The conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation broke out amid a political crisis in Ukraine in late November In Crimea, masked Russian soldiers without insignia began action to take control of all the strategic points in the region.
The international community did not recognize this annexation. At the same time, a destabilization operation was launched in eastern Ukraine. Armed groups without insignia under Russian control supported the demonstrators calling for the independence of these regions. This vote, held outside of the framework established by Ukrainian legislation and marred by a number of irregularities, was considered illegal by Ukraine and was not recognized by the international community including the Russian Federation.
Diplomatic negotiations began in June Minsk II sets out the operational stages for implementing Minsk I and resolving the conflict. Its intention is to advance the security situation on the ground and the political process jointly without preconditions. Ultimately, its aim is for the separatist-held zones to be re-integrated under Ukrainian sovereignty with decentralized organization.
United Nations Security Council Resolution , which was adopted on 17 February , endorsed this Package of Measures and called for its full implementation. The adoption of Minsk II resulted in a significant drop in the number of victims, with three-quarters of the approximately 13, deaths caused by the conflict occurring before the adoption of the Package. Tensions continue to fuel the Russian-Ukrainian conflict on a regular basis. In Crimea, Ukraine has not managed to fully restore its sovereignty and its territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders.
In eastern Ukraine, repeated ceasefire violations directly threaten civilians and the humanitarian situation is still very bad as winter approaches, particularly with regard to the most vulnerable people, including the elderly. The year has also seen the election of Volodymyr Zelenskiy as President of Ukraine. Moreover, Russia and Ukraine proceeded to exchange 70 political prisoners different from those held in relation to the conflict since , including the director Oleh Sentsov and the 24 Ukrainian sailors held since 25 November following a serious naval incident in the southern part of the Kerch Strait.
France does not and will not recognize the illegal annexation of Crimea: the redrawing of international borders by force is a breach of international law and of the commitments made by the Russian Federation. France deplores the worsening of the human rights situation in the peninsula, which especially affects the Crimean Tatars. It calls for the release of all persons detained in violation of international law.
The state tries to fulfill social expectations following from desired identity. More than that, such mode of behavior is, essentially, seen as rational, both by the acting states and other actors. At the same time, when a state is dissatisfied with identity prescribed to it by others, or when identity narratives of different states are conflicting or mutually exclusive, their actions are characterized by the high level of unpredictability as they strive to change the existing social arrangements.
The effects of such attempts depend on the structure of the shared knowledge itself. If it has produced a high level of mutual trust between the actors, and their identities are inter-dependent, the perpetrator is likely to face a collective response defending the existing arrangement. What matters is its social structure, which varies across anarchies.
The anarchy of friends differs from one of enemies, one of self-help from one of collective security, and these are all constituted by structures of shared knowledge. I will argue that social environment, in which the interstate interactions between Russia and Ukraine are taking place, resembles an anarchy of rivals, forcing the actors to engage themselves into the reproduction of the conflict-nurturing discoursing practices, even when the dispute itself originates, for example, purely from the clash of economic or even private interests that can be settled successfully by the quantitative bargaining on the elite level.
Search for Russian identity, or rather its formation was inherited task for its political and cultural elite. At the same time the coherent base for such formation was absent: the clash between Russian Empire and USSR legacies seems to be indeed fundamental despite the temptation for Russian leadership to construct the continuity Kortunov This view is primarily based on the assumption that the peculiarities of Russian empires both the tsarist and the Soviet ones diverted Russians from the task of their own consolidation and nation building, while conquering and ruling huge territories with diverse populations Tolz , The loss of these territories and people left Russia without the identity of its own, and the crises was enhanced by the structural drive for Russia to establish its succession both from the Russian Empire and the USSR Fofanova and Morozov , while the Soviet identity was partly constructed through the negation of the former.
These clashes are not newly created by the Soviet Union collapse, but rather enhanced by it. More than that, the ties between the state and the people are perceived as organic and are described in terms of continuation. The persistence of this paradigm of thinking in Russian contemporary public discourse can be illustrated by the position of Nikita Mikhalkov, a leading Russian filmmaker, who occupies several public or given the character of the state-civil society relations in Russia rather semi-official positions ranging from the Head of the Russian Cinematographers' Union to the Head of the Public Council under the Ministry of Defense.
State ideology was inseparable from the Orthodox world view, from the symphonies of the Kingdom and Priesthood. It is worth noticing that in line with this understanding that the unity of the Russian land, its people and the religion is organic, contemporary high Russian Orthodox Church ROC clergy strives to enlarge its influence far beyond the spiritual realm in the society.
The inverse process is possible as well. An important implication of this in the context of the search for Russian identity in the post-Cold War era is that the contradictions between Russian Empire and the Soviet Union identity complexes are not as insuperable as it may seem for the first sight. Consider, for example, that in Russian Orthodox Church canonized the last Russian emperor Nikolaj II and his family, despite the fact he ordered to shoot into the crowd during the peace demonstration in , killing and wounding several thousand innocents.
At the same time, the textbook reform of revises the role of Stalin 10, the cruelest representative of the regime that executed Nikolaj II, and portrays the dictator in the more positive way than ever after Brezhnev times. Another important aspect of the lines of identity debates in Russia is that the Liberal and the Romantic nationalist frameworks are incompatible on their core questions Neumann , Rewriting history of Russia.
If so, resting upon Romantic nationalism ideas, Russia today can not define itself in terms of a nation-state not only due to the contradicting historical legacies, but also because the dominant so called Romantic nationalist framework fundamentally rejects this type of identity. Both of these visions imply the perception of Russia as a civilization-like entity, playing the main role in a kind of world teleological historical development.
Orthodox Christianity. That is why for the purpose of this research I will concentrate on the European- centered vision of Russia in the further discussion.
It is interesting to note that Kyiv is even named as the second capital of Russian state in the Wikipedia article after Novgorod. However, despite these praised ancient that is medieval European origins, Russia entered the scene of the European powers late, when the leading parts had been already casted. According to Neumann , the first instance of such challenge by Muscovites appeared in the middle 15th century. Muscovy, on the contrary, defended it till the end and, thus, was morally superior to the rest of Europe.
Both doctrines strengthened the perception of the Russian land zemlya russkaya being sacred as it hosted the only remaining true church that is the state church.
However, Europeans were, for the most part, not eager to grant recognition to Russia More than that, Europe expected Russia to comply with the standards Russia did not take part in establishing including those of democracy , limiting its role to the norm-taker position Haukkala and imposing on Russia the view, which was inherently conflicting with its ambitious self-perception. According to the provisions of the constructivist theory, the unsatisfied recognition demand should be expected to push Russia to challenge the existing international structures.
Ukraina — ne Rossija. Moscow: Vremya, 17 For example, see Valko Kravchenko. Svitlo z Ukrajiny. Teofan Prokopovych. History of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Kyiv: KM Academia, As for the opposition, or, at least differentiation of Ukrainian history from the Soviet grand-narrative of glorious mighty and achievements, the case of Holodomor — the interpretation of the artificial famine of in Ukraine — logically comes in focus.
Interestingly, when compared to the analogues entry on Russia, the Wikipedia article on Ukraine in its Ukrainian-language version looks less state-centered, concentrating mostly on the history of the territory which is already called Ukrainian referring to medieval era , rather than the state Indeed, Ukraine features the sharp identity divide between its Central and Western provinces on the one side, and the Southern and Eastern ones on the other.
Eastern Ukrainians tend to prefer the opposite views. Consider, for example, the mere fact that among the ten Ukrainian Ministers of Foreign Affairs holding the position since only one was born in the Eastern part of the country, while other nine including the current Minister Mr.
Hryshchenko represent either Central regions and Kyiv city or the Western provinces. More substantially, as Jan G. Janmaat concludes from his analysis of the two generations of the Ukrainian high-school history textbooks published from till , 20 Ukrayina. Yushchenko should be rather seen as a more diligent follower of the previously established course with this regard.
This being said, however, we should not exclude the possibility that the situation might be changing now, with openly pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych largely in charge of Ukrainian foreign and humanitarian policy. Soon after his inauguration, Mr. Yanukovych stated that he would not insist on the international recognition of Holodomor as the genocide against Ukrainians and infamously deleted a link to a site dedicated to Holodomor victims from his official webpage.
However, in several months the link reappeared on the presidential site. In general, the recent developments in the Russian-Ukrainian relations support the proposed here view that the previously promoted by the state variant of Ukrainian identity was perceived as a threat by Russia, as well as pro-Russian forces in Ukraine.
For instance, the appointment of the current Minister of Education of Ukraine Dmitriy Tabachnyk, who is famous for his anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian stance, as well as dubious academic credentials, was accompanied by persistent rumors in Ukrainian media that his candidacy for the Ministry was one of the conditions Mr.
Medvedev or Mr. Putin set in front of Ukrainian President Yanukovych for the discounted gas prices from Gazprom during the spring negotiations The numerous voices of approval of Mr. Russia and Ukraine: Expressions of Identity Clash in Public Discourse From the outline of the identity anchors of the Russian and Ukrainian states we can identify several aspects that potentially can generate conflicting patterns of interactions between them.
The first point concerns the meaning of the Russian Imperial, and more vividly, the Soviet past. In this section I will highlight some vivid examples of clashes in public discourse that occurred between Russia and Ukraine and can be explained by the model of identity dynamic discussed in this paper. The interpretation of events of suddenly became a cornerstone of Russia-Azeri, as well as Russia-Kyrgyz relationships, when President Medvedev allegedly firmly discouraged the Central Asian leaders from recognizing Holodomor By Laurent Mihu.
The mere fact that the senior officials of both states come back to the point unworthy of discussion from any practical perspective on the highest possible level compels us to refer to the identity analysis in order to explain this pattern.
I argue that we would have won the war anyway, because we are a country of winners. However, a reaction of the most dedicated pro-Russian force in Ukraine, that is the Communist Party CPU , seems to be the most telling.
Although Russian history boasts a myriad of glorious episodes, many people associate its might and successes solely with Joseph Stalin. Russia's unwillingness to confront the whole truth about its 20th century history hints at an inferiority complex. Furthermore, it encourages other countries, primarily in Eastern Europe, to force their interpretations of history on Russia.
This is unacceptable for a country that did not lose that war and which has solid reasons to consider itself one of the few fully sovereign world powers capable of dealing with internal problems without foreign assistance. Therefore, we should show initiative
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