Ukraine, Europe, and the world

Martin Henry, Contributor

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, in which now National Hero Norman Manley distinguished himself as a young man and was wounded. It was a war which nobody wanted, but which happened nonetheless, as belligerence among European Great Powers and Alliances, after a critical tipping point, avalanched out of control and into conflict.

History teachers are still fond of asking students to discuss the causes of the First World War. There have been no final answers.

While we have been cocooned in our own domestic concerns, the crisis in Ukraine has within it the seeds of a major multinational conflict in an age of nuclear weapons and vastly smarter and more destructive conventional weapons than those of WW1 and even WW2.

Proximity to a crisis makes it even more intense. I was in Spain, on work business when Russia "invaded" Ukraine in a dramatic move which took the world by surprise. Spain is away in the southwest, Ukraine in the southeast. But that small continent is painfully aware of the large conflicts which have wracked its space over time and the fragility of peace.

Surrounded by Spanish, the BBC was providing in English tense, minute-by-minute, blow-by-blow updates on the unfolding drama. In one dramatic scene captured on camera, unarmed Ukrainian soldiers, singing their national anthem, marched up to the armed Russian line until the antagonists were eyeball to eyeball. Russian shots were fired over the heads of the Ukrainian troops who quietly turned and marched back to their quarters.

One could almost hear again the shots in Sarajevo, Serbia, with which Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austria-Hungary imperial throne, and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated on June 28, 1914. This was the immediate spark which set off the First World War. Suppose the Russian troops had fired on to the defenceless Ukrainian soldiers?

If you listen only to 'Western' media, you will get the distinct impression that a wicked and imperialistic Vladimir Putin-led Russia is seeking to dominate a democratic Ukraine for its own selfish interests.

Ukraine has hardly been a separate nation state for any length of time. In modern history, parts of the territory have been variously under Polish, Austrian and Russian rule. The territory has been caught between Western Europe and Russia for centuries, a situation which is the very cause of the current crisis. Ukraine has, in the past, sought alliance with Moscow to protect it from Polish domination.

After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Ukraine declared its independence from Russia, but splintered into several warring factions. The Red Army subjugated the territory, which became one of the founding republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and disappeared from history as a separate entity until 1991 with the disintegration of the USSR in 1991.

Ukraine was on the verge of signing a trade agreement with the European Union (EU) last November when the government backed out at the last minute, induced by Russian carrot and stick - promise of aid and threat of sanction.

The EU is a post-World War II invention intended to prevent the continent from ever being engulfed in war again, but instead to enjoy peace and prosperity from free trade in a 'European community'. And the Western European military alliance with the United States, NATO, we mustn't forget, had as its principal "enemy" the Soviet Union. The USSR has given way to Russia.

NO TRUST

For deep historical reasons, Western Europe and Russia fear and have never trusted each other. The last thing the EU or NATO want is involvement in a war 'at home' that would further savage economies badly hurt by the global recession and unleash massive infrastructural and human damage. Russia and its president deeply understand this European aversion and are gambling on it. But a single shot, which nobody wants fired, could change everything.

Crimea is a special case. The population there is just over 58 per cent ethnic Russian. In announcing the annexation of Crimea last Tuesday, after the overwhelming secession vote with nearly 97 per cent support, President Putin said, "In the hearts and minds of [Russian] people, Crimea has always been, and remains, an inseparable part of Russia." He went on to tell the applauding Russian Parliament that ethnic Russians had found themselves isolated from the motherland when the Soviet Union collapsed, both in Crimea and elsewhere. "Millions of Russians went to sleep in one country and woke up living abroad, as a national minority in former republics of the union. The Russian people became one of the biggest, if not the biggest, split-up nation in the world," he complained.

The Russian Black Sea fleet is based at Sevastopol in Crimea, shared with Ukraine by agreement after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Russia was defeated in the Crimean War of 1853-1856 by an alliance of Britain and France with the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Our nurse, Mary Seacole, distinguished herself in that war serving wounded British soldiers. The reckless charge of the British Light Brigade in that war against embedded Russian guns was immortalised in poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

The flip-flopping government in Kiev was ousted by sustained street protests which led to violent clashes with the police and some deaths. The US, the EU and separate Western European countries like Britain are backing the new government, which was established by violent overthrow of a duly elected government.

Russia, of course, does not, and Putin blasts the hypocrisy of the West. In his speech to the Russian Parliament last Tuesday, he reiterated the long historical Russian fear of being encircled by the West. "I do not want to be welcomed in Sevastopol by NATO sailors," Putin said.

STRATEGIC BUFFER

The Ukraine in Russian thinking is a strategic buffer (which, incidentally, bore the brunt of the assaults by the Nazi German army in World War II when Hitler switched and attacked his ally, the USSR, without warning). The non-Russian Ukrainians do not, of course, take kindly to any such role. Listening to Putin and signing annexation documents with him after the speech was Sergei Aksyonov, the de facto leader of Crimea, who came to power after seizing the Crimean Parliament building at gunpoint to absorb the territory into Russia.

Annexation, in Putin's view, reclaims territory that was part of Russia from 1783 when Empress Catherine II took it over from the Ottoman Empire to 1954 when Nikita Khrushchev transferred the region to the Ukraine, then a Soviet republic. "Our Western partners have crossed a line," declared Putin. "We have every reason to think that the notorious policy of confining Russia, pursued in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, continues today," he said. Without a deep understanding of the history and the fears which that history engenders, there can be no negotiated peace-sustaining settlement to the difficult Ukrainian crisis.

Ukraine is no match for the Russian military and has, so far, been only issuing brave posturing statements as it capitulates to Russian actions while looking to the West. And, so far, the US and the EU have been mounting only threats of sanctions of various sorts. We are faced with the kind of situation of escalating belligerence that Europe faced running up to the summer of 1914, out of which a single shot could precipitate a major conflict. Europe is, again, the centre of the world.

Martin Henry is a university administrator and public-affairs analyst. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.