Weltschau

“In his eyes, an individual who is unable to enjoy all of his/her fundamental rights or is prohibited from doing so is not considered a genuine human being”. The quoted text is an excerpt from the preface to the book, which is about the principle that “revolutions cannot destroy”, which he translated into Turkish. Although the death penalty, which is the subject of Victor Hugo’s book Le dernier jour d’un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man), has been completely abolished in 112 countries around the world, acts of violence and brutality persist in many manifestations across the globe. The occupation that Russia initiated during the presidency of Vladimir Putin continues to claim lives. In addition to Hugo’s book, Prof. Dr. Erhan Büyükakıncı, who translated Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun’s “Jour De Silence a Tanger” and poet and novelist Luis Mizon’s “La mort de l’Inca” into Turkish, put pen to paper the book “Russia and Ukraine in the Changing World”. Büyükakıncı responded to questions regarding Ukraine’s historical background, its relations with neighbouring countries, and the forthcoming Ukrainian presidential elections.

ÖZELGÜN: You start an article of yours, “Ukraine-Russia Relations in the Independence Process”, with an old Russian saying. “Moscow is the heart of Russia, St. Petersburg is its head, and Kiev is its mother.” What does motherhood mean in this context?

BÜYÜKAKINCI: Russian literature has always had a penchant for making references to ancient sayings. In my academic work on Russian-Ukrainian relations, I aimed to incorporate this ancient saying in order to emphasize how Russia was perceiving the Ukrainian territories in its own soul. In the geographical definitions, we refer to “Mother Russia”, the big geographical area dominated by the Slavic tribes, in which the capital of the central state (Russian knez), founded in the mid of 9th century shifted from Novgorod to Kiev in the 10th century. This new capital on Dnieper would have become a strategic junction point where the Russian state, using its ties with the Byzantine empire, would quickly embraced the Christian faith. Along with the imposition of Christian culture in Kiev and all over the Russian cities, the state further strengthened with all central political powers, and also trade expanded with the principalities in Mother Russia’s territories between the Black Sea, the Baltic region, and Asia. Following the Mongol invasions, Kiev left its capital status to Moscow in the 14th century, and in 1712, St. Petersburg became the new capital under the regime of Peter the Great. The concept of the “Mother Russia” intertwines the notions of Slavic identity and Christianity. Russian culture’s oldest Christian monuments are concentrated in Novgorod and Kiev; thus, the Ukrainian territories are both a historical and strategic focal point of Mother Russia’s civilization. We can explain Russia’s historical and emotional attachment to these (Ukrainian) lands as the foundation of Russian culture, established as a combination of Slavic and Christian influences.

ÖZELGÜN: Why do you think Putin presents the Ukrainian nation as an “imagined community” in the sense of Benedict Anderson?

BÜYÜKAKINCI: In the geography lessons in Russia, it is emphasized that the region called Ukraine means an “outskirt region or borderland” and that this name does not contain any special ethnic meaning. The word “Ukraine” became known as a country when Lenin established regional soviets after the 1917 October Revolution. Within the principle of self-determination, socialist administrative councils were made autonomous on the way to the Soviet Union, and after the October Revolution, many Soviet administrative structures such as Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were established in the first stage. In this context, there was no state called “Ukraine” in history before the 20th century, and the existence of the Ukrainian dialect is also academically debated. Although the old great writers who were born and lived in Ukraine (Gogol, Sholokhov, etc.) always wrote their works in Russian, there are very few works written in Ukrainian dialect. Although the popular initiatives of the people living in this region against the tyranny of tsarist Russia have been the subject of literature, starting with poet and writer Taraş Shevchenko’s texts, there are also critical texts in Russian territory about this tsarist period. At the same time, this region has been a homeland for many people, from Cossacks to Crimean Tatars, for long centuries. If we start with the concept of “imagined community”, it is a very difficult phenomenon to define a specific Ukrainian identity, independent of Tatar, Kazakh, and other local identities, in completely different ways from the Russian identity. The reason why Putin considers today the Ukrainian identity as an artificial construction is that he wants to emphasize the inconsistency of Ukraine’s territorial relations with the Catholic structures extending to the Polish and Lithuanian kingdoms. From the perspective of the Russian administration, the lands of “Mother Russia” are defined as a large country where many different ethnic and local identities have lived “voluntarily” together since the tsarist period until today. Therefore, we see here that Putin reactively belittles Ukraine’s recent national independence by accusing directly western countries to support micro-nationalism and to support Ukraine to be defined as a completely different ethnic and cultural structure from Russia.

ÖZELGÜN: How does the fact that Ukraine is a geographical bridge between the European continent and Russia shape the current war policies of Western countries?

BÜYÜKAKINCI: Throughout history, the Eastern European geography was caught between great civilizations and was a specific region where wars occurred intensively. This place has been seen as a buffer zone between Austria, Germany, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire throughout history. Today, in order to be an island of stability in such a highly competitive region, there is a very big need for Ukraine for a stable political and economic order within the country. At the same time, geopolitical and strategic balances should also be taken into consideration. From this perspective, we need to ask a political question here about whether Ukraine wants to be a bridge between the West and the East or whether it wants to be a front, completely belonging to one side. The same question is valid for Georgia and Moldova as well. On the other hand, since the end of the Cold War, we see that Russia has aimed to change the post-Soviet international borders through frozen conflicts and wants to make some countries geopolitically dependent on it. Russia wants to make the borders after World War II discussable with the newly born states. However, Russia is also a nuclear actor and has great capabilities in cyber security and the military industry. Therefore, Western countries feel obliged to develop and consolidate alliances with high technological capabilities against Russia’s security interests on the way to enlargement.

ÖZELGÜN: Journalist Deniz Berktay mentions in one of his broadcasts on YouTube that Ukraine is fighting a two-front struggle. While there is a struggle against Russia in the east, countries such as Hungary and Slovakia take a stance against Kiev’s EU membership. Why do you think they follow a policy against Ukraine’s EU membership?

BÜYÜKAKINCI: In fact, it would be more accurate to say that Ukraine is fighting a war on many fronts. While fighting against Russia and the Central and Eastern European members of the EU, there are also other points of competition: The uncertainty of American policy heading towards the 2024 Presidential elections, as well as the instability in Ukrainian domestic politics. In answer to your question, let’s focus specifically on the European Union (EU) issue. The EU has still not been able to digest the issue of full integration since the last waves of eastern enlargement. It already took a long time for Eastern European countries, which came from the communist system, to fully adopt the economic and legal values ​​of Western Europe, the real founders of the EU system. At the same time, strategic values ​​existing in the political culture of some countries in Eastern Europe consider relations with Russia very important and consider this as an element of geopolitical balance for their own survival. Joining a war-torn Ukraine with uncertain borders to the EU will bring a financial burden to Brussels and is not seen as fair for the Eastern European member states, which have experienced difficulties and bargaining for many years in terms of accession negotiations. They advocate Ukraine’s accession to the EU as a “stable country”, because rebuilding a war-torn Ukraine would directly impose great burdens on all member states. At the same time, there is a high probability that migration flows will increase with the opening of borders. When we look at the Eastern European countries that did not accept the Middle Eastern refugees, they think that Ukraine’s accession to the EU will fuel nationalism in their own countries. As a matter of fact, let’s not forget that most of the governments that reject this policy are right-wing parties.

ÖZELGÜN: How do you think holding Ukrainian presidential elections on time but under martial law conditions can affect the development of Ukrainian democracy? What do you think are the chances of success in the elections if the current chief of general staff resigns and enters politics?

BÜYÜKAKINCI: Of course, when there is a war situation in the whole country, I think it becomes difficult to hold presidential elections in Ukraine in the next spring. Since a part of the country is under occupation and there are socio-economic difficulties due to the war within the country, changing the government does not seem to be an easy matter because both military and political leadership must be carried out together here. At this point, the rivalry between President Zelensky and chief of general staff Zaluzhny, which has become more evident in recent times, according to medias, gains importance. While Zelensky wants to portray the Ukrainian war as a purely “international problem”, the general staff is focused on the military efforts towards the country’s defense and counter-offensive against Russia. Therefore, the effectiveness of internal and external connections in the defense of the country depends on the cooperation of these two leaders. When we look at world history, we often come across examples of popular commanders entering into politics during and after the war periods. The question of whether the real leaders in times of war will be “military commanders” or “political leaders” who successfully embrace and direct them is a controversial issue. However, we should not forget another dimension of this debate. I think that the USA and its Western partners may not prefer to work with a military commander instead of the political leader Zelensky, and therefore we can say that Zelensky will continue to be seen as a legitimate leader, even if there are no elections.

References

Berktay, Deniz. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnZo2I8CPmBgXnupBK_4pKQ

Büyükakıncı, E. (2004). Bağımsızlık Sürecinde Ukrayna-Rusya İlişkileri. https://www.academia.edu/2079991/Ba%C4%9F%C4%B1ms%C4%B1zl%C4%B1k_s%C3%BCrecinde_Ukrayna-Rusya_%C4%B0li%C5%9Fkileri

Hugo, V. (2013). Le dernier jour d’un condamné. Çev. Erhan Büyakıncı.  

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