TheAltWorld Ukraine: Is The End Of Lenin’s Unnatural Mini-Empire Drawing Near?
Russia’s continued request for Kiev to finally implement the Minsk Accords might be the last chance that the rest of Ukraine has to remain unified, albeit not as a ‘unitary’ state since it seems almost inevitable that only a ‘confederal solution’ can keep this communist zombie construct from further collapsing, and that’s only if the Donbass Republics agree to this implied proposal (which can’t be taken for granted) and similar such rights are afforded to Ukraine’s other indigenous minorities like the Hungarians, Poles, Romanians, and the rest of the Russians living on its territory.
Empires have existed for millennia but they’ve almost always been “natural” ones in the sense of one people conquering (and hopefully subsequently assimilating, integrating, and treating fairly) another. For right or for wrong, for better or for worse, this is how International Relations have developed up until only comparatively recently. That’s not to imply any blanket judgement on such systems but simply to remind everyone that they exist. This is crucial to keep in mind when analyzing President Putin’s decision to recognize the independence of Ukraine’s breakaway Donbass Republics. His nearly hour-long speech can be heard in full in English here and read on the official Kremlin website here, though the latter hasn’t yet released the entire text at the time of this article’s publication.
What particularly struck some observers was the Russian leader’s very keen sense of history in explaining to his people the origins of the modern Ukrainian state. President Putin refreshed their memory about how it’s actually the legacy of none other than Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, the same man that self-proclaimed Ukrainian (fascist-)”nationalists” hypocritically revile, who he accused of making massive administrative mistakes by stealing historical Russian territory and giving it to newly created national units that he then endowed with the constitutional right to potentially secede. He did this, the Russian leader said, as part of an unethical plot to keep himself and his communist party in power after the 1917 revolution, which was actually more akin to a Color Revolution coup.
While commenting on the blatant double standards of modern-day Ukraine being directly created by Lenin even though that same country’s own self-proclaimed (fascist-)”nationalists” are feverishly obsessed with de-communization, President Putin unforgettably asked with his characteristic hint of irony, “Do you want de-communization? Well, this quite suits us. But you must not stop halfway. We are ready to show you what genuine de-communization means for Ukraine.” He then elaborated more at length on the unnatural administrative manufacturing of that country’s post-independence borders that came to encompass a much wider variety of people than just those who identify as Ukrainians. The impression left upon hearing his historical lecture is that Ukraine is an unnatural mini-empire.
What’s meant by this is that it came to encompass more than just the Ukrainians themselves through top-down means imposed upon associated minorities by a third party, the de facto central authorities in the Soviet capital of Moscow. The Ukrainians didn’t conquer others and then – as everyone always hopes that natural empires end up doing – assimilate, integrate, and treat them fairly. Kiev was simply granted control of historically non-Ukrainian territories as part of Lenin and his communist party’s self-interested plot to cling to power through divide-and-rule means that appealed to extreme nationalist movements which might otherwise have continued violently resisting his government had he not generously but irresponsibly granted such extreme concessions to them for the sake of their prestige.
This resulted in not only parts of Russia’s historical territories being taken away from the de jure direct administrative control of their millennia-long civilization-state, but also those Hungary, Poland, and Romania that were conquered by Moscow throughout of the course of various conflicts following the 1922 establishment of the USSR. To be clear, the Soviet Union sincerely did its utmost to assimilate, integrate, and treat fairly those new minorities that entered its de facto empire no matter how imperfectly this was implemented in practice, but post-independence Ukraine’s efforts were an altogether different matter. This was especially the case after the foreign-backed coup of early 2014 that followed the spree of urban terrorism popularly described as “EuroMaidan”.
The (fascist-)”nationalist authorities that subsequently rose to power with Western support sought to aggressively suppress the rights of minorities within their country that had hitherto been neglected but then began to be actively reversed. NATO-member Hungary loudly condemned its so-called “language law”, which the Venice Commission human rights watchdog confirmed was a “justified” position for Ukraine’s neighbors to have, thus implying Russia as well in spite of the US claiming that such positions are ”unjustified”. In late 2021, none other than Ukraine’s second most passionate supporter behind the US, Poland, surprisingly released a very critical report slamming that neighboring country for the vile mistreatment of its co-ethnics.
This wasn’t a report by a random NGO or some no-name journalist but was shared by the Polish Deputy Foreign Minister with the Committee on Liaison with Poles Abroad, thus making it the official position of the Polish government. It expressed extreme concern with Ukraine’s “language law” that both Hungary and Russia had earlier condemned and also lashed out at Kiev for glorifying those responsible for committing genocide against the Polish people during World War II on what’s nowadays that former Soviet Republic’s territory. Additionally, the report warned about religious tensions brewing against Polish Catholics there too. For these reasons, Deputy Foreign Minister was reported to have declared that “It would not be an overstatement to say that Poles in Ukraine are being discriminated against”.
These objectively existing and easily verifiable facts add credence to the observation that Ukraine is an unnatural mini-empire created by Lenin and his communists for self-interested reasons, one that outright refuses to respect the rights of the minorities that were arbitrarily placed within its administrative borders by a third party, the then-de facto central authorities in Moscow. Crimea’s democratic reunification with Russia and the Donbass Republics’ eventual recognition by that Eurasian Great Power as independent states shows that Ukraine’s unnatural mini-empire is crumbling, to say nothing of the criticism that it’s increasingly come under from its NATO-member Hungarian and Polish neighbors. Nevertheless, that’s not to imply that Ukraine as a UN member state will soon cease to exist.
Rather, it’s important to draw attention to Russian Ambassador to the UN Vasily Nebenzya’s statement to the Security Council on Monday where he reaffirmed that Kiev still has an obligation to implement the UNSC-backed Minsk Accords. He specified that “by the moment the Minsk Agreements were signed, the LPR and DPR had already proclaimed independence. The fact that Russia recognized this independence today makes no changes to the list of sides to the Minsk Agreements, because Russia is not a side thereto.” This implies that although Moscow recognizes the Donbass Republics as independent countries, it still supports them entering into negotiations with the rest of rump Ukraine, which Russia now regards as a separate country. This hints at a possible shift in Russia’s end game there.
Those now-sovereign polities could potentially reunite with Russia in order to right Lenin’s historical wrong of “literally squeezing (them) into Ukraine”, as President Putin put it on Monday evening during his speech, but for the time being at least it appears as though Moscow has a different outcome in mind. While its representatives have repeatedly made it clear that they consider the issue of Crimea to be closed, the issue of Donbass isn’t as clear-cut. By reminding Kiev of its obligations to the Minsk Accords, Russia is hinting that it might accept a future “confederal solution” between Donbass and Ukraine, one which would essentially amount to the “Bosnification” of that former Soviet Republic and thus comply with the Minsk Accords’ clause for that region to be constitutionally afforded a “special status”.
That’s the only potentially acceptable scenario for Donbass to ever reincorporate itself within Ukraine since no other option would credibly allow for the protection of its indigenous Russian population’s human rights. The same can be arguably be said for Ukraine’s Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian minorities as well since they too are suffering similar abuses at the moment as evidenced by their titular governments’ official positions towards Kiev’s “language law”, though their situation thankfully isn’t (yet?) as severe as the Russian minority’s. In other words, Lenin’s unnatural mini-empire has to undergo revolutionary administrative-political changes lest it risk further crumbling and thus losing more control of its minority-inhabited territory whose locals are objectively regarded as historically indigenous there.
At this point at least, Russia would prefer not to see the further “Balkanization” of Ukraine, which is why it’s holding out hope that Kiev will finally implement the Minsk Accords and thus presumably consider a “confederal solution” for nominally reincorporating Donbass. That, however, also implies potentially granting similar such confederal rights to the lands in which other minorities like the Hungarians, Poles, and Romanians are also considered indigenous. It was this fear of the possibly uncontrollable devolution of Lenin’s unnatural mini-empire that resulted in Kiev refusing to implement its international legal obligations through the Minsk Accords in the first place but now that outcome is already a fait accompli one way or another due to its disastrous miscalculation.
Had Kiev done what it was supposed to, then Donbass would already have been reincorporated into Ukraine, albeit with constitutionally enshrined “special status” affording it some unclear degree of autonomy (most likely in local political affairs and cultural-linguistic rights). Now, however, the only way that it has any chance of ever hoping to nominally reincorporate Donbass is to agree to a “confederal solution” bestowing that breakaway region with broad autonomy akin to de facto independence due to Moscow’s recognition of their sovereignty and associated mutual security treaties with them. If Kiev doesn’t agree, then Donbass is lost forever (it might very well already be since those republics might not even agree to this speculative “confederal solution”) and it could even risk losing other territories too.
All of this is because Ukraine is Lenin’s unnatural mini-empire, but it could possibly have remained administratively-politically sustainable in theory had it sincerely respected its many indigenous minorities’ rights, both before but especially after the 2014 Western-backed coup. Instead, post-“Maidan” Ukraine chose the path of rabid (fascist-)”nationalism” that ultimately spelled the doom of this artificial polity’s foreign borders. Russia’s continued request for Kiev to finally implement the Minsk Accords might be the last chance that the rest of Ukraine has to remain unified, albeit not as a “unitary” state since it seems almost inevitable that only a “confederal solution” can keep this communist zombie construct together. If Kiev doesn’t comply, then Ukraine might soon see even more separatism.
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