[re: Ukraine] JRL 2014-#44/Matlock

Subject: JRL 2014-#44/ Matlock
Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2014
From: Reuben F. Johnson – Warszawa, Rzeczpospolita Polska reuben.johnson@sambadoaviao.org

I have the honour to refer to Item 1 of this issue of JRL.  I have enjoyed reading JRL for years and almost never make any comments on the pieces that are published.  We all have too much to read the way it is without me adding to the burden.  However, I find this item by Jack Matlock so annoying that any proper means of conveying the level of said annoyance escapes me at the moment.  Moreover, I regard it as a literal apology for the years of hostile actions by Russia to destroy the Ukraine as an independent nation.

I will confess to not being a huge Matlock fan.  His book “Autopsy on an Empire” was interesting and was a thoughtful narrative.  But, I was always happy that someone sent me a free copy for review because I would have deeply regretted having spent real money to feed the coffers of an individual who, while knowledgeable and had good stories to tell, really came off in the end sounding so pompous.  The book did nothing to diminish the image that the US Foreign Service has of being a collection of arrogant, know-it-all, third-rate academics.

I suppose that the reason that his piece rambles on without any coherent organisation is because he is writing for his own private webpage and not any real public affairs magazine or other political/foreign policy publication.  Any respectable editor would have thrown this back at him and told him to start all over with a reasonably intellectually sound argument.

I am particularly puzzled by the one paragraph which states “because of its history, geographical location, and both natural and constructed economic ties, there is no way Ukraine will ever be a prosperous, healthy, or united country unless it has a friendly (or, at the very least, non-antagonistic) relationship with Russia.”  I hate to break to Mr. Matlock, but I can make the same generalised, one-size-fits all type of statement about Russia itself.  Russia is not now, nor will it ever be a “propserous, healthy or united country,” at least not as long as it is ruled by a gang of KGB criminals and their political allies who have – more than twenty years after the end of the Cold War – succeeded in destroying any semblance of real commerce and have confined the nation to a primitive hunter-gatherer economic model that relies almost entirely on exports of raw materials to keep itself afloat.  Massive, state-funded projects designed to modernise the nation or create a high-tech sector in the Russian economy – like the Skolkovo project outside of Moscow or the Sukhoi SSJ 100 SuperJet airliner programme – are just like the recently (and mercifully) ended Olympic Games: wonderful mechanisms for those in power to steal money from the state’s coffers.  They have nothing to do with trying to really improve the life of Russia’s ordinary people.

Then there is the small fact that Russia gets a free ride in this piece insofar as there is no mention about how from the first day that Ukraine existed as an independent nation Moscow has done everything possible to interfere in the internal affairs of this country.  (A violation of international law that they always accuse everyone else of being guilty of while they are at the same time engaged in it themselves every day.)  Ask anyone who actually, really knows anything about the inner workings of the Ukrainian state apparatus and economy and you will be writing for the next 99 years about the number of Russian spies, saboteurs and agents of influence working on the inside with the full and unabashed aim of keeping Ukraine divided, dysfunctional and in a deteriorating economic state.  Putin’s threats that practically amounted to holding a gun to Yanukovych’s head last Fall and and forcing the now-deposed Ukrainian president to reverse course at the last minute and not sign the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement was only the last act in a more than two decades-long campaign to keep Ukraine enfeebled and tied to Russia like a vassal state.  All of this with the hope by Moscow that some day conditions in Ukraine would drop to a point so low that the Russians would be asked to finally “save” the country.

After the long history of shenanigans engaged in by the British Empire in fomenting ethnic and religious fault lines in its one-time colonies, perhaps no country in the world is as adept at the “divide and conquer” game as Moscow is.  Russia has also always been so skilled at dividing European powers that Peter Mandelson, the former EU trade commissioner, stated that “no other country reveals our [EU] differences as does Russia.”  (Mandelson made this statement some time ago – in 2007 – and it is doubtful he would be so forthcoming about Russia’s trouble-making abroad today.   In 2013 he was bought off by Putin in the form of a $325,000 per annum salary as a director on the board of Sistema, the massive Russian conglomerate that deals in telecoms, oil, banking, insurance and now owns the Soviet-era travel agency Intourist.)

But no mention of Russia’s long-practiced arts of disinformation and despicable manipulation of half-truths is here.  Matlock allows that Russia has interfered in Ukraine’s internal affairs, but immediately brushes it off by stating that “it is not Russian interference that has created Ukrainian disunity but rather the haphazard way the country was assembled from parts that were not always mutually compatible.”  So, we are all supposed to believe that the composition of Ukraine’s population is akin to that famous joke about how “a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.”  Not only would it seem that Matlock agrees with Putin’s famous (and incredibly revealing) 2008 comment made to then-US President George W. Bush that “you don’t understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state.  What is Ukraine?  Part of its territories is Eastern Europe, but the greater part is a gift from us” – his article sounds like he probably wrote this for Putin as one of his talking points.

With people like Matlock Russia always seems to be the poor, misunderstood, victim and we should all be sensitive to their insecurities and fears of NATO approaching their borders.  When I hear this tired argument for about the 10,000th time I like to remind people that many Ukrainians hate the Russians, as do many of the Georgians, most of the people in the Baltic states, almost all the Poles and a whole other list of nationalities on the periphery of Russia.  The apologists for the “poor, frightened Russians” seem to miss the very obvious object lesson: if all of their neighbours hate Russia then there is probably a reason.  After Russia’s long history of invading neighbouring states, stealing everything from them that it could lay its hands on, murdering their intelligentsia (and in the case of the Poles in the Katyn Forest, the entire officer corps) it is no small wonder that they all want to become NATO members.  If you live next door to the most thuggish and murderous bully on the block (and that bully also has nukes) you would want some protection in the form of an alliance of your other neighbours – that is, unless you have some kind of a death wish.

What the world needs in general and what the people of Ukraine need in particular is to take this self-righteous, know-it-all Russian apologist and drop him onto a deserted island along with his intellectual soulmate, Stephen Cohen.  Give them a mountain of ruled paper and some writing instruments and let them scribble this kind of rubbish to their heart’s content about how each one of them is the smartest man in the world and the only one who “really” understands what is wrong with Ukraine.  Then they can compare each other’s work and someone can judge which one of the two most aptly demonstrates that God in all of his bounty created many more horse’s asses than horses to wear them.  Whatever you decide to do with them I could not care less – just as long as those of us who actually live here and work in Ukraine and have on-the-ground knowledge of what is really happening here do not have to read this kind of self-aggrandising drivel.  Just try telling the family members of the dozens who died on Kiev’s Independence Square that Russian interference had nothing to do with those deaths.  I can guarantee you that their reaction will be far less restrained than my own.

[From a later communication: I apologise for the stridency of my tone, but there is a serious crisis in this country – one that could mushroom into a real disaster for all of us.  It is no time for armchair pontificating by people who have not been in the trenches here and want to take the old “the west does not really understand Ukraine the way I do” line.  There is no room for this kind of self-aggrandisment now.  When Matlock has been hit by shotgun blasts, deafened by stun grenades, tear-gassed, drenched with a fire hose and has seen dead bodies being carried away in front of his own eyes on Independence Square – as I have – then I might consider listening to what he has to say.]

Respectfully,
Reuben F. Johnson
Kiev, Ukraine
Reuben F. Johnson
Correspondent
The Weekly Standard (US)
Jane’s Defence Weekly (UK)
Contributing Analyst
Rzeczpospolita (Poland)
Revista Força Aérea (Brasil)
现代军事 (PRC)
I have living and reporting from Kiev for 14 years – including full coverage of the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution