Doug Saunders
November 15, 2024
The Globe and Mail
Your view of what should be done in Ukraine after 2024 is determined by what you believe happened there in 2014. Those events unfolded so quickly and chaotically, and were witnessed firsthand by so few, that many have come to believe three malicious fictions about 2014.
First, that it involved NATO. Second, that it was a “coup” – a mob overthrow of a legitimately elected president. And third, that the United States and its officials interfered.
These fictions are retailed by U.S. president-elect Donald Trump and his circle, by Russian President Vladimir Putin, by some on the left who view world events as acts of U.S. imperialism, and by a range of people who call themselves foreign-policy “realists.”
Well, I was in Kyiv during some of those decisive weeks of 2014. And more significantly, I was there during 2010 for the presidential election that lit the fuse for the explosion of 2014.
That election pitted Kremlin-backed Viktor Yanukovych, who’d briefly claimed victory after the fraudulent presidential election of 2004, against the nominally pro-Western prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
One thing wasn’t an issue in that election: joining NATO. The military alliance wasn’t so much as mentioned in any candidate’s platform. While Mr. Yanukovych did eventually pledge to end further integration with NATO, that was an afterthought, as NATO members had made it clear in 2008 and after that they did not want Kyiv in the alliance. Ms. Tymoshenko countered with her own pledge to effectively end any NATO relations.
Nobody campaigned for NATO. And the alliance and its largest members were generally opposed, then and for the next dozen years, to Ukrainian membership.
One thing that was a big issue: the European Union. Ms. Tymoshenko promised to get Ukraine into it. Mr. Yanukovych also did – but even faster, and without irking Russia.
Harvard University historian Serhii Plokhy writes that Mr. Yanukovych and his circle of eastern Ukrainian oligarchs sought the EU because they “hoped to imitate reforms, protect their business interests from Russia, and penetrate European markets” – and win the next election in the popular afterglow.
Mr. Yanukovych won the presidency, and he spent the next few years negotiating with Brussels.
That culminated in November, 2013, when he was to fly to Vilnius to sign an association agreement. Then, after landing, he refused to sign. It later emerged that Mr. Putin had promised
Ukraine a US$15-billion bailout if he dropped the bid, and “threatened to occupy” Crimea and Donbas, according to Mr. Plokhy, if he didn’t.
Shocked Ukrainians took to the squares of Kyiv and other cities, their numbers soon swelling to the millions. Kyiv’s Maidan Square was a cross-section of the country’s people – and there was no mention of NATO. Diplomats from the U.S., Europe and Canada were taken entirely by surprise; their governments did not like the timing, and generally preferred the stability of Mr. Yanukovych.
One part of the story that is true involves U.S. interference – but not the way it’s told. Inside Mr. Yanukovych’s campaign offices in 2010, I regularly encountered neatly besuited Americans, proud to say they were from the political-consulting company of Paul Manafort, who would become Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chair, as well as other Republican Party-linked bodies. They would continue their work for Mr. Yanukovych through the events of 2014. Mr. Manafort later pleaded guilty and served prison time for laundering and hiding money for this Ukrainian work; a Senate committee concluded that his ties to Russian intelligence had made him a “grave counterintelligence threat.”
But the United States wasn’t interfering on the other side, or even providing significant support to the Ukrainians after Russia invaded. Mr. Putin tried to make it seem as if they were, by releasing a wiretapped phone call between then-assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland and her ambassador as they helped mediate transition negotiations after Mr. Yanukovych stepped down, expressing her wish that more democratic candidates would prevail – as one would hope any diplomat would. But it was the elected legislature that used its constitutional powers to make the democratic transition – as far as you can get from a coup.
In fact, it was a constant source of frustration in Kyiv that Washington wasn’t offering support, in 2014 or after. President Barack Obama went as far as saying in 2016 that Ukraine was a “core interest” of Russia’s, and the conflict fell into Moscow’s sphere of influence; Mr. Trump actually got impeached for withholding aid to Ukraine in exchange for favours.
Talk of Ukraine joining NATO, and of significant Western support, didn’t really begin until after Mr. Putin’s second invasion in 2022. A decade ago, the Americans and NATO both wanted to stay away from Ukraine. Far from the “Western expansion” fictions, the fate of Ukraine was left to Ukrainians.
Doug Saunders is The Globe and Mail’s international affairs columnist. He has been a writer with the Globe since 1995, and has extensive experience as a foreign correspondent, having run the Globe’s foreign bureaus in Los Angeles and London. Doug was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and educated in Toronto. After early success in magazines and journalistic research, he first worked for The Globe and Mail as a general news reporter, then as an editorial writer and feature writer. In 1996, he joined the weekend section where he created a specialized writing position on media, culture, advertising and popular phenomena. In 1999, he became the paper’s Los Angeles bureau reporter, covering both social and political stories in the American west and the broader developments in wider U.S. society. From 2003 until 2012, he was the paper’s London-based European bureau chief, responsible for the paper’s coverage of more than 40 countries. He has also done extensive reporting in the Middle East, North Africa, the Indian Subcontinent and East Asia; from 2013 to 2015 he was the paper’s online opinion editor and creator of the online Globe Debate section. He has won the National Newspaper Award, the Canadian counterpart to the Pulitzer Prize, on five occasions, including an unprecedented three consecutive awards for critical writing in 1998-2000, and awards honouring him as Canada’s best columnist in 2006 and 2013. He has also won the Stanley McDowell Prize for writing and has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award. His work has been awarded the Schelling Prize in Architectural Theory, the National Library of China Wenjin Book Award and the Donner Prize.