Who Is The Aggressor?

Agreeing in no small part with Mehdi Hasan, Peter Hitchens writes:

I would like to wrap up a few of the arguments about the rights and wrongs of Russia’s intervention in Crimea and Ukraine.

How can anyone justify the seizure of territory from a sovereign country?

This takes me back to the subject of who has title to territory, how is it established, how far back does one go?

This often comes up in discussions of Israel, the true ownership of the West Bank and of many other former territories of the defunct Ottoman Empire.

Who has title to the territory which Ukraine held before Russia seized the Crimea? The territory has, as I have mentioned here a lot, been physically fought over during the 20^th century after a reasonably long period during which it was an accepted part of the Russian Empire, with no recent history of true independence.

The USSR, as it then was, successfully recovered its territory twice from German invaders. At the last general settlement of European borders, the Yalta conference of 1945, Ukraine was left within the borders of the USSR.

The borders of that settlement remain, at least formally, unchanged ever since. Poland is still confined within borders which removed its former eastern territories, yet gave it large pieces of Germany. Slovakia is still shorn of its far East, which is part of …Ukraine.

Germany’s internal border, not agreed at Yalta, the accidental result of post-war partition, never recognised as a formal frontier by West Germany, has vanished and the German Democratic Republic (which was, paradoxically given diplomatic recognition by West Germany and most major countries, even though its Western frontier was never really recognised by them) has simply ceased to exist, despite a brief attempt to maintain it as a separate state.

But the borders of the rest of Europe, East and West, have remained fixed, apart from in former Yugoslavia, which some might see as a sort of miniature sandpit version of the ‘West’s’ dismantling and dismembering of the old USSR - with Serbia playing the part of Russia.

I yearn for a serious dispassionate history of this curious episode, which – like Russia – has been made virtually incomprehensible by a ‘goodies v. baddies’ media narrative which bears very little relation to the truth.

It’s not that the baddies weren’t baddies. It’s that the goodies weren’t goodies. In which case, how and on what basis does one take sides?

Even in this case, the external borders of former Yugoslavia have not been breached.

The really big frontier change in the west of Europe is invisible to most people, who are weirdly uninterested in this momentous thing.

It is the revolution imposed by the astonishingly unremarked Schengen agreement which at a stroke deprived almost every country of Western Europe of its frontier, so undoing in an afternoon the entire Versailles settlement.

But it seems that the bureaucratic aggressions of supranational bodies are not in any way the equivalents of old-fashioned takeovers by sovereign states. I have to ask ‘Why not?’

Who is the aggressor in modern diplomacy?

If a supranational body takes away your borders, your customs posts, your currency (and so your control over your economy), your independent foreign policy, your supreme court and your power to make your own laws, and denies you the right to protect your citizens from arrest by foreign police forces, for offences which don’t even exist in your country, is that not a serious cross-border incursion, to say the least?

The fact that it is done by paper-shuffling rather than by tanks doesn’t alter its essentially invasive character.

Remember those pictures of grinning Wehrmacht soldiers in 1938 and 1939 and 1940, gleefully smashing down border posts all over Europe? Well, wasn’t one of the main points of World War Two to put those border posts back?

But look for them now (I’ve done so) and you’ll find…nothing. I walked last summer from Aachen in Germany into the next-door town of Vaals, in the Netherlands. The border is no more noticeable, and no more enforced, than that been West and East Sussex.

I have done the same between Strasbourg in France and Kehl in Germany, though for this you have to cross an unguarded footbridge, and have done it by train between Austria and Italy on the Brenner pass, and between France and Spain between Hendaye and Irun.

Anyone can get the Eurostar from London to Brussels, and find that he passes through France into Belgium without any check or hindrance.

Take the train from Brussels to Amsterdam and you will notice more change when you cross from Wallonia into Flanders, which is technically in the same country, than you do when you cross from Flanders into the Netherlands.

Very convenient for travellers, but very alarming for believers in the nation state.

But within the old USSR, there was the most enormous frontier upheaval.

Ukraine went. Belarus went. Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia went. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – in many ways the most contentious, and in my view the ones over which there will one day be most trouble – went. Soviet semi-control of Finland (the Moscow Politburo used to approve Helsinki cabinet appointments) went. The whole of Central Asia departed.  

Borders which I used to pass without restriction when I lived in Moscow have now become real barriers, requiring visas and customs checks – the exact opposite of Schengen.

Now, you have to look closely at exactly how Ukraine ceased to be within the old Yalta borders.

On 1^st December 1991, 92.3% of Ukrainian voters approved a declaration of independence by Ukraine’s Supreme Council (Parliament).

This independence applied to the curious creature previously known as the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, whose borders suited internal Soviet convenience, were purely administrative,  and had never been intended or designed as an international frontier.

This is one reason why they have never worked very well since, economically, ethnically or politically.

In the months before this, it’s interesting to note, Crimea had sought to obtain some sort of separation from Ukraine, and had achieved a high level of local autonomy which the Kiev government would later cancel, though it did make very special arrangements for the city of Sevastopol and its immediate surroundings, as part of a treaty with Moscow that brought in enormous cash payments.

But it’s also interesting to point out that Crimea’s recent declaration of independence and referendum are in some ways remarkably similar to those of Ukraine nearly 23 years before.

Very soon after Ukraine’s secession, a very strange meeting took place in a  Belarussian forest, at which the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine dissolved the USSR and, in a sort of sop to those who might not be entirely pleased by this, created the vacuous ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’. It is a sort of high-speed caricature of the collapse of the British Empire 50 years earlier.

Mikhail Gorbachev, until a few months before one of the mightiest men in the world, hopelessly described this event as an ‘unconstitutional coup’, as it was.

By this time there existed in Moscow what the Bolsheviks would have called ‘dual power’, with the real power flowing with increasing speed away from the empty organs of the old USSR and into those of the new Russia.

The final hours of the USSR, with their ill-temper, surprise and unexpected speed, are well-described by Conor O’Clery in his tremendous book, which I recommended here some years ago, The Last day of the Soviet Union.

If you wanted to see them as a description of a coup d’etat, you could easily do so. The only thing that was unclear was who was overthrowing whom.

Now, after the Yeltsin years  it seems more obvious. Yeltsin shelled his own Parliament, conducted a savage war in Chechnya and blatantly rigged the ballot in his own re-election.

Yet he was not criticised, as Vladimir Putin rightly is, for his misdeeds. Why not? Because he allowed his country to be raped by the ‘West’, and offered no serious resistance to the EU/NATO destruction of Federal Yugoslavia.

Now, consider this. What if Russia had refused to recognise this breakaway, despite the enormous popular support for it, and its inability to do anything about it anyway?

As it happens, the breakaway was almost immediately recognised abroad, by among others Boris Yeltsin’s Russia; one of the reasons why Russians of today tend to despise Yeltsin is his weakness over such matters.

But if the ‘West’ is right to register impotent and anti-democratic objections to the Crimea succession, why wouldn’t President Yeltsin have been right to do the same over Ukraine? You’ll have to explain to me.

If the behaviour of Washington, Brussels and London on this issue has been correct, and the former power has a veto over any secession, then Russia had a veto over Ukrainian secession, and could have condemned Ukraine, and any backers it received, to endless harassment and sanctions from that day to this.

Oddly enough, either out of weakness or out of a sensible recognition of that weakness, Russia didn’t do that. In fact Russia was intensely relaxed about Ukrainian ‘independence’ for years afterwards, not even bothering to build a proper border.

Our weakness, by contrast, has not caused us to use the same common sense.

The real trouble only began when first NATO (and what is NATO for since we won the Cold War, can anyone tell me?), and then the EU began to threaten a bureaucratic, economic and legal invasion of Ukraine.

Is it unfair or misleading to describe these attempts to bring Ukraine into the EU political orbit, and perhaps into NATO, as a postmodern form of territorial aggression?

In fact, Russia’s first responses were symmetrical. Moscow first used its energy power. Then it used its economic power, to offer Ukraine a far more generous deal than the EU could possibly offer.

The ‘West’ did not desist. It persisted with increased vigour.  At that point it became absolutely clear even to the dimmest observer that the EU’s intentions were political, not economic.

It was when President Yanukovich refused the EU offer that the demonstrators in Kiev opened a new phase of aggressive protest, at such a level that any sovereign government was more or less forced to respond if it was to remain in power. 

Can a government ever use violence to defend itself against protest?

Which brings us to the next question, that of violence.

Many of my opponents in various discussions about this question have said that, yes, it is true that the Kiev mob overthrew a legitimate government and did not come to power lawfully, constitutionally or democratically.

They have little choice, if they have any respect for the truth.

But they have then said such things as that the Yanukovich government ‘lost the mandate of heaven’ or at any rate its legitimacy, when it started killing protestors.

No doubt it did so. But who exactly killed whom and under what precise circumstances? Once again, I’d value an impartial report on exactly who killed whom, and also about who was armed.

It remains my impression that 13 Ukrainian police officers were shot dead, and another 130 wounded by gunfire, which suggests that the protestors were neither wholly unarmed nor peaceful.

Any government would, I think, feel justified in using its monopoly of force to defend itself against such an attack, and I really don’t see how it can be condemned for the use of force as such.

Protestors who use violence, or who continue to associate with, and hope to benefit from the actions of other who sue violence must expect the state to respond with equivalent violence.

This is not a specific defence of the actions of the Yanukovich government, for which I hold no brief. It’s a fundamental question about what sovereign governments can reasonably be permitted to do in defence of their own authority.

I said earlier that I’d welcome an impartial investigation into who killed whom, when, how and under what circumstances.

But I don’t expect to get one. Not because the Yanukovich state was innocent (it plainly wasn’t) but because the protestors have serious questions to answer which may be very politically difficult, given the make-up of the new governing coalition.

No, my point is that it is not, in my view, automatic that a government loses the right to rule because it uses lethal violence. The chant that such-and-such a government has ‘killed its own people’ has no moral force unless it can be shown that it did so without justification and disproportionately.

In any case, it’s so selectively applied that we are entitled to wonder whether the outrage of its advocates is real or feigned.

I’ve mentioned that Turkey gets away with its 40-year occupation of North Cyprus, free of sanctions and untroubled by moral lectures from Messrs Obama, Hague and Cameron.

I’m also endlessly amused by the way in which the anti-Putin media ignore the behaviour of Turkey’s increasingly flailing Premier, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who killed his own people last year in suppressing demonstrations in Istanbul (one victim died of his injuries last week), holds evidence-free show-trials which end by putting his opponents in prison, and menaces the free press.

Turkey has many more journalists in prison than Russia, and is also grotesquely corrupt. On Saturday Mr Erdogan actually tried to shut down Twitter, a laughable piece of postmodern despotism which, done by Vladimir Putin, would have led every bulletin in the world. But it’s hardly mentioned.

As for the Egyptian military junta, the failure of the ‘West’ to condemn or criticise this very violent government, which repeatedly kills its own people and locks them up on dubious pretences, is beyond satire.

hy is the moral outrage directed against Presidents Yanukovich and Putin never aimed at Cairo?

No attempt has been made to declare the governments of Turkey or Egypt illegitimate, or to say they have ‘lost the mandate of heaven’.

In that case, these contentions clearly don’t operate as laws. They are just things people say when it suits them, and they can be disregarded by serious observers.

I think the real deep point here, touched on by Sir Rodric Braithwaite in the article I linked to here yesterday, is the new role played by supranational bodies – notably NATO and the EU.

They can invade and interfere, but when they do so tanks and special forces are not needed to transfer power. But individual nations, not covered by these supranational shelters and disguises, have to act more obviously.

So this conflict is more symmetrical than it looks, because the aggression of the ‘West’ is disguised behind the skirts of the EU and NATO, and often operates through the deniable, untraceable fomenting of coups d’etat through ‘people power’, which is almost impossible to counter without being accused of ‘killing your own people’ and so declared illegitimate.

So the choice is ‘give in now or later’. The counter-aggression of Russia, on the other hand, looks like exactly what it is.

And a populace which sees everything on TV sees only the Russian counter-aggression, not the primary aggression which provoked it.

How funny, by the way, that this aggressive ‘people power’ in Ukraine involves people not terribly unlike Jorg Haider, the Austrian ultra-rightist whose rise to power horrified the entire EU a few years ago.

If we were really such apostles of democracy, wouldn’t we have done more to get rid of these people? Or do we really not care?

Long ago, when I was a defence reporter in the late 1980s, I recall a debate in NATO as to what would happen to that alliance once the Cold War was won. The obvious answer was ‘shut it down and sell off the buildings’.

But this very much did not happen. The ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’ is now involved in a war in Afghanistan, which is about as far from the North Atlantic as you can get and which has less than one tenth part of nothing to do with the original purpose for which NATO was founded.

Sir Rodric hints strongly in his article that its subsequent career is a sort of job-creation project for bureaucrats who feared redundancy. There’s an element of that, but something else too.

People will note that I use the expression ‘The West’ in inverted commas, because it seems to me have completely lost the meaning it had when it was set against ‘The East’, that is, the Warsaw Pact built around the USSR.

What is this ‘West’? What is it west of? What does it stand for or defend?

I don’t mean to be rude, but Turkey’s no paragon of freedom (see above) and still occupies northern Cyprus (see above). I am far from convinced that Bulgaria and Romania reach Western European standards of transparency or governance. As for Albania, a veil is best drawn over it.

I remain amazed  that anyone thought it wise to bring the three Baltic Republics into NATO.  What good did this do? Whom did it help? Did the members of NATO, when they agreed it, really think through all the consequences of their bravado?

Anyone who knows anything of Russia will know that this part of the world is regarded with extreme sensitivity by any Russian government. I have myself seen the bloody evidence of this sensitivity, having witnessed (and been greatly angered, disgusted  and distressed by)  the grisly events in Vilnius on January 1991, of which most of the world remains ignorant.

This was the last time Moscow tried to assert its control there. And this was done under the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, perhaps the most enlightened and liberal-minded person to rule Russia since Tsar Alexander II.

I happen to think that Moscow reluctantly recognises that it must accept their independence. It is willing, if not happy, to respect their continuing independence indefinitely.

But it cannot look happily on any attempt to turn them into bases for hostile operations against Russia, and anyone who advocates doing so is playing with fire.

Americans should consider their possible reactions to Russian military bases in the West Indies, Bermuda, Montreal or Cancun, to begin to get the picture. British people might imagine their attitude to the stationing of Russian bomber planes on the Isle of Wight. I promise you, you wouldn’t like it.

What I can’t understand is this absolute refusal to see that, if you poke someone repeatedly in the eye with a stick, you should not be surprised if he eventually fetches you a great whirret round the jaw.

I suppose, if you can pretend to yourself that you haven’t been poking him in the eye, you can then go on to pretend to yourself that he is the aggressor.