Naked aggression: Putin finally moves

By August of 1914 Europeans had enjoyed just under a century of relative peace, punctuated by smaller regional conflicts such as the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian War. Trouble had been brewing throughout the latter decades of this era. Nevertheless, Europeans had managed to muddle through these years, and the fact that so many royal families were related to each other appeared to guarantee continued peace. The 19th century had been an age of material progress as railways and telegraphs greatly enhanced transportation and communication. More people were entering the middle classes, and prosperity was more widespread than at any time in history. War? Unthinkable.

Yet the unthinkable became reality, with the 20th century becoming one of the bloodiest in history. Two world wars, totalitarian ideologies, a Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, four Middle Eastern wars, and numerous civil wars have left their mark. The United Nations represented an attempt to maintain peace or at least to manage local conflicts so that they would not spread or intensify. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949 to contain communism, has been far more successful in keeping peace within the territory it encompasses. Europe has seen relative peace for 77 years, despite the outbreak of local conflicts at its edges and in the former Yugoslavia.

In 2022 no one wants to go to war. In 1939 no one wanted war, but it came anyway because German Chancellor Adolf Hitler was hungry for more territory and was determined to acquire it from his country's neighbours. After an attempt to appease him by allowing him to dismember Czechoslovakia failed, Great Britain and France were finally dragged into war that September as Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland per their mutual agreement in August.

This morning the world woke up to the news that Vladimir Putin's Russia had launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This followed eight years of Russia whittling away at Ukraine's territory, first annexing the largely Russian-speaking Crimean Peninsula and then supporting separatists in the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. Western countries have imposed sanctions, but Russia has persisted in its ambitions despite these. We can expect new sanctions to be imposed, but Russia is a huge country with ample natural resources, and it has been preparing for this moment for some time. Economic sanctions might deter a smaller country with fewer resources, but they may not work with Russia. If they do begin to have an impact, it will fall disproportionately on ordinary Russians, most of whom almost certainly do not want war and prefer to live in peace. If Russia becomes a pariah state and its citizens suffer from sanctions, Putin and his associates will almost certainly not. Unless, that is, Russians figure out a way to unseat him.

Putin is a crafty politico with evident tyrannical tendencies. The 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation, which ostensibly created a democratic form of government, has long been an ineffectual scrap of paper. Russia is a pseudo-democracy misgoverned by a leader who has systematically shut down opposition and virtually guaranteed his continued presidency for as long as he wants it. Now he is openly attacking a neighbour in defiance of the rest of the world, the United Nations, and international law. Whether he will get away with this action remains to be seen, but prospects for his being stopped are not promising.

Putin is following in the footsteps of previous despots who cynically seize on the slightest pretext to justify their aggression against a smaller and weaker neighbour. At the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine found itself a de facto nuclear power, inheriting a substantial portion of the former country's arsenal. In 1994 it signed an agreement returning these weapons to Russia in exchange for security guarantees. Moscow has now violated this agreement, and Ukrainians are undoubtedly regretting having given up something, however destructive, that might have been a deterrent to future Russian aggression.

This crisis is of special concern to Canadians. There are over one million Canadians of Ukrainian ancestry, making them the 11th largest ethnic group in the country. Their communities are scattered across the country, but are most prominent in the Niagara Peninsula and in the Prairie Provinces. Hamilton, Ontario, is home to several Ukrainian churches, both Orthodox and Greek Catholic. One of our former governors general, Raymon Hnatyshyn (1934-2002), had Ukrainian roots. And a well-known artist, William Kurelek (1927-1977), was a Ukrainian Canadian. There are close ties between our two countries going back to the 19th century.

So have we returned to the Cold War? Not exactly. The Cold War pit two competing ideologies embodied in the United States and the Soviet Union against each other. The current crisis seems more obviously rooted in Russian irredentist ambitions. I will not presume to offer advice to our western political leaders, which I am not in a position to do. But I do hope and pray that they will do their utmost to defuse this crisis and to defend Ukrainian independence in the face of naked aggression.