Mr ‘P’ has now become so prolific and incessant here that he is almost a cottage industry.
He incorrectly asserts that ‘the entirety of Mr Hitchens' theme focusses on claim, opinion, interpretation dressed up as fact. ‘
This simply isn’t the case. I ceaselessly present facts, both historical and contemporary.
And he charges ‘Essentially Mr Hitchens argument is "Any fool can see I'm right"’.
Far from it. It takes quite a clever person to fool himself on such a simple and rather blatant matter.
My argument is to present the facts of an objectively-measurable geographical aggression by an eastward-expanding power into neutral territory bordering a declining and diminished power. I also present the facts of an objectively demonstrable removal of a lawful, legitimate government by unconstitutional means - in defiance, again objectively demonstrable, of that country’s own written constitution.
This document prescribes a system of lawful impeachment for the removal of a President rather than handing over the process to the largest and most vociferous multitude (I hope this term is dispassionate enough for Mr ’P’. See below) which can be assembled.
I also point out that this unconstitutional, and therefore lawless, action overrode the democratically-expressed wishes of Ukraine’s voters in electing, in an undisputed poll, President Yanukovych. I make no claim, for I have no way of knowing, how representative Mr Yanukovych was of his divided nation *as a whole*, before, then or later.
Though I do point out (and elaborate below) that Mr Yanukovych faced a very difficult and contentious decision which would affect many people in his country in many different ways, not all of them good. It is Mr ‘P’ who repeatedly asserts that the multitude spoke for the whole of Ukraine’s people.
I also point out that this process undoubtedly involved severe violence against the stability and order of the state. This is once again objectively shown by the undisputed deaths of at least 20 police officers. The deaths of larger numbers of demonstrators, likewise undisputed (though we have yet to have an investigation into that) provides supporting evidence.
There are also disputes as to who started the violence. Even so, most serious persons accept that legitimate authorities are legally entitled to defend themselves against unconstitutional attempts to put pressure on the government.
This view is not confined to despotisms. Washington DC was placed where it is, and designed as it was, to ensure that the Supreme Court, Congress and President should not be besieged and put under pressure by multitudes. Likewise, the Sessional Orders which prohibit large gatherings in Parliament Square in London, during Parliamentary Sessions, are there to avoid MPs being besieged during law-making by multitudes in a manner they might interpret as threatening.
The presence of a large and hostile multitude close to the seat of legislation and government is a serious matter, as any who have experienced it will know. Some might describe it as encouraging to those who agree with the demonstrators. Some might describe it as discouraging, even intimidating, for those who do not agree with them. Again, I am being careful to take Mr 'P' (and his prefence for me (atleast) to use dispassionate terms into account) in making these points.
For, rather than properly acknowledge these points or grasp their significance, Mr ‘P’ seeks to make our disagreement about Ukraine a matter of language. In evading the question of whether he would support a 'people power' or 'multitude-power' putsch in his own country, he complains about my use of the word ‘mob’ to describe the multitude which appeared in the heart of the Ukrainian capital.
He says ‘ “mob rule” is a pejorative expression. It condemns itself the moment it is uttered, intended so by the utterer.’
He then says: ‘A mob was set loose on the democratically elected government, a mob orchestrated from the watercoolers at the EU by sinister bureaucrats. It's absurd. Wikipedia has it thus.... "The suspension of the association agreement signature initiated a wave of protests that would ultimately overthrow Viktor Yanukovych and his government." And.... "Viktor Yanukovych and his government were removed from their post by parliament after the 2014 Ukrainian revolution in February 2014."'
(I am amused by Mr ‘P’ using Wikipedia, that minefield of contention, as an impartial umpire in matters of judgement. Alas for himself, he also seems to have garnered (From ‘Wrongipedia’?) the idea that Britain was part of a Triple Alliance with Russia and France against Germany in 1914. The fact that Britain *wasn’t* in any such alliance has of course always been the hinge of arguments about why we entered the war anyway. What do they teach them in these schools?).
I’ll leave aside the use of caricature by Mr ‘P’ to misrepresent and so ignore my points about EU aid to NGOs and Civil Society organisations in Ukraine, clearly recorded by the EU’s own websites, and its general long-term efforts to make itself beloved there, by the use of other people’s money . I’ll only say that to attribute to me the formulation ‘a mob orchestrated from the watercoolers at the EU by sinister bureaucrats’ is unserious and unresponsive. Such a formulation would indeed be absurd, had I said it. But I did not. I first quoted a pro-EU writer on the subject, Matthew Omolesky, who said ‘Some might take issue with the rather grandiose claim that Europe cannot endure without Ukraine, but the European Union has long had designs on it. Brussels funnelled some 389 million Euros to Ukraine between 2011 and 2013 alone and distributions were made to a host of civil-society NGOs…
‘...The 2014 protests, touched off by Yanukovych’s rejection of a European Union association deal, constitute the natural and immediate consequence of groundwork undertaken in Brussels, much to the Kremlin’s chagrin’. I then published the EU’s official response, and then produced, with the help of others, substantial evidence of long-term EU spending rather greater than that alluded to in the EU response. But I didn’t say anything like what Mr ‘P’ attributes to me. Those who complain about pejorative language in others should be more careful in their own writings.
Right, then, let’s proceed in the most neutral language I can find, and see if we can establish agreement over that. I have emphasised some points in this narrative:
1: Ukraine declared independence from the USSR in 1990.
2. Ukraine remained economically and culturally close to Russia.
3.Russia made no attempt to compel Ukraine to return to Russian rule
4. Russia has repeatedly made it clear throughout this period , with increasing force and clarity, that it believed Ukraine should stay out of Western European alliances, and that Russia believed it had had an assurance to this effect from the USA at the time of dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.
5. After these warnings were ignored, Russia eventually sought to bring Ukraine into an eastern mirror-image of the EU (See below, item 16 and following)
6. Political dialogue between Ukraine and the EU began in 1994.
7. Ukraine first expressed a desire for associate membership of the EU in 1998
8. In 2002, EU Commissioner Guenter Verheugen said membership was a possibility
9. The then President, Leonid Kuchma responded by saying Ukraine wanted to sign an association agreement by 2003, and would meet all membership requirements by 2011.
10. In November 2005, Commissioner Olli Rehn said the EU was ‘full’ and should avoid overexpansion
11. The ‘Orange Revolution’ of 2004-5 (mistakenly stated to have been in 2007, thanks for correction) accelerated demands from parts of the Ukrainian elite for closer links with the EU.
12. The subsequent collapse of the 'Orange Revolution' coalition weakened this pressure, and several EU states, including Germany, were said to be against commitments to bringing Ukraine into the EU.
13.By 2008, an Association Agreement was said by President Yushchenko to be ‘months away’.
14. But in December 2009 the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said ‘our Ukrainian friends need to do more if they want us to help them more’ and ‘enlargement is not possible in the current situation.’
15. New attempts to reach an Association Agreement were begun under Viktor Yanukovych in March 2012, but were delayed largely thanks to the trial and imprisonment of Yulia Tymoshenko.
16. In December 2012, President Yanukovych was in talks with Russia over a customs union with Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia.
17. On 25 February 2013, the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso said ‘One country cannot at the same time be a member of a customs union and be in a deep common free-trade area with the European Union’.
This is absolutely crucial (and makes it clearer than ever before that the EU is a political power, and one which cannot tolerate any rival interest in what it regards as its territory, or in territories as yet outside its control, to which it now lays claim).
From this point it is clear that, for whatever reason (and the exploration of this reason would be most interesting), the EU has finally set aside its long-held and highly justified doubts and hesitations about Ukraine’s economic, political and governmental readiness to be an Associate of the EU. These doubts are based on Ukraine’s appalling economy, its raging unchecked corruption, its administrative incompetence - and on the politicisation and corruption of its law-enforcement and judicial systems, none of which have been addressed or put right in all the preceding years. It is these doubts among EU members and officials, not Russian opposition, which have until this moment delayed the EU’s moves towards and Association Agreement. The EU has never paid the slightest attention to Russia's views on the matter, from 1990 till now.
It is also clear (from Mr Barroso’s statement) that this is a contest between Moscow and Brussels, that this is a zero-sum game in which one side must lose all and the other must win all. The EU is specifically and explicitly on the record as not being prepared to view Ukraine as neutral, non-aligned or shared territory. No compromise is to be discussed. It (rightly) recognises as political the moves by Moscow to bring Ukraine into a Eurasian customs union, and implicitly recognises as political its own moves to bring Ukraine into EU association. It must be one or the other.
It is my contention that this was the moment at which the process became a severe diplomatic conflict between the two power-blocs, a conflict which those who began it must have known was likely to lead to violence, and possibly even war, if pursued to a decisive conclusion.
Let us be coolly arithmetical here:
Ukraine, having been part of Russia’s empire and sphere of influence, is now free of its empire but not of its influence. Nor is that influence small, insignificant or easily set aside. Ukraine’s economy (especially its advanced weapons factories inherited from the USSR and still integrated with Russia’s defence industry, which are seldom, mentioned in this context, for some reason) is still heavily influenced by Russia. So is its culture, through Russian language and media.
And in Crimea, Ukraine still contains that great anomaly Sevastopol, Russia’s principal warm-water naval port, vital to Russian interests in the Near East. Ukraine is very heavily dependent on subsidised Russian gas, and this is probably the only reason why Sevastopol remains in Russian hands, the allegedly pro-Russian Putin puppet Viktor Yanukovych having used the status of Sevastopol to squeeze a highly advantageous gas-price deal out of Moscow, to the fury and resentment of Vladimir Putin.
This is the background to President Yanukovych’s last-minute decision to back out of the Association Agreement. This Agreement will expose Ukraine’s economy to a hurricane of free market ‘reform’, very likely to destroy a lot of jobs and squeeze agriculture. It will put in doubt some of Ukraine’s most successful and stable remaining industries. It will put in doubt cheap Russian gas. It will put in doubt (because of its military and political implications - the agreement commits both parties to promote a gradual convergence toward the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy and European Defence Agency policies) and the lucrative agreement over Sevastopol.
It will quite possibly cause grave conflict in the medium-term over the ownership of Crimea, already a complex and volatile dispute. It is accompanied by rather small promises of aid, compared to much larger promises of credit from Moscow . Nor is this surprising. The EU is in a serious banking and economic crisis, to which no end is in sight. It has no money even to solve its own problems. Russia is a major oil producer with big cash reserves.
It would therefore be perfectly reasonable for any Ukrainian head of state (especially one then under heavy pressure, as he certainly was, from both Moscow and Brussels, and presumably from Washington DC as well) to hesitate over such an agreement, and to seek instead a compromise between Ukraine’s two suitors, perhaps by seeking from the EU something rather less momentous than the Association Agreement, which would have allowed him to retain some ties with Russia and avoid a confrontation over Sevastopol.
But Mr Yanukovych’s decision hesitate was followed by the appearance of very determined and well-organised multitude in Ukraine’s capital. This was presented by some naïve reporters as an uprising against Ukraine’s corruption and a desire for the (alleged) wonders of EU rule.
I have no doubt that every citizen of Ukraine would like to be rid of the kleptocracy which rules over them,. But the idea that either faction in this battle is wholly clean is absurd beyond measure.
Indeed the untruth of this naïve belief was shown almost immediately by the rapid fading of the star of the West’s pin-up, Yulia Tymoshenko. I think any serious observer must accept that the cause of the multitude, and its uniting purpose, was the Association Agreement. If Mr Yanukovych was corrupt, he was corrupt long before the multitude gathered. And if the multitude’s main concern was corruption in government, then I suspect it ought to be assembled and in full voice, in the heart of Kiev, right now. President Poroshenko is refreshingly unusual among the Ukrainian super-rich, in that he actually made his own fortune. But many of his associates and allies do not, er, have the same distinction.
I think I have demonstrated, in the above, that this is an aggression, and that it took the form of an unconstitutional putsch.
If these things are so, then it seems to me to simply wrong to blame Russia’s President for responding to the aggression (after many years of patient forebearance) with defensive measures, nor to put the blame on him for being the first to step outside the rule of law. You might as well call Britain the aggressor in the Falklands in 1982. I shall return later with some thoughts on the Great War, its outbreak, significance and outcome.