Although several rounds of economic sanctions have arguably had little effect on Russian involvement in eastern Ukraine, the U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced yet another round of sanctions. Among those Russians targeted in the latest round of sanctions is Aleksandr Dugin — the chief architect of Russia’s Eurasianist ideology — and the Eurasianist Youth Union which has allegedly played a significant role in recruiting Russian fighters in eastern Ukraine. According to a March 11 press release from the Treasury department:
The Eurasian Youth Union has actively recruited individuals with military and combat experience to fight on behalf of the self-proclaimed DPR [Donetsk People’s Republic] and has stated that it has a covert presence in Ukraine. Aleksandr Dugin, Andrey Kovalenko, and Pavel Kanishchev are leaders of the Eurasian Youth Union. This group and its leaders are being designated for being responsible for or complicit in actions or policies that threaten the peace, security, stability, or sovereignty or territorial integrity of Ukraine.
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Aleksandr Dugin, the intellectual father of modern Russian Eurasianism, came under scrutiny last year when he called for a campaign of genocide against the people of Ukraine. As reported last September for The New American, Dugin decreed:
Ukraine should be cleared of the idiots. Genocide of the cretins is suggested. The evil cretins are closed to the Voice of the Logos, and deadly with all their incredible stupidity. I do not believe that these are Ukrainians. Ukrainians are beautiful Slavic people. This kind of appeared out of manholes as a bastard race.
During a May 6, 2014 interview, Dugin (then a professor at Moscow State University) was apparently even more direct in explaining what policy should be pursued in Ukraine, as he stated, “‘Kill, kill, kill. There should be no more talking. As a professor, this is how I think.”
Such violent rhetoric is hardly new to Dugin’s lexicon; already in 1998, he proclaimed that “aggression — is the founding law of existence” and that the coming conflict between the West and “Eurasia” is a conflict between “Two positions which could not be brought together, two all-encompassing super worldviews, two mutually exclusive projects of the future of mankind. Between them is only enmity, hatred, brutal struggle according to rules and without rules, for extermination, to the last drop of blood. Between them are heaps of corpses, millions of lives, endless centuries of suffering and heroic deeds.”
Dugin has long advocated his Eurasianist ideology as crucial to organizing a successor state to the Soviet Union as a means of opposing “Western hegemony” and restoring the glory of Russia. However, in the past year, Eurasianism has gained attention in the West primarily due to two factors: the formation of Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union, and the involvement of Eurasianists in the battle for eastern Ukraine. As Christian Gomez explained last June in an article for The New American, the Eurasian Economic Union is an attempt at establishing a new totalitarian state to take the place of the old Soviet Union. When the union went into effect on January 1 of this year, three states — Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan — had joined the union.
For Dugin and the Eurasianist ideologues, the involvement (voluntary or otherwise) of Ukraine in the Eurasian Economic Union is of critical importance if the new union is to succeed. Dugin wrote in 2001 in his “Main Principles of Eurasist Policy” that “the integration of CIS countries into a united Eurasian Union is the major strategic imperative of Eurasism.” The CIS — Commonwealth of Independent States — was established in 1991 as a ‘successor entity’ to the USSR. Even in the earliest phases of formulating the Eurasianist doctrine, the reintegration of CIS states into the new Eurasian Union (which would not even be openly proposed until 2013) was understood to be a vital step in the creation of the new union. And Dugin’s hostility to an independent Ukraine has long been recognized by the Ukrainian government: in 2006, Dugin was formally declared to be persona non grata for a period of five years “for violating Ukrainian law” and when Dugin attempted to enter Ukraine in June 2007, the government deported him, “arguing he sought to destabilize the country.”
In 2008, Dugin declared that even “friendly relations” between the United States and Ukraine would amount to “a declaration of war. As a declaration of psychological, geopolitical, economic and open war” against Russia and that if Ukraine took steps to join NATO, he declared, “I think that the Russian reaction would be to support an uprising in eastern parts and Crimea and I could not exclude the entrance of armed force there, as in the Ossetian scenario.” Six years later, even without Ukraine joining NATO, the scenario Dugin set forth was in motion and activists from the Eurasian Youth Union were allegedly involved in helping to bring about the uprising.
Last March, Oleg Bakhtiyarov, a leader of the Eurasian Youth Union, was arrested in Kiev by the Ukrainian security forces because he was allegedly coordinating a plot to seize control of the parliament on the eve of the presidential elections scheduled for May of last year. As Paul Gregory wrote for Forbes.com:
Bakhtiyarov, a “youth leader” in his mid 50s judging from his picture, is accused of procuring Molotov cocktails, scaling ladders, and other equipment for the storming of parliament. The Russian “youth leader” is accused of hiring 200 “activists” at the price of $500 each for the takeover by force of the parliament building. It is doubtful that an unknown youth group would have such funds ($100,000) in their coffers.
The sanctions against Dugin and other leaders of the Eurasian Youth Union are likely to have little effect; as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reports, for those who have thus been sanctioned, “Any U.S. property held by those individuals is frozen, and U.S. citizens are prohibited from doing business with them.”
On occasion, Dugin’s followers have endeavored to downplay the public perception of his influence on current Russian policy. However, the recent sanctions clearly establish that the United States government is prepared to hold Dugin responsible for the effects of his Eurasianist ideology; in the words of the RFE/RL report: “The United States took the action to ‘hold accountable those responsible for violations of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.’”
Photo of Aleksandr Dugin: AP Images
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