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.]

Diplomats Scramble to Keep Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict from Reigniting—but Why Is It Happening Now?

The so-called “frozen conflict” between the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh territory may be thawing out in the post-Crimea world of Russian expansionism.  That would be bad news for the safety and stability of the rest of the Soviet successor states and for the Middle East as well.

The blurry, contested line between Armenian and Azeri areas was the first part of the wobbling Soviet Union to flare into war—as early as 1988, years before Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia became independent in 1991.  Some history: those three nations had established brief independence during the Russian Civil War that raged for years after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.  When they were absorbed into the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by victorious Bolsheviks in the 1920s, guarantees were given to protect the rights of the ethnic Armenian minority in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of what was now the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic, and to resolve the border dispute eventually.  But that became moot as Josef Stalin exerted brutal central control over the entire U.S.S.R. and repressed national identities other than Russian.  For decades, it did not matter where the boundaries between republics and sub-republics and fictively labeled “autonomous regions” were if everyone’s lives were run directly from the Kremlin anyway.

But the 1980s saw a revival of Armenian aspirations to expand into Armenian-populated areas of Azerbaijan, and, not always even unconsciously, to exact vengeance on Turkic-speaking Azeris for the 1910s and 1920s genocide by Anatolian Turks in the “Western Armenia” region that was forcibly absorbed into the new Republic of Turkey.  A six-year war ended in 1994 with an Armenian victory, the deaths of nearly 40,000 people, mostly Azeris, and the establishment of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R., a.k.a. Artsakh Republic), a supposedly independent Armenian puppet state carved out of western Azerbaijan.  The N.K.R. was ethnically cleansed of Azeris and Kurds, bankrolled by the fiercely nationalistic Armenian diaspora (especially in the United States), and backed both diplomatically, militarily, and financially by Armenia and, less directly, Russia.

Since 1994, peace talks have dragged on without result and a shaky cease-fire has held—just barely—on the border between the N.K.R. and Azerbaijan proper.  As long as things did not flare up again, it was a situation the international community could live with and mostly, it hoped, afford to ignore.  Till now.  So far in August, though the figures are disputed, twenty people have been killed along the cease-fire line, including young civilians, and including flare-ups along the tensest part of the shared border, that between Armenia and the Azeri exclave of Nakhchivan, wedged between Armenia, Iran, and Turkey—tensest because no one, no one, wants Armenia and Turkey to start shooting at each other.

Armenian-American demonstrators in Los Angeles with the Nagorno-Karabakh flag

On one level, none of this is unheard of: each year since 1994, dozens of incidents have occurred along the border, mostly snipers mistaking civilians for hostiles when they stray too close to the hot zone.  Each month, each country routinely issues a list of the other side’s supposed cease-fire violations.  But none of it has been game-changing.  What is different in the past three weeks has been the numbers: more deaths along the border than in the average year over the past decade of “peace.”  And the usual propaganda issuing from both Yerevan and Baku about these incidents is using more heated rhetoric than usual.  Ambassador James B. Warlick, Jr., the U.S. co-chair of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (O.S.C.E.) committee on Karabakh called the Minsk Group, went so far as to declare earlier this month, “Unfortunately, the armed conflicts in the region show that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is not ‘frozen’ anymore.  You cannot explain to the family of an injured or a dead soldier that it is a frozen conflict.”  And John Heffern, the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, recorded a special video message to both sides in the conflict, urging peace.

An emergency meeting in Sochi, Russia, between Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, the Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, and the Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan ended last week with nothing to show and the situation more tense than ever.  This week, on August 18th, the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey met in Nakhchivan, a meeting which mainly ended with Tbilisi and Ankara expressing determination to stay out of the Karabakh mess at all costs.  Meanwhile, the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) is activating its water-carriers in the U.S. Congress to escalate anti-Azerbaijan rhetoric—a losing battle in some ways, since the Armenian government has hitched its wagon to the isolated and despised Putin regime (see relevant articles from this blog here and here).

Presidents Aliyev and Sargsyan

Why now?  Surely it has much to do with the new cold war between Russia and the West.  Russia had always aligned itself far more with the Armenian side in the dispute.  Russia under Putin regards itself as a Christian country, and a large component of the conflict is sectarian: Armenians are mostly Christian, and Azeris, like most other Turkic-speaking peoples, Muslim.  Azerbaijan became a natural ally of Turkey, which is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a quixotically aspirant European Union (E.U.) member state, and a long-time enemy of Armenians.  And the puppet-state model used by Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh is identical to the approach used by Russia in the supposedly independent republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia carved out of Georgia, the partly-ethnic-Russian-populated Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (a.k.a. Transnistria) carved out of Moldova, and, before its annexation, the briefly “independent” Republic of Crimea within Ukraine.  The Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic in southeastern Ukraine, currently the scene of a war between Ukrainian and pro-Kremlin forces, are further examples.  After Crimea’s annexation, Abkhazia and South Ossetia began clamoring for annexation as well, and Transnistria and the N.K.R. began asking for, if not annexation by their sponsoring states (Russia and Armenia, respectively), at least the diplomatic recognition that Russia and a handful of toadying allies like Nicaragua and Venezuela grant to Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  So the N.K.R. is getting restless.  Some there are confident they can win an endgame, like the one apparently playing out in Ukraine.

Expanding outward, Iran and Syria are also allies of Russia and Armenia, while the U.S., Israel, and the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq are allied with Azerbaijan and Georgia.  So the seemingly imminent independence of Iraqi Kurdistan and eventual control of Syria by Western-leaning forces in that civil war are prospects that are making Russian and Armenian nationalists eager to make the N.K.R.’s status official.  What we are seeing could be engineered provocations by the Armenian side—or by the Azeri side, though they are less motivated to unfreeze the conflict.

Or are they?  Some Armenian observers have a different fear.  They see Russia’s diplomatic isolation and the international sanctions against it as motivating factors behind a new initiative by Putin to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in Azerbaijan’s favor, as a way of making nice with the West.  In this view, Putin encouraged Aliyev to shatter the cease-fire so Putin could play peace-maker and put Armenia in its place.  Like many paranoid nationalist theories, this one is full of holes.  For one thing: why would the international community care so much about what happens way over in the South Caucasus that it would forgive Putin for stoking conflict in Ukraine that directly threatens to embroil all of Europe and destabilize the global international order?  And why would Putin shrink the territory where he exerts influence?  The Armenian theory holds that it is part of a longer game by Putin to bully Azerbaijan into joining the new Eurasian Union trade bloc (also containing Belarus and Kazakhstan) into which Putin has already bullied Armenia into joining.  To sum up: Armenian nationalists, by allying themselves with Russia, have painted themselves into a corner and now feel that the whole world opposes them.  It sort of does, actually, and the Armenian government sort of asked for it.  That kind of feeling of ethnonational grievance and persecution is a dangerous cocktail: it makes leaders take military risks (think Adolf Hitler or Putin).

As an observent reader pointed out, Iceland, despite being blue in this map, is not actually in the E.U.  See comments below.

With war already engulfing all of Syria, all of Iraq, and half of Ukraine, both Armenia and Azerbaijan would do well to dial back the rhetoric, lower their weapons a bit, and let this conflict freeze over again.  No good can come of a thaw.

[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, 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.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  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.]

Looking for a scary Halloween costume?
How about “Naughty” Armenian Ultranationalist?

Is Gorno-Badakhshan Stirring Again?

Outsiders are still trying to sort out what happened on May 21st in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (G.B.A.O.), the sealed-off eastern half of the Republic of Tajikistan.

According to the Russian news agency ITAR–TASS, three people were killed and seven wounded in Khorog, the Badakhshani capital, in the wake of a drug raid in which police killed two local residents.  Other suspects escaped in a car and shot and wounded four police officers in the ensuing chase.

Khorog, Gorno-Badakhshan’s capital

In response to these deaths at police hands, mass protests were held, cars were overturned, and public buildings were subjected to grenade attacks and set on fire, including a court, a police station, and the public prosecutor’s office.  One policeman was killed in street confrontations associated with the protest violence.  This was followed by demonstrations in the days following, with the public demanding an investigation.

Though the situation seems to have calmed down since then, it may have had an ethnic and sectarian dimension.  Gorno-Badakhshan—along with the adjacent part of Afghanistan, the eastern “panhandle” province of Badakhshan—is home to the Pamiri minority.  Pamiris, who like Tajiks speak a language related to Persian (see map below), follow Shi’a Islam—and in particular are Ismailis, i.e. followers of the Aga Khan—unlike the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and other Sunni Muslims who make up the other 97% of Tajikistan’s population.  An estimated 100,000 Pamiris and members of a related ethnic group, the Gharmis, were slaughtered in the civil war that lasted from 1992 to 1997 after Tajikistan’s separation from the Soviet Union.

A scene from the violence in Gorno-Badakhshan in 2012

Since then, Gorno-Badakhshan, which covers nearly half of Tajikistan’s territory, has largely run its own affairs, without molestation by the central government.  The conflict was revived in 2012, when the government moved in to reoccupy the region for a while following the murder of a central-government security-chief, which Tajikistan blamed on Tolib Ayombekov, a Pamiri warlord from the 1990s who became a major drugs and weapons trafficking boss.

It is hard to know what goes on in Gorno-Badakhshan.  The area is sealed off from much of the world. But its fate has wider strategic implications.  The Russian government acted aggressively to snuff out the civil war in the late 1990s out of fears that the ascendant Taliban government in Afghanistan could take advantage of ethnic affinities across the Afghan–Tajik border to gain a foothold there.  Both Pamiris and Afghanistan’s ethnic mainstream, after all, had long-standing resentment of Soviet and Russian influence.  It is not as though the Taliban has particularly much influence in the Pamiri areas of Afghanistan; but the appearance or threat of it could be enough for authorities on either side to take overly precipitous action.  The area also borders the People’s Republic of China, in particular the vast and predominantly-Muslim Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where the Beijing government is using separatist violence by the oppressed Uyghur people (some of which might even be staged, in “false flag” operations, as many Uyghur exiles believe) as the excuse for a crackdown—and for building cross-border alliances with Tajikistan, Pakistan, Russia, and other states to crack down on “separatist” and “terrorist” networks.

This map of Central Asian languages, seems to classify Pamiri (controversially) as Tajik.
It also shows, in pink, the presence of Kyrgyz people in eastern Gorno-Badakhshan.

One Central Asia expert, Omar Ashour, believes that the currently ongoing winding-down of the United States and NATO war in Afghanistan may be leading to instability (which of course is different from suggesting that those forces should stay). Some groups—the Taliban among them—are betting that the drawdown will leave power vacuums that they can fill. “I think what the NATO departure will do,” Ashour says, “is just make all the major players in Tajikistan think that they can expand their influence without having some big brother in the neighborhood intervene to empower one side or the other.”

Tajik soldiers display weapons captured in Gorno-Badakhshan raids, in 2010.

Surely, in a larger sense, China and especially Russia feel that way too. In particular, the new aggressive “Monroe Doctrine” approach to the former Soviet lands which President Vladimir Putin made public earlier this year with his annexation of Crimea lends extra significance to any unrest in Soviet successor states. The possibility, or even the fear, that events are the work of Kremlin-directed agents provocateurs creating a pretext for Russian intervention or annexation, will help determine the progress of any conflict.  We already see this happening with the ongoing coup d’état situation in the unrecognized Russian puppet state of Abkhazia, on Georgia’s territory.  Tajik instability also serves Russian interests by making Tajiks feel they would be safer inside the new “Eurasian Union” trade bloc of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus inaugurated last week as a counterbalance to the European Union.  Putin has already baldly exploited territorial anxieties to arm-twist Armenia (a prospective Eurasian Union member) and Kazakhstan to pull closer to Russia.

Tajik-Americans angered by the lack of information coming out of the violence-torn
areas in their homeland demonstrate in front of the Tajik embassy in Washington, D.C.

Ashour added, “Tajikistan is really on the brink at the moment and I think without some kind of international pressure to start some serious reforms in the security sector, in the military sector, and the political system, I think this country may see another cycle of heavy violence.”

[You can read more about Gorno-Badakhshan 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.]

Imperialism, Not Democracy: Donetsk and Luhansk Vote Today at Russian Gunpoint

Voters in Luhansk, Ukraine, make their choice today at gunpoint (New York Times photo)

We at Springtime of Nations are in favor of regional, ethnic, and linguistic self-determination and the right of peoples to choose who governs them.  But that does not mean that every movement that invokes those principles is worth supporting.  The referenda being held in two oblasts (provinces) in Ukraine that have already declared themselves independent “people’s republics”—Donetsk and Lugansk (Luhansk, in Ukrainian)—are a case in point.

A few things have to be in place before a referendum on self-determination can be legitimate.  First, there must be freedom of the press and freedom to speak and organize and there must be independent bodies keeping watch on the voting process to ensure it is carried out properly.  Not only are those conditions not being met in Donetsk and Luhansk, but they cannot be met.  Those two oblasts—especially Donetsk, which, unlike Luhansk, is more or less completely out of the central Ukrainian government’s control—are effectively under military rule by a shadowy group of separatist activists.  These include local ethnic-Russian militants (many of them current or former members of far-right or far-left street gangs or terror groups), police and military who have defected to them, certainly mercenaries and special forces trained in Russia, and quite likely even regular Russian troops operating in disguise.  Most of the armed activists wear masks, and some exhibit such sophisticated equipment and training that the idea that they are not Russian-trained troops (which the Kremlin swears up and down is the case) is difficult to maintain.  In such a climate, it is impossible for citizens to feel that they can campaign or vote in any way that they please.

A Donetsk Republic flag

The Crimea referendum on March 16th failed to meet those criteria as well.  In some voting districts, the number of those voting “yes” to annexation by Russia exceeded the number of residents.  But the Russian military controlled the entire peninsula; although previous referenda clearly show that the majority of Crimean residents did and do prefer to be part of Russia, this vote was illegitimate.  In the Donetsk Oblast city of Slavyansk, which is under complete separatist control, the newly installed mayor, Vyachislav Ponomaryov, predicted—“with a gold-toothed smile,” as the New York Times put it—a “yes” vote of 100%.  Given the fact that everyone knows that many elements in the community are known to be against separation, this amounts to a bald-faced promise that the vote will be rigged.

Another important component of a legitimate vote on self-determination is that the separatism not be a mere cloak for the expansionist aims of a neighbor.  This was the problem with independence referenda in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region (now a de facto puppet state of Armenia) and in the pro-Russian pseudo-states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia (on Georgia’s territory) and Transnistria (on Moldova’s).  And just to show that we are not completely partisan, it has also been an inherently troubling factor in autonomy and independence movements in places as varied as Kosovo (a part of Serbia coveted by nationalists in Albania), the Miskito Indian autonomous region in Nicaragua (used as puppets of the United States during the 1980s), Sri Lanka (where the government of India has at times had a stake in establishing a separate Tamil state), Northern Cyprus (a puppet state of Turkey), and the ethnically Magyar (Hungarian) parts of Romania, where dreams of autonomy dovetail unsettlingly with neo-fascist dreams of a reestablished “greater Hungary.”  The very presence of such a dynamic does not mean any such vote is invalid, but it means that the relevant foreign power’s hands need to be seen to be withheld from the entire process.  In Donetsk and Luhansk the opposite is the case.  President Vladimir Putin’s grubby little fingerprints are all over every aspect of today’s referenda.

Kosovars love to wave Albanian flags.  Russia claims their independence
movement is a cover for Albanian expansionism.

Sometimes, a minority is so threatened with violence that it is necessary to push through a good-enough referendum and make some kind of forced separation from the parent country just to save lives.  This is the rationale that was used when the U.S. and the United Nations ushered South Sudan to independence in 2011 and, most notably, in the late 1990s when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) established the Republic of Kosovo, which declared full independence in 2008. Putin and his state-controlled media cite the Kosovo example constantly, to point up the West’s supposed hypocrisy in opposing his annexation of Crimea.  Putin claims that ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers are an endangered and oppressed minority in post-Soviet Ukraine and that Serbs were not really persecuting ethnic Albanians in Kosovo all that badly.  He is wrong on both counts.  There is no violence or oppression to speak of by Ukrainians against Russians in Ukraine to justify any kind of rebellion.

Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, Slovyansk’s coup-installed “mayor,” speaks to
the press beneath the Donetsk oblast flag (left) and the Slovyansk municipal flag (right).

Roman Lyagin, the pro-Russian election commissioner for the Donetsk People’s Republic, told reporters this week that the question on today’s ballot, “Do you support the act of self-rule for the People’s Republic of Donetsk?”, is open-ended and intentionally ambivalent. “ We win the right for self-determination,” he said. “The next step will be another referendum when we ask, ‘Do we want to join Russia? or do we want to join Ukraine? or do we want to become an independent state?’ There are many possibilities.”

But residents of Donetsk and Luhansk—only a third or so of whom, polls indicate, want to split from Ukraine—can be forgiven for not feeling that there are “many possibilities.”  Their oblasts have been overrun by armed men in masks.  No one in the world doubts the outcome of the vote.  This is not democracy.  This is an attempt by Russia to at least destabilize and weaken—at worst, to dismember and consume—a sovereign nation, Ukraine.  And there doesn’t seem much reason to think it won’t work.

Pavel Gubarev, “people’s governor” of Donetsk

[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, 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.  The book is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  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.]

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.]