Ukraine Has Lost Its Halo

His articles on Ukraine used to come with an editorial health warning. But now, in those same pages, Peter Hitchens writes:

Ukraine has lost its halo, as corruption charges swirl like an evil-smelling fog around its political elite.

For years, it has been portrayed as a saintly nation, a paradise of freedom and democracy, the anti-Russia. Vladimir Putin is said to fear that his own people would like to live there. This belief, always absurd to anyone who knows the region, has now collapsed as Ukrainian elite figures are exposed with bundles of banknotes under their beds and golden lavatories in their bathrooms, making unhealthy livings out of a supposed holy war.

President Zelensky is not among them – but he tried very hard to squash the investigations, which have led to this exposure of shame and misrule. There is no suggestion he is involved.

It would be grotesque if he were. For he came to power as a ‘servant of the people’, a fairy tale hero dedicated to cleaning up his country. He had played that very role in a TV drama. But the dark figures who control real power in Ukraine are another matter.

Is it time we looked behind this actually rather misleading image of Ukraine as a paradise of birdsong, goodness and sunshine, and began to treat it as a normal country? If we did that, would the leaders of Europe be so keen to commit themselves to a forever war on the shores of the Black Sea? For that is what they are now doing.

And on the face of it, it is very strange behaviour. Several EU leaders were very doubtful about George W Bush’s policy of offering Ukraine Nato membership. When they agreed it at the Nato summit in Bucharest in April 2008, they knew it broke pledges made to Moscow at the end of the Cold War.

They knew it risked conflict, which would certainly damage their economies and might lead to uncontrolled violence in our continent. But in the dying months of his presidency Bush wanted it, a lot, and pushed for it, hard. So they gave it to him.

This was his bruising response to a spine-chilling performance by Putin, at the Munich security conference of 2007. The Kremlin despot said that Nato expansion was ‘a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?’ What he meant was that Russia was sure it was aimed at Moscow and he wanted it to stop.

Bush’s unyielding answer to this warning was probably the point at which war became likely. This is not an argument about whether Putin’s aggression was justified. It obviously wasn’t. He was stupid to be provoked as he was. But it is an argument that a foreign policy faction in Washington –the same people who created the illegal 2003 Iraq invasion –wanted war with Russia and hoped to provoke one.

And Ukraine was the ideal spot. Precisely because it is not in Nato, a war on its soil would not lead to a nuclear confrontation. That is why the Western allies have been so careful to make sure it doesn’t spread.

I suspect the Russia hawks in Washington hoped they would quickly wreck Moscow’s economy, bleed its army white and so bring about the downfall of Putin. It has not worked

That is one of many reasons why President Trump wants to slither out of it. Most of his voters are sick of endless foreign wars and can see no sense in this one.

But a crazy thing has happened. European leaders, including our own Sir Keir Starmer, have decided they want it to carry on. Each time Trump tries to stitch together a peace deal, the EU’s main figures rush about the place begging to be allowed to take over America’s abandoned war. It is hard to see a rational explanation for this.

They lack both the money and the weapons to drive Russia back, let alone to defeat Putin. They would be rash to send troops there (the US has not), or allow their missiles to be used to bombard Russian cities. This could bring direct Russian retaliation on our soil. And the war hurts us. Germany’s economy, especially, has suffered greatly from the war, which is strongly opposed by growing numbers of its voters.

So why do these leaders support it? I suspect it is because of the myth of Ukraine as a paradise, now very tattered indeed.

Then there is the opposite myth of Russia as a sort of Mordor, the most uniquely evil country in the world.

Actually it has several rivals for this title. These include our close friend Saudi Arabia, much visited by our Royal Family, courted by Trump and holidayed in by metropolitan trendies such as Emily Maitlis, in a tasteful hijab.

How many people must die, be made homeless or just kept miserable, to fulfil this fantasy of a war in which one side is so right and the other so wrong that it must be fought to the very end? Borders are not as sacred as we claim and they can be changed by violence, even in Europe.

Aggression is, in fact, rewarded. In 1998, Britain agreed to get rid of the border dividing Northern Ireland from the Republic. It will only be a matter of time before it vanishes. We did this in response to 30 years of ruthless violence by the IRA and under pressure from the US.

An entire country, Yugoslavia, was removed from the map of Europe and cut up into convenient morsels through aggressive Western and American diplomacy plus a little light bombing. A new country, Kosovo, was created in the same convulsion.

East Germany was swallowed by West Germany, thanks entirely to the military and economic might of Nato, even though Britain, France and Russia were all privately deeply worried by the prospect.

Turkey seized Northern Cyprus 51 years ago and plainly has no plans to leave, ever. Even though it is a Nato member, nobody has tried to expel it for this action.

Many would argue that some or all of those changes were improvements. They would say that the old borders were unfair or in the wrong place. They would often have a point, though in truth it was strength and readiness to fight that decided them all.

But the great unsayable heresy is that Ukraine’s borders are open to question. They were devised by stupid Communist bureaucrats long before Ukraine became a nation or anyone imagined those frontiers would be significant in world strategy.

How many more Ukrainian deaths, how much waste, demolition and misery, how much squandering of their own wealth, are Europe’s leaders prepared to put up with? What principle do they hope to prove by doing so, which they have not already violated elsewhere?

When the great Tory statesman Lord Lansdowne tried in 1917 to bring World War One to an end by a negotiated settlement, he warned: ‘Prolonged war means world ruin.’

He was right. That war went on – and out of the bankruptcy and death that it caused, arose Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor, and many worse things.

Wars begin in anger, a kind of madness. They end in reason, which is far harder to locate in the world.

Can we find it in Ukraine?