1938 Revisited

The announcement by President Putin of Russia that he recognised the breakaway Russian backed Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk as separate states, was in one sense, only a confirmation of the facts on the ground ....

Russia Has Recognised The Rebel Regions As States

..... Russia had backed the Russian rebels in those two Ukrainian provinces since 2014, and was never going to allow the Ukrainian forces to recapture the land currently held by the rebels.

So the border between the two forces, the Ukrainians and the rebels, had been fixed for a long period, and thus Russia felt they were now permanent situations. But this diplomatic move, was obviously not just a framework to allow Russian armed forces to enter in to both rebel areas as 'peace keepers,' but also, as we have now discovered, a prelude to the wholesale invasion of the Ukraine. So not just a mechanism for "incorporating" the two rebel held regions fully into Russia ... which was an aim alluded to by at least two advisor's, in Mr Putin's televised talk with his team about the situation, even though Putin quickly 'corrected' them.

So despite Western upset, the move to recognise the rebel areas as 'independent states', if that was all that Russia had been going to do, would possibly have been lived with by the West .... but the invasion of the rest of the Ukraine is another matter completely. Now the world is suddenly plunged back into the era when dictators in Europe invaded other lands, in the name of irredentism!

There Was No Ukraine In Imperial Russia

President Putin has stated that he would demilitarise and "de-Nazify" the Ukraine (a democratic country, with a freely elected Jewish President), but he claims that they won't occupy the country .... however, presumably after destroying its armed forces, arresting all the 'Nazi's,' and installing a puppet government, then he won't need to occupy it?

It was obvious from his recent statements, that President Putin believes that the Ukraine has never been a real independent country, and this underpins all his claims and in his mind justifies his actions in the Ukraine, and possibly the Baltic states (where he has voiced similar views) as well. However the claims about Ukraine's treatment of 'Russian-speaking people' in the country as a justification for invasion, suggest that the Russians recognise the Ukrainians have a separate language and culture.

His Ukrainian views are based on Imperial Russia Pre-1917, when the city of Kiev was part of 'Little Russia', and the southern area including the Crimea was part of 'New Russia'. After WWI western Ukraine was incorporated into Poland, while the rest went to the new USSR. Its current boundaries are in his opinion, simply the creation of the USSR after 1945, when the USSR redrew the borders of Eastern Europe again, and that in any case the Ukraine was an 'integral part of his country's history', and he has described eastern Ukraine as "ancient Russian lands". 

USSR Borders in 1930's Show Crimea Not In Ukraine

Now once again, there is a germ of truth in these claims in Russian eyes, something that the West has never really acknowledged (and therein lies much of Putin's anger "You didn't want us to be friends," was how he put it to the West, "but you didn't have to make an enemy of us.") ... the Ukraine has barely existed as a country in his opinion ... and certainly never outside Russian control.

Kiev Rus' Was The Birth State Of Russia And The Ukraine

Of course, as he has also frequently alluded to, its also true that the Kievan Rus' state was the founding state for both Russia and the Ukraine, and so the Ukraine is an 'integral part of Russian history' as Putin claims. 

But its also a separate culture in many key respects, partly as a result of foreign domination of the area that comprises the modern Ukraine, by other European states such as Poland, and Ottoman Turkey for centuries. Also while its true that certain areas of the Ukraine in the East, such as Donetsk, Luhansk were always mainly Russian populated areas, in the Crimea they have also had large populations of Turks and Germans, due to Ottoman occupations and internal policies in the Imperial Russia of Pre-1917.

The Ukraine was only recognised again as an individual state in the 1920's (after 500 or more years of non existence), but even then didn't include the Crimea region, until it was incorporated in to what are now Ukrainian borders, in a fraternal act after the second world war, when it was an integral state in the then eternal USSR. So for instance in the 1920's and 1930's, the Crimea was still a separate political area within the USSR.

So as we have seen with the annexation of the Crimea, President Putin is from his point of view, merely correcting what he (and French President Macron, who also used the term after meeting Putin), likes to describe as some 'historical mistakes' i.e. the mistakes of adding of historical Russian lands to the borders of the Ukraine by the Soviet leaders.

Now, this invasion, and demands for a union of the Russian populations in certain regions with 'Mother Russia', along with the return of 'historic' lands, has a more than an echo with the 1930's, where irredentism was also a key Nazi German policy. Adolf Hitler used the term 'Anschluss' (Unification or Union) to describe his demands that German populations on Germany's borders be reunited with the 'Fatherland'. This was part of the The Heim ins Reich ("back home to the Reich") foreign policy that he followed.

So, in political and military actions very a similar to those that President Putin is following against the Ukraine, Hitler claimed Austria was a historically a German people, and he managed to get a referendum promised in Austria (which was cancelled when he thought he would lose), and then German troops simply marched in as part of the untested, 'popular will' ... the Nazi's then held a plebiscite (probably rigged), on the 10th of April 1938, which officially ratified Austria's annexation by the Reich.

He then made similar demands on the Czech state for what was called the Sudetenland, which was populated by Sudeten Germans, and on the  15th of September 1938, the Czech Prime Minister (seeing how the tide was going), secretly offered to give 6,000 square kilometres (2,300 sq mi) of Czechoslovakia to Germany, in exchange for a German agreement to admit 1.5 to 2.0 million Sudeten Germans, which Czechoslovakia would expel. 

This was rejected, and Hitler, with the agreement of Britain and  France (who at best were trying to buy time before the inevitable European war, and at worst, under appeasement, were willing to sacrifice parts of Czechoslovakia to Germany, in order to avoid war), just walked in to the territory. Of course the general war still inevitably started anyway, when in a false flag border operation Germany invaded Poland and later annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia ... so the lesson of history is that you must resist these sorts of activities from the start, as appeasement only emboldens the aggressors anyway. 

President Putin's claims and demands may have a superficial ring (especially in Russia eyes), and if he had stopped with the two rebel areas, then maybe the world would have learnt to live with the Realpolitik of the situation .... but now after the full blown invasion of the Ukraine, history shows that he will likely have other demands that he will pursue, such as the return of the rest of the two regions (or the whole Ukraine, despite his claims that he won't occupy the country) to 'Mother Russia', and that Nato expansion must be rolled back from countries such as Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and the Baltic States.

We now teeter on the brink of a situation that will change Europe yet again for decades ... we must keep in mind that this is not a "quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing" ... because in the smaller world in which we now live, the Ukraine is just 4 - 6 hours away.

We live in very dangerous times ..... because as events are showing us, you can't fight tanks with banks.