by John McCain
As I watched the contest intensify, I wanted to bring a Senate delegation to Ukraine to encourage the association with the EU. I had been a longtime supporter of Ukraine’s pro-Western, democratic development, and had connections with a number of prominent Ukrainian reformers. But administration officials, primarily Assistant Secretary of State Toria Nuland and Vice President Biden, both good friends of mine, encouraged me to wait as U.S. and EU diplomats trooped regularly to Kiev and pushed Yanukovych to break with his Russian patrons. It didn’t work. After all outstanding issues in the association agreement had been resolved, and most Ukrainians were excitedly waiting for the agreement to be signed, Yanukovych announced on November 21, 2013, that he was backing out. The announcement came just hours after the Ukrainian legislature had defeated a bill that would free former prime minister Tymoshenko from prison, which had been a condition of association with the EU.
Ukrainians took to the streets in protest. Three days later, the police used force to break up the demonstrations in Kiev. The demonstrators multiplied exponentially. The largest demonstration gathered in Kiev’s Independence Square, from which the protest movement took its name, the Maidan, Ukrainian for “square,” or the “Euromaidan,” to recognize what it was the protesters were demonstrating for—a European identity. A large, specially trained police force attacked the square with flash bangs, truncheons, and tear gas on November 30, beating hundreds, including bystanders, and driving most of the protesters out of the square. But every use of force by the police seemed to strengthen the movement’s resolve. That same night protesters rallied in another Kiev square, calling for “revolution.” In early December, 800,000 people filled Independence Square in Kiev, many of them recently arrived from other cities. Most swore they wouldn’t leave the Maidan until the government acquiesced to their demands, which now included Yanukovych’s resignation. On December 11, the security police and civilian thugs in their employ made another run at clearing the Maidan, and an eight-hour battle ensued. Church bells rang, and reinforcements flooded into the square. Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan formed their own Maidan security force and repelled police attempts to infiltrate it. I had waited longer than I cared to, and Toria and Joe had no further objections. They wouldn’t have dissuaded me if they had. In mid-December, I left for Kiev, where I would join Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, a knowledgeable and like-minded member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I arrived on Saturday afternoon, December 14, and was briefed by embassy officials, who helped arrange meetings with individuals they hoped we could encourage to support, or at least not work to thwart, the Maidan’s goals. We met with the Patriarchs of both the Ukraine and Russian Orthodox Churches. We met with several government officials, and put in a request to see Yanukovych. We saw half the oligarchs in the country, those who hadn’t yet decided which side to support. Others were loyal to Yanukovych or more accurately, loyal to Moscow. Still others had embraced the Maidan, and one of them, Petro Poroshenko, was a prominent Maidan leader and financial backer. I was introduced to him that night, and met with other opposition leaders, including Vitali Klitschko, one of the famous Klitschko brothers, both heavyweight champion boxers. Vitali had never been knocked down in a fight. I was a fan, and had gotten to know him years before, when I had sponsored legislation to reform the sport. Now, both brothers were leaders in the fight for Ukrainian independence.
It was freezing, windy, and snowy that Saturday night as we drove to a trade union building, and took an elevator to a sixth-floor balcony that overlooked the Maidan. There might have been a half million people in the square that night, unafraid, confident, and joyous. Men, women, and children, young and old, and from all parts of the country. They held their cell phones aloft as they cheered the speakers, LED lights glowing in the swirling snow.
Martin Luther King, Jr., had called it “the fierce urgency of now,” the transformational moment when aspirations for freedom must be realized, when the voice of a movement can’t be stilled, when the heart’s demands will not stand further delay. I saw it that night. I felt it. It was thrilling and affirming. If you told me I could choose to retain only a handful of memories from my long life, that night at the Maidan would be one of them. Ukraine’s politics might be complicated by competing ethnic loyalties, but that’s mostly because Russia stokes the anger and insecurities of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. There was nothing tribal about the Maidan that night. There were nationalist sentiments in evidence, of course, but in a common demand for independence from corruption, injustice, and imperial dominion. The fervent political movements of our age seem so often to be the workings of religious fanaticism or injured ethnic pride or dehumanizing ideologies of one kind or another, and the power seekers who profit from them. That night I witnessed a fervent mass movement for the universal ideals of freedom and justice. That’s what a European identity meant to those people. It was humankind I saw in that square, in all its impossibly resilient dignity, known to God, and striving to be recognized and answered to by the powerful forces who had set themselves above them. Those ideals were my cause, the cause that gave meaning to my eventful life, a life that might otherwise have been squandered. All are created equal. All are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights. The Maidan put the lie to rationalizations that those ideals can only thrive in some civilizations and not others. It was beautiful to see.
The next day was long and busy, but I was still inspired from the night before. We had breakfast with another oligarch the embassy was trying to enlist, Rinat Akhmetov from Donetsk, who denies having ties to organized crime though it’s a familiar biographical detail among Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, as is elective office. Akhmetov had been elected to parliament as a member of Yanukovych’s party. The embassy knew he could bring a lot of powerful converts to the pro-Europe side and a lot of money. He engaged politely with us, but gave no indication whether he agreed with anything we said. Today, he’s purported to provide financial support for Donetsk separatists.
The highlight of the day was our invitation to speak at the Maidan. I had planned brief remarks written as a series of one-sentence bullets, to make them easy to translate simultaneously, with a single message, that America supports Ukraine’s sovereign right to seek its destiny in Europe. I stood onstage with Vitali and Chris, and a crowd of protest leaders, while an English-speaking Ukrainian diplomat translated. “Ukraine will make Europe better, and Europe will make Ukraine better,” I promised. I wish our speeches had receptions at home as rousing as the one we got there. When I told them that “America is with you,” chants of “thank you, thank you” in English came roaring back at me. I had asked staff to find an appropriate line or two from a Ukrainian poet that I could use to end my remarks. “Love your Ukraine,” I quoted the poet Taras Shevchenko, “love her in cruel times, love her in cruel moments, pray to God for her.” Every politician likes to flatter themselves that they can move an audience. I don’t succeed at that as often as I sometimes pretend to myself that I do. I didn’t need to pretend that day. It wasn’t my delivery that had the effect, just the message and the moment.
We spent a couple hours in the square talking and taking pictures, and soaking up the vibrancy of the experience. I made a point to commend some of the fifty-something Afghanistan vets who were protecting the demonstrators. They looked alike, big guys, with thick arms and long beards, wearing their old uniforms and their medals and patches. They were pretty imposing, and when the regime’s goons attacked the square, they held the line.
We got word at seven o’clock that night that Yanukovych would meet us in his palatial residence. We arrived an hour later. Chris Murphy; the U.S. ambassador, Geoff Pyatt; my national security assistant, Chris Brose; and I were seated at a long conference table across from Yanukovych and two of his aides. We exchanged quick introductions, and then Yanukovych proceeded to speak uninterrupted for at least an hour. He dwelt in detail on a long litany of grievances. It had been an ea
rly start to the day, the room was overheated, and all of us had to struggle to stay awake. Finally, Chris interrupted him, explaining that we had hoped for more of a dialogue than a lecture. Bless him. If he hadn’t spoken up, I swear we would have been there to ring in the New Year two weeks later. We spent another hour going back and forth with the beleaguered president. He had resumed discussions with EU officials in response to the protests, and the EU had called them off, he complained, because he still refused to release Yulia Tymoshenko. Yanukovych was stalling for time hoping the protests would lose momentum, and everyone knew it. What was there left to negotiate, we countered, you had an agreement all but signed. What is it you need to get you to sign it now? His response was to return to his grievances, citing all the ways Europe had mistreated him, one of which, I kid not, was a soccer game in which a European referee had called a goal wrong and cost Ukraine the game. He wanted to give us the sense that he understood our position, but that he was doing what he could in an impossible situation, caught between his country’s interests and the ruthlessness of their colossus to the east. We had heard that before he had refused to sign the EU agreement, he had been summoned to Putin’s dacha in Sochi, where the Russian had laid out all the ways the Kremlin would crush Ukraine’s economy and his finances along with it. Yanukovych had used his presidency to join the ranks of the oligarchs, standard practice, sadly, in Ukraine and Russia. Sanctions targeted at certain wealthy men, Putin is purported to have warned him, trade cutoffs, export bans, the whole panoply of economic blackmail. Yanukovych returned to Kiev a changed man, it was said, self-preservation having become his sole occupation. Integration with Europe was now a fantasy from happier times. We tried to impress upon him that the Maidan movement had reached escape velocity. He wouldn’t be able to stop it. If he tried, he would be swept from power. He could only complain that he had been ill-treated. Two days later, Putin would offer Yanukovych $15 billion in debt relief, and to slash the price for Russian gas deliveries to Ukraine. We left the next morning for home and the holidays, certain that Ukraine would overthrow its government, and certain, too, that we would be back in Ukraine soon.
By the time I returned in March with a large, bipartisan Senate delegation, the peaceful, festive protests of December had been eclipsed by a series of riots and general pandemonium caused by the government’s attempts to suppress the demonstrations, and resulting assaults on the protesters, including killings, by the security police and thugs paid by the regime. Death squads had targeted some Maidan leaders. The prime minister resigned on January 28, and the legislature repealed anti-protest laws that had been enacted the week before. Putin again summoned Yanukovych to Sochi. Several days later a senior Putin advisor intimated that Russia might have to intervene to prevent a coup and continuing chaos. The same day a bomb exploded in the trade union building where I had watched the Maidan demonstrations. On February 18, protesters marched on parliament. Police fired on the marchers, who fought back. Dozens were killed, including ten policemen, and thousands injured. Within a few days, the government had essentially fallen, and Yanukovych had fled the capital, en route ultimately to Moscow.
Putin convened a meeting with his security services to plan the conquest of Crimea. Pro-Russian protests in Crimea began the next day in Sevastopol, and on February 27, Russian soldiers disguised as civilians seized the Crimean legislature and other government institutions. A puppet government led by Sergei Aksyonov, an ethnic Russian who had received 4 percent of the vote in the last election, was installed. He declared Crimea an autonomous republic, and invited Russian troops to serve as “peacekeepers.” By March 2, Russian forces completely controlled the peninsula. A fraudulent referendum was staged on March 16, two days after our delegation arrived in Kiev, that overwhelmingly approved Crimea’s federation with Russia. Two days later, Russia formally annexed it.
Eight of us had rushed to Kiev, five Republicans and three Democrats, in a show of American bipartisan solidarity with Ukraine as it confronted the Russian invasion. Just before we left the Wall Street Journal reported that the Obama administration had denied Ukraine’s request for lethal assistance to defend its territory. Members of our delegation were divided on the subject, but not along party lines. I was in favor, and have argued continuously for the last three years that Ukraine has the right to defend itself from Russian invasion, which would soon include the Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine, and the U.S. should help provide it weapons for that purpose. The administration remained opposed, however, until its last day in office, as did Chancellor Merkel, who feared a wider war, and spoke for most of the EU on the subject.
We met with the acting president and his cabinet, as well as the leaders of all the political parties who would be contesting a presidential election in May and parliamentary elections in October, including Vitali Klitschko and Petro Poroshenko, who was expected to be the next president. The next day we flew to Donetsk in the Donbass, where Kiev feared the Russians would next invade, which they did a few weeks later. Anti-Maidan, pro-Russian demonstrations had been building in Donetsk and other locations in Eastern Ukraine since the beginning of March and protesters had occupied the local government administration building. At every stop, and in every public statement, we pledged our support for the independence of Ukrainians, and condemned Russia’s actions. Without the promise of defense assistance, however, Putin was unlikely to be concerned with our disapproval or be deterred.
The administration and the EU imposed sanctions on Russia, travel bans, and asset freezes that had been authorized by the Magnitsky Act, targeting individuals in Putin’s inner circle. They went after Russian banks, too, and state-owned companies such as Rosneft. Russia was suspended from participation in G-8 summits. In retaliation, Moscow announced similar sanctions against eight American officials, including Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Harry Reid, a few White House staffers, and me. I was delighted. “I guess this means my spring break in Siberia is off,” I joked.
The provisional national government promised to take back control of the Donbass. Russian separatists, mostly led by Russians from Russia, seized other government buildings and demanded independence. By April it was a shooting war. Many of the militants, possibly the majority of them, were Russian paramilitaries. In July, they shot down a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet with Russian-supplied missiles. The war has ebbed and flowed over the last three years, and continues unresolved. Various cease-fires have been agreed to, announced, and promptly violated by the Russians. Minsk I and Minsk II and I’m sure whatever Minsk agreement comes next have wrung commitments from Moscow to cease its incursions, but Russians still fight in Ukraine. The insurrection would be finished without Putin’s patronage. While we were in Ukraine, I had an op-ed published in the New York Times criticizing the administration’s response. While not blaming the Russian invasion on the administration or any policy of the U.S. and its allies, I did claim that the administration’s lack of realism about Russia specifically and the state of the world generally had created a perception of weakness, and to Putin “weakness is provocative.”
For Mr. Putin, vacillation invites aggression. His world is a brutish, cynical place, where power is worshiped, weakness is despised, and all rivalries are zero-sum. . . . He does not accept that Russia’s neighbors, least of all Ukraine, are independent countries. To him, they are Russia’s “near abroad” and must be brought back under Moscow’s dominion by any means necessary.
I attended Petro Poroshenko’s presidential inauguration in June 2014, and have been back several times since then, reiterating my solidarity, and promising to keep pressing the administration for support. My last trip was just after Christmas in 2016, when I attended with President Poroshenko a meeting of the families of killed and missing Ukrainian soldiers. A mother of one of the casualties, who wasn’t very old, but very stoic, stood quietly, with tears streaming down her face, as Poroshenko pinned a medal on her for her late son. Later that same trip I flew with Lindsey Graham and Amy Klobuch
ar, a Democrat from Minnesota, to Mariupol in Donetsk, and from there we traveled to an outpost on what constitutes the front in the war in Eastern Ukraine. We spent New Year’s Eve with an impressive group of Ukrainian marines, all committed to the struggle with the powerful country that wants Ukraine subjugated. They made me a gift of a rifle, not an antique, but a modern assault rifle, an AK-47 or something similar. Jim Hickey, a retired career Army officer who serves on the Armed Services Committee staff, was there, and I handed the case containing the rifle to him. He carried it onto the airplane for me. Before the plane took off, he opened the case and found it had a full magazine and a round in the chamber. He cleared the chamber and ejected the magazine. For two years, I had argued the U.S. should provide the lethal arms Ukraine needed to defend itself from invaders. I had included authorization for that assistance in the defense bill every year. I had failed. Now, Ukrainians had given lethal arms to me. I wondered if they had meant it as a joke.
We had arrived in Mariupol soon after the Obama administration announced new sanctions against Russia for interference in the 2016 election. Russia had not announced retaliatory measures yet. We would later learn that was because President-elect Trump’s incoming national security advisor, retired lieutenant general Mike Flynn, had urged the Russian ambassador in Washington not to impose new sanctions, presumably implying that once the new administration was in office they would reconsider the sanctions the White House had just announced. If that was indeed what happened, it was a terrible thing to do. A ruthless adversary had tried to sabotage our elections, aggravating our political divisions and worsening our government’s dysfunction. Sparing Putin any serious penalty for his assault on our democracy doesn’t just encourage further aggression, it tells the victims and potential victims of Russian aggression in Ukraine and Georgia, the Baltics, Poland, Moldova, and Montenegro, and in Russia itself, that the United States, the greatest power in the world, couldn’t be relied on to defend its own democracy. It’s a colossal strategic mistake, and a stain on our honor. In the last decade, I’ve traveled to all the countries named above, save Russia, and many others in the neighborhood. They are all scared of what Russia plans for them, and though they will never say it publicly, worried that the U.S. won’t help defend them when it comes. Putin’s kleptocracy has left the sluggish Russian economy overly dependent on its oil and gas reserves. Russia’s population is declining at an alarming rate as birthrates plunge and life expectancy is static. Much of the wealth of the country has been plundered by the Russian ruling class and invested in the West. Putin’s authoritarianism has bred more dissent in his country than the West credits. Russia’s future is bleak, darkened by all the ills he and his collaborators have created for their country, and blamed on the United States. Putin is uniquely vulnerable and yet, from the Donbass to Syria to an American presidential election, he is on the attack. Because he has not encountered the resolve it will take to expose his precarious position, to shatter his ambitions. Until he does meet that resolve, there’s no end to the trouble he’ll cause, and the victims he’ll claim.