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LAST week’s Nato summit in the Welsh city of Newport was hyped up as a momentous occasion that would reinforce the relevance of the Western military alliance, which has struggled to identify a raison d’être since the collapse of European communism.
Its role in the post-9/11 occupation of Afghanistan has turned out to have been less than a resounding success. Likewise its incredibly misguided intervention in Libya three years ago.
The consequences of whatever actions Nato undertakes in Iraq may well turn out to be equally uncongenial, but the forays of the so-called Islamic State (IS) have offered it some kind of goal to strive for. Inevitably, that provided a significant agenda item for Newport — the first Nato summit on British territory since 1990.
The host, David Cameron, signposted an even more key concern, meanwhile, when he told a European Union summit in Brussels the previous week: “We run the risks of repeating the mistakes made in Munich in ’38… This time we cannot meet [Vladimir] Putin’s demands. He has already taken Crimea and we cannot allow him to take the whole country.”
It certainly won’t pay to provoke Vladimir Putin.
Although Ukraine is not a Nato member state, the problems in its east have provided the alliance with a European crisis to tackle. Even before the Western leaders congregated in Newport, there were indications that a rapid response force would be proposed as a means of challenging Russian aggression.
Such a force did indeed turn out to be one of the more cogent outcomes of the summit, although its deployment in Ukraine is out of the question. Beyond that, however, Putin deftly blunted Nato’s potential sting by proposing a ceasefire plan for eastern Ukraine and persuading his counterpart in Kiev, Petro Poroshenko, to accept it.
Poroshenko was a lionised guest in Newport, and undermining his declared aims would have put Nato in an absurd position. Thus outmanoeuvred by Putin, it could do little else but to lamely endorse the truce.
Back in Kiev, meanwhile, Ukraine’s prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk dismissed Putin’s peace proposal as a trap. He has frequently referred to Russia as a terrorist state and appears to believe that Putin’s ultimate aim is to resurrect the Soviet Union.
The post-Maidan prime minister has ensconced himself so far up the rear tract of the Western digestive system that it is impossible to imagine him emerging intact from any extraction procedure. It is just as well that Ukraine’s legislative elections next month will in all likelihood lead to his replacement by a more sensible head of government. And for the moment it is fortunate that the recently elected Poroshenko appears to have the final say.
The Ukrainian president communicates frequently with his Russian counterpart, which is crucial in maintaining the ceasefire declared last Friday following talks in Minsk between government and rebel representatives.
The possibly temporary calm is undoubtedly a blessing for the civilians in Donetsk and its surrounds who were bearing the brunt of the shelling. But it is also something of a reprieve for government forces, which have been on the retreat — ostensibly because the ranks of the separatist rebels have been swelled by Russian army regulars.
That at least is the Western and official Ukrainian narrative, although there seems to be plenty of circumstantial evidence suggesting this is not a complete fantasy. That possibility squares with the fact that Kiev’s forces suffered crushing defeats in the fortnight or so preceding the truce.
In the days before the Soviet Union conclusively imploded, the US administration endorsed Mikhail Gorbachev’s view that Moscow’s military withdrawal from Eastern Europe must not presage Nato’s expansion. That spoken agreement has been violated with impunity.
Cameron’s reference to 1938 was intended as a reference to Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” pact with Adolf Hitler. When Russia looks back to that period, it sees the absence of buffer states that exposed it to a lightning Nazi invasion.
Josef Stalin’s appeal to nationalism was crucial in the Soviet defeat of the Nazi menace. The significance of the fact that the authorities in Kiev enjoy neo-Nazi support is not lost either on Moscow or on Russian-speaking Ukrainians who dominate the country’s east. Many of them are determined to secure independence, but autonomy within a Ukrainian context should suffice.
Putin is in many respects a nasty character, who last week warned the president of the European Commission his forces could take Kiev within a fortnight. That would, obviously, be incredibly stupid, and there are no indications that Putin intends to take it. But it certainly wouldn’t pay to provoke him, thereby feeding into a frenzy that could unleash a third world war.
It’s a delicate situation in Ukraine. But it can be handled relatively peacefully, provided the idiotic likes of Cameron and Yatsenyuk can be dissuaded from provoking a catastrophe.
Published in Dawn, September 10th, 2014
