The fuss about Nigel Farage’s remarks about the war in
Ukraine is clearly overblown. He makes clear that he supports Ukrainian
sovereignty and unequivocally says that it was wrong for Russia to invade. Describing
the causes of the war is no more appeasing Russia or justifying Russia’s
actions than arguing that the Versailles Treaty was one of the causes of the Second
World War. To make this point neither excuses Germany of blame, nor in any way
appeases. It is simply to discuss history.
Ukraine is a sovereign state, and it ought to have
been possible for it to choose to join the EU and NATO, but by the same token
Cuba is a sovereign state and it ought to have been able to host Soviet nuclear
weapons. But during the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 the United States made this a
redline issue and took the world to the brink of war to stop the deployment.
Cuba was in USA’s sphere of influence even though it was a sovereign state. If
today Russia tried to deploy nuclear weapons in Mexico or attempted to create a
military alliance with Mexico, there is little doubt that USA would intervene
to stop it.
For this reason, the Euromaidan revolt 2014 that led
to the impeachment and departure of Ukraine’s elected president Viktor
Yanukovych was unwise and the encouragement it received from the EU and the
West generally was unwise too. It led directly to Russia annexing Crimea and the
Donbas.
Again, Ukrainians ought to have been allowed to revolt
and get rid of their president. It was their business and their business alone
and did not justify Russia’s invasion. But it was also a failure to understand
the reality of living next door to Russia. This was a long-term policy error
since the beginning of Ukraine in 1991.
Ukraine’s borders follow those of the Ukrainian SSR.
They are due to territories conquered by the Russian Empire from the Ottoman
Empire and especially territories conquered by the Soviet Union from Poland in
1939. Ukraine’s borders are therefore somewhat arbitrary and its people
somewhat mixed. In Galicia in the west, which previously had been part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire the Ukrainian language was widely spoken, to the east
of the Dnepr historically Russian was more widely spoken.
Ukrainian nationalism failed to accommodate the fact
that a significant part of Ukrainian population was ethnically and linguistically
Russian and tried to impose the language of Galicia on places that had
historically spoken Russian.
Contrast this with Belarus, which initially went down
the Belarussian nationalist route of trying to make everyone speak Belarussian,
but later recognised that its population was mixed and allowed everyone to
speak whichever language they pleased. Belarus too had a policy of remaining
close to Russia. For this reason, Belarus has not been invaded because it
neither attempted to join the EU nor NATO nor to make life difficult for a significant
part of its population. The downside is that Belarus is a vassal state, but at
least it was not invaded.
Having lost Crimea and the Donbas we had a frozen
conflict from 2014 to 2022. Crimea and the Donbas were de facto parts of
Russia, but legally part of Ukraine. But it was always likely to become a hot
conflict simply to resolve this contradiction.
Ukraine in 2022 was no threat to anyone and certainly
had no plans to attack or in any other way damage Russia. Putin’s decision to
invade was wholly unjustified, but the historical context partly explains his
decision to do so.
Ukraine and Russia have common origins and a thousand
years ago they were certainly one people. The divergence between Ukrainians and
Russians was primarily due to Ukrainians being ruled historically by Poland and
Austria Hungary.
The Soviet Union was the successor to the Russian
Empire. When the Soviet Union collapsed Russia lost in an afternoon territories
that it had spent centuries gathering. It was the worst catastrophe in Russian
history. Just as the Soviet Union spent the years 1918 to 1945 gathering back
the territories that it had lost during the revolution, so too Putin sees his
task as gathering back the lost territories of the Russian Empire.
To explain this is of course not to justify it.
The West was not directly responsible for the Russian
invasion in 2022, but we were indirectly responsible because we appeared weak
after the chaos that followed the withdrawal from Afghanistan and our defeat in
the war in Iraq. We were not spending enough on arms, and we were getting
involved in too many conflicts that were none of our business.
It was right to help Ukraine in 2022, but it was a
mistake to allow much of the Ukrainian population to flee. Outside those parts
of Ukraine that were invaded, Ukraine is far less dangerous than Britain was
during World War Two. It would have been impossible for Britain to continue the
war effort then if large parts of our population had escaped. Soldiers have to
have something to fight for. You can’t fight for something that now lives
abroad.
Now two years later the ideal would be of course that
Ukraine freed all its territory from Russia and kicked the invader out. But
realistically if there was a chance of that happening it ceased in the summer
of 2023. When Wagner rebelled and in one day got closer to Moscow than the Wehrmacht
in 5 months, then Ukraine had its opportunity. It failed to take it and another
such opportunity cannot come again.
So, there is a choice either we have another frozen
conflict with the present front lines the de facto borders, but Ukraine still
legally sovereign over its 1991 borders, or we have a comprehensive peace
treaty.
A frozen conflict will become another hot one in a few
years.
No one wants to reward Russian aggression by giving it
territory, but historically this has proved to be the only way to arrive at
lasting peace. Sometimes as with Germany’s conquest of Alsace-Loraine in 1871,
this has contributed to later wars. But often as with the boundary changes that
followed the First and Second World wars people have come to accept the new
reality and peace has endured.
It ought to be possible to talk honestly and openly
about Ukraine. Farage may not have been right in all details, but he is right
that mistakes by the West contributed to the war and that it is best to learn
from those mistakes.
What happens in the war in Ukraine is up to the
Ukrainians, but at some point, quite soon an American president is going to
tire of spending quite so much on a war that has reached stalemate and then if
the Ukrainians want to keep fighting, they will have to do so without American
money or weaponry.
We may not like this, but it is the truth.
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