It’s been a long time since I’ve watched football: yesterday
evening, as Bayern Munich left Arsenal behind in the Champions League, I was
distracted by the many Gazprom advertisements lining the field. Gazprom is a Russian
energy giant. In 2000, Putin restructured Gazprom to come under increased state
control. He appointed Dmitry Medvedev as the chair. Medvedev is the current
Prime Minister of the Russian Federation.
On the other side of the border, Yulia Tymoshenko rose to
political power after a career as one of the richest people in Ukraine.
Tymoshenko set up the Ukrainian Petrol Company in 1991 and in 1995 reorganised
this company into the United Energy Systems of Ukraine, which, under her leadership,
became the main importer of Russian natural gas to Ukraine (1995-1997),
negotiating with Gazprom. Tymoshenko’s imprisonment was a political move by
Yanukovych, but she is firmly a part of the political and economic culture that
has devastated Ukraine since independence in 1991. Similarly, the hero of the
2004-2005 Orange Revolution, Viktor Yushchenko, was the Governor of the
National Bank of Ukraine in 1993. Although consistently a controversial figure
in Ukrainian politics, he was nominated by Leonard Kuchma to be Prime Minister
in 1999. After the Orange Revolution, and his election in 2005, he quite
quickly fell in popularity and power due to not living up to the high
expectations of the Revolution.
Putin, and maybe Europe and USA as well,
is afraid of allowing people to actually think about what happened and is
happening now in Maidan. The Maidan collectives have successfully self-organised alternative
community management – there are medical clinics, food distribution, safety
patrol units, talks, concerts, art projects and music collectives. Thus, Crimea
is necessary to divert attention from the uprising and revolt against a corrupt
paradigm of government and governance. Crimea has become a playground for a
military and diplomatic game, a retreat to the familiar rhetoric of the Cold
War imaginary.
But what of international law? Moscow and Kyiv signed the
bilateral Treaty
of Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian
Federation in 1997. Under Article
2, the neighbours agreed to "respect each other's territorial integrity,
and confirm the inviolability of the borders existing between them." The
Friendship Treaty ensures "the protection of the ethnic, cultural,
linguistic, and religious originality of national minorities on their
territory" and the creation of "conditions for the encouragement of
that originality." This presumably refers to the large Russian minority in
Ukraine as well as Ukrainian communities in Russia. Yes, Russia has veto power
in the Security Council. Yes, the United States and Britain have acted as aggressors
and used foreign intervention in contradiction to International Law. But this
does not mean that the law does not continue to exist. Yet currently, political
leaders prefer to play back and forth, breaking international agreements with
impunity. Are we left with no other option but to
throw our hands up and agree that these Treaties and agreements mean nothing?
As we have seen, history is full of broken Treaties.
Meanwhile, in Simferopol on Crimea, a young Russian woman
working at a reception hotel desk asks a reporter whether she has interviewed
all of the "fascists" in Ukraine. They're planning bombings in
Crimea, she says. They want to blow up all the Russians. She says she heard
this on Russian television.
Another Russian woman living with her family in Crimea provides
an opposite perspective: "Putin is not a Russian, he's a KGB spy. He has
no nationality."
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