Ukraine crisis: Vladimir Putin has caught the west napping again

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/08/ukraine-crisis-vladimir-putin-caught-west-napping

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Vladimir Putin acts, and the west (sometimes) reacts. That has been the pattern of the Ukraine crisis since it erupted into an open contest between Russia and the west last November.

At every stage, whether through poor intelligence, policy shambles or divisions in Europe and with America, the west has been caught napping, while the Kremlin called the shots.

Putin has been winning all the battles, although it does not necessarily mean he will win the war.

Putin ordered the ditching of Ukraine's political and trade pacts with the EU; he annexed Crimea; he sowed chaos, violence, and secessionism in the east; he left Kiev looking incapable of running, controlling or defending Ukraine.

The Russian leader's sudden volte-face on Wednesday, calling for separatist referendums in eastern Ukraine to be shelved and sounding sanguine for the first time about Ukraine's presidential election slated for this month, has again caught the west napping and brought rewards.

Putin has reinforced Europe's split between hawks and doves, between those calling for "proper" economic and trade sanctions and those quickly seduced into giving Russia the benefit of the doubt.

Having created chaos he can still probably control, Putin has stepped back, appearing moderate and conciliatory while still able to pull the levers of destabilisation at will.

He has avoided for now the imposition of sweeping European sanctions that would hit Russia hard.

He has made himself indispensable to any settlement, meaning that his terms for a new Ukraine constitution – far-reaching federalisation that enfeebles the central government in Kiev and allows him to pull the strings in the east of the country – will need to be given a hearing.

For western would-be mediators, Putin is the one to go to. But who does Putin go to? Is it Angela Merkel or Barack Obama? Or perhaps Catherine Ashton? Or John Kerry or William Hague or Herman Van Rompuy?

Putin's central control contrasts with western fragmentation, incoherence, and equivocation.

"Putin is continuing to pursue the strategy of indirect, proxy destabilisation in order to achieve his goals. This latest apparent feint appears at best a tactic to diminish the costs of pursuing this strategy," said the Eurasia Group on Thursday.

To listen to the Russian foreign ministry or watch Russian television in recent weeks is to get a picture of a Ukraine riven between Soviet nostalgics in the east pining for 1970s Mother Russia and terrified of antisemitic fascists from Kiev and the those in the west who long for a Europe of the 1930s.

The caricature has been assiduously cultivated to manufacture ethnic, linguistic and cultural tensions between east and west which may have been latent but were quite manageable under responsible political leadership.

Slobodan Milosevic performed precisely this trick in the 1990s in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo. It is in this respect – the calculated manufacture of tension, hatred, and conflict – that Ukraine now resembles Bosnia, although there are ample differences.

A Pew opinion poll on Thursday highlighted a much more benign Ukraine than the one sighted on Russian TV.

Only 14% of respondents favoured allowing secessionism, while 70% in eastern Ukraine wanted to retain a single country. There was no appreciable dislike between ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians. Two-thirds of Ukrainians deplored Putin's influence on Ukraine while one fifth thought it favourable.

Among Ukraine's Russian-speakers, outside Crimea, a minority, 41%, supported Russia's role in Ukraine.

That suggests another reason, perhaps, why Putin called for Sunday's eastern referendum to be shelved: short of massive rigging, he will probably lose it.