The West Forgets History. Putin Repeats It :Matthew Kaminski
http://online.wsj.com/articles/matthew-kaminski-the-west-forgets-history-putin-repeats-it-1409008065
By outsourcing the Ukraine problem to Germany, the U.S. echoes 19th century mistakes that led to repeated conflicts.
Hapless in response to Vladimir Putin‘s wars, successive American leaders are left puzzling over the Russian’s place in time. “Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century,” said President George W. Bush in August 2008, after Russia’s invasion of Georgia. When the Russian force of “little green men” took Ukraine’s Crimea last February, Secretary of State John Kerry exclaimed, “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.”
Mr. Putin has proved impervious to complaints about his outdated behavior. On Monday morning, Ukraine reported that a column of 10 Russian tanks and a couple of armored vehicles charged over Ukraine’s southeastern border into areas held by Russian rebels. Russian artillery now fire at Ukrainian military positions from inside Ukraine’s territory, NATO said on Friday. Ignoring objections from Kiev, Russia announced its intentions to send a second “humanitarian aid” convoy in a week of military trucks dressed in white, bringing and taking who knows what.
As the military pressure grows on the pro-Western government in Kiev, the Europeans are adding their own. Plainly anxious that these latest escalations risk a replay of 20th century wars, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday turned up in Kiev to push for an accommodation with Moscow. The chancellor pressed the Ukrainians to cease fire and ruled out new EU sanctions against Russia. So Mr. Putin comes into talks Tuesday in Minsk with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko with fresh leverage.
The crisis in Ukraine revives one of the oldest clashes in the heart of Europe—the “bloodlands,” to use Timothy Snyder’s phrase—between autocracy and liberalism. For centuries this region was shaped by “the Polish Question”—what should happen to the difficult, independent-minded people between Russia and Germany. With the end of communism, and EU and NATO membership, Poland was taken off the chessboard. Ukraine is now on it.
Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004 against a fraudulent election and this winter’s overthrow of a corrupt and hated president in Kiev resemble the Polish uprising against Russian rule in the 19th century. When the Poles revolted in 1830, the reactionary Czar Nicholas I, who froze Russian domestic reforms after a brief spell of opening, declared, “Russia or Poland must now perish.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
To rephrase for the Putin age, either he or Ukraine’s young democracy will survive—not both. Pyotr Chaadayev, a Russian writer, witnessed the 1830 uprising and Nicholas’s eventual victory. “Russia is a whole worlds apart—submissive to the will, the arbitrariness, the despotism of one man,” he wrote in 1836. “Contrary to the laws of coexistence, Russia only moves in the direction of her own enslavement, and the enslavement of all neighboring peoples.”
With every Polish crisis up to World War II and into the Cold War, Europe’s realists feared disturbing the balance of power and favored an understanding with autocrats in Moscow and, most famously, Berlin. Commercial interests were a factor.
In his magisterial history of Poland, “God’s Playground,” Norman Davies writes about the leader of the 1863 uprising, who concluded, after a fruitless tour of European capitals to seek help, that the West viewed Russia as “a gold mine for capitalists.” This is the current sanctions debate in the EU.
Mr. Davies writes that the Poles “were a living rebuke to all the myths and legends on which the Russian Empire had been built. Together with the Jews, in whose company they had been incorporated into Russia, they were the advocates of a vibrant democratic culture, and as such were the natural opponents of Autocracy.”
Today’s realists blame NATO’s and the EU’s voluntary spread across Europe for Mr. Putin’s outbursts. But Russia’s autocratic battles against liberalizing influences from abroad predate all of that.
The Soviets moved into Czechoslovakia to snuff out the Prague Spring in 1968. In 1991 the hard-liners around Russian President Boris Yeltsin, led by his deputy Gen. Aleksander Rutskoi, pushed for military action to keep Ukraine’s nearly 50 million Slavs within a reconstituted Soviet Union. Yeltsin rebuffed them and accepted Soviet republic borders as the new international frontiers, likely sparing the U.S.S.R. the bloody fate of Milosevic’s Yugoslavia. Mr. Putin’s long-standing fear and distaste for democracy in neighboring countries, principally Ukraine, unwinds this settlement. Over 2,000 people have died this year in Ukraine.
This is an existential struggle for the current, freely elected and popular president in Kiev too. Mr. Poroshenko has resisted past German-initiated entreaties to stop his recently successful military advance and cut a deal. As he seems to know, nothing short of recovered Ukrainian control over its territory will fly at home. He needs to win this war on the ground. The likeliest result of a premature cease-fire is a festering “frozen conflict,” backlash from hardened national opinion, instability and trouble for years to weaken Ukraine’s democracy and European ambitions. In that case, Mr. Putin wins
Distracted by the Middle East, Washington has outsourced the Ukrainian file to Germany. Whoever thinks that another German-Russian understanding will calm Europe’s bloodlands has a historical tin ear.
Since the Cold War ended, only those fortunate enough to choose their political systems and allies have found peace and stability in Europe. Ukraine wants to join them. Cold War architect George Kennan, so beloved by America’s realists for his opposition to NATO enlargement, once wrote: “Russia can have at its borders only vassals or enemies.” The problem isn’t with the neighbors but with Russia itself. The Kennan rule will hold as long as a tyrant rules in Moscow.
John Kerry’s rejection of Mr. Putin’s 19th century moves can only come with the victory of liberalism over autocracy in Europe’s east. A muddied compromise over Ukraine would be a moral and a strategic calamity for Europe and America.
Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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