National Post (National Edition)
It’s everyone’s war now
‘Today the war has overspilled from the territory of Ukraine,” Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko said after the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. “For weeks we have shed tears over our own dead. We have tears left for the innocent victims of this crime. Today Ukraine mourns with you.”
For those with a sense of history — and it impossible not to live in the shadow of history in Poland and Ukraine — there is foreboding in addition to sorrow and anger over the mass murder of those on board MH17. Some years ago, historian Timothy Snyder wrote a book about the nations’ histories under Hitler and Stalin, from 1933-1945. He called it Bloodlands. Those dramatic years left some 14 million civilians dead in the bloodlands — the high price of being on the bloody borders between evil empires.
The western territories of Ukraine were Polish before the Second World War, so there is great sensitivity here to what happens in Poland’s eastern neighbour. Is it a buffer against Russia, or a bridge to the malevolent forces gathering strength there? Poland today is secure in the European Union and in NATO, but the memory of what happens when aggressors foment upheaval is within the lifetime of many here.
I am here in Krakow teaching in an annual seminar that brings together students from across Eastern Europe, including Poland, Ukraine and Russia. We had a distinguished visitor join us last week, Bishop Borys Gudziak, president of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. He was part of the Maidan movement last winter and spring. And what he reported about the “separatists” in eastern Ukraine is even more urgent to understand now that Russia aggression against Ukraine has spread to Malaysia, of all places.
There are four components to the socalled separatists, those militants seeking greater union with Russia. First, there are Russian special forces — meaning the Russian armed forces already operating on Ukrainian sovereign territory. Then there are Ukrainians whose pro-Russian rebellion against Kyiv is being financed, it is as-
If passenger jets are no longer safe over eastern Ukraine, is it so difficult to imagine Putin occupying and ‘pacifying’ the region?
sumed in Ukraine, by the monies stolen by Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president who fled into Russian exile after the Maidan overthrew him. A third group includes (loosely) organized criminals, seeking to exploit mayhem for their own gain. Finally, there are mercenaries, paid to foment violence against Kyiv.
It is to this last group that Poroshenko has attributed responsibility for MH17. (Presumably Russian special forces would have known better than to shoot down a passenger jet full of Dutch and Malaysian passengers.)
“The State Security Service of Ukraine has intercepted a conversation in which one of the leaders of the mercenaries boasted about bringing down the plane in his reporting to his Russian supervisor, colonel of the General Intelligence Unit of Russia’s Armed Forces. Other terrorists have also boasted about their success,” said Poroshenko.
On the borders of Ukraine, to say nothing of within the country itself, people are hearing the echoes of 1938. It does not matter whether Putin is a new Hitler; it is the sequence of events that is familiar. Noises are made about concern for fellow “nationals” in bordering countries. Territories are annexed with appeal to their historic status. Trouble is fomented across the border, as a prelude to further expansion in the name of security. Given that international flights are no longer safe in Ukrainian airspace, is it so difficult to imagine Putin announcing that the Russian army will occupy parts of eastern Ukraine in order to “pacify” the region?
A view widespread in Poland is that Western leaders simply lack the imagination to understand Russian aggression, and the courage to do anything serious about it. Imagination is not so much needed here, where memory alone suffices for a sufficiently sober and serious assessment of threats on the borders. Now, the shooting down of MH17 means that Russian-backed aggression is no longer a threat confined to Ukraine alone. The blood has indeed “overspilled” the bloodlands.
“Shooting down a civilian aircraft is an act of international terrorism, targeted against the entire world. This is a wake-up call for the whole world,” said Poroshenko. “We expect an adequate response from the international community.”
In the 1938, the world slept. Will it wake up now?