It has been nearly 13 years since Russia invaded Crimea, and nearly five since they invaded the rest of Ukraine. It has lasted nearly as long as the Second World War and at that only if we start the clock with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Where is the end?
As the Nazi government expanded Germany into neighbouring territories in the 1930s, the western allies approached the problem as if it could be managed through words and the concept that there might be ‘enough’ territory taken to satiate their expansionist hunger. By spring of 1939, Britain had finally figured out that this was not going to be a workable strategy and, along with France, committed to defend Poland should it be invaded.
In August of that year, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a non-aggression pact. Two days later, the British government declared that they and France would defend Poland should they be attacked.
A week after that, on September 1st, Germany invaded Poland, followed over the next week by declarations of war on Germany by Britain and France on September 3rd, and by Canada on September 10th.
That bit is more or less common knowledge.
We forget, though, that in 1938, when Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler led the Munich Conference, there was more to it than offering Germany the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. A region of the country that had been the subject of a border war in 1919 was also handed over to Poland, and annexed at the end of that year.
History also often conveniently ignores the Soviet invasion of Poland a week after Canada’s declaration of war on Germany. On Sunday, September 17th, the Stalin’s Red Army invaded the eastern half of Poland while Nazi Germany completed its annexation of the western half of the country.
At the time, the western Allies did not react to the Soviet invasion of the same country that they were going to war to defend from the German invasion.
Fast forward to 1994, a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the newfound independence of several Soviet controlled countries including Poland and Ukraine. The Soviet nuclear arsenal had largely physically been left within the territorial bounds of Ukraine and, having fresh memories of Chernobyl, among numerous other concerns, the country agreed to return its entire nuclear arsenal to Russia in exchange for security guarantees from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia itself, in what became known as the Budapest Memorandum.
The guarantee was simple. Give up the nuclear weapons, and the signatories will (unabridged text available from the UN)
“respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine”;
“refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine”;
“refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind”;
“provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used”;
commit “not to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons”; and of course to
“consult in the event a situation arises which raises a question concerning these commitments.”
The invasion of Ukraine in 2014 obviously grossly violates nearly every aspect of this signed treaty. The full scale invasion of the country 8 years later was such a flagrant violation as to raise doubt to the purpose of ever signing a treaty.
That the war has now raged on for nearly as long as the most generous measure of the Second World War, that the full scale war has itself lasted nearly as long as the European theatre of that war, and that we are collectively accepting this as a somehow normal far off conflict is beyond my ability to comprehend.
The allies refused to react to the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 while promising to defend the country. We have offered logistical support to Ukraine in dealing with the Russian invasion approaching its 13th anniversary, yet never in quite enough quantity and quality to secure a final, clear defeat honouring the Budapest memorandum commitments. Nobody wants war with Russia — but that is exactly what they are banking on.
Ukraine is succeeding in this war because, for them, failure is not an option. Yet, for the rest of the western allies, it certainly seems to be.
One of my Substack feeds claimed recently that the re-arming of Germany before WWII came largely from American banks. If true, I wonder if that helped slow their entry into the war? Certainly, Trump and others connection to Putin is slowing any support for Ukraine.