Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/13/22 John Quigley on the Russian Enclaves of Eastern Europe

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

Scott talks with John Quigley about Crimea, the Donbas and other regions in Eastern Europe with heavy ties to Russia. In the mid-90s, Quigley was tasked with leading talks between the new Ukrainian government and the people of Crimea and the Donbas who saw themselves as Russian. Scott and Quigley go through the history of these regions and examine the issues with today's Eastern Eruopean borders.   Discussed on the show: “I led talks on Donbas and Crimea in the 90s. Here’s how the war should end” (Responsible Statecraft) John Quigley was CSCE expert on Crimea 1994-95. A specialist in international law, he is Professor Emeritus at the Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys introducing john quigley he wrote this important piece for the quincy institute it's responsible statecraft dot org i led talks on don bass and crimea in the 90s here's how the war should end. Welcome the show. John, how are you doing? Thank you. Very well. Good, good. Appreciate you joining us here. The subhead here says after the USSR's breakup,

the OSCE, now known as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, knew that the large number of Russian speakers in Ukraine would become an issue. And yeah, that's really everything, right is the curse of the old world is that all these nations are divided supposedly by ethnicity kind of but all the borders are in the so-called wrong places and then but after World War

2 the UN Charter says no one's ever going to change these borders again except through negotiation so you could see how in an iffy situation like this people might want to really emphasize diplomacy and figure out a peaceful way to resolve

these problems. Seems like their competing interests at play, maybe, too. What do you think? You're absolutely right. The issue was seen by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe as one that could really lead to some trouble. And it definitely has in the case of Ukraine and Russia. So now can you take us back then? what was your job and what issues were coming up here as early as when? This would be 1994. You had the Soviet Union breaking up, what, 1991, and rather quickly it came to be seen that

these little clusters of Russians, now in other countries, was going to be a problem. And I think it was viewed in the context of what happened after the First World War when you had the breakup of the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And similarly, at that time, you had pockets of Germans who were in countries now that were not only different from the empires that they had formerly been in, but were in countries that were resentful against them as having been part of the population that oppressed them. So you had a similar dynamic after the breakup of the Soviet Union. And the organization, well, at the time it was called Conference on Security and Corporation in Europe,

began to focus on this. One place where they focused on it was Estonia, where the Russian population is concentrated in one province, which is very near the border with Russia. And those Russians had lived more or less to themselves. They were not, I would say, integrated into Estonia, and they didn't speak the Estonian language. And the government of Estonia adopted a law saying that in order to be a citizen of Estonia, you had to know the Estonian language, which was kind of a disguised way of denationalizing the Russian population. So the conference focused on that and was actually quite successful in negotiating with the government of Estonia to reduce this language requirement to the point that the Russian speakers would be able to qualify for citizenship. But with Crimea, a similar situation developed, although with its own historical peculiarities,

namely that this territory, Crimea, the peninsula of Crimea, had historically been part of Russia, going back to the late 18th century, but that in 1954, the government of the Soviet Union had transferred it from the Russian Republic to the Ukrainian Republic. That is, when the Bolshevik Revolution came, you had the division of, of the, well, I mean, there were now different territories that developed that had not existed under czarism. And at that time, Crimea was part of, you know, Russia. It was not part of Ukraine. But then in 1954, it was switched from Russia into Ukraine for reasons that nobody has ever been able to figure out with any degree of certainty. But that's part of the

background with regard to Crimea, namely that it historically was more affiliated with Russia than it was with Ukraine. And it has never had a population that was predominantly Ukrainian. It's always been, at least from the early, let's say, mid-19th century. It's been a majority Russian. So it was in that context that I was asked to go with a team, a three-person team, a German fellow, and an Italian, and to try to get to some compromise for the population of Crimea. At that point in time, the Donbass region, the eastern part of Ukraine, was not yet at play. That is, there was no effort at having any kind of autonomous development there. That came only after 2014 when Crimea was merged into Russia.

But in 1994, the population of Crimea didn't really see any reason why it should be part of Ukraine. They thought it was a historical anomaly that had been put into Ukraine in 1954, which at the time didn't matter all that much because the shots were really called from Moscow. But after the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was a big deal because it meant that these Russians instantly became a minority population in a foreign country. And their orientation, that population's orientation, was to Russia. And they were worried about things like whether their children would be able to get into the universities in Russia if they were considered to be, foreign country. So it was in that situation that they declared a republic. It was called the Republic of Crimea. And they held an election that was not considered a legitimate election by the

government of Ukraine, but they held an election nonetheless. And they voted in a fellow who ran on a platform that he wanted to merge Crimea with Russia. And it was right at that point that that I got there, having been asked to do this by the U.S. Department of State, given that the United States is a member of this organization on security and cooperation in Europe. And it was in its capacity as a member that it had been asked by that organization to nominate someone who would undertake this task. And the task was to promote dialogue and to try to work something out. So the three of us, you know, went there. We worked on this for maybe a year, a little more than a year, making a number of trips into Simferopol, which is the capital of Crimea and Kiev,

the capital of Ukraine, talking with officials there about the situation, how they viewed it, what they saw as being feasible to work it out. and we discovered that the two positions were very far apart. That is that the government of Ukraine figured, well, Crimea is our territory, and so it should be governed the way any other part of Ukraine is governed, whereas the people in Crimea said, you know, we don't understand why we are part of Ukraine. The problem for them was that at that point in time, Russia was quite weak and was not prepared to get involved in the situation, in particular, was not prepared to take Crimea away from Ukraine. So the Crimeans were stuck

in that they didn't want to be part of Ukraine, but Russia wasn't prepared to undertake what it would be necessary in order to remove the territory from Ukraine. So what we came up with was a plan for autonomy for Crimea within the government system of Ukraine. And we made this proposal to the Security and Cooperation in Europe organization. And we knew that for it to be acceptable on the Crimean side, it needed to have some teeth in it. So we made it a rather robust autonomy plan. We included in particular international oversight if the autonomy rights were to be infringed by the Ukraine government. So, I mean, I drew all this up in the form of a potential treaty that could have been

concluded between Crimea and Ukraine and showed it to the fellow in the conference on security and cooperation in Europe who was in charge of minority issues. And he was horror-stricken when he saw my proposal. He said the Ukrainian government would not accept it, that it was too much of an infringement on Ukrainian sovereignty. So, you know, I put it back in my file drawer. And nothing got done. I mean, we did hold one conference in Switzerland in 1995, where the representatives of both, sides were invited to come and have a dialogue, and they did and spoke in a friendly way, but

nothing ever came of it. So nothing ever came of the work that I did in Crimea. And then in 2014, by that time, the Russian government was prepared to take Crimea and did so. And that, and that sparked a similar kind of effort in eastern Ukraine. I say similar, though not quite the same. It wasn't for a split from Ukraine. It was for some kind of autonomous status. But in any event, that led to hostilities, which have been in place since 2014. Hang on just one second. Hey guys, I had some wasps in my house, so I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug assault or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org, so keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up.

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priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, Real history, real economics, real education. You got that right. Well, very interesting. So I wonder if you can fill us in any further on developments kind of in the 1990s there after that one conference in Italy fell apart. I've read kind of vague references to, yes, and there were also other sorts of controversies about Crimean sovereignty and wishing to be independent and or switch to the Russian Federation during the 1990s, but not too many details. I wonder if you have any more for us. This is fascinating stuff. Yeah, that's a good question. The matter didn't really move.

anywhere from that point in time. The Ukrainian government was successful in suppressing the Republic of Crimea. That is, they came in and just wouldn't let it operate. So they brought it into the general governmental system of Ukraine. And that's the way things remained up until 2014. I mean, there was some effort at respecting the rights of the Russian speakers, but nothing really significant was done in that regard. You know, in many countries where you have a substantial minority that speaks a language different from the majority.

you'll have a law on language that will say that both of the languages are official languages of the country. Ukraine had a law that said the Ukrainian was the official language, which, I mean, one can understand the Ukrainians felt that their language had been suppressed when they were part of the Soviet Union, and they were trying to reassert. I mean, that was the dynamic in the post-Soviet states, that they all wanted to assert their own culture. That's why the Estonians were requiring knowledge of the Estonian language. You had the same in Moldova. I spent some time there as well. and the population there of Russians similarly was concerned that they were a minority within the larger population, which is ethnically Romanian. And in Moldova, it's even more interesting because the population that identified with the Russian

language included not only Russians, but Ukrainians. So in Moldova, the split is Moldovan Romanians as the majority population on the one side, and Ukrainian and Russians on the other side. So, I mean, this is something that was an issue, as I was saying earlier, in all of these places. Same thing in Georgia with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which developed into warfare in 2008. Yeah. So let's go back to Transnistria there, or Moldova for a second. I'm interested in, if you can talk about that little breakaway region right there on the border between Ukraine and Moldova, which is this, you know, loyal to Russia. I don't think it's sovereign Russian territory like Kaliningrad is there between the Baltics and Poland,

but it's at least loyal to Russia, breakaway region, loyal to Russia. And when you talk about the Russian speaking ethnically Russian and Ukrainian minority in Moldova, are they all in Transnistria or that's just part of them? Yeah, that's where most of the Russian and Ukrainian speakers are in Moldova. I see. So, I mean, there's a question now of whether the Russian's warfront will eventually take the entire southern coast all the way to Transnistria there in the name of protecting that pro-Russian and ethnically Russian and Russian-speaking minority there. And there's been some violence. So, but I guess the Russians are still quite away from there. They still would have to take Odessa first and so forth. So I don't know if that's in the coming in the near future

or not, but that seems to be an open question with this war right now. yeah i think you're right i don't have any better guess than you do on that yeah um but so well can you go back and describe a little bit of the history of how transnisteria became this sort of breakaway autonomous region inside they're on the moldovan side of the line or what supposedly internationally the moldovan side line rather than the ukrainian side is that correct right right So this developed, you know, once the Soviet Union dissolved, you had in that area a population that was not overwhelmingly, but I would say predominantly Russian with an element of Ukrainian, but still some Romanians. but but there were enough Russians and Ukrainians that they were afraid of becoming a minority population in Moldova so they set up their own little government and were able to muster enough

military you know to keep the Moldovan military from coming in And that is the way it's been ever since that time. Yeah. Well, you could see how that's a tripwire. They call that an unresolved conflict. Apparently, a frozen conflict, I guess, is the term for it. Right, that's the term. Yeah, they can't just say, all right, well, this is fine.

We'll just let the people of Transnistria just have this severe level of autonomy and whatever. It's fine. It's always got to be a conflict. that has to be resolved, I guess, violently, one way or the other. I don't know. It's tough. I've always thought the curse of the old world that's supposedly the advantage here in America is that we're all individuals, so I don't really care where your great-grandpappy was from.

But over there in the old world, sure does matter a hell of a lot. And so now, I actually saw a map because there's a new question of whether the polls are going to invade and try to steal Lviv back and re-expand the Polish Empire into Western Ukraine. And I don't know if that's going to happen or not, but that was being debated. But my point is I saw a map where someone was showing the old former Polish Empire in Ukraine, which did dominate all of Ukraine on that older map. But by all of Ukraine, that completely excluded what we now think of as the entire southern coast of Ukraine, of course, including Crimea. but all the land from Moldova to Russia

on that southern sort of belt there and including the Dombas in the far east. According to that map, that was never part of the Ukraine, at least that was dominated by Poland. That was Russian territory. And so I guess it really brings home the idea that these borders,

there were Lithuanian emperors and things too that ruled over this whole territory. These lines have changed over and over and over again through the years. This isn't just the legacy of the world wars, but of, you know, from antiquity, right? Vikings and God knows what rampaging through there. No, you're right. The area that of Leviv or Levov in what's now Western Ukraine was part of Poland at one point. They were the, they were called Padolia and Volina. And if you go back far enough, you had the Lithuanian Empire, as you were mentioning.

So, yeah, you could see why this stuff is hard to resolve. I mean, you know, I don't know. It seems like if people of good faith were really trying to resolve these problems, maybe they wouldn't be too hard to resolve. Like, for example, even after the fighting broke out in the East, in 2014 and 15, as you say, the Minsk Two Deal of February 2015 says that, well, we'll have this new level of autonomy, not full independence, not transfer of sovereignty to the Russian Federation, but just will cease fire and we'll give them this new federalism and respect their language and ethnic rights and whatever differences of religion from people in the West and whatever things are coming between them and try to hold it together by essentially avowing to extend less power over those people.

and it seems like that could have worked but Kiev never implemented their side of the deal and so now it looks like this is what happens when it doesn't work you know no I think you're right I think that could have worked it was a proposal actually not all that different from what I had proposed for Crimea in 1994

but it was not implemented and I think the West bears a certain amount of blame here because I think we didn't push the Ukrainian government to go in that direction as much as could have been done, even though Germany and France were both kind of participants in the Minsk Agreement or guarantors or conveners, you might say, for the Minsk agreement. But you're right. It's something that, you're In retrospect, you think, well, it doesn't make sense that it wasn't worked out and now we've got a real war. Well, I'm reminded something that Pat Buchanan wrote in 1999, which is after the first round of NATO expansion,

and they'd brought in Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic. And he said, well, now they're talking about bringing in the Baltics. But don't you know there's this strip of land called Kaliningrad that's still owned by Russia? Russia, and if we expand NATO to the Baltics, then that means from the Russian side looking west, Kaliningrad is now behind NATO lines, and we're one skirmish between those guys and the Polish infantry away from a world war. It's like the crazy situation of having West Berlin inside Kami, East Germany, it's like deliberately creating a situation like that.

let's put our potential adversaries sovereign territory wholly within our military alliance as this little island in the middle of it it's nuts and then they did it anyway of course yeah no i think i think that uh is a factor that made the russian government very nervous and set the context for what we now have Yeah. You know, I've noticed something, and you seem to have some experience in dealing with these people. It seems like those who knew better all along don't have any problems saying, yeah, you know, even though we're Americans, we can tell that. Yes, it's true. America played a role in picking this fight. But the people who were wrong all along, they would rather die that admit that they were wrong. And so instead, Putin is Hitler. And now we've got to stop them. Yeah, yeah, that may well be some of the psychology behind it. From dealing with the State Department and these type people, you know, in the past, I mean, do you know anyone who was for a NATO expansion then who would now admit that, yeah, maybe that was a bad idea, you know, I don't know. Yeah, you know, it's very hard for people to acknowledge that they were wrong or, if not,

you know, wrong, at least that they took positions that they didn't fully understand in terms of their implications. Yeah. Oh, well. I don't know. These things happen, I guess. And I guess we'll see if the war expands. It seems like there's at least a reasonable chance that it will now. What do you think? I'm very bad at predicting. I don't want to say. I never thought that the Soviet Union would fall apart. So, you know, don't ask me for predictions. Yeah, I need to probably start adopting that policy as well. All right, well, listen, I really appreciate the history lesson here.

It's great stuff, and I'm going to quote you in my book. So thank you a lot. Well, thank you very much. All right, you guys. That is John Quigley, formerly working with the OSCE there, trying to form a peace deal of some kind back in. 1994 on the Crimea issue and you can read all about it at responsible statecraft.org I led talks on Donbass and Crimea in the 90s.

Here's how the war should end. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute. dot org.