Want to understand the conflict in Ukraine? Compare it to Ireland

What seemed this time last year to be a little local difficulty in Ukraine has metastasised to the point where a peace plan drafted in Paris and Berlin may be all that stands in the way of war between the West and Russia. Over the months, many of those watching, appalled, from the safety of the side-lines, have combed history for precedents and parallels that might aid understanding or offer clues as to what might be done.

Last spring, after Russia snatched Crimea and appeared ready to grab a chunk of eastern Ukraine too, the favoured comparisons were with Nazi Germany’s 1938 annexation of Sudetenland. It was a parallel that seemed all too plausible, given the Kremlin’s statements about the need to protect Russian ‘compatriots’ wherever they might live. The Baltic States, with their sizeable Russian minorities, were not the only ones immediately on edge.

Now, with Moscow threatening to dust off its nuclear warheads, alarming parallels have been drawn with the Cuban missile crisis – those 13 days in October 1962, when John F.