One of the things about liberals, it turns out, is they love being right. This article in the Washington Post is a nice example of this vein of liberalism. The “analysis” is written by somone called Glenn who is described as a full-time “fact-checker” which would make us laugh, if we didn’t already know that in the strange upside-down world these people live in, “fact-checker” actually means propaganda writer.
The starting point for the article is comments by Trump’s envoy on the Ukraine war saying, “They’re Russian speaking. There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule”. Witkoff is apparently refering to all the occupied and claimed by Russia territories in Eastern Ukraine. For the record; if he is refering to Zaporiziah and Kherson provinces one can take issue in particular with the referendums; by the time they took place in September 2022, part of the population had already been displaced by war and the referendum was conducted during war time and by a power that one side would have regarded as an occupying power. And, these referendums, did not cover the full extent of the provinces. (This must also have been the case with Donetsk). These are not auspicious conditions for a referendum. Because of the previous history with the LDNR territories and established evidence, from polling, demographic evidence etc. I would have more confidence in referendums held in these provinces. For example; the Washington Post itself, produced survey material, in April 2022, (surveying had started before the hostilities broke out in February), which showed that in the LDNR if you combine joining Russia and independence there was a majority for leaving Ukraine. [1] Nonetheless, overall, the arguments about the legitimacy of the referendum in the LDNR, Zaropriziah and Kherson, given by the Russian Foreign Ministry [2] are legitimate and historically testable. These are themes which this site has constantly returned to. The population in Ukraine is, simply put, increasingly, both ethnic Russian and “pro-Russian”, or, at least, not Ukrainian nationalist, the further East you go. The Western backed coup in Kiev in 2014 led to a nationalist party coming to power who wanted to shape Ukraine in an (extreme?) Ukrainian nationalist mold. Such a policy, necessarily, alienated and excluded ethnic Russians and their fellow-travellers in Eastern Ukraine and the split in Ukraine was the inevitable result of this policy.
I would want to distinguish between legitimacy and validity. One can make a legally convincing case that the referendums, including the Crimea referendum, were not legally valid. This can be done by referring to Ukraine’s constitution and by focussing on those parts of international law which emphasize sovereignty. This is how the author of this Washington Post article seeks to establish the invalidity of all the aforementioned referendums. The Russian Foreign Ministry, for their side, point to other arguments; the UN Charter supports the right of self-determination of peoples. The UN ICJ set a precedent when they found that Kosovo could unilaterally declare independence from Serbia. It is an over-simplification but one could argue that the Washington Post is making technical arguments about Ukraine’s constitution and sovereignty and Russia is in effect countering with arguments which are more moral and are about legitimacy; what do people actually want. Of course; once a split has been engendered there are going to be people disappointed on both sides. You cannot have an amicable contested divorce.
The Washington Post article contains a host of lacunas which are necessary to trying to assert its claims about Russia’s “ludicrous” and “fraudulent” referendums. The first one is the massive elephant in the room; Ukraine started to unravel from a democratic process when a foreign-backed coup in 2014 saw an elected President, (popular in the now contested territories in the East), chased from power. European mediated attempts to broker a democratic transition of power were accepted and then, within 24 hours, actively repudiated by the coup organisers. The next massive lacuna relates to the Minsk agreements; a set of agreements backed by European leaders, which would have seen regional autonomy for the LDNR territory. This agreement represented an attempt to solve the problem using a model often used in Europe and around the world to balance competing interests of a national government and a significant minority. The agreements were never implemented by Kiev and in late 2021 were being openly repudiated. Subsequently, the German sponsor, Angela Merkel claimed that she had deliberately supported the process in bad faith in order to buy Kiev time to arm. Then, there is the entire set of lacunas which are a kind of virtual genocide, in that they simply ignore the reality of the millions, (literally), of people in Eastern Ukraine who are not part of the Ukrainian nationalist movement and who, in vary degrees, want to be part of Russia or, at least autonomous or independent of Kiev. Western opinion polling confirms the results of what the WP calls a “ludicrous” referendum in Crimea. Indeed the numbers produced by Western polling are so close to the officially announced results of that referendum that it is clear that the referendum was an honest reflection of the popular mood.
The author of the WP article also claims that Russia violated the Budapest Memorandum, which they were a signatory to and which stated that Ukraine’s borders and sovereignty would be respected. The author, naturally, did not cite Putin’s response to this point; his argument is that the coup in Kiev in 2014 represented a totally new situation and a break in continuity with the states which had originally signed this document, and, therefore, it was no longer valid. Putin does not need to do this; every state in the world, will, in reality, act in terms of its national security interests regardless of the UN Charter, (or any interpretation of it), or any other treaties. The West does this all the time; and goes further, carrying out interventions far from its borders justified either in terms of tenuous claims of national security or, simply, as “humanitarian interventions”. And this is the point; the “fact-checking” of the Washington Post is simply a sophist exercise in making the liberals feel that they are “in the right”. A kind of smug and self-righteous piece of dry legalese which ignores historical and political realities and indeed the actual interests of millions of actual people.
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