By taking the New Year’s call from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Vladimir Putin hopes to deepen the split between those like the Ukrainian president who feel they must come hat in hand to the master in the Kremlin and those who have been fighting for five years against the Russian president’s efforts to occupy and destroy Ukraine, Vitaly Portnikov says.
And if that split becomes deep enough, the Ukrainian commentator says, the Kremlin leader hopes that it will spark a civil war in Ukraine, something that will not only justify Mr. Putin’s own actions but allow him to achieve his long-held and unchanging goal of destroying Ukrainian statehood (graniru.org/opinion/portnikov/m.278117.html).
Mr. Zelenskyy said he called Mr. Putin in order to follow up on the recent exchange of prisoners, but he could have called about that on another occasion when the conversation, the first new year’s exchange between the presidents of the two countries in years, would not have been so freighted with political meaning, Mr. Portnikov says.
In fact, the commentator continues, Mr. Zelenskyy wanted to call Mr. Putin on New Year’s “for one simple reason: this was a call to a ‘real’ president from someone who hardly considers himself a real president at all” and who still worse “hardly considers Ukraine a real state either.” Mr. Putin and Russia are entirely different.
Mr. Putin, whose “office is located in a sacred place for every Soviet and post-Soviet individual,” runs a state in which he acts without any doubts about his status and that of his country. He can punish those he wants to, and he can pardon those who appeal to him in the right way if that is what he wants.
Mr. Zelenskyy clearly hopes that “perhaps” Mr. Putin will “stop shooting, release prisoners and allow the little president of the little country to rule in his small place without obstacles.” This, of course, is “the simple logic of a small man who became president of a large country fighting for its chance to exist and remain Ukraine,” Mr. Portnikov writes.
“But the problem and tragedy of Ukraine is that this logic is no accident. And Zelenskyy himself is no accident either,” given that “a large segment of the residents of this big country view themselves as small people in a small non-state.” For such people, the commentator notes, “the word ‘patriot’ has become just as much a curse word as the word ‘nationalist’ once was.”
At the same time, however, there are many Ukrainians who do not think like this and do not support what Mr. Zelenskyy is doing. “Each such step by him ever more strongly deepens the gulf between the president and the patriotic part of society, and this means between the patriots of Ukraine and those who whose interests” Mr. Zelenskyy in fact represents.
According to Mr. Portnikov, “the Kremlin understands this perfectly.” And it hopes to use it to its advantage. Having failed to split Ukraine in 2013-2014, it now hopes to “ignite a real internal conflict among Ukrainians. Putin needs a civil war to justify himself and establish control over Ukraine after a new conflict.”
And because that is the case, he will always be willing to take “each new call of Zelenskyy’s.”
Paul Goble is a long-time specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia who has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau, as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The article above is reprinted with permission from his blog called “Window on Eurasia” (http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/).