US president Donald Trump’s pledge to end Russia’s war in Ukraine is proving somewhat trickier to fulfil than he had expected. So far two tentative deals have been agreed - sort of - by both sides but neither appears to have actually come into force. 
 
Russia’s Vladimir Putin - wily old fox that he is - is playing a cunning game, offering a semblance of agreement to proposals then adding so many conditions that any accord becomes impossible to implement. While Trump congratulates himself on reaching a deal, he appears not to notice that the Kremlin keeps kicking his ball into the long grass.
 
First there was Ukraine’s 11 March agreement to a full 30-day ceasefire if Russia also accepted the terms. Such was Putin’s obfuscation that some media outlets initially reported that he had agreed, while others said he refused, and the whole idea seems now to have dropped off the discussion agenda.
 
Following the shuttle negotiations in Saudi Arabia earlier this week, both sides undertook to halt attacks on energy infrastructure and on maritime operations in the Black Sea. But interpretations of the agreements differed between the Russian, Ukrainian and US versions in several key elements. 
 
Russia claimed the ban on energy strikes began on 18 March and said it had recalled its warplanes, but then launched fresh attacks before the ink was even dry; it has struck Ukraine’s energy sites on eight separate occasions since. Its commitment to the Black Sea deal is also in doubt after it later imposed conditions relating to the lifting of sanctions on its agricultural exports before agreeing to implement it. 
 
It’s worth noting that both pledges made so far benefit Russia more than Ukraine. Kyiv has achieved notable success over the past year or so in pushing Russia out of the western part of the Black Sea to facilitate its own grain exports, and in targeting Russian oil refineries and military energy facilities in long-range attacks. Even if fully implemented, neither deal would affect the war on the front lines or diminish the relentless Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure.
 
Putin is dragging his feet in the negotiations precisely because he has no desire to settle for peace just yet. What he really wants out of any potential peace deal is territory. The Kremlin is stepping up its efforts to consolidate control over the four Ukrainian regions it partially occupies - which amount to about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. 
 
A decree that Putin signed on 20 March is the latest step in the Russification of the illegally occupied regions. The decree mandates that Ukrainian citizens “illegally” staying in Russia must obtain Russian documents or leave. In other words, Ukrainians who refuse to accept Russian passports and citizenship will be kicked out, or to put it another way, the regions will be ethnically cleansed. 
 
The issue of the occupied Ukrainian territory was something the Russians were keen to discuss with the US delegation in Saudi Arabia this week, as Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and chief Russia negotiator, unwittingly revealed in an interview with the far-right political commentator Tucker Carlson on 21 March.
 
“They’re Russian-speaking…There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of people indicated they want to be under Russian rule,” Witkoff said, parroting Russian disinformation. Displaying a shocking ignorance for someone involved in such high-level negotiations, Witkoff was unable to name the four regions in question, referring to “these so-called four regions - Donbas, Crimea… and there’s two others”. He didn’t even get the first two right: the four regions that Russia illegally annexed in 2022 are Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
 
Witkoff also muddled the concept of Russian-speaking Ukrainians with ethnic Russians, and made the assumption that those who speak Russian would ally themselves with Russia, which is far from the case. Equating Russian speakers with Russians who support the war, and using language as a motivation for the war, is an oft repeated chapter in the Russian playbook. My own Ukrainian relatives are Russian speakers; they most definitely are not Russian sympathisers.
 
The referendums that Witkoff referred to, held in September 2022, were a sham, secured by the Russian military amid widespread voter intimidation - often at gunpoint, and contravened both Ukrainian and Russian law. Freedom of speech and assembly were denied, no procedures were in place to guarantee the safety and confidentiality of voters. Many pro-Ukrainian voters were persecuted, some were even murdered. No independent observers were present and there were no systems to prevent voter fraud.
 
The BBC reported at the time that in some towns, Russian soldiers with guns stood with a ballot box in the main square to collect votes. Elsewhere, they went door to door. "You have to answer verbally, and the soldier marks the answer on the sheet and keeps it,” one woman recounted.
 
Voting was hastily organised in a matter of days and took place only in the parts of the four regions that were under Russian control - those living in areas of the four regions still held by Ukraine did not have a voice. In spite of this, the Kremlin claimed that the referendums gave Moscow the right to annex the four regions in their entirety. At that time, Russia occupied most of Luhansk and Kherson regions, but only around 60% of Donetsk, and in Zaporizhzhia it has never even controlled the state capital. The city of Kherson (capital of the region of the same name) was occupied by the Russians at the start of the full-scale invasion but liberated in November 2022, prompting thousands of residents to take to the streets in celebration.
 
Russia claimed that 99% of voters in Donetsk region were in favour of becoming part of Russia, 98% in Luhansk, 87% in Kherson and 93% in Zaporizhzhia. The results were recognised by only two countries - Russia and North Korea, neither of them known for being a beacon of democracy.
 
“Any annexation of a state's territory by another state resulting from the threat or use of force is a violation of the principles of the UN Charter and international law,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the time. “The so-called referendums cannot be called a genuine expression of the popular will.”
 
Steve Witkoff, it would seem, disagrees.

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Photo by FlyD on Unsplash
 
 

Today marks three years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and in the last two weeks the conflict has suddenly been propelled back to the top of the news agenda and into the public consciousness again.

US president Donald Trump’s love-in with Russia’s Vladimir Putin has upended all previously held expectations about the war’s future and potential peace negotiations. Just as they were three years ago, Ukrainians are staring down the barrel of a gun, feeling the full weight of the existential threat facing their country. Ukrainian sovereignty and its existence as an independent country are once again in serious doubt, as they were in February 2022. Then, a 35-mile-long column of tanks was heading towards Kyiv from the Belarusian border and the Russians were aiming to assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky and install a puppet leader as president of Ukraine.

“How do I begin to describe what it feels like here, on the ground? It feels oddly similar to these very days three years ago,” says Olga Rudenko, editor-in-chief of the Kyiv Independent. “That anxious February of 2022, filled with a buildup to a disaster. We saw it coming closer but didn’t want to believe it would happen – it seemed so insane, impossible to imagine. A military invasion to take over a free country? Impossible. Just as impossible as it is to believe that the leader of the free world will side with the Russian dictator. And yet, it’s happening.”

For three years, Ukrainians have stood up to the Russian aggressors. The resilience and defiance of the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian people has shocked and impressed much of the world. Since February 2022, nearly 50,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed on the battlefield, as well as thousands of civilians. Eighty percent of Ukrainians have personal experience of loss, be it a close relative, friend or acquaintance. Ukrainians cannot allow themselves to believe that the carnage of this brutal war is all for nothing.

In the few short weeks since Trump’s inauguration, he has upended the geopolitical principles that have been in place since the end of World War II and in doing so, he appears to have pivoted the US from an ally of Ukraine to a foe.

Many Ukrainians were justifiably frustrated with former president Joe Biden. His regime furnished Ukraine only with sufficient military assistance to prolong the fighting, not enough to win the war. Had Biden been willing to supply more sophisticated weaponry earlier, before the Russians had time to build their formidable lines of defence, he could have saved lives, territory and, probably, money in the long run. But for all that, Ukrainians always knew the US was on their side.

One can only guess at the content of the infamous 90-minute phone call between Trump and Putin, but the Russian president was clearly very persuasive. From that moment on, Trump began parroting Russian propaganda and hurling well-worn Russian insults at Zelensky: calling him a dictator, falsely claiming his approval ratings are at rock bottom, and even insinuating that it was Ukraine that started the war.

It comes as little surprise that the Russian leadership and its state-run media are euphoric, the current state of play goes beyond their wildest dreams. Before negotiations to end the war in Ukraine have even begun, Trump’s team has blithely conceded two of the West’s key leverage points without demanding any concessions in return, stating that a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is unrealistic and that Ukraine will never join NATO, not to mention ending Russia’s isolation.

Putin’s three years as an international pariah have come to an abrupt end. He is soon to have a seat at the table with the American president, while US negotiators agreed to reestablish full diplomatic relations and talked about potential joint energy ventures. Trump has even signalled an intention to invite Russia back into the G7.

Numerous historical comparisons with the period before and during the Second World War have already been made by myself and many others. Most obviously, Trump’s appeasement of Putin calls to mind the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which the leaders of Britain, France and Italy signed away part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in an attempt to avert a wider war. Any freezing of the frontlines in Ukraine is likely to set the scene for further Russian incursions down the line.

Then there’s the notion of two nationalist dictators making a deal behind the backs of other world leaders (while Putin is a dictator in every sense of the word, Trump merely acts like one), reminiscent of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 – the ill-fated non-aggression treaty that enabled Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to carve up parts of Eastern Europe unopposed.
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And, of course, the meeting of Russian and American officials in Saudi Arabia to discuss the fate of Ukraine without inviting representatives from Kyiv or the rest of Europe to the table smacks of the 1945 Yalta Conference. Then, the three chief allied leaders – Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin – met in the Crimean resort town to decide the fate of Germany, carving up the country into zones and deciding the future of the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe. 

The momentous events in Syria that culminated in the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad earlier this month may come to be seen as a turning point in Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

It seems all too fitting that Assad should flee to Moscow, to be welcomed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and granted asylum. The two men have much in common. They came to power within weeks of one another, both anointed by their predecessors. Assad assumed the presidency in July 2000 on the death of his father, the brutal dictator Hafez al-Assad, while Putin was nominated by the increasingly drunken and shambolic former president Boris Yeltsin as his successor at the turn of the millennium. He went on to win a snap election in March 2000, formally taking office in May that year.

A quarter of a century ago, both men represented a great new hope for their respective countries. Assad was young, Western-educated and charming. Many expected him to make a decisive break from the violent and repressive autocracy of his father. Putin’s accession to the presidency also marked a dramatic shift from the chaotic Yeltsin years. Then US president George W Bush famously said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy…I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

But the Western politicians and diplomats couldn’t have got it more wrong. Assad and Putin have presided over two of the harshest totalitarian states of our era, marked by strict repression, human rights abuses, and imprisonment or murder of opponents.

The two dictators cemented their alliance during Syria’s civil war. Putin came to Assad’s aid when the latter’s grip on power was hanging by a thread, launching thousands of Russian air strikes in 2015-2016 that wreaked havoc on opposition strongholds, in particular Aleppo, which was bombed to smithereens. Mile after mile of Syria’s second biggest city was razed to the ground, leaving nothing but rubble, twisted metal and shattered remnants of people’s lives – a strategy Putin would later repeat in Mariupol and elsewhere in Ukraine. Russia’s intervention in Syria was instrumental in turning the tide back in Assad’s favour.

The fall of Assad’s regime casts doubt on the future of Russia’s naval base at Tartus, a key strategic deepwater port on the eastern Mediterranean, and its nearby airbase at Hmeimim. Russian naval vessels have already moved away from their base. What’s more, Russia’s failure to prevent the fall from power one of its key allies serves to dampen Moscow’s prestige in parts of the world, most notably the Sahel region of Africa, where Putin has sought to gain influence and control of natural resources.

But most worrying of all for Putin, the swiftness of the rebel advance in Syria proves that longstanding autocratic leaders can be toppled, including when they least expect it. Even though it failed, the march on Moscow by Putin’s former friend Yevgeny Prigozhin in June 2023 – often referred to as an attempted coup – indicates that Russia is not immune to such sudden reversals. It’s well known that Putin is prone to paranoia and he must now be seeing shadows lurking in every corner of the Kremlin.

There are other signs too, that Putin isn’t getting things all his own way. Meddling in the elections of other countries is one of Russia’s tried and tested methods of gaining influence and fomenting opposition to the West, including using Russian bots to flood social media platforms with anti-Western commentary and disinformation. But neighbouring democracies have got wise to Moscow’s tactics and started fighting back.

Last month a referendum in Moldova on including a desire for EU membership in the country’s constitution passed by a far narrower margin than expected, allegedly because of a surge in Russian-sponsored interference. Moldova issued a formal protest to its Russian ambassador, accusing Moscow of organising ineligible voting, bribery, and security threats in a bid to influence the vote.

In Georgia, opposition groups accuse the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party of rigging the vote and stealing October’s parliamentary elections, plunging the country into turmoil. Mass protests reminiscent of Ukraine’s Euromaidan movement of 2013-14 have continued since late November following a decision to delay EU accession talks, further reignited by the appointment of a vehemently anti-Western president.

And most recently, and most dramatically of all, Romania has annulled the result of its 24 November first round presidential election vote, which was won by Calin Georgescu, an almost unknown far-right Putin sympathiser. Romania’s constitutional court took the unprecedented step of cancelling the election after intelligence concluded that Georgescu had benefitted from a mass influence operation conducted on TikTok, allegedly orchestrated from Russia.

As well as declining influence in its near abroad, signs are beginning to emerge of discontent at home as the Russian economy sags under the pressure of nearly three years of war. Galloping military spending and labour shortages have sent inflation soaring, creating a cost-of-living crisis far eclipsing anything we have experienced in the West. Butter prices have risen by 30% this year and supermarkets now keep it in locked cabinets to prevent people from stealing it to resell on the black market.

Spiralling interest rates and sharp falls in the rouble’s value are further eroding spending power for consumers, and the effects of US and European sanctions are finally beginning to bite. Having defied the West with its resilience for the last three years, Russia’s economic growth is dropping sharply and leading even the hardy and complacent Russian populace to question its government’s priorities.

These reversals in Moscow's fortunes are not yet enough to affect the situation on the battlefield, where Russia remains on the ascendancy. Its army continues its slow, grinding offensives into Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and around Kharkiv, as well as taking back inch by inch (with the help of North Korean troops) the Russian territory in Kursk region that it lost to Ukraine in the summer.

But Russian progress is painfully slow-moving and comes at an ever-greater price. November’s military losses were the highest since the start of the war, with more than 45,000 Russians killed or seriously wounded over the course of the month. Even by Russian meat-grinder standards, the figures are truly staggering. On 28 November alone, Russian casualties numbered 2,030. Compare this with the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan in the 1980s when approximately 15,000 Russian soldiers were killed in nearly a decade of fighting.

It is no coincidence that Russia’s war losses have soared since Donald Trump’s presidential election victory in the US. Trump famously boasted on the campaign trail that he would “end the war in 24 hours”, prompting Putin to redouble his efforts and throw the kitchen sink at his war effort, desperate to put Russia in as strong a position as possible ahead of expected peace negotiations when Trump comes to power.
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In contrast, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has initiated a charm offensive with Trump, signalling a willingness to compromise and discussing possible scenarios for ending hostilities. And the initial signs indicate that his tactics may be working. Following a meeting with Zelensky in Paris, the mood music in the Trump camp may be shifting slightly in Ukraine’s favour.

​Everyone knows that Trump loves to make a deal and that he can’t stand losers. If he can be persuaded that backing Putin – who he has previously referred to as a friend – would be the equivalent of a great big L on the forehead, Trump may just throw himself decisively behind Zelensky and enable the Ukrainians to reverse some of Russia’s gains on the battlefield and negotiate a peace deal on favourable terms. Maybe, just maybe, the tide is starting to turn.

We all know that US President-elect Donald Trump is big on words, but that his actions don’t always mirror his rhetoric. He has said on numerous occasions that he would end Russia’s war in Ukraine “in 24 hours”, but what is that likely to mean in practice?

The most widely used adjective to describe Trump (or the most widely used adjective that I can repeat in print) is “unpredictable”. His actions are impossible to second guess, but what we do know is that Russian president Vladimir Putin will be dancing a jig (inwardly at least) at the prospect of a second Trump term.

Russia has played an active role in helping to influence in Trump’s favour the outcome of all three presidential elections he has contested. A US investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller found that Russian troll farms had disseminated propaganda aimed at damaging the Democratic Party and attacking its 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, as well as hacking the Democratic Party campaign and promoting Trump. During this year’s campaign, the US government in September sanctioned high-profile Russian figures, including Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, for allegedly interfering in the election and seized internet domains linked to Russian propaganda.

Trump has repeatedly touted his close relationship with Putin, and the two are reputed to have participated in frequent phone calls. His past remarks on the Russian invasion of Ukraine make troubling reading. He has described the Kremlin’s actions as “savvy” and “genius”, and declared that he would not help protect NATO allies that fail to allocate at least 2% of their GDP to defence: “I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills,” he said in February. He has also described Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as “one of the greatest salesmen in history,” for his success in obtaining billions of dollars of US support for Ukraine.

But Putin is a wily old fox. His expectations for the outcome of his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 may have been wildly misguided (a “special military operation” intended to last two weeks has rumbled on for close to 1,000 days) but he can still outsmart Trump any day of the week. Recent comments by Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov hint that Putin isn’t going to make it easy for the incoming US president.

“We know him from his previous quest for power and we believe that some of his promises, in which he spoke of a quick resolution of the situation in Ukraine, are nothing more than rhetoric,” Ryabkov told Russian news agency Interfax. Moscow currently only conceives of ending the war on its own terms, he continued. "There is no opportunism here and our interests do not depend on who occupies the Oval Office.”

President Zelensky may have been quick to congratulate Trump on his victory, but his election win has met with deep fear and despondency in Ukraine. All his campaign rhetoric indicates that Trump will withdraw financial support for Ukraine and try to broker a peace deal. This manifesto represents a lose-lose for Kyiv. Without US weaponry and ammunition, Ukraine would quickly cede territory on the battlefield; and any deal is likely to favour Russia, with the added fear that Putin would fail to honour the terms of the treaty and advance again in the future.

Putin in June laid out his demands in a peace proposal and there’s no reason to suggest his goals have changed since then. He said Russia should keep all the land it occupies as well as the provinces that it claims but does not fully control – meaning the whole of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, even though Ukraine still holds parts of the latter two, including their regional capitals. Russia would also insist on Ukraine giving up all hope of NATO membership. For Ukraine, these demands are nothing short of an ultimatum for surrender.

Whatever the terms of any new peace treaty, the signals from Washington and Moscow already hint that progress may be far from straightforward. Trump and Putin are both notorious for their casual relationship with the truth. We’ve already had Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov (an expert in the art of denying statements that later turn out to be true) dismissing reports of a phone call between the two after the Washington Post reported that Trump had warned Putin of “Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe”.

We learned during Trump’s first term that campaign rhetoric is not necessarily an indicator of his policies once in office, and his opinions can pivot wildly depending on who he listens to. He appears to be surrounding himself with a small group of wealthy allies and loyalists, and has ruled out his pro-Ukrainian former secretary of state Mike Pompeo as a possible defence secretary. But frequent personnel changes were a feature of Trump’s first term, and Pompeo says he still believes Trump will adopt a more hardline approach to Russia once he re-enters the White House.

“It’s absolutely critically important that the perception is the West stood up to this thug and this horrible guy [Putin] and didn’t allow evil to triumph and that’s imperative,” Pompeo told the Fortune Global Forum. “I’m very hopeful President Trump will see that imperative.”

Pompeo told the BBC Ukrainecast podcast back in May that the way to deter Putin’s aggression is with “an administration in the US and a strong, capable NATO that deliver a message to President Putin that the cost of continuing his aggression will exceed the benefits”.

Only time will tell whether Trump listens to Pompeo’s view, or to those Republicans who say the billions of dollars allocated to supporting Ukraine would be better spent at home. The future of Ukraine is more uncertain than ever.


Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash

Next Monday, 18 March, marks the tenth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The move followed swiftly on from Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution, which culminated in then-president Victor Yanukovych’s flight from Kyiv in late February 2014. Russia took advantage of the chaos in Kyiv, quickly seizing military bases and government buildings in Crimea.

Armed men in combat fatigues began occupying key facilities and checkpoints. They wore no military insignia on their uniforms and Russian president Vladimir Putin insisted the “little green men” – as Ukrainians called them – were acting of their own accord, and were not associated with the Russian army. Only later did he acknowledge the role of the Russian military in the occupation, even awarding medals to those involved.

By early March, Russia had taken control of the whole peninsula and its ruling body, the Crimean Supreme Council, hastily organised a referendum for 16 March. The vote went ahead without international observers and was widely condemned as a sham. It offered residents two options: to join Russia or return to Crimea’s 1992 constitution, which gave the peninsula significant autonomy. There was no option to remain part of Ukraine.

The result, predictably, was landslide in favour of becoming part of Russia. Turnout was reported to be 83%, with nearly 97% voting to join the motherland, in spite of the fact that Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars made up nearly 40% of the population. The accession treaty was signed two days later. In May that year, a leaked report put turnout at 30% with only half of all votes cast in favour of becoming part of Russia.

The annexation of Crimea gave an immediate boost to Putin’s approval ratings, following a turbulent period of pro-democracy protests across Russia in 2011-12. In the face of a weak economy, Putin’s re-election campaign in 2012 had focused on appealing to Russian nationalism, and the swift and bloodless coup in Crimea provided a perfect model for his propaganda narrative.

The peninsula had first become part of Russia in the eighteenth century under Empress Catherine the Great, who founded its largest city, Sevastopol, as the home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Crimea was part of the Russian republic of the Soviet Union until 1954, when it transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet republic.

When the USSR collapsed in December 1991, the successor states agreed to recognise one another’s existing borders. Russia’s seizure of Crimea violated, among other agreements, the UN Charter, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances for Ukraine and the 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and Russia.

Crimea has experienced significant changes over the past ten years. Ethnic Russians made up around 60% of the population in 2014 — the only part of Ukraine with a Russian majority. Since then, around 100,000 Ukrainians and 40,000 Crimean Tatars are estimated to have left the peninsula, while at least 250,000 more Russians have moved in, pushing the ethnic Russian population above 75%. Many are members of Russia’s armed forces as the Kremlin has built up its military presence on the peninsula. Others are civilians lured by Russian government incentives, such as job opportunities, higher salaries, and lower mortgage rates.

Crimean Tatars complain of intimidation and oppression. They are routinely searched, interrogated, accused of terrorism offences and sent to prisons thousands of kilometres away. In prison, they are denied access to medical care, put in isolation cells and forbidden from communicating with relatives or lawyers, or from practising their religion, according to a report in the Kyiv Independent.

Of the ethnic Ukrainians who remained in Crimea in the years after annexation, a significant number have since been expelled, imprisoned on political grounds, forced to move to Russia or mobilised into the Russian military. Amid the ubiquitous narrative of Crimea as historically and enduringly Russian, and with public spaces dominated by Soviet and war nostalgia, Crimeans today are afraid to identify as Ukrainian. The high-tech security fence erected on the border between Crimea and mainland Ukraine in 2018 now symbolises separation from family and friends elsewhere in the country.

Moscow has poured more than $10 billion in direct subsidies into Crimea, investing heavily in schools and hospitals, as well as military and civilian infrastructure. Crimea today accounts for around two-thirds of all direct subsidies from the Russian federal budget. But many local businesses have suffered, particularly with the decline in tourism, which once accounted for about a quarter of Crimea’s economy. And as Ukrainian products in shops were replaced with higher-priced Russian goods, and later as the value of the rouble fell, prices have spiked. Western sanctions against Russia have also taken their toll on Crimea’s economy. Crimea was one of the Russian regions with the lowest income levels in 2023, according to the Russian state-owned rating agency RIA.

Russia has also funded major construction and infrastructure projects, such as the Tavrida highway, which opened in 2020 connecting the east of Crimea with its major cities in the southwest, and the highly symbolic Kerch bridge linking Crimea to Russia, opened to great fanfare by Putin in 2018. Today parts of the Tavrida highway have reportedly begun to buckle, leading to a rise in road traffic accidents. The Kerch bridge has sustained serious damage from Ukrainian attacks and by December last year was still not fully restored.

Back in 2014, many Russians in Crimea were euphoric about rejoining the motherland, having always identified with Russian rather than Ukrainian culture and customs. They welcomed the attention that Putin lavished on them, and the influx of Russian cash meant that wages and pensions, now paid in Russian roubles, initially increased. The euphoria has since subsided, and particularly since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many Crimeans are fed up with living in a territory that is isolated, highly militarised, tightly controlled, economically weak and under attack from Ukrainian forces.

This week marks the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Seeing satellite images of a long line of Russian tanks heading towards Kyiv on that awful morning, few believed that the war would last more than a handful of days; weeks at most.

I wrote at the time that Russian president Vladimir Putin had a whiff of Joseph Stalin about him, as he stepped up his attempts to recreate Stalin’s Soviet empire by taking control of Ukraine. Now that whiff has become more of a stench. The death of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most prominent critic, on 16 February makes the parallels between the two dictators starker than ever.

Like Stalin, Putin views the outside world as a hostile and threatening place and brooks no dissent. Stalin subjected his opponents to show trials, found them guilty on trumped-up charges and had them shot. Today, anyone who publicly opposes Putin’s regime, who attempts to tell the truth, expose the corruption, is a grave threat. Putin’s methods of silencing opponents are more varied – imprisonment, poison, shooting, defenestration, a plane falling from the sky.

Again like Stalin, Putin heads a cruel and corrupt administration, but has built a personality cult around himself to appear as a paternalistic leader who has the best interests of his citizens at heart. Both regimes have been guilty of hiding or falsifying data and masking the truth with a state-sanctioned view of world events and a thick veneer of propaganda.

At the time of writing, the cause of Navalny’s death is unclear. A video taken the previous day showed him looking surprisingly well given the inhumane conditions in which he was incarcerated. His family and legal team have repeatedly been refused access to a mortuary where his body is believed to lie.

Just days before Navalny’s death, another Russian politician, Boris Nadezhdin, was barred on technical grounds from standing against Putin in next month’s presidential election. Nadezhdin has been careful to play by the Kremlin’s rules, to avoid calling out or criticising Putin, but he is a vocal opponent of the war in Ukraine. Russia-watchers had considered he might be allowed to remain on the ballot to give the appearance of competition, and to provide a narrative for Putin to rally against.

But Nadezhdin proved too popular. A hundred thousand Russians flocked to sign supporter lists to enable him to stand against Putin, so the electoral commission ruled that thousands of the signatures he had gathered were fraudulent. Nadezhdin continues to appeal the ruling, but he must now be looking over his shoulder in case FSB officers are sent to arrest him, just as those who opposed Stalin’s regime lived in fear of a knock at the door in the middle of the night.

Another parallel between Putin’s Russia and Stalin’s Soviet Union can be found in the Russian-occupied cities of eastern Ukraine, where the Kremlin is carrying out ethnic cleansing just as it did in the 1940s. In Mariupol, Zaporizhzhia and other cities located in the regions where the Kremlin held rigged referendum votes on becoming part of Russia, the occupying authorities are doing all they can to wipe out Ukrainian identity.

Mariupol, before the war a pleasant, leafy coastal city on the Sea of Azov, was besieged and almost razed to the ground in the spring of 2022. Now smart, Russian-built apartment blocks line newly reconstructed avenues planted with lawns and neat rows of trees. In these apartments live recently arrived Russians, shipped in from the Motherland with the promise of better housing, good jobs, higher wages.

Many of the previous inhabitants fled the bombardment back in 2022, or were killed or taken prisoner during the siege. What’s more, around 5 million Ukrainians from the occupied territories are estimated to have been deported to Russia in the last two years, including 700,000 children. Those who stayed and survived, or returned, were forced to acquiesce with the occupying authorities, to become Russian.

Access to social services, including pensions and maternity payments, is only available to those with Russian passports. This in turn means babies are born to Russian rather than Ukrainian nationals, and inherit Russian citizenship. They will go to schools where they are taught in Russian, be subject to Russian cultural influences and learn a Russian history curriculum filled with hateful rhetoric about Ukrainian Nazis.

Refusal to apply for a passport of the occupying power leaves defiant Ukrainians living a shadowy undercover existence, while any show of insubordination is likely to land them in a Russian prison.

Crimea has experienced the same manipulations of population and bureaucracy for the last decade, since the Russian annexation in March 2014. Ukrainians were forced out or coerced into giving up their citizenship, native Russians were encouraged to settle, and only those holding Russian passports can access schools, hospitals and social services.

Most Russians, and many outside Russia, have long believed that Crimea was not really Ukrainian, that it was something of a Russian enclave inside Ukraine. After all, it had only become part of Soviet Ukraine in 1954, transferred by then premier Nikita Khrushchev from the Russian Federation (for reasons I discussed in a previous article). Crimea’s population at that time was roughly 75% Russian and it was home to the Soviet (now Russian) Black Sea Fleet.

But that only tells a small part of Crimea’s story. The peninsula, strategically located at the centre of the Black Sea, was wrested from the Ottoman Empire by Russia in 1783 under Catherine the Great. Its population for centuries had been predominantly Crimean Tatar – a Turkic-speaking, Sunni Muslim ethnic group. In 1944, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars en masse to Siberia, the Urals and Central Asia and expelled Crimea’s smaller populations Greeks, Armenians and Bulgarians. The peninsula was repopulated with ethnic Russians.

Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, many Crimean Tatars had returned to their homeland, along with other ethnic groups, who were granted citizenship rights by the Ukrainian government.

At least 95 Ukrainians known for their work in the creative industries have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began nearly two years ago, according to the writers’ association PEN Ukraine. The organisation tracks losses among writers, publishers, musicians, artists, photographers, actors, filmmakers, and other creative professionals whose stories appear in the information field. It is likely that many more artists have been killed in the war than appear on PEN’s list.

On 7 January the poet Maksym Kryvtsov was killed by artillery fire in Kupiansk, near Kharkiv, one of the key fronts in Moscow’s winter offensive. His loyal companion, a ginger cat, was killed with him. Kryvtsov, aged 33, had been hailed as one of the brightest hopes of Ukraine’s young, creative generation.

Kryvtsov was an active participant in the 2013-14 Revolution of Dignity – better known in the West as Euromaidan – and joined Ukraine’s armed forces as a volunteer in 2014, when the war against Russian separatists in the Donbas region began. He was later involved in organisations helping to rehabilitate fellow veterans and help them reintegrate into society, and also worked at a children’s camp. He was, by all accounts, far from the stereotypical image of a fighter.

Kryvtsov returned to army in February 2022 when Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Comrades knew him by his call sign Dali – a reference to the curling moustache he grew in imitation of the Spanish artist Salvador Dali.

“I think the war is a kind of micellar water that washes cosmetics off: from a face, streets, plans and behaviours. It’s like a hoe cutting through sagebrush, leaving a bitter aftertaste of irreversibility. In war, you become your true self, no need to play a role. You are simply a human, one of billions who ever lived on the Earth, sharing the commonality of breath. There’s no time for love at war. It lies abandoned next to a trash pile and disappears like a grandfather in a fog, lost somewhere behind this summer’s unharvested sunflower fields of a heart,” Kryvtsov said in a 2023 interview with Ukrainian publishing and literary organisation Chytomo as part of its Words and Bullets project with PEN Ukraine.

Even through the chaos of war, Kryvtsov continued to write poetry. Many of his poems reflect on the harsh reality of war and the contrast between war and ordinary, civilian life. His first poetry collection Вірші з бійниці (Poems from the Embrasure) was hailed by PEN Ukraine as one of the best books of 2023. Within days of his death, the book’s entire print run had sold out and the reprint had racked up thousands of preorders. Profits from the book will be split between Kryvtsov’s family and projects to bring books to the armed forces.

Hundreds of people gathered at St Michael’s monastery in Kyiv to attend a ceremony to honour Kryvtsov, ahead of a funeral in his hometown of Rivne. Some carried copies of his book, others a bouquet of violets, a reference to Kryvtsov’s final poem, posted on Facebook the day before he died (see below). The second part of the memorial service was held in Kyiv’s central Independence Square, the scene of the Euromaidan revolution in which Kryvtsov had participated. Mourners took turns stepping up to a microphone to share their memories of Kryvtsov and his poetry.

He “left behind a colossal height of poetry,” said Olena Herasymiuk, a poet, volunteer and combat medic, who was a close friend of Kryvtsov. “He left us not just his poems and testimonies of the era but his most powerful weapon, unique and innate. It’s the kind of weapon that hits not a territory or an enemy but strikes at the human mind and soul.” (quote from the Associated Press)

In an outpouring of grief on social media following Kryvtsov’s death, many drew parallels with Ukrainian cultural figures killed during the Soviet Union’s repression of writers and artists in the 1920s and 30s. Among these is the mighty figure of Isaac Babel, whose most famous collection of short stories Red Cavalry was written a century ago, inspired by Babel’s experiences as a war reporter in the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. I have recently been rereading the Red Cavalry stories and had intended my latest article to be about the historical parallels between Babel’s commentaries on war and contemporary war writers in Ukraine. That will have to wait for next time. Instead, I leave you with the prophetic poem Maksym Kryvtsov wrote the day before he died, and an extract from his poem about his ginger cat, posted on Instagram a few days earlier.
 
My head rolls from tree to tree
like tumbleweed
or a ball
from my severed arms
violets will sprout in the spring
my legs
will be torn apart by dogs and cats
my blood
will paint the world a new red
a Pantone human blood red
my bones
will sink into the earth
and form a carcass
my shattered gun
will rust
my poor mate
my things and fatigues
will find new owners
I wish it were spring
to finally
bloom
as a violet

My Ginger Tabby
When he falls asleep
slowly stretches his front legs
he dreams of summer
dreams of an unscathed brick house
dreams of chickens
running around the yard
dreams of children
who treat him to meat pies
my helmet slips out of my hands
falls on the mud
the cat wakes up
squints his eyes
looks around carefully:
yes, they’re his people:
and falls asleep again.
Taken from Wikipedia, translation credited to Christine Chraibi

Since February 2022, more than six million Ukrainians have fled abroad in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Another 8 million are internally displaced, mostly in western Ukraine. And around a million Russians have also escaped abroad, many because of their opposition to the war or to avoid the draft under Russia’s partial mobilisation.

Among these numbers are tens of thousands of Jews. According to Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, more than 40,000 immigrated to Israel from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus in the year to February 2023. Many members of the Ukrainian Jewish community have also found refuge in other European countries, but those who arrived in Israel held an advantage in having an immediate right to citizenship.

The number of Ukrainians with at least one Jewish grandparent – and therefore qualifying for Israeli citizenship by Israel’s Law of Return – was 200,000 in 2020, according to the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), while the number who identify as Jewish (the ‘core’ Jewish population) was estimated at 45,000.

Since the end of the Cold War, the Jewish population of Russia and Ukraine has fallen by 90%, according to the JPR, continuing an exodus that had begun in the early 1970s. An easing of the ban on Jewish refusenik emigration from the Soviet Union at that time allowed approximately 150,000 Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. With the collapse of the Soviet Union a further 400,000 departed, with more than 80% heading to Israel and the remainder mostly to Germany and the US – several members of my own family among them.

In 2014, the number of Ukrainian Jews immigrating to Israel jumped by 190% in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and occupation of parts of eastern Ukraine. Jewish emigration from Russia also spiked and the numbers coming to Israel from both countries stabilised at this higher level in the eight years leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

With another war now raging in the Middle East, some of those displaced by the hostilities in Ukraine have had to flee twice over. Among them are more than sixty children from the Alumim children’s home near Zhytomyr in western Ukraine. Some are orphans from the surrounding towns and villages within the historic Pale of Settlement, others have parents who are unable to provide a stable home for them.

On 24 February 2022, bombs began to fall around the home, which was located close to a Ukrainian air base. Its founders, Rabbi Zalman Bukiet and his wife Malki, had made advance preparations in case of a Russian attack and were able to quickly evacuate the children to the west of the country by bus. After a few days, when it became clear that the war would not reach a swift conclusion, they crossed the border into Romania and from there boarded a plane to Israel.

The logistics of the transfer were complex as almost none of the children had passports. Some of their mothers and other community members joined the group until it numbered 170 people. “El Al Airlines wanted us to finalise the number of seats we needed, and the paperwork was an open question,” Rabbi Bukiet recalled. One child had been away visiting his home village when the war broke out and had to be driven to Romania by taxi for a fare ten times higher than the standard rate.

Once in Israel, the group was hosted at the Nes Harim education centre in the Jerusalem Hills. “We came for a month and stayed for six,” Rabbi Bukiet said. But as the new school year came round, he needed to find a more permanent home for the children. The group moved to Ashkelon, a coastal town in southern Israel, and rented two accommodation buildings – one for girls and one for boys – as well as apartments for the 16 families that had come with them from Zhytomyr and a home for the rabbi and his own family.

“And so Ashkelon became home. The kids learned Hebrew, gained Israeli friends and integrated into the local community. The mothers took jobs and learned to navigate life in Israel. And we all got used to the new normal,” Rabbi Bukiet said. He and Malki arranged visits for a family member from Ukraine for each child, along with outings and activities. With the next school year due to begin, the group decided to stay another year in Ashkelon.

Until history repeated itself. On 7 October the sirens once again blared at six am, just as they had in Zhytomyr 18 months or so earlier. Once again, the sound of gunfire and explosions reverberated around them. Rabbi Bukiet and his own family ran to a shelter but were unable to reach the children’s dormitories until midday. By the afternoon, the constant sirens had eased the he and Malki were able to gather the children together in a larger shelter. That night they made plans to relocate again, further north into Israel. Today the inhabitants of the children’s home are based in the Hasidic village of Kfar Chabad, not knowing how long they will stay. Safe for now, their future is uncertain once again.

The full story of the Alumim children's home can be found here:
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/6186434/jewish/How-Our-Childrens-Home-in-Ukraine-Was-Uprooted-Again-by-War-in-Israel.htm

When Hamas terrorists entered southern Israel last month, they committed the biggest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. That on its own is a desperately chilling thought. But Israel’s response to the attacks has unleashed a wave of antisemitism around the globe on a scale not seen since the middle of the last century. Words that for decades have been unsayable in public are now being chanted in the streets of our major cities.

And in Russia, a country with a devastating history of antisemitism that had until recently been quashed, pogroms have broken out once again. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jews in Russia suffered wave after wave of pogroms – anti-Jewish riots that involved terrorising communities, attacking Jewish homes and businesses, humiliating and maiming, rape and murder. Last weekend Russia witnessed its first pogrom in sixty years.

In Dagestan, a mainly Muslim region of southern Russia bordering Chechnya, an angry mob shouting antisemitic slogans stormed the airport of the regional capital Makhachkala. The rioters broke through security barriers onto the runway with the intention of attacking passengers arriving from Tel Aviv, fuelled by rumours circulating on social media that the plane was carrying refugees from Israel. The rumours were later proven to be untrue.

Elsewhere in Dagestan, a riot broke out outside a hotel in the city of Khasavyurt, because Israeli refugees were believed to be sheltering inside. The protestors pinned a sign to the door: Entry strictly forbidden to Israelis (Jews). And in Nalchik - located, like Dagestan, in the North Caucasus region - a mob attacked and set alight a Jewish cultural centre that was under construction. The words Death to Jews were daubed on its wall. These events took place in spite of strict rules prohibiting public demonstrations in Russia, implemented to stifle protest against the war in Ukraine.

The pogroms of the past took place across the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were restricted to living in Tsarist times – in present day Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and the western fringes of Russia. These regions had been absorbed by Russia during the partitions of Poland under Catherine the Great in the late 18th century. Jews had long been present in great numbers in Poland because its liberal policies contrasted with most other parts of Europe at the time; Jews were welcomed for their skills in commerce that helped bolster the economy. But Russia was far less tolerant and pogroms were a direct result of an official policy of antisemitism.

Today’s pogroms in Dagestan derive from sympathy with Palestinians under Israeli bombardment in Gaza. With a mostly Muslim population, Dagestan has historically been more closely aligned with the Middle East than with Russia. But it is also home to Russia’s oldest Jewish community. Jews have lived in the region since Biblical times and as Jews from elsewhere in Russia have emigrated in huge numbers, mostly to North America and Israel, Dagestan today is home to Russia’s largest Jewish community.

Just as the pogroms of the past were a manifestation of official antisemitism in the Russian Empire, the pogroms in Dagestan reflect a change in sentiment in the echelons of power in Moscow. While the Vladimir Putin of the past spoke out against holocaust denial and xenophobia, the Russian president has in recent months ratcheted up antisemitic rhetoric as a reaction to Russia’s failings in the war in Ukraine, not least with his derogatory comments about Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky (see my article on the subject here). Putin’s reaction to the violence in Dagestan has been to blame Ukraine and the West, accusing Russia’s enemies of fomenting unrest to destabilise the country.

The violence in Dagestan continues a worrying trend for Putin, demonstrating again how his authority is being undermined. Having risen to power almost a quarter of a century ago, Putin cemented his popularity with a reputation for restoring Russia’s territorial integrity and stability after the chaotic unravelling of the 1990s. It was his quelling of violence in Dagestan and neighbouring Chechnya that helped reinforce the strongman image that the president has sought to project ever since.
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But Putin’s obsessive focus on trying to destroy Ukraine has led him to turn a blind eye to unrest in Russia’s provinces that threatens to undermine his reputation and the sense of order and stability that he has so painstakingly nurtured. The attempted mutiny in June by his once loyal ally Yevgeny Prigozhin was the first clear manifestation of Putin’s authority beginning to unravel. Unrest in the North Caucasus may be the next. 
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Vladimir Putin has been accused of multiple crimes and offences over the years, but until recently, antisemitism wasn’t one of them. In the last few months, he has come in for criticism from the West, from Israel and the Ukrainian leadership for a spate of antisemitic comments.

Putin appeared on TV in early September ranting that “Western masters” installed Volodymyr Zelensky, “an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins” as Ukraine’s president “to cover up the anti-human essence that is the foundation…of the modern Ukrainian state” and “the glorification of Nazism.”

The diatribe followed comments made at the St Petersburg international economic forum in in June, when Putin was asked about the apparent contradiction of Ukraine being a Nazi state led by a Jew. “I have a lot of Jewish friends. They say Zelensky is not a Jew; he is a disgrace to the Jewish people,” he said.

And most recently, speaking at an economic forum in Vladivostok, Putin said of the former senior Kremlin official Anatoly Chubais, who fled Russia after last year’s invasion of Ukraine and is reportedly living in Israel, “He is no longer Anatoly Borisovich Chubais, he is some sort of Moishe Israelievich, or some such.”

The brand of ethnic nationalism that Putin has started to espouse sits rather strangely. Firstly, there’s that awkward issue in his repeated claims to be trying to “denazify” Ukraine, that the country’s leader is a Jew who lost several members of his family in the Holocaust.

To those raised with a Soviet (or post-Soviet) view of history, this is less paradoxical than it seems. According to Soviet historiography, no specific emphasis was placed on the Nazis’ persecution of Jews, rather the focus was on the suffering of the Soviet people as a whole. And indeed, the suffering of the Soviet people was terrible, Hitler’s regime classed Slavs as sub-human and Communists were a mortal enemy. There was little awareness during Soviet times that the Jews had suffered any more than the rest of the population and many Russians have held onto that mindset.

Putin’s antisemitic outpourings echo comments made in May last year by his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, comparing Zelensky with Hitler. Lavrov claimed that Jews had been partly responsible for their own murder by the Nazis because, “some of the worst antisemites are Jews,” and Hitler himself had Jewish blood.

But the conflation of Zelensky and Nazism doesn’t fully explain Putin’s recent antisemitic outbursts. According to historian Artem Efimov, Editor-in-chief of Russian independent media outlet Meduza’s Signal newsletter, the Russian president is exploiting rhetoric to serve his purpose, whether that rhetoric is Marxist, right-wing or, indeed, antisemitic. His words are not based on any deep, systematic beliefs – for Putin has no ideology of his own – but serve as a means to justify his actions, Efimov says.

Most notably, Putin repeatedly manipulates the collective memory of Russia’s struggle against Nazism in World War II – or the Great Patriotic War as it is known in Russia – to legitimise his imperialist ambitions in Ukraine.

In pivoting towards antisemitism, Putin is repeating an age-old tendency to create a distraction, a scapegoat even, as his strongman image frays and begins to fall apart. As I have written before, Putin has more than a whiff of Joseph Stalin about him. Stalin, amid the paranoia and insecurity that characterised the final years of his rule, repeatedly resorted to antisemitism to push the blame onto others.

The post-war years were characterised by Stalin’s purge of “rootless cosmopolitans”, a reference largely to Jews, whose loyalty to the USSR was questioned with the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. Well-known members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, formed during the war to organise international support for the Soviet military effort, were arrested, tortured, and executed.

Shortly before his death in 1953, Stalin launched another anti-Semitic purge in the form of the “Doctor’s Plot” – an alleged conspiracy by a group of mostly Jewish doctors to murder leading Communist Party officials. The plot was thought to be a precursor to another major purge of the party, and was halted only by Stalin’s death.

Moscow’s former chief rabbi, Pinchas Goldschmidt, has repeatedly warned of rising antisemitism in Russia and urged Russian Jews to leave the country while they still can. Rabbi Goldschmidt resigned in July 2022 because of his opposition to the war and lives in exile in Israel. Tens of thousands of Russian Jews have already emigrated to Israel since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February last year, the largest wave of departures since the fall of the Soviet Union.