UKRAINE (5)

The situation in eastern Ukraine is getting trickier. Pro-Russian activists have taken over Government buildings and police stations, the Ukrainian Government has threatened to send in troops to take them back. Conflict may well lead to bloodshed.

In my original post on Ukraine, I said that the price of peace might well be the secession of the eastern part of Ukraine to Russia. I still see that as the long-term solution. The people there do not feel Ukrainian, do not speak Ukrainian, and are discriminated against by the authorities in Kiev. As in the Crimea, if there were a vote today, I believe that they would vote to switch country.

For the West, the problem is the old one of where the principle of self-determination - a good one in theory - has boundaries. For some years it has seemed as if it has been supported if the result makes the area more pro-Western; ex-Yugoslavia, Kosovo and Cyprus all spring to mind (though the last was stymied by those perfidious Greeks). Now, however, the self-determinists all want to go off and hug Russia. Since that end-result is a "bad thing" in Western eyes, self-determinism has gone out of the window and all the talk is of territorial inviolability and sovereignty.

Apart from some loss of prestige, I would also have thought that getting rid of those pesky easterners was in the Ukrainians' own interests. What would be left would be a country speaking the same language, and free to join the West if it wanted to.

Splitting up countries goes against a long-standing nationalist tradition. But the Czechs and Slovaks managed it. Why shouldn't the Ukrainian Ukrainians and Russian Ukrainians?

Walter Blotscher