So you want to solve the Ukraine crisis by dividing the country into "Russian" and "European" sections, and letting each go its own way? That idea hangs in the air, proposed not just by Russian president Vladimir Putin (who has already tried it with Crimea) but is also increasingly popular among many voices in the West. After all, if we ended the wars in the former Yugoslavia by allowing it to divide, the logic goes, why not do the same with Ukraine?
Well, good luck with that.
The problem with Ukraine is not just that its "separatist" trends are entirely being imposed from outside – though that is a big problem – but that the country simply isn't divided in two, and doesn't split along any easy lines. The closer you look, the more you realize how unworkable a solution this is.
1. Ethnic Russian and Ethnic Ukrainian. In the early days of the crisis, people circulated dramatic maps showing a starkly divided Ukraine: Ukrainians live in the west, Russians in the east and south. Or so it seems.
Alina Polyakova, a senior research fellow in sociology at the University of Bern, points out in an article in Foreign Policy that this is not at all true: There is, outside Crimea, no Russian-majority region of Ukraine.
"In this scenario," she writes, "Russia could not lay claim to any Ukrainian district except Crimea, where 58 per cent of residents identified themselves as ethnically Russian... In all other districts – including in those in which pro-Russian separatists have occupied government buildings and led protests – ethnic Russians are a minority. In Luhansk district, only 39 per cent of the population claims Russian ethnicity... In Donetsk district, the number was 38 per cent. And only two others – out of 24 total – have significant ethnic Russian presences: Kharkiv (26 per cent) and Zaporizhia (25 per cent)."
That may be why a poll by the Donetsk Institute of Social Research and Policy Analysis showed that two-thirds of the district's residents (66 per cent) reject the idea of joining Russia and prefer to keep Ukraine whole.
2. Rural and urban. If there are so few ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, how come so many of them seem to appear at protests? Mainly because ethnic Russians tend to live in cities, while Ukrainians are more likely to live in rural areas. And this makes a big difference: Ukraine has a fairly low urban-population ratio by European standards (32 per cent of its people live in rural areas), and, while the east is more urbanized than the west, its countryside still has a fairly high population density – suggesting that the ethnic-Ukrainian majority in the east may be silent at the moment, but would likely come out of the bushes, so to speak, and resist any attempt to leave Ukraine.
3. Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking. This is, presumably, the division that "pro-Russia" activists prefer to use, because official figures show that an awful lot of non-Russian Ukrainians, including majorities in districts such as Donesk, speak Russian as their native tongue. If you go by such maps, it looks like most southern and eastern Ukrainians speak Russian.
Or do they? In fact, a more detailed breakdown shows that Russian is far less prevalent. "Bilingualism and generational differences," Dr. Polyakova writes, "complicate the neat picture of a geographically and linguistically divided Ukraine. A map reflecting primary language use, as opposed to native language, would likely resemble Swiss cheese – there would be pockets of Russian speakers in predominantly Ukrainian-speaking regions and pockets of Ukrainian speakers in predominantly Russian-speaking regions."
4. Young and old. The underlying problem with the neat-looking maps is that all of their data come from the last Ukrainian census, which took place in 2001 – only a decade after the country had ceased to be part of the Soviet Union, which imposed the Russian language on the entire population, and strongly encouraged a Russianized identity for many. In 2001, every Ukrainian adult had been schooled in Russian and had entered a work force in which the Russian language was prized.
In the 13 years since then, an entire generation, raised in the Ukrainian language in an independent Ukraine (which, under some leaders, has actually outlawed the teaching of Russian) has come of age. This, almost exclusively, is the generation that poured into Kiev's Maidan square in the hundreds of thousands. Even those who were born in Russian-speaking households are more likely to speak Ukrainian in public (the languages are similar, are mutually understood by most Ukrainians, and speaking one or the other is often more a matter of choice or affinity than of mother tongue) . While there do remain Ukrainians, some of them ethnically Russian, who prefer the Russian language (and they are more numerous in the east and south) outside of Crimea they appear to be a scattered and ageing population.
5. Happy and unhappy. Of course, whether you choose to identify with Russia or Ukraine is not a matter of ethnicity or language or age or geography: It's a matter of how you feel. Those Ukrainians who would rather side with Moscow do not fall along neat lines: While more likely to be ethnically Russian and older and eastern, they are also mainly people who are either very unhappy with Ukraine or who are very impressed with Russia, or both.
When he visited the eastern Ukrainian city of Horlivka, in Donetsk region, this week, Globe and Mail writer Mark MacKinnon found a depressed place where people "don't really want to live in an independent Donetsk. In many ways, they don't even want to live in today's Russia, although there's a lot of admiration for President Vladimir Putin here. What they want is to go back in time, to when the Soviet Union still existed and Horlivka residents had jobs producing things that people in other places wanted to buy."
As Mr. MacKinnon and others have found, the "pro-Russian" activists in the east and south – and even those in Kiev – tend to be more regretful that the Soviet Union came to an end than excited by the prospect of falling under Moscow's rule. In the wrecked economy of Ukraine – starved of growth by its exclusion from the European Union and depressed by misrule and corruption – the Soviet days are going to look better to a lot of people, especially older ones.
Paradoxically, those feelings are less likely to be inspired by events in the east, where employment levels and salaries are higher. Like any of Ukraine's great divides, it is almost impossible to slice it along a nice, neat line.
Doug Saunders
