One of the truly bizarre things about the geopolitical crisis developing on the Ukrainian border is the number of otherwise reasonably serious commentators who have been trying to lay the blame for the standoff at the feet of NATO, and the west. Fintan O’Toole was at it, for example, in his weekend column, cogently, as usual, laying out the core argument of those who think Putin has a point:
You don’t have to like Putin – or excuse in any way his belligerence towards Ukraine and other former Soviet countries – to acknowledge that there has been a monumental breach of faith on the part of Nato. Not only did it expand rapidly eastwards, but it has refused to give any guarantees that this expansion will stop.
There are legitimate arguments about the rights of the Baltic states and former Warsaw Pact countries to express their newfound independence by joining whatever military alliance they choose. They are free countries – and so is Ukraine.
But Nato did not have to accept these new members. It could have honoured the assurances given to the Soviets in 1990 and sought to create instead a mutually guaranteed neutrality for all the newly liberated states.
The “Putin has a point” argument relies on the idea that NATO has “aggressively expanded” into territory in eastern Europe that was once in the Russian, or Soviet, sphere of influence. The problem with it, on a very basic level, is that NATO has not pursued any strategy of expansion at all: It is not in the business of recruiting new members. Those countries which have joined its ranks from eastern Europe have done so voluntarily, because their people, through their democratically elected Governments, see the west as a better bet than Moscow.
O’Toole, in his article, cannot dispute this fact. So he pins the blame on NATO in a different way: They should, he says, have said “no thank you” to any former eastern bloc country which wanted to join, on the basis that letting them into the alliance would antagonise Russia. The essence of this argument is that the west should recognise that Russia has some form of ultimate dominion over the free peoples of eastern Europe, and that they should be denied any protection from Moscow – even if they seek it – on the basis that Moscow has more of a say in their fate than they do themselves.
At this point, it is worth repeating a simple fact about the present crisis: It has not come about because of a threatened Ukranian invasion of Russia. NATO has not deployed Tank divisions and artillery units and logistics teams along the Russian border. There is no “invasion order” ready to be given, at a moment’s notice, in NATO headquarters. If a war breaks out in Ukraine, it will be because President Putin wants a war, not because anybody else does.
It should be remembered, too, that the Ukranian people have much to fear from Russia. In his article, Fintan O’Toole lays out all the reasons for Russian anxiety: In the last two centuries, it has suffered two full scale invasions from Europe. First, Napoleon, and then Hitler. O’Toole posits that the memory of these wars lives long in the Russian people and makes them desire a buffer zone with the west and NATO.
But the Ukrainians have their own memories: It is less than a century since Stalin deliberately starved 3.5million Ukranians to death in the great famine that the Ukranians call the Holodomor, a genocide recognised internationally as an attempt to wipe out the Ukrainian people. In the second world war, Ukranians suffered greatly at the hands of red army soldiers as they liberated the land from the Nazis, because of the perception that Ukranians had collaborated with Hitler. Russia has never made any secret of its territorial claims to Ukraine. It is not unreasonable for the Ukranians to want to ally with other countries to protect themselves.
And that, ultimately, is what this crisis is about. Putin and Russia fear that Ukraine, in NATO, will be a Ukraine they can never seize. So they want to seize it now, while they can. Or, if not, to keep seizing Ukraine on the table for later on by keeping it out of NATO.
In this crisis, there is only one warmonger. There is only one aggressor. There is only one baddie.
The idea that the west has some moral duty to abandon millions of people to Russian overlordship and bullying just to keep the Russians happy is absurdist. As is the idea that it will stop with Ukraine.
After all, Russia can make the same argument about Latvia. And Lithuania. And Estonia. And Belarus. When it comes for Ukraine, it will come for the others, too. If we believe that people should be free to choose their own destiny, and if we believe, in Ireland, that smaller countries have a right to independence and security from larger, imperial, neighbours, then there is only one side to be on, here.