The Fact Remains

Although he sets up a straw man towards the end about Latvia and Estonia, and gets their history wrong, Stephen Glover writes:

When all politicians, and the great and  the good, rush to unanimous agreement about a proposition, my instinct is to examine it carefully. Of course they are sometimes right. But  not always.

So it is with Crimea. Labour, Tories, Lib Dems and, for all I know, Ukip stand four square in denouncing President Vladimir Putin’s incorporation of Crimea into Russia.

In every European chancellery, and in Washington, Russia is said to have destroyed the international order.

Can they all be wrong? Well, not quite.  I have no doubt that Putin is a bully  and an anti-democrat, and that he has turned Russia into a semi-rogue state — though I question whether he is a ‘mad dog’. I agree he must be watched. He may be dangerous.

But that Russia has a strong case in respect of Crimea seems to be so obvious that it is difficult to understand why western statesmen, and their cheerleaders in the media, insist on overlooking this fact.

From the time Catherine the Great seized Crimea in the late 18th century until the Russian Revolution in 1917, Crimea was part of Russia. After the Revolution, it was incorporated into the Soviet Union.

Then, in 1954, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev unilaterally gave Crimea to Ukraine, probably because he wanted to consolidate his position in the Kremlin.

In his eyes it was a symbolic move since, whether in Russia or Ukraine, Crimea was part of the Soviet Union, whose leaders expected it to last forever — or, at any rate, far beyond its actual demise in 1991.

Though it found itself part of Ukraine after that country became independent in 1991, Crimea was and remains overwhelmingly ethnically Russian, with significant Ukrainian and Tartar minorities.

How would we feel if there were an enclave in France that until 1954 was part of Britain, whose inhabitants largely saw themselves as British and spoke English? 

We would feel a great affinity with them, and, if they wished to re-unite with this country, and separate from France, we would support their aspirations.

Shared ethnicity and common cultural identity are very powerful factors, though some on the Left might wish it otherwise.

Didn’t Margaret Thatcher send a taskforce halfway around the world over 30 years ago to defend the interests of 2,000 Falkland islanders who saw themselves as British?

Look how irate the Spanish are about the tiny outcrop of Gibraltar.

If they can feel this way about a strip of land that has not been Spanish since 1713, and contains very few, if any, Spaniards, imagine how much more the Russians must yearn for their Crimean brethren to be re-united with them after a recent divorce that was a whim of history, and entered into without any democratic legitimacy.

I believe in self-determination.

It would be hard to argue that the people of Hereford had the right to secede from Britain in the unlikely event of their wishing to do so. But if the people of Scotland — once a separate country from England, as Crimea was from Ukraine — want to go their separate way, that is their democratic right.

Western politicians who huff and puff about Russia’s alleged perfidy miss this point.

They are perfectly justified in complaining about  the means Putin has employed, and to question Sunday’s hasty and untransparent referendum, though it may well be that the 90 per cent plus vote in favour of becoming part of Russia was an accurate reflection of Crimean public opinion.

Criticise Putin’s methods, by all means, including his sponsorship of pro-Russian defence groups, and the activities of Russian soldiers, who are intimidating Ukrainian troops.

Because he is not a democrat, he uses non-democratic means. The fact remains that his cause is a perfectly reasonable one.

And yet western politicians, usually so sensitive to their own nationalistic concerns and aspirations, appear oblivious to those of the Russians, which understandably makes Putin and his colleagues paranoid.

Many Russians feel that they  are being got at, or judged with double standards, as they have been since the humiliating break-up of the Soviet Union.

They also pardonably wonder how western countries which invaded faraway Iraq without a proper United Nations mandate in 2003 can feel justified in berating President Putin for engineering the reabsorption of Crimea into Russia.

Aren’t we guilty of hypocrisy?

When Russia was too weak for its complaints to be taken seriously, Britain and America bombed its regional ally Serbia in 1999, and then confiscated the Serbian enclave of Kosovo (which, by the by, remains a basket case bankrolled by the West).

Why was that right and moral, whereas the return of Crimea to Russia with the approval of most  of its population is wicked?

I suggest that when it suits us we do what we think we can get away with, but that when the Russians act on the same principle we accuse them of violating moral norms and international law.

By all means, in a spirit of realpolitik and beady-eyed self-interest let us beware of Russian expansionism.

Let us, indeed, pursue practicable measures — the most important of which would be not savaging our armed forces — which might convince Putin that we are still a nation to be reckoned with.

But this lop-sided judgment, by which we condemn Russia for supposedly jeopardising the international order while serenely exculpating ourselves for no less egregious sins, is shaming and unimpressive.

Moreover, the overblown rhetoric of our statesmen also betrays weakness.

Despite all the harrumphing moral lectures, the West is unprepared or unable to do  anything other than apply mild sanctions.

How terrified President Putin must be by David Cameron’s meaningless threat of ‘more serious consequences’!

The West in the shape of the European Union also stands accused of encouraging Ukraine to break its links with Russia and join the EU in return for dollops of cash — and then running for the hills when the going gets tough.

A line must be drawn somewhere, of course.

It must be made clear to Putin that Latvia and Estonia are fundamentally different from Crimea. Each country has a population that is about a quarter ethnic Russian — much lower than Crimea.

Neither country has ever been part of Russia. Most important of all, there is no prospect of a referendum in Latvia or Estonia revealing a preference for joining the Russian Federation.

As for Ukraine, that too is historically a distinct country, though one with roots in Russian culture.

There are undoubtedly parts of eastern Ukraine where a majority of people would like to join the Russian Federation, but these do not obviously meet the test for self-determination.

The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, would doubtless say that the reason we object so shrilly to Russia taking back Crimea is to warn Moscow not to do the same with parts of eastern Ukraine.

But our protests over Crimea are not going to convince anyone, least of all Vladimir Putin, because they do not make sense, or carry conviction.

Russsian policy over Crimea may have been crude, even brutal, but  it has also been motivated by considerations which we should try  to understand.

The simple truth is that Crimea has been part of Russia, and wants to be again.