The More We All Know About This Crisis

Peter Hitchens writes:

There’s a fascinating fact (one of many) in Serhii Plokhy’s book about the Ukraine War which I review today on page 9 of our TV&Critics section. He says that General Mark Milley, chairman of the USA’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, tried to work out some rules for avoiding World War Three in Ukraine.

One of them was ‘Contain war inside the geographical boundaries of Ukraine’. You can see why. Russia will not react against the West even if it knows or suspects strongly that it is fighting Western-backed forces in Ukraine.

But if it believes attacks on its own territory are equipped or trained by Western nations, as some recent reports suggest it may do, it may take this as a pretext to hit back at Nato nations in some underhand way.

Ukraine reasonably itches to attack Russian targets and appears to have started doing so. But was General Milley right? Is this wise? Should we encourage it?

And:

Even the title of this book is wrong. It describes a war between Russia and America, on the soil of Ukraine. Yet it calls it The Russo-Ukrainian War. Without the deep, decades-long involvement of the USA, and without its military aid, Ukraine would not be able to fight and Russia would not have invaded Ukraine. To leave America out of the title is like leaving the Hound out of the Baskervilles, Ant out of Dec and Morecambe out of Wise.

This is not to say that it is a bad book, or that it is inaccurate. Anything but. It is just to say that it omits huge and important parts of the story. Professor Plokhy, himself a Ukrainian, is a fine, crisp writer and does brilliant research. He does not hide the fact that Ukraine is not the perfect law-governed democracy that so many sentimentalists, new to the region, like to pretend.

Evaluating that democracy rather politely as ‘viable but chaotic’ he admits the existence of serious corruption and other wickedness. He writes (for example) about an inconvenient journalist who annoyed those in power and whose headless body was then found in the woods. He recounts the fate of the sinister minister of Internal Affairs who committed alleged suicide by somehow shooting himself in the head twice. These, like the recent arrest of a Supreme Court judge on charges of corruption are illuminating correctives to the modish view that Ukraine is somehow so well-run that Russians envy its way of life. In my experience, they don’t.

Yet in general the book is dominated by the conventional wisdom of ‘West Good, Russia Bad’ which does not actually aid understanding. To find out more about the rough edges of Ukrainian politics, I would recommend Professor Richard Sakwa’s very different Frontline Ukraine (published by I.B.Tauris) as a good companion volume. To see an alternative view of the origins of the war, Ben Abelow’s short online book How the West Brought War to Ukraine is a powerful corrective to fashionable thought.

The Ukraine crisis is only the latest expression of a century-old struggle for mastery in Europe. Yet you would not know from Professor Plokhy’s book that modern Ukraine’s existence as a state began when the German empire violently tore it from the grasp of the Russian empire in 1918. Surely this one fact illuminates the whole terrible controversy and indeed the murderous history of the region ever since, and the furious, often cruel passions unleashed there.

And Prof Plokhy’s bland description of the 1940s Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera and his Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) does not really explain why so many Ukrainians (and Jews and Poles) loathe his very memory and that of the OUN, whose red and black flags can still be seen in street demonstrations in Ukraine.

Bandera was a fanatic, imprisoned in pre-War Poland for his part in the assassination of a government minister. He was also a racial bigot, and beyond doubt an anti-Semite, who sought to collaborate with Hitler and whose followers and sympathisers undoubtedly engaged in murders of Jews and Poles. Nor does it explain why other Ukrainians put up statues to him, thanks to his enduring popularity with the fiercer factions of Ukrainian nationalism, whose continuing prominence is an embarrassment to that country’s civilised democrats.

But the book does describe the important and connected truth, ignored by so many commentators, that there is more than one kind of Ukrainian. In fact, until 2014, the very large difference between the two halves of the country - roughly north-west versus roughly south-east - gave Ukraine that priceless advantage, a narrowly balanced electorate. This permanent tension meant that governments could and did fall – and could be peacefully replaced by democratic votes. It also meant that there was always a strong opposition.

Ukraine was the most competitive, evenly-divided democracy in the lands of the former USSR. And this was largely thanks to the split between eastern voters who spoke mainly Russian and did not wish to join the EU or Nato, matched against a more nationalistic and more EU-oriented west. That is why Ukraine escaped Russian-style despotism. But when the eastern-backed (and fairly-elected) President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in an illegal, violent convulsion in February 2014, that all changed. 

Large chunks of the country were swiftly grabbed by Russia and its proxies. What was left of Ukraine was much more united, and much more Ukrainian, as elections since have shown. But is it perhaps also less free? Gone are the noisy but democratic days of strong oppositions, close elections and narrowly-balanced parliaments. The key event in all this was the overthrow of Yanukovych, a much-disputed moment.

Prof Plokhy’s description of this process is creditably detailed and researched. And his timeline is inconvenient for those who still pretend that the legitimate President was lawfully removed. Two serious attempts were made by Yanukovych to reach a peaceful, constitutional deal with the protestors and the opposition. The first such compromise was actually under way on February 18. But the protestors destroyed it by attacking and torching Yanukovych’s party HQ. Two days later EU Foreign Ministers brokered a second deal, including early elections. Again the protestors rejected it, some threatening violence.

Was this because they did not think their faction would win those early elections? Who can say? But Prof Plokhy’s account of Yanukovych’s behaviour over the following few days shows beyond doubt that the President was still in Ukraine when Parliament voted illegally to remove him (it lacked the votes needed to do so under the constitution, but went ahead anyway).

Those who condone the removal (including the British government) have tried to justify this lawless act on the grounds that Yanukovych had fled the country. Now they cannot say this. There is so much more here to inform this huge and important debate that I can only urge anybody who cares about the matter to buy and read the book. The more we all know about this crisis, the more hope there is of bringing it to a civilised end.