Arming Ukraine (06/02/15)

Peter Brookes cartoon

Roger Boyes writing in The Times makes a strong case for helping Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression and, to be honest, I can't disagree with a word of what he has to say.

Russia has been heavily involved in the east of Ukraine for many months providing know-how, equipment and manpower to the separatist groups - and Russia's fingerprints are all over the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-17 which caused the death of 300 innocent civilian lives.   

So while a political solution would be the best way forward, I suspect that this will only happen by levelling the playing field between Ukraine and Russia. 

Arming Ukraine will stop Putin in his tracks


By Roger Boyes - The Times




Vladimir Putin Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA Novosti/Kremlin/Reuters
Last updated at 12:01AM, February 4 2015

The Russian leader’s expansionist aims are clear. The west must act to help Kiev to protect itself

Slickly turned-out lobbyists have urged me so often not to demonise Vladimir Putin that I reckon Satan himself must be running an account with one of London’s reputation-burnishing PR companies. However hard I try — the man, it must be conceded, loves his black labrador — I can find no redeeming virtue in the Kremlin chief. He is set on a blood-and-soil mission to purify his nation through conquest and annexation of a foreign country. There is a special place in Hell for people like that.

If only his invasion of Ukraine could be convincingly explained away as an act of cynical destabilisation, mischief-making or fear of Nato encirclement, then we could reasonably expect the current east-west confrontation to burn itself out. At some stage, his men would put away their guns and we would find a way of rewarding him, forgive him his sins and forget about Crimea.

There is a pivotal time in every crisis, though, when players realise with a thud that diplomacy has run its course. That moment was reached last week when the separatists he has trained, funded and equipped mounted an attack on the industrial city of Mariupol in southern Ukraine.

Mariupol has been attacked before but the intentions are now quite clear. Strategically, the city is needed to create land corridors through Ukrainian terrritory linking Crimea with the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic. It gives an economically important port to a future Russian-run mini-state. And it is a component part of Putin’s vision of Novorossiya (New Russia), an administrative region that in tsarist days stretched along the Black Sea coast from Transnistria in the west to Mariupol in the east.

Putin really is set on the dismemberment of his neighbour. He is pursuing with force — heavy armour again crossed the border ahead of last week’s attacks — the dream of a Greater Russia, just as the Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic wanted to make a Greater Serbia out of the collapsing Yugoslav republic. The pro-Russian separatists say they are about to mobilise 100,000 men, presumably for a spring offensive against Mariupol and other contested cities. The number is unfeasible and it’s a sure bet that they are simply cover for the Russian reservists who will enter the country and step up the pressure on the Ukrainian government and its already overstretched army.

There is no real deterrent to Putin taking what he wants in the east of Ukraine — unless we provide anti-tank weapons, drones and up-to-the-minute satellite surveillance of the border. The west has used sanctions as an alternative to this kind of military commitment. It is hurting the Russian economy but hasn’t come close yet to changing Putin’s behaviour. For the most part they are an inconvenience. Putin, rather than being humiliated by his exclusion from G8 summits, behaves as if its significance ranks only just ahead of being blackballed by the Blackburn WI’s flower-arranging club. His assumption is that we will give up on sanctions and go back to business as usual, much as we did after the Russian war against Georgia in 2008. That’s the kind of example we have been setting.

When Milosevic was backing separatists in pursuit of Greater Serbia in 1991, the west imposed an arms embargo on all the Yugoslav republics. Fewer weapons, we thought, would mean less fighting. Instead Belgrade used the heavy duty munitions of the former Yugoslav army to batter the emerging and scantily armed states of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Denying them arms actually intensified the violence and made ethnic cleansing feasible.

The time to arm Ukraine — or rather enhance its present stocks with kit that is sophisticated enough to counter the Russian armoury — is now, not in a year’s time. It is delay that raises the stakes. Milosevic did eventually sign up for the Dayton accords but only after Nato reluctantly launched air strikes. Nato will never get sucked into a direct military confrontation with Moscow. Arms however can and should be supplied on a bilateral basis, first by the US, which has enabling legislation in place, and also by those eastern Nato members who still have stocks of Soviet-made weaponry.

This is a call for Barack Obama to make and he should do so quickly. It is no longer just about trying to change Putin’s behaviour, about setting him limits or raising the price of his misbehaviour. He won’t turn up at the negotiating table until he has secured the functioning architecture of his Novorossiya and made a husk out of the sovereign state of Ukraine. Rather, it’s about giving an internationally recognised state the means and added self-confidence to defend its territory against a rapacious neighbour.

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