#28 - JRL 9044 - JRL Home
Moscow Times
February 1, 2005
In Ukraine, Western Media Mirrored Kremlin
By Ira Straus
Ira Straus is U.S. coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO, an independent non-governmental international association that advances consideration of NATO expansion and transformation. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.

The Western media were on the right side on Ukraine, while Russia was on the wrong side. But the reporting was almost as unsound in the West as it was in Russia. Even a cursory glance revealed that something was amiss. The media were strangely unanimous in their views. They took leave of "report mode" and went into "campaign mode." They used a good guys-bad guys approach. And -- most importantly -- they treated Russia as the main "bad guy" in Ukraine, not the Leonid Kuchma-Viktor Yanukovych regime. While Viktor Yushchenko was campaigning against Yanukovych, the Western media were campaigning against the Kremlin. They presented the elections as a choice between Russia and the West.

Without a doubt, this was more interesting for Western audiences. Who wants to read about the internal complexities in Ukraine? How much more exciting to read about a battle over whether Ukraine is going to be part of the West or the Russian Empire! It was an approach that mirrored the Kremlin's.

In this crucial matter of how to frame the issue, the Western media sided with Yanukovych. Their meta-message undermined Yushchenko, even as their explicit message applauded him. Yushchenko did not want an East-West conflict for two good reasons: He did not want the country he would lead to be divided, and he did not want to lose the election. Eastern Ukraine has more people than Western Ukraine. The more pro-Russian candidate traditionally wins in Ukrainian elections, which was how Kuchma beat Leonid Kravchuk in the first place.

For this very reason, the Yanukovych campaign pushed for polarization into two camps, East and West. It promised unlimited integration with Russia. It had Kuchma excise the goal of integration with the European Union and NATO from a national strategy document. Yushchenko refused to oblige Yanukovych; he tried to keep the focus on democratic and market reform inside Ukraine.

But the Western media did oblige Yanukovych and joined him in presenting the election as a Russia vs. West struggle. If Ukrainians had believed the Western media, they would likely have voted for Yanukovych.

But they didn't. The two-camp approach proved counterproductive for Yanukovych because Yushchenko refused to take him up on it. Instead, Yushchenko spoke as a moderate who would maintain close ties with both East and West, even while moving along a westward vector. He did not threaten to split his country, and the people responded favorably to him.

The Western governments, too, denied that theirs was a geopolitical battle aimed against Russia. It seems they were sincere in this, but it was hard for them to sound convincing when the Western media were keeping up a loud anti-Russian drumbeat. They tried to contrast themselves favorably to Russia, which openly backed Yanukovych and put crude pressures on Ukraine to elect him, and they denied they were supporting Yushchenko, just democracy and free elections. But in fact they were supporting both democracy and Yushchenko, if only passively.

The West supported Yushchenko as a friend of democracy and of mutually beneficial ties. The West also opposed Yanukovych out of fear of a possible gradual restoration of the Russian Empire, beginning with the imposition of an authoritarian regime dependent on Russia. For Yanukovych, the sky was the limit in terms of reintegration with Russia. Thus two camps formed, which were differentiated internally and more asymmetrical than the mirror image presented by outside observers.

It was Russia's choice, not the West's, that Russia defined support for Yushchenko and Ukrainian integration into the West as a priori anti-Russian. It accordingly tied itself to the Kuchma regime, not so much as a positive partner for Russia -- in fact, Kuchma was an inevitably limited partner, protective of his own fiefdom, as all authoritarians are -- but more as an insurmountable obstacle to Ukraine's potential acceptance in the West.

All this would have been hard enough to explain and keep clear, even if the Western government spokespeople had been able to formulate all the necessary distinctions. It was nearly impossible to explain the situation convincingly, when added to these complexities came the burden of the two-camp crudities incessantly propagated by the Western media and the Russian government, which melted all relevant distinctions and wore down the ordinary person's mental resistance to simplification. Many Russians took the media as expressing the real views of the West -- all the more so as it corresponded to what their government was telling them.

Not only the Western media, but also NGOs spoke with the two-camp geopolitical reductionism of Yanukovych. This introduces another complicating factor: The independent NGOs, funded with careful arms-length procedures by Western governments in order to support free elections and development of civil society, took sides in a much cruder geopolitical spirit than did the governments themselves. This is something that Russian analysts like Sergei Markov have blamed on the prominence of Eastern Europeans among NGOs, leading him to the interesting conclusion that Russia should have no problem with Western governmental involvement in Ukraine, only with NGO involvement. All in all, however, it seems the biases of the NGOs did very little to change the political coloration.

Yushchenko's victory was a remarkable accomplishment in that complexity triumphed over simplification. And it did so in an intense, bitter electoral campaign. The Ukrainian people showed greater maturity in choosing complexity than did the Western media, which joined Yanukovych and the Kremlin in choosing oversimplification and the collapsing of logical barriers between categories. The reason for this was likely Ukrainians' awareness of realities on the ground in central Ukraine and grim determination not to let themselves be deceived or cheated. The Western media exhibited a more mercenary interest in whatever would grab the attention of a lazy, distant audience.

The Western media misrepresented the West's real position in Ukraine. This, to be sure, is their right. They are not the government; they usually have an adversarial relation to governments. Nevertheless, in this case, the media behaved as unofficial spokespersons for the Western cause. They bungled the role. They didn't lose the election for Yushchenko, but they did more than their ordinary share to help convince Russia that it was faced with a West that was out to do it harm in Ukraine. And this could prove so damaging in its consequences as to outweigh the gains within Ukraine.

We have "won" Ukraine and gone a long way toward "losing" Russia. This was not a natural, unavoidable consequence of Yushchenko's success. It was an outcome constructed by the devotees of two-camp thinking on both sides.