ANOTHER MUNICH?

August is supposed famously to be ‘the silly season.’ A dearth of real news leading to a plethora of trivial, shallow and sometimes downright silly news stories. This season only ever really existed in the parochial news world of the 1950’s and 60’s. In an age of 24 rolling news there is no silly season. However this August has made a nonsense of the whole idea of a flat news period with disaster enfolding across the Middle East as fascist Islamist insurgents operating from Libya to Syria and Iraq seek to impose a 7th century caliphate, this alongside the destruction in Gaza and the collapse of Egyptian democracy. Now Russian forces are invading Ukraine as Putin sees the crisis in Iraq providing ideal cover for his move against his southern neighbour.
Nearer to home Scotland threatens to break away and the Conservative party is imploding once more over Europe. The scandal of the monstrous scale of child sexual abuse is exposed in Rotherham further eroding the legitimacy of the police, social services and the political establishment at the same time as a report informs us that we are ruled by a tiny elite of the privileged and privately educated. (As if we didn’t already know). Is it hyperbole to suggest this is the greatest August crisis since 1914?


President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko (L) and
 European commission president
 Jose Manuel Barroso give a press conference
Any regular reader of this blog will know that I am no fan of the cult of ‘leadership,’ however there are times which demand action not talk and when individuals ‘at the top’ can make a difference. This after all is the whole rationale for hierarchy. Now in the face of the greatest threat to European stability since the end of the last Balkan conflicts, and arguably since the end of World War II, we have the spectre of the European Union dithering, equivocating, and offering up the political and diplomatic equivalent of a slap in the face with a wet lettuce.

‘After a lengthy briefing by Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, who warned “full-scale war” was imminent if Russian troops continued an advance in support of pro-Moscow rebels, the EU leaders agreed on Sunday to have officials draw up within a week a list of new measures that could hit a range of sectors.’[1]

Well, in truth the message is more nuanced, “we’ll hold back on that that lettuce for a moment, but we’re warning you.” There will be fear and trembling in the Kremlin tonight.
 Either wilfully or out of profound stupidity they just don’t get it. Putin doesn’t care about sanctions and is not interested in dialogue, not yet at least. What he wants to do is create what the Israelis call ‘facts on the ground.’ He wants to dislodge a swathe of Western Ukraine away from Kiev, create a corridor to facilitate access to the Crimean peninsula, and a sympathetic puppet regime based in the Donetsk basin but incorporating Lugansk. Once he has created this reality Putin will talk. He is playing a long game gambling on the West losing interest and coming to terms with this new reality when the dust settles. Indeed just as it seems to have done respecting Crimea. Who would now bet against him pulling this off?
If the rest of Europe does abandon Ukraine it will be the most shameful betrayal since the Munich conference of 1938.

To understand Putin’s thinking one needs to have an understanding of Russian history, and when speaks of Russian history one is speaking of Ukraine. For centuries the union between Russia and Ukraine was much closer than that between England and Scotland, the two being seen as indivisible. Thus reading Prit Butter’s book ‘Collapse of Empires’ as I currently am, I read that ‘…in April 1914 the Russian General Staff met in Kiev…’ This is hardly unusual, I could pluck any reference to Russia from the 18th century onwards in which Russia/Ukraine are interchangeable. For anyone of Putin’s generation the idea of a separate and autonomous Ukraine feels ‘wrong,’ whilst an independent Ukraine moving its allegiance away from Moscow to the west has about it the feel of a two headed sheep. It is this vision that gives Putin tantrums in his bath tub.
 I say understand, which is not to excuse, people have the right to determine their own fate and not be allotted to one sphere of influence or another by a process of Bismarckian realpolitik dictated by the big diplomatic players. Those days are gone.
Most liberals like to imagine that so too had the days when European borders could be altered by force. As Putin turns up the heat the commitment of European politicians to democracy, freedom and international law is about to tested as never before. Whether they are up to this test or setting up some sort of Munich style capitulation we shall see. Recent history does not inspire confidence. If they do capitulate, like those who took the easy path in 1938, they will find the world a much more dangerous place. For Putin has a big appetite and an extensive agenda.    


[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/31/eu-threatens-russia-unspecified-new-sanctions-ukraine

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