There will be no peace in Ukraine until its domestic politics are brought into conformity with its cultural reality.

Ukraine’s independence in 1991 created a nation-state whose two predominant cultural constituencies were unevenly divided between urban and rural, between wealthier and poorer regions, and between the more and less educated. The historical disbalance in favor of the Russian-speaking in each of these groups automatically made the status of the Russian language in Ukraine an issue of political contention.

Political elites from the westernmost region of Ukraine—Galicia—who before 1939 had been part of Poland, and before that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, argued vehemently that for Ukraine to become truly independent, the use of Russian had to be restricted. State policy, they argued, should aim at creating a Ukrainian national identity based on their own Galician identity which, given the oppression of the Soviet era, was now the only authentic Ukrainian identity. In those halcyon days many Russophone Ukrainians, seeking to distance themselves from the legacy of communism, also supported a gradual Ukrainianization. As Ukraine’s first president Leonid Kravchuk explained to them in the run-up to the independence referendum, they would be “full-fledged owners” of the country, and they would always be guaranteed “preservation of full-blooded, unhindered ties with Russia and other sovereign states of the former Union.” With this understanding, they voted in large numbers for Ukrainian independence at the end of 1991.

But the vastly divergent historical memories of Eastern and Western Ukraine quickly led to mutually exclusive visions of Ukraine’s future.

In the Galician narrative, Russia is the root of all evil. The reason there is corruption in Ukraine is that Russia has imposed its slave mentality on Ukrainians; the reason the country is not more prosperous today is because of Russia’s colonial trade practices; the reason Ukrainian politics continue to be unstable is that Russia is always intervening. Since all problems point to Russia, the solution is to sever all ties with Russia.

By contrast, in the Maloross narrative, which predominates in the half of the country that lies East of the Dnieper river, Ukraine is a distinct nation with indelible cultural and religious ties to Russia. Many Maloross Ukrainians see Russian and Ukrainian ethnic identities as interchangeable and still believe, as Vladimir Zelensky did in 2014 and Vladimir Putin does today, that the two are one people. Rather than blame Russia for Ukraine’s woes, Maloross Ukrainians blame the policies of the Ukrainian government. They see the solution not in separating Ukraine from Russia, but in restoring their close ties.

For more than two decades these two regionally based competing national identities managed a tense co-existence by alternating the presidency between them and stymieing the parliament’s ability to function as an effective check. This prevented either region from achieving absolute political dominance.

Many observers say that this gridlock thwarted economic and political reform in Ukraine. This is true, but it was also Ukraine’s way of avoiding civil war, which many assumed would erupt as soon as one side gained enough control to turn its own cultural identity into a litmus test of loyalty.

This is precisely what happened in February 2014, when President Yanukovych was ousted by a revolt led and manned by Western Ukrainians up to a quarter of whom, according to surveys taken at the time, identified with the radical nationalist parties. According to Volodymyr Ishchenko, Deputy Director of the Center for Society Research (Kiev), “tolerance of the far-right against the ‘greater evil’ of Yanukovych allowed Svoboda to play the most visible role in Maidan protests and later helped to de-legitimize them for the majority of the population in southeastern Ukrainian provinces, thus forming the ground for the civil war.”

Yanukovych’s ouster was thus seen as a violation of the delicate balance that had been established between Eastern and Western Ukraine, and a direct threat to the core interest of Russophone Ukrainians. They responded by challenging his ouster on constitutional grounds. Immediately after Yanukovych’s removal, some 3,700 local elected officials from every region of the East and South (but none from the West), convened in Kharkov to condemn what they saw as an illegal coup d’état. The delegation from Crimea even called for a national assembly to come up with a new federal constitution for Ukraine.

The new government in Kiev responded by consolidating all levers of power—executive, legislative and military—in the hands of the former head of Ukrainian security forces,  Aleksandr Turchinov. The stage was thus set for a confrontation between Western Ukraine, where the overthrow of the government was seen as an expression of the people’s will, and Eastern Ukraine, where it was seen as a nationalist coup.

This stalemate did not last long. The head of the Ukrainian Navy, along with more than 70 percent of the Ukrainian military in Crimea, switched sides, making military defense of the island impossible. Crimea was annexed on March 21^st, four days after 80 percent of the total population voted to join Russia.

The same scenario was already brewing in another zone of historical conflict, Donbass, but there Russia responded very differently. When the rebels scheduled a referendum there, President Putin urged them to stand down. When rebel leaders went ahead with the vote anyway (66.8% of the total population in Donetsk supported “self-rule,” while 77.8% of the total in Lugansk supported “independence”), Russia said that while it respected the will of the people, it would not recognize the results.

Second, after conducting military exercises near the Ukrainian border in late February, Russia returned troops to their barracks in late April, after the beginning of Kiev’s anti-terrorist campaign, clearly signaling that it had no intention of involving its troops in this conflict. Finally, on June 24, just as the Ukrainian military campaign in the East was ramping up, the Russian parliament recognized Petro Poroshenko as the new president of Ukraine and rescinded Putin’s authority to use troops outside Russia.

After assuming office, Poroshenko pledged victory in the East in a matter of hours, but after his offensive suffered a catastrophic defeat at Ilovaisk at the end of August 2014 he was forced to negotiate directly with the rebels. A second disastrous defeat at Debaltsevo in February 2015 led to the Minsk peace accords which, despite persistent violations, have not been repudiated because neither side sees any realistic prospect of a military victory.

What is the end game, and why has it been so elusive?

As I said at the outset, any solution must bring Ukrainian politics into conformity with cultural reality. There are two ways to accomplish this.

The first is to create a pluricultural Ukraine in which minority communities can retain their different cultural and religious identities within the framework of a common Ukrainian civic identity. The second way is to create a culturally homogeneous Ukraine in which Russophone Ukrainians are subordinated by law, and will thus be powerless to change their status.

A pluricultural Ukraine would resolve the split in Ukrainian identity by defining it more broadly; a monocultural Ukraine would resolve it by making the identity and values of Galicia normative for all Ukrainians.

The pluricultural option has been rejected by the current president, and by the current majority in parliament. Thanks to the war in the East, the monocultural option has become more viable than ever before. That is because there are now six million fewer Russophone Ukrainians under Ukrainian government control than before the Maidan. This is a 28 percent reduction in the number of local voters. Furthermore, as a direct result of the local nature of the military conflict, Maloross Ukraine has lost 43 percent of its GDP, and 46 percent of its export capacity compared to 2012.  The ten Russophone regions that were once able to sway national politics in their favor, thanks to their higher levels of wealth, education, and economic productivity, are simply no longer capable of doing so.

With everything pointing toward the establishment of a monocultural Ukraine, the question now being debated in the Ukrainian media is how to treat the remaining Russophone population, which still constitutes a third of the population. Should they have the right to use Russian in public? Will they be allowed to educate their children in Russian?  Do they even form part of the indigenous population of Ukraine? A spate of legislation passed in the last few months has answered all of these questions negatively.

Prominent nationalist intellectuals have argued that Russophone Ukrainians simply need to be re-educated into a proper appreciation of their suppressed Ukrainian identity, or forced to leave. Donetsk University professor Elena Styazhkina calls this “positive, peaceful colonization.”  Others, like the Deputy Prime responsible for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories, Alexei Reznikov, have argued for a more direct approach—expelling those who are disloyal and limiting the rights of Ukrainian citizens from those regions to participate in political life for 25 years.

I, therefore, expect the region will continue to resist until the government in Kiev gives them either meaningful autonomy or independence. As for the rest of Maloross Ukraine, it remains to be seen whether the population there will assimilate, leave the country, or remain within it as a disgruntled minority. 

It is also possible that a more pragmatic form of Ukrainian nationalism will someday emerge; one that feels secure enough that it no longer sees the identification and elimination of dissonant Ukrainians as top priority, and instead tries to broaden its social base. In theory, this would also allow Ukraine to mend ties with Russia which, for obvious geographical, cultural, historical, and religious reasons, remains the one indispensable nation for Ukraine. 

Such a transformation is unlikely in the foreseeable future. The classics of political science do indeed suggest that revolutionary movements tend to lose their fervor after the first generation and that politics then slowly shift back to traditional historical patterns. What political science cannot tell us, however, is whether Ukraine can manage its internal divisions long enough for that Thermidorian Reaction to take place, or instead be split asunder by them.

What is the West’s Interest in Ukraine? What Should it Be?

Ukraine is caught in the crossfire of the global East-West rivalry because of the Eurasian Union, which Russian President Putin sees as the key to establishing Russia’s regional hegemony, and the United States, therefore, sees as a threat. Since the United States cannot prevent the Eurasian Union from becoming the largest commercial pathway of the New Silk Road that will connect China to Europe and the Middle East, it has decided that, at the very least, Ukraine must not become a part of it.

That is why the United States and its NATO allies worked so hard to undermine president Yanukovych during the 2014 Maidan, and specifically why the peaceful transition of power to the opposition, that both sides had signed on 22 February 2014, was immediately repudiated by its Western authors when it became clear that the radicals had a chance to seize total control. Western government officials expected that the restoration of order in Ukraine would take no more than a few weeks. The popular unrest that erupted throughout Maloross Ukraine, and spilled over into outright rebellion in Crimea and Donbass, came as a total surprise because all of their attention had been fixed on pro-Western forces inside Ukraine, which dutifully told them what they wanted to hear—that reports about cultural tensions within Ukrainian society were vastly overblown.

Since 2014, therefore, Western governments have been engaged in defending their choice to back Galician Ukraine in its effort to impose a unitary national ideology, while at the same time being unwilling to commit the resources that would be needed to make that ideology succeed. Meanwhile, Russia has proclaimed consistently since 2014 that it will not simply stand by and allow Galicia to eradicate Maloross Ukraine.

We are witnessing the reverse of the Judgment of Solomon. In this famous parable, King Solomon is asked to judge which of two women is the true mother of a child. He orders the child split in two. The true mother relinquishes her claim in order to save the life of the child. In this instance we have achieved the opposite: the West and Russia would each rather see Ukraine torn apart, rather than let the other side have all of it.           

But what many observers fail to realize is that in this competition Russia has an enormous advantage over the West. It retains overwhelming cultural influence within Ukraine thanks to centuries of common history, language, and religion. Judging from the latest year-end tallies for searches on Google and YouTube, Ukrainians still conduct internet searches overwhelmingly in Russian, and for cultural content from Russia. This appears to be as true for young people as it is for older age groups.

In other words, Russia can influence the Ukrainian agenda in nearly every walk of life much more easily than the West can. Over the past seven years, the Ukrainian government has tried desperately to counteract this influence —through the banning of Russian books, movies, television programs, Ukrainian language quotas, and restrictions on a vast swath of commercial and social activity—but while these restrictions enjoy broad support in Galicia, in Maloross Ukraine they are viewed as human rights violations.

Given the variety of economic, political, geographic, cultural, and religious influences it retains in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, Russia has a staying power in Ukraine that no other nation can match, with the possible exception of Poland. Geopolitical strategists like to point out that power is never applied in the abstract, but to specific regions with specific historical characteristics. What this means, in essence, is that in Ukraine it is Russia, not the United States, that will always be the superpower.

But don’t sanctions change this? No. Sanctions allow politicians to claim that they are doing something when outright warfare is not an option. But as nearly every comparative study of the impact of sanctions has shown, they have almost no perceptible impact on key decisions of the target country. Politicians in the West acknowledge as much, saying that they do not expect Russian policies to change, but that it is still important to “send a message.” But, as French President Emmanuel Macron said of NATO if your strategy consists of sending messages that you know will be ignored, then you are becoming brain-dead.

The only approach that might actually reunite all of Ukraine is a complete course reversal. Although it is customary to treat complex diplomatic issues by breaking them down into smaller components, in this case, every attempt to achieve a settlement using this process has failed. That is why we need to think bigger, not smaller.

We need a reconstruction package for Ukraine that, in scope and ambition, would be beyond the wildest dreams of George C. Marshall. The beauty of such a project is precisely that it would be a challenge so massive that it would require the combined resources of Russia, the European Union, and the United States to fund and administer. This would necessarily require placing the entire post-Soviet region into a broader context, one that considers the needs of all of the constituencies I mentioned previously—international, bilateral, and domestic.

We should be working toward a new Treaty of Westphalia, the gist of which would be this: Russia and the United States should each take a step back, Russia and Ukraine should each take a step back, and all parties would stipulate that both Ukraine and Russia must, at the end of this process, become part of a new pan-European security arrangement. A framework that would welcome both Russia and Ukraine might just provide enough of an incentive for Russia and Ukraine to deal creatively with Donbass and Crimea. Failing that, they should both forego the benefits of European integration, investment, and security guarantees.

A project of this magnitude demands a level of cooperation among states that, sadly, seems to be beyond our current political leaders. They would much rather shrink into their national shells, blame others for rising tensions, and quietly allow Ukraine to suffer its fate.

We will pay twice over for this lack of vision and compassion. First, in the demise of Ukraine as its fragments fall into the very spheres of influence that Western government so fervently claims to abjure.

Second, in what I call the Great Shift Eastward—Russia’s embrace of her Asian destiny foretold by the great Russian polymath, Mikhailo Lomonosov, three centuries ago. His prediction, that “Siberia is destined to magnify Russia’s greatness,” may yet prove to be the most lasting outcome of the latter half of the 21^st century.

Remarks prepared for the 2021 Monterey Summer Symposium on Russia.

Nicolai Petro is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island (USA). He is the editor of Ukraine in Crisis (Routledge, 2017), and served as Special Assistant for Policy in the U.S. State Department in 1989-1990. He writes from Odessa, Ukraine.