crimea.JPG

An officer speaks to civilians waiting for a swearing-in ceremony before joining the newly formed army of Crimea at a military base in Simferopol, Ukraine, March 13.

(AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

By John Bento

I have a bit of history with Russia. Back in the cold war, we “played” readiness games with their Black Sea and Mediterranean fleets, which sortied from their main base in the Crimean peninsula. Later in life, they ruined my Peace Corps experience by invading my host country of Georgia, and just recently they “extended their borders” for security purposes into their Georgian puppet region of Abkhazia. So, as I listen to and read all these “experts” explanations for the situation and how to handle it, I am shocked at the blatant politicization that is taking the place of deeper understanding of the situation unfolding in Ukraine.

Hillary Clinton compared Putin to Hitler. Condoleezza Rice, in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, claimed, in so many words, that constructing the Keystone pipeline would solve this mess. Huh? No, these are intelligent, experienced, long-time diplomats from whom you would expect something less reductive and banal than shouting “Hitler!” or “drill, baby, drill!” And then of course there are the talking heads who reduce the issue to our president being weak and pundits who talk only of the U.S.S.R. and the cold war.

But the real reason is so simple, so easy to understand if you allow your foreign policy gaze to go further back than 1945 and your knowledge of history begins sometime before 1938. It might not be as “Twitter-worthy” as those other reasons, but if you want to solve a problem, it really helps to understand the problem. This isn’t a Putin thing, or about how Putin wrestles bears and Obama wears “mom jeans” or how the Soviet Union could rise again. It’s traditional, opportunistic Russian expansionism. Period.

The Nazi Party lasted for 25 years (1920-1945). The Cold War lasted 46 (1945-1991). Russia has been expanding its territory for over 700 years. Take a moment and read those numbers again. So, with a vast land full of resources, why keep expanding? Simple. There are only three places that Russia can directly trade with the wider world: the Pacific (Vladivostok), the Baltic (St. Petersburg) and the Black Sea (Crimea). It is this Russian obsession with warm water ports that has driven its expansionism for hundreds of years. Even the post-World War II expansion into eastern Europe was less an advance of communism than a way to make those vital trade routes more secure. Eastern bloc puppet states brought much more coastline under Russian influence (Poland in the Baltic and Bulgaria and Romania in the Black Sea).

And, despite having so much land, the Russia is exceptionally paranoid about its sea routes. It fought the Poles, Swedes, and Finns for Baltic access, and expanded into the Crimea diplomatically in the 1780s to protect the area from the Ottoman Turks. So important was the Crimea to Russian trade and power projection, that it remained part of Russia until 1954, when it was finally absorbed into the Ukrainian S.S.R. It should be also noted that Crimea, although part of the Ukraine after the fall of the U.S.S.R., maintained a degree of autonomy and self-rule since 1991.

It seems it is more newsworthy to make this all about Obama-Putin or capitalism-communism, but the truth is this is about trade and tradition. The United States just doesn’t think about blue water access in the same way as Russia given our geography, and until we do, progress on the Ukraine situation will be improbable at best.

John Bento, of Portland, is a Persian Gulf veteran and Peace Corps volunteer. He works as an instructional designer.