Richard Robin is the director of the Russian language program.
Imagine that you could watch only two news channels: Fox or RT, the Kremlin’s cable mouthpiece. How would you know what’s going on in the world?
That’s how I feel watching the Western and Russian media coverage of the events in Ukraine over the last week.
The Western media shows us brave Ukrainian patriots who toppled a corrupt, unresponsive pro-Russian regime. These underdogs are fighting to preserve the nation’s territorial integrity against encroachment from a rapacious powerful neighbor who wants to bring back the Soviet Empire.
On Russian television, the victors in Kiev are radicals, fascists and extreme nationalists, hell-bent on repressing ethnic Russian majorities in the eastern and southern parts of the country.
Lost in the battle of the competing narratives are some defining facts. First, that Crimea is even a part of Ukraine today is a fluke of relatively recent history. Sixty years ago, former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev presented the mostly Russian-speaking peninsula to Ukraine at a time when such a gift was purely symbolic. The Crimea has in fact been a part of a truly independent Ukraine for a bit more than two decades.
Second, the populations of the industrial cities of the eastern part of Ukraine are overwhelmingly Russian. Finally, the deposed Viktor Yanukovich, an ethnic Russian who is less comfortable speaking Ukrainian, was democratically elected in 2010 — after the failure of the leaders of the pro-Western Orange Revolution of 2004 to meet the country’s rising expectations surrounding the country’s Westernization.
The corrupt, vengeful and ultimately incompetent Yanukovich was deposed himself — for welshing on a promise to bring his country closer to the European Union.
Now, none of these circumstances make heroes of anyone. Putin, who, like many Russians, regrets the breakup of the Soviet Union, sees the unrest in Ukraine as an opportunity to bring all or part of the country from the “near abroad” – as Russia calls the rest of the ex-USSR – closer to or wholly into Russia. To Western eyes, he’s a nuclear-armed strongman who stuck his hand into the Crimean cookie jar too eagerly and too soon.
But Putin’s bear-step changes neither the region’s demography nor its national leanings. The solution for areas like the Crimea lies in Puerto Rico, where every few years they hold a plebiscite to take the people’ pulse on statehood, independence or commonwealth status. Of course, guaranteeing an honest vote in many places in the old Soviet empire is no cakewalk. But it’s better than a constant military drumbeat.
