Guards and Guardians
Here's a thoughtful report from The Guardian by Ian Birrell, a journalist who has taken the trouble to visit Ukraine recently and has seen for himself how Russia has behaved recently in annexing Crimea.
Ian invites readers to consider the reaction if France demanded the break up of Switzerland to 'protect' the interests of French speakers and there are many other similar examples from around Europe, of course.
The key point is that self-determination is a complex issue, as we're finding out in Scotland with out own referendum taking place on 18 September 2014, but the 'solution' in Crimea has been found through the use of force and at the point of a gun.
So it's good to know that The Guardian still employs people with journalistic integrity, despite the fact that the newspaper's comment editor, Seumas Milne, seems more inclined to bend the facts to fit his own political views, if you ask me.
Don't fall for Putin's lie
Too many in the west fall for the lie that Russia has a historic right to dictate events in neighbouring nations such as Ukraine
By Ian Birrell - The Guardian
'Putin behaves like a 19th-century imperial overlord, and wants to restore the Russian hegemony destroyed by the collapse of the Soviet Union.' Photograph: Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty Images
Vladimir Putin has won plaudits at home and brushed aside censure abroad with his brazen theft of Crimea. His few supporters at the UN last week tellingly included some of the planet's most unsavoury regimes, such as North Korea, Syria, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Their leaders no doubt appreciated the skilful blend of force, speed and propaganda with which he seized the region from Ukraine.
But it is extraordinary that the Russian president has bedazzled so many in the west – and not just his new admirer Nigel Farage. Putin is the autocratic leader of a regime reviled for domestic repression and systemic human rights abuses. He is a man accused of overseeing atrocities in his quest to restore the Russian hegemony destroyed by the collapse of the Soviet Union – something he outlined quite openly in his first speech to the Duma.
Yet many people fell for his farcical referendum, held at gunpoint and boycotted by big chunks of Crimea's population. They ignored polling showing that only a minority supported joining Russia – as well as the paltry 4% support won by the party that advocates Russian unity and now runs the region.
Even before I left last week after a month there, some Russian speakers were regretting their support as economic and social realities have hit home; other Crimeans have simply fled.
Now Putin, with his tanks and troops lined up on the border, has gone further. His foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, insists that Ukraine is effectively dismembered. The country cannot function as a unified state, he says, and must become a loose federation with autonomous powers given to regions bordering Russia. He adds that Ukraine is not permitted to join Nato – which is, remember, a self-defence alliance.
Pause for a second. Imagine the furore if France, for example, demanded the break-up of Switzerland to protect French speakers, with the creation of a crippled client state on its borders. Yet Putin behaves like a 19th-century imperial overlord, still playing the great game as his country resorts to blackmail, while too many observers fall for the lie that Russia has a unique historic right to dictate events in neighbouring nations.
The Soviet Union crumbled because it was an economic, moral and political disaster; many citizens could not wait to throw off the chains of communism imposed from Moscow. Now Putin seeks to extend the Russian empire once again – and with it the reach of his brutal and venal rule. And he does so because he feels threatened by the potential outbreak of liberal democracy in Kiev following the overthrow of his patsy president, fearing that ripples may spread elsewhere around his backyard.
So Putin's propaganda machine promulgates the idea that Ukraine has been taken over in a coup by a bunch of Nazis. But, as Yale historian Timothy Snyder points out, the restoration of democracy could not be further from fascism. Polling for May's presidential election indicates that the highest-placed far-right candidate is on course to get a lower share of the vote than the BNP won in the last British general election.
Western criticism has been weakened by misguided interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq – and, indeed, by a short-sighted failure to stop flows of illegal cash so corrosive to countries such as Russia and Ukraine. But this should not prevent firm support for the fledgling democracy in Kiev, with financial help, military training and tougher sanctions on Putin, his banks and his circle if they remain belligerent.
Instead, there seems to be too much tacit acceptance of the annexation of Crimea, which will have been noted in the Kremlin, and too little thought given to Ukrainian self-determination.
Putin's refusal to play by conventional global rules should shake any complacency, as it raises profound questions. One leading Eurosceptic told me he now thought the continent needed a combined army, while a harsh critic of the Iraq conflict praised President Obama's tough stance. But above all there must be clarity over who is the bad guy in this new cold war drama as he seeks to extend his Russian empire.
Soviet Reunion (7 March 2014)
I started reading this opinion piece in The Guardian by Seumas Milne but when I got to the paragraph (in bold) about the 'disastrous' break-up of the former Soviet Union I rather lost interest, I have to say.
Because I could understand why someone like Seumas was a political apologist for the old Soviet Union - lots of people on the left were in those days and saw the world in ideological terms as a battle between unfettered Capitalism and state-controlled Socialism.
But the world has since moved on then and despite the recent problems of the global economic recession, no serious politician is now suggests that anything other than a market based system is the basis for organising a modern, productive economy.
Not even China or Russia disagree these days although their political and social systems leave much to be desired as far as civil rights and freedom of expression are concerned.
So having been an apologist for the old Soviet Union what puzzles me is why Seumas should be such an admirer of Russia when it is such a repressive capitalist country operating under a harsh political system - where minority groups are harassed and punished on a regular basis?
If anything, Russia is practising and even more brutal and exploitative version of capitalism under Valdimir Putin and the Russian oligarchs.
And the fact of the matter is that the former satellite countries of the Soviet Union such as Poland, Latvia, Bulgaria and Slovakia (which borders Ukraine) have all become much more democratic and liberal since shaking off Soviet domination.
Whereas Russia, the member states of the Russian Fedearation and satellites countries like Belarus have all gone the other way - they have all become less democratic and more illiberal.
In the case of Iraq of course, prior to any military action being taken there were years of wrangling at the United Nations in an effort to knock some diplomatic sense into the vile Saddam regime.
Yet Seumas has nothing critical to say about the fact that President Putin has ordered boots on the ground in Ukraine at the drop of a hat under the pretext of fascist political activity - while the Dutch UN special envoy (Robert Serry) was chased our of Crimea after being threatened by armed men, so who's kidding who here?
If you ask me Seumas Milne is really arguing for the political rebirth of this beloved Soviet Union - a kind of Soviet Reunion if you like, under the aegis of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation.
The external struggle to dominate Ukraine has put fascists in power and brought the country to the brink of conflict
By Seumas Milne
Troops under Russian command fire weapons into the air in Lubimovka, Ukraine. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Diplomatic pronouncements are renowned for hypocrisy and double standards. But western denunciations of Russian intervention in Crimea have reached new depths of self parody. The so far bloodless incursion is an "incredible act of aggression", US secretary of state John Kerry declared. In the 21st century you just don't invade countries on a "completely trumped-up pretext", he insisted, as US allies agreed that it had been an unacceptable breach of international law, for which there will be "costs".
That the states which launched the greatest act of unprovoked aggression in modern history on a trumped-up pretext – against Iraq, in an illegal war now estimated to have killed 500,000, along with the invasion of Afghanistan, bloody regime change in Libya, and the killing of thousands in drone attacks on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, all without UN authorisation – should make such claims is beyond absurdity.
It's not just that western aggression and lawless killing is on another scale entirely from anything Russia appears to have contemplated, let alone carried out – removing any credible basis for the US and its allies to rail against Russian transgressions. But the western powers have also played a central role in creating the Ukraine crisis in the first place.
The US and European powers openly sponsored the protests to oust the corrupt but elected Viktor Yanukovych government, which were triggered by controversy over an all-or-nothing EU agreement which would have excluded economic association with Russia.
In her notorious "fuck the EU" phone call leaked last month, the US official Victoria Nuland can be heard laying down the shape of a post-Yanukovych government – much of which was then turned into reality when he was overthrown after the escalation of violence a couple of weeks later.
The president had by then lost political authority, but his overnight impeachment was certainly constitutionally dubious. In his place agovernment of oligarchs, neoliberal Orange Revolution retreads and neofascists has been installed, one of whose first acts was to try and remove the official status of Russian, spoken by a majority in parts of the south and east, as moves were made to ban the Communist party, which won 13% of the vote at the last election.
It has been claimed that the role of fascists in the demonstrations has been exaggerated by Russian propaganda to justify Vladimir Putin's manoeuvres in Crimea. The reality is alarming enough to need no exaggeration. Activists report that the far right made up around a third of the protesters, but they were decisive in armed confrontations with the police.
Fascist gangs now patrol the streets. But they are also in Kiev's corridors of power. The far right Svoboda party, whose leader has denounced the "criminal activities" of "organised Jewry" and which was condemned by the European parliament for its "racist and antisemitic views", has five ministerial posts in the new government, including deputy prime minister and prosecutor general. The leader of the even more extreme Right Sector, at the heart of the street violence, is now Ukraine's deputy national security chief.
Neo-Nazis in office is a first in post-war Europe. But this is the unelected government now backed by the US and EU. And in a contemptuous rebuff to the ordinary Ukrainians who protested against corruption and hoped for real change, the new administration has appointed two billionaire oligarchs – one who runs his business from Switzerland – to be the new governors of the eastern cities of Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk. Meanwhile, the IMF is preparing an eye-watering austerity plan for the tanking Ukrainian economy which can only swell poverty and unemployment.
From a longer-term perspective, the crisis in Ukraine is a product of the disastrous Versailles-style break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. As in Yugoslavia, people who were content to be a national minority in an internal administrative unit of a multinational state – Russians in Soviet Ukraine, South Ossetians in Soviet Georgia – felt very differently when those units became states for which they felt little loyalty.
In the case of Crimea, which was only transferred to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, that is clearly true for the Russian majority. And contrary to undertakings given at the time, the US and its allies have since relentlessly expanded Nato up to Russia's borders, incorporating nine former Warsaw Pact states and three former Soviet republics into what is effectively an anti-Russian military alliance in Europe. The European association agreement which provoked the Ukrainian crisis also included clauses to integrate Ukraine into the EU defence structure.
That western military expansion was first brought to a halt in 2008 when the US client state of Georgia attacked Russian forces in the contested territory of South Ossetia and was driven out. The short but bloody conflict signalled the end of George Bush's unipolar world in which the US empire would enforce its will without challenge on every continent.
Given that background, it is hardly surprising that Russia has acted to stop the more strategically sensitive and neuralgic Ukraine falling decisively into the western camp, especially given that Russia's only major warm-water naval base is in Crimea.
Clearly, Putin's justifications for intervention – "humanitarian" protection for Russians and an appeal by the deposed president – are legally and politically flaky, even if nothing like on the scale of "weapons of mass destruction". Nor does Putin's conservative nationalism or oligarchic regime have much wider international appeal.
But Russia's role as a limited counterweight to unilateral western power certainly does. And in a world where the US, Britain, France and their allies have turned international lawlessness with a moral veneer into a permanent routine, others are bound to try the same game.
Fortunately, the only shots fired by Russian forces at this point have been into the air. But the dangers of escalating foreign intervention are obvious. What is needed instead is a negotiated settlement for Ukraine, including a broad-based government in Kiev shorn of fascists; a federal constitution that guarantees regional autonomy; economic support that doesn't pauperise the majority; and a chance for people in Crimea to choose their own future. Anything else risks spreading the conflict.
