Ukraine: time for the west to pull back too

Amusing the way that you and these FCO ex-Moscow grandees all see the issue in terms of how we meet ‘Russia’s interests’. What about the interests of the 45 million Ukrainians?
I seem to recall that you argued that bringing Poland into NATO was a serious mistake! ONLY by bringing Ukraine into the wider ‘Western’ family can the insidious post-Soviet KGB-style networks of corruption be scaled back to something approaching normalcy. The sort of appraoch you advocate leaves Ukraine subject to Russian neo-imperialist overlordism. What’s so good, wise or even stable about that?

Brian writes: Thank you for this, Charles. Exactly the reaction I expected! I would only remark that “the interests of the 45 million Ukrainians” are best served by neither Russia nor the west meddling in its internal and external affairs but by both sides cooperating, not competing, to give it disinterested economic support; and that it’s not “the approach that I advocate” that leaves Ukraine subject to Russian influence and power, but the hard facts of geography (and history) which even mighty NATO is powerless to change.

And yes, I believe that recent expansion of both NATO and the EU has been a potentially dangerous mistake. In the case of Poland, it has entailed giving the Poles a guarantee of military support if it gets into a fight with a neighbour which in practice we would be no more able to honour than we were able to honour the similar guarantee we had given when the chips were down in September 1939. It’s a bad habit, issuing promises that you can’t keep, and it leads to inevitable betrayal of trust. The statement issued by the Secretary-General of NATO today describing Ukraine as “a partner of NATO” could hardly be a less helpful contribution to the effort to calm a dangerous situation: it can only fan the flames.

I had always understood that ‘Russia’ began with the Principiate of Kiev in the tenth century: somehow it moved northwards to Moscow and the vicinity of the future St. Petersburg, leaving behind what we always used to call the Ukraine, which leter got reabsorbed when the Tsarist state pushed towrds the Caucasus and Black Sea – sounds like a great amoeba moving around.  But who did what and to whom, and when did White Russia – sorry, Belorus – appear?  Sorry, not trying to be frivolous: the present situation is fascinating in a ghastly way.  Must find a decent European history that deals adequately with Eastern Europe and European Russia.

Brian writes: Thank you for this. There’s some useful historical background to all this both in Sir R Braithwaite’s article in the Independent on Sunday and in Sir R Lyne’s article for Chatham House — see links to both in my blog post above. I am forwarding to you a recent email from a friend with some relevant historical background. The same friend recommends a paperback by Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms. He says the chapter on the kingdom/duchy of Poland/Lithuania has current resonance. Others may have other recommendations for background reading: if so, perhaps they will kindly post comments here with the details.

Timothy, the reference in Vanished Kingdoms is to the chapter entitled Litva, which documents the origins of Belarus and Ukraine, among much else, and outlines their history within the joint commonwealth of Poland/Lithuania until its collapse and partition under assault from Prussia, Austria, Sweden and Russia in the late 18th century.
Robin

I would make a clear distinction between expansion of the European Union and expansion of NATO.

When I was ambassador in Greece in the mid-90s I asked my Ukrainian colleague what his attitude was to the expansion of NATO. His answer was that Ukraine wasn’t greatly concerned, with one important proviso: expansion should not go up to the Ukrainian border, i.e. including Poland etc, and then stop.

As long ago as 1997 I crossed swords with Brian Cartledge in the letters column of The Times on this. He wrote that the debt of honour we incurred at Munich and Yalta should be redeemed by admitting Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia into NATO: the “unequivocal statement (article V of the North Atlantic Treaty) that a threat to any of the three new democracies will be treated as a threat to the Alliance” would constitute a “stop” sign which Russia would be ready to observe. I argued that the dynamics of the situation were different. The aim of our security policy should be to strengthen elements in Russia working for the harmonious inclusion of Russia in a European system and avoid feeding xenophobic elements who interpret our policies as an attempt to isolate them. “There is”, I wrote “a parallel with the way Germany was handled after 1945, learning from the lessons of 1918, by inclusion and not by exclusion.” Pointing out that “it is not seriously contemplated” that the three Baltic states would be included in NATO, I suggested that the debt owed to the Poles, Hungarian and Czechs could be paid through the enlargement of the European Union.

Since then, of course, not only the expansion of NATO feared by my Ukrainian colleague has taken place, but it has even extended to the Baltic states. I have yet to meet any non-specialist who realises that if there were any military trouble between Russia and, for example, Latvia (which is almost half ethnically Russian), we in Britain would be bound by that Article V.

The idea that Ukraine should join NATO is even more likely to provoke xenophobia in Russia. As I understand it plans to join were shelved by Ukraine in 2010. Has there been any suggestion of reviving them? The Russian analyst Dmitri Trenin suggests in today’s Observer that in the Russian view the “February revolution in Kiev” was likely to have various consequences including that “the new Ukrainian government would revoke the 2010 law on the country’s non-aligned status and seek a Nato Membership Action Plan, or MAP.” This appears to be speculation at present. Let us hope that no Western leader gives it any substance.

Brian writes: Thank you for this, Oliver. I, like you, have been consistently sceptical about the merits of NATO’s relentless expansion since the collapse of the Soviet Union. I accept of course that there is a huge and material difference between NATO and the EU, but it seems to me understandable that the idea of EU membership for a country on Russia’s border which was previously a constituent part of the Soviet Union and in which Russia has such enormous strategic and political interests should appear hardly less threatening to those interests than its membership of NATO itself. I also happen to think that the EU expansion which has already occurred has been at best premature and that it has made the EU almost unmanageable (which is of course why Mrs Thatcher favoured it): so that yet more expansion eastward might well be terminal for the EU, which would be a tragedy, even leaving aside the monumental crisis in relations with Moscow that it would provoke. But that’s a rather different argument.

Good to see there’s still some life in assorted ex-FCO mastodons (NB myself included)!
The key point about NATO is that the very deepest, nastiest unreconstructed communist-type forces in the former Eastern bloc were buried deep in the armed forces (GRU etc). Under communism they were allowed to run both internal and external parallel intelligence operations. Without a country joining NATO and turning out its military pockets (so to speak) there is NO prospect of dismantling these forces who continue to play an utterly malign anti-democratic role.
So anyone saying that Ukraine must ‘never’ join NATO is condemning Ukraine to Moscow-inspired corruption and ideological infiltration/subversion for ever. Why should ‘Russian interests’ in the modern world extend to defending that situation with the rest of us meekly backing off? Had Poland not joined NATO one shudders to think how the country would have been held back. See also Serbia, and how Mladic was defended by the Serbian army for over a decade.
That said, it’s clearly going to cause more harm than good to press Ukraine’s NATO membership now, and Ukrainians themselves might reasonably want not to commit to it. Let them decide for themselves in due course, perhaps as part of a new negotiated European security architecture that works with Russia as an equal but respectful partner?
I suspect that in years to come this flailing by Putin will be seen as a colossal Russian blunder that wrecked the credibility of Moscow’s Eurasian Economic Union initiative (which CIS country will want to be subject to the sort of bullying Ukraine is now getting)? Plus Putin seems to be making a striking mistake in alienating Ukrainian speakers who are being treated as traitors and ‘fascists’ simply for wanting to become more European. Ukraine may come to signal the beginning of Russia’s own eventual disintegration into smaller units.
Bottom line (Lyne?)? Russia seems to define its ‘interests’ under current management by insisting that you must be crushed in a hug of Russian affection until you can scarcely breathe, and if you ask for some fresh air you’re being hateful. That sort of policy is about as unsuited to the emerging modern world of easy-going e-pluralism as can be imagined.
It will fail. But how many people including Russians themselves will die or suffer as it lumbers around before it crashes?

Brian writes: Thank you for this further contribution, Charles. I take your point about NATO, but I don’t accept that it’s a legitimate function of a military defensive alliance designed to deter Soviet aggression against western European democracies to help former communist client states or republics of the USSR to shake off the nastier repressive detritus left behind by Soviet-led communism. Nor do I believe that these states would have been incapable of such essential reforms without NATO membership to help them on. Do you really think that the Poles, for example, would not have shaken off the residues of communism without NATO membership as a spur?

But I’m glad to see that you have joined the remarkable ex-ambassadorial near-consensus that this is not a good time to press NATO membership on Ukraine. And I have no quarrel with your forecast that Putin’s tactics will in the end do Russia more harm than good, although I’m far from clear what else he could be doing, given what’s at stake. It’s also worth recalling that by rushing to press the most ruthless and socially uncaring form of primitive capitalism on the Russians as they emerged from Stalinist communism, without encouraging a transition that might have allowed them to preserve some of the positive features of the communist system, we helped to produce Putin, his oligarchs and the kleptocracy. We might have been more careful about what we wished for. But of course it might have happened anyway.

I have never served in Russia or the Ukraine.  This is a brief attempt to give a perspective from someone who has worked principally on and in the EU.
1.  The fundamental problem is that the only lever the EU has ever had to generate change in the neighbourhood is to offer a “membership perspective”.  It could offer that to Ukraine but it will not because member states do not agree and will not agree.  So all it can offer to neighbours is weak support for reforms for little in return.  That is always going to be an unappetising offer and hence generate controversy and instability. 
2.  Seen from Brussels what is most evident is the EU’s *lack* of purpose and consistency in doing even that.  The Eastern Partnership was largely seen as an enthusiasm for Eastern Europeans, to be indulged as such, just as southern Europeans cared most about the Euro-Med initiative, and so on.   The major EU members were and are reluctant to bear any significant price to spread European values to Ukraine – one reason why the FTA was so controversial in the first place and why its effects would have been rather minimal.
3.  This lack of purpose and introspectiveness (for Eurozone crisis reasons and others) was always very clear to any serious observer and ripe to be exploited by any outsider who wished to.  The EU may have “meddled” in the region but if so only in an absent-minded and feeble way. 
4.  For the same reason the EU will find it hard to pay sustained attention to Ukraine once the immediate crisis is over.  Underlying differences of perspective will reassert themselves and other problems will emerge.  The EU collectively simply does not care as much about Ukraine as Russia does and hard decisions there will be put off or sidestepped if possible. 
5.  So the rational strategy for Putin is to ratchet up the threats (military action anywhere in Ukraine) but not implement them fully.  To create a sense of relief in the EU that the worst didn’t happen, and establish a new normal as quickly as possible, so that the EU reverts to type.   As Russian troops sit in Crimea as they do in Transdniestria etc, the EU will plausibly accommodate itself to the new reality.
In the long run the only durable solution is for the EU to develop some kind of weaker membership arrangements for an outer tier, and for these to be negotiated along with broader security arrangements for wider Europe.  That is a long way down the line at the moment and conceptually most difficult for those in the EU institutions who most understand how it might be done.  Meanwhile we have to keep talking up our values and refusing to accept that doing so is somehow challenging or unreasonable behaviour.  We could start by implementing the FTA unilaterally, to prove we were willing to pay some kind of price to support economic liberals and pro-Europeans in Ukraine.  I am not holding my breath. 
 
David

Brian writes: Thank you for this extremely interesting and rather depressing analysis of the EU perspective. It strikes me as highly plausible. Your comment that in the end Ukraine is more important to Russia than it is to the EU seems especially pertinent. I’m sure you’re right that in the last resort the EU won’t be willing to pay a high price either politically or financially (and least of all militarily) in defence of Ukrainian independence. I’m afraid that such reluctance is probably justified. In practice the Ukrainians will have to work out their own modus vivendi with their big and menacing neighbour, as the small neighbours of great powers have always had to do the world over.

“It’s also worth recalling that by rushing to press the most ruthless and socially uncaring form of primitive capitalism on the Russians as they emerged from Stalinist communism, without encouraging a transition that might have allowed them to preserve some of the positive features of the communist system, we helped to produce Putin…”
Yes. R Braithwaite, D Manning, Rod Lyne and the rest of us who grappled with the actual collapse of the Soviet Union are ALL GUILTY. Why? Because instead of running around looking for ways to inject UK/EU taxpayers’ money into helping Russia we did not think enough about helping the Russians preserve some of the ‘positive features of communism’!
Hahaha. That would have made for a lively submission back in October 1991.
Problem: How to help Russia get out of the civilizational black hole that Communism has dug, leading to miooions of corpses and 200+ million people having very little food?
Recommendation: That we look hard for ways to preserve the positive features of communism
Your basic problem in all this is that you can not let go of a naïve and in fact bonkers idea that there was indeed something noble and positive about communism as such, and that therefore the Russians who invented communism ergo must in some way be noble too. This misconception leads you inexorably to defend the indefensible, above all the idea that Russia as such has existential ‘interests’ that trump everyone else’s.
What else could Putin be doing? He could be hosting a G8 meeting in Sochi that allows a full and frank discussion about corruption in and across Ukraine, inviting EU/Russia/US etc to work out a plan for fast-tracking Ukrainian reform in a transparent and intelligent way. In return for accepting openly that Russia’s policies are part of the problem, he could ask that we look again at security and other guarantees for Ukraine and its Russian-speaking communities. To show he means business he could allow free media in Russia to start operating fully again, and start to work with Western financial authorities to track dodgy Russian money.
In other words, he has many options other than invading a neighbouring country and being obnoxious. He too is trapped in the idea that there was something ennobling about the USSR. He even absurdly says that “the greatest tragedy in the C20 was the end of the Soviet Union”. No, Mr Putin (and Brian): the greatest tragedy was that it was ever set up, as millions of dead Russians and Ukrainians would testify.

Brian writes: You sarcastically misrepresent my own and others’ views so radically that it’s impossible to deal with such a scatter-shot attack except by inviting you to go back and re-read my original post. For the record: I regard, and always regarded, Soviet communism as an abomination, and unreservedly welcomed its demise; I unreservedly condemn Russia’s illegal and dangerous military takeover of Crimea and recognise the extreme danger of the possibility that the Russians will be tempted to act similarly in eastern Ukraine; and I strongly support the right of the Ukrainians to run their own affairs and decide their own future free from strong-arm interference from the outside, although it helps to acknowledge the limits to their options imposed by their geopolitical position. Where we differ is in our prescriptions for lowering the tensions and tackling the root causes of the crisis. Threatening Russia with political isolation and trade or financial sanctions strikes me as likely to be counter-productive. I have suggested what I believe to be a better way. You are welcome to disagree — as all too predictably you do; but the kind of abuse and misrepresentations in your ‘comment’ are surely beyond the pale.

The next stage is apparently to be “sanctions,”  to which Russia is “vulnerable,” as proved by the crash of the Moscow stock exchange. 
Counter-sanctions? Europe’s energy supplies?
Hateful though Putin’s bullying and double-speak may be, the need to de-escalate is incontestable.

Brian writes: Thank you for this, David. I entirely agree that the idea of sanctions prompts a number of questions that need careful consideration. How much pain and cost are we EU Europeans really willing to endure on Ukraine’s behalf when there’s no certainty that our sanctions will have the desired effect? If David Frost’s well informed analysis of the EU position in his comment on this blog post is correct, the answer is probably not much. As the other David points out, at the end of the day Ukraine is much more important to Russia than it is to the EU. As you say, the need to de-escalate is incontestable — and, I would add, urgent.

I have to take issue with Brian’s reference to NATO’s ‘relentless expansion’, which creates the impression that the NATO enlargement process was driven from the NATO side.  I was seconded to NATO 1994-1998 and was very much involved in it all, and it was clear to me from many discussions at that time with visitors from NATO’s new ‘Partnership for Peace’ countries and with their NATO-based liaison officers that they very much wanted to be members – it was their choice, not something we pushed at them.  In some cases – the Baltic states and Poland in particular – they were indeed looking for protection against Russia, but they, and the others with a less traumatic recent history, were quite clear that this was also about cleaning up their military and turning an overstaffed, old-fashioned structure into a reformed, modern, cheaper and more effective one.  For the same reason I flatly disagree with the line that we should tell Ukraine that they can’t ever be a NATO, or EU, member.  It may be many years away, and there are indeed lots of issues about whether the existing members have, now at least, the appetite for taking in a country the size of Ukraine.  But denying them the possibility, ever, when Ukraine is clearly a European country, would be to tell them that they have some sort of second-rate sovereignty.  I think that would be wrong.
 
As for Russia, of course it was wrong for the US (Jim Baker, I think) to tell them at the time of German unification that NATO would not expand eastwards.  For the reasons set out above, this was unrealistic, and a promise that NATO could not have kept.  But whatever soreness the Russians may feel about that – and I suspect that they exaggerate their feelings on this, for effect – does not justify their behaviour now.  For reasons of his own, Putin in Ukraine has chosen to follow Milosevic’s example in Bosnia – whipping up the fears of a minority community, with distorted reports and dire predictions; supporting and very possibly arming dubious ‘local self-defence forces’/militias; encouraging separatist passions – followed through now by full-scale invasion, in Crimea.  There are many countries around the world, including the UK, which have large numbers of their citizens living in other countries.  It is natural to be concerned for them, when things go wrong.  But that concern does not justify military intervention and the attempted permanent annexation of another country’s territory.  Russia needs to understand that.  Unfortunately we were not clear enough about this, when Russia broke South Ossetia and Abkhazia away from Georgia.  We need to be clearer now – while underlining that where Russia has legitimate concerns we are always ready to listen, and to try to work together to find a solution.

Brian writes: Thank you for that interesting perspective. No doubt your description of how NATO came to expand right up to the borders of the old Soviet Union and beyond, even to include former Soviet republics, is accurate. But the essence of diplomacy is surely the ability to understand how things are bound to look to the other fellow. Just because you think, or even know, that your adversary’s fears and concerns are without foundation, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he is deliberately exaggerating them or exploiting them for his own advantage. You need to consider whether they might be genuine, and if so what they might impel him to do and whether it might be prudent to take some action to dispel or alleviate them. During the cold war the west went to considerable lengths to prevent Russia extending its influence deep into western Europe (to Greece, for example, or Italy) because we regarded any such expansion as a threat to our own freedoms and independence. It’s worth considering the outside possibility that the Russian leadership, however brutal, opportunistic and cynical, might feel much the same way about the dramatic expansion of NATO and the EU up to their own front door, regardless of whether that expansion was part of a grand plan or whether it just happened because the new members wanted to join. As a great power with pronounced paranoid tendencies, Russia is always going to want to ensure, by whatever means seem necessary, that its immediate neighbourhood does not fall under hostile influence or control. It seems to me that the west would be prudent to accept that reality and to understand that to challenge it is to risk dangerous instability, constant conflict and ultimately even war. We know our own intentions are pure, but that may not be how they look to others.

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion….

Thanks for the reply. I set out your last paragraph below.

Finally, and most importantly, I disagree emphatically with your apparent thesis that if a country’s people wish for membership of such international organisations as the EU or NATO, they have an absolute right to that membership, regardless of the views and interests of the organisation’s existing members and irrespective of the consequences for international or regional peace, stability and security. I’m sure that some at least of the people of Ukraine, Turkey, Serbia and a number of other countries would seize on your thesis with great enthusiasm. Fortunately, however, it doesn’t hold water, and I stand by my view that the best contribution the west could make to de-escalation of the present crisis is to tell both Russia and Ukraine that Ukraine will never be admitted to either the EU or NATO — in its own interests as well as those of Russia, the west and the entire region.

Interesting that you don’t accept sovereignty and it begs huge questions. Who decides that we can have what we want, but ‘they’ can’t? Whose assessment is said to be so accurate as to allow this decision to made for other people? What is their track record? How is it compliant with our membership of treaties guaranteeing human rights and national sovereignty? On what basis is paternalism (however benign) a basis for foreign policy? How does it differ from appeasement – another FCO policy which didn’t exactly support the thesis that these decisions are being well or effectively made? 

Brian writes: Thank you again. This has nothing to do with ‘not accepting sovereignty’. You ask: “Who decides that we can have what we want, but ‘they’ can’t?” If this refers to membership of the EU or NATO, the answer is obviously “the members of the EU and NATO”. (Who decides who can join the Athenaeum or the Conservative party?) Guarantees of human rights and national sovereignty clearly can’t confer a right to membership of any particular international organisation. ‘Paternalism’ and ‘appeasement’ have nothing to do with it. Appeasement is about giving in to unreasonable and illegitimate demands, often backed up by blackmail. I am suggesting something very different: acting in ways calculated to help allay the legitimate (even if arguably unfounded) fears and concerns of a key player with a legitimate stake in the matters at issue. Doing that is only simple common sense. I’m not sure why you find such difficulty with it.

I don’t have a great deal to say on the topic of Ukraine – international affairs isn’t anywhere remotely near any of my areas of dubious expertise – but someone passed me a link to your blog and I enjoyed it a great deal.
 
Many thanks for a lucid and incisive post that has approached a number of perspectives that hadn’t crossed my mind.

Brian writes: Thank you very much for this generous comment.

Simon,
Superb contribution. Nothing at all ‘ordinary’ about your insight here. On the contrary, your insights and judgement are spot-on
 
Charles

Thank you Brian for the response. I also accept a lot of what you say. But – there are important ‘buts’. First, I’m sorry that this reply is so long. I tried to make it brief, but failed!

Yes, it is essential to understand and adapt to Russia’s legitimate concerns. I see two types of Russian concerns – public opinion within Russia, and the opinions of the government – that is, Putin. Public opinion in Russia is so distorted by the manipulation of mass media controlled by Putin that it is hard to take direct action to satisfy it – it will not be presented with objective facts no matter what you do. There are the more enlightened sections of the intelligentsia – but these are already I think to a large extent sympathetic to Ukraine in this situation. So we are left with Putin’s concerns. What motivates Putin is extremely hard to know. No doubt loss of influence over Ukraine is unacceptable to him, and seeing it being sucked into a western sphere of influence is humiliating. But I also think that he is not so much about what he might lose as what he can gain.

I worked with Medvedev on a project in St Petersburg when he was not long out of university. He seemed pleasant and professional enough then, but my impression is that he excelled at the manipulation of rules to consolidate power on behalf of himself and his friends. We can take an educated guess at who those friends might have been. I also saw first hand how the privatisation process in Petersburg worked, and how closely the FSB were involved in that process (appointing former or current FSB officers as directors of companies, providing FSB security at auctions that helped to ensure that the right person won, and so on). The mechanisms used were sometimes labyrinthine and ingenious. Further, for private companies outside the privatisation process, it is well known that the FSB acted on a freelance basis, taking a share of profits in return for keeping non-state mafia off their backs – in other words, a protection racket. I don’t know much about what Putin was up to at that time – except that he was in charge of foreign investments into St. Petersburg – but that itself is yet another example of a (possibly ex-)FSB officer popping up in control of a key post in the privatisation process.

I mention all this just because I think it gives an idea of the Putin/Medvedev technique and background, which is to construct, use and abuse convoluted rules (and mass media) in order to consolidate power and wealth. They emerged on top in what was an extremely ruthless and competitive environment. You can see this technocrat, legalistic approach in their foreign policy at the moment, the manipulation of meetings, referendums, quorums,, taking the trouble to deny that the troops in Crimea are Russian in order to be seen to be within the letter of the rules, when pragmatically they would almost certainly do better to admit the truth and not to be discredited and seen as brazen liars. This is the use of loopholes in bureaucracy, just like in a Gogol novel (cf. Dead Souls, Government Inspector, etc.)

The point is that I doubt that Putin is really that interested in ‘legitimate concerns’, he is rather interested in what he can achieve in this situation.

Brian, you said:

it’s virtually impossible for us at this distance to be sure whether the allegations of abuse of Russians by Ukrainian crowds have any basis in fact or whether they are simply invented excuses for Russian intervention. Agnosticism seems to me the only safe position on these matters.

I mentioned that many of my friends come from one of the more ethnically Russian parts of Ukraine, just next to the Crimea. I invited any of them who wanted to to give their views of what has been happening. It gives a good feeling for public opinion in one of the predominantly Russian regions of Ukraine (even though it’s a tiny sample, the thrust of comments I see from the region on social media are broadly consistent however). Please have a look at the comments below my post:
http://simoncroftsphoto.com/blog/a-note-from-south-eastern-ukraine/

Note: places like Donetsk may be different. I personally find it harder to gauge the sway of opinion there. I doubt however that the treat of invasion is winning Putin many friends.

The impression was given in some media reports both in Russia and the West that some the new Ukrainian government was trying to prevent Russians from speaking Russian. In fact, the dispute was rather about whether Russian should be given equal status as an official language – that is, whether official documents could have equal standing in either Ukrainian or Russian. That could be – and was – a cause of minor annoyance for ethnic Russians, but it is a very long way from a crackdown on speaking Russian.

What is true is that the state media channels have been in Ukrainian for quite a few years now, and this has been a huge mistake. It has meant that a lot of Russian speakers especially in the East switched to watching Russian TV channels broadcast from Moscow, and because of the propaganda being pumped out on those channels, public opinion in those parts is much more wary of the EU and of Maidan. After all, these were the regions that originally voted Yanukhovich in, so politically many disapprove the Maidan movement and the change of power. What would make a huge difference to Ukraine’s future, if it’s not already too late, would be if there were Ukrainian TV /Radio channels broadcasting in Russian. I really hope that will happen.

There is one point that I feel less sure about than when I posted the day before yesterday – and that is whether Putin will invade Eastern Ukraine. Maybe I was wrong. Only Putin knows.

But returning to your suggestion of allaying Russia’s – Putin’s – concerns by providing an assurance that Ukraine will never be a member of the EU. Perhaps such a reassurance could be given with respect to NATO membership, I can’t imagine Ukraine joining NATO. But I think there are reasons why this shouldn’t be done with respect to EU membership. The first is, that this won’t actually appease Putin, because it’s not enough. He wants to know that Ukraine will be ‘his’. I hope his ambitions stop at Ukraine. But a reassurance about EU membership won’t stop him implementing his familiar power-accumulation game, because this is what he does – he has been doing it for years, and he will carry on doing it. The pattern of provocation-legal technicality-propaganda–invasion-occupation-assimilation is one that has worked well from the start and will continue to be employed. I was living in a Moscow apartment block not far from those that were being blown up as a casus belli for invading Chechnya when Putin came to power, and I won’t forget it in a hurry.

The second is, that, just maybe, in a number of years’ time, the time will in fact be right for Ukraine to join the EU. There is no particular reason why it shouldn’t, if there is a political will in the EU and in Ukraine (which there isn’t at the moment in either).

The collapse of the USSR was caused partly by economic stagnation, but also because of aspirations to become part of the rest of the world. These are in the long term the two biggest threats to Putin’s power too – within Russia. Turning Ukraine away from Europe – failing to support Ukraine in its stance against Russia – would cause disillusionment and anger towards the west at a time when Ukrainians – and Russians – need the carrot of economic and cultural integration more than ever. Don’t forget that there is a substantial sector of people even in Russia who support Ukraine and believe that what Putin is doing is wrong. If Ukraine is left without support, then these Russians too are left without support. The way in the end to reintegrate not only Ukraine, but also, perhaps in many years to come, Russia, into world society is simply to behave as ethically as possible and not abandon a country to become a ‘borderland’ – a No Man’s Land – because of a bully.

Brian writes: Renewed thanks for this further illuminating contribution, rooted in your first-hand experience. I especially welcome the link to your own extremely informative blog (http://simoncroftsphoto.com/blog/) with its splendid photographs.

Finally, on the question of EU membership for Ukraine, I venture to query your assertion that “maybe … the time will in fact be right for Ukraine to join the EU. There is no particular reason why it shouldn’t…” I believe that there is a very particular reason why it shouldn’t: not only Putin, but any conceivable government in Moscow at any time in the future would regard EU membership for Ukraine as an intolerable threat to Russia’s security, international standing, and interests. Ukraine has a unique position in the Russian and Slav mythology and its defection to the EU will always, I believe, constitute a red line that no Moscow regime could allow to be crossed. This may sound absurd, or worse, to western ears. But some of the wording of the western-proposed draft EU-Ukraine Association Agreement (quoted in my response to your earlier comment at https://barder.com/4126/comment-page-1#comment-199170) can only be interpreted as a cynical attempt to draw Ukraine into an anti-Russian western security system as well as a trade agreement. It’s really no wonder that Russia stepped in to stop the then Ukrainian president signing it. Even without that naive revelation of the west’s ultimate ambitions in Ukraine, integration into the EU will always, I think, be unacceptable to Moscow, and to dangle it as a possibility for the future amounts to a cruel deception of the Ukrainian people, liable to tempt them into unrealistic expectations of practical western support in any quarrel with their big Russian neighbour, and a dangerous reinforcement of Russian suspicions of the west’s real intentions.

While all this may be seen a question of balance – we both agree at least (I think) that we should take account of Russia’s legitimate concerns (whatever ‘legitimate’ means – there is a whole discussion there) and that Ukrainians shouldn’t be abandoned. Unfortunately those two points may be mutually contradictory.

However, I see two points that we fundamentally disagree on. The first is the title of your post ‘time for the West to pull back’. I would rather say – ‘time for the West to engage and support’.

The second is where you say:

“… Putin is solidly rooted in age-old Russian tradition. If it was not Putin it would be someone else pursuing much the same agenda…
It’s a fantasy to think that the centralist, secretive, repressive, secret-police-dominated, fiercely patriotic, sentimental-cynical, corrupt and inefficient characteristics of Russia down the centuries can be replaced overnight by a modern liberal free market democracy.”

The lessons of history are important and have a continuing presence in the present, and one of the most important of these is the constantly repeated mantra among Russians that ‘Russia needs a strong Tsar’. It is important to know about this self-fulfilling (in my view) fallacy, and the idea has a real effect on politics, it invites paralysis. But I firmly believe that ‘nothing is written’. I honestly believe that it would be perfectly possible for a liberal democratic state to be introduced in Russia overnight. It may not happen very soon, but then again, it might happen the day after tomorrow.

It very nearly happened both in 1917 and in 1991-1995. In 1917, decisive action by a small group of particularly ruthless people ensured that it didn’t.

In the 1990’s, there were two reasons why it didn’t happen. The first is that there was an overwhelming political pressure, on the advice of western advisers, to make the privatisation process ‘quick and dirty’. Privatisation may or may not have been quick, but it was certainly dirty. This was a contrast to transformation in Poland etc., where governments were criticised for not pursuing privatisation and economic transformation fast enough. Looking back, ‘slowly and properly’ would have been a better approach.

The second turning point was when Yeltsin, with support from western governments, pushed through an illegal new constitution adopted only by his own decree, that gave all power to the President, including an effective veto over Parliament’s laws (Article 107 of the Russian constitution). The reason why the west supported the dismantling of Parliament was because Parliament was not prepared to push through reforms ‘quickly and dirtily’ enough. “To privatise” became a synonym in popular Russian for ‘to steal” (eg. “I privatised these slippers from the hotel”). Shortly afterwards, Russia’s first democratically elected Parliament was shelled into submission by the Tamanskaya Tank Regiment. Incidentally, and sorry to refer to my blog again, but I wrote a brief description of how Putin/Yanukhovich were trying to use the equivalent clause in the Ukrainian constitution (Article 94) to crush the authority of the Rada: http://simoncroftsphoto.com/blog/a-comment-on-the-situation-in-ukraine

In both cases, well-intentioned but mistaken western intervention was very important in leading to the triumph of oligarchs, the FSB, and the President over democracy. In each case, one important reason was because western government were willing to let what they saw at the time as pragmatism (and lack of patience) prevail over ethics and patient democratic support. I’m not really interested in allocating blame, or feeling guilty about it, there were good reasons why western advisers at the time favoured speed and good reasons to support Yeltsin through thick and thin, but in retrospect it was a big mistake.

Russians on the whole, act like other peoples, and behave more or less rationally given the information that is at their disposal. It is worth reading Vasily Grossman’s 1955-64 work Everything Flows – Chapter 22, where he describes why Russia chose slavery in the form of Lenin:

“But then is this truly a specifically and uniquely Russian law of development? Can it truly be the lot of the Russian soul, and of the Russian soul alone, to evolve not with the growth of freedom but with the growth of slavery? Can this truly be the fate of the Russian soul?
No, no, of course not…
’Soul’ is neither here nor there, it doesn’t come into it. If the French or the Germans, the Italians or the English had been placed a thousand years ago within the same parameters of forest, steppe, bog, plain… then the pattern of their history would have been no different from that of Russian history. Anyway, it is not only the Russians who have known this path. There are many people on every continent of this earth who have come to know the bitterness of the Russian path – some only vaguely and from a distance, some closely and clearly, suffering bitterness of their own.”

I don’t think it is helpful to analyse Russia in tired and outdated Churchillian or Dostoyevskian clichés: Russia being an enigma, the Russian soul being incomprehensible, Russia having its own route, Russia needing a strong Tsar and so on. Both Ukrainian and Russian societies need to be supported in their attempts to move on and become sophisticated modern societies. The impetus for this was demonstrated today by the 50-or-so-thousand people who came out today to demonstrate on the streets of Moscow.

Brian writes: I confess that I’m baffled by this. I see no disagreement between us on either of the issues you raise. You misrepresent the title of this blog post by omitting the crucial word ‘too’: “Ukraine: time for the west to pull back too“. As I have pointed out to another contributor to this thread, and as the body of the post makes abundantly clear, I am not suggesting western abandonment of Ukraine to its economic fate — on the contrary, I explicitly advocate active and generous western cooperation with Russia, institutionally based and safeguarded, in supporting Ukrainian recovery and stability. What is abundantly clear from my article is that I propose that both the west and Russia (‘too’) “pull back” from the brink of conflict and crisis and work together, not competitively, to rescue Ukraine from economic bankrupcy, corruption, dangerous political and ethnic division and instability verging on collapse. It’s hard to imagine anyone seriously disagreeing with that.

Not only does the draft association agreement contain this inflammatory and naively revelatory language: the west has shown itself prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to try to get Ukraine committed to the agreement, strongly supporting (probably by clandestine as well as open means) a revolution to overthrow an elected Ukrainian president who had refused to sign it and installing in his place a probably unconstitutional régime explicitly committed to EU and often also NATO membership. Moreover all this western pressure has to be seen in the context of the expansion of EU and NATO membership to a raft of countries that were formerly either component parts of the Soviet Union or else members of the Warsaw Pact, partially encircling Russia by potentially hostile states entitled by treaty to western military support in the event of a conflict with their Russian neighbour. Did anyone carry out an assessment of Russia’s likely reaction to all this pressure on Ukraine, of all countries, to join them? None of this is to condone what looks increasingly like Russia’s use of its military presence to annex Crimea and to threaten the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine proper, on the familiar pretext of protecting its ethnic Russian population. I simply ask: what else did we expect? And how did we imagine we could do anything to stop it?

For some reason, when I attempted to paste a quote rather than type it – Tamanskaya, and the extra words at the bottom of my last post, they don’t appear in my comment, and I have to type them out manually (which makes it more likely to introduce errors like the missing ‘too’), but when my message is posted the pasted text reappears as unwanted text at the end. Hence the last unwanted quote which has just appeared at the end of my last quote, and all the extra words at the end of my “Tamanskaya” correction. I think there may be a bug in the blog software.

Brian writes: The comment box has its own formatting buttons and assumes that you will type direcdtly into it. You can paste in simple text, e.g. from Notepad, but not HTML or Rich Text such as from Word.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious:
 
Your words: “Russia’s autocratic régimes down the centuries”    
= Russia HAD strong Tsars
 
Your words “the proposition that many features of the Putin régime perpetuate features of Russia’s autocratic régimes down the centuries”      
= Russia HAS a strong Tsar
 
“Putin is solidly rooted in age-old Russian tradition. If it was not Putin it would be someone else pursuing much the same agenda.”     
= if Russia didn’t have this strong Tsar, it would have a different strong Tsar
 
Ergo, from arguing that Russia must necessarily have an autocratic regime (a strong Tsar) it is a very small step indeed to “Russia needs a strong Tsar”. You are making a classic Putin-ite argument. If you really can’t see that connection, further discussion seems otiose.
 
“The comment box has its own formatting buttons and assumes that you will type direcdtly into it. You can paste in simple text, e.g. from Notepad, but not HTML or Rich Text such as from Word.“
The problem on arises when typing directly into it and pasting a quote from your own blog. The problem doesn’t arise when pasting from Word etc. (though does need reformatting in that case). No problem now I know about it, I can type in Word then paste, but just thought I’d let you know about it.

Brian writes: Even your ingenious intellectual gymnastics, Simon, can’t close the yawning gap between ‘is’ and ‘should’ — i.e between the descriptive and the prescriptive. You are employing the well-known Today programme technique of informing your interlocutor that what he has really said is something entirely different, and then demolishing the latter with a great deal of unearned relish. Enough of that! Correspondence on this particular narrow issue will now cease.

As to your account of what can and can’t be done in this blog’s comment box, I repeat my appeal to those writing comments NOT to paste into it text from MS Word or from any other text in Rich Text or HTML format. Occasionally that works, more or less, given a bit of further formatting; generally it involves me, as blog owner and editor, in a lot of unnecessary work editing out metres of code and other detritus. Please either write it directly into the comment box or paste it from a text file, .txt, e.g. in Notepad. You can even copy and paste a passage from Word, or from this blog, into Notepad, and then copy and paste it from Notepad into the comment box. But not otherwise. This is Ephems-specific guidance and not for any further discussion, thank you.

Superb blog on Ukraine.  Confirms my belief many modern day politicians, journalists and commentators know dangerously little about many conflicts. Consequently many conflicts are created or made worse through ignorant blunders.  Perhaps politicians and bureaucrats need to be taught to say ” We need to find more about the situation before we comment . We will consult widely and study the history”. The Hippocratic Oath ” means do no harm and those without First Aid Training are told not to try and treat victims of accidents as they may make it worse but get help.   I think this approach could be applied to International Affairs.
The rise in PPE and similar degrees as those of choice for politicians, civil servants, journalists rather than Classics, History (with a knowledge of French and Latin ) and Modern Languages  will make misunderstandings such as those over Ukraine more, common; as fewer Britons speak the languages.  I would suggest that one cannot understand another race unless one is fluent in their language.  Misunderstandings often happen because a person does not understand the nuances and subtleties of the way a nation or members perceive themselves  which can only be achieved if one is fluent in the languages an very knowledgeable on the history, religion and factors which formed a nation/ race. 
The decline in Britons working overseas and managing offices/companies and requiring a knowledge of the local languages, customs and history decreases the percentage of the middle and upper middle classes who understand how other countries operate. The days when Britons spent decades in the ICS, Colonial Service, Engineers involved in construction/mining/oil production, shipping, managing plantations, merchants and  bank offices are long gone. Britons rarely spend more than 2 years managing a foreign office, so few develop an in depth knowledge of another country.
As a consequence, I think British policy in E Europe and The Middle East  should be to consult widely, be a good listener, promise nothing and never use  threats unless one is prepared to undertake  violence. The complexity of much of The World   is such that I would expect it is difficult to support one group without causing offence to another. We consider Ukraine problematic but some Albanians still consider that part of Greece should be their territory which they lost in 1912.  Therefore no new membership of NATO and/or the EU should be offered
What I think Britain can offer is a “Wise Head “.  What we can do is take a Socratic approach. If a country/race proposes a rash sort of action we could ask them ” How will your neighbours perceive this comment or action? Will this action increase or decrease tension? If you increase tension how much can your country take? Will there be a run on the currency and /or stock market  and if so, how  much can you take? Are your actions likely to create a civil war and if so how will it end?

Brian writes: Thank you for these generous words. I agree with everything you say about the need to ask Socratic questions before rushing into hasty action. In the bad old days it was the function of civil servants and diplomats to ask such questions and to ask ministers to consider the likely answers to them before making irrevocable decisions. The second greatest post-WW2 blunder in international affairs was the criminal Suez misadventure, which was kept secret from officials until it was too late. The worst blunder (Iraq) awaits Chilcot’s analysis before we can be sure about the precise degree of collusion and support on the part of officials, but it seems to be well established that Tony Blair and some of his mmost senior ministers were prone to policy-making on the sofa with a minimum of advice from experienced and sceptical officials, or none at all; and that there was a marked tendency, begun under Mrs Thatcher, to promote to top civil service and diplomatic jobs only those officials or outsiders regarded by successive prime ministers and other ministers as “One of Us”, i.e. sharing their political masters’ ideological preferences and prejudices, so unlikely to tender unwelcome or challenging advice. The destruction of our once unified, independent, politically neutral and savvy civil service is among the most lamentable features of the years since Margaret Thatcher scatter-bombed the post-war political consensus (Suez was a blip for which a sick Eden was mainly responsible), and it accounts, I think, for the increasingly low standard of governance from which we have been suffering and continue to suffer.
 

I note that rather few of the worthy and eminent ex-dips and other commentators have ever lived and worked in Ukraine. It is so easy to be wise from far away. I will declare myself. I am in Kyiv, working to try to overcome the crisis. I have spent three years living here and in Odessa. And I am an ex-dip. Brian’s analysis is worthy of the centuries old British imperial outlook. Thank you, Charles, for pointing out that Ukraine is a sovereign country with the right to decide its own foreign policy and regime. And to Steve for reminding everyone that NATO and the EU did not go out and court new members. They came hammering on the door. I wonder why? Precisely because of the eternally expansionist tendencies of their Eastern neighbour, conqueror, occupier. 
Ukraine’s post-independence governance has not been impressive. But this is as proud a nation as any other, whatever language its citizens speak. They deserve to be treated as sovereign, and not the object of others’ aspirations to use them as a buffer against democracy, transparency and law-governed society, which is what educated young people in many countries seek, and will I hope one day achieve.

Brian writes: Thank you for this. I of course respect the views of anyone who is working in Ukraine for a solution to its problems. And I of course share your hope that the people of Ukraine will one day achieve their goal of becoming a democratic, transparent and law-governed society. I don’t however believe that such an aim is inconsistent with a recognition that Ukraine’s freedom of action and policy will always be constrained by its absolute need, imposed by its geographical position, its culture, history and demography, to work out a mutually acceptable modus vivendi with Russia; that NATO membership could never be reconciled with any such modus vivendi (nor probably could EU membership either); that in the awful event of a conflict with Russia, the US, Britain and France would not and could not risk going to war with Russia to support Ukraine (which they would be committed to do if Ukraine were to be admitted to NATO); and that if Ukrainian policies refuse to accommodate themselves to these realities, they are bound to fail, with potentially catastrophic consequences going far beyond the borders of Ukraine. None of this is inconsistent with respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty and freedom to choose its own course in international affairs. But it will require special skill and restraint to achieve good, strong, constructive relations both with the west and with Russia, which is the only practical situation in which Ukraine can hope to flourish. Ukrainian policy-makers might benefit from a study of the way Finland, a prosperous democracy on Russia’s border, handles its relations with both Russia and the west. And, finally, I repeat once again that no country has a right to membership of either the EU or NATO, however much its citizens may desire it.

Sir Brian
Mr Putin is, so far as I can see, an old-style Russian nationalist, resentful at the collapse of the Soviet Empire, and pursuing Realpolitik.
Perhaps, over the next 50 years or so, with people travelling more. the Web, etc, things will slowly evolve towards more “democracy”. But the great lesson that I learned from 33 years in our Service is that tribalism is enormously powerful. Best wishes to all.
 
David

Brian writes: Thank you for this, David. I absolutely agree about tribalism, which in this context more or less equates with nationalism. Of course in some situations it’s a virtue, in which case we call it patriotism or loyalty. In others it’s destructive, irrational and liable to lead to violence, especially in divided communities (Northern Ireland, Ukraine and many others). For Russian nationalists or patriots Ukraine will always be an intrinsic part of Russia, whatever the legal and constitutional position. If Scotland becomes independent from the rest of the UK I shall never be able to see it as foreign, or as anything other than a part of the country I was born in and grew up in and worked for for my entire working life. Russians with their powerful attachment to ‘rodina’ (homeland, motherland) can’t in many cases see Russia’s recovery of Crimea as annexation or as anything other than a restoration of the natural order of things. Some will feel the same about the whole Ukraine. It’s futile to argue that they’re wrong: the point is to recognise that that’s how they see it, or rather feel it.

By the way, I think we mislead ourselves by attributing everything to President Putin, as our media love to do: personalisation of everything accompanied by demonisation of a foreign leader behaving in ways of which we disapprove. No doubt Putin’s own background and values are important factors in Russian policy-making and international behaviour, but in my view it’s misleading to suppose that any other Russian leader currently in sight would be behaving very differently. There’s usually a rationale for what Russia does, based on its own view of its own self-interest, security and prestige. Millions of Russians inevitably saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragic national humiliation for Russia and a blow to its pride and self-esteem. It’s natural that many Russians want to see their country respected by the rest of the world as a great power, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to re-establish the Soviet Union as it was at its peak, still less to establish control over the countries that were members of the Warsaw Pact. Any national leader in a partial democracy, whether democrat or demagogue, will tend to play to these nationalistic sentiments and it’s a reasonable assumption that he probably shares them. Denouncing this as revanchism or expansionism isn’t really helpful. Comparisons with Hitler and the Sudetenland are also probably unhelpful and misleading. And blaming everything Russia does or seems to be planning to do on Mr Putin and his KGB background may lead us into grave miscalculations with potentially appalling consequences. To try to understand how the world looks to the Russians is not to condone what their government actually does, but it may give us a better basis on which to try to influence events and if possible to avert disaster.

Sir Brian
I agree with the comments above. Unfortunately, we seem to be in a situation where almost  anything tends to be attributed to one person.
How many times do we see; “why doesn’t David Cameron do…?”
Like Charles, I really do not know any really effective action that the West can now take to prevent Russia acting aggressively, but I hope that the next 50 years may gradually lower tensions. Best wishes.
 
David

Brian writes: Thank you again for this. As you will know from my earlier responses to comments and from my two recent posts about Ukraine, I share the growing consensus that the west’s ham-fisted wooing of Ukraine and crude attempts to draw it into the orbit (and perhaps eventually membership) of the EU and NATO, and the west’s active support for the coup against Ukraine’s former elected government, have been largely (but not exclusively) responsible for accentuating Ukraine’s internal divisions and bringing it to the brink of a civil war which in turn might prompt Russian military intervention “to restore order and protect civilians”. Those who loudly condemn the takeover of local and national government buildings by pro-Russian demonstrators need to explain how their actions differ from the takeover of the whole national government in Kiev by the assorted Maidan Square demonstrators in western Ukraine who deposed the elected president and his government and declared themselves the new government.

Finally, I disagree with the commonly heard proposition that there is no “really effective action that the West can now take to prevent Russia acting aggressively”. Two things the west can and should do without further delay are (1) to declare formally that there can be no question of EU or NATO membership for Ukraine, and (2) to endorse the Russian proposal for a federal constitution for Ukraine with increased internal autonomy for the eastern and southern areas of the country. The west has been stirring up division and almost inviting a countervailing Russian reaction: Russia has made a concrete and constructive proposal to reduce tension in Ukraine: why do we not seize it gratefully and embark on discussions with both Russia and the interim régime in Kiev of how best to bring it about? No doubt Russia has also been egging on the pro-Russian protestors in the Russian-speaking areas in their provocative and sometimes violent activities, and giving them various kinds of semi-clandestine support, but it seems highly unlikely that they actively want either a full-scale civil war right in theor own back yard or a situation in which they will be virtually forced to intervene by military force. Both sides should be searching for a face-saving way out, not continuing to stir the pot and banging on about ‘punishing’ Russia with ever-escalating but mainly ineffectual sanctions.