This month marks the twentieth anniversary of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. When protests over a rigged presidential election first erupted in central Kyiv on November 22, 2004, few observers could have imagined that they were witnessing the beginning of a geopolitical drama that would eventually lead to Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II. Yet there can be no doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s desire to crush Ukraine first began to take shape two decades ago, as he watched the Ukrainian people challenge their own authoritarian rulers and demand a democratic future.
Over the past twenty years, there has been a tendency to view the Orange Revolution primarily as a political failure. This assessment is easy enough to understand. After all, although the revolution overturned a fraudulent presidential election and brought a reformist candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, to power, it did not bring about the political transformation that the millions of Ukrainians who participated in the protest movement had hoped for. Instead, Yushchenko spent much of his presidency squabbling with colleagues and compromising with opponents before ultimately losing the 2010 election to the Orange Revolution’s villain, Viktor Yanukovych.
While the revolution clearly failed to achieve its lofty political goals, focusing solely on domestic Ukrainian politics is shortsighted. To appreciate the true historical significance of the Orange Revolution, it must be viewed in a much broader context.
Before the revolution, post-Soviet Russia had significant influence in Ukraine, with Vladimir Putin leading the polls as the most popular politician among Ukrainians. At the same time, the two countries were already quite different. The centralized vertical of power in Russia created the conditions for hard authoritarianism. By contrast, the need to balance competing centers of influence and power in Ukraine gave rise to a softer authoritarianism.
Putin’s brutal promotion of Viktor Yanukovych before the 2004 presidential election and his subsequent drive to suppress protesters during the Orange Revolution underscored the growing differences between the two countries. It accelerated Ukraine’s trajectory away from Russia, which continues to this day.
Putin played a very visible personal role in the Orange Revolution. Russian television, widely watched in Ukraine at the time, relentlessly promoted the candidacy of Viktor Yanukovych in the run-up to Ukraine’s presidential election. On the eve of the vote, Putin made the fateful decision to intervene directly. He traveled to Kyiv in late October 2004, where he was greeted with an impromptu military parade before appearing on national television to lecture the Ukrainian public at length on the importance of supporting his preferred choice of president.
It soon became clear that Putin had miscalculated disastrously. His open and naked attempt to interfere in Ukraine’s internal affairs was widely interpreted as a grave insult and an indication of his contempt for Ukrainian statehood. It electrified public opinion and helped mobilize millions of previously apolitical Ukrainians.
Weeks later, after a deeply flawed second round of voting, Ukrainians responded to the attempted theft of their election by pouring into central Kyiv in huge crowds. It is no exaggeration to say that Putin’s act of supreme imperial hubris was one of the main causes of the Orange Revolution.
This pattern has repeated itself over the past two decades, with Putin’s attempts to impose his will on Ukraine consistently backfiring and driving the two countries further apart. In 2013, he pressured his Ukrainian ally Yanukovych to abandon European integration and return the country to the Kremlin’s orbit, but this triggered a second revolution and the fall of Yanukovych’s regime.
Putin then opted for a military solution. He launched an invasion of Ukraine in February 2014 by seizing Crimea, then sent troops into the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine a few weeks later. When it became clear that this limited military intervention had only strengthened Ukraine’s resolve to break away from Russia’s sphere of influence entirely, Putin began planning what would become a full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Since the Orange Revolution, Putin’s quest to retake Ukraine has defined his entire rule. In his single-minded pursuit of this goal, he has demonstrated a willingness to bear enormous costs. In addition to the lives of countless Russian soldiers killed or maimed while fighting in Ukraine, Putin has also sacrificed Russia’s economic prosperity, the country’s international standing, and its ties to the developed world.
The historic shift in Putin’s worldview became apparent soon after the Orange Revolution. Within months of the popular uprising in Ukraine, he ordered work to begin on what would become the Kremlin’s flagship English-language media platform, RT. It was the first step in a process that would make Putin’s regime the undisputed global leader in spreading anti-Western disinformation.
In the spring of 2005, the Kremlin also backed a nationwide campaign encouraging Russians to display orange-and-black St. George ribbons in honor of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. With images of rebellious Ukrainians with orange ribbons still fresh in everyone’s minds, the loyalist symbolism of this reciprocal gesture was hard to miss. The St. George ribbons became the basis of a fanatical victory cult as the Putin regime sought to justify its own authoritarianism through increasingly extravagant forms of World War II veneration. What began as a reaction to the orange ribbons of the Ukrainian revolution became the ultimate symbol of the Putin era.
Why is Putin so obsessed with Ukraine, and what was it about the country’s Orange Revolution that so irreversibly hooked him? The answers lie in Putin’s imperialist understanding of Russian identity and his formative political experiences as a KGB officer in Eastern Europe during the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Putin was in East Germany in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. He watched helplessly as the entire Soviet presence in the region crumbled amid a surge of pro-democracy protests. In his own account of that traumatic time, Putin claims that his stunned superiors told him, “Moscow is silent.” The experience haunted Putin and convinced him that Moscow should never again “be silent,” especially when faced with mass protest movements or attempts to shake off the Kremlin’s control.
Putin is particularly sensitive to contemporary Ukraine’s national awakening and its embrace of European democracy because he views the country as part of Russia’s imperial depths. If a democratic political culture can take root in a place as central to Russia’s national identity as Ukraine, it could prove contagious and serve as a catalyst for similar demands within Russia itself.
Tellingly, Putin first began to signal his opposition to Ukrainian independence shortly after the Orange Revolution. In April 2005, he alluded to recent events in Ukraine when he called the collapse of the USSR “the greatest political catastrophe of the twentieth century.” This is evident in some less-quoted passages of his speech, which also referred to an “epidemic of disintegration” and lamented the fate of “tens of millions of compatriots” who found themselves outside Russia’s borders in 1991. At the time, Ukraine was home to the largest ethnic Russian population in the former Soviet Union.
Little has changed in the past twenty years. Today’s ongoing Russian invasion is a direct result of Putin’s firm conviction that the loss of Ukraine would pose an existential threat to Russia itself. It would therefore be a fallacy to suggest that some limited territorial settlement could end the current war and lead to a sustainable peace. Any attempt to make concessions would only result in a temporary pause in the fighting before Putin resumes his campaign to destroy Ukrainian statehood.
Vladimir Putin’s efforts to restore Russian control over Ukraine began with the Orange Revolution of 2004 and have now escalated from political meddling into the bloodiest European war in generations. He sees the destruction of the Ukrainian state as his historic mission, and believes that Russia’s fate depends on its success. In these circumstances, talk of compromise with the Kremlin is futile. Instead, peace will only be possible if Putin can be convinced that Ukrainian independence is irreversible.
Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council's UkraineAlert service.
Source: Source
