For the West, the most shameful part of the Ukrainian War is that if we had stood by the assurances of security that we gave Ukraine in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 after negotiating the transfer of its nuclear arsenal to the latter’s owner — Russia — this war would never have happened. Our fudged guarantee, which should have been based on THREATS, has proved worthless. No wonder Zelensky’s patience with us wears thin.
How could a guarantee have been given teeth? First, by threatening Russia with nuclear attack if Russia, having removed nuclear weapons from Ukraine, ever itself attacked Ukraine by any military means. Even Putin would have had to swallow this. Second, by negotiating a treaty with Ukraine to occupy its western half as Ukraine’s ally if Russia attacked Ukraine from the east, north or south. An attempt by Russia to take western Ukraine would therefore have involved war with NATO, which even Putin would have baulked at. Third, by having a plan well prepared to draft a large military force next to the border with Kaliningrad, say, and another next to the Polish border opposite Brest in Belorussia, immediately Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border. That would have worried both the Russian and Belorussian dictators.
But there does not seem to have been any plan for swift NATO military action in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine aided by Belorussia. All the actions I have just described are THREATS, and we seem to have completely lost the ability to threaten — whereas Putin is a master at it, even if he is bluffing, and we cave straight in.
* * *
I have been speaking to a very clever old Russian woman who has lived in Britain most of her life. She regards the war as an utter tragedy for Russia, let alone Ukraine. She told me that she watches both the BBC and Russian television reports. They use identical images, she said, but they are ‘presented in diametrically opposed ways’: the pictures of the devastation of Mariupol, for example, or of children in hospital maimed by shrapnel, are presented by Russian television as the results of bombing by ‘the Ukrainian nationalists’. The cynicism of it defies belief. Russia has long suffered from two national diseases, however: paranoia and compulsive lying (vranë).
* * *
A letter last week in The Times suggested that if we informed the Russian people that Putin was going to be indicted at the International Court of Justice as a war criminal and taken there one day, it would encourage them to oppose him, depose him, and hand him over. Alas, no! Nothing would more certainly drive the Russian people to close ranks around ‘poor’ Putin; he would suddenly become another ‘victim of the West’… Russians are as intransigent about extraditing ‘their’ criminals as Americans are. Yet there can surely be no doubt that Putin is a war criminal, because he personally ordered this war. My grandfather, who went through the whole of the Great War, told me when I was about nine that the Kaiser ‘should have been hanged’. At the time, I couldn’t see why. Now I think that if the Kaiser had been tried at the Hague as a war criminal, found guilty and hanged, it might have deterred Hitler and the German people from the next war.
* * *
I was willing the Ukrainians to counterattack last week, after they had successfully stalled the Russian offensive around Kiev and other Ukrainian cities; and on 17 March the Ukrainians did, to great effect. But it must have put a severe strain on their forces and one wonders whether they can do it again. In a war of attrition, Russia would seem to be bound to win — but it did not in Afghanistan, remember. And Russia’s defeats in the Crimean War (1853-56), Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), Russo-Polish War (1919-20) and Afghan War (1979-89) triggered big changes. Again, it is difficult to see how Putin can survive.
* * *
Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 was illegal, of course, but I do not see what right Ukraine has to it, either. Since 1783 Crimea had been part of the Russian Empire. It was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR only in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev. I had always understood that he took this arbitrary-looking action purely to reward those Ukrainian Communists who had assisted him in his bloody purges when he was boss in Ukraine; who supported his post-Stalin bid for supreme power and kept their mouths shut about the atrocities he had committed on Stalin’s behalf. I personally believe, then, that Ukraine could reasonably recognise the ‘return’ of Crimea to Russia. Where the Donbas and Luhansk areas of eastern Ukraine are concerned, I do not know whether Russia has any more right to them than Hitler had to the Sudetenland, and would welcome someone explaining the facts of the matter in a Comment!
* * *
To anyone who lived in Russia under Communism, it is simply incredible that the West fooled itself about Putin for so long. He is a middle-ranking KGB man suffering from the typical psychiatric problems of his class: inferiority complex, paranoia, and megalomania. The first thing a KGB man said to you at an ‘interview’, every time, was: ‘We know everything about you.’ They did not. However, they themselves believed they did. That was the measure of their self-delusion. Their self-delusion was the most dangerous thing about them. And again, always trust the body language: on official occasions, Putin controlled his face and gestures, but when he addressed rallies of Nashi (the Putin-Jugend) his face started contorting with hate and aggression, he ‘lost it’ and ranted incoherently.
ADVERTISEMENT
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
The trouble is, the Budapest Memorandum is just that: a ‘memorandum’, it is not a UN Treaty. Also, it offers ‘assurances’ not ‘guarantees’. So it allows for a lot of wiggle room on both sides; offensive and defensive. Also, times have changed from a period of embryonic trust to one of deep distrust (or worse). Even a formal treaty might not withstand such a dramatic change of circumstance.
I agree with the Sudetenland analogy for the Russian enclaves, but the German invasion was more overt.
You are right, Philip: the Budapest Memorandum was a fudge and I have changed ‘guarantee’ to ‘assurances’, which was the most the English version of the documents would run to. Unfortunately, of course, it was generally thought collectively to mean ‘guarantee’, which it manifestly wasn’t!
Well, Patrick, your post this morning has provoked some thoughts:
1. Violence begets violence begets violence ad infinitum. And that applies to threat of violence too. Assuming that there will be rational reactions to threats and that that will keep everything in check flies in the face of a long history of human irrationality, and you just need one nutter to ruin it for everyone. There has got to be a better way than constantly threatening and punishing people. Do families or schools that are governed by threats and punishment lead to happy balanced adults?
2. Likewise human irrationality means killing heads of state can provide a rallying point for some people however evil the ‘martyr’ has been proved to be. It certainly doesn’t seem to have provided a deterrent to Putin (though I’ve seen reports that he has repeatedly watched Gaddafi’s end – with one outcome being that he ends up doing terrible things when backed into a corner).
3. It’s difficult for the West to take the moral high ground when:
(a) countries in the West have illegally invaded and destroyed sovereign countries (I still find it amazing that there are many in this country and the US who count the Iraq wars in terms of the number of UK & US soldiers killed rather than the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis) – and that is before you go back into history and see all the wars of acquisition that had nothing to do with who originally had claim to the land.
(b) the West’s major motivating factor for anything is just MONEY without consideration of the full picture of good and evil. Accepting money from all sources with no questions asked has enabled Putin to spread his tentacles around the whole world and believe that he can do what he likes (see ‘Moneyland’ by Oliver Bullough – and also this letter in today’s Financial Times from a retired UK Defence Attaché in Moscow https://www.ft.com/content/857d2ccd-2853-43ba-b6b9-88e04b42ba93). It has also skewed our economies in favour of the super rich and away from doing what is right for this wondrous but troubled planet and the people on it.
4. Why should whoever owned anything at any particular point in history mean anything today? A load of the discussion towards the ‘peace’ treaty after the First World War was based on these sorts of arguments to redraw the borders, particularly in Eastern Europe. And that went well. (see ‘Prisoners of Geography’ by Tim Marshall for a discussion of this as well as how the characters of various nation states have been influenced by the physical realities of their geography).
5. The logical end point of looking for the original owners of any piece of land is to find that no-one owned any of it. And there is a school of thought that says Man only started making war when he started ‘owning’ things. (See ‘Utopia for Realists’ and ‘Humankind: A Hopeful History’ by Rutger Bregman for thoughts about this as well as other possibilities for the future of mankind).
The wrong lessons have been learnt from previous major wars. The victors assert their rights over lands and peoples which fester resentment. Bigger walls and stricter borders are put up which end up dividing people both in space and thought. Greater controls over state media lead to irrational beliefs about the people of other countries including fear of ‘the other’ and claims of racial superiority that ‘legitimise’ terrible atrocities against ‘subhumans’ (whether that’s Jews in the Holocaust or whites in Japanese concentration camps).
Most of the people of the world want an easy life in the face of the strange mysteries and difficulties that affect us all. There has got to be a way of enabling everyone to see that we all share that and that we are all individual human beings rather than faceless representatives of a country or a government or a doctrine.
This all may seem a bit lacking in realism but ‘realism’ seems to lead to us being stuck in this infinite loop. A far greater mind than mine said, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’. What can each of us do differently? How can we connect to other human beings in other places and lead to a different outcome?
Each of us possesses a power beyond the limits of our flesh and bone. Look at the history of the world and look at the individuals who have changed it for the better in the face of impossible odds. Once the shooting starts it generally means it’s too late to do anything but fight, but in the in-between times, we’ve got to look further into the future and I would ask anyone reading this, ‘What are you going to do today to make your bit of difference?’
Huge thanks for this, Andrew. I invite other people to Comment on it at more length than me: I feel that in order not to hog the response I should simply say that there is much, very much, that I agree with you about (especially that the West occupies no ‘moral high ground’ whatsoever), and that your profound empathy with the people who had to fight WW1 has given you true wisdom in these matters. Britain’s 1839 guarantee, with four other countries, of Belgium’s neutrality, turned out not to be worthless, but it still did not deter Germany from invading Belgium in 1914, of course.
Thank you Patrick for your post today: and I also thank Philip Andrews-Speed and Andrew Tatham for their responses — especially their clarification of the 1994 guarantee/assurance. It is a real consolation (for us as powerless but concerned observers) to have a commentary such as yours, informed by lived experience and long reflexion, to help those of us on the outside to gain some purchase on these extraordinary and horrifying events — which seem to be accelerating with all the unpredictability and danger of a runaway train. Times thousands.
There was an excellent and chilling documentary programme on the evolution of Putin on the Arte TV channel here in France last night, in the wake of which I find that your summary of ‘inferiority complex, paranoia, and megalomania’ gets all the toxic essentials.
Dear Andrew,
I found the clarity, impartiality, and profound wisdom of your insights extremely helpful as I try to understand the situation in Ukraine.
You ask, ‘What are you going to do today to make your bit of difference?’
When I consider the existential threat that is climate change, I can choose not to fly, and I can shun single-use plastics and beef. When I watch ‘Life and death in the Warehouse,’ I can make the effort to walk to Wilko’s for a light bulb, rather than order one on Amazon prime. But night after night I see the obliteration of Mariupol on TV – and I cannot answer your question. I wish, how I wish, that I could.
Thank you, Clare. I share your helplessness in feeling that there is so little I can do to directly make a difference to the situation in Ukraine or to climate change or to the handling of Covid or all the other horrors that bombard us on the news. However if you think about these problems as if you were in a war against a very large enemy, direct frontal assault is rarely an effective answer. You need to think laterally and develop new ways of making change. If you’re in a war that means guerrilla tactics (and in this war there are hackers messing with the Russian government’s IT, Russian speakers ringing up random Russian citizens to listen and inform, as well as all those giving aid). In peace, it can be so many things. Not all of us are practical or political or managerial but each of us has something unique to offer the world and we just have to pick something and do it with our best strength. I often struggle with the idea of being an artist and historian when it seems of so little immediate practical use, but then stories and songs and pictures can have a power that changes minds and feelings in extraordinary ways. You have your contribution to make to the world and there’s no better cure for helplessness than action. Pick something and do it (oh, and write to your MP – they may not seem to be listening but it keeps them on their toes!).