Nothing can stop Putin and nothing can “push” him to “be even more aggressive

Experts on Ukraine Still Getting It Wrong

by Alexander J. Motyl

When the West’s leading experts get elementary facts about Ukraine wrong, blithely encourage Russian expansionism, or make illogical arguments, I worry. As should everybody. After all, these are presumably the people influencing or making policy in the United States and Europe.

The latest two examples are Jacques Attali, the founding president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and Ian Bremmer, president of the New York–based consultancy, Eurasia Group.

Attali’s views on Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia are alarming, indeed, irresponsibly so. Bremmer’s rest on definitional ambiguity and faulty logic.

Here’s Attali’s interpretation of what just transpired in Crimea: “a majority vote from a Russian-speaking province, part of Russia for centuries, attached in 1954 to another province of the Soviet Union on the whim of the secretary general of the Communist Party at the time, Nikita Khrushchev.”

No word of the Russian invasion, of the gangsters running Crimea, of the Crimean Tatars inhabiting the Crimea “for centuries” before Russia grabbed it in 1783, of the 1944 ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Tatars, of the bogus referendum conducted recently in the shadow of tanks, of the public opinion survey showing that only 41 percent of Crimeans supported unification with Russia, of the mass settlement in Crimea of Russian veterans after the expulsion of the Tatars. And the bit about Khrushchev’s whim is too precious. Doesn’t Attali know that the USSR was always run on the whims of its leaders?

Then there’s this:

Crimea and Russia chose to use the chaos born of the arrival in Kiev of a strongly anti-Russian government to reunite. Why does it bother us? Why should the Crimean population be denied the will to choose their destiny against the view of the country of which they are a member? After all, aren’t we preparing to allow the Scots to vote on exactly the same issue in Great Britain? Don’t the Catalans intend to do likewise in Spain? … And what will happen if Moldova, Belarus, or the Russian-speaking part of Kazakhstan ask to become attached to Russia? We will interfere? On what grounds? … What about Czechoslovakia splitting up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia?

Does Attali really believe that referenda in Scotland, Catalonia, and Quebec, and the break-up of Czechoslovakia, are in any way comparable—procedurally—to Russia’s military occupation of Crimea and the subsequent bogus referendum? Does he really believe that the government in Kyiv is “strongly anti-Russian”? Heaven help us all, if he does.

.............

Read more: worldaffairsjournal.org