Michael McDowell: We are having another ‘Munich moment’

Giving Putin what he wants would have entirely predictable consequences. It must not happen

History does not repeat itself that often but there are many parallels and analogies available to those who need them to make rhetorical points for political purposes. Some of them are valid; others are monstrously invalid such as the claim by Vladimir Putin that the West or Nato started the Ukraine war, and that Russia has merely responded to Western-backed Nazi aggression by the Kyiv government.

Truly we have arrived at the point imagined by Orwell where Oceania’s Ministry of Truth proclaimed: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.”

Based on the current ideology of the Putin regime I think we would be very naïve to conclude that had the Russian invasion succeeded a year ago there would not now be a threat to reabsorb the Baltic states, Georgia and Moldova into a recreated Warsaw bloc.

Such naivete led Britain and France to abandon Czechoslovakia in 1938. Chamberlain’s piece of paper fluttering over his head was no more a peace charter in 1938 than appeasement of Putin would be in present circumstances. The real agenda then was already written in the pages of Mein Kampf. And Russia’s real war aims are clearly discernible in the neo-imperialist propaganda and theory that represents Putin’s orthodoxy today.

We are having another “Munich moment” but this time the message emerging from the recent German government-backed Munich security conference is that Russian aggression is seen for what it is and the Putin strategy is clearly understood. Toppling the Ukraine domino would have entirely predictable consequences. It must not happen.

The intellectual rottenness of Putin’s kleptocratic regime is matched by the rottenness of its military. The scouring of Russia’s prison population for human cannon fodder tells its own story. Allowing the Wagner organisation to become an army within an army shows how useless the Kremlin’s military structures had become. Driving ill-trained conscripts into hails of bullets and shells to advance a few blood-soaked kilometres and executing any malingerers is truly Stalinesque.

I fear the emergence now of useful idiots in Europe and America to subvert the determination expressed by Biden to face down the Putin agenda of state aggression and war crime.

Trump is utterly undependable. Many on the Republican right are in the same category. Luckily Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are backing Ukraine unambiguously.

Even the Irish hard left is beginning to wobble on Ukraine. Through my letterbox today came a missive from euro-sceptic lobby group the National Platform managed by veteran campaigner Anthony Coughlan arguing that “Putin’s incursion into Ukraine was understandable and justifiable”. He continues: “Whether it was wise, now that it has led to a proxy war between the USA/Nato and Russia at the expense of the Ukrainians, only the outcome of the war itself will tell.”

An interesting point of view. The Russian invasion was “understandable and justifiable”, but its “wisdom” will be determined by whether it succeeds. As a moral cornerstone for the new world order that logic is truly Orwellian. He predictably calls for an immediate armistice. The purpose of Nato, as Coughlan sees it, is to keep Russia out of Europe, keep America in Europe, and to keep Germany down.

I sometimes ask myself how an ideology can blind some people as to the reality of the Russian policy of induced famine, liquidation of the kulaks, transportation of the Cossacks, the mass purges by quota of Ukrainians in the 1930s, and mass deportations to the gulag over 30 years.

Either the people of Ukraine are entitled to decide their own future or they are not. Either the Kremlin is entitled to pursue the recreation of its dominance over the old USSR or it is not. Either protecting the Russian-speaking minorities in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania entitles Russian intervention in the same way as the Sudeten Deutsch in Czechoslovakia warranted the Hitler invasion or they do not. Either the UN charter still means something or it does not.

Of course the war in Ukraine must – and will – end in the short term. But if that war ends by tearing up the foundations of the world order it will be the harbinger of many more wars.

Recreating the Russian sphere of malign influence over the former territories of the USSR is a very bad idea. Rewarding Putin’s use of invasion, war crime, assassination, corruption, subversion and repression is morally the same as abandoning Czechoslovakia in 1938. The consequences for humanity are not to be underestimated.

Yes, we are paying a price for resisting Putin. But there is a far greater price for not doing so.

And to think that our own educationalists were contemplating removing history from the school curriculum a little while back.