Ukraine - A Warning to the Furious

I feel a strong foreboding about Ukraine. Stories quite a long way inside most of today’s papers recount appalling carnage in and around Donetsk, where jet fighters and helicopters were used earlier in the week by the Kiev government to retake the airport from rebels, and where the mortuary is said to be full of tangled, maimed bodies.

 

There are unpleasant stories from the town of Gorlovka (which I have visited, and which is twinned with Barnsley) claiming that policemen have been  murdered by rebels there.

 

It all sounds extremely dangerous and chaotic, and I feel great sympathy for the courageous journalists attempting to report what is going on, and being rewarded with inside pages.

 

This is the kind of conflict where one could easily become dead, or very badly wounded, simply by driving down the wrong road at the wrong time of day, or by not leaving a building quickly enough. I have been very lucky in such circumstances, but plenty are not.

 

But my concern for the reporters and photographers and cameramen is just a small part of it. Who is in charge? What are they trying to achieve.

 

Although he is not really legitimate, as his predecessor was never lawfully removed, we have at least to give a fair wind to Petro Poroshenko, the newly-elected president in Kiev.

 

But can he, only just elected, have had any personal say in the use of overwhelming force in Donetsk? If so, things look very bad. Russia is plainly angling for a compromise over Eastern Ukraine, a federal system which would allow the east of the country to retain strong economic and political links with Russia.

 

 

There are good material reasons for this. Much of Russia’s defence industry, pretty much its only successful industry apart from oil, still depends on quite advanced factories in this part of Ukraine. An EU-dominated Kiev, subject to the sort of economic and trade constraints that EU satellites must obey, could not long permit such an arrangement to last.

 

There are also  (as discussed here to the point of exhaustion) strong political reasons why Russia will do all in its power to prevent the transfer of Ukraine from its current buffer-state neutrality to EU/NATO loyalty. And Moscow sees a federalisation of Ukraine, with a good deal of autonomy for the east,  as a tolerable way of doing this. It would without doubt prefer the whole Ukraine in its sphere. But it recognizes that this is not a realistic objective at present or in the foreseeable future, so does not seek to pursue it. This is just grown-up diplomacy, not all that difficult.

 

So when Vladimir Putin said he would recognise the outcome of the Ukraine presidential election, it was a significant concession, made not out of the kindness of his heart but in the hope of receiving something worthwhile in return.

 

An airborne attack on Donetsk airport does not seem to me to be that something.

 

Now, perhaps people in the Kiev regime were trying to bounce Mr Poroshenko, or hem him in by creating impossible hostility and so preventing compromise, before he was fully in charge. Perhaps some of them still half-fear and half hope that Russian tanks will come storming across the border.  I have noticed how supporters of the Kiev putsch have always believed very strongly in the likelihood of such an action, and have wondered if it was wishful thinking, since it would compel the USA and Western Europe to intervene unequivocally on Kiev’s side, in some way. And this is what many of them want(in my view, quite madly, as it would cause untold grief. But they don’t seem to grasp this).

 

I have until now always doubted that Mr Putin intended an invasion It would be an act of emotional folly, likely to lead in the end to his own downfall, and I do not get the impression that he does such things. As Sir Rodric Braithwaite has said elsewhere, he usually knows when to stop. He knows his history. He knows that Nicholas II’s mobilisation in 1914 led directly to the murder of the Imperial family in a cellar in Yekaterinburg, and to the disaster of Lenin.

 

If he had done it before now then I would  have to confess to having completely misunderstood his nature and motives. The Crimean takeover was quite different,  aided by the fact that large numbers of Russian troops were already legally there, the status of Crimea was legally dubious from the start, thanks to Kiev’s blocking of a referendum on Crimea’s position 20-odd years ago,  and the action had popular support.

 

Now that Kiev is deploying such strong violence in Donetsk, I cannot be quite so sure. Violence of this kind and on this scale can make men take leave of their senses, as history also shows. In 1914 it was as if they had put something in the water, so quickly did politicians take leave of their senses.   

I must just hope that people on both sides keep hold of their reason and their sense of proportion. And also that this is not Mr Poroshenko’s will, and that he has the real power to control those who are seeking to ramp this up.

 

Meanwhile, where are the condemnations of the Kiev government for ‘killing its own people’? There is no doubt that it is doing so, and using indiscriminate methods. It is all very well saying (truthfully) that it faces an armed insurgency and claiming( almost certainly correctly) that this insurgency is being aided and armed by outsiders.

 

Exactly the same was and is true in Syria, but that has not prevented the liberal interventionist chorus from condemning the Syrian government and classifying it as a ‘regime’.

 

I’ll say again what I have said several times before. The EU and the USA are the aggressors in this matter. It is they who have intervened openly and actively in the internal affairs of what they simultaneously claim is a sovereign state, overthrowing its legitimate government when it failed to what they wanted it to do.  It is they who have sought to make a major and significant shift in the alignment of a key state in South-East Europe, in the knowledge that such a change is highly unwelcome to a major neighbouring power. The fact that they have used NGOs, civil society organisations and gullible idealistic youths ( as well as biddable media)  as their weapons does not mean it is not aggression. This is how aggression is done in the post-modern world.

 

Russia has no doubt used methods just as cynical and dishonest,  if not more so. But it has been reacting to an attempt to alert the status quo, an attempt which only an ignoramus could believe to be unimportant, or unlikely to meet opposition. The West has then become righteously angry that its own methods have been played back, and that the country the ‘West’ hoped to push out of Ukraine has pushed back.

 

This is unrealistic and morally absurd. If you start a fight, then you cannot condemn your opponent if he retaliates.   

 

And if your actions lead (as this adventure has) to deaths on quite a large scale, it is you, the aggressor,  who is responsible for them.

 

War is hell. Its face, which I have glimpsed,  is so ugly it is almost impossible to look upon. It always has been foul and cruel and always will be. Sane, civilized people should do their utmost to avoid it. The best way to avoid it is to compromise, and recognise the limits of your power. Do the EU and NATO and the USA have any capacity to do this, or do they think that because all Europe has so far fallen before them, that they can sweep eastwards until they reach the shores of the Caspian?This is not a board game.This is real earth, inhabited by real people with lives they hope to lead.

 

I have yet to hear any of the leaders of the 'West' talking like grown-ups. They aren't even cynical. They are just adolescent. Meanwhile the warnings from retirement of Helmut Schmidt are worth listening to. Look them up. Some of you may remember him as a very distinguished Chancellor of West Germany an old-fashioned Social Democrat, and anotehr man who knows some history, quite a lot of it from direct personal experience.  He’s old enough to know what war is, and how hard it is to end, once it has begun.