I really like Peter Hitchens (writes for the Mail). He’s brave. He puts his genuine beliefs out there, even when he knows his is the minority view. He’s also not afraid to publicly admit when he’s changed his mind. He used to be a member of the Labour party, then he joined the Conservatives, but left again when he realised his take on conservativism didn’t align with that of the party.
And he’s a good writer. That and a sense of humour earn my unfettered respect and admiration.
So when yesterday he wrote yet another piece criticising Ukraine, lambasting the West’s almost unanimous support for the country, and defending (up to a point) Russia, I felt I had to tread carefully before blogging any disagreement.
PS: Hats off to the Mail for allowing such dissent amongst its ranks.
Anyhoo, Hitchens does make a good case, several in fact; that’s not to say I agree with him.
Let’s start with his opening gambit: “Not since the wild frenzy after the death of Princess Diana have I ever met such a wave of ignorant sentiment. Nobody knows anything about Ukraine. Everyone has ferocious opinions about it.”
I agree. I’m one of those ignoramuses who knows nothing about Ukraine or Russia but ferociously embraces Zelensky in all his military fatigues. What do I base my opinion on? Russia is committing the most heinous war crimes against civilians, and Ukraine soldiers enjoy yelling God save the Queen. What else is there to know?
In any event, how many “waves of ignorant sentiment” are we confronted with on other topics? Who knows enough about anything? Still, everyone has ferocious opinions about everything. The sheer tripe out there about the NI Protocol from its supporters, who’ve obviously never read it (I have), is surpassed only by those Sharkey-groupies who have a one-dimensional, fragmented and technically flawed knowledge of sewage overflows.
Gee, I haven’t had an off-topic moment like that for a while. It feels soooooooo good.
Back to Hitchens and Zelensky (sounds like next year’s double-act for another Eurovision win). Hitchens is very critical, and not a little sarcastic, of “the lovely, angelic, saintly, perfect” Ukraine blocking off the water supply to Crimea in 2014. He infers this was an act of great evil. Was it?
In 2014, Moscow annexed the Crimean Peninsula on Ukraine's Black Sea coast and backed separatists fighting in its east. Some 58% of people in Crimea are ethnic Russian, with the rest made up of Ukrainians and Tatars. A canal from the River Dnieper to Crimea was supplying 85% of the peninsula’s needs and, following the annexation, Russia took over canal operations, which had been run by the State Water Resources Agency of Ukraine. Ukrainian officials said that they decided to dam the canal only after Russian authorities failed to pay for water delivery. While the shutdown destroyed Crimea’s rice plantations, drinking water was not affected (per the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)). Russia was forced to divert other water sources to the region, which was costing it big time. (Note – Russia bombed the dam in February of this year.)
In other words, Russia illegally annexed part of Ukraine, effectively stole Ukraine water, so Ukraine responded in a way that cost Russia a lot of resources yet did not impact the basic water supply to civilians. Sounds like an ok response to me.
Hitchens goes on to say, “… almost nobody, in education, politics or journalism, knows about the nasty, racist roots of Ukrainian nationalism, the horrible history of the vicious Stepan Bandera (now a Ukrainian national hero), or the Kiev state’s discriminatory scorn for the Russian language.”
Stepan who? Oh dear – are his crimes sufficient to tarnish the saintly image of Zelensky? Hardly – he died in 1959, over 60 years ago. Who cares in the current context?
Hitchens alludes to modern-day state-sanctioned Nazism against the country’s Russian speakers, and Putin is using that as an excuse to invade Ukraine. A generic Google didn’t help. The top recommended websites were either Russian or Ukraine-backed. Then I tried “BBC fact check Ukraine Nazis”. That worked! OK, I’m normally a ‘de-fund the BBC’ kind-a gal, but sometimes they manage to be even-handed. So, here’s Auntie’s take:
“At the last parliamentary election in 2019, support for far-right candidates was just 2% - far lower than in many other European countries. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and members of his family died in the Holocaust. In the 2019 presidential election which Mr Zelensky won, the main far-right candidate won just 1.6% of the vote.
“But there have been far-right groups in Ukraine - the most high-profile is the Azov regiment - elements of which have expressed support for Nazi ideology. It was formed to resist Russian-backed separatists, who seized areas of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and was subsequently absorbed as a unit within the Ukrainian military.”
To parallel the ‘no Crimea-annexation, no water dam’ mantra we now have, ‘no Crimea-annexation, no far-right militia’. How’s that for a sweeping statement.
Giving Hitchens the benefit of the doubt, I dug further and found a report on the referendum in Crimea in 2014, when there was a huge majority for becoming Russian. However, the exercise was flawed from start to finish. For example, “Most of the Tatars that the BBC spoke to said they had boycotted the vote, and felt that life under the Kremlin would be worse.”
My tentative conclusion is that life as a Russian speaker (or non-ethnic Ukraine) wasn’t all roses under Ukraine rule, but when Putin is on the other side, you know the grass is greener where you are.
What else did Hitchens have up his sleeve? Ah yes: he traces the first act of violence that resulted in the current war as being the “Western-backed mob putsch which overthrew Ukraine’s lawful government in 2014” (which prompted Putin to annex Crimea).
I don’t see it like that.
Whereas I agree with Hitchens that EU attempts to woo Ukraine into its sphere of influence riled Putin and they should have seen it coming, the democratically elected President Yanukovych rejected at the last minute a deal with the EU, choosing instead to pursue closer ties with Russia. I couldn’t find a smoking gun but I assume this breached his election promise to sign the agreement. This did, unsurprisingly, lead to protests, but whether they were really “Western-backed” as Hitchens phrased it, or just protests by Western supporters, I can’t ascertain.
I did read one commentary as follows: “The [Mariupol] Nazi volunteers are a minority among the Ukrainian forces, and even they, however unpleasant their views may be, are not anti-Russian; in fact the lingua franca of the battalion is Russian, and most have Russian as their first language … much of what [Mariupol] members say about race and nationalism is strikingly similar to the views of the more radical Russian nationalists fighting with the separatist side.”
Which means, anything Ukraine can Nazify, Russia can do it just the same.
Hitchens concludes with, “I personally have no idea what British interest is served by slavishly backing the American policy of stirring up trouble in Ukraine and goading Russia into combat.”
Personally, I wouldn’t say Blighty is stirring up trouble. What we are doing is helping to quash Russian aggression in Ukraine so that Putin won’t try it on in Moldova, Poland or Finland.
However, I’m right behind Hitchens when he expresses his ridicule at Marks & Spencer for renaming a popular dish Chicken Kyiv, “… just like their old ‘Chicken Kiev’, only with added propaganda.”
Unless said ‘Kyiv’ dish is salt-free, fat-free, sugar-free, additive free, meat free, free-range, organic, carbon neutral and Red Tractor kite-marked, it’s not going to pass muster with the Big Brother, virtue-signalling Thought Police; M&S should keep out of politics and focus on the day job (but they don’t do that very well either – a future blog will explain.)
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