Still not Getting the Point on Ukraine

I think any historian looking back on this period will see the Ukraine crisis as by far the most significant event of the time. So I have no hesitation in returning to it, as my first offering on returning from my involuntary disappearance from the Internet .

 

And I think my own trade is doing a lot of damage by failing to understand or explain what is going on. I was dispirited, for instance, by Hugh Muir’s selection of items on Ukraine in last Sunday’s ‘What the Papers Say’ on BBC Radio 4. The ‘Guardian’ writer,  while giving long quotations of descriptions of events, also quoted only analysts (Edward Lucas and Janet Daley) who supported the ‘New Cold War’ view  and ending by quoting yet another dim article comparing Vladimir Putin with Adolf Hitler.

 

Sure, some people genuinely do think that this  ignorant, unhistorical, crude, misleading and frankly dangerous comparison is valid and useful.  They deserve airtime, not least because there are so many of them, as one might expected in our poorly-educated society. But there is another view, which has been expressed by several people including me, and you wouldn’t have known from Mr Muir’s selection (still available here for a few days http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0414rsb ) that such a view even existed. Shouldn’t a review of the papers have at least given some mention to the dissenting position? To its considerable credit, Radio 4’s ‘The World Tonight’ has for some time (after a poor start)  been a model of proper impartiality on this, giving ample airtime to genuine experts on both sides who disagree on this matter, and leaving it to the listener to form his or her opinions. Whenever it happens, I almost weep with nostalgic joy, for it reminds me of the old long lost World Service to which I would listen in Weimar, Prague and Moscow on the crackling, elusive short wave  - ‘The Truth, Read by Gentlemen’, as it was once described, though among the gentlemen there was also the evocative voice of Pamela Creighton, bursting with intelligence and so English you can almost see the meadows and woodlands (you can hear clips from those days here  http://andywalmsley.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/this-is-london-world-service-memories.html

 (scroll down) .

You will even hear the (now-abolished) station signature ‘Lilliburlerlo’, the song that drove James II out of Ireland, and thus impossibly Unionist, British, patriotic, Protestant and ‘outdated’. A truncated, blandified version was used until a few years ago but appears to have vanished. Note that it's always 'Greenwich Mean Time', observe the use of language as carefully-separated words pronounced with care and the scrupulous attribution to others of any claim which the BBC has not itself been able to verify (an absolute rule at that time).

 

By the way, listeners to today's BBC and readers of the mainstream press in Britain might be forgiven for thinking that the Geneva accords agreed between Russia, the USA and the EU (plus the Ukrainian junta installed by the mob) only applied to Russian-speaking separatists in the east of the country, who have plainly not taken any notice of the agreement.

 

Well, it’s quite true that they haven’t taken any notice, and indeed it is not clear how Russia could make them observe it anyway, short of actually sending in the troops that it is said to be massing on the frontier. Though I personally have no doubt that Russia has been fomenting a lot of this, it is notoriously harder to rein in such things than it is to start them, and  it may genuinely be the case that some Russian speakers in places such as Slavyansk are keener or joining Russia than Russia is on having them.

 

But what did the agreement actually say?

 This is the only text of it that I have been able to find, and it is so brief that there’s really no excuse for any media outlet not having read it in full: 

 

‘The Geneva meeting on the situation in Ukraine agreed on initial concrete steps to de-escalate tensions and restore security for all citizens.

 

All sides must refrain from any violence, intimidation or provocative actions. The participants strongly condemned and rejected all expressions of extremism, racism and religious intolerance, including anti-Semitism.

 

All illegal armed groups must be disarmed; all illegally seized buildings must be returned to legitimate owners; all illegally occupied streets, squares and other public places in Ukrainian cities and towns must be vacated.

 

Amnesty will be granted to protestors and to those who have left buildings and other public places and surrendered weapons, with the exception of those found guilty of capital crimes.

 

It was agreed that the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission should play a leading role in assisting Ukrainian authorities and local communities in the immediate implementation of these de-escalation measures wherever they are needed most, beginning in the coming days. The U.S., E.U. and Russia commit to support this mission, including by providing monitors.

 

The announced constitutional process will be inclusive, transparent and accountable. It will include the immediate establishment of a broad national dialogue, with outreach to all of Ukraine’s regions and political constituencies, and allow for the consideration of public comments and proposed amendments.

 

The participants underlined the importance of economic and financial stability in Ukraine and would be ready to discuss additional support as the above steps are implemented.’

 

Note the two really central sections (with my emphases added):

 

‘All sides must refrain from any violence, intimidation or provocative actions. The participants strongly condemned and rejected all expressions of extremism, racism and religious intolerance, including anti-semitism.

 

All illegal armed groups must be disarmed; all illegally seized buildings must be returned to legitimate owners; all illegally occupied streets, squares and other public places in Ukrainian cities and towns must be vacated.’

 

I think it is blazingly clear from this that Russia requires the ‘Maidan’ occupation in Kiev to disperse, and for the Pravy Sektor squads to be disbanded,  as a quid pro quo for the dispersal of the pro-Russians in Donetsk and elsewhere.

 

Have you seen or heard or read *any* description of moves to do this, or to disarm and disperse such organisations as the menacing ‘Pravy Sektor’ in Kiev itself, or elsewhere in the West? Or have you seen any discussion of the fact that the agreement imposes obligations on both sides? If so, please do let me know, for I have not. I have not even seen a recent report of the state of affairs on the ‘Maidan’ . And how’s the promised inquiry going into the highly public beating, by members of the Ukraine parliament, of the TV boss Oleksandr Pantelymonov?

 

Now, whether the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, or his boss, Vladimir Putin, ever seriously expected the Ukrainian Junta (I use this name as a corrective to the selective use of such terms as ‘regime’ applied by mainstream media to governments of which they disapprove, especially that in Syria. If The Assad government is a ‘regime’, then how much more is that Ukrainian government, which came to power through violent mob rule, a ‘Junta’)  to do anything of the kind I do not know.

 

Neither of these persons is exactly naïve or lacking in cynicism or calculation.

 

 

And it seems to me that the ‘West’ which has big jaws and a large appetite, but rather small teeth, may have wholly misunderstood what these accords really meant. To Russia (which has quite big teeth and much more limited and well-thought-out aims, despite the absurd caricatures of Putin as a new Hitler) , they were an official and irreversible recognition that the future of Ukraine is Russia’s legitimate business. I think that may prove very important indeed in the months to come, unless everyone completely loses their heads (as so many people seem so anxious to do).

 

I should have thought that the events of the past few weeks would have helped to make my point that ‘Ukraine’ as a country is a fiction. We know it has nothing truly resembling an economy or a currency, that it has no common language or culture, and now we see that it cannot physically defend itself from external or internal threats, its armed might being on one occasion quite easily overcome by a  crowd of old ladies and fat men with beards. I agree that the old ladies of the former USSR, with their armour-piercing scowls, weighty handbags and extra-wide loading gauge, are not to be trifled with. But even so.

 

The real problem is that, in the age of supranational states, Ukraine is a throwback to the loopy idealism of Versailles, a Wilsonian state based on a nationality, but containing in its borders many people who don’t really share that nationality, and also being smack in the middle of a volatile and contested piece of territory. So, from the start it was ripe for destabilisation by neighbouring outsiders, and very likely to be subjected to it.

 

The only thing to be said in its favour that that this mess was created entirely by accident, rather than as an act of carefully-thought-out policy.  Actually, it seems to me that any wise person would see these events not as a pretext for boarding up the doorways between Russia and the ‘West’ (as Washington seems so strangely anxious to do) but to reorder the borders so that Ukraine had more of a chance of developing into a viable entity. But to do that I think everyone would have to recognise its neutrality.

 

Western Europe has undone the follies of Versailles (without anyone noticing) by simply dissolving all the borders on the entire Continent, up to the River Bug. I still can’t get people to see what an astonishing thing this is, how the Treaty of Schengen ought to be ranked with those of Versailles, Potsdam, even Westphalia, as a momentous occasion. The supreme paradox of this is the borders dissolved by Schengen are the very same borders which so many young men fought and died to preserve and restore (and in which so many others died in collateral results)  in the 1939-45 conflict.

 

The modern age makes a great fetish about the nobility of World War Two. Then it presides smilingly over an act which utterly undoes that war’s principal purpose and achievement.  This is what happens when people stop thinking.