Could Ukrainians ever trust a Putin peace deal?

Last week at the Buxton International Festival I joined a big audience for an onstage interview with Anna Reid. She’s a writer who specialises in Eastern European history, was once the Economist magazine’s correspondent in Ukraine, and made her name with a brilliant book, Borderland, which was both a portrait, a history and an appreciation of that country long before it entered the western public consciousness. It’s still worth reading today.

But at Buxton she was introducing her latest book, A Nasty Little War: the Western Intervention into the Russian Civil War, which opened the eyes of many in the audience (including me) to an almost forgotten but serious and grisly conflict straddling the end of the first world war. The Allies, led by Britain and France and including the United States, tried to snuff out Lenin’s Marxist ascendency. The adventure was a military disaster (the White Russian forces, which we supported, being incapable of seizing control) and a political embarrassment.

This is perhaps why I (and perhaps you?) had never heard of this war.