Author Archives: markdowe1

Arts, Books, History, Russia, Ukraine

Book Review: Overreach

RUSSIA-UKRAINE

Intro: Owen Matthews is a writer with close family ties to Russia, but a disturbing portrait of the Russian president’s propaganda is swallowed whole by his own people. The Russian despot’s lies are working. Overreach is the inside story of Putin’s war against Ukraine

READERS of foreign affairs’ news will know the name of Owen Matthews, a veteran Moscow correspondent, from articles and pieces he has written about Russia and Ukraine.

But his book on the war now raging between those two countries – an act of pure and vicious choice by President Putin – reveals for the first time the depth of his own family’s involvement in the complex background of conflicting national identities.

Or as he puts it: “We all like to believe that we think with our rational minds. But a little bit of us, a deep bit, thinks with our blood.” For Matthews’ mother, Lyudmila Bibikova, was born in Kharkiv, a predominately Russian-speaking city, at the heart of the Ukrainian territories Putin is determined to annex; and her own parents were both born in what is now, legally, Ukrainian land.

Yet as Matthews goes on to explain: “The Bibikov family did not consider themselves Ukrainian. For two centuries the Bibikovs played a significant role in Russia’s imperial role in Ukraine, first as servants of the Tsars and later as loyal lieutenants of Soviet power. Whether I like it or not my family history – my blood – is intimately linked not only to Ukraine and Russia but to the history of the Russian Empire.”

Although Putin is widely regarded as being highly motivated by a desire to reassemble the Soviet Union – and the secession of Ukraine in 1991 marked the end for the USSR – the Russian president sees himself as the heir to Catherine the Great, who brought most of Ukraine under the Kremlin’s rule.

And, as Matthews recounts, his ancestor, Captain Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bibikov, was “one of the Russian officers who accompanied the empress on her first imperial progress through the newly conquered lands of south and west Ukraine”.

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Arts

Camouflaged appearance

IS THIS WHO YOU ARE?

HE was a big, heavy man. His camouflage jacket was buttoned tightly around him. The hat, decorated with skulls, was pulled low on his forehead. The bandana across his face left just enough space to see the glitter of his eyes.

He might just have been wrapped up against the cold, but everything about his dress and demeanour said, “Stay away! Don’t talk to me.”

There were six concrete steps between the car park and the pavement. As I walked down, he stepped up purposefully, and was breathing heavily by step three.

“You’ll get there,” I said, speaking as if I had every right to.

“Oh, I’m getting too old for this,” he replied.

“I know that feeling,” I said with a little laugh.

At the bottom I looked over my shoulder. He stopped at the top and turned. He raised his hand in a sort of salute, and said “Happy New Year, mate.”

For a second we were more than the camouflage we habitually wear; we were fellow travellers on the same difficult journey.

I could have taken his appearance at its word and said nothing, but how we look is so rarely who we are.

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European Union, Kosovo, NATO, Serbia, United States

NATO needs to strengthen its hand in Kosovo

KOSOVO

Intro: Two decades since NATO intervened in Kosovo, and almost 15 years since the country declared independence, Serbia’s refusal to accept Kosovo’s sovereignty is increasing the possibility of renewed conflict in the region

EARLY last month, ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo – near the Serbian border – started setting up roadblocks. They were protesting against the arrest of an ethnic Serb former police officer. The situation soon escalated into a dangerous impasse between Kosovo and Serbia, with Pristina calling on NATO-led international peacekeeping forces in Kosovo (KFOR) to intervene, and Belgrade announcing its forces was on “the highest level of combat readiness” due to tensions at the border.

Following dialogue between Serbia’s President Alexandar Vucic and Kosovo’s Western partners that no arrest would be made over the incident, the protesters eventually started dismantling the roadblocks on December 29.

With the reopening of border crossings, the crisis appeared to come to an end. But the escalation in December was not the first incident that almost pushed Serbia and Kosovo into open conflict. It is unlikely it will be the last. The fragile relationship between the two neighbouring countries has been on the verge of collapse since last summer, when Kosovo’s government started taking steps to exercise sovereignty over the country’s entire territory. This included the demand that all citizens of Kosovo (including ethnic Serbs) start carrying IDs and using licence plates issued by Kosovo. In response, ethnic Serbs in the north barricaded roads and threatened violence, leading KFOR forces to start patrolling the streets in the region. A few days later, following mediation by the EU and US, Pristina and Belgrade reached a deal on ID documents but left the issue of licence plates to be resolved at a later date. That was resolved in November, with a signing of a deal that required Serbia to stop issuing licence plates with markings indicating Kosovo cities and Kosovo to cease its demands for reregistration of vehicles carrying Serbian plates.

The latest standoff at the borders came just a few weeks after this landmark deal, demonstrating quite clearly that the tensions between Kosovo and Serbia are chronic. They will not be truly resolved until mutual recognition is achieved.

Recent escalations between Serbia and Kosovo have followed a clear pattern. Kosovo attempts to exercise sovereignty over its whole territory; Belgrade responds by stoking unrest using the ethnic Serbs in the north as its proxies. The EU steps in, brokers a deal and stops the unrest from escalating into cross-border conflict. Then the cycle is repeated.

All of this shows that the recurring tensions have little to do with the practicalities of governance (such as licence plates), and everything to do with one core issue: Kosovo’s independence.

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