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A UKRAINIAN-RUSSIAN BORDER PLEBISCITE? ANYONE GOT A BETTER IDEA?  
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Tom Gallagher
April 23, 2024
Medium
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_ If we can’t even imagine and articulate methods of settling
border disputes that don’t involve tanks and drones we’re in even
more trouble than we thought. _

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“Billions for defense but not one cent for diplomacy!” So far as I
know, no one in Washington has actually spoken these words, but they
do seem to pretty well sum up the US approach to the current war in
Europe (excepting the Republican faction that supports neither in this
case). In the more than two years since Russia launched its all out
attack on Ukraine, virtually no one has suggested any alternative to
both sides continuing to come up with soldiers and weapons — until
one of them doesn’t. So, here’s one — how about a vote? Yes —
a plebiscite. Unlikely? To be sure. An extreme longshot? Yes, but is
it really any less likely to come to pass than either of the current
propositions on the table: Ukraine recovering all of its territory, or
Russia conquering all of Ukraine?

If nothing else, the idea would seem to have a ready made constituency
among the substantial number of Americans who think our country spends
far too much money on the military, deploys it in way too many places,
and thereby exists in a permanent state of war — even if many of its
citizens may be unaware of that fact. At the moment, though, this is a
group that finds itself in the unusual and uncomfortable position of
quietly acquiescing to Washington’s huge weapons shipments because
Ukraine remains under an attack that — while perhaps explicable to
those who care to know the history — is certainly not defensible.
Now largely rendered mute, many such people would likely prefer to
have something more and better to offer.

While we all know that in the end it will be entirely up to the two
governments at war to make the decision to stop pulling the triggers,
is that really all there is to say on the matter? We might suppose
that our State Department is actually all over the case, privately
engaging in creative peace mongering in our name — right now, as I
write these words or you read them. But even if we could believe that,
history suggests that simply relying on the progress, or even the
existence of behind-closed-doors government negotiations rarely leads
to optimal outcomes. And in the mean time we now see stories of
Ukraine’s tenacious defense of small bits of battlefront land in the
interest of “national morale” — in other words, soldiers dying
for appearance sake.

At the least, attempting to set foot into the diplomacy breach would
be a sign that there are people outside the Marjorie Taylor Greene
faction who have something to say on the matter beyond, “Pass the
appropriations bill, please.” And, while diminutive to be sure, the
possibility of success is probably something greater than zero. There
is, in fact, actually some reasonable precedent in the not-too-distant
past.

In 1999, Indonesian President B. J. Habibie shocked the world by
asking the United Nations to conduct a referendum allowing the
populace of East Timor to choose between remaining in Indonesia, with
a status of increased autonomy — and independence. Habibie had
ascended from the vice presidency the prior year when President
Suharto resigned after thirty-two years in office, and such things
were not expected of the new president. After all it was Suharto who
had ordered the 1975 invasion of East Timor that ultimately resulted
in the death of an estimated ten percent of the once and future
independent nation’s population — and it was Suharto who had
chosen Habibie as his running mate. So when Habibie made the
unexpected offer, the UN jumped at it and began implementation at
breakneck speed.

The situation had a complicated history, as such situations generally
do — Ukraine included. East Timor had not been originally been a
part of Indonesia — as the western part of the island was — by an
accident of colonialism. While the rest of Indonesia had been a Dutch
colony, East Timor had been claimed by Portugal. When the Netherlands
divested itself of its colonies after World War II, Indonesia was
created. Portugal, however, did not release its colonies until the
1974 Carnation Revolution had brought down a dictatorship severely
weakened by fighting colonial independence movements, primarily in its
African colonies of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. At that
point, much as Vladimir Putin now claims that Ukraine is legitimately
part of Russia, Suharto decided that East Timor should be part of
Indonesia and invaded. Although Suharto had sounded out the
possibility of the invasion with then US President Gerald Ford and
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger beforehand and met no opposition,
the subsequent annexation of East Timor was never recognized by the
UN.

The result of the hastily put-together, UN-organized “popular
consultation” was a 78.5% pro-independence vote. Unfortunately, the
days that followed were not so peaceful as the voting process had been
— the sorely disappointed pro-Indonesian side killed another 2,500
people and displaced a hundred times that many. But after a
UN-authorized military intervention led by Australia — which had
actually been the first nation to recognize the Indonesian annexation
— order was established and the pro-independence leader Xanana
Gusmao became the new nation’s first president three years later.

The situation in Ukraine and Russia being markedly different, any
plebiscite that we might imagine taking place in the border region
would likewise be quite different. While Putin’s claim that Ukraine
is part of Russia may be dismissed as Tsarist-era nostalgia, the fact
is that the two countries spent most of the twentieth century as part
of the same larger multi-national country, the Soviet Union. As a
result of that history, along with the natural admixture of the two
populations, it’s widely recognized that the larger country’s
dissolution left people on both sides of the new border wishing they
were on the other. Just as was the case with Slobodan Milosevic and
other nationalist political leaders during the breakup of the
multinational state of Yugoslavia, while the underlying ethnic
tensions don’t justify Putin’s actions, it is the fact that they
pre-existed him. And in both cases genuine issues were exploited to
ignoble ends because, among other things, no one else could come up
with an alternative to a military approach.

What specifically might the Russian/Ukranian population vote on?
Perhaps to which country their oblast — a basic political entity in
both countries that is on the order of a state in the US or Germany
— should belong. Presumably any such vote would be held in oblasts
on both sides of the original border. Or perhaps the question should
be determined in smaller subdivisions. These sorts of details are not
the point here — although they would naturally assume immense
importance were such a scenario to ever actually play out. If that can
be imagined, there will be no shortage of resources to actualize it.
In fact, in addition to both belonging to the UN, Russia and Ukraine
actually share membership in another organization well practiced in
conducting votes under contentious circumstances.

In 1977, during a Cold War thaw, the US-aligned North Atlantic Treaty
Organization and the Soviet-aligned Warsaw Pact nations signed onto an
agreement called the Helsinki Accords. This effort to de-escalate
their conflicts created an organization called the Conference on
Security and Co-operation in Europe. In the subsequent Warsaw
Pact-dissolution and NATO-expansion era, that entity morphed into the
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. In 1997, the new
group’s first major undertaking involved organizing the first
post-Yugoslavian Civil War elections in Bosnia. While in this case the
new borders of the once united, later belligerent, and now independent
nations had been settled in the 1995 Dayton Accords, the election
process encompassed dealing with any number of tense situations and
interactions between people recently at war with one another. In
subsequent years the organization has monitored numerous elections
with missions both large — in former Soviet and Yugoslavian nations,
and small — in its other member nations (including the US, where its
critiques are generally incisive — and ignored). There is no doubt
that over the years Russian and Ukrainian observers have actually
worked side by side in a number of these frequently tense electoral
circumstances.

To be clear, you’d have to give me astronomical odds to get me to
bet on the possibility of a Ukraine-Russia border vote actually
happening. In fact, you’d have to give me those kind of odds to bet
that anyone in any kind of position of power would even consider such
an approach. My point here is that if we can’t even imagine and
articulate methods of settling border disputes that don’t involve
tanks and drones we’re in even more trouble than we thought.
Governmental institutions often deal with things they call “shelf
legislation” — proposed laws to be enacted only if and when future
circumstances allow for their passage. Difficult as it may be to
envision an end to the Russia-Ukraine war at the moment, it is a
certainty that it will end — some day, some how. We might think of
this sort of referendum as shelf legislation for a future peace
treaty.

So, a Ukrainian-Russian border plebiscite? You got a better idea? Then
by all means, let’s hear it!

_Tom Gallagher is a former Massachusetts State Representative and the
author of 'The Primary Route: How the 99% Take On the Military
Industrial Complex.' He lives in San Francisco._

* Ukraine invasion
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* Russia
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* diplomacy
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