If the recent and ongoing debacle
surrounding the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine has
taught us all nothing else, it has shown, beyond any doubt at all that the much
talked about myth of a single European political entity, a conjoined
international presence, or even a unified voice on foreign policy is little
more than a sham, a pretence, an invention of the most epic proportion. In fact
anything other than what the EU's leadership would have us believe it to be.
Nearly two weeks after Flight
MH17 was shot out of the sky over Eastern Ukraine, an as yet undisclosed number
of dead passenger's bodies still remain scattered over the Ukrainian
countryside, along with many of their possessions and much of the wreckage of
the aircraft that they had been travelling on. Generally those innocent, as yet
unidentified victims still remain there, not because no-one cares, but because
they have been allowed to become hostages to a bitter national insurgency that
has been cynically aggravated and encouraged by third party states, most of
whom have their own political agendas to pursue.
The point has been made before,
but it is worth reiterating again perhaps. If Flight MH17 had been carrying a
large contingent of Russian, American or even Ukrainian passengers, does anyone
imagine for a moment that their bodies would still be lying out in the fields,
nearly two weeks after their deaths, or that the crash site itself would still
remain unsecured? Were they Russian, American or Ukrainian bodies still lying
there, what are the odds that significant military resources from any of those
countries would have been brought into play; and the good offices of the United
Nations, the ICRC and other international welfare bodies forced to involve
themselves in any subsequent humanitarian recovery?
It's hard to imagine that
Russian, American or even Ukrainian troops wouldn't have already secured the
area, recovered all of the bodies and taken away all of the necessary
diagnostic evidence within hours, if not days, of the crash itself. Yet because
its primarily a European-led recovery mission, with no single person taking
such vitally important decisions, some two weeks later it still has all the
hallmarks of a tragic farce in the making, one that seems to go on; and on; and
on; and on!
One wonders just how many Britons
would need to have died in the tragedy before Prime Minister, David Cameron,
might have felt compelled to actually commit military resources to bringing our
dead citizen's bodies back home to their loved ones, assuming of course that he
had the personal gumption to make that sort of decision in the first place,
which one doubts that he has. Even the Australian government, which is located
on the other side of the world, has given serious thought to such a proposal,
as have the Dutch, although both have made the same fundamental mistake of
deferring to the Ukrainian government in Kiev when it comes to making any firm
decisions on such an action. One cannot imagine that the US or Russia would
have requested any sort of permission, for what both countries would probably
regard as doing the right thing in their own national interests and in the
interests of their citizens at home.
Quite why Britain, Australia, the
Netherlands, or any other country that lost citizens on Flight MH17, would
expect a highly dysfunctional nation like Ukraine, to be able to guarantee
anything is a highly questionable approach anyway. It is clear that any
international mission to recover bodies, personal possessions and diagnostic
wreckage is going to play a secondary role to their own military conflict with
the Russian backed separatists, as has been the case in recent days when fresh
fighting erupted close to the plane's crash site. Obviously, neither insurgent,
nor Ukrainian regulars have any real interest in helping the international
community to bring some sort of conclusion to the MH17 tragedy, by removing the
remaining bodies and other vital evidence out of what is rapidly becoming an
active war zone.
Russia's own actual complicity in
the shooting down of MH17 aside, it has become abundantly clear that the
imposition of economic sanctions against Mr Putin, his associates and
increasingly against wider Russian interests were never likely to be a
straightforward matter to begin with. Each and every one of the European
Union's 28 member states will always have their own national interests in mind
when being asked to consider imposing sanctions against one of their own major
international trading partners. Britain's financial markets do a great deal of
business with Russia, while France has significant arms dealing with Moscow,
Germany is heavily involved with major cross border commercial ventures, whilst
a number of other member states rely heavily on Russian oil and gas supplies to
heat their homes and power their industries. As is the nature of modern
business, a great deal of continental commercial activity takes place between
Russia and the European Union, worth billions of Euros and Roubles every year;
and nobody in their right mind would want to put that business at risk.
Unfortunately for everybody
though, with Vladimir Putin's Russia choosing to act as the continental bully
of the 21st century; and with no-one being prepared to go to war in order to
curtail his worst excesses, the most obvious way for western nations to punish
the Russian President is through a range of increasingly severe economic
measures, depriving him of the financial income and economic muscle that he will
need in order to rebuild his country's ageing infrastructure, industry and
military.
Even though Europe has now
started to co-ordinate their economic sanctions, with the likes of the United
States and some of Asia's leading economies, the fact that it has taken nearly
two weeks to agree them; that a range of specific national exemptions have been
written into the agreement in order to protect the interests of certain member
states; and that whole industrial sectors, along with particular Russian businesses
have been purposefully overlooked, has simply helped to exaggerate the size of
the international stick currently being waved at Mr Putin and his wealthy
associates.
Such is the desperation of the
West to find a solution to the current crisis that it is rumoured that the
German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is prepared to do any sort of backroom deal
with Vladimir Putin, even if that means coming to some sort of accommodation
regarding Crimea, which the Russian President has managed to wrest from
Ukrainian control. Quite whether there is any truth to such rumours remains
unclear, but in the event that Mr Putin was somehow rewarded for his illegal
land-grab, then it truly would be reminiscent of the 1930's and Adolph Hitler's
annexation of various continental territories, which later led to a much wider
and much bloodier European conflagration.
But then that's the problem with
bullies of any shape or size, the more they are appeased the more emboldened
they become. So the West allows Mr Putin's Russia to keep the illegally seized
region of Crimea, but what then? As has been reported in any number of the
quality newspapers, there are millions of ethnic Russians living in any number
of newly independent eastern states, most of which share borders with Russia. Using
a similar premise to that which led to the illegal annexation of Crimea, what's
to stop Mr Putin fomenting discord in any of these former soviet satellite
countries; and then ordering his troops to cross their shared borders in order
to protect those ethnic Russian citizens? Wouldn't that be exactly the same
reason that President Putin used for his invasion of Crimea; that he's
currently attempting to use in Ukraine; and that he might well chose to use
elsewhere in the future? If Crimea wasn't worth a concerted western effort to
confront Mr Putin, then why is Ukraine, or Poland, or Latvia, or Lithuania, or
anywhere else for that matter? Just where does the EU draw the line when it
comes to protecting the principle of international law, or is it simply a case
of individually measuring profit and loss, or cost and benefit when it comes to
the rights of various European states?
This piece isn't really about the
rights and wrongs of Russia's actions in Eastern Europe. Aside from any trade
that our country has with the likes of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, etc.
the chances are that most British people don't care about who controls what in
Europe, just so long as it doesn't interfere with or impact on their own daily
lives. Similarly, most people in the UK don't have more than a passing interest
when it comes to the European Union, or its leadership, save for when its
mountain of rules and regulations directly impact on their daily lives, which
is increasingly the case, thanks to successive British governments.
What is probably more important
to a large number of people in the UK is the basic principle of international
laws, those that state that a modern, supposedly democratic nation like Russia
shouldn't invade a neighbouring country on a complete pretence, for no good
reason. Another basic principle of international law requires that the dead, no
matter what their ethnicity, creed, gender, or age, should be treated with
appropriate respect and that their remains should be delivered up, so that they
can receive a dignified and respectful burial from their families and friends,
in a place of their choosing. Under international law, perfectly innocent
civilians shouldn't be shot out of the sky, their remains shouldn't be
mistreated, they shouldn't be looted or exploited, nor should they be allowed
to fester and rot in a field, when the means exist to have them recovered and
returned to their grieving families for burial. These are likely the sorts of
issues of principle that many Britons would be concerned about regarding the
Ukraine crisis, not whose entitled to live where and to be governed by whom?
Unfortunately, the major fly in
the ointment regarding Ukraine appears to be one of responsibility, or rather
the choice by multiple people, countries and organisations, not to take any
sort of responsibility at all. President Putin doesn't want to admit
responsibility for arming and supporting the armed separatists in Ukraine,
whilst the administration in Kiev doesn't want to take responsibility for
creating the conditions that might allow for unfettered international access to
the crash site. The international organisations, like the OSCE who have gained
limited access to the scene won't take responsibility for retrieving human
remains, while the separatists won't take responsibility for helping to create
the sorts of conditions that would allow other outside groups to undertake that
particularly gruesome and arduous task. The likes of the UN and the ICRC have
both been conspicuous by their absence in Ukraine, possibly because they don't
want to take responsibility for the crash site either, or indeed the retrieval
of the remaining passenger's bodies.
And then there are the various
overseas governments whose citizens actually died in the crash, most of whom
have been equally poor when it comes to taking responsibility for overseeing
the retrieval of their citizens, investigating the events surrounding the crash
itself; and imposing far-reaching penalties on those who caused MH17's
destruction, or those who have deliberately sought to impede a speedy
resolution to the incident.
But here in a sense, we end up
back at the beginning, with the European Union and its seemingly monolithic
inability to achieve anything at all, such is the divisiveness of the union,
when individual member states national interests are somehow threatened by
co-ordinated actions. So you have the Germans advocating punitive measures
against Russia, but at the same time trying to preserve its national trade
worth billions of Roubles and Euros in automotive parts and energy supplies.
Then you have the former Eastern Bloc states, who have most to fear from an
expansionist Russia, but who at the same time are some of the most reliant on
oil and gas from the East, whilst trading their fruit, vegetables and arable
crops the other way. France has its multi-billion Euro arms trade with Russia,
while the Dutch sell their flowers. The UK provides financial services and safe
havens for Russian oligarchs; whilst Italy is another significant consumer of
Russian gas and oil.
Although virtually all of the EU
members are publicly aghast at Russia's actions in the Crimea and the Ukraine,
for each in turn their principles have a price, be that in terms of oil and
gas, arms deals, financial investments, property values, or whatever other
benefits their country derive from its trade with modern Russia. Where at one
time Russia's intransigence and military interference might have led to almost
total international isolation and condemnation, today we are governed by a
class of politician who will almost always put a price on pretty much
everything, be that international treaties, agreements or even laws. Rather
than looking at how they might strengthen the various economic and political
sanctions against Russia, European politicians are thought to be thinking of
ways to lighten the pressure on Mr Putin, believing that encouragement, rather
than discouragement will ultimately lead them out of the current international
crisis, a strategy that history tells us never works. Confronting a bully is
always far more effective in the long run rather than simply ignoring or even
condoning one.
The
wider point is of course that the crises in both Crimea and Ukraine are minor
by comparison to the sorts of issues that Europe may or may not face in the
future, whether they were to come from Russia or elsewhere around the globe.
The fact is though that the EU has singularly failed to offer an effective
co-ordinated response to Mr Putin's troublemaking in Eastern Europe, which
should make us all question their ability to resolve any possible problems in
the future, if and when they do arise. To even consider that Britain's future
defence might be put in the hands of European leaders whose own narrow national
interests will almost certainly outweigh those of the UK should make us all
shudder at the prospect; and if the EU can't defend Europe, ALL of Europe; and speak with one voice
on all such vital subjects, then just what is the point of the European Union
project anyway?
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