This week, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine waged on as pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian military fought for control of the crash sight of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. According to the Washington Post, while the fighting continued, the United States and the European Union issued more severe sanctions against Russia on Tuesday in efforts to curb the nation’s aggression.
According to the Huffington Post, fighting has also intensified this week as the Ukrainian military continues to fight for the rebel stronghold in the East. There is now a growing danger to civilians in the separatist-controlled area, where artillery shells have rained down on residential neighborhoods — an assault for which each side blames the other.
USC law student William Buschur witnessed some of the earliest developments of the conflict that now consumes Ukraine. He and his wife, Anna, had been planning to visit Anna’s relatives in Kiev when protests began in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kiev’s central square. Demonstrators protested governmental corruption, calling for the resignation of President Yanukovych and demanding closer ties with the West. The wave of protests became known as the Euromaidan, a movement that would eventually lead to the ongoing Ukrainian revolution.
Despite the escalating tension, Buschur and his wife decided to join the cause.
“We decided that we would go, we would not cancel our plane tickets,” Buschur said. “We were yearning to go down there, to just physically be there.”
Buschur recalls that he and Anna “found a niche” for themselves in the Euromaidan. As protests continued in the square, doctors and nurses set up a clinic to tend to demonstrators. The medics needed medicine, Buschur said, and they posted lists of the supplies they required on Facebook. Using the social media posts and funds provided by an American diaspora nongovernmental agency based in New York City, William and Anna supplied the doctors with medicine every day for the three weeks of their winter vacation before returning to school.
“It was incredibly powerful and incredibly moving,” Buschur said. “It was a really incredible thing to experience and see actually happen.”
In light of the conflict’s escalation this week, Buschur offered his personal insights and opinions on the crisis. He feels that the current revolution is a culmination of Ukrainian unrest due to ongoing internal corruption and Russian intimidation, issues that have mired the nation since it gained independence in 1991.
“The generation previously has no true conception in their bones of Ukraine as an independent state; it was part of the Soviet Union. But the new generation has no notion of that. They grew up in an independent Ukraine,” Buschur said. “I think Ukrainians just got sick and tired of business as usual and so they stood up for themselves. And when they did that, that meant that they were going away from the old post-Soviet way of doing things, and by doing so
that means that they were pulling away from Russia.”
In Buschur’s opinion, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its militant response to Ukraine’s movement for increased political autonomy and Western alignment reveal the political weakness of Putin’s regime.
“What Putin is doing in Ukraine is upsetting the post-Cold War order — the ‘new world order’, as George Bush senior called it in 1991 … This is not how the world works anymore. A state cannot just covet the land of a neighboring state and go and take it with superior military force.”
Buschur argued that Russia’s actions are heavy-handed and reckless in a complex and highly interconnected political landscape. Border disputes no longer remain between feuding nations, but instead create a far-reaching web of diplomatic issues. For this reason, the West has an obligation to pay attention.
“The shoot-down [of flight MH17] is an example of how what used to be a regional conflict has become an international problem. It bleeds out, not just into the local region where it’s taking place, but into the into world itself. A plane could get shot down, or a terrorist attack could kill people who have no connection to the regional conflict. We don’t live in the 19th century anymore. It’s much more integrated. I think the people here should realize that … we need to stand up to bullies like Russia that think that they can get away with this.”
While Buschur said that most Ukrainians hope to maintain independence, he believes that many Ukrainian separatists are fueled by the same conditions that sparked the Euromaidan.
Pro-Russian rebels, he said, just believe in a different solution.
To shed light on the separatist movement, Buschur traced the rebels’ unease to 1991. Most pro-Russian separatists come from east Ukraine, an area that relies on heavy industry like coal mining. The area has suffered extreme economic distress since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
“I think that those people feel that there’s nothing left for them if the mines go away — if these big, oligarchical enterprises disappear … from their perspective, they … see fundamental instability for themselves.”
As fighting has expanded in east Ukraine this week, civilians in the rebel-controlled area have faced increasing threats, and while Buschur is optimistic about the future of the crisis, he predicts that the coming weeks will be “hell on earth for civilians.”
But resolving the conflict will be a difficult task, and determining the appropriate role and course of action for the West will prove challenging. While thus far sanctions have yielded few results, more serious economic punishments would harm other European nations as well, Buschur said.
To further complicate the west’s dilemma, it is Buschur’s belief that Russian politicians will spin any western interference to heighten anti-American and anti-western sentiments.
“The narrative that Russia is promulgating is that NATO and the U.S. is surrounding Russians and persecuting them because of their Russianness. However weird and twisted that sounds, it’s what a lot of people think.”
Nevertheless, Buschur believes that the west is the best hope for Ukrainian autonomy and, eventually, for the nation’s development into a more transparent, modern state.
“The people in Ukraine, the Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers who are fighting the rebels in the east are doing it for the same reason that we fought our revolutionary war: because they want to enjoy a free life and have the right to self-determination … From my perspective, we should support that because that ‘s what we stand for in the U.S. as well.”