Sir, – It is not very often that I take issue with the analysis of Fintan O' Toole. However, his contention that Nato is as much to blame for the current crisis in Ukraine as Russia is simply does not stand up to scrutiny ("Putin bad and Nato good is not a binary we have to accept", Opinion & Analysis, February 19th).
O’Toole’s central piece of evidence for his claim is that “informal assurances” were provided by Nato leaders and these can be found in the historical archive. Putting aside the notion that “informal assurances” can ever constitute a commitment to anything, O’Toole relies on the interpretation of a single academic – Dr Joshua R Shifrinson – rather than the archive itself. Most specialist scholars from the field of international relations take issue with this interpretation. For one thing, the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, so how can assurances allegedly given to representatives of a state that no longer exists count for anything? Russia’s violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which guaranteed Ukraine’s borders, is not mentioned.
O’Toole correctly identifies the Russian experience of invasion from the West as a factor in contemporary Russian insecurity. The invasion of the Russian Empire by Napoleon in 1812 and the USSR by Hitler in 1941 surely left an indelible psychological mark on Russians.
However, the article fails to mention Russian/USSR attacks on neighbouring states, including the attack on Finland in 1939, the almost simultaneous Nazi-Soviet Pact which divided Poland between the aggressors, the forced and involuntary incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union in 1940, the violent suppression by Soviet forces of uprisings in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. There is no mention either of Gorbachev sending troops to Lithuania in January 1991 in an attempt to prevent that nation becoming independent, resulting in the deaths of 14 people. To these earlier acts of aggression, we should add the attack on Georgia in 2008 which swallowed up one-third of Georgian territory, as well as the entirely illegal occupation of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014.
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Insecurity thus cuts both ways. By trotting out the Russian insecurity line to the exclusion of other factors, O’Toole is effectively denying agency and sovereignty to the Baltic states and every other state in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). He is also implying that CEE states should have been forced to live in a security vacuum after 1991, with no capacity to make their own choices. Once again these states would have been condemned to the role of a buffer zone between east and west, to eventually be devoured by Russian predation.
We might also ask ourselves why was it the unanimous decision of every post-1991 sovereign state in Central and Eastern Europe to seek membership in the EU and Nato (unlike their involuntary incorporation into the Soviet sphere after 1945)? Why did none of these states seek integration with Russia?
The Russian demand that CEE return to its pre-1997 borders is entirely performative and part of the instrumentalisation of the past for Vladimir Putin’s propaganda purposes. Why echo Kremlin talking points that have no basis in fact?
Or is it that small and medium-sized European countries, unlucky enough to be located in the same neighbourhood as Russia and the lawlessness that it encourages, should just be forced to suck it up?
Answers on a postcard to Tallin, Riga, Vilnius. And Kyiv. – Yours, etc,
Prof JOHN O’ BRENNAN,
Jean Monnet Chair
of European Integration,
Director,
Maynooth Centre
for European and
Eurasian Studies,
Maynooth University,
Co Kildare.
Sir, – There’s little point in bringing a dainty cake knife to a gunfight. And even less point in trying to placate someone who has always been hellbent on having a row with you. Sooner or later they contrive a situation which forces outright conflict.
The parade of European leaders meekly attending the tsarist autocrat in Moscow in the last few weeks has been difficult to watch. Seasoned and intelligent politicians are falling for Mr Putin’s playbook: foment aggression, await your opponent’s reaction, then accuse them of causing and heightening the aggression. Next, sit back, smirk and watch the flailing attempts to resolve the crisis you have instigated. It’s schoolyard basics.
Has Mr Putin travelled anywhere to negotiate a way out of the impasse he has so icily paved? No. He wants to unleash the dogs of war and he won’t stop until he does.
He has the EU in an energy bind with Nordstream 2 and its shockingly naive promotion by callow German politicians past and present. He need not worry about oil and gas revenues should the EU impose sanctions or withdraw from Nordstream. China will surely operate on the basis that the enemy of my enemy is my friend and hoover up Russia’s supplies, all the better to squeeze Europe economically.
The supplicants paying tribute to him with visits, phone calls and petitions must cease their useless appeals and inflict without further delay all and any sanctions which will hurt Russia economically, financially and politically. Germany, in particular, has a unique opportunity and indeed, obligation, to take a leading and decisive stance against this dangerous, war-mongering aggressor. He has learned his history lessons well. Germany must now show it has too. – Yours, etc,
PATRICIA MULKEEN,
Ballinfull,
Sligo.
Sir, – The US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is right in saying that the actions of countries in the current international crisis should be informed by history, and more than just very recent history.
The Great War is an object lesson in how power plays and ultimately miscalculated brinkmanship over a series of crises took much of humanity over the brink, leading to catastrophe on an unprecedented scale and a disproportionate price being paid for reshaping the modern world. Few of the empires and other principal countries involved were blameless.
The United States has never been detached from developments on its doorstep, whether it was the Cuban missile crisis or radical régimes in Central America. Everyone surely realizes that attempts by the school of liberal internationalism to push out the boundaries of western security to right under the noses of Russia represents a bridge too far. De Valera recognized from 1920 on that a condition of Irish independence was a guarantee that it would not allow itself to be used as an enemy base against Britain. Ukraine cannot realistically expect to become a forward staging post for Nato.
Demanding a “No” become a “Never” with regard to Ukraine’s hypothetical membership of Nato also has a precedent. Napoleon III in 1870 was not satisfied with the withdrawal of the Hohenzollern candidature from the throne of Spain. Effectively as an excuse for war, he sought a guarantee from Kaiser Wilhelm I that there would never be a Hohenzollern on the throne of Spain. Bismarck drafted the Ems telegram in response, which indignantly rejected the demand. War followed, and the Second Empire fell.
There is a famous Kissinger dictum that absolute security for one power means absolute insecurity for others.
During the second World War, Churchill demanded use of the ports handed back to Ireland in 1938. In his reply to Churchill’s triumphalist broadcast boasting that Britain could easily have seized them, de Valera reflected that making Britain’s necessity a moral code was exactly how other great powers had behaved, and precisely why they had had a disastrous succession of wars. Massing a vast number of troops on the borders of a neighbouring sovereign independent state is intimidating, even without an intention to invade, and a deeply unfriendly and disrespectful act.
The Jameson raid in 1896, allegedly in response to a call for help from a British minority in a Boer Republic, was essentially a false flag operation and precursor of the Boer War that began the downturn in the trajectory of the British Empire.
If leaders were wise, they would temper the overhead propaganda barrage, dial down the confrontation on the ground, and seek reasonable diplomatic compromises, while the damage can still be contained, and to give people the chance of continuing peace and development without a potentially massive disruption to both international relations and the world economy. – Yours, etc,
MARTIN MANSERGH,
Tipperary,
Co Tipperary.