By Serhy Yekelchyk
As Ukrainian voters go to the polls this weekend to elect the new president, their country remains stalled at a historical crossroads. A revolution sparked by the previous government’s turn away from Europe, Russia’s flagrant annexation of the Crimea, and the continuing fighting in eastern Ukraine–all these events of recent months can only be understood in their proper historical context.
A monument to the legendary founders of Kyiv re-imagined as a symbol of the pro-European revolution.
One must begin with Russia’s imperial domination of Ukraine during the age when modern nations developed, from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Much like the Scots in the United Kingdom, Ukrainians could make brilliant careers in the Russian imperial service, but their group identity was reduced to an ethnographic curiosity. Moreover, the tsarist government insisted that Ukrainians were not a separate ethnic group, merely the “Little Russian tribe” of the Russian people. Their language was no more than a peasant dialect, and all educated Ukrainians were expected to accept Russian high culture. To prevent a modern idea of nationhood from reaching the Ukrainian masses, the Russian government banned all educational books in Ukrainian in 1863 and literary publications in 1876.
This denial of Ukraine’s national distinctiveness had major implications for modern Russian and Ukrainian identities. The notion of what it meant to be Russian remained linked to the imperial project, first tsarist, then Soviet, and now Putin’s. In all these incarnations, imperial Russia was not prepared to let Ukraine go its way precisely because Russia’s own identity as a modern democratic nation without imperial complexes failed to develop. This explains the rise in Putin’s popularity after the annexation of Crimea. This act of aggression soothed the injured national pride of Russia’s imperial chauvinists, who still mourn the loss of their country’s great-power status.
A fake road sign used by the pro-European protesters in Kyiv: “Changing the country, sorry for the inconvenience.”
The long Russian “fraternal” embrace also had implications for Ukraine’s ambivalent national identity. The Ukrainian national governments of 1917–20 did not stay in power in large part because patriotic intellectuals could not reach out to the peasants in the previous decades. The Bolsheviks first tried to disarm Ukrainian nationalism by promoting education and publishing in Ukrainian, but in the 1930s Stalin decimated the Ukrainian intelligentsia by terror and killed millions of peasants in a man-made famine, the Holodomor. His successors promoted creeping assimilation into the Russian culture. As a result, the population of Ukraine’s southeast, although largely Ukrainian in ethnic compositions, was taught to identify with Russian culture and the Soviet state.
Another thing that the tsars, the commissars, and the Putin administration have in common is an inflated fear of “Ukrainian nationalists.” Its real explanation lies in the fact that the Russian Empire never controlled all Ukrainian ethnolingustic territories. In the 19th century their westernmost part belonged to the Austrian Empire, where the Ukrainians acquired the experience of political participation and communal organization. The tsarist government’s desire to crush the stronghold of “Ukrainian nationalism” in the Austrian province of Galicia was among the international tensions that caused World War I. After the Red Army finally secured this region for the Soviet Union during World War II, the anti-Soviet nationalist insurgency continued for nearly a decade. The spectre of “Ukrainian nationalism” has haunted the Russian political imagination ever since, because it threatened the main tenet of imperial ideology, that of Ukrainians being essentially “uneducated Russians.”
A barricade of tires prepared to be burned on Kyiv’s main boulevard.
In the twenty-three years since the Soviet collapse, the political elites in Russia and Ukraine learned to exploit the ambiguous sense of identity in both countries. The Putin administration discovered imperial chauvinism’s appeal to conservative voters outside of major cities. In Ukraine, President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions cultivated nostalgia for the Soviet past and identification with Russian culture in their electoral stronghold in the Donbas, the region of Soviet-style smokestack factories propped up by government subsidies. The identity time-bomb was bound to explode at some point, and it went off twice in the past decade.
The Orange Revolution of 2004 began as a mass protest against a rigged election allegedly won by Prime Minister Yanukovych, but grew into a popular civic movement against corruption and political manipulation. Unfortunately, the victors of the revolution did not manage to build a new system, instead descending into political infighting. Yanukovych finally gained the presidency in 2010 and went on to establish an even more corrupt regime. By the end of 2013 Ukrainians were so fed up with their government that the latter’s last-minute withdrawal from the Association Agreement with the European Union sparked another popular revolution.
The protestors on the EuroMaidan were not fighting for Europe and against Russia per se, but against authoritarianism and corruption. However, it is telling that the Putin regime saw their movement as a threat to Russia’s interests. The Russian state-controlled media exploited the presence on the barricades of radical Ukrainian nationalists to paint the entire popular revolution as “fascist.” Without the Russian annexation of the Crimea and barely-concealed support for the separatists in the Donbas, the situation there would also not have reached the brink of a civil war.
In many ways, then, the long-term resolution of the Ukrainian crisis would entail Russians and Ukrainians coming to terms with history–laying the imperial past finally to rest.
Serhy Yekelchyk is Professor of Slavic Studies and History at the University of Victoria (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada) and the author of Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (OUP, 2007).
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Images courtesy of Serhy Yekelchyk. Used with permission.
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By Marco Roscini
Alarming headlines have recently started to appear in the media (see, for example, the CNN’s “Cyberwar hits Ukraine”). This, however, is sensationalism. What has actually happened so far is limited disruption of mobile communications through Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. In addition, certain state-run news websites and social media have been defaced and their content replaced with pro-Russian propaganda. In the months that preceded the current crisis, Ukrainian computer systems were also allegedly targeted by “cyberspies”.
If the above scenario sounds familiar it is because it isn’t the first time that cyber operations have occurred during a military crisis involving the Russian Federation. In 2008, immediately before and after the Russian troops entered the secessionist Georgian province of South Ossetia, several Georgian governmental websites were defaced and their content replaced with anti-Georgian propaganda, while DDoS attacks crippled the Caucasian nation’s ability to disseminate information. Estonia was also the target of severe DDoS attacks in 2007, although in the context of a political, and not military, confrontation with Russia. In neither case has it been convincingly demonstrated that Russia (or any other state) was responsible for the cyber operations. The same can be said of the cyber operations against Ukrainian computer systems and websites, which have also been, at least until now, far less severe than those on Georgia and on Estonia, leading some to suggest that Russia is exercising restraint in the use of its cyber capabilities.
Does international law apply in this scenario?
While the DDoS attacks and the defacement of websites obviously don’t establish on their own an armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the fact that they have been conducted in the context of kinetic exchanges of fire and a situation of occupation may potentially lead to the application of the law of armed conflict (jus in bello). Two points are important from this perspective. First, although there have been no extensive armed hostilities between Ukraine and Russia yet, it has been reported that at least one Ukrainian soldier has been killed and another wounded, allegedly by Russian military forces or pro-Russian militias. Unlike in non-international armed conflicts, the jus in bello applies to any shot fired between states, regardless of intensity thresholds. The Commentary to Article 2 common to the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the Protection of the Victims of War clearly states that “[i]t makes no difference how long the conflict lasts, or how much slaughter takes place, or how numerous are the participating forces” (p. 23). Secondly, the fact that Crimea is now under the control of the Russian forces determines a situation of occupation that also falls under the scope of the law of armed conflict (Article 2(2) of the Geneva Conventions).
However, the law of armed conflict would extend to the DDoS attacks and other cyber operations against Ukraine only if these have a “belligerent nexus” with the hostilities and the occupation. Otherwise, they would be mere cyber crimes and would fall under the scope of domestic criminal laws. To have a belligerent nexus, the cyber operations must have been designed to cause a certain threshold of harm to a belligerent (Ukraine) in support of another (Russia) (see Recommendation V(3) of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)’s Interpretive Guidance on the Notion of Direct Participation in Hostilities). Harm must be either death, injury, or destruction on civilian persons or objects, or military harm, whether physical or not (Recommendation V(1)). Even though they didn’t result in material damage on protected persons and property, then, the threshold of harm would have been crossed if the DDoS attacks and other cyber operations had at least aimed at affecting the Ukrainian government’s ability to communicate with and the operability of its armed forces, so to disrupt Ukraine’s military operations or military capacity. From the information available, we don’t know whether this is the case.
Do the DDoS operations against Ukraine amount to “attacks” under the law of armed conflict? The question is important because the rules on targeting and protecting civilians, including the principles of distinction and proportionality and the duty to take precautions, only apply to “attacks”, defined in Article 49(1) of Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions as “acts of violence against the adversary, whether in offence or in defence”. I have argued elsewhere that a cyber operation is an “attack” in this sense whenever it employs cyber capabilities that produce or are reasonably likely to produce “violent” consequences in the form of loss of life or injury of persons, more than minimal material damage to property, or loss of functionality of infrastructures. From the available information, this doesn’t seem to be the case of the DDoS attacks against the Ukrainian communication systems and, even less, of the defacement operations. Cyber “espionage” also doesn’t normally affect the functionality of the accessed system or amend/delete the data resident therein. It doesn’t have “violent” consequences and is therefore not an “attack”, although it may be an act of hostilities.
To conclude, we can’t establish for sure whether the international law of armed conflict applies to the cyber operations conducted so far against Ukraine because we don’t know whether they were designed to militarily support Russia to the detriment of Ukraine. What we do know is that the operations in questions are not “attacks”, and therefore the rules on targeting don’t apply to them, whether or not they have a belligerent nexus.
Dr. Marco Roscini is Reader in International Law at the University of Westminster. He has written extensively in international security law, including cyber warfare and nuclear non-proliferation law. His most recent book, Cyber Operations and the Use of Force in International Law, has just been published by OUP. He is also the author of ‘Cyber Operations as Nuclear Counterproliferation Measures’, published in the Journal of Conflict and Security Law (2014). Dr. Roscini regularly blogs at Arms Control Law and can be followed on Twitter at @marcoroscini.
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"In 2007, Vladimir Denshchikov suffered a stroke, right before a theatrical premiere, which led to his taking a teaching job at the Simferopol Institute of Culture. While recuperating from this terrible condition, the artist continued working on an icon for the church of Malorechenskoye village, and as he struggled to weave little knots, he felt his partially paralyzed hand moving ever more freely, as if God was guiding it Himself. The artist made a miraculous recovery and continues to create wonderful macrame artworks."
read
the rest of this story here ht to
@ChrissiHrt on
Twitter.comI do want to note that this particular artform is not correctly an icon according to
traditional Orthodox iconography. Instead, the artist is here reproducing in macrame what used to be done in precious metal as a not only an adornment but also protection of the painted icon against wear and tear caused by veneration in the form of kissing. Here is an example in metal:
With the acceptance of the icon as a religious tool well established, the icons’ religious use was further dictated and refined by Church doctrine. The form of the religious icon as it is recognized today, both by art history and the Church, is still easily traceable to these doctrines, the most famous of them being the Byzantine aesthetic rules of “clarity and recognizability,” which limited both the scope of the images which were reproducible and the form these reproductions could take. Functionally, this increased the images’ ability to be recognized as of the church and increased their circulation. First adopted from the Byzantines by the Greek Orthodox church, the images soon after became a central part of
