Let us try and find a way to drink to friendship once again
A letter to my Russian friends
My Dear Friend,
I write with a solemn and broken heart, for I cannot believe that, after 75 years of peace, war has come to Europe once again.
I have friends in both Russia and Ukraine, and it hurts me to see two peoples with so much in common fighting so unnecessarily, and for what? The soul of a country which, surely, is going to be forever harmed.
My pain is doubled because I know Russia and Ukraine well. I have studied their histories, both that written before 1990 and afterwards, revised with the greater knowledge which came when the Berlin wall came down and, for a short period, Russia became a more open society.
I can assure you that, until now, the United Kingdom is not, and has never been, a threat to Russia. Why would we be? What would we gain from not being friends?
Three times in the last two hundred years we have been allies in war and, since the end of the Cold War, the British people have been very welcoming to all Russians, into our schools, our universities, our clubs, societies and homes. You need to look no further than the fact that Evgeniy Lebedev, the son of Alexander Lebedev a former KGB officer, sits in The House of Lords, our second legislative chamber, to understand the depth of friendship we would like to have with your country. Could you imagine President Putin appointing an Englishman to sit in your State Duma?
I studied President Vladimir Putin’s one hour address to the Russian people on Russia Today before Russia invaded Ukraine. A few days later, on 24th February 2022, when Russia launched its attack on Ukraine by land, sea and air, I watched again as he outlined the objectives of what he called a Special Military Operation. It is worth reminding ourselves of what he said exactly:
“The leading NATO countries are supporting the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine, those who will never forgive the people of Crimea and Sevastopol for freely making a choice to reunite with Russia. They will undoubtedly try to bring war to Crimea, just as they have done in Donbas. The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarise and de-nazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.
It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory.
We do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force.”
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, subsequently said: “The goal of Russia's Special Military Operation is to stop any war that could take place on Ukraine territory or could start from there.
It appears that Lavrov was saying - We have started a war to stop the potential of there being a war.
Based upon these words, it seems to me that one of Russia’s objectives is regime change in Ukraine - and we know how badly that turned out for Iraq, the US and the UK and, before that, in Afghanistan, which turned out pretty badly for the US, UK and Russia as well. Perhaps some lessons are hard to learn.
As I watch on my television screen the refugees leaving Ukraine in their thousands, each with their story to tell, and I am bombarded with hundreds of images shared on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Viber and Telegram from people I know (or who can be vouched for as genuine) I see the horrors being inflicted by the Russian army. But these horrors are not just being inflicted on the Ukrainian people but the Russians people who were living peacefully in Ukraine, side-by-side with their neighbours. We must explore why?
I write in the hope of discussing with you some of the issues raised by President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov’s remarks to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the war Russia is now in. My aim is to get a better understanding, for men and women of peace, like us, need to understand the whole narrative, the complete story, if we are to use our tiny voice to change things for the better.
I am sure you will know much of what I write in this letter, but I do not apologise for what we call “teaching your mother to suck eggs,” because, hopefully, it will bring to the forefront of our mind many issues pertinent to the moment.
“Russia and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole. Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are descendants of Ancient Rus. How can this heritage be divided between Russia and Ukraine?” – President Putin.
According to Rus Primary Chronicle, Kyivan Rus (Ancient Rus) started as a loose federation of East Slavic, Baltic and Finnic peoples from Northern and Eastern Europe. It was brought together more formerly by Prince Rurik sometime in the 9th Century. The first recognised ruler was Prince Oleg, and it was he who moved the capital to Kyiv. It was under Yaroslav the Wise that his family’s control was extended from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south and east to the Dnieper River, but he died in 1015. Is President Putin not recognising that things can legitimately change over 1,000 years?
However, it was Russia, or more precisely the Communist Bolsheviks, who directly after the 1917 Revolution, created Ukraine. This is more than 100 years ago. Is President Putin really seeking to put the clock back to a time before the Russian Revolution?
On 26th June 1945, over 75 years ago, Ukraine signed the Charter of the United Nations as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, becoming a founding member and being among the first countries to sign. Beyond doubt, this recognised Ukraine, and its borders, as a separate state within international law.
On 24th August 1991, the Verkhobna Rada, the Parliament of the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic, passed the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine from the USSR. This was after 84% of the citizens of Ukraine had voted in a referendum ratifying it, and 92.3% of them voted yes. How can it be, thirty years on, that Russia now dismisses, and seeks to overturn, the demonstrable and overwhelming vote of the people that they wanted to be independent of Russia?
On 2nd December 1991, President Boris Yeltsin, on behalf of the Russian Federation, signed an agreement that recognised Ukraine's independence.
In the 1996 Budapest Memorandum, a binding international treaty, Russia accepted and agreed to Ukraine’s borders as at that date. Further, it gave Ukraine certain security assurances in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arsenal. For President Putin to unilaterally repudiate this treaty is not only a breach of international law, but it seems to be a very strange way to behave if he is seeking respect for Russia.
Is President Putin’s idealistic dream of a reunited Rus worth killing thousands, and maybe tens of thousands, of fellow Rus?
As a comparison, in 1066, France invaded and took control of the United Kingdom, that is nearly 1,000 years ago too. The last time there was any territorial claims over land in either England or France ended in 1453, and although France and England were constantly at war until 1815 and the defeat of Napoleon, we have been at peace with each other and allies (albeit strained), ever since. It would be inconceivable that France would argue that the clock be turned back 1,000 years, and the United Kingdom should cede control over its country to them once again.
The Russian and Ukraine Orthodox Church
President Putin has said: “Kyiv is the mother of all Russian cities.” He is very clear in his view that Ukraine and Russia share a religious background. Since this is one of the reasons given for the invasion, we must look at the claim carefully.
It is reported that seventy-eight per cent of Ukrainians and seventy-one per cent of Russians identify as Orthodox Christians. Fifty-one per cent of Ukrainians say it is important to be an Orthodox Christian to be truly Ukrainian, and fifty-seven per cent of Russians say the same thing. These high percentages add weight to the importance of examining the religious claims made by President Putin.
It was Vladimir the Great King, the Grand Prince of Kyiv, who ruled Kyivan Rus’ from 980 to 1015, who brought Christianity to Ukraine. For some time, representatives from all the religions in the neighbouring nations had been urging him to embrace their faith, so, in 987, after consultation with his boyars, Vladimir the Great sent envoys to study all the main religions. The result of these studies is described in detail by the chronicler Nestor. Of the Muslims, the envoys reported, there is no gladness among them, only sorrow. He also reported that Islam was undesirable due to its taboo against alcohol and pork. Vladimir remarked: "Drinking is the joy of all Rus. We cannot exist without that pleasure.” Vladimir consulted with Jewish envoys and questioned them about their religion but rejected it, saying that their loss of Jerusalem was evidence that they had been abandoned by God. Ultimately Vladimir settled on the Eastern Orthodox Church which was then a subsidiary of the Roman Catholic Church. He did so because his emissaries wrote of a service conducted in the Hagia Sophia, a Byzantine Church in Constantinople (Istanbul) Turkey: “We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on earth nor such beauty, and we know not how to tell of it,” they said.
It was the Great East-West Schism of 1054 which saw the break from the Roman Catholic Church and the creation of the Eastern Orthodox Church in Constantinople as a separate religion.
It was not until after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, following a dispute between the patriarch of Moscow and the patriarch of Constantinople, did the Russian Orthodox Church evolve into an independent branch of Eastern Christianity with a centre in Moscow.
What President Putin ignores, in his angry narrative, is that, at the time of the split with Moscow, the Eastern Orthodox Church in Constantinople (now Istanbul) kept, or believes it kept, Kyiv within its religious jurisdiction. It meant that, in 2019, when the Orthodox Church in Constantinople recognised the Orthodox Church of Ukraine as a separate body and with no ties to Russia, it did so on the legitimate basis that Kyiv was already in its jurisdiction and not Moscow’s.
The lineage seems to me to be straightforward:
For Russia Rome → Constantinople → Kyiv → Moscow
For Ukraine Rome → Constantinople → Kyiv
It makes no sense that President Putin should now seek to argue that, because the religious foundation of Russia was conceived in Kyiv, and the centre of Christianity was then moved to Moscow that this gives Russia the moral right to occupy and rule over Ukraine. To extend the logic, one must ask why his territorial claim doesn’t go even further to Turkey and Istanbul?
A comparison would be for the United Kingdom to claim a right to control and occupy the Vatican because Roman Catholicism, which was brought to the UK in 597, was started there.
What makes President Putin’s claim even stranger is that the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, which brought communism to Russia, is renowned for being a period of atheism, and although the Russian Orthodox Church was not made illegal, its properties were seized and practised religion went almost underground. How can it be that, having abandoned religion for nearly eighty years, it becomes right to claim it back from someone else?
None of this seems to provide sufficient reason to justify the starting of a war with Ukraine. And how do President Putin’s actions reconcile with the creed of his Christian faith – thou shalt not kill. Or the Golden Rule of every religion: Do unto others as they would do unto you.
There is another worrying aspect. It is the failure of Russia to separate the Russian Orthodox Church from its State. Throughout Europe, there has been a slow but painful separation of the various churches from their state. Even in England, there has been a separation for, although the Queen remains Head of the Church of England, her role as Head of State is purely a constitutional one, with her political powers lost many generations ago.
It is the separation of church and state which allowed ideas of democracy, and the rights and freedoms of the individual, to develop.
Before 1917, the Russian Orthodox Church was a vehicle of the Tsars. It did their bidding. The lack of space between the patriarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Tsars meant that the democratic ideal, which put individual choice at the centre of society, did not develop in the same way in Russia as it had in Europe. In turn, this made it easier for the communist idea to take hold and flourish.
Today, the Russian Orthodox Church is funded by Putin and his band of oligarchs. The magnificent restoration of the cathedrals and churches have all been funded by them. And ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’. It means that the priests of the Russian Orthodox Church do not talk freely on ethical matters which are critical of the Russian government which, in their conscience, they might reasonably do.
Ukrainians and Russians speak the same language
Another one of President Putin’s reasons for seeking to unify Ukraine with Russia is that almost all Ukrainians understand spoken Russian, and about 60% speak it. The trouble with this claim is that if states were formed on the basis of ethnicity and linguistics, then there would be thousands of conflicts all over the world.
Society has already decided that states are formed for the convenient, safe and efficient administration of its people. Areas can democratically join and leave a state or political grouping based upon the will of its people. For example, in 2014, Scotland had an independence referendum to decide whether it should leave the United Kingdom and become an independent country. 55.3% answered no, and so Scotland remains part of the United Kingdom. In 2016 the UK democratically voted to leave the EU and, after an enormous argument, did so without a bullet being fired.
Political debate, argument and a referendum is the way to decide issues of statehood in a civilised society. It should not be decided by tanks and bombs.
The de-Nazification of Ukraine
We have been told by President Putin that one of the reasons for his military occupation of Ukraine is to de-Nazify the country.
The United Kingdom is very sensitive to Nazism. We went to war with Germany to remove the Nazis from that country.
In the United Kingdom, to cancel or remove someone from a debate, it has become the unfortunate practice of the ill-educated to call them a Nazi. It is generally done because the accuser does not hold the same views as the person they are attacking. In nearly all cases, the person being attacked does not hold ultra-right-wing views with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system, as the name-calling would suggest. Nor do these people hold genocide, racism, or eugenic views, each of which is a hallmark of Nazism. It is a sloppy and lazy term used mostly by the ignorant when they are losing their argument.
Just outside Kyiv, at Babyn Yar, there is a memorial to 33,771 Jews who, over a 2-day period in Sept 1941, were shot dead by the Germans. Then, between 22nd and 24th October, a further 25,000 to 34,000 Jews were killed in the Odessa region. It is estimated that, overall, 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were killed, and over 800,000 were displaced by the Germans.
I have made a point of searching online for ultra-right-wing Nazi groups in the Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine. There are, of course, unpleasant people in every society, but I can assure you there is no large Nazi culture pervading throughout Ukraine.
What I did find in my search was that three television stations had been taken off the air by President Zelenskyy in the last couple of years, but these were propaganda channels for Putin’s Russia.
I have also looked at the murder of journalists since 2015 as this is a good indication of either ultra-right or ultra-left wing illegal activism. Between 2015 and 2018, there were four non-battlefield killings of journalists, of which one was associated with investigations into local corruption. Since April 2019, when President Zelenskyy took office, to the start of the Russian- Ukrainian war, there had not been a single journalist murdered in Ukraine.
I make one final point in this section. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine is Jewish. Volodymyr Groysman, Ukraine’s Prime Minister, is also Jewish. It is inconceivable that they would rule over a nation of Nazis.
Throughout this letter, I will try and be careful with my words as I do not want to cause offence, but I am sorry to tell you that President Putin's claim that there are Nazis in Ukraine is wrong. He is misinformed. Unquestionably, Ukraine is culturally opposed to Nazism. Ukraine’s leaders are not Nazis, and neither is the country as a whole. If this is President Putin’s reason for war, then he has made a profound mistake.
Yes, Ukrainians are nationalists. They support and want the best for their country. But the Russian people want the best for Russia too. Supporting your country does not make you a Nazi.
Perhaps this is a case of ‘the pot calling the kettle black’ as my paragraphs below on Alexandr Dugin reveal something which, if true, is quite worrying.
Ukraine’s Democracy and Crimea
Given that much of the tension between Russia and Ukraine arises in the Crimea, I think we should review together the history of democracy in both Ukraine and the Crimea following the collapse of the USSR in August 1991 to see what it might teach us.
The Crimean Peninsula, jutting into the Black Sea from the Ukraine mainland, is the home of 250,000 Crimean Tatars, an indigenous Turkish ethnic group.
In 1783, Rear-Admiral Thomas McKenzie, in the service of the Russian empire, founded Sevastopol. A year later Catherine the Great of Russia ordered a fortress to be built there and gave the naval base its name.
Prior to 1991, Crimea’s port of Sevastopol was the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in which the USSR had invested a lot of money. In addition, the Black Sea Fleet had a naval facility in Odessa. Further, many officers and sailors of this fleet were Russian.
When the USSR broke up, the issues relating to Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet caused tensions between Russia, Ukraine and a group of Crimean Separatists.
Since 1954, Crimea had been administratively part of Ukraine. Prior to the dissolution of the USSR, Crimea was granted the status of an Autonomous Republic by the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. This followed a state-sanctioned referendum held in January 1991. When Ukraine became independent, Crimea remained an autonomous republic within Ukraine.
Between 1992 and 1995, there was a struggle about the division of powers between a Crimean separatist movement and Ukrainian authorities, which included the election of a separatist leader as President of Crimean president in 1994,
In March 1995, the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian Parliament) abolished the Crimean Constitution of 1992, all the laws and decrees contradicting those of Kyiv, and removed the separatist leader as President of Crimea, along with terminating the office itself.
Following the fall of the USSR, Ukraine had the world's third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, but Russia controlled the launch codes. In 1994, The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was signed in which Ukraine agreed to give up its Nuclear Arsenal on the condition that:
Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.
Relying on those assurances, in 1995, the Verkhovna Rada (the Supreme Council of Ukraine) abolished the Crimean Constitution of the Ukraine SSR and the post of President of Crimea, and in June 1996, Ukraine adopted a new constitution.
In 1997, Russia and Ukraine signed a series of treaties called The Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership. Under these treaties, Ukraine ceded control of 81.7% of the Black Sea Fleet to Russia, keeping 18.3% and getting $526 million in compensation for its part of the divided fleet. It also formally leased the Sevastopol port facilities to Russia until 2017. In exchange, Russia formerly recognised Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea and its existing borders, and each gave a commitment not to use its territory to harm the security of each other. The treaty was designed to prevent Ukraine and Russia from invading one another's country respectively and declaring war.
In 1998, The Autonomous Republic of Crimea ratified a new constitution in which it was explicitly clear that it was secondary to the constitution of Ukraine.
To this date, everything is easy to understand, and the position is clear. Ukraine is recognised by Russia as a separate country. Crimea is a semi-autonomous region of Ukraine (like one of the states in the USA), and Sevastopol has been leased to Russia for its Black Sea Fleet.
AND, 80% of Russia's natural gas exports to Europe flow through pipelines in Ukraine to Poland, Slovakia, Germany, Italy, Romania and then through to the Balkans, for which Ukraine is paid substantial transit fees by Russia. These transit fees are material in amount, such that, to the Russian oligarchy, they are worth fighting for.
To understand what happens next, we must consider the 2004 Ukrainian Presidential election.
The 2004 Ukrainian Presidential election was between Viktor Yanukovych and Viktor Yuschenko.
Yanukovych, whose name I will shorten to Yank, was Prime Minister of Ukraine. He had been to prison in his youth for theft and battery. He is described as being inarticulate and is known to have a hard time speaking Ukrainian, as he had grown up in the mainly Russian speaking province of Donetsk. He was supported by Oleg Deripaska, who was, at that time, Russia’s richest oligarch.
Viktor Yuschenko, whose name I will shorten to Yush, was a former Prime Minister and is Ukrainian Speaking. He ran on a platform of European integration and membership of NATO.
In September 2004, Yush was poisoned, in an assassination attempt, with TCDD, a dioxin with contaminant of Agent Orange. He suffered facial disfigurement because of the poisoning but has since made a full recovery. Who authorised or carried out the poisoning remains uncertain.
In the first round of the October 2004 presidential election, Yush, whose native tongue is Ukrainian, won 39.87% of the vote and Yank, who is a native Russian speaker, won 39.32% of the vote. Because there was no decisive winner, the election went to a run-off
In the November runoff, Yank won 49.22% of the vote, with Yush getting 46.69%. However, there were dramatic increases in turnout in Yank’s supporting eastern region, with one voting district reporting a 127% turnout. There were many voting irregularities that were described as systematic. They included fraud, ballot stuffing, multiple voting, media manipulation, disruption of publicity, and the arrest of hundreds of student activists.
Believing that the election had been “stolen,” a popular uprising, later known as the Orange Revolution, sought to block the pro-Russian Yank from taking power. Yulia Tymoshenko became a key figure in denouncing Yank’s presidential win as an ‘electoral fraud’ and became a key figure in the Orange Revolution protest movement.
On 3rd December 2004, the Ukrainian Supreme Court found widespread falsification of the 2004 election results and ordered a repeat.
Despite the poisoning, Yush won the re-vote in January 2005 with 55% of the vote and was appointed to serve as President until February 2010.
Now, we must consider the involvement in Ukraine politics of US lawyer Paul Manafort. Manafort was a lobbyist and political consultant who had all his life worked for the US candidates in the US Republican Party. He arrived in Ukraine in 2005 as an election campaign adviser to presidential hopeful Yank and the pro-Russian Party of the Regions. His services were paid for by Russian supporting Oleg Deripaska so it can hardly be said that he was working for the Nazis, as some have claimed. Manafort said he was there to help the Ukrainians come closer to the US and the EU. But that’s not how U.S. diplomats saw his role. A U.S. embassy cable sent from Kyiv to Washington in 2006 described Manafort’s job as giving an “extreme makeover” to Yank “who had the backing of the Kremlin and most of Ukraine’s wealthiest tycoons.” “Yank’s Party of the Regions,” the US cable said, was “a haven” for “mobsters and oligarchs.” The main funding for the Party of the Regions came from the coal and metals magnate Rinat Akhmetov who was from the East of Ukraine, where the country has its largest coal reserves.
The first-round of the 2010 Presidential election saw no candidate with an overall majority of votes. By this time, Yush was so unpopular that he failed to secure a run-off spot during this election, gaining just 5.5% of the votes in the first round.
The run-off 2010 Presidential election was held between Yulia Tymoshenko, the gold-braided heroine of the Orange Revolution who had become Prime Minister, and Yank who was the opposition leader.
On 14 February 2010, Yank was declared President-elect and winner with 48.95% of the popular vote. According to Ukraine's Constitution, the president had to be sworn into office within 30 days of the official declaration of the results. Parliament subsequently scheduled Yank’s inauguration for 25 February 2010.
On 17 February, the Supreme Administrative Court of Ukraine suspended the results following an appeal by Tymoshenko. The court suspended the Central Election Commission's ruling that Yank had won the election, but did not postpone or cancel his inauguration as President. Tymoshenko later withdrew her appeal.
In April 2010 Yank, who was now president of Ukraine, and Russian President Dimitry Medvedev signed the Ukrainian - Russian Naval Base for Natural Gas Treaty which extended Russia’s lease on the naval facilities in Crimea until 2042 in exchange for multi-year discounts on Russian gas. This treaty was primarily an extension of the lease provisions in the 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership which saw the partition of the Black Sea Fleet between the two states. Shortly after the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014, Russia unilaterally terminated this treaty.
President Yank, using his office as President, now starts to amass an enormous fortune, easing cronies from his home region of Donetsk into key posts around the country. He also built an opulent palace for himself outside Kiev, complete with a private zoo, a golf course and a restaurant in the shape of a pirate ship docked in his backyard.
In August 2011, Tymoshenko was arrested for a series of alleged offences accusing her of abuse of her office as Prime Minister, including her brokering of the 2009 gas deal with Russia. She was found guilty in October 2011 and was sentenced to seven years in prison. Amnesty International concluded that Tymoshenko was de facto a political prisoner of Yank, stating “the acts for which Tymoshenko was convicted did not correspond to a recognisable criminal offence and that her prosecution had been politically motivated.”
“It’s normal practice,” said Yank, in reference to his jailing of the opposition leader. He went on to say: “The party is powerful. The voters support it. Today the President of Ukraine has the highest ratings of any politician.”
Yank owed those ratings, at least in part, to Manafort’s political coaching, which included a new wardrobe for the President, as well as a coiffed hairdo and elocution lessons. But the jailing of Tymoshenko, which U.S. and European leaders denounced as part of a political vendetta, still dealt a severe blow to Ukraine’s reputation in the West. With money from the Party of the Regions, and its financial backers, Manafort hired lobbyists in Washington to spin the imprisonment of Tymoshenko as an example of Ukraine’s commitment to the rule of law. “Their job is to say that white is black and black is white,” said Tymoshenko’s daughter Eugenia in 2012.
Such services did not come cheap. After the Maidan Revolution and Yank had been removed from power, the national anti-corruption bureau discovered a secret ledger of off-the-books payments from the Party of the Regions. Manafort’s name appears in this ledger 22 times showing $12.7 million was paid to him between 2007 and 2012.
In November 2013, under intense pressure from Moscow, Yank accepted an offer from the Russian government to cut the price of its natural gas and for it to purchase $15 billion of Ukraine bonds. At the same time, Yank cancelled the work being done on the draft Ukraine - European Union association agreement. As a result, street protests erupted in Kyiv, with people gathering in Maidan (Independent) Square calling for Yank to resign.
I will not go into the details of the Maidan Revolution. It is well documented. I will simply say that as Yank’s government imposed tighter legal restrictions to deal with the street protests, the security services took against the people on the streets and tried to disperse them using significant violence. The result was that the demonstrations turned in to riots with protesters occupying police stations and government offices, not just in Kyiv but in many other cities throughout Ukraine. As is well known, Yank’s security services ended up firing indiscriminately into the crowd of protesters, killing twenty people and injuring hundreds more.
The bloodiest week in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history concluded on 21st February 2014 with agreement between Yank and opposition leaders on the formation of an interim unity government. Under the agreement, Yank was removed as president, and Oleksandr Turchynov, who was the Speaker in the parliament, was appointed acting president of Ukraine in Yank’s place. Turchynov was the deputy leader of the Fatherland Party, a former head of Ukraine’s security services and a close confidant of Tymoshenko.
The parliament overwhelmingly approved the restoration of the 2004 Ukrainian constitution, thus reducing the power of the presidency. In subsequent votes, the parliament granted full amnesty to protesters, removed internal affairs minister Vitaliy Zakharchenko for his role in ordering the crackdown on the Maidan protesters, and decriminalized elements of the legal code under which Tymoshenko had been prosecuted. She was released from prison, and, after her release, the Ukrainian Supreme Court found no crime had been committed by her.
Yank fled Kyiv ahead of an impeachment vote that was to strip him of his powers, and on 24th February 2014, the interim government charged Yank with mass murder in connection with the deaths of the Maidan protesters and issued a warrant for his arrest. He resurfaced on 28th February 2014 in Rostov-on-Don in Russia, where he delivered a defiant speech in Russian saying he was the victim of a coup d’état and insisting he was still the rightful president of Ukraine.
With Yank out of the country, the people broke into his country estate which revealed, for all to see, the extent of his corruption.
The 2014 Winter Olympics, which had been held in Sochi in Russia, ended on 23rd February 2014. President Putin was bitterly upset with Western politicians who had boycotted these games on human rights grounds, particularly regarding their complaint about the treatment of homosexuals in Russia. A point of view President Putin refused to understand. He had invested a lot of personal capital in the success of these games, and he took it as a personal slight that they were not there. The non-attendance by senior country representatives at these games confirmed in Putin’s mind that the West was disrespectful of Russia and was ‘out to get it.’ Nothing could have been further from the truth.
It may be pathetic, but I am told Putin was determined to give the West a punch on the nose for disrespecting him at Sochi, and his target for retribution was the Crimea.
Ukraine’s ownership of the Crimea was a long-standing sore to President Putin because of Russia’s long and historic connection with the peninsular. It irritated him that it was not part of Russia.
At the same time, Putin was angry at the fact that the Ukrainian government had just rejected Russia’s offer of financial help. To add to his chagrin, it was also planning on re-opening negotiations with the European Union. Again, Putin saw this as being disrespectful of Russia. He saw the chaos in the Ukrainian government and realised that this gave him the opportunity to do something about taking control of Crimea.
It is said that Putin is no great strategist, but undoubtedly, he is proven to be a great opportunist.
At the end of the meeting with his security service chiefs which was held on the night of 22nd/ 23rd February 2014, Putin order them to start work on returning Crimea to Russia.
On 23 February 2014, insurgent Russian soldiers, out of uniform and dress as locals, suddenly appeared in Sevastopol and started a pro-Russian demonstration.
On 27 February 2014, masked Russian troops dressed as quarrymen without their insignia (later to be called ‘the little green men’) from Russia’s Special Operation Forces, together with paratroopers from the 45th Guard Spetsnaz Brigade from Russia’s 8th Combined Arms Army, headquartered at Southern Military District Command based in Rostov-on-Don, took over the Crimea’s Supreme Council (its parliament). These little green men then surrounded and captured strategic sites across Crimea, including the airport in Sevastopol.
Sergey Aksyonov, a Russian supporter, was appointed as head of the government in Crimea. On 18 March 2014, Russia formally incorporated the Republic of Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol as two federal authorities within the Russian Federation. This completed Russia’s annexation of Crimea, after which it escalated its military presence on the peninsula. And all this was done with total disregard for any of the treaties Russia had signed regarding the security of Ukraine or the Crimea.
Whereas President Putin has vehemently denied the takeover of Crimea was a Russian military operation, it is a fact that what happened was captured on mobile phones, posted on numerous websites and from this people around the world were able to match the faces of those little green men, who had unwisely removed their masks, to the social media sites of soldiers of Russia’s Southern Military Command.
I am told that Putin did not foresee or plan for the Russia militia moving into east Ukraine. These were de facto independent initiatives from the nearby enthusiastic regional governors in Volgograd Oblast and Rostov Oblast seeking to help those Russians in Ukraine who wanted to be part of Russia once again (‘Russian Separatists’).
Once the Russian Separatists had started to occupy these regions, Putin felt he had no alternative but to give them his support, not least because, they were trying to give him the east of Ukraine so Russia could have an almost straight North / South route from Moscow to Sevastopol. This anecdote is important to us as it shows that Putin only controls those pieces on the chessboard which are close to him, and the rule of unintended consequences has always to be born in mind.
The West's imposition of sanctions, and its public discussions on its possible responses to the annexation of Crimea, taught Putin everything he needed to know. The West was weak. By 2016 he was certain in his foreign policy. He was not going to allow the West to dominate Russia in any way. To do this, he was going to use Russian gas as a political tool, but before he could do this, he was going to 'untie the rubber band with China'
China has got 1.3 billion people. Russia's got 150 million. China needs Russia's oil and its other raw materials. Think of the surface area under a twisted elastic band and then untwist it. It becomes much bigger. Much closer trade with China would increase the prosperity of the average Russian and, whatever sanctions the West might apply in future, would have much less effect.
In November 2016, China and Russia, as part of untying the elastic band, created their own unified payment system which meant that they were no longer dependent upon SWIFT. They had seen what the exclusion from SWIFT had done to the Iranian economy.
On 25 May 2014, Petro Poroshenko, who had served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2009 to 2010 and as the Minister of Trade and Economic Development in 2012, won the Ukrainian presidential election outright, obtaining 54.7% of the votes cast in the first round.
Tymoshenko finished a distant second in these 2014 Presidential elections with just 13% of the vote. Given Putin’s claim that he has invaded Ukraine to de-Nazify it, I need to record that in this 2014 election, the ultra-right-wing parties (those which Putin describe as Nazis) received just 1% of the vote.
Sadly for Poroshenko, his presidency was marred throughout by the Ukraine - Russian war in which Russian back separatists fought the Ukrainian army for control of the Donetsk, Luhansk (‘the Donbas Region), Kharkiv, Zaporizhia and the Odessa regions of Ukraine.
Although Putin has denied any Russian involvement, we know that the Russian Separatists were financed, equipped and backed by Russia, with Russian forces being engaged in actual combat. We also know the separatists’ side of the war was organised by Sergey Glazyev, an adviser to President Putin, and Konstantin Zatulin, a Russian politician, who was deputy chairman of the committee of the State Duma of The Commonwealth of Independent States, a regional intergovernmental organisation set up by Putin to create the old USSR.
We know of Glazyev and Zatulin’s involvement because intercepts of a phone call between them discussing the armed occupation of administration buildings and other military actions were publicly released by the Ukrainian Security Forces. Glazyev refused to deny the authenticity of the intercepts, while Zatulin confirmed they were real but claimed "they were taken out of context." Further batches of intercepts were presented as evidence during the criminal proceedings brought against former president Yanukovych.
In all this tragedy we must not forget the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on 17 July 2014 in which 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed. The subsequent investigation concluded that the airliner was shot down by a Buk surface-too air missile launched in pro-Russian separatist controlled territory of Ukraine, and that the launcher used to shoot down the plane originated from the 53rd Anti- Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Federation and had been transported from Russia on the day of the crash, fired from a field in a rebel-controlled area, and the launch system returned to Russia afterwards.
It does not take the security services to conclude that the shooting down of this commercial passenger plane was Russia’s fault. The released intercept of the excited voices of the Buk operatives as they made their report on their successful shooting down of the passenger plane made it clear to anyone who listened as to what had happened and by whom.
Further, the journey of the Buk surface-to-air missile launcher to and from the launch site, and the burn marks from the place of launch, were all captured on mobile phones, and posted on numerous websites. Anyone with access to a computer and time could work out what had happened. This wasn’t a West / NATO false flag attack as Russia tried to claim but there was a Russian conspiracy to hide the fact that it was their fault, as Russia gave six separate explanations for the shooting down of the plane, but not one was plausible.
In December 2015, Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine continued when hackers, traced back to the Kremlin, shut down Ukraine’s electricity grid, cutting off power to millions of people, and for good measure shutting down the emergency telephone lines, in a well-orchestrated cyber-attack.
Then again, in July 2017, on Ukraine’s Constitution Day, the Russians launched the most devastating cyberattack on a country the world had ever seen. Ukraine saw its banks, shops, ATMs, its postal service, railway, and most government agencies shut down, sometimes for days, other times weeks. The Russians even shut down the radiation monitors at all of Ukraine’s nuclear power stations. Three years after the event and the country had still not fully recovered.
I must ask, why would Russia want to cyber-attack Ukraine other than in its efforts to make sure the eastern region of Ukraine was returned to Russia? Did it not want to live alongside its neighbours on friendly and co-operative terms? How can Russia expect to get the respect it says it deserves if it treats the people of other countries this way?
Until the annexation of Crimea in 2014, there was little appetite among the Ukrainian people for it to join NATO. The Ukrainians were primarily interested in the economic benefits of being part of the European Union; being able to travel freely as fellow Europeans. It was only after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and its cyberattacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and its people, such that they could not even use their bank accounts, did Ukraine’s membership of NATO become a serious agenda matter.
President Putin’s actions in Ukraine have had entirely the opposite effect to the one he intended. Rather than bringing the country closer to Russia as he wanted, he drove it closer to NATO. The very thing he was complaining about. Another example of the law of unintended consequences in action.
In 2018, Poroshenko helped create the Orthodox Church of Ukraine separating it from, and allowing it to become independent of, the Russian Orthodox church and the Moscow Patriarchate. A move which was said to have made Putin furious.
The Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation signed in 1997, which fixed the Ukraine’s borders and was designed to prevent the parties from invading each other's country was automatically renewed on each 10th anniversary of its signing, unless one party advised the other of its intention to end the treaty six months prior to the date of the renewal. In September 2018, Ukraine announced its intention not to renew this treaty on the grounds that Russia had already invaded their country and was in substantial breach. The treaty expired on 31 March 2019.
The 2019 Ukrainian presidential election was held on 31 March and 21 April and was won by Volodymyr Zelenskyy a former actor and comedian with 73.2 per cent of the vote in the second round, defeating Poroshenko. Zelenskyy identified himself as a populist, positioning himself as centrist, anti-establishment, and anti-corruption.
Zelenskyy took office on 20th May 2019. In his inaugural speech, he announced the dissolution of Parliament and triggered a snap election. Those elections, which were held on 21st July 2019, delivered an absolute parliamentary majority for his Servant of the People Party. In his address, he told the people not to have pictures of the president in their offices, but of their children as that is their future.
Given the democratic mandate achieved by Zelenskyy and his Servant of the People Party, I am sorry to say, it is impossible to accept President Putin’s narrative that Ukraine is a Nazi ridden state.
It seems to me that after 30 years of totalitarian rule from Russia, Ukraine was developing into a mature democratic country and starting to prosper.
Is it Ukraine’s success which is frightening Putin? Is it a possibility that he doesn’t like the idea of Ukraine providing a benchmark against which the Russian people might judge their prosperity? Perhaps, like Stalin before him, President Putin does not want ordinary Russian people to see how much better it is to live in a democracy?
Whatever his reasons, I hope you and I can agree it is not worth the lives of tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians.
The Minks Agreements
We cannot review the relations between Russia and Ukraine without considering the two agreements which were signed in Minsk and were intended to end the conflict between Ukraine and the Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region. A dispute which had, prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, killed more than 14,000 people.
The September 2014 agreement provided, inter alia, for a ceasefire, prisoner exchanges, deliveries of humanitarian aid and the withdrawal of heavy weapons, but the agreement quickly broke down with violations on both sides.
In February 2015, representatives of Russia, Ukraine, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the leaders of the two pro-Russian separatist regions signed a 13-point agreement. The leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine gathered there at the same time and issued a declaration of support for the deal. However, it remained unimplemented because of Russia's insistence that it is not a party to the conflict and therefore is not bound by its terms. For example. Point 10 of the second agreement required the withdrawal of all foreign armed formations and military equipment from the two disputed regions, Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine says this refers to forces from Russia, but Moscow denied it has any there.
As we now know, Russia officially recognised the Luhansk and Donetsk people's republics on 21 February 2022 and on 22 February 2022, President declared that the Minsk agreements "no longer existed", and that Ukraine, not Russia, was to blame for their collapse. Russia then invaded Ukraine
Journey to democracy – a Return journey to totalitarianism.
Since August 1991, Ukraine has had seven presidents including an interim presidency and the current President Zelenskyy. Since August 1991 Russia has, in reality, had just two. Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, for all the Russian people know that Dmitry Medvedev’s time as president was as Putin’s proxy.
For all democracies, particularly emerging ones, the path is difficult, painful, with many mistakes made, as some leaders are good, some are bad, some go into politics for themselves, and their enrichment and others go into it to do the best for their people.
Being part of being a democracy allows the people to ridicule and make jokes of their leaders. Those countries which criticise their politicians the most are those which are the freest. Watch any late-night TV show in the US or the UK and the wit can be acerbic. It was in this spirit of freedom that Ukraine had a TV show which mocked and made jokes about its government, and so it was that they elected an actor who, in the show, had overwhelmingly ridiculed its politicians, but doing so in the cause of fighting incompetence and corruption.
I have not seen the same progress in Russia towards democracy as in the Ukraine. In fact, the reverse. It seems to me that democracy has all but disappeared in Russia. The country appears to have returned, once again, to a one-party totalitarian state. Basic freedoms such as an independent press, television and radio have all gone. We see a state where to protest against the government on the street sees you imprisoned. We note that 21 journalists critical of the Russian government have been killed in Russia since President Putin came to power. We see a state where opposition leaders are poisoned or imprisoned or both. I must ask – are you seeing Russia in the same state, or am I being misled by Western propaganda? It would be helpful to know.
Why are Russia and the United Kingdom not the best of friends? – we should be.
It is a simple fact that Britain and Russia should be best of friends and yet we are not. We should be natural allies, but it does not happen. When we meet one-to-one, we are friends. We enjoy each other’s company. We banter about our country as friends’ banter about the football team they support.
We have the same judo-Christian philosophies of love, and freedom and common good.
We love your writing. The works by Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn (and many more) are some of the best in the world.
We love your music, your ballet, your vodka, your drinking, your laughter. We love your cities of St Petersburg and Moscow: the Red Square, the Bolshoi Theatre, St. Basil's Cathedral, Kremlin, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, and many other places.
We men compete in bone crushing handshakes (something we don’t do with any other nation) and most times we grimace and smile graciously in defeat. We play your vodka drinking games and you know we are cheating by filling our glasses half full of water, and we men think your women are some of the most beautiful in the world.
We should be competing on the sports field and not the battlefield. We watched with admiration and awe at the skill and grace of Kamila Valieva, the 15-year-old Russian figure skater, and agreed she was the best in the world. And we shed tears with her when she was denied the gold medal because of a drug taking scandal. And we pray that she will be able to recover her confidence and thrill us once again.
And perhaps sport is a good illustration of the differences between our cultures and the difficulties it creates. For how can Russia achieve the world prestige it seeks when, it is later discovered (as it was bound to be) that the London 2012 Olympic games were “sabotaged by Russian state sponsored doping” and the agency appointed to investigate the issue, said that “they were unable to fully carry out their work because of intimidation by armed FSB agents”?
The harm to the Russian nation and to the Russian people from the doping scandal is far greater and longer lasting than coming lower in the medal tables. It means we must ask, if Russia cannot be trusted to compete fairly in the harmless pursuit of games, is there any other walk of life in which we can trust your country?
Or are these doping scandals stories made up by the West to discredit Russia, and if so why would it do such a thing?
I think there are two other reasons which create challenges in our relationship:
a) The UK’s aversion to Totalitarianism
b) Russia’s aversion to the West – to be the West Plus
The UK aversion to Totalitarianism
The United Kingdom’s problem with Russia comes from the fact that the British have a strong aversion to totalitarianism. Perhaps it is because we had to fight so hard against our kings to get our freedoms that we feel this way. Perhaps it is also because we had to fight so hard to achieve (in part) a separation of church and state. Perhaps, too, it is because many of us are eccentric, and we like those who are different and do not conform. Whatever the reason, we have an aversion to dictators and unfairness, and there is nothing we can do about it.
The dictatorial control which we saw in Hitler’s Germany from 1933, or we saw in Stalin from 1922 until his death in 1952, and we now see in Putin is an anathema to us. We cannot help but lose respect for a great people when they appoint tyrants as their leaders.
But the same has happened with our regards for the USA and their disastrous election of presidents over recent years, and on that, I am sure we are on the same page.
We had great hopes for Russia when the Berlin Wall came down and the cold war ended. The period when Dmitry Medvedev was president was particularly positive, but I can pin the date when the relationship between us started to go sour. It was in July 2006 when the Federation Council approved a law which permits the Russian president to use its armed forces and special services outside Russia's borders to combat terrorism and extremism. Since then:
a) We have incontrovertible evidence that ex- Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was killed on Putin’s orders in London in 2006 by two Russian agents with polonium-210, a poisonous radioactive isotope. As you may know, Litvenenko was a former KGB Officer who had accused the Russian secret service of staging a 1999 Russian apartment bombing and other acts of terrorism to bring Putin to power. He also accused Putin of ordering the assassination of journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
b) We have the poising of Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia in 2018 with the Novichok Nerve Agent by three Russian Agents on Putin’s orders in Salisbury, affecting not just the intended targets but poisoning both a British policeman and an innocent woman too. Sergei Skripal was a former Russian military officer and double agent for the British. It is a fact that there was so much Novichok in the bottle which was brought to the UK that it could have killed hundreds of people.
At worst these are criminal acts, and at best they are impolite, for what friend goes into someone’s house and craps on their sitting room carpet, for this is how it seems.
We then observe as
a) Boris Nemtsov, another political opponent of Putin, was shot and killed crossing the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge near the Kremlin in February 2015. We also note that a Chechnya gunman and four accomplices were found guilty of the murder, but they were without a genuine motive. It was clear that theirs was a contract killing. We also note how loyal the ‘winners’ of the Chechnya War remain to Putin.
b) Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a former Chechen rebel commander, is shot in a Berlin Park in August 2019 by Vadim Krasikov. Again, the German’s tell us, this killing was on the orders of Putin.
c) Alexei Anatolievich, a political opponent of President Putin was poisoned with Novichok nerve agent in August 2020. When he returned to Russia, we see him being imprisoned for violating his parole conditions when it was impossible for him to comply because he was lying ill in a German hospital bed.
And who can have failed to notice the work of Bill Browder as his work in highlighting the dreadful death in prison of Sergei Magnitsky, a tax advisor who had discovered a $230 million tax fraud in Russia and who, after reporting it to Putin, ended up in prison with nothing being done to the perpetrators.
Then, we see the wealth of the Russian oligarchs, have sight of the amounts of money which these elites possess, and quickly conclude that they must have stolen from the Russian people.
We see, through the leaks of papers from tax havens and the Panama papers, the amount of Russian money being laundered through London, Cyprus, Geneva and the British Virgin Islands and instinctively we know something is not right. We see the many London properties and superyachts owned by Russian oligarchs. We know that Russian GDP per capita is 38% less than ours but with all that oil, gas and minerals being exported that doesn’t make sense for it to be so low. Further, we have seen how life expectancy in Russia has fallen between 2013 and 2019 and, with all those resources, it doesn’t seem fair.
Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem called ‘Norman and Saxon’ about the English from the point of view of the French. One verse reads
“The Saxon is not like us Normans.
His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious
Till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow
With his sullen eyes set on your own,
And grumbles, ‘this isn’t fair dealing,’
My son, leave the Saxon alone.”
This is true. I think we are one of the most tolerant nations on earth. If you want evidence, you only have to look at how easily and readily, we have adopted to being a multi-racial society. We are also known for our sense of justice and fair play. It is why so many Russians choose to use the London courts to settle their disputes. However, when our sensibilities are offended, such as an illegal invasion of another country, then we become the worst of enemies.
We don’t want our relationship to be like that, and it doesn’t have to be so.
Russia’s aversion to the West – to be the West Plus
Russia is a great country. There can be no doubting that. It covers 11% of the world's landmass. It shares a land border with 14 countries and has four maritime borders. The distance from its western and eastern borders is roughly 10,000 km. In mineral and agricultural terms, it is the wealthiest country on earth, and it is entirely self-sufficient. But you know all this. Therefore, it seems very strange to us that Russia’s leaders appear to have a deep sense of insecurity.
It was Peter the Great, Tsar of the Russian empire, who set Russia’s heart on being a major European power, and I can say with authority that we would positively welcome a stable, responsible Russia both within Europe and to the top table of world leaders. But it should come by the positive contribution Russia can make, and not by reason of it being a world power for, as we are seeing right now, Russia’s position as a world power is doing both itself and the world considerable harm.
Look at Sweden, a long way from being a world power, but through its skills in diplomacy and in negotiating the settlement of disputes, it is held in high regard and is strongly influential around the world.
The problem Russia has with the West comes, I believe, not from our making. It originates from the 1917 Russian revolution which, by the very nature and creed of the Communist manifesto, resulted in a direct and deliberate rejection of the Western principles of freedom of the individual and free market capitalism.
Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin deliberately rejected everything that the West stood for.
To build unity in a nation it is helpful to create a common enemy. This is precisely what Hitler did in Germany with his treatment of the Jews. There can be no doubting that Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin decided that they would solidify their position within Russia by making the West the peoples common enemy.
Perhaps, it was the West’s partial funding of the White Guard in the early days of the revolution which created Stalin’s paranoic hatred of the West, but then, as the history books tell, Stalin’s paranoia ran deep and wide and all his life.
In the matter of Stalin’s paranoia, perhaps it is worth mentioning Vladimir Rezun (pseudonym Viktor Suvorov), a former GRU agent who made the study of the cause of the Great Patriotic War his life’s work. He is certain that Germany was forced to launch Operation Barbarossa and attack Russia in a pre-emptive defensive move because Hitler had strong evidence that Stalin was going to launch a pre-emptive attack on Germany. If he is right, then this adds to the evidence that it is Stalin’s paranoic hatred of the West which has been the cause of 100 years of soured relations between us.
Further evidence of Stalin’s paranoia against the West can be found in his 1940 murder of 20,000 Polish officers in Katyn Forest, or his insistence at the Yalta Conference that, at the end of the Great Patriotic War, every Russian soldier or civilian, who had been captured as a prisoner of war or been transported to Germany as forced labour, should be returned home. Sadly, the treatment these people received on their return was not good. 5% of civilians and 43% of prisoners of war were redrafted. 10% of civilians and 22% of prisoners of war were sent to labour camps, and 2% of civilians and 15% of prisoners of war were sent to Gulags.
I think there is strong evidence that Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, each in their own way, helped to create a Russian culture of hatred and distrust of the West for the purposes of gaining and holding power. It was as unjustified then as it is now.
Putin was born in 1952, six months before Stalin died. Throughout, his life and particularly during his time as a KGB officer, Putin will have been schooled and trained in Stalin’s paranoia summed up in the phrase: “Russia’s good. West’s bad.” It is a narrative which he has been turning into action ever since he came to power in 2000.
Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, once said, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man,” and therein lies our problem.
Putin is a child of the Cold War. He is a man of the Cold War. He fought in the Cold War in Dresden. His mind set is completely and utterly Cold War. He has not realised that the West left the Cold War behind 30 years ago. Or if he has realised it, then he has created a new Cold War for his own nefarious reasons, for how do you control a population, you give them something to be frightened of.
From watching Russia Today Television, I get the sense that Russia's foreign policy, for the last ten years at least, and probably longer, appears to be based on several beliefs and grievances:
a) “That the West is the enemy of the Russian people.”
b) “That the West is keeping Russia down.”
c) “That the West is keeping Russia from it's just destiny.”
d) “The West is stopping Russia from achieving its greatness.”
e) “That NATO and the European Union have an aggressive posture towards Russia which must be countered.”
f) Anything which damages the West is good for Russia.”
The trouble is that, apart from (f) none of the above is true. And in respect of (f) I need to understand why this would be?
The perceived NATO threat is heightened in Russia to a far greater extent than it is in reality. For example, do you know that in 2021, Germany’s military was so weak that it only had half a dozen tanks working, and they could not put a tank battalion together if they had to defend themselves. And the focus of the US is not on Europe and the Atlantic, but the Pacific Region and the rising ambitions of China.
And how does the policy of ‘anything which damages the West must be good for Russia’ work’? The US Senate Committee on Foreign Nations stated that the Russian Government has used cyberattacks, disinformation, financial influence, and campaigns to meddle in the internal affairs of at least 27 European and North American countries since 2007. Why would a country do that if it was seeking peaceful and harmonious relations with its neighbours?
It is often said, in relation to the expansion of NATO, that prodding the Russian Bear is bound to result in it punching out. Is this what has been happening?
And in a world where Russia sees the US as ‘overlords’ of the UK and France, would it not be best to make friends with France, which sees itself as America’s First Ally, or the UK which claims to have a ‘Special Relationship’ with the US? For, as Sun Tzu, who wrote the book the Art of War is credited with saying: “Keep your friends close but keep your enemies even closer.”
I am in no doubt that it was the US who stupidly changed the international rules-based system, which was developed after the Great Patriotic War, to one where ‘Might is Right’ – otherwise the invasion of Iraq couldn’t have happened. And quite ashamedly the UK stupidly helped in this. But Russia has very quickly followed the US in adopting this policy.
In the first decade of the 21st Century we used to feel welcomed in Russia. We accepted the different prices charged to the locals and us tourists to see the ballet or to go to a concert as part of the experience, but nevertheless there was a warmth on the streets. By the second decade of the 21st century, which saw Russia move deeper into its Greater Russia policy, we no longer felt welcomed. Instead, we felt the positive hostility of the Russian people as we travelled on the trains from St Petersburg to Moscow. So sad!
It seems to me that, almost single-handedly, President Putin has returned Russia to the Stalinist state it was at the height of the Cold War, and I have to ask: Cui bono – Who benefits? It is certainly neither the West nor the Russian people.
Are we an enemy created by Putin to keep him in power? Are we the enemy created to take the blame for his fundamental failure over 20 years to fix Russia’s economy? I need to ask because none of it makes sense.
The Death of an Empire – The Birth of the Eurasia Enlightenment
The Great Patriotic War enabled Russia to build an empire. In 1991, with the collapse of communism, its empire was lost. As England discovered when it started to lose its empire post 1945, empires die slowly, and they are a painful death for the empirical power.
Britain appreciates how traumatic the loss of the Soviet Union has been for Russia for we found the loss of our empire tragic too. In our case we sought to run into the arms of the European Union. It was a 49-year experiment during which time the UK regained its confidence ready to be on our own again, outside of Europe, and this time without an Empire.
We need to ask and answer the question why it was that, after years of Russia being in control of the USSR, did its satellite countries rush, as soon as they could, into the arms of the EU and NATO? In comparison, how was it that the United Kingdom has been able to build out of its lost empire a Commonwealth of friendly nations with, in many cases, the Queen remaining as head of state, i.e., Canada, Australia, New Zealand et al. Each of them significant nations in their own right.
I think the answer can be found in the book ‘Why Nations Fail’ written by Acemoglu and Robinson. It is a detailed and complex book. He asks the question why, in the town of Nogales which is divided in two by a fence with the United States on the north side and Mexico on the south side, is life so very different? Why do those in the north earn three times those in the south and with a much better standard of living in every way?
Acemoglu and Robinson concluded that the difference is whether the society is run on an inclusive or extractive basis. Those societies which are inclusive in nature tend to distribute power and spread their wealth more widely. This, in turn, creates a virtuous circle of collaboration, innovation and economic growth. Those societies which are extractive typically have centralise power, are exploitative in nature and see huge wealth held by a tiny few.
England which, in its time built and lost two empires, was a tiny seafaring nation. It did not have the manpower to impose centralised power throughout its empire so instead it had to work collaboratively with its colonies paying for, and not just taking, their hard-earned goods.
When the communist economic system failed, as it was bound to do, for a centralised system cannot make all the small individual decisions which have to be made (Adam Smith in his book The Wealth of Nations called this ‘the invisible hand’ of free market economics), Russia’s empire collapsed too.
Unfortunately for Russia, it had not work collaboratively with its satellite countries during the USSR days. Instead, it imposed on them their governments and demanded they adhere to an economic system which did not serve its people well. How easily we forget that, before 1990, every Russian aspired enviously to a set of Levi Jeans or a pair of Italian made boots because the quality of these things in the USSR were so poor. Further, the USSR locked them inside their country making it illegal to go abroad. Why? Thus, it is not surprising that, as soon as they were free to do so, the countries of the former Soviet Union would look elsewhere for friendship and support. This is not NATO or the EU’s fault.
Perhaps Russia might like to consider whether it was the way it treated its former satellite countries which caused them to turn their back on Russia. Can it be said that the fault lies with themselves and not with the West?
President Putin appears to think he can put the Soviet Union back together again by force. This is shear folly. If you have been in an abusive relationship once and escaped, you do not want to repeat it.
It is a fact that Russia is both in Europe and Asia. This gives it both uniqueness and strength. It gives Russia the “West Plus status” which analysts of Russian affairs tell me your country yearns – But why, for it is already there? You already have it. It just needs a different approach.
It is only on Russia’s Eurasia geopolitical position that I am prepared to agree with Alexandr Dugin, the political philosopher, on whom I comment later. Everything else he proposes I violently disagree with.
It is Russia’s Eurasia geopolitical position which gives it the chance to be a great world leader but only if that leadership is built upon trust, respect, goodwill, and generosity of spirit.
At present Russia’s leadership seems obsessed with the downfall of the West for reasons which we in the West find hard to understand. In the United Kingdom, we have a saying: “When you seek revenge, dig two graves.”
If only Russia would lead Eurasia, not in an exploitative manner as it seeks to do now, but in a partnership which works for the common good, works for the benefit of all – towards a truly Greater Russia.
In a true partnership, there are no winners and no losers. In a true partnership you want your partner to do well, to do better than you, and they in turn reciprocate that feeling towards you. In a true partnership, each is more generous to the other, for then there is more than 100% to share (See: The Vines of de Gressier and The Watches of de Gressier - novels by C. S. Bunker).
I commend to the Russian people the Partism Philosophy which believes that individuals, businesses, corporations, governments, and nations operate more efficiently, effectively and fairly when in an active partnership.
The United Kingdom and Russia are historical allies, not adversaries.
I am highly aware, and so is everyone who has been to school in England, that Russia and the United Kingdom have been allies three times in the last 210 years.
We were your allies against Napoleon. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, commemorating the successful Russian defence against Napoleon's invading Grande Armée, is as much a part of our culture as it is yours.
The second time we were allies was in 1914. Our history tells us (yours might be different) that, although Russia had no formal treaty obligation to Serbia, it wanted to control the Balkans. After the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria and Hungary, in Serbia, Tsar Nicholas II mobilized Russian forces on 30 July 1914 to counter a threat that Austria-Hungary might invade Serbia in retribution.
Because Germany’s military was incredibly strong, Russia and France had a defence pact in which they agreed that, if one country was attacked by Germany the other would come to its defence. The idea being that Germany would not want to fight a war on two fronts at the same time.
Germany wanted to break the French-Russian alliance and was fully prepared to take the risk that this would bring about a major war. Its military assessment was that France would be defeated in six to eight weeks, and because of Germany’s investment in its railways, it expected to be able to redeploy its army very rapidly against Russia, which they knew would take much longer to defeat.
Britain didn’t want a war and kept out of it as much as possible, but when German troops marched into Belgian on 4th August 1914, and subsequently into France, Russia and the United Kingdom became allies once again. This was to last until the 1917 Revolution after which Russia sued for peace. For Britain, France and our other allies this war went on until November 1918, when Germany surrendered.
Turkey entered the First World War in October 1914 on the side of the Germans in the hope of winning back some of its lost lands from the Ottoman Empire. Little known in Russia is that, wanting to help relieve the pressure on the Russian army, that the United Kingdom sent an army from Britain and its empire (Australia) to fight Turkey/Germany in Gallipoli. A campaign which lasted from February 1915 to January 1916 and was so disastrous that it too remains stuck in the psyche of every Australian to this day.
And it is here our history books probably divide, for since the end of the cold war, historians have had access to both East Germany’s and Russia’s records. Sadly, Putin has stopped that access once again – not the act of a friendly nation.
We now know that the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 because Germany financed a coup d’etat.
In 1917, the Russian people, fed up with the hardship caused by war wanted Soviets - democratic councils - in place of the Tsar, and that was what the provincial government was giving them. However, using a middleman called Parvus Helphand, Germany arranged for Lenin and his supporters to be taken by train from Switzerland through Germany to Finland where they made their way to Russia. Helphand also arranged for millions of deutschemarks in gold to go to the Bolsheviks on the condition that they seized power. They did this by recruiting soldiers into their new Red Army from Russia’s imperial army and paying them, which the imperial army could not do.
I do not wish to upset you, but the Russian people may have started a revolution in 1917, but it ended up with your country being taken over by a bunch of ideological thugs who held power for over thirty-five years until Stalin, Beria and their like were dead.
How and why do I know this. In 1917 we (Russia, France and Britain) were slowly but surely winning the war against Germany. Except the release of German troops from the Eastern Front to the Western front after Russia had surrendered gave the Germans the additional military resources it needed to counterattack. In just a few weeks, in Spring 1918, the German army had recaptured much of the ground it had taken the British and French armies’ over three years to win. My grandfather won a bravery medal in March 1918 for fighting in that Spring Offensive. Thus, I have taken the extra trouble to study the history and learn the detail of this war.
Further, the First World War is stuck in the British psyche in much the same way as the Great Patriotic War is in yours. We lost 880,000 men accounting for 6% of the adult male population and 12.5% of those serving in the military. Russia’s losses in the same war are reported as being 1.5% of your total population.
The third time we became allies was June 1941 after Germany invaded Russia. I have stood by the side of the Kremlin and have seen the repairs made to the Red Wall damaged by Hitler’s shelling. I know how close his army came to capturing Moscow.
Russia’s entry into the war was 20 months after Britain had declared war on Germany, and 12 months after the fall of France in June 1940. During these 12 months, Britain and her empire stood alone against Hitler.
Of course, when the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, it did not then know of the secret Molotov–Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia signed on 23rd August 1939. Under this pact, Hitler and Stalin agreed to partition Poland between them. It was the alleged breach of this agreement (it appears by both sides) which resulted in Russia and Germany going to war.
But our motives in fighting the Great Patriotic War were different. Our war with Hitler was against fascism and dictatorial totalitarianism and for democratic freedom. Whereas Russia’s fight was to keep communism which we saw as just another form of totalitarian government and to recover its captured land.
The Great Patriotic War was won by Russia (for which we are eternally grateful) but it was also a war in which the United States became the economic victors, Russia became the geographic winners, and the United Kingdom lost out entirely, for our empire was gone, our country destroyed, and we were bankrupt.
Russia and the Harm of the Great Patriotic War
I can, without hesitation or reservation acknowledge that the Great War would not have been won without the forces and sacrifice of the Russian people. Although Hollywood would have us believe it was won single-handedly by the United States, Russia’s overwhelming contribution is taught in our schools, as it is in France. Why President Putin is so resentful that Russia’s winning of the war is not acknowledged by the UK and Europe when it is, seems very strange. To be profoundly upset by the myths created by Hollywood suggests he is a man of deep insecurity.
I have stood and watched as the red carnations were laid at a Moscow May Day parade. I have watched as the limbless, with their medals proudly displayed, marched passed and I saw the sacrificial commitment it took by each man and woman to win the Great Patriotic War, for it was there on display.
The Soviet Nations together had 24 million civilian and military deaths. England and France had a total of one million civilian and military deaths between them. The United States lost 418,00 civilian and military deaths and yet, because they were not fighting on their own land, they were the winners, for Europe and England lay in devastation. The United States then claimed for themselves the title of “the policeman of the free world” – and lousy policemen they have turned out to be, but more on that later.
The Great War was a battle between three ideologies, Marxism, communism, and democratic free-market capitalism. It was won by a joint venture between free-market capitalism and communism, but it took another 45 years before the ideology of communism was defeated. And whereas the benefits of free market capitalism were, in 1991, in Russia’s grasp for all its people, it seems to me to have been quickly lost to a kleptocracy where the wealth of the whole nation has been stolen by a few men who have become obscenely wealthy.
But in the context of the Great Patriotic War, I would like to tell you about two days in my life:
In May 2013 I was in Kyiv for Kyiv Day. The women were dressed in their national costumes, wearing laurels of flowers in their hair, and the men were in their best suits. For 12 years the country had been free from Soviet rule and on the streets, you found a people full of joy and happiness. There was an incredibly positive spirit of a young nation with everything to look forward to.
Just one year before, in May 2012, Vladimir Putin had become President of Russia for the second time, and everything was about to change.
In May 2013, Ukraine was commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor (death by hunger). An exhibition had just been opened in Kyiv to tell how Joseph Stalin, using the Russian secret police and the Red Army, had confiscated from Ukrainian farmers their livestock, wheat crops, even their seed potatoes. This premeditated famine saw 3.9 million Ukrainian people starve to death and 6.1 million associated deformed births.
The exhibition went on to show how Stalin did the same in 1946/47, again confiscating grain from Ukraine but this time doing such additional things as taxing fruit trees with such a high levy that they became economically unsustainable. As a result, many were chopped down. This time another 2.8 million people died from starvation. The pictures and letters, particularly of those telling of cannibalism, were truly appalling to see and read.
Is it unsurprising that after such an experience, Ukraine wants little to do with Russia?
Reflecting the same Ukrainian confidence, which allowed an exhibition to directly criticise Russia, there had also been a change in emphasis of the story being told in The Ukrainian State Museum of the Great Patriotic War. The museum was built in Soviet times to commemorate the war with Germany and, although there had been little change in the artifacts and exhibits, the narrative around them had changed to better reflect Ukrainian rather than Soviet history.
The history now learnt by every Ukrainian school child is that when, in June 1941, the German forces started to enter Ukraine their arrival was greeted with enthusiasm by a significant proportion of the Ukrainian people. A mere nine years after the Holodomor, they saw the Germans as their liberators, bringing an end to communism and giving them back their land which had previously been taken over by Soviet style collective farms.
In the face of the German advance, the Ukrainians watched as the Soviet army retreated. The Russian’s NKVD’s Destruction Battalion shot Ukraine’s political prisoners, burned the people’s homes and their factories, destroyed crops and food reserves, and flooded their mines to make sure there was nothing Germany could use. In the Red Army’s retreat, four million Ukrainians were evacuated East. By November 1941 when the occupation of Ukraine by Germany had been completed, the Russians were the most hated people in the country.
But the illusion of Germany as liberators was quickly shattered when the Ukrainian leaders, who had accompanied the Germans into the city, were arrested and interned in concentration camps, and the killings and transportations began. In just two days, on 29th and 30th September 1941, at Babyn Yar, just outside of Kyiv, the Germans killed 33,771 Jews, and then, between 22nd and 24th October, a further 25,000 to 34,000 Jews were killed in the Odessa region. It is estimated that, overall, 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were killed, and over 800,000 were displaced, by the Germans. In addition, some 2.2 million Ukrainians were taken from Ukraine to Germany as slave labour.
As a result of these atrocities the museum now records, with pride, the efforts of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known as the UPA. This was Ukraine’s nationalist partisan movement, like the Maquis in France. Between 1942 and 1945, it fought both the Germans and Russians in guerrilla warfare in the hope of freeing Ukraine from both their control.
Thanks to Germany and Russia, Ukraine’s losses in the Great Patriotic War, were the worst in Europe, only second to Poland. Even after accounting for the returning evacuees and forced labour, one in seven Ukrainians were killed. Ten million people were homeless, and only 20% of its industrial machinery and 15% of its farm machinery remained intact. It is estimated that the war destroyed 40% of Ukraine’s national wealth, but some estimates put that as high as 60%.
The next day I visited the 1944 Uprising Museum in Warsaw. Those not familiar with the history of the Polish Uprising should know that Hitler’s army was retreating from Russia. The Soviet army had crossed the Polish border and was less than 20 miles from the edge of Warsaw when the Polish Home Army comprising 50,000 resistance fighters, thinking that the Russians were their allies, rose-up and fought the Germans. At this point, Stalin stopped his army where it was. This enabled the Germans to counterattack. The result was 16,000 dead Polish soldiers and 200,000 dead Polish civilians. Warsaw was completely destroyed. At the end, it was estimated that only 1,000 people were still living in the city.
A centrepiece of the museum is a Wellington bomber as Winston Churchill sent 200 planes to do low-level supply drops using the RAF, South African, and the Polish Air Forces. Churchill pleaded to Roosevelt and Stalin for help in supporting their Polish allies, but these were ignored. In fact, Stalin went as far as refusing permission for his allies’ planes to use the nearby Russian landing fields to refuel. Instead, he ordered his troops to fire upon these aeroplanes, such they were shot at by Russians and Germans alike. The casualties were horrendous.
We must ask – How can the President of Russia betray his allies in this way?
Then there is the matter of the massacre in April / May 1940 of 22,000 members of the Polish Officer Corps in Katyn Forest by the Russian MKVD under the orders of Stalin, which Russia has subsequently admitted. To persuade the British people that Russia should be our ally against Hitler, we deliberately overlooked the evidence of Katyn Forrest which clearly pointed to the Russians as the murderers. Instead, the UK government deliberately and falsely set out to deflect the blame on to Germany.
Whilst I was walking around the Uprising Museum there was a strange, even uncomfortable, anti-British feeling. Undoubtedly the Poles feel the British let them down at the Yalta Conference when it was agreed with Stalin that, post the Great Patriotic War, Poland would come under the Soviet sphere of influence rather than being free. Perhaps it explains why there is a statute to President De Gaulle in Warsaw but not to Winston Churchill.
In two days in two separate cities, I visited one exhibition and two museums, and, in each case, there was a strong anti-Russian / anti-German flavour about them.
Undoubtedly Ukrainian and Polish history has left its people with a hatred and distrust for both Russia and Germany. Perhaps it is not as strong as it was between 1941 and 1945, but it is actively being passed from generation to generation.
As I reflected upon the weekend, I realise that, unlike Western Europe, the Great Patriotic War did not end in 1945 but for Poland, and the other USSR buffer states, it ended in 1990 after 45 years of Russian occupation. It ended in Ukraine at the same time but, for them, that period of Russian occupation had stretched for an incredible 80 years.
Having been invaded and cruelly oppressed by Russia for so long perhaps the Russian people should not be surprised that Ukrainians see their future away from Russia.
NATO – An alliance risen out of paranoia which became a reality
On 5th March 1946, Winston Churchill famously said: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent”. It was both a pertinent and accurate observation. In this speech Churchill call for the United States and Britain to act as ‘guardians of peace and stability’. Three years later, in 1949, NATO was formed with just 12 members states.
It was in June 1950 when Communist North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel into South Korea, and the Korean War began, that NATO started to seriously integrate and co-ordinate their defence forces. Unquestionably, both Chinese and Russian military hardware was provided to North Korea during that war.
Five years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, Russia had changed sides. Why – because it was fighting for the communist ideology and against everything the West stood for.
For the UK, NATO was extremely important as, without using the weapon of last resort, we had no way of defending ourselves so weakened had we been by the Great Patriotic War.
And in this regard, we were defending ourselves against Russia. For we were very clear about the threat Russia posed to us, but we didn’t know why. We went without schools and hospitals and very many things to make sure we could keep battle tanks on the front line in Germany.
And to prove it was a defensive alliance, you should note that NATO did not get involved in the Vietnam War. It had no conceivable reason to do so.
I cannot describe to you how please we were when the Berlin Wall came down. Not only was the fear of war gone but there was the fact that we could all travel freely again. Every politician talked with enthusiasm at how we were going to spend ‘the peace dividend’ - the money we were not going to spend in the defence of Europe from an attack by Russia.
The Expansion of NATO Post 1990 - Russia needed it satellite countries as a buffer zone from future invasions
I was in Moscow in June 2002 a week or so after Presidents George Bush and Vladimir Putin had signed a landmark treaty to make the largest reductions ever in US and Russian nuclear arsenals. Carelessly President Bush made a remark telling Russia that it should have given up its satellite countries years ago and casually referred to the ending of West Germany’s occupation by the US, UK and France in May 1955. At the same time, West Germany had become a member of NATO.
My hosts were furious with those remarks telling me angrily that Russia had not been the aggressors and these countries were strategically needed as a buffer against invasion from the West. But is this true?
Certainly, Napoleon was the aggressor in 1912 with his invasion of Russia. But Russia is not blameless for the war started in 1914 with Germany, and the famous Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, which Russia lost, was not fought on Russian soil but in East Prussia (now Stębark, Poland). Further, as I mentioned earlier, we now have Vladimir Rezun’s evidence that Russia intended to invade that part of Poland occupied by Germany, and that Germany’s attack on Russia in 1941 was provoke by Russia, because Hitler had intelligence which showed that Russia was going to attack it.
There can be no doubt that, in some part, Russia has reason to be blamed for the two world wars that she says she needs the buffer states to protect her from her enemies.
Since its inception, NATO has had an open-door policy stating it is open to any European country in a position to undertake the commitments and obligations of membership and contribute to security in the Euro-Atlantic area.
In October 1990, as part of the reunification of Germany, and recognising Russia sensitivity to the enlarged Germany within NATO, the USA, the UK, and France, agreed that there would be no deployment of non-German NATO forces in the territory of the former GDR – East Germany. That was the extent of any limitation agreement. At that time, there was little thought paid amongst the NATO allies that any other country would want to join.
It was not until 1999 that Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO after which President Putin first complained that NATO had become too big. It was also the year that the Second Russian-Chechen War began when Islamist fighters from Chechnya declared the Dagestan region an independent state and called for a holy war. Russian military and pro-Russian Chechen paramilitary forces faced Chechen separatists in open combat and then lay seize to the Chechen capital Grozny which lasted from December 1999 until February 2000. The seize of Grozny was an action of unbelievable cruelty – a humanitarian disaster. Russia eventually established direct rule over Chechnya in May 2000. But the world had seen what Putin could order happen.
In 2001, the Afghanistan War starts, triggered by the 9/11 attack by al-Qaeda on the United States. A war in which the US were joined only by the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, Italy and New Zealand, proving once again that this was not a NATO mission. The Afghan war was, because of mission creep, to last until 2014. It eventual resulted in the US and its mission allies leaving Afghanistan in August 2021 in disarray, and with their tail between their legs, just as Russia had done before them
In 2003, the illegal Iraq War was started by US and its Coalition of the Willing which comprised 49 Countries including the UK. It was a huge mistake of incalculable incompetence for, after Saddam Hussein was deposed, there proceeded to be a protracted civil war which lasted until 2011 and beyond. But here again we can see that NATO is a defensive pact as Canada, France, and Germany all wisely decided they would not be part of this coalition.
In 2004 Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO.
In August 2008, there is the Russo-Georgian War between Georgia, Russia and the Russian-backed self-proclaimed republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which saw these areas annexed by Russia.
Albania and Croatia joined NATO in 2009.
But it is the Syrian War which probably shows the biggest difference in our thinking. But not only that, it shows a complete failure to co-operate when it would have been in our best interests to do so.
After the start of the Arab Spring, the West was very keen for democracy to come to such places as Syria and was supporting the Independent Rebel forces against ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and the Bashar al-Assad regime.
Russia had supported the administration of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in 2011. If the West had been bright enough, it would have known there was no way President Putin was going to allow the West to depose Bashar al-Assad as President of Syria. This is because Russia's Black Sea naval facility at Tartus, and its airbase at Khmeimim, are both in Syria. Putin would only allow the President of Syria to be someone of his choosing who would keep these bases open to Russia.
The reason for Putin's stance was obvious. Turkey and Russia have been constant enemies and allies for well over 300 years. Russia's open sea access for its Black Sea Fleet, stationed in the Crimea, is through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straights which are controlled by Turkey (although I understand that, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, these straights have been closed to Russian shipping). Under no circumstance was Putin going to allow Turkey (a NATO ally) to have control of one of its vital strategic routes. Further, with its bases secure in Syria, Russia would be able to attack Turkey from both the north and south if needs be.
When you think about these things strategically you can see why the Crimea is militarily important to Russia – although there are plenty of other places on the Russian Black Sea coastline where they could build a port and station their ships.
Our mutual best interests would have been served by co-operating on removing ISIS and al-Assad, and putting someone in Syria who Russia approved of, so that its military bases could stay in Syria as Russia needs. Instead, some of Russia's most intense bombing in Syria came in 2016 during the battle for Aleppo, where a month-long assault by the Russian/Syrian coalition resulted in the deaths of more than 440 civilians, including more than 90 children, according to Human Rights Watch.
In 2014 Russia annexed Crimea and commences unprovoked Cyberwarfare against Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania,
Montenegro joined NATO in 2017, the year in which Russia launched it second major cyberattack on Ukraine, and North Macedonia in March 2020
Vladimir Putin swears that Washington has betrayed a promise that NATO would move “not one inch” eastward and on this basis justifies his occupation of Ukraine as “a necessary response to the alliances illegitimate deployment of military infrastructure to Russia’s borders.” But the United States insists that neither President George H.W. Bush nor any other leader made such a promise.
Given that President Putin has failed to produce a single agreement, memorandum, note, or email exchange we can only presume that, as Her Majesty the Queen said, in dealing with her Megan Markle issue, “recollections may differ.”
However, we do have the benefit of M. E. Sarotte’s book “Not One Inch,” based on over a hundred interviews and secret records of White House–Kremlin contacts on the expansion of NATO. She recounts the bitter clashes with Russia over NATO and how Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both tried to make a place for Russia in European security institutions and even offered Moscow several forms of affiliation with NATO. But those efforts were overwhelmed by the zeal of former Soviet satellites to become full members of the alliance, as they reacted to the totalitarian ways of Putin’s Russia.
There is another point and that is, Russia’s Eurasia geopolitical position excludes it from membership of NATO for Europe ends at the Urals, but Russia goes eastward until it reaches the Pacific.
NATO’s position on Ukraine was difficult. It did not want to upset President Putin by taking in Ukraine as a member, but likewise, it did not want to give him the power of veto as to who gets to apply. Allowing Russia to dictate limits to its member countries was not a position NATO could accept.
However, President Putin does have a point about missiles being placed on the border of Russia pointing at Moscow and St. Petersburg, but it is primarily a political point and not military one. A drone manned in New York can bring devastating damaged to anywhere in the world. The new hypersonic cruise missiles can be launched from miles away and do a huge amount of harm, and battlefield nuclear weapons are best fired away from the battlefield area if they are to be fired at all. Like birds, missiles no longer respect man made boundaries.
Given NATO’s open-door policy, the question the Russian people need to ask and answer, is not why didn’t NATO turn down any country which could meet the requirements but, what was it about the conduct and behaviour of Russia which made these countries decide they should apply?
In the context of Russia, its former satellite countries and NATO, the Russian people might like to answer the question: what kind of neighbour doesn't open their door to a wife running away from an abusive husband?
People want the old days back
Part of Putin’s claim for occupying Ukraine is that its people want the old days back.
To research for a book I was writing, I returned to Moldova a couple of years ago. In the discussions I had there it was clear that some wanted to return to the good old days of communism. It was, they said, a time when everyone had a home, everyone had a job, everyone had access to hospitals. It was not all dependent upon having money! Some were certain that communism had provided them with a much better standard of living than they are able to enjoy today. But this was to look back on life through rose tinted spectacles.
I was in both Romania and Moldova in 1992, just after the collapse of communism. The poverty was appalling. The air was thick with filthy dirty diesel engine fumes, the food in the shops and restaurants were poor and limited, the quality of goods on sale was terrible and whether you had electricity, or not, appeared to be in the hands of the gods. The transformation between my first and last visit was incredible. There were new airport terminals, new hotels, new buildings, new modern homes, modern cars, and clean air. Above all there was good quality food which was reflected in the improvement in the quality of the skin of the people. In every way, they looked healthier.
In every revolution, or a time of economic crises, there are always winners and losers. The important thing is that, in every change, a society works to make sure that all those in need are looked after. To repeat a mistake is never a good idea. Further, to conflate the desire to return to the command-and-control economics of the communist system, with returning control of their country to Russia, seems to me to be promoting emotion well above logic.
I believe the desire for the past comes from the huge wealth disparity which is seen in very many of the former eastern-bloc communist countries and the scourge of corruption. Too much has been purloined by the few leaving the many with very much less than is fair. A proper and fair tax system would help rectify the imbalances people complain of. Reverting to communism is not the answer. Reverting to rule by Russia is even less of an answer.
The mysterious influence of Alexandr Dugin
Aleksandr Dugin is, I read, a Russian philosopher, professor, political analyst and strategist. He was the main organizer of the National Bolshevik Party, National Bolshevik Front, and the Eurasia Party. I have tried to buy his book The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia published in 1997, but the download is an unintelligible translation. Therefore, I can only base this part of my letter on Wikipedia and other media which I have read. I acknowledge this is unreliable, but it is, nevertheless, worth sharing with friends.
I am told Alexandra Dugin is referred to Putin's Rasputin, not because of the way he looks, but in the fact that he is a close advisor to the Russian President. I have no idea whether this is true or not. But I do know that Dugin is being widely acclaimed in the West as having helped forge the Russia’s new nationalism and shaped Putin's foreign policy.
Dugin is reported to believe that the concepts of liberalism, freedom and democracy are alien to Russian culture. I read that he believes the default setting in world history is authoritarianism. He is certain, as is Plato, that all democracies must eventually die. He believes the Internet should be banned and that the sciences of chemistry and physics are demonic Western influences. He believes that Russia is culturally closer to Asia than to Europe, and espouses an ultranationalist, neo-fascist ideology based on his idea of neo-Eurasianism.
Unfortunately, Dugin is an inspiration for some western far right / alt-right nationalists and white supremacist.
Like Putin, Dugin is a great admirer of Stalin, except when it comes to the establishment of Ukraine in 1917, whom he unforgivably blames for dividing the Russian nation. I am told, like Putin, Dugin considers the breakup of the USSR as one of the greatest geo-political disasters to befall Russia, and that a new Greater Russia must be established by force as a new “Russian House” has to be built.
I am told that, in The Foundations of Geopolitics’, Dugin argues that (i) Abkhazia and Ossetia should be incorporated into Russia, (ii) the United Kingdom should be cut off from Europe (iii) Ukraine should be annexed by Russia (iv) Russia should fuel instability, separatism, and ethnic, social and racial conflicts within the United Sates (v) that Finland and the Baltic States should be absorbed into Russia too.
Given the contents of Dugin’s book and recent events, perhaps it is unsurprising that some people think he has written Putin’s strategic playbook. Further, given the nature and apparent influence of Dugin on Putin are you entirely sure that it is not Russia, under Putin, rather than Ukraine which is flying the Nazi flag?
But as I wrote earlier in this letter, Russia’s role as the bedrock of a Eurasia Partnership of the willing has much to commend it. Perhaps it is something Russia should be perusing with enthusiasm, but it will take a different leader, with a different mindset, if it is to be successful.
The Legal Case for War
I cannot write on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine without mentioning the legal case for war.
Many of us in the UK have become quite an expert on the subject following the UK/US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It is how I can say, with certainty and without hesitation, that the Iraq War was illegal, and Tony Blair and George W. Bush are both war criminals. They should be tried in the Haque and locked up. I can confidently say that because the UK had an open public enquiry to investigate why we went to war. The evidence revealed, and the conclusions drawn, were seriously damning.
As a result of the Iraq Invasion the reputation of the United Kingdom was forever harmed. I am sure it will be the same for Russia now it has invaded Ukraine.
You might argue that the Iraq War proves the threat NATO comprises for Russia. I would suggest not. Firstly, the invasion of Iraq was not by NATO but only the US, UK, Australia, and Poland. Secondly Russia has nuclear weapons. These are the ultimate deterrent. Why do you have them if you don’t think that, above all, this will stop NATO invading Russia?
There are three reasons in international law for one country to legitimately attack another. Firstly, if it is itself attacked; secondly if the attack is approved by the United Nations, and thirdly if there is a clear, real, and present or imminent threat of attack from another country which has Weapons of Mass Destruction.
None of the above apply, so Russia’s attack and invasion of Ukraine must be treated as an unprovoked and unjustifiable attack. When the attack is for the purposes of conquering a land, taking control of a government, and replacing it, as President Putin has stated, then under international law any person who commissions or aides such an attack is, unquestionably, a war criminal.
The statement of aims and objectives set out by President Putin in advance of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, and included at the start of this letter, particularly those parts I have underlined, will not shield nor protect him from any war criminal charge.
The World Against Russia
I am told it was Putin's plan to have a short war. He had been promised by his military leaders that he would be standing on the steps of the Holly Dominion Cathedral of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kyiv on 2nd March 2022 to announce the liberation of Ukraine and the reunification of the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches.
It must be remembered that, for Putin, this is as much a religious and cultural war as it is about the security of Russia. In winning this war, he would have reunited the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches, whose separation in 2019 has always offended him.
Although Putin knows that no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy, there are three big things that have surprised him after his military crossed the border and into Ukraine.
Firstly, it is widely reported that President Putin has been genuinely taken aback by the incompetence of the Russian military to achieve their objective. There have been a number of serious sackings of top military personnel. But he has only himself to blame for when you breed a culture of corruption you should not be surprised when the equipment you have paid heavily to purchase and maintain does not perform as it should. To hear Russian conscripted soldiers (and many of them) talking on TikTok of their supply chain issues and lacking basic things, like fuel, food and water, tells of a deep systemic problem.
Secondly, it is widely reported that President Putin has been surprised at the ferocity with which the Ukrainians are fighting for their land and way of life. He thought he would be welcomed as a ‘messianic’ liberator and has been surprised to find that this has not been the case.
Thirdly, President Putin has been taken aback by the reaction of Germany and its new chancellor Olaf Scholz. Putin's planning was based upon his experience of dealing with Angela Merkel, who was very pro-Russian and his assessment that Germany was so dependent upon Russian gas that, while they might scream and holler, their reaction would be limited. For Germany to deliver five thousand soldier's helmets in defence of Ukraine will go down as one of the stupidest political gestures of the 21st Century as, for Putin, it was the signal that Germany had already raised the white flag of surrender.
Scholz's immediate cancellation of Nord Stream 2 in protest at the attack on Ukraine is not a worry to Putin. He knows he can, at any time, turn off the gas going from the Russian pipelines into Ukraine and through to Germany, Italy and the rest of Europe. Putin also knows that, if these countries want Russian gas in the future, he can insist it will have to come through Nord Stream 2.
It was Scholz's speech to the German Parliament referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as "Vladimir Putin's cold-blooded war", which was the watershed moment for Europe. In a stroke, he ended Germany's extreme caution in dealing with defence matters, traditionally avoiding committing troops to joint operations or indeed sending weapons into situations of active conflict. Instead, Scholz announced an immediate boost to defence spending of €100 billion to bolster Germany's armed forces and committed the country to spend 2% of GDP on defence in future. Finally, he agreed that Germany would provide Ukraine with battlefield weapons immediately, and he released other countries from the territorial restrictions on their German weapons, enabling them to go to Ukraine too.
Scholz's intervention was a complete game-changer. It provided the leadership Europe was looking for. As a result, the US, EU and the UK have piled into imposing sanctions that are far tougher and swifter than Putin could possibly have imagined.
President Putin is a long way from being the victor, and as each day goes on, he is destroying the country he had hoped to win. He is now laying siege to the cities of Ukraine, just as he did in Grozny and Aleppo. We have seen what happens. We know the outcome. We are on the dawn of a catastrophic humanitarian crisis like the world has never seen.
Thermobaric and short-range strategic nuclear weapons are already in Russia's arsenal, ready to be used. Cluster bombs are being dropped by Russia and it will only be time before they drop chemical weapons onto the civilian population as they did in Aleppo. Already Russian troops have shelled Ukraine’s Nuclear Powers station in an attack which is beyond insane!
Please, I urge you to realise what is about to happen before it is too late. There will soon come a point when the people in the US and Europe will no longer be able to tolerate seeing, night after night on their television screens, Ukrainians being massacred. Very soon they will demand their politicians act. (Remember my Kipling poem earlier.)
If anything is going to cause the United Nations (not NATO) to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine it will be the sight of a Grozny or Aleppo in Eastern Europe. I fear that, unless something is done soon, things will quickly get impossibly out of hand.
In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary to the USSR Communist Party, telexed President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile Crises. He wrote
"Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose. Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.
Already the Russian-Ukraine knot is becoming tightly tied. As the West and Russia pull on that knot harder only disaster is foreseeable.
As I am sure you have been able to work out, Russia is in a war it cannot win, as even if it were to occupy Ukraine, which is highly unlikely, it does not have sufficient forces to hold it. And let us remember the quagmire of Afghanistan while it is still fresh in both our memories. Or the fact that Ukrainian Separatist freedom fighters could well bring the fighting to Moscow, or St Petersburg or anywhere in Russia.
Much better for Russia to withdraw now rather than one week, one month, or one year’s time before the forces of the free world unite to forcibly remove Russia from Ukraine, as it removed Sadden Hussain from Kuwait.
I am told your nation seeks to
a) be treated with respect,
b) be recognised as a world power,
c) be more than just Western, instead leading the world in rebuilding, with China, a new tri-partite world order away from the US led international order which has dominated world affairs since 1945.
If these were Russia’s objectives, then the invasion of Ukraine will have badly damaged that ambition, and probably irreparably, for several generations.
And the evidence for the damage to Russia’s standing in world opinion is found in 3rd March 2022 vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution that:
“Russia immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraws all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.
Overwhelmingly, world leaders voted in favour of the resolution and against Russia’s invasion, with 141 countries, out of a total of 193 countries, voting in favour. Only five countries - Belarus, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (more commonly known as North Korea) Eritrea, Syria, and, of course, Russia voted against it. 35 abstained and 12 didn’t vote at all.
But it is perhaps the abstentions that are most telling. China, which would normally have supported Russia, abstained. So did India and Pakistan, as did Armenia, Tajikstan, Kazkhstan, and Kyrgyzstan who are all included in Russia’s sphere of influence, but couldn’t, on this occasion, find their way to support Russia
China’s abstention was perhaps the most gladdening from both our points of view because an intermediary will be needed if a peace settlement is to be negotiated, and they might provide ‘the good officers’ needed. Although, I see the Ukrainians have asked Israel to take on this role.
It is important to note that China also gave security guarantees to Ukraine when it gave up its nuclear weapons. This means that China has an obligation to Ukraine to try and solve this crisis too.
And given the enormous scale of the sanctions which the international community have applied against Russia, and before that pain is fully felt by ordinary Russians, surely it is time to say enough is enough and for Russia to withdraw all its troops and stop the war.
I appreciate the invasion has seen President Putin enjoy a 10% boost in the opinion polls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that 66% of Russian’s blame the War on America, NATO or Ukraine and only 4% think it was Russia’s fault. But that will soon change once the bodies start returning and the prisoners of war start to write home.
The West will hurt for a few years as it re-adjusts its energy policy away from Russian oil and gas, but never again will any Western country allow Russian energy to dictate its foreign policy which, in the long run, will hurt Russia
Likewise, there is going to be an immediate problem with food next year unless the fighting stops soon. Russia and Ukraine together account for 57% of world sunflower oil and 27% of world barley production. Together, they account for 29% of world wheat exports, and Ukraine alone accounts for 17% of world corn exports.
History records that Germany lost the First World War, not because it was losing militarily but because it did not have the men to work the farms to produce the food the nation needed. They were starved to submission.
Unless the Ukrainian farmers get on their land soon - this spring - then food production will be way down. It will not be those who Russia perceives as its enemy who will suffer; the Americans, Europeans or us. We are wealthy countries who can weather this kind of storm. It is the poor who will suffer. One report I read suggested that this war is going to lead to 1 billion people going hungry. Is that the plan – to inflict hunger on the least able to fend for themselves? Surely not, and for what?
Is this what Russia wants to be remembered for? Not just the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932/33 but the World Holodomor of 2022/23?
I appreciate Russia has all the resources it needs to exist on its own, trading with China and a few others, but is that what its people really want? Do they want to live behind a new iron curtain, their reputations smashed?
I, for one, would like to be dining with my Russian friends once again whether it be in London, Paris, Rome or Moscow.
Summary
In my view the peoples of the United Kingdom and the peoples of Russia are friends. We should never be divided. We have no reasons to be enemies. Let us resume our friendships as soon as we can.
The United Kingdom is friends with every nation in Europe, even after Brexit. What is it about Russia which stops us being friends too? Whatever it is we need to fix it fast.
I prepared to accept that President Putin felt Russia had no alternative but to invade Ukraine, but I am sorry to say I don’t agree, nor can I understand it. I think if all the facts were available to the Russian people, they would not agree with him too. Nothing like enough effort was put into mediating a settlement. What I will acknowledge is that there have been mistakes on all sides and we need to learn the lessons fast, not only to stop what is happening now, but to stop any disputes repeating.
It is my perception, and I may be entirely wrong, that arising from Stalin's period in power Russia has inherited a deep sense of insecurity. President Putin, a child of the Stalin era, has inherited that sense of insecurity too and, for primarily personal reasons, he has brought that insecurity once again to the people of Russia without any need, for the West is no threat.
As a result, Russia has, for the last 20 years, been tilting at Western windmills, but it is only on the occasions when its lance strikes the West’s sails that the West has responded. And, if you notice, on every occasion its response has been pathetically weak, until now, the invasion of Ukraine.
There is no basis to the narrative that the West does not appreciate, or respect Russia and its people. It is an argument without merit. However, it is undoubtedly helpful to President Putin to tell the Russian people that we are your country’s enemy, for it helps to keep him in power while he fails to deal with the issues which must be tackled at home.
The bargain between any set of people and their government, whether democratic or totalitarian, is that the people will accept the ‘autocratic’ rule of their government in exchange for security and economic stability. It was the basis upon which governments all around the world locked down their people in the Covid Pandemic. But what then happens to a government when it breaks its side of the bargain? When conscripted sons are sent to fight in a war against fellow Rus and are maimed or killed? When sanctions, the size the world has never seen before, begin to bite at home?
Russia’s relationship with the international community will only improve with a change of leadership. When it happens, how it happens and who the Russian people choose is entirely up to them. We have no interest in how you make your choice. This is a different approach to President Putin’ who has sought to influence our choices.
When the time comes for a new leader, I urge all Russians to find someone to lead them who does not carry the phobias of the past, but someone who understands the West and shares our desire for peace and prosperity.
When I first visited the Eastern Bloc after the Berlin Wall came down, the retort I remember most was “What can I do?” It was the standard response any time I asked about a repair which needed fixing. It was said in recognition that the state was much bigger than any individual. But anyone who has spent the night with a mosquito in their bedroom knows how effective such a little thing can be. In world affairs we are the mosquito. However, we can be an irritant, and in this way be effective in finding peace, even if our only contribution is in preaching peace to others.
Too long Russia has been swinging its ice picks at blocks of ice frozen in the cold war, not realising that the ice melted long ago. I would like to suggest it is time for Russia to put down the ice pick, put the remaining remnants of the ice into two glasses of vodka and we drink to friendship once again.
With goodwill and very best wishes
Charles
Cambridge, UK
10th March 2022