Why Does Abkhazia Get to Host the 2016 “World Cup” for Aspirant Nations?

[Special note to readers: This article elicited a strong reaction from ConIFA, which contributed a statement to the effect that it considers itself a “non-political” organization.  For that statement, please see the comments section at the end of this article.  This blog welcomes and encourages a full discussion of the political and ethical implications, if one feels there are any, to ConIFA’s relationship with Abkhazia, Transnistria, Magyar irredentists, and other entities which many see as playing a negative role, to say the least, in European politics.]

We are used to international geopolitics inserting itself into the world of association football (that’s “soccer” to Americans).  World powers sometimes use the game as a proxy war for their own tussles over what is and is not a state and where national borders lie.  Examples include the ban on holding FIFA games in Russian-occupied Crimea, Spain trying to block Gibraltar, which it still claims, from member-state status, and ongoing politically motivated fan violence in Balkan hotspots like Bosnia and Kosovo.  But now a smaller football league that was supposed to be aloof from the rougher political edges of FIFA (the French acronym for the International Federation of Association Football) is courting similar controversy.

This league, the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (ConIFA), a new organization devoted to aspirant or unrecognized states ineligible for FIFA membership, decided this summer that its 2016 football (soccer) world cup would be held in the Republic of Abkhazia, a de facto–independent Russian puppet state in what most of the world outside Russia regards as part of the Republic of Georgia.  Despite damage and economic instability resulting from a recent history of separatist war and ongoing diplomatic limbo, Abkhazia and its capital city, Sukhumi, can, ConIFA promises, offer “top-class infrastructure” for a sporting event.  But Abkhazia is bound to be a divisive choice, considering that Russian support for violent separatism in Ukraine since early last year—a political situation which closely parallels Abkhazia, which split away as the Cold War ended—has led to calls to boycott the Russian-hosted FIFA World Cup planned for 2018.

ConIFA is not the first league of its type.  A predecessor was Viva, which doesn’t stand for anything but is a play on the name FIFA, also set up for national teams of unrecognized states.  Viva’s first world cup, in 2006, was originally to be held in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a puppet state that every country in the world other than Turkey recognizes as part of the Republic of Cyprus.  Northern Cyprus ended up ceding hosting duties to Occitania (southern France) after a brouhaha over Northern Cypriot demands to vet participating teams—probably the result of Turkish skittishness at that time about any kind of recognition of any kind of Kurdish entity, since northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region was also a participant.  Viva has successfully kept politics out of the team-selection process in the four subsequent Viva cup finals hosted by, in turn, Sápmi (the northern Scandinavian homeland of the Sami, or Lappish, people), Padania (separatist northern Italy), Gozo (the Republic of Malta’s smaller island), and Erbil, the Iraqi Kurdish capital.

Sami (Lapp) footballers competing in Östersund

Other participating Viva teams over the years have included Monaco (not a pseudo-state, but too small for FIFA nonetheless), Provence, Zanzibar, Arameans Soryoye (the team of the Christian Syriac people), Darfur (southwestern Sudan), Raetia (the linguistically distinct Ladin, Friulian, and Romansh speakers of southeast Switzerland and northern Italy), Tamil Eelam (the Hindus of northern Sri Lanka), and Western Sahara (the Moroccan-occupied Sahrawi homeland).  Customs red tape and other logistical problems have mostly prevented Southern Cameroons, West Papua, and Tibet from participating.  But no one was deliberately excluding anyone, or being remotely provocative.  Even the Northern Cypriot team graciously conceded defeat to the Kurdish team in the 2012 Erbil games.

(Yet another organization, FIFI (Federation of International Football Independents), in 2006 held a one-off exhibition “Wild Cup” tournament in Hamburg, Germany, where Northern Cyprus triumphed over Zanzibar, Gibraltar, Greenland, Tibet, and the Republic of St. Pauli—this last being a fictive micronation (fictive even by micronational standards) consisting of Hamburg’s red-light district.)

The ConIFA European cup this June, for its part, was hosted in Hungary by Székely Land, a proposed state in western Romania’s ethnic-Magyar (Hungarian) region.  Padania (northern Italy) won that 11-match series, with the County of Nice (in southeastern France), the Isle of Man, and Felvidék (Slovakia’s “Upper Hungary” region) ranking second through fourth, in that order.  The first ConIFA world cup, in 2014 in Östersund, Sweden, hosted by Sápmi (Lappland), was won by the highly impressive Niçois team.

Magyar nationalists displaying the Székely Land flag in Transylvania

And here, with this ConIFA line-up, the observant reader who is familiar with the minor nationalisms to which this blog is devoted will have caught perhaps a clue as to why Abkhazia, of all places, was selected to host the 2016 ConIFA cup.  Start with Székely Land, an autonomist cause with nowhere near the popular momentum enjoyed by, say, Scotland, Catalonia (both of which keep a plenty high profile in FIFA football), Padania, Kurdistan, or Tibet.  In fact, the idea of giving autonomy to the Magyar-dominated parts of western Romania is mostly a pet cause of the extremist far right in Hungary and Romania (as discussed once in this blog).  Autonomy for Romania’s Szeklers (Magyars) is in particular an abiding emotional rallying point for Jobbik, the neo-fascist ultranationalist party in Hungary, which in an election last year became Hungary’s third-largest party.

Jobbik armbands on parade

Felvidék, or “Upper Hungary,” the formerly Hungarian-ruled parts of Slovakia, is an even obscurer cause.  Slovakia is a stable, increasingly western-style state, and Hungarian is an official language in areas where speakers are more than 20% of the population.  (They are 8.5% of it nationwide.)   Slovakia’s Magyars are hardly separatist, but Jobbik has not forgotten them.   The party specifically calls for the revocation of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.  That agreement, part of the dismantling of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War, whittled the newly independent Hungary down to its current size, stripping away territories that had been under the Hungarian crown within the empire: all of Slovakia, a third or so of modern Romania, the Vojvodina province of northern Serbia, Ukraine’s Transcarpathia oblast, and significant territories which are now along the edges of Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia.  Jobbik wants all these lands back.  Only small bits of them have ethnic-Hungarian majorities today, but under Habsburg rule the German-speaking Austrian and Magyar élites ruled over smaller ethnonational groups in a political structure that was almost feudal.  Hungary, when it was an Axis country during the Second World War, tried and failed to use that conflict to regain lost territories.

Light green is modern Hungary;
darker green are those areas stripped from
the Kingdom of Hungary after the First World War

The County of Nice, too, is mostly a right-wing, even neo-fascist, irredentist cause.  In the years of conflict leading up to Italian unification in the mid 19th century, this Mediterranean city and its environs were ceded by the Kingdom of Sardinia’s House of Savoy (soon to become the ruling house of unified Italy) to France in exchange for help fighting the Austrians.  This stuck in the craw of the unification hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, a Niçois native who once famously said, “If Nice is French, then I am a Tatar.”  Thus Nice shifted from a mostly Italian-speaking city to a francophone one.  A claim on Nice was revived by Benito Mussolini during the Fascist era, and it is also included by the far-right, xenophobic, anti-Brussels Lega Nord (Northern League) in northern Italy as part of its dreamed-of “Greater Padania.”  Oh, and of course Padania is prominent in ConIFA too (as it was in Viva).  A ConIFA delegation to Nice in May of this year is prominently featured on the ConIFA website.

Football fans waving the Niçois separatist flag

Abkhazia, next year’s ConIFA host, is one of two ethnically distinct parts of Georgia which split away from Georgia after the fall of Communism in the early 1990s—the other being South Ossetia, which, like Abkhazia, is also a ConIFA member “state.”  After the brief South Ossetia War in 2008, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin shored up their de facto independence and granted them diplomatic recognition, something only a handful of other tiny states have followed the Russian example in extending.  Abkhazia and South Ossetia are in fact just the longest-standing parts of an archipelago of Russian-backed puppet states in non-Russian parts of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Others (discussed at length elsewhere in this blog, e.g. here) are Transnistria, in Moldova; the Armenian-dominated Nagorno-Karabakh Republic in Azerbaijan (the N.K.R. is also in ConIFA); the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” established last year in eastern Ukraine; and, less concretely, possible future separatist entities in places like Transcarpathia (see discussions in this blog here and here), Ukraine’s Odessa oblast (see reports from this blog here and here), and ethnic-Russian parts of Kazakhstan, the Baltic States, and elsewhere.  Another emotional issue for Armenian nationalists and their Turkophobic puppetmasters in the Kremlin is another ConIFA “member,” Western Armenia, a proposed N.K.R.-type entity many Armenians would like to carve out of what is now eastern Turkey.  (Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and has been a bugbear of Russian nationalists since Ottoman days.  Turkey and Azerbaijan are both allies of the U.S.)

Transnistria, it will be no surprise, is also a target of ConIFA diplomacy, in the form of an official ConIFA visit just before June’s European cup to Tiraspol, capital of this tiny, Russian-backed sliver of a pseudostate consisting of Moldova’s eastern edge abutting Ukraine.  ConIFA would like Transnistria to host a future tournament.  It also features prominently in contingent Russian plans for a takeover of more of the southern, ethnic-Russian-dominated areas of Ukraine, which mostly extend in a belt across the northern shores of the Black Sea, extending to Odessa oblast, which borders Transnistria.

Transnistrians in Bessarabian folk costume in a flag ceremony in Tiraspol

Putin’s proxy expansionism, while it exploits Soviet iconography and terms like “people’s republic,” is in fact a right-wing type of enterprise, and to this end it is not surprising that it has gained the support of far-right parties in the west that might otherwise talk a lot about “freedom”—such as (see discussion in this blog) Jobbik, Lega Nord, Flemish separatists in Belgium, libertarian-leaning separatists in Venice, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), and high-profile right-wing conspiracy-mongering nuts in the United States such as Lyndon LaRouche and Ron Paul.  Putinism shares with these far-right movements a suspicion of the European Union (E.U.), NATO, and multilateralism in general; xenophobia focusing on a nakedly bigoted Islamophobia; and an infatuation with muscular militant nationalist leadership that in fact has more in common with 1930s Fascism than with Soviet-style Communism.

Putin is a darling of xenophobic Padanist separatists like these Lega Nord activists in Milan

To be sure, leftist aspirant states are in ConIFA too, including the Aymará indigenous nation of Bolivia; the disinherited Chagos Islanders of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, who live in exile in England; and Cascadia in the American and Canadian Pacific Northwest.  But even some of these are causes which appeal to Putin’s anti-Western imperialism.   The Aymará nation includes Bolivia’s left-wing president, Evo Morales, who sided with Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea.  Bolivia was one of only ten countries which sided with Russia in voting against a March 2014 United Nations resolution that upheld Ukraine’s right to territorial integrity following the Crimea annexation; the others—all of them (as discussed at the time in this blog) mostly profoundly undemocratic societies—were Armenia, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Syria, Sudan, and Belarus.  Even Iran, China, and Myanmar had the decency to at least abstain.  The Chagos Islanders’ cause, too (see discussion here and here), is one which Putin is keen to highlight because it is an example of a serious human-rights abuse which can be laid at the feet of NATO.  Along with the prominence of the above-discussed obscure neo-fascist irrendentist entities like Upper Hungary, Székely Land, and Nice, most of the teams prominent in ConIFA are ones that conform to the anti-Western, anti-NATO, anti-E.U. agenda of Putin’s new imperialism in its “near abroad.”

Aymará Indian demonstrators with their national flag

One possible result of a tournament in Abkhazia next year, and a possible later one in Transnistria, would be to spread the popularity and prestige of the Russian puppet-state model among separatist groups across the political spectrum and around the world—fitting the new pattern of parties like Lega Nord, France’s National Front, and Jobbik—even the otherwise-leftist Basque nationalists in Spain—lining up behind Putin’s imperialist agenda in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.  Playing in Abkhazia is sure to be willfully misinterpreted as a de facto recognition by these aspirant nations.  It is worth asking who is running ConIFA—or, perhaps, who has taken it over or whom it serves.  While Putin plays hardball in Ukraine, the lurch to the right in separatist soccer may be playing into the hands of his stealth “soft power” offensive against the West.

[You can read more about Abkhazia, Transnistria, and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Strange Bedfellows: “Republic of Venice” Libertarians Side with Putin in Ukraine, as Europe’s Regional Parties Tilt Eastward

Strange things are happening in Europe, as the West’s political landscape shifts in the wake of the war in Ukraine.  In the latest head-scratcher, a prominent academic historian and separatist libertarian activist in northern Italy is praising the Kremlin-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, saying the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk are legitimate states whose election results this week ought to be respected.

Paolo Bernardini, a Genoa-born professor of history at the University of Insubrica in Como, is known in academic circles for prolific work on the history of Jewry in Europe.  In politics, he is better known as co-founder of Veneto Independence (Indipendenza Veneta), a group seeking to separate the autonomous Veneto region—including its capital, Venice—from the Italian Republic and restore the historic Most Serene Republic of Venice, as outlined in Bernardini’s 2011 book Minima Libertaria.  For centuries, the republic was the premier naval power in the Mediterranean.  Many Venetian regionalists assert its absorption into the unified Kingdom of Italy in the mid nineteenth century was illegitimate.

Speaking a few days ago to Russia’s state-controlled news agency R.I.A. Novosti, Bernardini said, “The real and effective independence of the D.P.R. [Donetsk People’s Republic] and the L.P.R. [Luhansk People’s Republic] may create a new balance of power in the former [sic] Ukraine, and peaceful relations among the various parts of the region, including the D.P.R., L.P.R., Crimea, and what will be left of Ukraine.  A number of small states in fiscal competition one with the other would re-launch a region full of economic potential.”  Of course, this view ignores the fact that President Vladimir Putin’s not-very-covert military invasion of Ukraine has destabilized the entire world order and ushered in a new Cold War, with everyone wondering how far he will go in swallowing up his neighbor, which was ruled from Moscow for centuries until it gained independence with the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991.  The D.P.R. and L.P.R. were declared independent states this spring by shady right-wing paramilitary rebel armies financed, supplied, and even staffed by the Russian military, with the overt desire for eventual annexation to the Russian Federation, along the lines of Crimea, which Russia had brutally invaded and annexed weeks earlier.  Western European countries and the United States have offered only token resistance to Putin’s expansion.  Ukraine is not in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so NATO member states are not obligated to defend it.

This week’s voting in Donetsk.
The peace signs do not seem to be intended ironically.

Another Veneto Independence leader, Alessio Morosin, told R.I.A. Novosti that the European Union (E.U.) “would be foolish to impose new sanctions against Russia for the sole reason that it [Russia] officially recognizes the November 2 elections,” as E.U. leaders have promised.   “There are no precedents in international practice,” Morosin added: “the threat of using sanctions against a state to change its political course, foreign and domestic policy is unacceptable.”  Morosin was silent on the question of  whether Russia is by the same token allowed to use military force to change Ukraine’s political course.  At the time of the Soviet collapse, Ukraine surrendered to Moscow the nuclear arsenal on its territory in exchange for recognition of its borders, including Crimea and the southeast, an agreement Putin now declares invalid because Ukraine’s government is now different—a highly eccentric reading of international law (which, if applied to Russia, would require the return of Sakhalin to Japan and Tuva to China).

Venetist demonstrators fly the Catalan flag as well to show
their—at times far too indiscriminate—support for separatists abroad.

The relationship between northern Italian separatism and Putin’s neo-Soviet imperialism is not new.  A strong theme in the European Parliament elections earlier this year, in which far-right separatist and xenophobic parties in western and central Europe made an unexpectedly strong showing (see recent article from this blog), was some parties’ infatuation with Putin’s style of muscular, aggressive, unapologetic nationalism.  Putin’s annexation of Crimea won praise from groups as disparate as Belgium’s Flemish-nationalist Vlaams Belang party, France’s Nazi-sympathizing National Front (Front nationale), and, yes, Italy’s xenophobic, anti-E.U. Northern League (Lega Nord) (see a recent discussion of them in this blog).  A reporter described a recent Lega Nord rally in Milan (pictured below) as oriented less toward an independent Padania (i.e. northern Italy) and more toward backing Putin, condemning the international sanctions against Russia, and praising Putin’s denigration of “invading” Muslims, a large theme of Lega Nord’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.  This shows what a dim memory the ideological divides of the Cold War have become.  Who would imagine that western Europe’s goose-stepping fascist fringe would be standing up for “people’s republics” in the Ukrainian rust belt?  But in true fascist style, it’s not about political economy: it’s about nationalism and aggression, two things the far right respects no matter what flavor they comes in.

A separatist rally in northern Italy morphs into a saint’s procession for
beloved fellow Muslim-basher Vladimir Putin.

For the most part, non–Lega Nord separatist parties in northern Italy had once occupied another part of the political spectrum (as discussed in an article in this blog; see also this article).  Those movements based in Venice, including the ideologies of “Venetism” and “Serenissimism” (the latter referring to Republic of Venice revanchists), defined themselves in opposition to the Lega Nord founder Umberto Bossi’s intolerance and jingoism, adding their own streak of American (or, in truth, Austrian) style classical-liberal libertarianism.  To make analogies with politics in the U.S., Lega Nord was Pat Buchanan while the Venetists were Ron Paul.  But Venetists are now shifting to the right, despite the fact that Lega Nord is still trying to relegitimize itself in the wake of the Euro crisis, which ejected the party from its role as Silvio Berlusconi’s junior coalition partner and ushered in a corruption scandal, and despite the fact that informal referenda in Veneto earlier this year showed that Venetist separatism could appeal to a majority of Venetians without the appeals to xenophobia and bigotry typical of Lega Nord.

Lega Nord, Republic of Venice, and Russian flags mingle at a League rally in Milan
(along with flags of the former Duchy of Milan, also used by the “eco-nationalist” Insubria movement).

Of course, the Kremlin and its state propaganda organs have been having a field day with the support they are receiving from western European third-, fourth-, and fifth-party politics.  The independence movements in Scotland and Catalonia have been touted by Russia as Exhibit A in its case for the West’s hypocrisy concerning “separatism.”  If Scots should be allowed to choose whether or not to secede, then why not Crimea’s ethnic-Russian majority? (or so the argument goes).  And the far-right xenophobic political party in Hungary, Jobbik, has openly backed the idea that ethnic Hungarians just over the border in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia) oblast should be offered “protection” from the “oppression” of the new Ukrainian government, just as the Kremlin is supposedly “protecting” ethnic Russians in the east and Crimea (as discussed in this blog; see also an article here).

Hungary’s Jobbik political party has all the trappings.

Even more bizarrely, in September the separatist parliament of Spain’s autonomous Basque Country region announced that it was recognizing the sovereignty of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), the unrecognized puppet state which newly independent Armenia slashed out of Azerbaijan’s soft western flank when Communism collapsed, after a pitiless campaign of ethnic cleansing of Azeris and Kurds.  Armenia, a close Russian ally, had essentially been doing the same thing for decades in Azerbaijan that Russia started doing this year in Ukraine—and few outside Russia and its puppet states (and, to their shame, many in the U.S. Armenian-American community) backs the N.K.R.  But now the Basques, despite their legacy of leftism and resistance against Francisco Franco’s fascism, are jumping on Putin’s imperialist bandwagon as well.  Strange bedfellows indeed.

The Basque parliament now recognizes the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.

Why is all this happening now?  Well, it’s easy to blame Putin’s propaganda machine, but some blame must be shared by the western European political establishment.  Though the U.K. showed itself to be an enlightened democratic nation by allowing the people of Scotland to choose independence, it still pushed strenuously—and, in the end, successfully—to convince Scots to stay in the U.K.  Spain, on the other hand, has drawn a line in the sand forbidding Catalonia, the Basques, or any other nation within its kingdom from holding similar referenda.  Nor do Germany, with respect to Bavaria; Belgium, with respect to Flanders; or Italy, with respect to Padania or Veneto, take anything like a British approach to regionalist movements.  In fact, the E.U. and NATO establishments are quite panicked at the idea that regions within European countries might be allowed to—horrors!—choose who governs them.  Well, who does allow such a thing?  In some very blinkered views, Russia does, with its support for eastern and southern regions’ secession from Ukraine.  Never mind that elections in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea are messy and crooked, without international observers; never mind that the movements were spearheaded by provocateurs from Russia and are in fact a mere step on the road to absorption into the heavily centralized Russian Federation, which grants regions far less autonomy than Ukraine does.  And never mind that in Russia even openly voicing support for any kind of autonomy or separatism is illegal, as activists in Siberia and in the Steppes just east of Ukraine have been finding out in the form of prison terms (as discussed recently in this blog).  And never mind the city of Grozny, capital of Russia’s Chechen Republic, which Putin leveled, murdering tens of thousands of civilians, in a war to prevent the Chechen majority’s desire for independence.  Indeed, never mind any of that—and western European far-right separatists are not being reminded of it, either, as they go online and read glowing reports of their own movements in Russia’s slick and deceptive English-language media.

Grozny in 1995.  This is how Putin reacts to separatists when they’re not Russians.

Because western European governments have for the most part turned their backs on the legitimate aspirations of their own ethnic minorities, those groups are now seeking validation and succor, and perhaps even funding, elsewhere—the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin, the most anti-separatist tyrant of all.  For the E.U. and the leaders of Spain, the U.K., and Italy, this should be a wake-up call.  Western European governments who want to show the world that they are more democratic than Putin’s Russia (which they are), it’s time to put your money where your mouth is on the question of ethnic autonomy.  Spain, I’m looking at you.

[You can read more about Venice, Padania, and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Will Transcarpathia Be the Next Donetsk—or Crimea?

Even as the actual territory controlled by the pro-Russian puppet states of the People’s Republic of Donetsk and the People’s Republic of Lugansk in eastern Ukraine shrinks under pressure from the advancing national Ukrainian military, the fictive super-state of which these rebel provinces are a part is sounding cocky and thinking of expanding.

Pro-Kremlin separatists call the light-blue-colored oblasts in this map a federated Novorossiya.
Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia) is at the far west.

The foreign ministry of the Union of People’s Republics of Novorossiya (that term meaning “New Russia”) (formerly the Federal State of Novorossiya)—the federation that includes the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts (provinces) as well as six other Ukrainian oblasts where rebel republics exist only in name or not at all—agreed in a meeting in Yalta, Crimea, on July 6th and 7th, to accept as a member the so-called Republic of Podkarpatskaya Rus’.  A new pro-Russian organization called the People’s Front for the Liberation of Ukraine, Novorossiya, and Transcarpathian Rus’ released a manifesto at that conference.

Pyotr Getsko (left), “Chairman of Government Minister” (sic) of the Podkarpatskaya Rus’
“republic,” with Vladimir Rogov, chairman of the foreign-affairs committee
in the Novorossiya “parliament.”  At left is the current Transcarpathia oblast flag, also used by
separatists and nationalists, while the flag on the right is that of the Donetsk People’s Republic,
though the center blue stripe is so washed out that I first mistook it for the black, white, and red
tricolor of the former German Reich (and, briefly, the Third one).  Thanks to a reader who pointed
this out to me on the “Flags of the World (FOTW)” Facebook group.

Transcarpathian Rus’ the Ukrainian government calls Zakarpattia oblast, in its far west.  Rus’ refers to Kievan Rus’, the Medieval state based in Kyiv (Kiev, for Russians) which both Russian and Ukrainian nationalists (and Ruthenian ones; see below) regard as their ancestral state.  The Carpathia part refers to the mountain range that separates the province from the rest of Ukraine to the east.  Variously known as Podkarpatskaya, Subcarpathia, or Transcarpathia, the territory’s Pod- (meaning below) and Sub- prefixes refer to the territory’s position on the Carpathians’ foothills (as in the name of the adjacent voivodeship (province) of Poland, Podkarpacie), while Trans- refers to its position “across” or “on the other side of” the Carpathians—a point of view that implies (as with Transnistria) the perspective of Moscow or Kyiv, rather than Vienna or Budapest.  And indeed, Transcarpathia used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Kingdom of Hungary’s administration.  Slavic-speaking locals called Ruthenians, Ruthenes, or Rusyns tried to establish their own state when the Hapsburg empire was being dismantled at the end of the First World War, but had to settle for becoming the eastern tail of the new-born oblong composite state of Czechoslovakia.  When the Czech portion of Czechoslovakia succumbed to annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938, Slovakia and Ruthenia declared independence but were soon consumed by the Third Reich as well.  After the Second World War, the Yalta conference (not the one referred to above, but the other one, the big one) awarded Transcarpathia, as it was then known, to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.  Josef Stalin proceeded to stamp out Ruthenian cultural identity, declaring Rusyn a mere dialect of Ukrainian.  Ruthenians demanded an autonomous region like Crimea’s when Ukraine became independent in 1991 but did not get one.  A declaration of independence in 1993 as the Republic of Subcarpathian Rus’ got nowhere, nor did a similar declaration in 2008 as the Republic of Carpathian Ruthenia.  That second one was strongly suspected by the westward-leaning Ukrainian government of the time to be a result of Kremlin pot-stirring; this, of course, was around the time of Russia’s expansionist South Ossetia War in Georgia.

How today’s Ukraine was divvied up before the First World War.

Transcarpathia has not been a particular hotbed of anti-Kyiv feeling, not does it have particularly many ethnic Russians, compared to all the other oblasts Novorossiya claims.  But this blog did suggest the tiny  province, as long ago as early March, as a future point of conflict between pro-Kyiv and pro-Moscow forces, a point I reiterated in another article, in early April.  (See also an article in which I report on Russian analysts’ predictions for an independent Transcarpathia by 2035.)  In particular, two factors make this enclave an inviting morsel for omnivorous Novorossiyan map-drawers, and indirectly perhaps for the Kremlin itself.  The two factors are demographics and geography.

A Transcarpathian flag (current oblast flag) at this year’s Novorossiya summit in Yalta.

First, demography.  Transcarpathia is more than 80% ethnically Ukrainian and less than 3% ethnically Russian, with Rusyns (Ruthenians) making up less than 1%—only about 10,000 people.  But this belies a possibly larger number of families of Rusyn descent who assimilated to Ukrainian and Russian culture and language in the Stalin era and may only now be dusting off their old ethnic identities.  Russia may be intending to use supposed oppression of Rusyns as a pretext for intervention, much as it did to “protect” Abkhaz and Ossete “victims” in Georgia in 2008 and ethnic-Russians in Crimea earlier this year.  (Compare also the Russian-speaking political forces in Latvia which have piggybacked their cause onto the question of autonomy for the traditional Latgalian people who live in the ethnic-Russian-dominated areas of Latvia.)

Are Transcarpathian Ruthenians ready for their ethnic revitalization?
Or does Moscow just wish they were?

More to the point, 12% of Transcarpathia’s 1.25 million or so people are ethnic Magyars (Hungarians), making them the largest non-Russian ethnic minority in Ukraine in any single oblast.  (Ukraine has more ethnic Belarussians and Moldovans (Romanians) than Magyars when taken as a whole nationally—but these other groups are more dispersed (though 20% of the less populous and smaller Chernivtsy oblast nearby call themselves Moldovan or Romanian).)  Concern for the Transcarpathian Magyars’ “plight” has become an obsession of Jobbik, the militant far-right party of xenophobes and anti-Semites that took more than a fifth of the vote in Hungary’s elections this April, making it the second most powerful party in that country.  Jobbik bloviators have been pushing Budapest to annex Transcarpathia if necessary to “protect” ethnic kindred there.  A lot of the rhetoric focuses on the Ukrainian government’s revocation of minority languages’ official status after Ukraine’s pro-Moscow president, Viktor Yanukovych, was impeached in April.  Even though the successor government quickly reinstated those rights, the original revocation is still Exhibit A of those, like the Donetsk and Lugansk rebels, who claim the current Ukrainian government oppresses minorities.  The fact that the armband-wearing, goose-stepping thugs of Jobbik and the southeastern “people’s republics” are working from the same playbook helps put the lie to Moscow’s lunatic assertion that it is the “junta” in Kyiv who are the right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis.

The far-right group Jobbik is the second-largest political party in Hungary.

Now to the geographic factor, which concerns central and western Europe’s dependence on Russia’s natural gas (hence the European Union’s toothless and half-hearted sanctions against Russia since the Ukrainian troubles began).  Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, would like to keep the gas flowing to Europe, but he would also like to be able to cut off the supply to Ukraine if necessary to bring it into line.  The trouble is the oil pipelines to western Europe for the most part run straight through Ukraine, and most of these go through tiny Transcarpathia in particular.  And Transcarpathia’s border with the Slovak Republic—an E.U. member-state friendly to Kyiv—is one of the few places where the pipelines could be used to send gas back into Ukraine as a way of making an end run around any plans by Putin to choke off Ukraine’s supply.

Could Putin or the Russian-speaking thugs in Ukraine make an actual grab for Transcarpathia?  Not likely.  They weren’t even able to turn independence declarations into “facts on the ground” in two other oblasts—Kharkiv and Odessa—where the demographics tilt toward Russians.  (The so-called Odessa Republic of Novorossiya declared with little effect in late April granted diplomatic recognition not only to the Kharkov, Lugansk, and Donetsk people’s republics but, a little mysteriously, to what its “foreign ministry” called the Carpathian Ruthenian People’s Republic—as reported at the time in this blog.)  Those areas are firmly under Kyiv’s administration.  But many observers feel that Putin may not really want to annex any other chunks of Ukraine, that he would be happy to destabilize it and weaken its central government through agitation for federalism.  And an invasion and annexation of Transcarpathia is not entirely impossible either.  After all, a mere year ago anyone who predicting a Russian invasion of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk would have been laughed out of the room.  Ukraine’s war with Russia has not yet been won.  Not by a long shot.

The scene in Donetsk.  Could conflict spread to Transcarpathia as well?

[You can read more about these and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Donetsk Putsch Nipped in Bud, but Could Odessa or Kharkiv Be Next as Russia Eyes Ukrainian Mainland?

The Donetsk Republic is no more—at least for the time being.  Last week in this blog, I reported on the pro-Russian rebellion in Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, whose leaders took over the regional government on March 3rd and by March 5th had declared a “Donetsk Republic” and were preparing to invite President Vladimir Putin to send Russian troops to support them.  The uprising enacted the worst fears that a parallel to the takeover of Crimea could happen in the Ukrainian mainland.

A map of how Ukraine’s oblasts voted in the 2010 election (with red being pro-Russian)
shows Donetsk in the far east, bordering Russia.

The following day, the local coup’s leader, Pavel Gubarev (pictured, center, at the top of this article), was arrested by Ukrainian federal police while he was holding a press conference (he was later sentenced to two months in prison) and the Ukrainian flag was raised again over the offices of Donetsk oblast’s regional government.  This did not end the conflict.  Supporters of Gubarev’s group, the People’s Militia of Donbas (Donbas being the larger region around Donetsk, on the Don River), staged street confrontations with police that night.  On March 8th, 3,000 people rallied in Donetsk’s Lenin Square to support the idea of the Russian Federation annexing this part of eastern Ukraine—as it is already gearing up to do in Crimea.  The crowds chanted, “Russia!” and “Referendum!” and surrounded the government building where the oblast’s new governor, Sirhiy Taruta, was holed up, challenging him to emerge.  Taruta, a multi-millionaire oligarch, was appointed by the new interim Ukrainian government in Kyiv (Kiev) partly in an attempt to mollify the long-corrupt national economy’s powerful tycoons and get them on the side of the anti-Kremlin opposition that returned to power late last month.  Donetsk is also, no one fails to note, the home oblast of Ukraine’s deposed pro-Kremlin president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Pro-Gubarev activists confront police in the streets of Donetsk.

Little is known about Gubarev, described as a 30-year-old advertising executive or entrepreneur from the Donbas region.  In the 1990s, he was a member of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, a post-Soviet but communistic and pan-Slavic political party which is stridently anti-Western and anti-globalization.  He has also, oddly enough, been a member of Russian National Unity, an extremist right-wing party often described as neo-Nazi.  If those seem like opposite ends of the political spectrum for one person to travel before the age of 30 (it is not clear in which order he belonged to these groups, or to which of the two, if either, he still belongs), then that possibly says as much about Gubarev’s peripatetic nature as it does about the topsy-turvy world of the Ukrainian political fringe.  As Marlon Brando said, in The Wild One, when asked what he was rebelling against, “What’ve you got?”  All Gubarev seems sure he’s for is seeing his home region swallowed up by an omnivorous Russia.

Supporters of the current Ukrainian government celebrate the snuffing out
of the Donetsk Republic uprising—but for how long?

The phenomenon of Gubarev also points up the absurdity of the Kremlin’s official line that the anti-Yanukovych, anti-Kremlin forces in Ukraine are in essence fascists and neo-Nazis—as opposed to Russia’s home-grown nationalists, who, in this view, are the moral heirs to the Soviet Union’s heroic defeat of the Nazis in what is still called “the Great Patriotic War.”  Here, as a bit of an antidote to that line of thinking, is Gubarev in the uniform of Russian National Unity:

Nice armband, huh?  As with many far-right groups in Europe, one wonders if they think people won’t notice that they are wearing modified swastikas, or if they are rubbing our noses in it.  Compare, for example, the insignia of Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn organization: ...

... or Hungary’s far-right ultranationalist party Jobbik: ...

... or the radical, neo-fascist Free Wales Army, in the United Kingdom: ...

... or, alas, Ukraine’s own extremist Rightist Sector party, which has revived the Nazi S.S.’s “Wolfsangel” (wolf’s hook) insignia (as has Ukraine’s more mainstream right-wing Svoboda, or Freedom, party) ...

... and then there’s Russia’s Movement against Illegal Immigration (D.P.N.I.): ...

... or the group Russian Deed (Russkoye Delo): ...

... and here is how members of Gubarev’s own Russian National Unity party like to greet one another at their little meetings ...

... including some fellows having a bit of fun, Busby Berkley style, via Mel Brooks ...

... and here is Russia’s National Bolshevik Party: ...

Phew.  Well, at least their emblem doesn’t look like a swastika.  What a relief!

If Putin does decide to pull a Crimean-annexation maneuver in the Ukrainian mainland, Donetsk oblast, which borders Russia, is an obvious place to start.  And, ironically, ethnic-Russian neo-Nazis like Gubarev will be his local confederates making it all possible.

... but “ethnicity” is a more malleable, and shifting, phenomenon than native language.

A point needs to be made here about the little matter of ethnicity.  I myself, in this blog, at times have been guilty of being insufficiently careful with defining what it means when one says something like “the 30% of Ukraine that is ethnically Russian.”  Those who follow the news will wonder at references to eastern Ukrainian regions where Russians are in the majority while some maps in news sources show Crimea as the only area where “Russians” exceed 50%.  The problem is that there are two concepts in use here: Russian-speakers and ethnic Russians.  Censuses and other data on what languages Ukrainian citizens speak is one thing, and here we do find Russian-speakers a majority in most of the eastern oblasts: Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk, as well as Odessa and Crimea.  But that is not the same thing as being ethnically Russian.  Many Russian-speakers in Ukraine have identified themselves as of Ukrainian nationality without further specification.  This is certainly the case with Yanukovych himself, who is of mixed Belarussian, Polish, and Russian ethnic background but, as president of Ukrainian, usually defined himself through his political career as simply Ukrainian.  But while data on language spoken at home might not shift much from one census to the next, ethnicity is very malleable.  Many Ukrainian speakers of Russian who have ethnically Russian ancestors have felt lucky to have landed in Ukraine, which emerged from the Soviet rubble in 1991 as the most prosperous of the Soviet successor states, and have defined themselves accordingly.  Crimea, which was part of the Russian republic until Nikita Khrushchev transferred it to Ukraine in 1954, seems to have been the one part of Ukraine where the great majority of Russian-speakers felt, and feel, far more Russian than Ukrainian.  But it has yet to be seen how much the feelings of Russian-speakers on the Ukrainian mainland will change their sense of identity.  Many Russian-speakers are anti-Yanukovych, but how many, and for how long?

Pro-Kremlin rioters in Kharkiv last week tried to take over government buildings.

In other ethnic-Russian-dominated parts of Ukraine, tensions are high.  In Kharkiv (Kharkov), pro-Russian activists rioted as the Crimea crisis unfolded earlier this month, demanding the Yanukovych government be returned to power.  Kharkiv, sometimes called Ukraine’s most Russian city, is a charged symbol: it was the capital of the fledgling Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic during the Russian Civil War between Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and others following the Communist revolution in 1917 as it fought anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian statelets formed in the west, mostly based in Kiev.  Kharkiv was the first place Yanukovych fled to when he lost power, and last month ethnic-Russian activists in Crimea laid out plans (as reported earlier in this blog) for a Federated States of Malorossiya, embracing Odessa, the Donbas, and Crimea, with a capital at Kharkiv.  Ukrainian police have been stepping up security around Kharkiv’s public buildings, fearing that a “Kharkiv Republic” might be next.

Some Russian nationalists envision a separate “Malorossiya” that includes Crimea, Donetsk, and Odessa.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin revealed February 7th that Vladimir Putin’s recent phone-call with President Barack Obama included Putin informing Obama something that might or might not be true: that ethnic Russians in Odessa have asked the Kremlin to intervene to help them.  This is all supposedly to protect them from persecution by ethnic Ukrainians—something that international media and human-rights organizations have found no evidence for.

Is Vlad the Impaler preparing to ride onto the western Steppes?

Odessa, although it is the westernmost of the Russian-speaker-dominated oblasts of Ukraine, is in one sense far more Central European than Russian.  Closer to Vienna or Istanbul than to Moscow, the area around Odessa was part of the Ottoman Empire, and it was only in the late 18th century that Catherine the Great won it from the Ottomans and erected its capital city as a Russian city.  In the 2001 census, 62.8% of the oblast’s residents identified themselves as Ukrainians, while 20.7% chose “Russian.”  It is likely that all of the “Russians” were Russian-speakers, while many of the slight majority that were “Ukrainians” were possibly Russian-speakers as well—and these may now be feeling divided loyalties as never before.  (In addition, Odessa oblast in 2001 was 6.1% Bulgarian, 5% Moldovan (i.e., ethnic Romanian), and 1.1% Gagauz (a Turkic people of Moldova).  Going for Odessa next—as Putin seems to have hinted to Obama he might (but why would he reveal his motives?)—would have the advantage of completely cutting off nearly all of Ukraine’s remaining access to the Black Sea (assuming the annexation of Crimea) and putting Russia on a border with Romania, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  It would also allow Russia to complete its sort of de facto incorporation of the eastern sliver of Moldova, which seceded after the Soviet collapse as the puppet state of Transnistria.  This would prevent not just Ukraine, but Moldova, from ever joining NATO.  And Odessa oblast would now be Russia’s westernmost point of land, not counting the exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast, wedged between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea.

“Odessa = Ukraine,” reads a sign (left).  Not all in Odessa agree.
“Mir” (peace), reads another (right).  Not everyone agrees with that one either.

Already, there have been street confrontations between pro- and anti-Russian elements in Odessa, and ethnic-Russian rebels—or, perhaps, as in Donetsk, imported provocateurs from Russia itself—have managed several times to break in and raise the Russian flag over Odessa’s government buildings.  On March 6th, a speaker told a large crowd of cheering ethnic-Russian demonstrators and ad hoc militiamen, “Our duty is to demonstrate against Kiev’s junta, whom America has paid $5 billion to take over political power; otherwise their armed fascist militia will force us to elect their oligarchs and turn our country into a NATO member!”  Etc. etc.

Pro-Russian demonstrators in Odessa on March 6th

What will Putin do if the Russians of Odessa get around to “asking” him to “rescue” them from Ukrainian “fascists” and invade?  Do you think he wouldn’t dare?  That’s what we used to say about Crimea.

Members of the Ukrainian feminist political collective Femen
brought a pre-Giuliani feel to Times Square in New York this week with an anti-Putin protest.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is nearly ready for the printer and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by February 2015.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

(Once again, thanks are due to Olga Buchel for directing me to some of the information used in this article.)

Related articles from this blog:

“Second Crimean War Update: Western Credibility, Russian Lies, and Putin’s Next Steps (Hint: ‘Donetsk Republic’)” (March 2014)

“Ukraine Loses Grip on Crimea, Prepares for Open War with Russia; Role of Far Right in New Kiev Regime Unclear” (Feb. 2014)

“Putin and Ukraine’s Ultranationalist Russians Light the Fuse: Second Crimean War Begins” (Feb. 2014)

“Games Begin! Ukrainian Hijacking, Putin Rounds Up Dissidents” (Feb. 2014)

“Yet Another Genocide Olympics: 10 Political Causes Sure to Disrupt the Sochi Games” (Feb. 2014)

“Minuscule Gagauzia Votes 99% to Declare Independence If Moldova Attempts Romanian Reunification” (Feb. 2014)

“Partition Lines in Ukraine Sharpen as Crimean Russians Call for Separate ‘Malorossiya’” (Jan. 2014)

“Will Ukraine Crisis Become Second Crimean War? Tatars and Russian Nationalists Take Sides” (Jan. 2014)

“Is Ossetian Reunification Just Russian Irredentism by Another Name?” (Jan. 2014)

“10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014” (Dec. 2013)

“‘Separatism’ Added to List of Things Russians Aren’t Allowed to Talk about” (Sept. 2013)

“Road Dispute Pushes Town near Moscow to Declare Independence from Russia—but with Dusted-Off Fascist Ukrainian Flags, Oddly Enough” (Oct. 2012)

“Transnistria’s Limbo to Continue Indefinitely” (Nov. 2011)