So the war goes on. Where will it end?
How can it end? Oh, I don’t mean the ceasefire, or even the peace treaty, or whatever bit of paper stops the actual shooting – I mean the real end. Real peace.
There are clues. One clue is the total lack of understanding between the sides, as demonstrated for example by the Russian propaganda which completely misreads the situation on our side of the fence. Propaganda isn’t going to work if it’s not written in the target’s language, and Russian propaganda just isn’t. It demonstrates a complete failure to grasp why we in the West are fighting.
So let’s try and explain the view from our side, as if a Russian were listening. And to do that, we have to go back a long long way – two centuries at least.
In the 1800’s, the whole concept of "country" was in transition, at least in Europe. Before then, there hadn’t really been countries at all; there had been seats of power – London, Paris, Vienna, Madrid, and so on – but their countries were simply what they could conquer and hold. But Napoleon changed all that – or rather, the process of dismantling his empire did – in two ways: first, it scrapped the wider and narrower structures of power, leaving only countries; there was no Holy Roman Empire anymore, no Papal or Protestant overarching, and no (or at least fewer) subcountries with self-government subordinate to an imperial throne: second, in drawing the new country boundaries the concept of national boundaries crept in – the idea of your belonging to the country of your language, customs, culture – of your mother’s milk. Only creeping in, inconspicuously, (no one thinking of a nation state would have invented Belgium) but it was there.
Throughout the 1800’s the big countries tried to pretend that nothing had changed; that they could carry on fighting over bits of territory without considering who lived there, but it became harder and harder. The little worm of nationalism that had crept into Vienna grew into a massive snake, fed by a new awareness of ordinary people, by the massive impact of the new industrialisation, by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Now, instead of a patchwork of little lands controlled by ancient imperial powers we had new nations: Greece, Italy, Spain, Germany, Romania, Norway – where would it finish up?
Meanwhile, as I said, the big countries played their games, but joined now by some of the new countries – Germany especially, biggest of the new countries, regarded itself as one of the big guys, and as it united so it played harder and harder. Germany allied with Austro-Hungary, itself threatened by the growth of nationalism, pushing France and the UK together, until Europe was divided into two massive blocs playing by the old rules, but deeply undermined by nationalist movements playing by the new rules. There was an important difference, though; the new-style wars of independence often triggered serious civilian deaths, while the old-style wars still largely involved only professional soldiers; serious civilian casualties were rare, and largely involved groups that no one cared about. The massive civilian losses in the Franco-Prussian war were regarded as an exception and an outlier at the time.
That was the setup for the 1914-1918 War. That war was started by countries still playing by the old rules, and when it started it was still largely seen through the old rules; everyone assumed it would be over in a year, with a gentlemanly Peace Treaty, and would not cause serious problems to civilians.
Everyone was wrong. It lasted four years, and caused deaths in the millions – and because the military death rate was so high, conscription became essential, and conscription meant that the war overflowed into civilian deaths – yes, deaths on the battlefield, but deaths of civilians forced to fight. The consequences were disastrous: in England and Wales, for example, every town and city suddenly lost huge numbers of men – and men of working age at that – and of the thousands of villages only 53 did not lose anyone.
So, at the end, there was universal agreement on one thing: this must never happen again. 1914-1918, World War 1, must be "the war to end wars".
The way to achieve this was obviously to eliminate the old rules completely; and a key idea from the new rules showed how to do this and thereby gave the world a new magic word.
Sovereignty
Sovereignty. The acceptance that all European states would become Sovereign states – no one from another country could cross their borders without permission, and no other country could interfere with its internal matters, however strong the reasons.
The route taken was to identify the national groups in Europe and to allocate each its own land. These lands were the new countries – no longer power blocks but national states – and these countries were completely independent entities with their own borders defined, fixed and recognised. Sovereign states. Any disputes had to be resolved by arbitration, not war. This implied an organisation to hold records of borders, and to arbitrate. This organisation was the League Of Nations, and in fact it extended far beyond Europe, with varying levels of effectiveness, but Sovereignty in Europe was its driver.
Two problems arose at once – although their importance was not fully recognised at the time. Firstly, despite the active support of its president, Woodrow Wilson, the USA refused to join; apparently it wanted to retain the right to declare war on other countries without having the League’s say-so. Secondly, Russia was in the middle of its revolution and was in no state to join anything; in fact Russia did join in 1934 as the USSR, but long after the League’s founding, and long after the driving force of the League had dissipated.
This meant that neither the USA nor the USSR understood the importance of Sovereignty, or even what it meant now to Europeans. Neither realised that Europeans saw Sovereignty as the bulwark against another disastrous war.
Another country that didn’t join immediately was Germany – they were kept out until 1926. But they had been involved from the outset, even without formal membership, and the German people fully understood Sovereignty. Their understanding was coloured, though, by the way Germany had been treated after the War, which many Germans saw as grossly unfair.
So it was no surprise that Germany pulled out of the League in 1933, but there was no immediate threat; Germany did not immediately breach anyone’s Sovereignty. Even the Anschluss, the union with (or rather, takeover of) Austria, was done nominally with the consent of both parties.
Until 1938.
Then Hitler demanded that Czechoslovakia cede the Sudetenland to Germany. And recognised the Sudetenland as an independent state – an independent German state.
This was a massive and unmistakeable breach of Czech Sovereignty, and should, according to the rules, have been resisted; it wasn’t. Everyone except the Czechs – and including the UK – gave in, and forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland. Hitler had hardly finished absorbing it when he invaded first Czechoslovakia and then Poland, and World War 2 broke out.
So Europe understood clearly: as long as Sovereignty held, Europe was safe; if Sovereignty was overridden, Europe was in danger.
After the end of WW2, the League Of Nations was clearly defunct; so a new organisation was set up called the United Nations. This should have been great opportunity to establish a firm basis for peace based on mutual respect, on Sovereignty, not just in Europe, but throughout the world.
It failed.
It failed at its very outset; in its membership – and here is where the problems in 1919 became important: neither the USA nor the USSR recognised the overriding importance of Sovereignty to Europeans.
The basis on which the United Nations was founded was very much the same as for the League: it was a free association of Sovereign states – a member of the United Nations had fixed borders acknowledged by all the other members, and a guarantee that there would be no interference in its internal affairs. Unfortunately neither the USA nor the USSR saw this, let alone accepted this.
F D Roosevelt, the president of the USA, hated and mistrusted Europe; he saw the European nations as empires competing with the USA, and happy to see the USA collapse. He therefore wanted to minimise European influence wherever he found it, and in particular in the United Nations.
Josef Stalin, the president of the USSR, on the other hand, felt that the USSR had been seriously weakened between the wars, and looked to strengthen the USSR’s influence.
So FDR and Stalin got together behind the Europeans’ backs and agreed to recognise Philippines, Belarus and Ukraine as members of the United Nations.
This was of course inconsistent. Neither Belarus nor Ukraine were Sovereign states – although they had a considerable degree of internal self-government they were ultimately controlled by the authorities of the USSR. The Philippines had much the same status vis-à-vis the USA. But internally both the USA and the USSR still called them Sovereign states – and therefore Sovereign came to have a different meaning in the USA and the USSR from the whole of the rest of the world – to the rest of the world it meant having inviolable borders and protected internal affairs; but to the USA and the USSR it simply meant any identifiable political entity which usually had a degree of self-government.
This created a very deep-seated misunderstanding between the USA and the USSR on the one hand, and everyone else on the other. To the USA and the USSR, crossing the borders of a member of the United Nations was undesirable, but something that might have to be done to protect their interests. To the rest of the world, it was an act of war that threatened every other state – threatened the destruction of the whole planet.
(Yes, the UK managed to slide India in in 1945 – but it was obvious to everyone at that point that India was on the brink of independence – OK it was proleptic, but not in itself damaging. And New Zealand was completely Sovereign in practice, but a technicality needed tidying up before it was legally so. Neither of these caused the massive damage that giving membership to permanently subordinate states did.)
By 1990, the United Nations had proved only a slight improvement on the League Of Nations; there had been quite a number of breaches of Sovereignty, and almost all had been by the USA or the USSR, but the United Nations had survived.
That is not to say they were small breaches; the colonisation of Eastern Europe by the USSR and of Central America by the USA were major breaches that did indeed threaten the destruction of the whole world. The actual threat of war between them fizzled out quite quickly, but the two powers became bosom enemies; each became the Big Bogeyman to the other. They both needed an enemy – "A tribe without an enemy is a tribe without a chief" – but all the other candidates acknowledged the Sovereignty of other nations, and neither the USA nor the USSR wanted an enemy with the moral high ground.
Even China: China’s support for North Korea was initially covert and only possible because of a shared and very leaky border, while Chinese interference in Indochina remained covert until the USA began openly interfering; and in fact China has never occupied North Korea nor openly invaded any of the Indochinese states – China has always acknowledged United Nations borders as sacrosanct, at least publicly. (This is not to offer any support to China’s policies; it is merely to assert facts.) And the area one would think in most need of redrawing, Africa, quite deliberately adopted the same principle, even though it meant fossilising colonial borders.
In 1990, though, the USSR broke up. Whether that was a good or a bad thing, whether and to what extent there was external interference – I don’t know and I don’t care. But it meant that Ukraine and Belarus now became legitimate members of the United Nations in their own right. Everyone recognised this, and everyone recognised them as Sovereign nations. Including Russia.
Yes, Russia recognised Ukraine as a Sovereign nation that was a member of the United Nations in its own right. The only problem was that Russia understood Sovereign in a completely different sense from anyone else in Europe. Russia saw nothing inconsistent in continuing to interfere in Ukraine’s internal affairs, nor in moving troops across its borders, nor in claiming the right to appoint and depose Ukraine’s leaders, or even regarding some or all Ukrainians as having Russian nationality.
This didn’t really show at first. Ukraine’s leaders were strongly pro-Russia and there was no reason for interference. Ukraine and Russia signed treaties and exchanged ambassadors just like two genuinely Sovereign states. There was no fuss and no tension, and all seemed good. No need for the West to do much at all. All most people in the West knew about Russia at this time was that it was run by oligarchs – but very few people knew what an ‘oligarch’ was, they just knew they were a bad thing – and about Ukraine was that it was where all the computer viruses came from – not strictly true, but not exactly false either.
But then came the Orange Revolution in 2004 and 2005 which led to a pro-European leadership in Ukraine and relationships became strained, but pro-Russian leaders were elected in 2010 and things settled down again.
Until the Maidan – er – event at the end of 2013. The Ukrainian leaders fled to Russia; and relations between Ukraine and Russia finally broke down. In March 2014 Russia occupied Crimea, and incorporated it into Russia. (As is normal with military invasions, a referendum was held under military control which of course voted in favour of union with Russia.) Even this did not get a lot of publicity in the West; the leaders of Europe were strongly pro-Russian because of their dependence on Russian fuel; the UK was navel-gazing after Brexit; the leaders in the USA were annoyed by the potential loss of a strategic partner – and anyway they did not really regard what Russia was doing as wrong, and certainly not a breach of Sovereignty. It must also be said that Ukraine’s claim on Crimea was not solid; yes it was better than Russia’s claim, but Crimea’s own claim to independence – to be a Sovereign state – was definitely arguable. So everyone simply declared a few more "sanctions on Russian oligarchs" – an action which satisfied their own public while not actually harming Russia at all.
At this time Russia also began infiltrating troops and guerrillas into the Donbas, and attempted to do so into Odes(s)a. The latter was a complete failure and led to the deaths of the infiltrators; significantly Russia insisted on describing their deaths as a "crime" as if it had occurred within Russia, and pressured the Ukraine government to arrest the "criminals" who had committed it. This was, to my knowledge, the first explicit, public assertion by Russia that Russia did not acknowledge the Sovereignty of Ukraine, and that Russia regarded Ukraine as part of Russia.
The infiltration into the Donbas was much more successful, and led eventually to what Ukraine described as police action and Russia as genocide, but was in fact a civil war, and as usual in a civil war the civilians suffered badly – but I will be saying a little more on this later. This also got almost no publicity in the West for the same reasons as for the Crimea, but with much less logic – nobody could claim that there was any historical doubt about the status of the Donbas as part of Ukraine.
So the West shut its eyes, and discouraged news of the civil war in the Donbas, while announcing more "sanctions on Russian oligarchs" whenever things became inconveniently hot.
This was fine in the USA, of course, especially as increasing evidence of Russian meddling in USA politics drowned out concerns with Russia’s behaviour to its neighbours, and Europe made the best of a bad job, while continuing to rely on Russian fuel imports. In the UK the poisoning by Russian agents in Salisbury made the UK population much more anti-Russian than they had been, but the strongly pro-Russian Boris Johnson – who has Russian relatives – became prime minister in 2019, so all was well there.
But the result was that Russia’s actions in 2022 came as a shock to the ordinary people of Europe.
There is a definite possibility that President Putin may well have forewarned the Western leaders about what he was about to do, and that they had agreed to respond merely with a few more "sanctions on Russian oligarchs"; and indeed at the first news that Russian troops had crossed the Ukraine border those "sanctions on Russian oligarchs" were all ready to be announced. It was the ordinary people in the West who reacted. Because Ukraine had fallen largely out of view for nearly a decade the people of Europe and especially the UK drew an obvious parallel:
In 1919 Germany agreed to the Sovereignty of Czechoslovakia, and the world became at peace
In 1990 Russia agreed to the Sovereignty of Ukraine, and the world became at peace
In 1938 Germany unilaterally rejected the Sovereignty of Czechoslovakia
In 2014 Russia unilaterally rejected the Sovereignty of Ukraine
In 1938 Hitler recognised the independence of the Sudetenland
In 2022 Putin recognised the independence of the Donbas
In 1938 Hitler demanded the reunion of the Sudetenland with Germany
In 2022 Putin demanded the reunion of the Donbas with Russia
In 1938 the West let Hitler get away with taking over the Sudetenland
In 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and World War 2 began
Therefore if Putin was allowed to get away with taking over the Donbas, there will be nothing to stop Putin invading Poland and starting World War 3.
It might be thought surprising that ordinary people in the West were capable of remembering these things. But in fact they are drilled into schoolchildren – in the UK, in Germany, in France at least, and judging by the public response, Italy, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia, and Finland. Everybody has learned that once Sovereignty in Europe breaks down, World War Three is inevitable – it was even one of the motivations for Brexit: the (false) claim that the EEC was encouraging a breakdown of Sovereignty in its area.
So public opinion forced Europe, the UK, and eventually the USA into action. Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, was already vulnerable, and could not risk yet another scandal; so despite his Russian family connections (and despite any secret deal with President Putin) he began actively supporting Ukraine with money and with munitions – but not, contrary to Russian statements, with troops (even his successors have only sent a handful of specialists). Poland chipped in as well. Germany and the other EEC nations were restricted at first by their dependence on Russian gas, but eventually they were forced by public opinion into contributing – and the question of dependence on Russian gas was eventually nullified by the Nord Stream damage.
For the same reason Finland and Sweden abandoned nearly a century of neutrality and applied to join NATO. Up to this point they had relied on Sovereignty to protect them; now they could do so no longer. Eventually even the USA was forced into getting involved.
And the rest is history. Well, it will be eventually, for the moment it’s mostly propaganda.
Ah yes – about that propaganda. I said at the beginning that one very startling aspect of the war is the appallingly poor quality of the Russian propaganda. The writers show no understanding at all of why the West is involved; they appear to believe that the West is supporting Ukraine because it approves of how Ukraine is run, so it is almost all directed at showing that Ukraine is a total cesspit. Surely, their thinking seems to run, if we prove that Ukraine is a neo-Nazi hellhole then enough Westerners will see that Russia was right to invade.
Consequently, and at least logically, the Russian propagandists seem to believe that the West’s target, the West’s definition of victory, is the incorporation of Ukraine into the West, and the destruction of Russia.
Wrong.
We all know Ukraine is a cesspit of criminality and corruption. We all know that computer viruses emerge from Ukraine almost weekly, and the organisations that write them seem to be immune from prosecution. We all know that money laundering is an important Ukrainian industry. We all know that there are active neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine; we have seen videos of the Azov Battalion in the north parading in neo-Nazi regalia, and of neo-Nazi groups in Donetsk parading the Russian flag alongside neo-Nazi symbols.
But these matters are regarded in the West as completely irrelevant. So Ukraine is a cesspit; so Ukraine is a hellhole; that is not an issue as far as public opinion is concerned; what matters is that Ukraine is a Sovereign cesspit; that Ukraine is a Sovereign hellhole – and that Russia is breaching that Sovereignty. If it is allowed to happen, Russia will invade Poland and World War 3 will follow inevitably.
Therefore, for the West, taking over Ukraine will be an admission of failure; it would mean the West had been unable to observe another country’s Sovereignty. It will not be a mark of success – and I know this would be hard to believe in Russia: hasn’t it been a Western target since 1991? Surely it defines how the West regards victory?
No, friends, the West will regard itself as victorious if Russia does not invade Poland.
Russian propaganda is a complete misreading of the Western position.
But the obvious and immediate consequence of this is that our propaganda surely must be equally and appallingly poor.
And indeed it is.
For example, there is no understanding in Europe and the UK that Russia does not see Sovereignty as we do; that Russia does not regard Sovereignty as an obstacle to Russia’s right to control, to move troops in and out, to treat Ukrainians as if they are Russian citizens. It is a waste of time trying to get Russian people to see this – there just isn’t the historical framework into which this understanding can be fitted. People in the West think that when President Putin refers to what he is doing in Ukraine as a "special military operation" instead of an invasion in order to avoid being charged with war crimes – but this isn’t so; President Putin does not believe that what he is doing is an invasion, because you can only invade a foreign country, and Ukraine is not a foreign country in Russian eyes. In this context, compare the USA’s description of its invasion of Korea as a "police action" for the same reason: the USA does not recognise Sovereignty either.
Or look at another active theme in our propaganda: the Russian claims around neo-Nazis. That Ukraine – and other Western countries – are neo-Nazi.
Our propaganda makes merry over these ‘absurdities’. But if they are so absurd, why do Russians believe them?
OK, nobody in the West believes that the Ukraine government is neo-Nazi – the president is a Jew! – and it is true that a good proportion of people in the West regard Russia as a neo-Nazi state: the parallels between Hitler and Putin detailed above, the personal attacks on President Zelenski for being a Jew, and above all the speeches by the openly neo-Nazi Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, have brought a lot of people to this point of view. It is easy to see why our propaganda takes the line it does. It is apparently not so easy to understand why our propaganda doesn’t actually work – or is it simply because nobody dares ask the question?
Because the truth is, again, a complete lack of understanding – on our part, this time. We have completely failed to grasp that Russia uses ‘neo-Nazi’ in a completely different sense from us Westerners.
It really shouldn’t come as a total shock. After all, we already live with a similar example in the USA: in the USA ‘socialism’ means something quite different from what it means in the rest of the world.
But as with ‘Sovereignty’, it’s worth going back to basics, to the origin of the problem. This time, though, we only need to go back to World War 2, and what Russia suffered then.
OK, I can hear the angry shouting – what’s Russia whingeing about? Weren’t we fighting all through the War, and they didn’t come in till halfway through – after allying with Hitler! And we went through the Blitz; almost every major city was bombed; so they had a siege of Stalingrad, but that was all, wasn’t it?
No, it wasn’t. Yes, we endured bombs. Yes we endured the deaths of our loved ones, the flattening of our cities, hunger and fear. Whether what Russia endured was as bad can be argued about – but unmistakeably it was different.
We aren’t talking about the degree of suffering that each side endured; we’re talking about the kind. And I don’t think we in the UK really understand that.
Let’s take an analogy. Suppose Britannia and Mother Russia are walking home from a party and are set upon in the street by a thug.
Britannia is punched, beaten, kicked, trampled on, nose smashed, eyes blacked, ribs broken, blood everywhere.
Mother Russia is raped.
I am in no position to pass judgement here. I can only report facts. And the fact is that a rape is essentially different from a beating.
And in the same way, the German invasion of the USSR was essentially different from Germany’s westward invasions. It involved not only occupation, it involved not only the extermination of Jews and other minorities – unspeakably evil as that was – but it involved the destruction of the whole society; the desecration of places of national identity; the confiscation of all rights to food, to land, to any form of property; it involved the enslavement of huge numbers of ordinary people – men, women, children – and shipping them westward to be worked to death in German factories, in German fields, in German brothels. The scale of this is poorly documented for obvious reasons; but, for example, a reasonable estimate is that Belarus had half her entire population shipped to Germany as slaves. And as an exquisite turn of the screw, the Slav lands that Germany conquered were plastered with posters inviting the inhabitants to work in Germany; the Germans could thus pretend that all the slaves were in fact volunteers – the equivalent of claiming that a raped woman "consented really". Worse still, enough people believed the propaganda that when the few surviving slaves returned home, they were often ostracised and worse for being collaborators – again, one thinks of raped women being ostracised by their communities for having "lost their honour".
Mother Russia was raped.
And when a Russian – or a Ukrainian or a Belarusian – speaks of ‘neo-Nazis’ that is what they are talking about: not the idiots parading flags in SS-style costumes, nor the reborn forces of antisemitism, but the forces capable of raping their country again.
But in that sense, Ukraine is neo-Nazi. By collaborating with the West, and especially with the USA, Ukraine has become an open door to forces drooling at the prospect of raping Mother Russia a second time (you don’t believe me? Just read some of the propaganda our people are pumping out. Or preferably, don’t.) Furthermore, Ukraine’s behaviour to its Russian – or at least Russophone – minority has not been good; even before the civil war broke out in the Donbas there was cultural suppression from the Ukraine government, and strong evidence of actual violence from Ukraine militant groups that the Ukraine government seemed to turn a blind eye to; during the war, and especially since the invasion, the Ukraine forces do not seem as concerned by Russophone civilian deaths as one might have hoped, nor as our propaganda suggests. Mind, the forces on the Russian side have certainly been no better, at any rate during the invasion.
Ukraine is a Sovereign cess-pit, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a cess-pit.
OK, enough of this. I could go on, but why bother when the point has been made? Our propaganda – when it is not based simply on malice and fake facts – is just as grounded in total mutual misunderstanding as Russian propaganda is.
Therefore I go back to where I began: I ask again.
So the war goes on. Where will it end?
As a Christian, I want it to end in peace – and that does not mean a peace treaty, a mere cease-fire, but actual peace – an actual peace that will at last end the possibility of war in Europe: a peace that – as you can see from what I have written here – will finally end World War 1.
Can it happen? Yes.
Will it happen? No.
So there is the short term – stopping the fighting. That might happen in the next three or four years
And there is the middle term – healing the wounds. A few token gestures will be made, but no actual progress
And there is the long term – making peace. Not going to happen.
Or am I wrong? In Europe the healing process after World War 2 did make real progress – it’s not over yet, but a lot has happened. There were, as far as I can see, two reasons for this: first, the refusal to impose reparations on Germany as happened after World War 1, and second, the systematic work by the Churches in all the countries involved to heal wounds and to campaign for peace, a campaign sustained not just for months, but for decades.
In the current context, well, we ordinary folk can do nothing about reparations or any other political decisions in the short term. But we can imitate the way the churches acted after World War 2 – and the seeds for that action were sown long before the end of the War: remember the Charred Cross in the bombed ruin of Coventry Cathedral with the slogan "Father Forgive"? Set up the morning after the Cathedral was bombed in 1940 – five years before the War ended?
We in the Churches can begin now.
We have contacts in churches in Russia and in Ukraine; we may have serious doubts about those churches on many levels, but they proclaim the name of Jesus, and there are many Christians in their membership – surely that is enough for us to work with them?
And we can stand up against the worst excesses of our own propagandists; Truth is the first casualty of war, they say, but usually she is only mostly dead.
And we can sow the seeds now of mutual understanding – and as I have shown in this essay, understanding is in very short supply – seeds that can grow into maybe a little healing, a little openness, maybe a little forgiveness – and even, in a future beyond our vision at the moment, a little peace?