Tim Black writes:
Since a ceasefire was agreed in early September between the
Ukrainian government and pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, little has
actually ceased.
The rebels continued to push for independence, even staging de
facto national elections in November; the government continued to try to quash
the rebellion, declaring the rebels’ political moves illegitimate; and the
firing and fighting have continued unabated.
According to recent United Nations
figures, since April the death toll has reached 5,300, with 12,000 more
wounded, and 1.2million having fled their homes.
And now it appears the conflict is entering a far more
dangerous phase.
In recent weeks, the rebels have made significant territorial
gains - 500sq kilometres, according to NATO estimates - and the talk now is of
them pushing on towards Mariupol so as to connect the rebel-held regions to
Crimea, annexed by Russia in March last year.
There is talk also of raising
mass armies. Rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko has spoken of rallying
together 100,000 troops, while Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has promised
to draft an army of 200,000.
Much of the Western media focus, though, has not been on
the conflict itself, exactly; it has been on Russia’s role in proceedings.
Russia has been presented as the shady protagonist in the conflict, the
military power behind the scenes, taking advantage of the massive political
instability in Ukraine to advance its own territorial and political interests.
And no doubt, Russia’s role is significant. Russian weaponry and Russian
soldiers do seem to be involved in the conflict, with anecdotes, satellite
imagery and corpses dragged out by the Ukrainian government and its allies as
evidence.
Russian president Vladimir Putin denies military involvement,
claiming that the Russian soldiers killed or captured in eastern Ukraine were there
voluntarily, unofficially.
But this seems unlikely, not least because Putin
seems to be actively profiting from the escalating conflict on Russia’s
borders.
Fighting back the West’s supplicants in Ukraine plays well to a
domestic audience: it bolsters Putin’s authority. Russia’s willingness to back
the rebels in eastern Ukraine is not just a territorial exercise, then; it’s a
reputation-building one, too.
And it is making the situation in Ukraine worse,
deepening antagonisms, unsettling a region, and rendering a federal solution to
the split even more unlikely.
But, as spiked has argued from the beginning of
Ukraine’s descent into civil war, while Russia’s actions are making things
worse, the West’s role has been more destructive.
At every stage of the recent
conflict, from the Maidan Square protests towards the end of 2013, which
eventually brought down the democratically elected government of President
Yanukovych, to the constant cosying up to his pro-Western successors, too many
in Europe and the US have recklessly, cluelessly upped the ante.
In fact, even
before the recent conflagration, before the Maidan protests, the West, be it
through NATO’s two-decades-long flirtation with Russia’s neighbours or the
European Union’s entreaties to Ukraine through its Eastern Partnership scheme,
has constantly threatened to pull Russia’s old allies into its orbit, all in
the name of promoting ‘democratic’ or ‘Western’ values.
Indeed, Western
provocation, raising the stakes in Russia’s old Eastern Bloc backyard, has a
history that extends back to the end of the Cold War.
So, Western leaders, cheered on by a braying,
Russia-stereotyping commentariat, have not only helped to create the situation
in Ukraine - they have also ceaselessly used it to haul themselves on to the
moral high ground, issuing condemnations of Russia, and pushing through new
rafts of economic sanctions with one hand, while beckoning Ukraine’s government
to come ever closer to the European Union with the other.
And now, as Russia responds ever more dangerously, ever
more unpredictably, to what it perceives to be a threat on its border, how are
Western leaders and an increasingly excited media responding?
By upping the
ante yet further.
Elite opinion, such as it is, is now becoming increasingly,
myopically martial.
The talk is now of backing the Ukrainian government, not
just with Russia-baiting, Putin-demonising rhetoric, and yet another new regime
of sanctions, but with actual military assistance.
One Financial Times columnist urges the West to arm the Ukrainians;
the Washington Post says the ‘clear answer is direct
military support’; a collection of US think tanks and politicians has just
released a report urging similar. Western politicians, with the exception of
the likes of Republican senator John McCain, may not have been quite so
forthright so far; but the prospect of military intervention is now firmly
circulating in the policymaking air.
And the most incredible aspect to this slow-motion slippage
into something approaching international warfare in Ukraine is that those
calling for the West to get stuck in are doing so for the most abstract, most
self-aggrandising, and therefore most dangerous reasons.
Theirs is not a
geopolitical calculation. It is not a matter of realpolitik balancing of power blocs. No, theirs
is a vain comic-book calculation.
It is a matter of fighting the bad guy, of
doing battle with the forces of Russian irrationality and reaction.
Former US
secretary of state Hillary Clinton likened Russia’s actions to those of Hitler
in the 1930s. Others, incredibly, have displayed even less subtlety.
One US
commentator blamed everything on, variously, ‘Putin the Thug’ and ‘Czar Putin’;
one UK commentator said that the West was dealing with ‘classic psychopathic
behaviour’; and in the Guardian,
columnist, policy adviser and laptop bombardier Timothy Garton Ash decided to
invoke his own Kosovo-era version of Hitler: ‘Vladimir Putin is the Slobodan
Milošević of the former Soviet Union: as bad, but bigger.’
This is what the conflict in Ukraine has been rendered up
as: a battle between the West and Putin the Bad Man.
It is a chance, once more,
for Western commentators and politicians to act out their liberal
interventionist fantasies, to do battle with a psychopath, a thug, a man intent
on doing wrong.
Those venting their anti-Putin diatribes no doubt feel terribly
good about themselves.
Those calling for the West to do more no doubt remain
convinced that, abstractly, as a moral decision, it is the Right Thing To Do.
And that is the problem.
This same unthinking, politically dumb impulse has
already wreaked immeasurable damage across the globe, pulling down social
arrangements and civic structures from Iraq to Libya, and leaving behind little
but massive instability.
And yet, because it always looks like the right thing
to do, especially when the antagonist is conjured up as a psychopathic
wrongdoer, the clueless interventionists continue to call cluelessly for
intervention.
They up the ante, selfishly, vainly and, ultimately,
barbarically.
Russia’s destabilising involvement in Ukraine cannot be
ignored.
But just as significant is the equally deleterious role of the
bumbling, purpose-seeking West and its international institutions.
Their
culpability in Ukraine’s disintegration has been ignored for far too long.
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