UKRAINE, RUSSIA AND EUROPE´S BLOODY BORDERS / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENT & ANALYSIS

Last updated: October 27, 2014 3:32 pm

 

Ukraine, Russia and Europe’s bloody borders

 

Gideon Rachman

 

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If nations were again allowed to claim bits of their neighbours, it could convulse the continent

 

 

Somebody born in Lviv in 1914, who died in 1992 and never moved out of the city, would have lived in five different countries during the course of a lifetime. In 1914, Lviv, then called Lemberg, was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire; by 1919 it was part of Poland and became Lwow; in 1941 it was occupied by the Germans; after 1945, the city was incorporated into the Soviet Union; and then in 1991 it became part of newly independent Ukraine.

 

Most of these changes were accompanied by warfare and bloodshed. So when it was suggested last week that, a few years ago, Russian president Vladimir Putin had proposed to Donald Tusk, then Polish prime minister, that Ukraine should be partitioned once again – with Russia claiming the eastern territories, and Poland Lviv and other parts of western Ukraine – there was an uproar.

 

The details of the Putin-Tusk conversation – and indeed whether it ever really took place – were swiftly made murky by denials and clarifications on all sides. But the furore over the idea of a partition of Ukraine was still telling. For it revealed the deep and justified fear in Europe that national boundaries might shift once again, across the continent, with all the dangers that implies.

 

The dismemberment of Ukraine has, in a sense, already begun – with Russia’s forcible, but largely bloodless, annexation of Crimea this year. Since then thousands have died in fighting in the east of Ukraine, parts of which are now controlled by Russian-backed separatists. Even though Ukraine held elections at the weekend, the occupied parts of the country were unable to vote.

There are influential voices within the EU now urging the Ukrainians to “accept reality”. Rather than waging a draining and losing war to win back all of the east – then having to rebuild its devastated cities – they are advised to concentrate on making a success of the large majority of the country that they still control. They can deny the legality of Russian control. But they should accept its reality.

That is the “realist” case for partition. But there are other influential voices who think that even tacitly accepting that Europe’s borders can once again be redrawn by military force would be a disastrous mistake. Carl Bildt, who has just stepped down as Sweden’s foreign minister, puts it bluntly: “The borders of Europe are more or less all drawn in blood through centuries of brutal conflict.” Allowing these borders to be redrawn, he thinks, would be an invitation “for the blood to start flowing again”.

The most obvious risk is that the Russian government would redeploy the argument that it used to justify the annexation of Crimea – that these are lands that are historically and culturally Russian – and use it to justify seizing the roughly one-quarter of Ukraine that the Kremlin now habitually calls “Novorossiya”. That part of the country includes all of the Ukrainian coastline, and losing it would in effect cripple Ukraine as a nation.
 

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