V- E Day celebrations explain past, present
World War II increasingly slips into the background for much of the world, but not in Russia, not this weekend. On May 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin will ensure that none in his domestic audience has forgotten, nor anyone abroad who happens to be paying attention. To celebrate V- E Day, nearly 15,000 Russian service members and their newest military hardware will parade across or fly above Red Square. By the end of the day, the connection between past and present will be clear.
Fed a diet of “Saving Private Ryan” and “Band of Brothers,” Americans can be excused for not knowing that the Soviet Union contributed most toward defeating Nazi Germany. Of approximately 60 million wartime deaths worldwide, from half to a third came from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Russian people today have every right to be mindful of these facts.
Putin, who once called the demise of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” may possibly describe Stalin’s victory over Hitler as “the greatest geopolitical success of the 20th century.” With speeches and parades covered by his PR machine, Putin will twist the World War II narrative to advocate international power politics, glorify war ( not just World War II), legitimize the use of force and honor sacrifice. His images of 1941- 45 will represent harbingers of future war, use of force and sacrifice.
Missing from the viewing stand will be top Western leaders, who flocked to Moscow for the 60th anniversary in 2005; numerous third- rate dictators, notably North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, will take their place.
The main reason for the different guest list is Putin’s nationalistic Novorossiya ( New Russia) project. As Saturday’s celebrations will confirm, a large portion of the long- suffering Russian people support this policy. However, neighboring countries do not have the same rose- colored opinion. Sure, Putin can buy off some of them with Russian energy resources or membership in his new Greater Eurasian CoProsperity Sphere economic union. But other neighbors would rather exist without his chest thumping or bullying, free to choose their own path to the future. Chief among these is Ukraine.
By most measures, Ukraine is far from healthy and may not want overly close relations with the West in any event. Since 1991, it has been on a rollercoaster ride, alternating between Western- oriented Orange and Maidan revolutions or the cleptocratic but disarmingly telegenic regimes favored by other former Soviet republics. It suffers from deep divisions: east- west tensions, and dueling social engineering schemes or Russian and Ukrainian historians debating “we were here first,” to name a few.
In 1994 and 1997, with Boris Yeltsin as president, Russia signed treaties with the sovereign nation of Ukraine, but now Putin is loathe to even recognize the country as a legitimate state.
Yet Ukraine is not such a failed state that its government could not have dealt with indigenous separatists in its Donetsk and Luhansk regions; these rebels are similar to Islamic State fighters, loosely associated goons with assault rifles in pickup trucks, on their own capable of little more than terrorizing civilians and occupying uninhabited countryside. But Putin deployed “volunteers,” equipped with heavy weapons, which exacerbated the situation and skewed the battle calculus in favor of the separatists, exposing the weaknesses of the Ukrainian authorities. So far both western Europe, which put security behind commercialism, and the war- weary United States have concluded that Ukraine “is not worth the bones of a single NATO grenadier” ( to paraphrase Bismarck) and have rightly eschewed war as a solution.
The United States is not squeaky clean when it comes to foreign policy moves that, to an objective observer, look uncomfortably like Putin’s annexation of the Crimea. However, in our interconnected age, Americans cannot consider the dispute between Russia and the Ukraine “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of which we know nothing ” as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin described the Nazi annexation of Sudetenland in 1938.
Even in the Pacific Century, events in Europe — central and eastern Europe included — matter to us. The crisis between Russia and Ukraine is a big problem for American interests and values. There are many negative measures to promote change in Putin’s rule- breaking behavior short of war still open to American and European leaders. More promising and on the positive side, the West can use positive approaches to strengthen the people of Ukraine and eastern Europe, encourage competent administration, provide financial support and increase cultural exchanges, i. e., be active in the region more than only during crises.
Ukraine has always existed in a dangerous corner of Europe, as Saturday’s V- E Day celebrations will remind us. Solutions to challenges need to be appropriate for 2015, not 1945.