisait la production et le stockage des gaz toxiques et des masques à gaz. Ce dernier point ayant soulevé des protestations justifiées, la conférence des ambassadeurs réautorisa l’équipement de la Reichswehr en moyens de protection contre les gaz, et, par voie de conséquence, l’étude des procédés de guerre chimique. Ainsi la remise en cause du Traité était parfois provoquée par le caractère excessif de certaines de ses clauses.

D’ailleurs, la commission de contrôle ne tarda pas à constater que l’industrie chimique échappait pratiquement aux investigations, en dépit des moyens importants qu’elle y consacrait. Il y a là une limitation dans l’efficacité du contrôle qui tient à la nature même des fabrications.

Le mois de mars 1920, échéance essentielle du désarmement d’après le Traité, allait être marqué en Allemagne par de graves événements intérieurs. On se bornera ici à évoquer le rôle de la commission de contrôle dans cette période troublée. […]

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What are the origins of the armed conflict that has been raging in eastern Ukraine since 2014? Which role did Russia play in the emergence and escalation of the originally unarmed confrontation, in the Donets Basin (Donbas), after the victory of the Euromaidan revolution? When, how and to what degree exactly did Moscow get involved? Which relative weight did local sources of the conflict compared to the impact of foreign factors, i.e. the Kremlin’s covert actions in Ukraine? These and similar questions are not only academic topics hotly debated in Ukraine and the West. The way one answers them has also far-reaching implications for Western thinking, policies and diplomacy with regard to Russia and Ukraine today and tomorrow. Since 2014, an array of new evidence and research has emerged that helps clarifying the picture.

New Evidence about the Pre-History of the War in the Donets Basin

For instance, in late 2016, Russia-watchers were intrigued by a leak of emails sent and received by the office of Vladislav Surkov, an official adviser to President Putin, responsible for Russia’s policies towards Ukraine and the Moscow’s satellite states in northern Georgia. The Surkov Leaks then renewed the discussion of Moscow’s involvement in the pseudo-civil war and emergence of “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine. These leaks confirmed once more that the armed conflict in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas is, to large extent, a Kremlin project. It is merely one part of Moscow’s broader policy of undermining the Ukrainian state after the victory of the Euromaidan revolution in February 2014.

Yet, while the Surkov Leaks provided important additional documentation, they do not alter, in principle, our understanding of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. They confirm with novel details and support with empirical proof earlier mainstream interpretations of the nature of the armed conflict in the Donbas as a covert Russian invasion of Ukraine. Two months before their release, another leak had, however, provided evidence that questioned earlier interpretations of the genesis of the tensions in eastern and southern Ukraine. They deal with the prehistory of the events that eventually led to the start of the still ongoing low-intensity war in the Donets Basin, in April 2014.

In August 2016, Ukraine’s General Procurator published a video tape containing illustrated and annotated audio recordings of a number of conversations between Sergey Glazyev, one of Vladimir Putin’s official Advisers within the Administration of the President of Russia, and several pro-Kremlin activists located or living in Southern and Eastern Ukraine. These dialogs were recorded in late February – early March 2014. They vividly illustrate Moscow’s covert support for anti-governmental protests in Ukrainian Russophone regions following the victory of the Revolution of Dignity on 21 February 2014. The tapes reveal the involvement either of the Russian state itself, or of, at least, a significant fraction with the Kremlin, in the initiation, coordination and financing of separatist meetings, demonstrations, pickets and similar actions on Crimea as well as in various regional capitals in Ukraine’s eastern and southern parts immediately after the victory Revolution of Dignity.

Putin’s advisor Glazyev, for instance, on 1 March 2014 informs his interlocutor Anatoliy Petrovich in the south-east Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia: “I have an order to raise everybody, to raise the people. People should gather on the square [of Zaporizhzhia] and demand to turn to Russia for help against the Banderites [derived from the name of Stepan Bandera – a war-time Ukrainian ultra-nationalist who fought against, among others, Soviet power and was killed by a KGB agent at Munich in 1959]. Specially trained people should throw out the Banderites from the regional council’s building. Then they should arrange a meeting of the regional council, create a regional executive committee, give it executive power and subordinate the police to this new executive. I have direct orders from the leadership [of Russia] – to raise the people in Ukraine wherever we can. That means we have to bring people to the streets, as we did in Kharkiv. According to this example! And as soon as possible! Because, you see, President [Putin] has already signed a [presidential] decree. The operation has already began, there is information that the troops are already moving out. What are they waiting for? We can not do all this with [military] force. We use force only to support the people – nothing more! But if there are no people, what support can there be?”

While the tapes became a big issue in Ukrainian media and caused an angry reaction in Moscow, they have so far been largely ignored by Western newspapers and think-tanks. Mostly, they were – if at all – mentioned only en passant in reports about Ukraine of that time, by European and American journalists and researchers. Their Russian contents were, to be sure, quickly translated into English and annotated with supplementary information by the Ukrainian analytical website UA Position. Yet, only few observers – for instance, Halya Coynash of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, or Brian Whitmore, then at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and today at CEPA – made, in August 2016, these tapes special topics of their analyses of the Kremlin’s start of its hybrid and proxy war against Ukraine. Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder and Virginia Tech geographer Gerard Toal have since mentioned the Glazyev Tapes in their recent seminal monographs on the confrontation between Russia, Ukraine and the West.

The Significance of the Tapes for the Interpretation of the Conflict

The low attention to the Glazyev Tapes, in the international analysts’ community, may have been partly due to the fact that the Ukrainian General Procuracy office has still not published the raw recordings out of which the annotated public tapes were composed. Some may suspect that the published records were tampered with, or/and that they do not reveal the full story of the events they are supposed to illustrate. It is, however, unlikely that these recordings are fakes or doctored. The published conversations are interactive and made by interlocutors whose voices can be easily ascribed to persons, on the basis of their audible statements recorded in video material published elsewhere. The Kremlin would have probably published proof for any manipulations, had they taken place. Nor has there been any other public questioning of the genuineness of these audio documents.

The continuing international inattention for the Glazyev Tapes was and is surprising. If they are indeed authentic, the Glazyev Tapes should modify our understanding of the origins, dynamics and nature of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The most important aspect of the Glazyev Tapes is arguably not their contents. What is remarkable about these conversations is the time of their recording in late February – early March 2014, i.e. several weeks before the post-Euromaidan civil conflict in eastern and southern Ukraine turned into a pseudo-civil war in the Donbas.

Until the publication of the Glazyev Tapes, the prevalent interpretation of the roots of the Russian-Ukrainian War was that Moscow intervened – with, first, largely paramilitary and, later, increasingly regular military forces – into an escalating confrontation between pro-Kyiv and pro-Moscow Ukrainian citizens of the Donets Basin. To be sure, few serious observers ever doubted the Kremlin’s crucial role in turning these initially unarmed – though often already violent – confrontations on the streets of the east and south Ukrainian cities into a putatively civil war by late spring 2014. Yet, there was and is still a debate among Ukrainian and foreign observers of these events about the character of the pro-Moscow protest actions that had preceded, and supposedly led to, the escalation of armed violence.

Even many “russocentric” interpreters of the confrontation in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas conceded that the cultural-regional differences between Ukraine’s russophone east and south, on the one side, and ukrainophone west and bilingual center were the predominant cause of the tensions in such Russian-speaking cities as Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk or Odesa, after the Euromaidan. The post-revolutionary anti-Kyiv grass-roots activities of many Russian-speakers in Ukraine – such was the story – led to their confrontation with the new pro-Western and nationally oriented leadership that came to power as a result of the Revolution of Dignity. The local tensions, so it seemed, led to a conflict in the Donbas that the Kremlin eventually felt – depending on the interpreter’s preferences – obliged, forced or convenient enough to intervene in.

To be sure, the evidence contained in the Glazyev Tapes does not nullify the factor of Ukrainian inter-regional strains (not a particularly unique characteristic of Ukraine, in any way) in the emergence of the Donbas conflict. In fact, the conversations published do not concern the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, but other regions in russophone Eastern and Southern Ukraine. One can only infer from these recordings that similar Russian mingling was happening in the Donbas too, and that the now documented early-on involvement of the Kremlin in certain locations is merely the tip of a far larger iceberg.

The Glazyev Tapes could, in fact, be seen as strengthening the argument about the relevance of regional differences within russophone Ukraine – an old theme in post-Soviet sub-national studies. They indicate that Moscow was engaged in a broader attempt to destabilize the largely Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, but was only able to instigate a pseudo-civil war in the Donets Basin. Russia’s informal influence was, however, not strong enough to do so in other eastern and southern regions in which Glazyev with his local partners, as the tapes illustrate, actively supported secessionist tendencies. The leak could be thus read as evidence for earlier interpretations emphasizing the crucial role of specifically regional factors in Ukraine’s break-up.

Yet, the time of the recording and documented depth of Glazyev’s involvement in these Ukrainian events also support a different narrative. They imply that Russia was by no means merely an additional third actor or late intervening factor when the protests turned massively violent and led to the first armed skirmishes, in April 2014. Rather, the Glazyev Tapes indicate that Moscow had been already entangled in the still largely unarmed protests across eastern and southern Ukraine immediately following the victory of the Euromaidan, in late February and early March 2014 (if not before). The recordings suggest that the Kremlin had been behind, at least, some separatist activities several weeks before the actual war started. Yet, Moscow’s clandestine pre-war activities remained remarkably unsuccessful in mainland Ukraine, in late February and early March 2014. Surprisingly, the distinctly weak Ukrainian state – just shaken by a full-scale revolution – was still strong enough to resist Russia’s clandestine non-military assault on its sovereignty and integrity, at that point. The only partial exclusion, in late February 2014, was of course Crimea where – as we already know – Russian special forces without insignia had played, however, a crucial role in starting the secession process.

The genealogy of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict appears, after the publication of the Glazyev Tapes, somewhat different than before. It looks now as if Moscow or, at least, a part of the Russian leadership was, in late February 2014, starting a comprehensive attempt to annex not only Crimea, but also large chunks of mainland southern and eastern Ukraine, i.e. to create a Novorossiia (New Russia). Yet, in order to do so, pro-Russian local activists had first to produce some legal or/and political pretext for an official Russian military intervention. An employment of Russian troops abroad had just been made (domestically) legal by a special Federation Council resolution adopted on 1 March 2014 granting the President of Russia the right “to use Russian military forces in Ukraine to improve public and political situation in that country” (– a right revoked in June 2014). Yet, for the Russian public and international audiences, it still needed a weighty justification for such plain expansionism coming from inside Ukraine. To this purpose, an – at least seemingly – official document or particularly grave political event would first have to appear in the respective Ukrainian region up for invasion, and to provide some basic fodder for the Kremlin propaganda machine. Such an initial move in this or that Ukrainian region could have then been spun by Russian media as providing sufficient legitimacy for preparing and conducting an armed “humanitarian” intervention by Moscow on Ukrainian territory – and to finally annex the occupied areas either formally or informally.

This scenario materialized more or less on Crimea. Glazyev’s conversations with the Russian imperialist politician Konstantin Zatulin and Crimean pro-Russian separatist Sergey Aksyonov, on the tapes, illustrates some of the particulars. Yet, even in Simferopol, the crucial session of the Autonomous Republic’s parliament that initiated Crimea’s secession had to be assembled and made to vote with the help of Moscow’s paramilitary forces, as one of their members, notorious Igor Girkin (“Strelkov”), detailed in a later interview. Something similar – as the Glazyev Tapes indicate – was also tried or, at least, intended in Kharkiv, Odesa and other cities. Yet, the hoped-for Ukrainian calls for Russian help did not come about as planned, during the first few weeks after the Euromaidan. The following “civil war” that only began more than a month later in the Donets Basin was seemingly merely Moscow’s Plan B. It may have been an altogether improvised scenario that spontaneously grew out of the initially unarmed, yet abortive subversion of the Ukrainian state by Russia-directed activists, in late February and early March 2014. More revelations and research will be necessary to fully verify, further specify and properly document this course of events.

Still, the Glazyev Tapes now provide first direct evidence for what earlier empirical research – by, among others, Nikolay Mitrokhin, Viacheslav Likhachev and Anton Shekhovtsov who focused on the Russian far right’s role in the Donbas – had already indicated. At least one important circle within the Kremlin was already actively fanning the East Ukrainian social conflict several weeks before it was replaced by a covert Russian paramilitary invasion. Whereas Mitrokhin, Likhachev and Shekhovtsov emphasized the ultra-nationalist ideological motivations of the Russian or Russia-supported activists in Eastern Ukraine, the Glazyev Tapes illustrate the financial remuneration that the Kremlin or a faction within it provided to the pro-Moscow “anti-fascists.”

How the Tapes Help Clarifying Two Paradoxes of the Donbas Conflict

To be sure, one could have suspected something like this already before the Glazyev Tapes were published. There had been two obvious contradictions in the “ukrainocentric” narrative of the origins of the conflict in the Donbass: First, comparative regional studies have emphasized some peculiarly “uncivil” traits of society in the Ukrainian Donbas. Ukraine’s easternmost population has been characterized as relatively more pro-Soviet and patriarchal than people in many other Ukrainian regions. After Ukraine’s assumption of independence in 1991, the Donbas’s crucial social, political and economic structures were, moreover, largely captured by the semi-criminal Donetsk clan and its political wing, the Party of Regions. Against this background, it was, in spring 2014, remarkable how well and sudden the most Soviet-nostalgic sections of the Donbas’s society managed to seemingly self-organize a large anti-governmental protest without much (official) help from the dominant regional Donetsk clan. Even before the Glazyev Tapes appeared, this story – implicit in the civil war narrative of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict – looked, at least, incomplete.

Second, while the pre-conflict Ukrainian Donbas was characterized by certain cultural pathologies, it still had a functioning and structured socio-political life. Like any other modern populated region in the world, the Donets Basin had, before Russia’s covert intervention, a multitude of established and interlinked political, industrial, educational, cultural and other institutions with formal heads, informal leaders and regional celebrities known to all or large parts of the Basin’s citizenry. Yet, when the Donbas “uprising” started in spring 2014, not a single widely known local dignitary seems to have visibly taken part in it – not to mention, led it. Although the Donbas had – like any other society – regionally prominent politicians, journalists, doctors, entrepreneurs, writers etc., apparently none or very few of the Luhansk and Donetsk notabilities chose to become, if not a leader, then at least an open participant of the 2014 so-called “Russian Spring.”

The only prominent Ukrainian politician ever officially involved with the putative insurrection in the Donets Basin was Oleg Tsaryov, a notorious member of Ukraine’s pre-Euromaidan parliament (who had, during the uprising of winter 2013-2014, tried to deport approximately three dozen foreigners, including myself, from Ukraine). Tsaryov became for a while the speaker of the joint and by now defunct Novorossia joint parliament of the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics. However, Tsaryov is not from the Donbas, but from the neighboring Dnipropetrovsk oblast – perhaps, the country’s most staunchly pro-Ukrainian russophone region. Instead, the leaders of the Donbas putative uprising and so-called “People’s Republics” were either Russian citizens, like the prolific ultra-nationalists Igor Girkin or Aleksandr Borodai, or hitherto un- or little known representatives of the Donbass – some of them, like the first Donetsk “People’s Governor” Pavel Gubarev, also Russian ultra-nationalists. (Gubarev had been a member of Russian National Unity, a Russian neo-Nazi organization that uses the swastika as a symbol and was involved in the “Russian Spring” in the Donbas.)

The Glazyev Tapes contribute to explaining the reasons for these two contradictions, i.e. the low social capital and civic under-organization of the rebellious region, and the absence of the Donbas’s regional notability in the leadership of the uprising. The allegedly popular insurrection in eastern and southern Ukraine was from its beginning in late February 2014 an undertaking meticulously guided and heavily supported from Moscow. The Russian Spring in the Donbas did thus not need an active local civil society. As political leadership and resources were provided by Moscow, an involvement of regional dignitaries was not necessary for the rebellion to happen.

Implications of the Glazyev Tapes for the Minsk Agreements

This interpretation should not only modify public narratives of the “Ukraine Crisis,” but also have repercussions for the Western approach to the Minsk Agreements. In particular, the West should re-consider its insistence on Ukraine’s soon fulfillment of the political parts of the Minsk Agreements. Not only is it obvious that Ukraine was forced to accept enormous political concessions to Moscow against the immediate background of extremely bloody Russian military offensives, shortly before or during the negotiations of the various Minsk Agreements in September 2014 (Ilovaisk) and February 2015 (Debaltseve).

The Glazyev Tapes also illustrate that the social rationale for far-reaching new political rules in the Donbas envisaged in the Minsk Agreements – a considerable reduction of Ukraine’s sovereignty, in the currently occupied territories – is slim. A popular Western interpretation of the concessions to the separatists in these Agreements had been that the mere fact of an, at least, initially grass-roots insurgency in the Donbas should be somehow reflected in its future status. Yet, the Glazyev Tapes illustrated, in 2016, that the entire East Ukrainian uprising had from its start not been as popular a phenomenon as it had earlier seemed. If one acknowledges the Russian involvement in, and imperial rather than local dimension of, the seeming insurgency, then the apparent compromise in the Minsk Agreements assumes a different notion.

The Minsk compromise appears now not any longer as a result of Ukrainian and Western consideration of certain peculiarities of the Donets Basin. Rather, a future special status of the currently occupied territories looks, after publication of the Glazyev Tapes, as a strange reward for the partial successes that Russia had in fueling otherwise weak separatist tendencies in eastern Ukraine following the victory of the Euromaidan. Ukraine has been undergoing a general decentralization drive since 2014 – a development unrelated to the Minsk process and a direct result of the victory of the Revolution of Dignity.  A special status for the currently occupied territories, as foreseen in the Minsk Agreements, is thus redundant.

All regions of Ukraine are currently or will soon be acquiring new rights, additional responsibilities and greater autonomy. If the now Moscow-controlled territories return under Kyiv’s control, they would sooner or later also benefit from general Ukrainian decentralization. It is less the Donbas’s specific regional interests than the partial successes of Russia’s secret subversion efforts that has found their way into the texts of the three deals between the Ukrainian government and the separatist pseudo-republics in Minsk. The West should treat the questions of whether, when and how Kyiv needs to implement the respective domestic political articles of the Minsk Agreements accordingly.

[Earlier versions of the article were published by Open Democracy, Geopolitika.lt and the ECFR.]

The post The Glazyev Tapes, Origins of the Donbas Conflict, and Minsk Agreements appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

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