West Watches Helplessly as Declaration of “Odessa People’s Republic” Hastens Dismemberment of Ukraine

Amid news of the chaos in eastern Ukraine—where, as I am writing this, the latest reports are of a dozen or more key government buildings in the control of “Donetsk People’s Republic” activists, with lots of conflicting reports as to Ukrainian defectors and casualties—a perhaps momentous declaration was made in an ethnic-Russian-populated area at the other end of Ukraine, in Odessa.  For many Westerners, Odessa is known only as the city whose famous “Odessa Steps” were used to stage one of the most riveting images in 20th-century cinema: in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin, about a 1905 anti-Czarist mutiny, a baby-carriage is let loose and tumbles down these steps during a bloody massacre, the mother struck dead by a Cossack rifle.  Nearly a century later, it is still difficult to watch this scene and sit still.  As film viewers, all we can do is watch helplessly and wait to see if the carriage tips over or reaches the bottom intact, or doesn’t.  It is something like the feeling that most in the West have as we watch a European nation of 45 million people attacked, invaded, and dismembered by a populist ultranationalist lunatic at the helm of one of the largest militaries in the world.  There is little we can do but watch and wait—or avert our eyes in horror, as film-goers did in 1925.

A statement on the website of Odessa’s “Anti-Maidan” group announced on April 16th, “Beginning today, the Odessa region becomes the People’s Republic of Odessa, where the power belongs only to the people living on its territory.”  It added, “At 16:00 tomorrow, Odessa must get blocked!  Literally.  Everybody who has not yet realized that the war had come to our houses should not go to work tomorrow.  ...   If you do not want a war that turns our country into ruins, like Syria and Libya, that costs thousands of lives, then you have to act.  Odessa is already surrounded by enemy checkpoints.  A state of war has already been declared in the country.”  Though of course it is President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, with a stealth military invasion that it continues to deny, that is plunging the Ukrainian mainland into civil war.

This declaration has so far not been accompanied by the physical takeover of administrative buildings, as has been the case in the eponymous capital cities of the three other separatist entities declared in the east, the People’s Republics of Donetsk, Lugansk, and Kharkov.  Nor have there been reports that the public is being acting on the separatists’ call to arms.  But it is clear that Odessa Oblast, between the Black Sea and Moldova, where Russian-speakers outnumber Ukrainian-speakers, is a place Putin has his eye on.

Pro-Russian demonstrators in Odessa

Donetsk Oblast, with its agricultural and industrial resources and the highest proportion of Russian-speakers of any Ukrainian oblast outside the now-all-but-surrendered Crimea, is where Russia has been concentrating most of its efforts so far, with a whole string of towns now more or less under the control of pro-Russian mobs almost certainly augmented by trained covert Russian troops taking direct orders from Moscow.  It is in Slovyansk, Donetsk Oblast’s second city, that Russian and Ukrainian troops are facing one another on the ground as I write this.  In two other mostly-Russian-speaking oblasts in the east, Luhansk (Lugansk, in Russian) and Kharkiv (Kharkov), the capital cities are seeing key buildings under pro-Russian control, but the hinterlands are so far not very affected.  So far there has been relatively little pro-Russian militancy in the two Ukrainian-majority oblasts between Odessa and Crimea—Kherson and Mykolayiv (Nikolayev)—but in Zaporizhia, the last of the truly majority-Russian-speaking oblasts, there are reports that so-called “self-defense forces” (i.e., pro-Russian mobs) are organizing themselves.

Odessa is crucial to Putin’s plans not only because of its long Czarist history but because it is adjacent to the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (a.k.a. Transnistria, a.k.a. Transdniestria), a sliver of eastern Moldova where Moldovans are in the minority and which declared independence in 1991 in much the same way Crimea did early this year.  Transnistria is occupied by Russian troops and propped up economically by Moscow, but Russia has not recognized it diplomatically in the way that it has its two similar puppet states within the Republic of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  But Transnistria has recently asked for diplomatic recognition from Moscow and for eventual incorporation, like Crimea, into the Russian Federation.  That would be difficult for Russia to do without also controlling Odessa.  Odessa is so close to Crimea by sea, and Crimea so close to Krasnodar Krai in Russia proper, that it would not be necessary for Russia to annex Kherson and Mykolayiv—where the Ukrainian majorities would presumably be more resistant—in order to create a safe corridor to Transnistria from the Russian mainland, though it is not impossible that those oblast’s more-Russian-populated coasts could be secured.

Transnistrian foreign minister Nina Shtanski’s newest fashion statement is these fetching shades from
the Wojciech Jaruzelski Collection.  They say, “I’m a puppet state—and I’m feeling confident today.”

But is this going to happen?  Well, in his question-and-answer press conference yesterday, Putin finally admitted that he had indeed, despite his protestations at the time, sent an advance covert military force into Crimea before its secession from Ukraine, though he still denies that this is what is happening right now in Donetsk.  He also said, for the first time, that he reserved the right to intervene militarily in the Ukrainian mainland to “protect” Russians and Russian interests there, and he described the current Ukrainian military moves against the pro-Russian separatists as “criminal.”  This reverses his earlier statement that he had no plans to do that.  In light of the fact that the events in Ukraine Putin says is “responding to” are events that he himself has staged, it becomes frighteningly clear that a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine will come soon.

An alternate Odessa separatist flag to that used on the Anti-Maidan website (see above)

As Putin himself put it this morning, “Kharkiv, Lugansk, Donetsk, Odessa were not part of Ukraine in Czarist times, they were transferred in 1920.  Why?  God knows.  Then for various reasons these areas were gone, and the people stayed there—we need to encourage them to find a solution.  We must do everything to help these people to protect their rights and independently determine their own destiny.”

Hmm, what to gobble up next?

The Ukrainian military is clearly powerless to stop Putin’s irredentist juggernaut should he decide to set it in motion.  Only the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  But perhaps “losing” Ukraine, or half of it, is preferable to nuclear war?  For now, keep your eye on Odessa.

Our sentiments exactly.

[You can read more about Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, 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.]

Partition Lines in Ukraine Sharpen as Crimean Russians Call for Separate “Malorossiya”

You don’t have to be a big believer in omens to feel that this one bodes particularly ill.  Yesterday in Rome, Pope Francis released doves at the Vatican to express prayers for the future of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.

Immediately, a seagull and a crow set upon the defenseless doves and an airborne battle ensued, with feathers flying.

The doves remain unaccounted for.

Indeed, prayers may be a little late at this point.  The protests in Ukraine over the direction of the country are beginning to take on some of the qualities of a civil war as ordinary Ukrainians rise up against the corrupt presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, who wants to bind his country closer to an increasingly isolated and authoritarian Russia instead of to the European Union and NATO.  Most of the ethnic Ukrainian majority favor a shift to the west and to democracy and an open society, while Yanukovych, who squeaked into office four years ago on the strength of votes from ethnic-Russians in the east and south of the country, is taking the opposite tack: cosying to Vladimir Putin and keeping the opposition leader and former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, behind bars on trumped-up charges.  Rapidly over the past few weeks, pro- and anti-Yanukovych riots have spread across the country, with a climbing number of fatalities at the hands of police and a sharpening geographic and ethnic divide.  Talks between the two sides have gone nowhere.  (See my recent article listing the Ukrainian divide as one of “10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014.”)

Ukrainians mourn an anti-government protestor killed by police.
The red and black flag is of Ukrainian National Self-Defense (UNSO),
armed wing of the Ukrainian National Party (Ukrayinska Narodna Partiya).

Initially, protests were concentrated in ethnic-Ukrainian-dominated areas, but then pro-Yanukovych counter-demonstrations in the past couple days began emerging, and in the past day or so anti-government protests have spread to places dominated by ethnic Russians, such as Odessa in the far southwest and cities in the eastern Donbas region such as Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk.  The latter, though now ethnic-Russian-dominated, is Tymoshenko’s place of birth.  Tymoshenko is ethnically Ukrainian, but Yanukovych, who was born to the east, near Donetsk, is of Russian, Polish, and Belarussian ancestry.

A protest structure honoring the jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko.
(Georgian flags are visible too, but what’s the one with the single, inverted-colors Bolnisi cross?)

As reported the other day in this blog, the Crimean peninsula is where many battle lines are being drawn.  One of the most heavily-ethnic-Russian parts of the country, Crimea was part of Russia rather than Ukraine when both were part of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union.  Nikita Khrushchev transferred the peninsula to the Ukrainian S.S.R. in 1954, though when he allowed hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities deported eastward by Stalin to return home, the predominantly-Muslim Crimean Tatars were not on the list.  When Communism fell in 1991, Crimean Russians threatened to secede and got their own autonomous republic in the peninsula, and Tatars, who had been trickling back but are still a 12% minority there, also were granted their own largely symbolic Mejlis, or Council, as the voice of their people in Crimea.  In recent days, the Mejlis has come out strongly in favor of the anti-government demonstrators, while the Crimean autonomous parliament, which is controlled by Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, hinted that Crimean Russians would not consent to remain in a country ruled by Yanukovych’s mostly ethnic-Ukrainian opponents.

The prime minister of Poland, another of Russia’s formerly captive nations which today borders the ethnic-Ukrainian-dominated parts of Ukraine, predicted darkly on January 24th that Ukraine might even split apart.  “We have no doubt,” said the prime minister, Donald Tusk, “that the administration of President Yanukovych and his behavior have led to this critical moment, when the unity of the Ukrainian state is in question.”  And, indeed, the borders of a future partitioned Ukraine may be appearing, emerging beyond mere hints and spreading beyond Crimea.

Media reported January 26th on a large angry meeting held in Sevastopol, the largest city on the Crimean peninsula, to discuss secession.  Sevastopol, which is the only part of the peninsula not in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea but administered separately within Ukraine, is also home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, as part of a deal negotiated after the Soviet Union’s collapse.  At this weekend’s Sevastopol conclave, which brought together Russian nationalists, pro-Moscow Cossacks, youth groups, and especially the sports-club fans who have featured prominently in the pro-government protests, a “Coordinating Committee” (Севастопольский Координационный) was formed.  The idea is that, in case of an anti-Yanukovych coup d’état, Sevastopol should secede and declare an independent Federated States of Malorossiya (Федеративного Государства Малороссия) that would eventually include other pro-Yanukovych regions like Odessa Oblast or the Donbas as well.  Malorossiya (sometimes spelled, in English, Malorussia) means literally “Little Russia” and refers to the mainland areas north of the Crimean peninsula, i.e. Ukraine when thought of as part of the Russian Empire.  The eastern Donbas region around Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk is sometimes called “New Russia,” or Novorossiya.  That name was also tossed around by ethnic Russians in 1992 during Crimea’s brief secession attempt.

You know things are bad when the police are the ones throwing Molotov cocktails.

Other pro-Yanukovych activists have drawn an explicit parallel between today’s growing geographical divide and the period of the Russian Civil War after the 1918 revolution, when for a few years what is today Ukraine was divided between an anti-Bolshevik and more progressive Ukrainian People’s Republic, with a capital at Kiev (Kyiv) (modern Ukraine’s capital), and a pro-Bolshevik Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (S.S.R.), which eventually prevailed and became the Ukrainian S.S.R. that kept all of Ukraine under Kremlin control until 1991.  The Russian nationalists are now saying that the Civil War–era Ukrainian S.S.R., when Ukraine was divided, which had its capital at Kharkov (Kharkiv), was the predecessor of today’s nascent Federated State of Malorossiya (see map at top of this article).  The intent to revive a Soviet-style Russian domination of Ukraine could not be clearer.

He has Ukrainian independence in the crosshairs.

So far this Malorossiya idea has not spread in very concrete ways beyond Crimea to the rest of Ukraine, but that appears to be only a matter of time.

Oh: and if you’re wondering if the West could ever possibly just stand by idly and just watch Russia invade and dismember Ukraine, just ask the Republic of Georgia.

Many thanks are due to Olga Buchel for alerting me to Russian- and Ukrainian-language news items that would otherwise escape my dragnet.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a 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, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]