Ukraine, Another U.S.-Facilitated Failed State

Yesterday's announcement by Russian President Vladimir Putin that troops were being pulled back from the Ukrainian border and that he was asking the anti-Maidan protesters occupying public buildings in eastern Ukraine to delay their referendum on autonomy from the junta in Kiev has already been cast off both by Western leaders and the Donetsk People's Republic. C.J. Chivers and David Herszenhorn have the story this morning, "Separatists in Ukraine Vow to Proceed with Autonomy Vote":

Antigovernment rebels in eastern Ukraine said on Thursday that they would proceed with a referendum this weekend seeking autonomy, even though President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Wednesday had appeared to withdraw his support for the vote. 

“The referendum will be held on May 11,” said Miroslav Rudenko, the co-chairman of the government of the Donetsk People’s Republic, as the rebels call their political wing, according to Interfax, a Russian state-controlled news service. 

The announcement is likely to revive tensions between the interim government in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, and the armed rebels who have seized terrain and buildings in parts of eastern Ukraine, including Donetsk.

My first reaction yesterday was disappointment when I saw the headlines of what appeared to be a retreat by Putin in the face of U.S.-orchestrated aggression. But that was an automatic gut reaction. This is all high stakes stuff nowadays. We are present at the creation (or recreation) of a new paradigm. I checked my head and realized that Putin knows something of course that we news consumers do not. Based on a reasoned appraisal of the facts on the ground Putin now feels that the Ukrainian military cannot control the Donbass. So it was his opportunity to appear magisterial.

That the U.S. immediately cast doubt on the overture is proof of something we already know well, that the Obama administration is locked in with its support of the Kiev junta. This is extremely unwise. The junta is inherently unstable, composed as it is of old school Fatherland Party oligarchs and far right neo-Nazi populists. We can see from our own U.S. Congressional majority, with its Tea Party patriots and Club for Growth plutocrat mouthpieces, how dysfunctional such national leadership can be. The only reasonable expectation going forward is that Ukraine is going to be a failed state. Whether as chaotic and broken as Libya or Syria remains to be seen, but that is the direction.

I will say once again, Obama's "Asia pivot," meant for the East and South China Seas, has ended up instead on the fertile soil of Ukraine (with its 15 nuclear reactors), the land bridge connecting Europe to Russia. An "Asia pivot" was necessary because the wars of the Greater Middle East were becoming too hard a sell, both in terms of the maintaining the fiction that Al Qaeda was an existential threat to the homeland rather than an ally and the cost of keeping a large number of boots on the ground in Afghanistan. What was needed was an old-fashioned Cold War against a predictable, stable adversary. The advantages here are plenty of pork for the military-industrial complex and a global order that would maintain American hegemony and keep a multi-polar world at bay.

But the world has changed in many ways since the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no trust, no allegiance to the Western governments from the populations that they rule. Obama, the Obama phenomenon, represents an end of the line. He bamboozled not only voters in the U.S. but Europe as well. Either a new, non-aligned, non-fascistic (the danger here is always fascism or corporate populism) truly representative political force enters the scene, or the political structure begins a rapid disintegration.