Russian and American Press on Presidential Elections in Ukraine

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NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

Faculty of Communications, Media and Design

BACHELOR THESIS

Russian and American Press on Presidential Elections in Ukraine

Author:

Alexander Avdeev, group 151

Advisor:

Boris Kalyagin,

Candidate of Historical Sciences

MOSCOW 05.05.19

Abstract

This paper is based on the analysis of academic and media sources regarding the political crisis in the Ukraine. In order to understand how interests of political actors are expressed, materials from the Russian and U.S. newspapers have been taken for empirical analysis. The goal of the research is to formulate and explain the principles of journalistic coverage of the Ukrainian presidential elections in 2019. The research employs a concept of agenda setting to examine the differences in the journalistic selection of topics, sources, arguments and powers of expression. The materials for analysis cover a period from November 2018 to April 2019.

To ground the research in a relevant context,political conflict in the Ukraine is analysed through a comprehensive discussion on the political development of the country. The chapter on history of the U.S.-Russia relations is designed to acquaint a reader with ideological roots, socio-economic circumstances and political decisions that have led the Ukraine to the current crisis.

Keywords:U.S.-Russia relations, international relations, journalistic discourse, agenda setting.

Acknowledgements

I would like to extend my appreciation to the teachers, lecturers and supervisors at the Faculty of Communications, Media and Design of the Higher School of Economics. The studies on the Journalism programme have given me tremendous support in professional and self-development. I particularly value professional advice and feedback of my supervisor Boris Kalyagin whose advice and recommendations were invaluable for the preparation of this research paper.

Introduction

When Volodymyr Zelenskiy became a most likely candidate to become a president, the main question arose about the future configuration of political power in the Ukraine. Parliamentary elections in November 2019 are expected to generate a new “oligarchic consensus” with plans towards corruption management, euro-integration, military conflict in Donbass and legal status of Crimea.

Background

Ukrainian conflict has a special significance in geopolitical terms. The internal structure of political power in the Ukraine is informative of the transition from bipolar to a multipolar formation of the global politics. Political processes in the country involve international actors that seem to dramatically influence the Ukrainian ones. With economic, cultural and ideological problems, it opens a wide scope of questions about the future of a state in the global politics.

As it is manifested in the National Defence Strategy (2018) of the United States, Russia is its long-term strategic competitor. In the document, the case of Crimea is regarded as subversion and discreditation of the democratic processes in the region. The ideological clash has no deliberative resolution and military operations in Donbass are likely to frozen the conflict for decades.

In April 2019 Volodymyr Zelensky opened a new chapter in the political history of the Ukraine. His position of non-system candidate and media-based political technologies may have a long-term impact on the political landscape of the Ukraine. The course of euro-integration, correspondingly, might be corrected in terms of more neutral relations with Russia on economic and cultural issues.

Problem statement

The key research problem in the selected area is informational uncertainty around the possibilities of the conflict resolution between Russia and the Ukraine. Any official position on the situation supports a view that the military operations in the Donbass and Luhansk republics should be stopped and regional security maintained. However, such initiatives as Minsk agreements or sanctions introduced by the countries towards each other do not contribute into the resolution of the conflict. Oppositely, public political discourse of the Russian and U.S. officials generates aggressive and tit-for-tat attitudes, so that conflict resolution resources are being substantially damaged.

The study is focused on searching for the explanative and interpretative means of the Ukrainian crisis. The main orientation of the paper is to search for the relevant arguments in history of the U.S.-Russia relations and development of independent Ukraine to discuss the current geopolitical competition between the countries. To explore various principles ofthe information warfare, the study observes and reports on a range of scientific publications and international expertise.

Goals and objectives

The methodological goal of the research outcome is to developa framework for the analysis of an international conflict in the press.It consists of several theoretical, historical and practical sets of goals and objectives.

First, the historical part of the paper aims at grounding the analysis of the newspaper publications on the conflict in the Ukraine. The goal is to prepare a relevant discussion about the historical context of the political problems in the country. The corresponding objectives are:

to describe the genesis of political system in the Ukraine since 1990s;

to formulate a set of historical factors that play an important role in the Ukrainian conflict;

to analyse socio-economic situation in the Ukraine at the time of the conflict.

Second, the theoretical goal of the paper is to inquire into the area of international relations and select effective descriptive and analytic tools for the conflict resolution. The corresponding objectives are:

to conceptualise the theoretical notions of international conflict;

to explain official positions of the United States and Russia;

to track the decisions and initiatives that led Ukraine to the crisis.

Third, the empirical goal of the paper is to define the methods of quality pressin reporting onthe Ukrainian presidential election of 2019. It has a practical importance, as the analysis is supposed to inform a reader of the possible discursive strategies in the international journalistic coverage.

The Russian newspapers selected for the empirical analysis: Vedomosti, Russian Newspaper (Rossiiskaya Gazeta) and Kommersant.

The American newspapers selected: New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

The timeframes covered in the research: November 2018 - April 2019 for the Russian press and March - April 2019 for the U.S. newspapers (further elaborations on the methodology are made in the empirical part).

The practical objectives are:

to analyse the information that journalists select for the coverage of the Ukrainian elections;

to conduct an analysis of English-language discursive strategies in the American publications;

to define persuasive and manipulative devices in the journalistic texts;

Methods and research questions

The object of the study is the journalistic discourse of Ukrainian elections in the American and Russian press. The research questions are:

What kind of agenda for the Ukrainian elections did the Russian and American newspapers set?

How do newspapers differ in reporting on the same topics?

How do journalists use the reported speech to support their arguments?

In terms of content, the research discusses the coverage of events from the perspective of agenda setting. In this respect, the emphasis is made on the presence /absence of the topic in the news. For the discussion, the topics were selected in terms of significance for the further course of events in 2019.

Another analytic step concerned various forms of journalistic argument. For the discourse analysis, publications were examined in terms of quotations usage (selection of experts), style (word choice) and rhetoric strategies. The main methodological material used for discourse analysis is the “Structure of NewsVan Dijk, T. A. (1985). Structures of news in the press. Discourse and communication: New approaches to the analysis of mass media discourse and communication, 10, 69.” (1985) by a Dutch social scientist van Dijk.

Novelty and delimitations of study

The initial hypothesis was that American and Russian quality newspapers stay impartial when describing the events in the Ukraine. High level of credibility and objectivity was expected from all selected newspapers except for the governmental Russian Newspaper (RG).

Among other key hypotheses, the agenda of the U,S, and Russian press was expected to overlap in such aspect as engaging a qualified expertise into reporting to raise credibility. The principle of “international community” and public sphere was expected to be developing, so that Russian and American readers could have a common ground when talking and analysing geopolitics.

It was quickly evident that the U.S. press did not focus on the subject in detail, so that little expertise on the candidates have been presented. It significantly hindered the comparative approach of both types of publication.

The analysis of the agenda setting is comprehensive: overlaps and gaps in the coverage are discussed in the empirical part of the paper. As there were no analogous studies in the academic publishing up to date, the study is relevant for the knowledge-making and discussion on the further course of political events in the Ukraine. The theoretical part of the study is unique: no selection of sources of such a range has been found in the open access online. The synthesis of various perspectives allows to get an informed perspective on the Ukraine as an independent state and a subject of geopolitical contradictions between the global actors.

One of the major shortcomings is that the Ukrainian press has not been studied at all. It is difficult to draw any conclusions about the impact of the Russian and American coverage on a Ukrainian reader.

Theory of international relations and positioning for the U.S. and Russia

Theory of international conflict

Regarding the political crisis and military character of the situation in the Ukraine, several descriptive and analytic concepts have been selected for the discussion of academic sources on the Ukrainian conflict. For descriptive purposes, theory of international relations by a Russian strategic consultant Y. KosovКосов, Ю. В., Анискин, А. А., Михеева, Н. М., Плотников, В. А., Сагалова, Ю. П. А., Шатравин, С. А., & Шумилов, М. М. (2012). Мировая политика и международные отношения. Питер.(2012) comes up as a productive point of reference. Basic concepts from the book by Moghaddam et al. Moghaddam, F. M., Harrй, R., & Lee, N. (Eds.). (2007). Global conflict resolution through positioning analysis. Springer Science & Business Media. (2012) supplement the given theoretical framework and ground further discourse analysis by focusing on the analytical categories of position, illocutionary force and narrative.

Kosov's model of system description helps to achieve necessary clarity about the substantial characteristics of international conflicts. In the textbook “World Politics and International Relations”, the essence of international conflict is defined as “intensification of competitive interactions between the subjects or actors of the world politics”. Contrary to the ordinary perceptions, it is suggested to consider conflict as a norm of social existence and a special type of cooperation. In the stable frames of international relations, conflicts serve as regulators and ways of transition to the new social realities. The author stressed the importance of the social factors, because studies of international conflicts are often hindered by the ideological, psychological and linguistic factors. Communication thus becomes a special focus of processing the international conflict from the diplomatic negotiations to public speaking in the media. It is well illustrated by a spontaneously invented “Cold War” metaphor of an American journalist Walter Lipmann. The catchy phrase has become a working definition and encouraged long-term political measures, many of which rendered negative outcomes. This example proposes that discussion of international conflict requires a deliberate attitude to every single word.

According to Kosov, the content of a conflicting relationship is realised through the goals of its participants. The analysis of the Ukrainian conflict, therefore, would be concentrated on defining the differences in what the participants tend to achieve. The differences in the goals of the conflicting sides are called the subject of the conflict. The subject varies from being concentrated in material resources (territory, natural resources, human resources) to non-material values (ideologies, symbols, collective representations). Among the non-material subjects are power, authority, influence on other actors and ideas, ideological complexes (e.g. religious artefacts of social consciousness). Actions around these issues become the sources of conflict.

A working definition of the source of international conflict is “a conscious activity of global political actors directed on achieving unilateral competitive long-term advantages”. This activity creates real or imaginary threats to the vital interests of other subjects of international relations or actors of global politics.

International situations switch from tension to conflict when the perception of a threat is accompanied with understanding the scarcity of resources to search for and implement an adequate response. Goals, activities and subsequently appearing mutual threats are analytically connected to the foreseeable and non-foreseeable consequences.

A special attention is paid to the definition of agency in the conflict. The term “subjects” is suggested to use for the sphere of international law where states-governments are the primary entities of influence. The term actors is used for the sphere of non-political agency that involves businesses, non-governmental organisations and private persons. This distinction is significant because the activities of state as subjects of international law cover only a part of the whole decision-making around a conflict. It is also necessary to distinguish between the “sides” and “participants”: sides are the groups of countries while participants are the countries, businesses, public organisations and other influential social groups. As for the smaller social groups and citizens, they have been defined asa category of “other socio-political powers” (secondary actors) that includes supporters, internal opposition and a fifth column. Depending on the activity and character of critics, opposition is defined as either “loyal”, “confrontational” or “uncompromising”. The “fifth column” is a part of society that possesses the resources of destructive influence on the political leadership of one of the sides of the conflict. Finally, the structure of international conflict is common to include the third side - peacekeepers, mediators and arbiters. Following the principle of system description, concretisation of secondary actors for this study of the Ukrainian case includes educational institutions (schools, universities), scientific laboratories, academic publishing and Russian and the U.S. newspapers.

Manifestations of the conflict development have various forms: geo-cultural, geo-political, geo-economic and geo-strategic. Kosov suggested to characterise the forms of a conflict by using the “global-regional-local” distinction. The levels of conflicting situation correspond to the layers of knowledge that politicians need to operate with in their decision-making. Such a levelling also serves analytic purposes. Thus, global level refers to the geo-political interests of the Russia and the United States as a dynamic model of the future and current international order. Regional aspect covers the internal situation in the Ukraine where interests of external actors are connected to the ethnic groups, municipalities and smaller businesses. The local level of the conflict can be explicated as a psychological field of analysis where all actors prove the importance of their interests in the concrete processes of economic exchange, interpersonal communication and individual behavior.

Chronologically, open phase of conflict has corresponding characteristics:

advent of formal causes to start open confrontation;

sides of the conflict bring damage to each other by conscious actions;

sides of the conflict articulate their perceptions in a form of the opposite meanings and exchange emotionally-coloured descriptions of circumstances which leaded to the mutual claims (discourse);

controversy of sides is built on the limited usage of resources in their possession to influence the conflict situation.

This period is characterised by three types of activities:

sides use the forms of impellingbehavior on the basis of diplomatic pressure, seizure of diplomatic relations, international sanctions, manipulation of military resources without weaponry violence;

conflict is escalated by the expansion of scales of bringing damage to the most important interests of the opposite side;

evolving of a crisis in the relations between the sides due to reaching the borderlines of urging each other, which leads to the weaponry violence in the organised forms.

The conflict is characterised as crisis when the sides of conflict reach the liminal zone of applying impelling behavior (forcing each other to act) and face inevitable usage of military violence. An ethno-political conflict is based on the contradictions in the following aspects: culture, self-consciousness (identity), self-identification, belonging to a religious confession, traditional areal of living and common historical faith (past) that is reflected in the experience of hostile relationships with a complementary or remote ethnos.

Positioning theory for international conflict resolution

As representations of political conflict are a textual phenomenon, it is important to distinguish between the substantial and emotional sides of the conflicting relationships. In terms of the public work on the resolution of the conflict - for example, during the diplomatic contacts with the press - this distinction becomes a crucial factor in understanding the on-going events. The remarkable contrast lies in the difference between confidential and public information in characterising the conflict. In the negotiation processes and decision-making, reason and argumentation are evidently more valuable than emotions and evaluations. Oppositely, public discourse tends to include emotional and evaluative language in the explanations of the conflict.

In essence, it is the confidentiality and limited access to the content of negotiations that limits the public perception of the conflict and supports the certitude in its necessity. The official information from the conflicting sides is supposed to communicate the position, claim for action or announce the results of negotiations, while the details of the talks are most often not articulated. When necessary, diplomats employ tactics of shifting away from the direct answer to a journalistic question or non-mentioning the important facts (in rhetoric it is known as paralepsis). In order to hide confidential data, diplomats use vague expressions and hide the original meanings. Such approach strongly divides the information about the conflict into the official and primary knowledge and the secondary commentaries with assumptions and interpretations.

Theoretically, this idea is explained within the field of international security by the distinction between the material-institutional capital and symbolic capital in possession of the geopolitical actors. Material-institutional capital consists of national armies (e.g. human capital and weapons), financial systems (e.g. state budgets, export-import balance) and large businesses (e.g. industries of natural resources, IT-technologies) while cultural-symbolic capital includes “artifacts, narratives and symbols that define the meaning of the world and legitimise it (what is right, good etc.)”.

The selected approach is supposed to engage with the cultural-symbolic capital as a reflection of institutional and material processes. Positioning approach to conflict is known as a “study of local moral orders as ever shifting patterns of mutual and contestable rights and obligations of speaking and acting”. The shifts of these patterns are investigated in discourse studies, one of which is called a positionality theory. As M. Moghaddam and Harre pointed out in their writing “Positioning and conflict” (2012), “all conflicts take place in a narrative framework and are ascribed meaning through discourse of various types”. Participants tend to represent their reality as a clash between “good” and “evil”, so that discourse becomes active and get a simple structure. Politicians rely on creating oppositions (oppositioning) to put one position against the other. It is needed to create easily understandable meanings and stable attitudes among their audiences.

Remarkably, oppositioning strategy is by itself poorly compatible with the desired concept of multipolarity in the world order, because locally a political conflict is classically understood as a confrontation between the two parties. In general, on the level of the broad audiences it is difficult to represent a conflict via political speeches, journalistic writings and other media-texts.

According to the positioning theory, representation of the conflict is viewed as a threefold structure that reflects the relationships between the participants. In this framework, the participants and their discourse are depicted in a triangle model with the analytic units of “illocutionary force”, “position”,” and “narrative”. Illocutionary force is the sum of actions that influence a conflicting situation.

Speech acts and corresponding literary devices (metaphors, idioms) are supposed to influence the political reality and change the behavior of the participants. Position is generally a statement by a party to declare the goals and selected means of achieving them. These statements are primarily related to the rights and duties of an actor. For example, a statement “Russia aspires to protect it's citizens on the territories of foreign countries” completely corresponds to the category of position and a declaration of political goal. Furthermore, this statement can be variously interpreted in terms of rights and duties where the Russian national and international law systems would create additional contexts as well as the specifications on what is the protection of rights and what are the limits of holding a stated duty. Importantly, the authors point out that positions by themselves are not supported with the laws and regulations. Rather, a position represents the combination of rights and duties that are taken for granted by the parties and realised through decisions, actions and public communication.

Narrative is a supporting text that suggests a chronology of events and causal connections between them. In the international conflicts, narratives reflect the historical past of the parties and represent a piece of political reality that serves the selected position tactically and strategically. In public diplomacy, these narratives are written beforehand to create a stable and consistent view on the on-going events. The actions of political leaders and clashes between officials are carefully designed and coordinated before entering the international public sphere. In this way, the utterances of diplomats, such as “Poroshenko is not about to abide by the Minsk protocol” by the Russian head of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov is a signal to the public rather than an information with the facts and details about the conflict.

As such measures are well-thought and thoroughly calculated by the participating actors, the narrative becomes an instrument in the construction of the ideological meanings. This work is similar to script-writing where real agents of influence need to represent the political process as characters. In the theory of arts, for example, political personalities are understood from the perspective of archetypes. Political archetype is a collection of psychological features that are familiar to the citizens and make a politician seemingly predictable in the perceptions of his or her audiences.

The above structural description is used to model the conflict for the analysis of texts from the media. Relying on these theoretical concepts makes possible to align the perceptions of conflicting sides and define the discrepancies in the understanding of the on-going events. Overall, approaching the Ukrainian events with the Kosov's theoretical thesaurus and positioning framework helps to create an informative representation of the conflict.

The position of Russian Federation: key historical points

From the geopolitical perspective, fundamental contradictions between the United States and Russian Federation lie in the sphere of the international security system. As it is stated in the Russian military doctrine, Russia is challenged by the tendency of military threats to shift to the informational spaces and internal sphere of the country. While the chances of large-scale war against Russia are evaluated as low, military development of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is regarded as a main external danger. The declared priority of Russian strategy is to oppose delegating global functions to NATO and thus violating the norms of international law. The threat of further enlargement of NATO and it's forthcoming to the Russian border is the main officially nominated reason for the Russian annexation of Crimea and military activities in the LNR and DNR republics. In fact, the Russian position directly contradicts the current political course taken by the Ukrainian president Victor Poroshenko in 2014. Some episodes from the history of the U.S.-Russia relations is valuable for the understanding of the Ukrainian conflict.

The argumentation base of Russia in the confrontation with NATO is that it's enlargement “violates the principle of equal security and leads to the emergence of the new dividing lines in Europe”. In this context, equality means a single approach to security within the territory of all countries, so that possibilities of preventive cooperation in case of a threat are ensured. As for the strategic goals, Russia is against the connection of the U.S. foreign policy to the European security and aspires to ensure a genuinely inclusive full-fledged participation of Russia in a new security system. Conceptually, following this goal assumes structural changes in the functioning of NATO and its transformation into a political coalition. The security and military activities, in turn, are preferred to be developed on the basis of the OSCE. In the long-term, Russian strategic expectation is to wait for the switch of the U.S. foreign priorities to more focus on managing the country's internal affairs and subsequent weakening of NATO.

Although Russia does not possess itself as aggressor, it tends to create the opportunities for expressing itself as a “great power” and influence the post-Soviet space by integration initiatives in economic, security and military spheres. The perspective and interest to try to neutralise the enlargement of NATO is expressed in the activity of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) that unites Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. This Russian-led organisation is majorly needed to project power on the post-Soviet space and ensure that NATO would not be expanding further. Overall CSTO has not a policy-making function and rather emphasises the Russian military presence in the CIS countries. Remarkably, CSTO-members cooperated with NATO without participation of Russia before 2014. After Russian annexation of Crimea, CSTO suspended the attempts to build a dialogue with NATO, turned to the more support of OSCE and declared the cooperation with China as a main priority.

As for the historical arguments, Russian strong disagreement with the total domination of NATO on the European territory has been developing since the 1990s. Low quality of the relationship was largely predetermined by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, economic difficulties of new Russian state and a series of nationalistic conflicts in Europe (Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine). What still has a significant impact on the geopolitical relationships is the re-organisation of the post-Soviet space that required significant compromises on the part of Russia both in its foreign and domestic affairs.

One of the first Russian significant abatements of the time was in the obstacles around the re-unification of Germany which are still being discussed in terms of the NATO enlargement. On the one hand, the end of the Cold War was associated with a series of statements by Bush (May 31, 1990) Thatcher (June 8, 1990) Kohl (July 15, 1990) to ensure the security of the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev searched for the possibility of a “common European home” and relied on the political assurances of the U.S. Secretary of State James Baker not to move “inch eastward”. In the recently published texts of the negotiations with the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in February 1990, the integration of Germany into the NATO system has been discussed as a matter of time Savranskaya S., Blanton T. (2017). NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard. National Security Archive. Raising the NATO question as a sensitive issue for Soviet people, Gorbachev admitted a stabilising role of American troops in Europe and asked for the stay of Soviet military forces in the West Germany until 1994.

From the Russian perspective, the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany formally opened the period of managing European security without Russian voice and decision-making. In December of 1994, NATO announced it's enlargement which assumed the inclusion of Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. In the same year, the Ukraine signed the Partnership for Piece agreement which proposed a process of NATO expansion.

Russian officials insist on breaking the promise of the Western partners about the expansion of NATO to the East. In response, Western politicians insist that the supposed promise was concerning only the 1991-1994 transition period, to make Russian forces leave and NATO's enter the Western Germany. As Vladimir Putin specified in 2017, the NATO question should have been put on paper: “It was a direct mistake on behalf of Gorbachev. In politics everything should be documented, and although documented things are often violated, he just had a talk and decided that it is all. But it's not like that”. According to the recently published documents from the 1988 talk of Robert Gates (former CIA analyst and specialist on the USSR) and Vladimir Kryuchkov (KGB leader), there was indeed an idea of making the promises a documented guarantee Memorandum of conversation between Robert Gates and Vladimir Kryuchkov in Moscow (5 February 1990). National Security Archive.

Another crucial compromising process was related to the decision-making around the transformation of the new Russian state from planned economy to free market. While the economic assistance of the U.S. was relatively low, Russia took credits from the IMF, London club and Paris club, so that it's foreign debt increased significantly. U.S.-Russian commission for the implementation of the privatisation, taxation and other economic reforms has been working with the extensive help of the U.S. consultants and advisors.

The restructurisation of the post-Soviet space started from ensuring that weapons of mass destruction would not be anymore dispersed on the territories of the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. The security system for the nuclear weapons needed to be changed. After signing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1994, Russia became an only possessor of the Soviet nuclear weapons. Same year, this was supplemented with a promise to keep the Soviet foreign debt in responsibility of Russia.

The circumstances of the treaty made Russia dependent on the U.S. in that it did not have enough finance to pay for the maintenance, transportation and destruction of the nuclear weapons. The American senators Nunn and Lugar proposed a law according to which the U.S. budget would had a separate section for financing Russian management of nuclear weapons. During the work of the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction in 1991-2012 and additional protocol of 1999 (accounting, control and physical protection of nuclear weapons), the countries created two national centres preparing specialists in nuclear sphere, built a facility to destroy Russian chemical weapons in the Kursk region and utilised Russian nuclear submarines. Defining the reason for the closure of the project in 2012 Lugar, R. G. (2012). Nunn-Lugar: Science Cooperation Essential for Nonproliferation Effort. Science & Diplomacy, 1(1)., Russian representatives said that there were a constant threat of sharing sensitive information about the Russian arsenal with the American representatives and that any further initiative should be less discriminatory to the Russian side. The United States estimated spending of 8 billion dollars while the Russian side's estimates were around 5 billion, provided that the difference have been re-directed to the U.S. consultants.

The Budapest memorandum of 1994 became an argument in the debate on the annexation of Crimea. Russia, U.K. and U.S. promised the territorial integrity of the former owners of nuclear weapons. Formally, none of the countries followed the agreement. The Russian state was officially defined as aggressor in the Ukrainian parliament after the annexation of Crimea but rejected by the Russian officials on the premises of the political character of memorandum which is not legally binding. Given that the work of the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty) had been stopped by the U.S. president Donald Trump and frozen by Vladimir Putin, the protocol of 1999 remains an only active format for nuclear weapons regulation between the countries.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the international relations are being transformed into the art of the methods known as “soft power”, “public diplomacy” and “information warfare”. While Gorbachev's idea about the “union of unions” that would enclose Russia with the European space has been contradicting to the plans of the United States, many post-Soviet sources produced non-verifiable versions of the U.S. role.

As a means of illustration, Russian internal activities in the information warfare can be seen in the educational materials. Here is the extract from the extremely strong political statement of 25 October 1995 by Bill Clinton found in the recent Russian university textbookМаринченко, А. В. (2009). Геополитика. ИНФРА-М. (2013) on geopolitics:

“When in the beginning of 1991 CIA workers passed 50 million dollars to the East to implement our plans, and after that the similar sums, many of the politicians and military men also did not believe in success. Now, four years after, it is seen - our plans started to realise. But it does not mean that there is nothing to think of. … In the upcoming ten years the following problems are to be resolved: - breakdown of Russia into small countries through the interregional wars, similar to one we organised in Yugoslavia; final disruption of the Russian army and military-industrial complex; setting up the regimes in the republics separated from Russia. Yes, we allowed Russia to be superpower, but only one country would be an empire - the United States (from the report of the president Bill Clinton at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 25 October 1995.)”

According to the open sources, there were no speech of Bill Clinton at this date, which makes this educational material a falsification of history. YablokovYablokov, I. (2018). Fortress Russia: Conspiracy theories in the post-Soviet world. John Wiley & Sons. (2018) suggests that the text has roots in the speculations about the Dulles plan which has no verification and is closer to a conspiracy than to a real historical fact.

The position of the U.S.: international security

What would serve as a documented evidence about the U.S. threat to the Russian interests is a recently declassified CIA report of the 1950s prepared by the Georgetown University. Although the nature of the American strategic plans for the Ukraine before the end of Cold War is different nowadays, the report serves as a source of geopolitical information that remains actual and systemic irrespectively to the political developments in the U.S. and Russia. Also, as a career intelligent officer J. Marchio researchedMarchio, J. (1995). Resistance potential and rollback: US intelligence and the Eisenhower administration's policies toward Eastern Europe, 1953-56. Intelligence and National Security, 10(2), 219-241. (1995), the intelligence played a significant role in the Eisenhower's policies and formed the U.S. objectives in the Eastern Europe.

In the document “Resistance Factors and Special Forces Areas”GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY RESEARCH PROJECT. Report RESISTANCE FACTORS AND SPECIAL FORCES AREAS UKRAINE (1957). Central Intelligence Agency. (1957), American analysts provided an overview of the Ukrainian territory in terms of the possibilities for military invasion and potential support of an anti-Soviet campaign. The analysis was based on the following criteria: variations in ethnic composition (ratio of Ukrainians to Russians); regional variations in traditional attitudes toward Soviet rule in the civil war of 1917-1921; variations in attitudes toward the German occupation of World War II; distribution of the resistance incidents.

The classification of resistance cases was made depending on toughness, so that the U.S. forces had clear representation of the possible military dynamics in all regions of the country. The level of approximation and goal-orientation is illustrated by the following quotation from the report:

“the third category of activities includes incidents in which violent opposition to the regime is expressed: plundering stores and supply depots; destroying railroad installations, kolkhoz property, or government buildings; assassinating supporters of the regime such as Communist Party members, leaders of local government, or kolkhoz chairmen; attacking Soviet police, security forces, or units of the Red Army. <…> In the years immediately following World War II the resistance groups were strong enough to defend themselves openly is some areas against the Soviet army and MVD troops. After 1948 they were no longer able to do so and were forced to rely on shelter provided by the local inhabitants or on bunkers built in the remote forested areas. The individuals who have participated in the incidents have committed themselves irrevocably to opposition to the regime. They would undoubtedly provide active assistance for Special Forces, if modest guarantees against immediate reprisals could be provided”.

The demographic and economic data has been used to divide the country into 12 sub-regions graded from the weak to the strong anti-Soviet attitudes. The contours of differences were similar to that of the modern days. Donbass and Crimean Peninsula were defined as the less probable to support Special Forces. The regions of the Western Ukraine have been called the most likely to support American troops. By the name of the largest towns that put on the map, these four regions are: Transcarpathia (Uzhgorod, Kolomyya, Chernovtsy); L'vov and Ternopol areas; Lutsk, Rovno; Zhitomir, Kiev. The authors pointed out that Galicia, governed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, adopted a relatively moderate policy toward its Ukrainian minority and permitted the development of Ukrainian political parties and usage of the Ukrainian language.

Ethnic statistics is the weakest part of the methodology, as there has not been defined a clear parameter of the ethnicity. It is stated that ethnos is represented according to the data of the USSR census, where citizens are classified as either Ukrainian or Russian, which polarises the overall picture and disregards steadily mixed attitudes among the Ukrainians.

This document was made public in 2015 to show that the United States continually considers the territory of the Ukraine as a potential zone of influence on the Soviet Union.

In essence, considering Europe as a zone of influence, the United States promoted the development of NATO to ensure it's status of the major political power in the world. Dealing with Russia, the U.S. strategic goal is to democratise the Ukraine, make it a market-based economy and involve it into the system of NATO security.

Regarding more academic positioning, there are two views on the Ukrainian role in the global politics formulated by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington in 1990s. Both analysts are important not only in politics, but in social sciences as well. Their implications are used in the West for the ideology of international development, national and strategic interests.

On a speech of 18 October 1999 in Kiev, Huntington suggestedMoroney, J. D. (1999). Ukraine's `European Choice'in the East-West Frontier. NATO Fellow Report, 2001, 19-20. an ideological constructionof “the West vs. the rest” which supposes a cooperation of the U.S. with the Ukraine as a subordinate but independent state. The U.S. is characterised by the term “uni-multipolar” system in which future international security and world orderare seen through the lenses of the four hierarchised levels. The first level is the United States as a superpower; the second - Russia and China as regional powers; the third level - such countries as United Kingdom, France and Germany as secondary powers; the fourth - secondary states which include the Ukraine, India, Australia, Argentina etc. Overall, the “West with the rest” configuration is based on the dominance of the United States as a source of “civilizational” values and “universal” ideas, which necessarily correspond to the economic domination of the U.S. over other countries. This ideology has a conflict potential, because Europe would resist the U.S. dominance and the first sign of it, according to Huntington, was the introduction of European currency in opposition to dollar. Huntington assumed that further steps include a growth of the military capability of Europe and anti-hegemonic initiatives handled by the other regional powers. Thus, this position is more associated with the position of the European Union.

The specificity and strategic importance of the Ukraine is suggested to see in the opposition “Western Christianity vs. Orthodox Christianity that symbolises a cultural disunity in a way of the Iron Curtain enclosing the Soviet Union from the rest of the world.

Brzezinski analysis shows that the U.S. and NATO influence is realised through the connection of the stability in Europe with the national, governmental and economic development of the Ukraine.

In the articleAsmus, R. D., Kugler, R. L., & Larrabee, F. S. (1993). Building a new NATO. Foreign Affairs, 28-40. of the NATO policy-maker and expert on Russia Ronald Asmus (1993), the cooperation of NATO and European Union is positioned to address the causes of potential instability and conflict. Nationalistic moods in the countries of the former Soviet Union were regarded as the areas of creating an intensive regional defense and building a new security order; the CSCE was criticised for inability of it's members to agree on the security challenges.

Mainly, in the article Asmus emphasised that the European integration and political development should be dependent on the security guarantees and ideological support provided by NATO. Asmus also suggested that democratisation of Russia should be the first priority of the West and that the Ukraine represents the “best guarantee against Russian imperial restoration”. As a result of this approach, the security awareness of the U.S. soon became an expansion of military resources on the territory of the Western Europe while the ideological influence was expressed in the promotion of the democratisation processes for the Eastern Europe. This vision, in essence, is a projection of the European “dividing lines” that are being represented in different approaches to security, presence of military forces in the region and political lobbying in the parliaments of the European countries.

As for the democratisation strategy of the U.S., it seems of geopolitical importance to elaborate on the American participation in the Russian domestic affairs throughout the 1990s. According to the critical descriptions of an American anthropologist Janine WedelWedel, J. R. (2009). Shadow elite: How the world's new power brokers undermine democracy, government, and the free market. Basic Books. (2009), restructuration of the Russian economy started from October 1992 was largely dependent on the team of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID). Among the leading actors cooperating with Russian reformers Anatoliy Chubais and Andrey Gaidar supposedly were such specialists as: a lawyer from Harvard Jonathan Hay, the World Bank representative Jeffrey Sachs, a Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer and the secretary of the U.S. Treasury Lawrence Summers. Wedel criticises the core of this group of reformers for the lack of transparency, multiple conflicts of interests, illegal enrichment and a vague character of the governmental/private status of the consultancy provided for the Russian politicians.

Legal and economic reforms on privatisation, capital markets and taxation were written by the network of the so-called “personalised bureaucracy” in which a limited number of decision-makers had interconnected access to the financial resources and governmental information. The similar set of initiatives for the Ukraine has been submitted by the USAID in a form of the uncompetitive award in May 1996. One of the responsible persons who mediated between the Ukrainian president Kuchma and the U.S. consultancy was an economist Janusz Szyrmer.

The core of the international security concerns continues to lie in the Kosovo conflict of 1999. The NATO intervention in Yugoslavia was supposed to change the existing order and imply the position of the U.S. that Russia is not a decision-maker in the European security order. Yeltsin negatively reacted on the start of bombardments in Kosovo: “Russia was not consulted with”. Acting of the U.S. in a hegemonic way was a source of diplomatic outrage in the country and supposed the understanding of NATO as a military bloc that can attack other countries.

The principle controversial moment of the situation was that the U.S. did not comply with the two conditions allowing such operation and thus violated then existing principles of the international law. First, relying on a premise of realisation of genocide in Kosovo, NATO did not get a resolution from the United Nation Security Council (UNSC). Therefore, from the legal perspective the nationalistic conflict in Kosovo remained a matter of Yugoslavian internal affairs and there was no legal prove of the genocide. Secondly, NATO as a military organization was supposed (and it is still actual for the organisation up till now) to start an attack only in case of self-defense. In the Kosovo conflict, the allegations that the Yugoslavian president Miloshevych conducted genocide were inconsistent with the policy of defending external interests of the NATO-member. As Russian expert on the U.S.-Russia relations Dmitriy Suslov explainedApril 2019. Lecture on the course “US-Russia Relations after the End of the Cold War”. Higher School of Economics (2019), the U.S. actions were justified by putting over the position that violation of human rights is more important than sovereignty. Then, the intervention of NATO could have been legitimised even if no facts of genocide have been monitored by the UN. This precedent has become important for the subsequent controversy about the legitimacy of the Russian intervention in Donbass and annexation of Crimea.

Another important moment illustrating the dynamic of the U.S.-Russia relations was the circumstances of the conflict resolution in Kosovo. After Yugoslavian troops withdrew from Kosovo and NATO forces deployed, the UN was starting to establish a civilian administration on the principles of non-military governance. The Kosovo region needed to be separated on sectors, each of which is controlled by one country in the UN mission, but Russia was refused to be provided a sector. This led to the dangerous situation in the Pristina airport when the Russian decision-makers decided to take a sector by simply organising the presence of the Russian troops in the airport area.

On June 12 1999, several dozens of Russian soldiers got Yugoslavian access to the airport just before the NATO forces should have been arrived. Planning to get a support of military contingent from Russia, the soldiers did not know that Bulgaria and Romania closed the air-space for the further Russian forces' incoming. NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark asked NATO forces to destroy Russian troops and according to the official version the orders have not been realised by the British Leutenant-general Jackson and Admiral Ellis. For three days, NATO and Russian troops were located at the airport on the edge of military clash and after the negotiations in Helsinki 3600 Russian peacekeepers joined the NATO forces.