Ukraine

Tuesday

Mary Dejevsky

Ten fateful forks in the road to Crimea

Regret suffuses the post mortem on many a conflict, with hindsight recommending alternatives that were far less obvious at the time. Crimea is different. Rarely can the fateful choices — those critical forks in the road — have been so evident as those that have led Russia, Ukraine and the West into this conflict. A different choice at any one of these 10 junctures could have averted immediate danger and indicated a route back to safety: 1. Last summer it became apparent that Russia and the EU were increasingly at loggerheads over Ukraine It was Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Union vs the association agreement on offer from Brussels. As November drew

Monday

Lara Prendergast

The University of Cambridge must choose its donors wisely

Just over three years ago, when I was editor of Varsity, Cambridge’s student newspaper, we ran a story documenting how Dmytro Firtash was using his Cambridge connections to bring libel charges to British courts. Here’s an extract: ‘A billionaire donor to the University of Cambridge has filed a libel lawsuit against a Ukrainian paper, the Kyiv Post, citing his donations to the University as one of the reasons he has chosen to pursue the case through the British courts. Dmytro Firtash, a gas-trading oligarch with strong connections to the President of Ukraine, has donated on a number of occasions to the University to help fund Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, based within

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Venetian secessionists deserve to be punished!

How should the western powers react when part of a friendly nation holds an illegal referendum and votes to secede from the country in which hitherto it was located? Sanctions? Military reprisals? We’d better send the gunships to the watery redoubt of Venice, then, which has just voted overwhelmingly to leave Italy. The Venetians, part of Italy for 150 years, are sick of paying taxes to bail out the indolent and mafia-ridden south of the country and wish to go it alone. The rest of Lombardy may soon follow suit. Rome has refused to recognise the plebiscite, fearing that the entire country may cease to exist. No sense of history,

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

What if the Crimea poll had been legitimate?

Just wondering: what would we be doing now about Crimea if the referendum a week ago had been done nicely? I know it’s not a good time to ask what with protestors storming bases in the east occupied by Ukrainian forces, but it seems pretty fundamental to me. The PM yesterday opined that the poll had been conducted ‘at the barrel of a Kalashnikov’ and was a twentieth century way of doing things (interesting put-down, that). And indeed, there’s no gainsaying that it was done in an inordinate hurry, that the entire exercise was conducted in the presence of about 20,000 troops – Russian supporting, or just Russian, take your

Friday

Ed West

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is jingoistic, angry and oppressive. But it’s nothing like Nazi Germany

I’m conservative, so it’s hard for me not to love Vladimir Putin. His ripped torso, the way the sweat glistens on his pecs, the steely gaze, the cheeky smile. How much does he bench press, I wonder? And of course the main reason why conservatives like me aren’t desperately keen to get stuck into the Ruskis over their occupation of Crimea is because, deep down, we really love Putin’s authoritarian style of nationalist chauvinism. Especially the beating up the gays part, because deep down we’re all secretly gay; or have micropenises. Whichever one would be more embarrassing. ——————————————- A lot of people actually believe this, and that those of us

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Vladimir Putin’s right about one thing: the West doesn’t observe its own rules

Congratulations to Stephen Glover for writing perhaps the only sensible piece about the Crimean crisis. There is a certain force, too, to Putin’s charge that the West believes itself a chosen people to whom the normal moral rules do not apply. We have meddled, frequently with the help of military might, to spread our own creed of liberal evangelism across the world, regardless or not as to whether the people to whose aid we have come actually share our aspirations. It has been a staggeringly unsuccessful policy. Look at Iraq. Look at Syria. Look at Afghanistan. I wonder too about the way the media reports these crusades. A while back

Molly Guinness

Remembering the decimation of Crimea’s Tatars

Crimea’s Tatars are nervous after Russia’s annexation of the territory. The Tatars, Sunni Muslims who account for 12 per cent of Crimea’s population, boycotted Sunday’s referendum worried that the Russians would impose repressive and discriminatory laws on them. Reading Bohdan Nahaylo’s 1980 article, Murder of a Nation*, you can see why. First, Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar nation. ‘In the early hours of 19 May 1944, some 238,000 people were abruptly awoken by units of the Soviet security forces and within minutes herded into cattle trucks. Sealed in without food or water, they were transported several thousand miles eastwards and eventually dispersed in Soviet Central Asia. Denounced before the

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 20 March 2014

Home In the Budget, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the economy was working but the job was far from done. He expected further falls in unemployment and wages rising faster than prices this year. The economy, he suggested, would return this year to its size in 2008. Before the Budget, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, said that as many as 1.9 million working families could receive a tax-free childcare allowance worth up to £2,000 per child. Mr Osborne had announced that the help-to-buy scheme for new homes would be extended until 2020. He also let it be known that a garden city of 15,000 dwellings would

Liam Halligan

Putin is making the West’s Cold Warriors look like fools

William Hague was on rather shaky ground when he argued this week that Moscow has chosen ‘the route to isolation’ by recognising Crimea’s referendum. On the contrary, it is the European Union and the United States who look as if they have seriously overplayed their respective hands in Ukraine. Across Asia, Africa and Latin America, the cry of ‘western hypocrisy’ has been heard much louder than complaints about Vladimir Putin. Even in the UK, mainstream opinion is steadily becoming more critical of western interventionism and our ‘New Cold War’ posturing, despite some pretty one-sided media coverage and much establishment tut-tutting. Independent thought is still viewed with suspicion, and even disgust,

Wednesday

Charles Walker

Russia is not a credible superpower in the 21st century

The West has really got to get its act together in its dealings with Russia. It is simply not credible for us to pretend that we are confronting a threat on the scale posed by the USSR throughout the cold war. Of course, President Putin is dangerous – any charismatic, nationalist strongman with expansionist ambitions and a nuclear arsenal is worth worrying about. But Russia is also Europe’s largest failing state, a country riven by corruption that permeates every aspect of its civil and public life. Its oligarchs have not built their fortunes through honest endeavour. They have plundered their nation’s natural resources aided and abetted by a governing class

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Sir Malcolm Rifkind delivers a stern warning on Ukraine

MPs moved seamlessly today from debating the breeding season of the hare to the situation in Crimea. It’s been quiet recently, but this afternoon the House of Commons chamber hosted one of its better speeches from Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who was bristling with a cold, disapproving fury. This crisis, he told MPs, wasn’t just a crisis for Ukraine, it was a crisis for every European country. And Europe was failing to recognise this, and failing to respond adequately, he argued. ‘For the first time since 1945, a European state has invaded the territory of another European state and has annexed part of its territory. The Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The west has a choice: abandon Ukraine or punish Russia? It should choose the latter.

An astonishing number of useless twits appear to think Russia’s annexation of the Crimea is somehow not Vladimir Putin’s fault. The poor Russia despot – no longer much too strong a term, by the way – is not responsible for his actions. He was provoked! Not simply by the Ukrainians, who should, it is implied, have known better, but by the west. It’s our fault and Putin is simply acting logically and rationally. He has every right to reassert Russia’s ancient prerogatives and if we hadn’t penned him into a corner he wouldn’t have needed to at all. Twaddle of course but the kind of stuff that’s not hard to

Walter Ellis

The BBC’s march to war

Perhaps we are growing war-weary – weary, that is, of the gathering storm of World War One documentaries on the BBC. There have been so many, not just Max Hastings (for) and Niall Ferguson (against), but Jeremy Paxman keeping the home fires burning and the reheated I Was There interviews with veterans of the conflict whom age withered, unlike those who left their corpses to stink in the mud of Flanders. For all that, 37 Days, the corporation’s recent reconstruction of the events leading up to Germany’s invasion of Belgium, was utterly compelling, once again confirming the place of docudrama in the history schedule. Not only was it beautifully realised (Downton

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Slavery continues to this day; and why Russia’s re-emergence as a world power is down to Obama’s apathy

Slavery isn’t over Sir: I was alarmed to read Taki’s piece in this week’s High Life (8 March) which claimed that ‘slavery… has been over since 1865, except in Africa’. The Centre for Social Justice, whose board I chair, last year published its groundbreaking report It Happens Here, exposing the desperate plight of those in modern slavery in the UK. The CSJ’s work revealed exploitation taking place across the country, from young British men enslaved on traveller sites and forced into manual labour, to vulnerable children forced to live as slaves behind closed doors in one of Britain’s thousands of cannabis farms, to young British girls being trafficked into sexual

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 March 2014

Home Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour party, promised that, if elected, his administration would hold a referendum on membership of the European Union only if there was a new transfer of power to Brussels, which he called ‘unlikely’. If Scotland votes for independence, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds might have to move their legal homes to London under European Union law, the BBC reported. BBC Three is to be closed as an on-air channel, to go online only. The future of BBC Four is also in question. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, told the Treasury Select Committee that interest rates could reach

David Blackburn

Our own folly may yet lead us to a second dishonourable Yalta

‘He was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.’ Those words are taken from Officers and Gentlemen, the second volume in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour, his trilogy about the second world war. The words describe the disillusion of the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, as Britain sides with Soviet Russia to defeat Hitler: an alliance with an atheist tyranny to defeat an atheist tyranny, an alliance that led to the betrayal – perhaps necessary – of Eastern Europe at Yalta. The words resonate

Ian Birrell

Crimean notebook: ‘They’ll have to break all my bones to make me a Russian citizen’

Vladimir Putin still swears that there are no Russian troops in Crimea, so their mission is to say as little as possible as they invade this holiday region in their unmarked uniforms and vehicles. It is remarkable how soon you get used to shouting questions at these heavily armed special forces soldiers while they pretend not to be Russians. They tend not to take the bait: the most you’ll get out of them is a curt ‘Nyet’. I wandered up to an officer who seemed to be in charge of seizing a Ukrainian naval base in the old Tartar capital of Bakhchisaray. He wore all black, his face hidden by

Wednesday

Brooks Newmark

Ukraine and Syria expose the West’s lack of appetite for protecting human rights

‘We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.’ So wrote Vladimir Putin in The New York Times in September last year. Last week, he invaded Ukraine. A system of ‘international law’ which gives a man like President Putin the right to decide whether a proposed action is legal or not, is morally bankrupt. Yet that is how the United Nations Security Council functions – and that is why Western democracies should not shrink from taking action even when the Russian veto stands in the way. President Putin’s New York Times piece was about Syria. He was appealing to the American

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Ukraine: Cameron and Merkel continue to focus on ‘de-escalation’

David Cameron and Angela Merkel held a working dinner last night in Hanover ahead of their visit to a digital trade fair today. Naturally, they discussed Ukraine, and Number 10’s readout of the call this morning says ‘they both agreed that the priority is to de-escalate the situation and to get Russia to engage in a contact group as swiftly as possible’. Cameron also spoke to Vladimir Putin yesterday, with the Russian President telling the Prime Minister that ‘Russia did want to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis’ – although presumably in Putin’s mind that doesn’t involve quite the same level of compromise as those words might initially suggest.

Friday

Alex Massie

The clock is ticking for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. He has missed his best chance of victory.

Tick tock. Tick tock. Time is running out in the Ukraine. Time passes and cements the “facts on the ground”. Russia controls the Crimea and, one way or another, we should probably expect the province’s referendum to endorse a return to Moscow Centre. Whether Crimea’s plebiscite can or will be conducted honestly is a different matter but that, in the end, is not the most important issue. Indeed the fate and future of Crimea is, if hardly an irrelevance, a question of secondary importance. It is not the major front in this struggle. Russia’s actions in the Crimea are plainly illegal and unjustified but they were supposed to be the