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Tajikistan on the Move: Statebuilding and Societal Transformations

the Euromaidan is described as a ‘faked’ abduction (Hahn, p. 218). According to Hahn, the Odessa fire on 2 May 2014, when 52 protestors died, was planned by Kyiv using ‘Ukrainian nationalists’ who were ‘disguised as civilians and pretending to be “separatists” who fired at Ukrainians’ (Hahn, p. 109). Such findings are only made by ignoring the work of Odessa journalists and video footage and by not undertaking fieldwork and conducting interviews in Ukraine. Hahn (p. 285) writes that the ‘deep political paralysis’ in Ukraine is ‘driven by the ultranationalist and neo-fascist wings of the Ukrainian polity’ which is contrasted with President Putin reining in Russian nationalists. This one-sided approach to the discussion of nationalism in the conflict ignores the influence of the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity (Russkoe Natsionalnoe Yedynstvo—RNE) holding leadership positions in the pro-Russian movements in the Donetsk People’s Republic and the influence of what Marlene Laruelle in a 2016 study describes as ‘brown’ fascist, ‘white’ pro-Tsarist and ‘red’ pro-Soviet nationalists in the ‘Russian Spring’. Van der Pijl uses conspiracy theories taken from Russian information warfare and social media, such as Russia Today, to promote his claim that MH17 was brought down by a Ukrainian–Western conspiracy, not by a Russian ‘Buk’ missile system sent as military assistance to pro-Russian groups in the Donbas. Van der Pijl also cites Wikipedia which, together with his use of non-scholarly Russian sources and social media, makes the book an unusual choice to be published by a prestigious university publishing house. The book is testimony to the unfortunate development of conspiracy theories spreading from social media into work that purports to be ‘academic’. Van Der Pijl’s book has too many mistakes on Ukraine and the crisis to list; just some of them include chesno translated as ‘garlic’ and ‘honesty’ (p. 165) when the Ukrainian word for garlic is chisnyk, Chernihiv described as a ‘western region’ (p. 249) when it is located in northeastern Ukraine, and western Ukraine described as ‘Catholic’ (p. 118) when in four out of its seven oblasti a majority of parishes belong to Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox Churches. Hahn’s and Van der Pijl’s two books on the Ukraine–Russia crisis were written with an explicit agenda and belong to a growing group of work by Western journalists, public intellectuals and academics who blame the West for the 2014 Russia–Ukraine crisis, seek to exonerate Russia of any responsibility, and strongly assert that a Ukraine outside the Russian World is an aberration that is being aided and abetted by a joint conspiracy of ‘Ukrainian nationalists’ and the West with the aim of weakening Russia. Ironically, while claiming to provide a liberal critique of the Ukrainian authorities both authors in fact are doing the opposite by drawing on traditional Russian nationalist stereotypes of Ukraine as an ‘artificial state’ and Ukrainians and Russians as ‘one people’.