From John Boothman.
HAVING met Gavin Ashenden once or twice, I have always treated his observations with interest and respect. That respect ended when I read his column (JEP 8 September) which sought to exonerate Vladimir Putin from blame for his bloody invasion of a sovereign state, Ukraine.
In essence, Dr Ashenden holds Ukraine and the West responsible for the current war, having supposedly provoked Russia by ‘toppling’ a pro-Russian government in May 2014 and then threatened Russia’s security by ‘pushing to expand Nato eastward’. But it was the Ukrainian people voting in free elections, not a coup d’etat, that resulted in pro-western governments from 2014 onwards, while Nato itself provides a defensive shield protecting member states from aggression, and poses no military threat to a Russia bristling with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
He refers to ‘a complete censorship of what was really happening in Ukraine’ in recent years. Really? How exactly was that censorship applied? The country is awash with foreign journalists only too anxious to uncover sensational stories, where such stories exist. They do not. Russia by contrast is a tyranny in which any dissent can be punished by imprisonment or worse, and the population is fed a constant diet of propaganda and falsehoods, thus providing Putin with the political cover he needs to prosecute his ‘special military operation’.
Evidently Dr Ashenden has not been paying attention to Putin’s own declared intention to eliminate the current Ukrainian government and reduce the country itself to the subservient province of a renewed Russian empire, presided over by a puppet ruler answerable (of course) to himself. Small wonder courageous Ukrainian fighters are prepared to fight to the death to save the land of their birth, the land they love.
Suppose we were to turn our backs on Ukraine, as Chamberlain and Daladier turned their backs on Czechoslovakia in September 1938. Were Putin to succeed in this annexation, we can be quite sure he wouldn’t stop there, because as he has repeatedly hinted that his next step would be, in essence, to recreate the old Warsaw Pact by reducing Poland, Romania, Hungary, and other former ‘eastern bloc’ countries liberated 30 years ago, to Russian satellites. From there Russia would be well-placed to finish the job that even Stalin blanched at: the subjugation of the whole European continent.
As to the heightened risk of a third world war, that is real enough. But appeasement won’t stop Putin any more than it stopped Hitler in the 1930s. Hitler too had his apologists in democratic countries, bemoaning the harsh treatment Germany had had at the Treaty of Versailles, and asserting the ‘logic’ of making territorial concessions so that German-speaking minorities could be reintegrated into the Fatherland. Hitler lapped it up, and went on building his European empire until in September 1939, in London and Paris, the penny finally dropped.
It seems that this time the aggressor may have miscalculated, and the penny has dropped soon enough to confront Putin – and if not him, the Russian military – with the potential consequences of his malevolent and foolhardy plan. Let’s hope so.
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