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Mykola RiabchukWierd Duk's silence on Ukraine is deafeningDutch journalist Wierd Duk thinks the West bears great responsability
for Russia's behaviour towards Ukraine. The Ukrainian writer and analyst Mykola Riabchuk is adamant about his 'colonial attitude'
towards smaller nations, that don't seem to have a say in their own destiny. In
fact Ukraine is conspicuously absent in Duk's narrative. Reading Wierd Duk’s article on
RaamopRusland is quite a painful experience. Especially if your observation
position is not located on the comfortable European heights of Realpolitik but
on the bottom of the Ukrainian battlefields, where a few thousand civilians,
including 300 passengers of MH17, have become ‘collateral damage’ and more than
one million IDP’s have lost their houses, jobs, and belongings. And where still
every day soldiers are killed or wounded. War graves near Slavyansk in the
Donbass, autumn 2014
What is strikingly missing in Duk’s
deliberations is Ukraine, and the silence is deafening. Omissions can be
as important in rhetorical strategies as words. In his article any
reference to the war, to its victims and culprits, would immediately put in
question his central argument: that the West shares equal responsibility for
the crisis with Russia, and that the only way to improve the deeply
deteriorated relations is to recognize Russia’s ‘strategic interests’ in the
post-Soviet space. The facts on the ground completely
undermine this thesis of ‘equal responsibility’. For it is definitely not the
West who bullies its neighbors, annexes its territories, and wages insidious
undeclared wars against them just because of dissatisfaction with their
domestic or international choices. Whatever can be said about Western
adventures in other countries (and Wierd Duk says a lot, using highly
questionable analogies and equations from the Kremlin propagandistic playbook),
the simple question remains: why should we, Ukrainians, be responsible for some
(alleged) Western wrongdoings in other parts of the world, and why should these
(alleged) wrongdoings legitimize Russian invasion, occupation and extermination
of our people? Why would the fact that somebody presumably made mistakes give
Moscow carte blanche to retaliate in my country? Why is ‘an awful lot of
sticks’ that the West presumably ‘handed to Russia to beat its opponent with’
(as Duk argues) used not against thém but against us? Only big players count
The problem with his (and all the
Putinversteher’s) arguments is that they consider international relations
exclusively in terms of 19th-century Realpolitik that divides the world
‘naturally’ into spheres of influence, and take only big and powerful players
seriously. In this millenarian struggle of global rivals there is no room for
smaller states, their national interests, sovereignty, and freedom of choice.
They are objects, not subjects. Pawns on the global chessboard. ‘Lesser people
of the lesser world,’ as Edward Said may have put it. The very language that Wierd Duk uses
to describe these pawns shows his implicit bias and ‘white-man’ supremacy. The
former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, is derogatively dubbed
‘Misha’, and Polish former minister of foreign affairs Radoslaw Sikorski, ‘the
glamourboy of Eastern-European diplomacy’, is nicknamed ‘Radek’. Would the
author apply the same kind of nicknames to Putin (Vova), or Yeltsin (Boria), or
Gorbachev (Misha)? Certainly not. Because he knows – and his readers too – who
counts in this game, and who is just a clown. Governor of Odessa Micheil
Saakasjvili, derogatively called 'Misha'
The same goes for politics: in the
authors narrative it is only Russia that is entitled to legitimate ‘national
interests’. Those of Ukraine and Georgia are downplayed as ‘overtures to the
West’ (funny, yeah?), while Western policy vis-a-vis these states is similarly
ridiculed as ‘the Western flirtations’ and ‘the carrot of NATO membership’
(which implies that these nations are not driven by any legitimate security
concerns but are merely tricked by Western pimps and stupidly manipulated, like
circus donkeys, by American ‘carrots’). With a special excitement, the author
quotes Putin’s infamous words about Saakashvili: ‘I’ll hang him by his balls!’
and explains that ‘Misha overplayed his hand by bombing targets in the
separatist region of South-Ossetia’, so ‘the Russians struck hard and annexed
two Georgian regions’ (in fact, Saakashvili ‘overplayed his hand’ far less than
Vladimir Putin nine years earlier, when he invaded the separatist region of
Chechnia, the closest analogue to South Ossetia. But again it is very unlikely
that Duk would ever apply the same terms to the Russian leader.) In Duk’s interpretation of the
events, a simple hatred of the leader of a neighboring country or
dissatisfaction with his policies is reason enough to ‘strike hard’ – without any
international or, at least, the author’s condemnation. Rather, he tends to
downplay any villainy the Kremlin commits: ‘After all, Putin had plans for
Ukraine: the country was to play a vital role in the Eurasian Union (EAU) he
had envisaged.’ Whether Ukrainians had any plans for themselves is no matter of
concern to Duk. The logic is pretty familiar: it is
not the rapist who bears the guilt but his victim who declined to respond
properly to his expectations. And, of course, the West bears its share of blame
because it manipulated a gullible maiden by inculcating in her poor head
Western ideas of freedom, dignity and sovereignty – as we all know absolutely
inappropriate in this part of the world. Subtle rhetorics
Wierd Duk is not a Kremlin
propagandist, so he does not try to absolve Putin from all his wrongdoings. His
rhetorical strategy is much subtler: first, he relativizes everything by
putting equal responsibility on the West and Russia, – as if Western soft power
in Eastern Europe in any way matches the hard power of Russian commandos,
kalashnikovs and rocket systems. And secondly he carefully twists the language
to downplay Putin’s crimes as minor excesses of an authoritarian strongman.
Just look how selectively he compiles a list of Putin’s wrongdoings to ridicule
any comparison of the Russian leader with real criminals: ‘Here [i.e. in the West] Putin's way
of dealing with corrupt oligarchs, the arrest and conviction of women’s punk
band Pussy Riot ... the attacks on the free press and on opposition leaders,
and the controversial Russian anti-gay legislation were reason enough to accuse
Putin of being a contemporary Adolf Hitler,’ writes Duk. Bridge in Moscow where opposition
politician Boris Nemtsov was killed
Putin certainly is not a Hitler – for
too many and too obvious reasons. But if anybody would judge Mr Putin
seriously, he would hardly put on top of the list of offenses his anti-gay legislation
or the persecution of Pussy Riot. I personally would start with Putin’s
analogue of the Reichstag fire – the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and
Volgodonsk, with quite a strong evidence implicating the complicity of the FSB.
Next I would probably list the genocidal war in Chechnia, where whole villages
were erased from the earth (journalist Anna Politkovskaya and a few other
investigators paid with their lives trying to collect evidences of these
crimes). Apart from Politkovskaya, Nemtsov, Magnitsky and Litvinenko I would
mention dozens of other opponents of Putin – victims of what Wierd Duk so
elegantly calls ‘the attacks on the free press and on opposition leaders’.
Finally, I would definitely mention Putin’s unprovoked war with Ukraine, that is
far more serious than anti-gay legislation or ‘dealing with corrupt oligarchs’,
of which clan Putin himself is part and patron. All the subsequent arguments in the
author’s article are derivatives of his general world-view where national
interests of big powers reign supreme and where no notions of justice,
equality, sovereignty are applicable to the smaller and weaker states. Within
this world, Russia may look paranoid, but at the same time its worries about
presumed, however incredible, stationing of Western troops in Ukraine are
legitimate. On the other hand, Ukraine’s worries about the all too real
deployment of Russian troops in Crimea, Transnistria and Belarus are
groundless, as are its endeavours to enhance its own security.
The largely mythical ‘encirclement’
of Russia by imagined enemies is taken utterly seriously, while the real
encirclement of Ukraine by troups of a profoundly hostile and aggressive state
are being dismissed as mere ‘Russophobia’. Classical supremacist approach
Needless to say that such an approach
is classically colonial – insofar as it divides people into those who are
entitled to sovereignty and those whose freedom depends on the sovereigns’
goodwill and arbitrarily established ‘spheres of influence’. All the talking
about EU or NATO expansion as allegedly harming ‘Russian interests’ implicitly
means that only Russia has ‘national interests’, but the same does not apply to
Estonia, Poland, Georgia, or Ukraine. Hence all calls to accommodate Russia
by acknowledging her ‘strategic interests’ boil down to grant it a free hand to
manage post-Soviet space as it pleases. Duk doesn’t state this explicitly, but
it is exactly what he implies: Putin’s Russia would hardly accept anything less
than a carte blanche.
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