Same But Different
David Aaronovitch writing in The Times uses various historical references to back up his argument that there is a valid comparison to be made between Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler, but he comes down to the same conclusion at the end - Prince Charles is as entitled to his view as anyone else.
And the Russian President is certainly in no position to lecture the UK anyone else about the influence of unelected figures in high places, as I said in my post the other day about princes and oligarchs.
Charles is right about Putin. So let him speak
By David Aaronovitch - The Times
The Russian leader has justified his takeover of Crimea with the same arguments that Hitler used about Poland
I was obliged to the BBC royal correspondent for pointing out yesterday what no one else had noticed about the Prince of Wales’s remarks about Vladimir Putin. Which is that, since His Royal Highness was “privately conversing” in public in Nova Scotia, then he was, technically, speaking as Canada’s next head of state, not ours. However, the fact that it was all thus none of our business abated the British interest in his remarks not one whit. Or mine.
To keep this simple let’s restrict ourselves to two questions. Was the prince right in making a comparison between Mr Putin and the late Führer? And whether right or not, should he have spoken as he did?
Vladimir Putin is not Hitler. He doesn’t shout, he’s not a vegetarian, he doesn’t have a tooth-brush moustache, he doesn’t think Jews are vermin and he has shown no liking for Wagner. These are important differences; some more than others. Not only that, but Mr Putin is president of a country that suffered dreadfully at the hands of the Nazis (as, indeed, did Ukraine). So any comparison must be carefully argued.
But what I took the prince to mean was that in the recent matter of Ukraine, there were clear parallels between Mr Putin’s approach to the people and territory of his much weaker neighbours and that taken by the German dictator in the years and days before the Second World War.
Hitler’s pretexts for the annexation of the Czech Sudetenland in 1938 and the invasion of Poland in 1939 were similar. In the first instance he appealed to an idea of national grievance. A natural order had been overturned. History cut this nation, this splendid nation, a raw deal and took away from us what was rightfully ours.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler made a speech announcing war with Poland, which began with a long prologue of justification concerning the Free City of Danzig, a city with a large majority of Germans and a Nazi government, and the “corridor” of Polish land that separated it from the Reich. “Danzig was and is a German city! The corridor was German and is German! These regions owe their cultural development exclusively to the German Volk . . . Danzig was torn from us.”
On March 18 this year Mr Putin announced the annexation of Crimea to a selected audience at the Kremlin. In a speech punctuated by standing ovations and TV cutaways to women crying with joy, he began by telling them: “Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia. This firm conviction is based on truth and justice and was passed from generation to generation, over time, despite all the dramatic changes our country went through during the entire 20th century.”
It was the Treaty of Versailles that robbed Germany of the corridor and divided its Volk. It was the post-1989 chaos that finally deprived Russia of Crimea. “Millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics,” said the Russian president, “while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders.”
In 1938 and 1939 that claim was made in Germany. The bad decision had left our ethnic brothers and sisters on the wrong side of questionable borders, where they were being mistreated by other nationalities. In Poland “the German minorities living here were treated in the vilest manner imaginable.” Just as Mr Putin was to claim, so Hitler said that “as always, I sought to bring about a change by peaceful means, by offering proposals to remedy this situation, which had become unbearable. My proposals were met with augmented terror increasing pressure on ethnic Germans in these regions.”
In Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine, said Mr Putin, “time and time again attempts were made to deprive Russians of their historical memory, even of their language and to subject them to forced assimilation.”
Unsurprisingly, the citizens of Crimea “turned to Russia for help in defending their rights and lives, in preventing the events that were unfolding and are still underway in Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkov and other Ukrainian cities”.
Help was forthcoming because “no honourable great power could calmly tolerate such a state of affairs for long”, as Hitler put it. Or, as Mr Putin said: “Naturally, we could not leave this plea unheeded; we could not abandon Crimea and its residents in distress. This would have been betrayal on our part.”
Mr Putin, like the German leader, was helped in creating this impression of Ukrainian anti-Russian violence by a media both supine and mendacious. Remarkably, in both cases footage of problems or atrocities was effectively faked. In the past week the TV channel Russia 1 has been exposed for using pictures from the Caucasus and pretending they represented an atrocity in Ukraine. An appeal to nationalism is used to suppress dissent, most of which is characterised by Mr Putin and his tame journalists as alien.
To cap it all, a fake legitimacy has been conferred on the land-grab by a rigged plebiscite in which no opposition has been brooked.
So, item one, was Prince Charles correct? Yes. Item two, should he have said it?
To me the answer to the second question depends on the first. Some people take the view that anyone associated with the monarch should, in effect, have their voice boxes removed and replaced by a machine that asks “What do you do?” Their sense must be that the constitution is more precarious than I think it is. I am not so worried, and would like to see the future head of state saying things he thinks are true and that are defensible. Like Nick Clegg, my position by default is that freedom of expression should apply to everyone unless there is a spectacularly good reason why it shouldn’t.
This even applies to areas where I disagree with the prince, such as some of his more traditionalist views on education and his absurd championing of homeopathy. But where he speaks the truth about how a large country seeks to bully its neighbours, I think it would be peculiar to try to insist that he may not even have a Canadian mutter about it.
Mr Putin can afford to laugh about it. He is, in effect, both executive and legislator. He is his own head of state. He has had the kind of power in Russia for nearly two decades that no British monarch has had since Charles I. The future King Charles III has no power, except to speak. I’d let him have that.
The Russian leader has justified his takeover of Crimea with the same arguments that Hitler used about Poland
I was obliged to the BBC royal correspondent for pointing out yesterday what no one else had noticed about the Prince of Wales’s remarks about Vladimir Putin. Which is that, since His Royal Highness was “privately conversing” in public in Nova Scotia, then he was, technically, speaking as Canada’s next head of state, not ours. However, the fact that it was all thus none of our business abated the British interest in his remarks not one whit. Or mine.
To keep this simple let’s restrict ourselves to two questions. Was the prince right in making a comparison between Mr Putin and the late Führer? And whether right or not, should he have spoken as he did?
Vladimir Putin is not Hitler. He doesn’t shout, he’s not a vegetarian, he doesn’t have a tooth-brush moustache, he doesn’t think Jews are vermin and he has shown no liking for Wagner. These are important differences; some more than others. Not only that, but Mr Putin is president of a country that suffered dreadfully at the hands of the Nazis (as, indeed, did Ukraine). So any comparison must be carefully argued.
But what I took the prince to mean was that in the recent matter of Ukraine, there were clear parallels between Mr Putin’s approach to the people and territory of his much weaker neighbours and that taken by the German dictator in the years and days before the Second World War.
Hitler’s pretexts for the annexation of the Czech Sudetenland in 1938 and the invasion of Poland in 1939 were similar. In the first instance he appealed to an idea of national grievance. A natural order had been overturned. History cut this nation, this splendid nation, a raw deal and took away from us what was rightfully ours.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler made a speech announcing war with Poland, which began with a long prologue of justification concerning the Free City of Danzig, a city with a large majority of Germans and a Nazi government, and the “corridor” of Polish land that separated it from the Reich. “Danzig was and is a German city! The corridor was German and is German! These regions owe their cultural development exclusively to the German Volk . . . Danzig was torn from us.”
On March 18 this year Mr Putin announced the annexation of Crimea to a selected audience at the Kremlin. In a speech punctuated by standing ovations and TV cutaways to women crying with joy, he began by telling them: “Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia. This firm conviction is based on truth and justice and was passed from generation to generation, over time, despite all the dramatic changes our country went through during the entire 20th century.”
It was the Treaty of Versailles that robbed Germany of the corridor and divided its Volk. It was the post-1989 chaos that finally deprived Russia of Crimea. “Millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics,” said the Russian president, “while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders.”
In 1938 and 1939 that claim was made in Germany. The bad decision had left our ethnic brothers and sisters on the wrong side of questionable borders, where they were being mistreated by other nationalities. In Poland “the German minorities living here were treated in the vilest manner imaginable.” Just as Mr Putin was to claim, so Hitler said that “as always, I sought to bring about a change by peaceful means, by offering proposals to remedy this situation, which had become unbearable. My proposals were met with augmented terror increasing pressure on ethnic Germans in these regions.”
In Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine, said Mr Putin, “time and time again attempts were made to deprive Russians of their historical memory, even of their language and to subject them to forced assimilation.”
Unsurprisingly, the citizens of Crimea “turned to Russia for help in defending their rights and lives, in preventing the events that were unfolding and are still underway in Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkov and other Ukrainian cities”.
Help was forthcoming because “no honourable great power could calmly tolerate such a state of affairs for long”, as Hitler put it. Or, as Mr Putin said: “Naturally, we could not leave this plea unheeded; we could not abandon Crimea and its residents in distress. This would have been betrayal on our part.”
Mr Putin, like the German leader, was helped in creating this impression of Ukrainian anti-Russian violence by a media both supine and mendacious. Remarkably, in both cases footage of problems or atrocities was effectively faked. In the past week the TV channel Russia 1 has been exposed for using pictures from the Caucasus and pretending they represented an atrocity in Ukraine. An appeal to nationalism is used to suppress dissent, most of which is characterised by Mr Putin and his tame journalists as alien.
To cap it all, a fake legitimacy has been conferred on the land-grab by a rigged plebiscite in which no opposition has been brooked.
So, item one, was Prince Charles correct? Yes. Item two, should he have said it?
To me the answer to the second question depends on the first. Some people take the view that anyone associated with the monarch should, in effect, have their voice boxes removed and replaced by a machine that asks “What do you do?” Their sense must be that the constitution is more precarious than I think it is. I am not so worried, and would like to see the future head of state saying things he thinks are true and that are defensible. Like Nick Clegg, my position by default is that freedom of expression should apply to everyone unless there is a spectacularly good reason why it shouldn’t.
This even applies to areas where I disagree with the prince, such as some of his more traditionalist views on education and his absurd championing of homeopathy. But where he speaks the truth about how a large country seeks to bully its neighbours, I think it would be peculiar to try to insist that he may not even have a Canadian mutter about it.
Mr Putin can afford to laugh about it. He is, in effect, both executive and legislator. He is his own head of state. He has had the kind of power in Russia for nearly two decades that no British monarch has had since Charles I. The future King Charles III has no power, except to speak. I’d let him have that.
Princes and Oligarchs (22 May 2014)
Prince Charles has caused a political rumpus by comparing Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler and while there's no suggestion that the Russian President is a fascist, there is a clear similarity in a highly militarised country acting on the basis that it is perfectly reasonable to push its neighbours around, often through the use of force and on the pretext that Russian speaking citizens in these neighbouring countries are under some kind of existential threat.
Which is nonsense, of course, unless you believe that Russia has some kind of ongoing right to interfere in the internal affairs of countries like Ukraine just because they were once treated as puppet states of the former Soviet Union.
Which is nonsense, of course, unless you believe that Russia has some kind of ongoing right to interfere in the internal affairs of countries like Ukraine just because they were once treated as puppet states of the former Soviet Union.
I heard the UKIP leader Nigel Farage say on the radio the other day that you could argue that Russia was being provoked or 'poked with a stick' by the West which is a bit rich coming from someone who has made a political career by complaining about the European Union and its wholly peaceful involvement in the UK's affairs.
Now I'm no fan of Prince Charles, but on the issue of Russian expansionism it seems to me he has a point and while he's not an elected politician with a mandate to speak on anyone's behalf - nor are the Russian oligarchs who keep President Putin in power.
Now as an American I wasn't very surprised to find that Anne Applebaum is critical of the Soviet Union and its 21st century successor in shape of the Russian Federation, but then I delved a bit deeper and found that Anne Applebaum became a Polish citizen in 2013 and is married to the Poland's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Radoslaw Sikorski with whom she has two children.
Now as an American I wasn't very surprised to find that Anne Applebaum is critical of the Soviet Union and its 21st century successor in shape of the Russian Federation, but then I delved a bit deeper and found that Anne Applebaum became a Polish citizen in 2013 and is married to the Poland's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Radoslaw Sikorski with whom she has two children.
Unchain Ukraine (23 February 2014)
Here's an interesting take on the momentous events in Ukraine by Anne Applebaum who is a American writer and historian apparently with a particular interest in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
So I think that Anne Applebaum probably has an excellent perspective on what's happening in Ukraine because she now lives in a country which managed to shake itself free of the Soviet Union without falling into the clutches of of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation.
I thought to myself after reading the article that if I didn't live in Scotland, would I rather live in Poland or Russia?
But I didn't have to think for long because there's no contest really - Poland and the European Union would win out every time and that's what the people of Ukraine are fighting for - their freedom.
The pictures from Kiev don't tell the whole story
The conflict in Ukraine is, at heart, about politics – not an ethnic, geographical or linguistic dispute – and nor is it confined to Kiev
Fanning the flames: anti-government protesters clashing with police in Independence Square in Kiev early Photo: Getty Images
By Anne Applebaum
Yes, the photographs from Kiev this week were uncanny, even “apocalyptic”. The orange sky, the burning buses, the blood on the barricades did indeed create scenes which looked like a Second World War movie. They made the city seem foreign, exotic, unreal – which is precisely why you should be wary of them.
Certainly there were quite a few things that the pictures didn’t show. The rest of Kiev, for example: it was far from business as usual in the Ukrainian capital this week, but neither was the entire city a war zone. The fighting was concentrated in a few places, and the rest of Kiev looked no different from any other European city.
The rest of the country wasn’t in the pictures either. In the city of Lutsk, in Western Ukraine, police not only refused to fight anti-government demonstrators, they joined them in demanding the resignation of the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych.
In truth, large parts of the country are already run by people who bitterly oppose Yanukovych and will happily say so quite loudly. Even if Kiev were permanently cleared of government opponents, the government’s problems would not be over. Disagreement is spread far beyond the capital.
More importantly, the pictures didn’t explain the motives of those who are taking part in these scenes. Nor did they explain why others, including many who were nowhere to be seen, went out of their way to create this kind of havoc.
This latest round of violence began, after all, with a surprise attack. On Monday, negotiations to alter the constitution and limit the powers of the president seemed to be progressing. Some demonstrators had even agreed to withdraw from government buildings that their protest camps had been blocking for many weeks.
But on Tuesday, the parliament, which is controlled by the president, abruptly blocked the reform. At the same time, police launched a violent attack on the remaining protesters, who had spent weeks preparing for just such an eventuality. To protect themselves, they set fire to the barricades which had surrounded them. Those flames made the Kiev scenes appear so dramatic.
The riot police did not act alone. In addition to the men in uniform, the Ukrainian government also employs plain-clothes thugs who periodically show up and wreak mayhem. In the past few weeks, groups of unidentified men – death squads – have grabbed activists off the street, beaten them or tortured them, cut off their ears, and left them in the woods for dead.
On Tuesday, they stopped the taxi of a well-known journalist, pulled him out and shot him. This wasn’t “crowd control”. Nor was this a legitimate response to troublesome demonstrators or an accident caused by circumstances. This was a planned murder.
When violence is deliberately provocative, it is always important to ask why – and in whose interests? Some of this state-organised thuggery was, of course, intended to scare people, to keep them away from the barricades and prevent them from joining the protests. But it was also intended to inflame people: violence can make any situation spin out of control.
To some extent, the attempt to make people very, very angry has succeeded. There were no violent protesters in November, when the unrest began: the original demonstrators were mostly young people profoundly disappointed by Yanukovych’s last-minute decision not to sign a trade treaty with Europe, and to join a Russian-led Customs’ Union instead.
There was no violence on New Year’s Eve either, when many tens of thousands of Ukrainians came to central Kiev to hear speeches, wave the European flag, and sing the national anthem.
But since then, the government’s opponents have been provoked, threatened and teased by a president who awarded himself dictatorial powers, then rescinded some of them, who has agreed several times to make big changes and then stopped short.
Now he has once again reversed: after two days of unexpectedly terrifying violence – and with heavy encouragement from three European foreign ministers and the threat of personal EU sanctions – he has agreed to bring back the old constitution, to hold early elections, and not to press charges against anyone.
It is possible that the opposition will still be reluctant to go home. After many months, Ukraine’s peaceful protest movement has developed into a much different, angrier and more volatile crowd, one which will indeed tear up paving stones and throw them at police who are spraying them with water cannons, or will capture police guns and ammunition and begin to use those as well.
And this is precisely the transformation that some wanted. Photographs of such violence certainly help the cause of the Russian parliamentarian who has just declared that he and his colleagues are “prepared to give all the necessary assistance should the fraternal Ukrainian people ask for it”. Since “fraternal assistance” was the term used to describe the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, or Afghanistan in 1979, this was clearly understood as a threat of military intervention.
Violence also helps the cause of those who want to describe all of the demonstrations as a “coup d’etat” orchestrated by “fascists” or “far-Right” extremists. It is just as useful for those who still want to organise an “anti-terrorist operation” and carry out martial law.
The chief of the Ukrainian security agency called for precisely such an “anti-terrorist operation” this week, and interior ministry troops were being prepared. Yanukovych has, for the moment, abandoned that plan: after signing the agreement negotiated with the opposition and the EU yesterday, riot police once again pulled back from the central square and the army is presumably back in its barracks.
But if Yanukovych wants to reverse himself again, there is still time.
Finally, the photographs of violent struggle and burning buses are misleading because they mask what is, in fact, a legitimate argument about the future of Ukraine.
Appearances to the contrary, the conflict we are witnessing is not an atavistic, ethno-linguistic struggle between Russians and Ukrainians, or some kind of tussle between street thugs and police. There are no ancient ethnic rivalries at stake.
It is not even clear that the Ukrainian political struggle is really just a geographic dispute, as it is so often characterised, between the more “European” western half of the country and the more “Russian” East.
On the contrary, this is a political conflict, and one which is not that hard to understand. On the one side are Ukrainians (both Russian and Ukrainian-speaking) who want to live in a “European” democracy with human rights and rule of law, one which is genuinely integrated with the European Union and the rest of the world. The supporters of this “European” option include students, pacifists, gay and environmental activists, as well as Right-wing nationalists and people motivated by memories of the terrible crimes that Stalin carried out in Ukraine 80 years ago.
On the other side are Ukrainians (also both Russian and Ukrainian-speaking) who support an undemocratic, oligarchic regime which is politically and economically dependent on Russia, more cut off from the European Union, and affiliated instead with the customs union controlled from Moscow.
Some of this regime’s supporters are the tiny elite who have made such massive profits from Ukrainian corruption, and who have famously purchased some of London’s most expensive homes (and, if rumours are correct, may have rapidly taken up residence in them this week).
Others without such wealth may fear the violent extremists they have seen on the television news, and the forces of general disorder. Still others may fear that even a trade agreement with Europe would entail deep reforms and economic changes, threatening their jobs.
Either way, this is not a fight over which language to speak or even over who controls Kiev’s main square. Historical allegiances are not an issue, either. Though both get bandied about, neither the word “fascist” nor the word “communist” is correctly applied to either side.
On the contrary, the fighting on the street this week was the latest manifestation of a deep national disagreement over the nature of the Ukrainian state, the shape of Ukraine’s economy, the status of the legal system, the country’s membership of international organisations. This is a legitimate political argument, and ultimately it can only have a political solution. And, in the end, this is why you should treat those dramatic photographs with caution.
This is not a war, or even a conflict which either side can win with weapons. It will have to be solved through negotiations, elections, political debate; by civic organisations, political parties and political leaders, both charismatic and otherwise; with the participation of other European states and Ukraine’s other neighbours.
The thugs, riot police and men bearing arms may be part of the problem right now, but in the very long term, they won’t bring about a solution.
Anne Applebaum is a writer and historian of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Her latest book 'Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe’ (Penguin) is available to order from Telegraph Books at £9.99 + £1.10 p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
The pictures from Kiev don't tell the whole story
The conflict in Ukraine is, at heart, about politics – not an ethnic, geographical or linguistic dispute – and nor is it confined to Kiev
Fanning the flames: anti-government protesters clashing with police in Independence Square in Kiev early Photo: Getty Images
By Anne Applebaum
Yes, the photographs from Kiev this week were uncanny, even “apocalyptic”. The orange sky, the burning buses, the blood on the barricades did indeed create scenes which looked like a Second World War movie. They made the city seem foreign, exotic, unreal – which is precisely why you should be wary of them.
Certainly there were quite a few things that the pictures didn’t show. The rest of Kiev, for example: it was far from business as usual in the Ukrainian capital this week, but neither was the entire city a war zone. The fighting was concentrated in a few places, and the rest of Kiev looked no different from any other European city.
The rest of the country wasn’t in the pictures either. In the city of Lutsk, in Western Ukraine, police not only refused to fight anti-government demonstrators, they joined them in demanding the resignation of the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych.
In truth, large parts of the country are already run by people who bitterly oppose Yanukovych and will happily say so quite loudly. Even if Kiev were permanently cleared of government opponents, the government’s problems would not be over. Disagreement is spread far beyond the capital.
More importantly, the pictures didn’t explain the motives of those who are taking part in these scenes. Nor did they explain why others, including many who were nowhere to be seen, went out of their way to create this kind of havoc.
This latest round of violence began, after all, with a surprise attack. On Monday, negotiations to alter the constitution and limit the powers of the president seemed to be progressing. Some demonstrators had even agreed to withdraw from government buildings that their protest camps had been blocking for many weeks.
But on Tuesday, the parliament, which is controlled by the president, abruptly blocked the reform. At the same time, police launched a violent attack on the remaining protesters, who had spent weeks preparing for just such an eventuality. To protect themselves, they set fire to the barricades which had surrounded them. Those flames made the Kiev scenes appear so dramatic.
The riot police did not act alone. In addition to the men in uniform, the Ukrainian government also employs plain-clothes thugs who periodically show up and wreak mayhem. In the past few weeks, groups of unidentified men – death squads – have grabbed activists off the street, beaten them or tortured them, cut off their ears, and left them in the woods for dead.
On Tuesday, they stopped the taxi of a well-known journalist, pulled him out and shot him. This wasn’t “crowd control”. Nor was this a legitimate response to troublesome demonstrators or an accident caused by circumstances. This was a planned murder.
When violence is deliberately provocative, it is always important to ask why – and in whose interests? Some of this state-organised thuggery was, of course, intended to scare people, to keep them away from the barricades and prevent them from joining the protests. But it was also intended to inflame people: violence can make any situation spin out of control.
To some extent, the attempt to make people very, very angry has succeeded. There were no violent protesters in November, when the unrest began: the original demonstrators were mostly young people profoundly disappointed by Yanukovych’s last-minute decision not to sign a trade treaty with Europe, and to join a Russian-led Customs’ Union instead.
There was no violence on New Year’s Eve either, when many tens of thousands of Ukrainians came to central Kiev to hear speeches, wave the European flag, and sing the national anthem.
But since then, the government’s opponents have been provoked, threatened and teased by a president who awarded himself dictatorial powers, then rescinded some of them, who has agreed several times to make big changes and then stopped short.
Now he has once again reversed: after two days of unexpectedly terrifying violence – and with heavy encouragement from three European foreign ministers and the threat of personal EU sanctions – he has agreed to bring back the old constitution, to hold early elections, and not to press charges against anyone.
It is possible that the opposition will still be reluctant to go home. After many months, Ukraine’s peaceful protest movement has developed into a much different, angrier and more volatile crowd, one which will indeed tear up paving stones and throw them at police who are spraying them with water cannons, or will capture police guns and ammunition and begin to use those as well.
And this is precisely the transformation that some wanted. Photographs of such violence certainly help the cause of the Russian parliamentarian who has just declared that he and his colleagues are “prepared to give all the necessary assistance should the fraternal Ukrainian people ask for it”. Since “fraternal assistance” was the term used to describe the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, or Afghanistan in 1979, this was clearly understood as a threat of military intervention.
Violence also helps the cause of those who want to describe all of the demonstrations as a “coup d’etat” orchestrated by “fascists” or “far-Right” extremists. It is just as useful for those who still want to organise an “anti-terrorist operation” and carry out martial law.
The chief of the Ukrainian security agency called for precisely such an “anti-terrorist operation” this week, and interior ministry troops were being prepared. Yanukovych has, for the moment, abandoned that plan: after signing the agreement negotiated with the opposition and the EU yesterday, riot police once again pulled back from the central square and the army is presumably back in its barracks.
But if Yanukovych wants to reverse himself again, there is still time.
Finally, the photographs of violent struggle and burning buses are misleading because they mask what is, in fact, a legitimate argument about the future of Ukraine.
Appearances to the contrary, the conflict we are witnessing is not an atavistic, ethno-linguistic struggle between Russians and Ukrainians, or some kind of tussle between street thugs and police. There are no ancient ethnic rivalries at stake.
It is not even clear that the Ukrainian political struggle is really just a geographic dispute, as it is so often characterised, between the more “European” western half of the country and the more “Russian” East.
On the contrary, this is a political conflict, and one which is not that hard to understand. On the one side are Ukrainians (both Russian and Ukrainian-speaking) who want to live in a “European” democracy with human rights and rule of law, one which is genuinely integrated with the European Union and the rest of the world. The supporters of this “European” option include students, pacifists, gay and environmental activists, as well as Right-wing nationalists and people motivated by memories of the terrible crimes that Stalin carried out in Ukraine 80 years ago.
On the other side are Ukrainians (also both Russian and Ukrainian-speaking) who support an undemocratic, oligarchic regime which is politically and economically dependent on Russia, more cut off from the European Union, and affiliated instead with the customs union controlled from Moscow.
Some of this regime’s supporters are the tiny elite who have made such massive profits from Ukrainian corruption, and who have famously purchased some of London’s most expensive homes (and, if rumours are correct, may have rapidly taken up residence in them this week).
Others without such wealth may fear the violent extremists they have seen on the television news, and the forces of general disorder. Still others may fear that even a trade agreement with Europe would entail deep reforms and economic changes, threatening their jobs.
Either way, this is not a fight over which language to speak or even over who controls Kiev’s main square. Historical allegiances are not an issue, either. Though both get bandied about, neither the word “fascist” nor the word “communist” is correctly applied to either side.
On the contrary, the fighting on the street this week was the latest manifestation of a deep national disagreement over the nature of the Ukrainian state, the shape of Ukraine’s economy, the status of the legal system, the country’s membership of international organisations. This is a legitimate political argument, and ultimately it can only have a political solution. And, in the end, this is why you should treat those dramatic photographs with caution.
This is not a war, or even a conflict which either side can win with weapons. It will have to be solved through negotiations, elections, political debate; by civic organisations, political parties and political leaders, both charismatic and otherwise; with the participation of other European states and Ukraine’s other neighbours.
The thugs, riot police and men bearing arms may be part of the problem right now, but in the very long term, they won’t bring about a solution.
Anne Applebaum is a writer and historian of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Her latest book 'Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe’ (Penguin) is available to order from Telegraph Books at £9.99 + £1.10 p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
Here's an interesting take on the momentous events in Ukraine by Anne Applebaum who is a American writer and historian apparently with a particular interest in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
So I think that Anne Applebaum probably has an excellent perspective on what's happening in Ukraine because she now lives in a country which managed to shake itself free of the Soviet Union without falling into the clutches of of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation.
I thought to myself after reading the article that if I didn't live in Scotland, would I rather live in Poland or Russia?
But I didn't have to think for long because there's no contest really - Poland and the European Union would win out every time and that's what the people of Ukraine are fighting for - their freedom.
The pictures from Kiev don't tell the whole story
The conflict in Ukraine is, at heart, about politics – not an ethnic, geographical or linguistic dispute – and nor is it confined to Kiev
Fanning the flames: anti-government protesters clashing with police in Independence Square in Kiev early Photo: Getty Images
By Anne Applebaum
Yes, the photographs from Kiev this week were uncanny, even “apocalyptic”. The orange sky, the burning buses, the blood on the barricades did indeed create scenes which looked like a Second World War movie. They made the city seem foreign, exotic, unreal – which is precisely why you should be wary of them.
Certainly there were quite a few things that the pictures didn’t show. The rest of Kiev, for example: it was far from business as usual in the Ukrainian capital this week, but neither was the entire city a war zone. The fighting was concentrated in a few places, and the rest of Kiev looked no different from any other European city.
The rest of the country wasn’t in the pictures either. In the city of Lutsk, in Western Ukraine, police not only refused to fight anti-government demonstrators, they joined them in demanding the resignation of the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych.
In truth, large parts of the country are already run by people who bitterly oppose Yanukovych and will happily say so quite loudly. Even if Kiev were permanently cleared of government opponents, the government’s problems would not be over. Disagreement is spread far beyond the capital.
More importantly, the pictures didn’t explain the motives of those who are taking part in these scenes. Nor did they explain why others, including many who were nowhere to be seen, went out of their way to create this kind of havoc.
This latest round of violence began, after all, with a surprise attack. On Monday, negotiations to alter the constitution and limit the powers of the president seemed to be progressing. Some demonstrators had even agreed to withdraw from government buildings that their protest camps had been blocking for many weeks.
But on Tuesday, the parliament, which is controlled by the president, abruptly blocked the reform. At the same time, police launched a violent attack on the remaining protesters, who had spent weeks preparing for just such an eventuality. To protect themselves, they set fire to the barricades which had surrounded them. Those flames made the Kiev scenes appear so dramatic.
The riot police did not act alone. In addition to the men in uniform, the Ukrainian government also employs plain-clothes thugs who periodically show up and wreak mayhem. In the past few weeks, groups of unidentified men – death squads – have grabbed activists off the street, beaten them or tortured them, cut off their ears, and left them in the woods for dead.
On Tuesday, they stopped the taxi of a well-known journalist, pulled him out and shot him. This wasn’t “crowd control”. Nor was this a legitimate response to troublesome demonstrators or an accident caused by circumstances. This was a planned murder.
When violence is deliberately provocative, it is always important to ask why – and in whose interests? Some of this state-organised thuggery was, of course, intended to scare people, to keep them away from the barricades and prevent them from joining the protests. But it was also intended to inflame people: violence can make any situation spin out of control.
To some extent, the attempt to make people very, very angry has succeeded. There were no violent protesters in November, when the unrest began: the original demonstrators were mostly young people profoundly disappointed by Yanukovych’s last-minute decision not to sign a trade treaty with Europe, and to join a Russian-led Customs’ Union instead.
There was no violence on New Year’s Eve either, when many tens of thousands of Ukrainians came to central Kiev to hear speeches, wave the European flag, and sing the national anthem.
But since then, the government’s opponents have been provoked, threatened and teased by a president who awarded himself dictatorial powers, then rescinded some of them, who has agreed several times to make big changes and then stopped short.
Now he has once again reversed: after two days of unexpectedly terrifying violence – and with heavy encouragement from three European foreign ministers and the threat of personal EU sanctions – he has agreed to bring back the old constitution, to hold early elections, and not to press charges against anyone.
It is possible that the opposition will still be reluctant to go home. After many months, Ukraine’s peaceful protest movement has developed into a much different, angrier and more volatile crowd, one which will indeed tear up paving stones and throw them at police who are spraying them with water cannons, or will capture police guns and ammunition and begin to use those as well.
And this is precisely the transformation that some wanted. Photographs of such violence certainly help the cause of the Russian parliamentarian who has just declared that he and his colleagues are “prepared to give all the necessary assistance should the fraternal Ukrainian people ask for it”. Since “fraternal assistance” was the term used to describe the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, or Afghanistan in 1979, this was clearly understood as a threat of military intervention.
Violence also helps the cause of those who want to describe all of the demonstrations as a “coup d’etat” orchestrated by “fascists” or “far-Right” extremists. It is just as useful for those who still want to organise an “anti-terrorist operation” and carry out martial law.
The chief of the Ukrainian security agency called for precisely such an “anti-terrorist operation” this week, and interior ministry troops were being prepared. Yanukovych has, for the moment, abandoned that plan: after signing the agreement negotiated with the opposition and the EU yesterday, riot police once again pulled back from the central square and the army is presumably back in its barracks.
But if Yanukovych wants to reverse himself again, there is still time.
Finally, the photographs of violent struggle and burning buses are misleading because they mask what is, in fact, a legitimate argument about the future of Ukraine.
Appearances to the contrary, the conflict we are witnessing is not an atavistic, ethno-linguistic struggle between Russians and Ukrainians, or some kind of tussle between street thugs and police. There are no ancient ethnic rivalries at stake.
It is not even clear that the Ukrainian political struggle is really just a geographic dispute, as it is so often characterised, between the more “European” western half of the country and the more “Russian” East.
On the contrary, this is a political conflict, and one which is not that hard to understand. On the one side are Ukrainians (both Russian and Ukrainian-speaking) who want to live in a “European” democracy with human rights and rule of law, one which is genuinely integrated with the European Union and the rest of the world. The supporters of this “European” option include students, pacifists, gay and environmental activists, as well as Right-wing nationalists and people motivated by memories of the terrible crimes that Stalin carried out in Ukraine 80 years ago.
On the other side are Ukrainians (also both Russian and Ukrainian-speaking) who support an undemocratic, oligarchic regime which is politically and economically dependent on Russia, more cut off from the European Union, and affiliated instead with the customs union controlled from Moscow.
Some of this regime’s supporters are the tiny elite who have made such massive profits from Ukrainian corruption, and who have famously purchased some of London’s most expensive homes (and, if rumours are correct, may have rapidly taken up residence in them this week).
Others without such wealth may fear the violent extremists they have seen on the television news, and the forces of general disorder. Still others may fear that even a trade agreement with Europe would entail deep reforms and economic changes, threatening their jobs.
Either way, this is not a fight over which language to speak or even over who controls Kiev’s main square. Historical allegiances are not an issue, either. Though both get bandied about, neither the word “fascist” nor the word “communist” is correctly applied to either side.
On the contrary, the fighting on the street this week was the latest manifestation of a deep national disagreement over the nature of the Ukrainian state, the shape of Ukraine’s economy, the status of the legal system, the country’s membership of international organisations. This is a legitimate political argument, and ultimately it can only have a political solution. And, in the end, this is why you should treat those dramatic photographs with caution.
This is not a war, or even a conflict which either side can win with weapons. It will have to be solved through negotiations, elections, political debate; by civic organisations, political parties and political leaders, both charismatic and otherwise; with the participation of other European states and Ukraine’s other neighbours.
The thugs, riot police and men bearing arms may be part of the problem right now, but in the very long term, they won’t bring about a solution.
Anne Applebaum is a writer and historian of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Her latest book 'Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe’ (Penguin) is available to order from Telegraph Books at £9.99 + £1.10 p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
The pictures from Kiev don't tell the whole story
The conflict in Ukraine is, at heart, about politics – not an ethnic, geographical or linguistic dispute – and nor is it confined to Kiev
Fanning the flames: anti-government protesters clashing with police in Independence Square in Kiev early Photo: Getty Images
By Anne Applebaum
Yes, the photographs from Kiev this week were uncanny, even “apocalyptic”. The orange sky, the burning buses, the blood on the barricades did indeed create scenes which looked like a Second World War movie. They made the city seem foreign, exotic, unreal – which is precisely why you should be wary of them.
Certainly there were quite a few things that the pictures didn’t show. The rest of Kiev, for example: it was far from business as usual in the Ukrainian capital this week, but neither was the entire city a war zone. The fighting was concentrated in a few places, and the rest of Kiev looked no different from any other European city.
The rest of the country wasn’t in the pictures either. In the city of Lutsk, in Western Ukraine, police not only refused to fight anti-government demonstrators, they joined them in demanding the resignation of the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych.
In truth, large parts of the country are already run by people who bitterly oppose Yanukovych and will happily say so quite loudly. Even if Kiev were permanently cleared of government opponents, the government’s problems would not be over. Disagreement is spread far beyond the capital.
More importantly, the pictures didn’t explain the motives of those who are taking part in these scenes. Nor did they explain why others, including many who were nowhere to be seen, went out of their way to create this kind of havoc.
This latest round of violence began, after all, with a surprise attack. On Monday, negotiations to alter the constitution and limit the powers of the president seemed to be progressing. Some demonstrators had even agreed to withdraw from government buildings that their protest camps had been blocking for many weeks.
But on Tuesday, the parliament, which is controlled by the president, abruptly blocked the reform. At the same time, police launched a violent attack on the remaining protesters, who had spent weeks preparing for just such an eventuality. To protect themselves, they set fire to the barricades which had surrounded them. Those flames made the Kiev scenes appear so dramatic.
The riot police did not act alone. In addition to the men in uniform, the Ukrainian government also employs plain-clothes thugs who periodically show up and wreak mayhem. In the past few weeks, groups of unidentified men – death squads – have grabbed activists off the street, beaten them or tortured them, cut off their ears, and left them in the woods for dead.
On Tuesday, they stopped the taxi of a well-known journalist, pulled him out and shot him. This wasn’t “crowd control”. Nor was this a legitimate response to troublesome demonstrators or an accident caused by circumstances. This was a planned murder.
When violence is deliberately provocative, it is always important to ask why – and in whose interests? Some of this state-organised thuggery was, of course, intended to scare people, to keep them away from the barricades and prevent them from joining the protests. But it was also intended to inflame people: violence can make any situation spin out of control.
To some extent, the attempt to make people very, very angry has succeeded. There were no violent protesters in November, when the unrest began: the original demonstrators were mostly young people profoundly disappointed by Yanukovych’s last-minute decision not to sign a trade treaty with Europe, and to join a Russian-led Customs’ Union instead.
There was no violence on New Year’s Eve either, when many tens of thousands of Ukrainians came to central Kiev to hear speeches, wave the European flag, and sing the national anthem.
But since then, the government’s opponents have been provoked, threatened and teased by a president who awarded himself dictatorial powers, then rescinded some of them, who has agreed several times to make big changes and then stopped short.
Now he has once again reversed: after two days of unexpectedly terrifying violence – and with heavy encouragement from three European foreign ministers and the threat of personal EU sanctions – he has agreed to bring back the old constitution, to hold early elections, and not to press charges against anyone.
It is possible that the opposition will still be reluctant to go home. After many months, Ukraine’s peaceful protest movement has developed into a much different, angrier and more volatile crowd, one which will indeed tear up paving stones and throw them at police who are spraying them with water cannons, or will capture police guns and ammunition and begin to use those as well.
And this is precisely the transformation that some wanted. Photographs of such violence certainly help the cause of the Russian parliamentarian who has just declared that he and his colleagues are “prepared to give all the necessary assistance should the fraternal Ukrainian people ask for it”. Since “fraternal assistance” was the term used to describe the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, or Afghanistan in 1979, this was clearly understood as a threat of military intervention.
Violence also helps the cause of those who want to describe all of the demonstrations as a “coup d’etat” orchestrated by “fascists” or “far-Right” extremists. It is just as useful for those who still want to organise an “anti-terrorist operation” and carry out martial law.
The chief of the Ukrainian security agency called for precisely such an “anti-terrorist operation” this week, and interior ministry troops were being prepared. Yanukovych has, for the moment, abandoned that plan: after signing the agreement negotiated with the opposition and the EU yesterday, riot police once again pulled back from the central square and the army is presumably back in its barracks.
But if Yanukovych wants to reverse himself again, there is still time.
Finally, the photographs of violent struggle and burning buses are misleading because they mask what is, in fact, a legitimate argument about the future of Ukraine.
Appearances to the contrary, the conflict we are witnessing is not an atavistic, ethno-linguistic struggle between Russians and Ukrainians, or some kind of tussle between street thugs and police. There are no ancient ethnic rivalries at stake.
It is not even clear that the Ukrainian political struggle is really just a geographic dispute, as it is so often characterised, between the more “European” western half of the country and the more “Russian” East.
On the contrary, this is a political conflict, and one which is not that hard to understand. On the one side are Ukrainians (both Russian and Ukrainian-speaking) who want to live in a “European” democracy with human rights and rule of law, one which is genuinely integrated with the European Union and the rest of the world. The supporters of this “European” option include students, pacifists, gay and environmental activists, as well as Right-wing nationalists and people motivated by memories of the terrible crimes that Stalin carried out in Ukraine 80 years ago.
On the other side are Ukrainians (also both Russian and Ukrainian-speaking) who support an undemocratic, oligarchic regime which is politically and economically dependent on Russia, more cut off from the European Union, and affiliated instead with the customs union controlled from Moscow.
Some of this regime’s supporters are the tiny elite who have made such massive profits from Ukrainian corruption, and who have famously purchased some of London’s most expensive homes (and, if rumours are correct, may have rapidly taken up residence in them this week).
Others without such wealth may fear the violent extremists they have seen on the television news, and the forces of general disorder. Still others may fear that even a trade agreement with Europe would entail deep reforms and economic changes, threatening their jobs.
Either way, this is not a fight over which language to speak or even over who controls Kiev’s main square. Historical allegiances are not an issue, either. Though both get bandied about, neither the word “fascist” nor the word “communist” is correctly applied to either side.
On the contrary, the fighting on the street this week was the latest manifestation of a deep national disagreement over the nature of the Ukrainian state, the shape of Ukraine’s economy, the status of the legal system, the country’s membership of international organisations. This is a legitimate political argument, and ultimately it can only have a political solution. And, in the end, this is why you should treat those dramatic photographs with caution.
This is not a war, or even a conflict which either side can win with weapons. It will have to be solved through negotiations, elections, political debate; by civic organisations, political parties and political leaders, both charismatic and otherwise; with the participation of other European states and Ukraine’s other neighbours.
The thugs, riot police and men bearing arms may be part of the problem right now, but in the very long term, they won’t bring about a solution.
Anne Applebaum is a writer and historian of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Her latest book 'Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe’ (Penguin) is available to order from Telegraph Books at £9.99 + £1.10 p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
