Understandably fearful, Ukrainian leaders are reminding Europe of the ghosts of Munich in September 1938 when Czechoslovakia was compelled to accept Adolf Hitler’s demands that it surrender the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia on the basis that the German leader would demand no more.
Neither Britain, with prime minister Neville Chamberlain at the helm, nor French premier Édouard Daladier, was prepared to defend Czechoslovakia. By March 1939, Hitler’s army occupied what was left of Czechoslovakia.
Today, Ukrainian foreign minister Andriy Sybiha, considering Moscow’s promise to occupy all the Donbas region by force, has insisted “we need real peace, not appeasement”.
A recent book by Polish historian Piotr Majewski, The Munich Crisis of 1938, suggests Munich “has become a nightmare haunting many smaller countries. Fears that the West will once again abandon its allies keep many countries awake at night”.
READ MORE
He writes: “These are especially vivid in Ukraine, for which Western aid is a matter of life or death. They are also familiar to the nations of central and eastern Europe – Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Romanians.
“Even though their countries belong to the European Union and Nato, their people are still anxious that, if they were attacked by an undemocratic Russia, the Western allies might not fight to defend them."
There was an interesting moment on the steps of Downing Street during the week after the meeting between Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, British prime minister Keir Starmer, French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Friedrich Merz, where Zelenskiy seemed unsure where to stand or to look.
Well might he worry. Donald Trump will continue to threaten to abandon Ukraine and there is still no agreement on the question of using Russian assets immobilised by the EU for a £78 billion (€89 billion) “reparations” loan for Kyiv, the dubious theory being Russia will eventually have to pay Ukraine reparations for the war which could then be used to pay back the EU loan.
The mantra from the EU has been the need for “robust security guarantees” against further or future Russian aggression, but these will mean little to Vladimir Putin, while the US president incoherently taunts a “decaying” Europe and continues to praise the Russian leader.
The US security strategy is officially to end the war, so the US can “re-establish strategic stability with Russia”. There is no real priority attached to Ukraine’s sovereignty within this strategy.
Desperate diplomacy, callowness and betrayal littered the road to the 1938 agreement that Hitler made a mockery of.
In his 2019 book The Bell of Treason, historian PE Caquet reminds us that Chamberlain said of Hitler: “Here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word … Hitler had certain standards … he would not deliberately deceive a man whom he respected.” One Czech diplomat called Chamberlain “the errand boy of gangsters”, a position Trump now occupies.
Back then, British diplomat Frank Ashton-Gwatkin told Hubert Masaryk of Czechoslovakia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “If you do not accept, you will find yourselves facing Germany alone. The French may sugar this with fine phrases, but, believe me, they are of the same view and have lost interest in your fate.”
Such exchanges are also a reminder of the fear and disgust generated in the 1930s by the prospect of another world war.
The narrative of Chamberlain’s descent from peace hero to humiliated fool has been challenged by some historians who document the strength of public opinion in Britain and France in favour of diplomacy and the extra time it gave Britain to prepare for war, the argument being that taking on Hitler in 1938 with a divided Britain would have been disastrous.
But it is Chamberlain’s arrival on September 30, 1938, at Heston Aerodrome that is most frequently recalled, with “the paper which bears his [Hitler’s] name upon it as well as mine” and which he declared would mean “peace for our time”. Now, it is Trump who wants that paper in the form of a big, beautiful “peace” deal.
Today, the capacity of diplomacy remains under the spotlight. In 2022 Olaf Scholz, then German chancellor, responded to Putin’s bellicosity by arguing for “as much diplomacy as possible, without being naive”. How much is that? And what of the effectiveness of sanctions in relation to Russia’s oil and gas exports that finance so much of the war?
The Financial Times estimates that last year Russia’s oil revenues alone rose by more than 25 per cent to $108bn (€92 billion) despite sanctions, and that “since February 2022 the EU has imported over $122bn of Russian LNG [liquefied natural gas], making it one of Russia’s largest fossil fuel customers”.
Future historians will undoubtedly highlight another, more recent Munich moment, when Zelenskiy, suited, fresh faced and clean shaven, found himself at a security conference there in February 2022, just before Russia’s full-scale invasion. He asked this question: “Has our world completely forgotten the mistakes of the 20th century, of where appeasement policy usually leads?”
