Ukraine-Russia crisis: West must choose between defending its values or letting Vladimir Putin's might prevail – Joyce McMillan

She was the first person I saw, in the autumn of 1990, when I arrived at the Obecni Dum (Municipal House) in Prague for the first meeting of a Europe-wide civil society network called the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly; a small middle-aged woman, dressed all in blue and yellow, holding a Ukrainian flag, which most of us in the West had never seen at that time.

She was standing by the steps like a sentinel, saying nothing; and her face was full of a strange mixture of defiance and pride, as she stepped out in her country’s colours for what might have been the first time in her life.

I never saw her again; and I soon learned to recognise the many different strands of nationalism that were present in the resistance to Soviet rule, across eastern Europe. Some activists – including the Ukrainians I later met through the HCA – were true civic champions for democracy and human rights, who associated the new independence of their countries with those values; a few were ethnic nationalists of the most unpleasant kind.

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What was true of the whole period, though, was a certain dream-like quality, as the Soviet power which had once seemed so unassailable melted away, allowing the emergence back onto the political stage not only of Warsaw Pact countries like Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but also of former Soviet republics including Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on the Baltic, and Ukraine itself, the great land between Poland and Russia.

We had become accustomed to peace in northern Europe since 1945, of course; but it was conditional on the “balance of terror” between the major nuclear powers, and fears of nuclear war haunted our dreams and our politics.

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To see that fear suddenly removed, the “Iron Curtain” fall, and the vision open up of a Europe without walls, united – at least in theory – in the pursuit of peace, democracy, and the greater freedom of it citizens, was a moment of astonishing exhilaration; and despite the horror of the war in former Yugoslavia, which cast a long shadow over the early 1990s, we in northern Europe have largely been living in that dream of open borders and increasing co-operation ever since, as the EU and Nato expanded eastward, and travel to places once largely inaccessible – for business, pleasure, work, or friendship – gradually became the new normal.

Now, though – with a thud of missiles slamming into military sites across Ukraine, and signs, already, of some civilian casualties – Vladimir Putin has administered the brutal wake-up call that ends that dream, and forces us to learn again that the kind of peace and freedom most of us have taken for granted for the last 30 years may sometimes have to be defended, in ways that do not come easily to nations that have come to see peace as the norm.

Ukrainian soldiers get ready to repel an attack in Ukraine's Lugansk yesterday (Picture: Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images)Ukrainian soldiers get ready to repel an attack in Ukraine's Lugansk yesterday (Picture: Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images)
Ukrainian soldiers get ready to repel an attack in Ukraine's Lugansk yesterday (Picture: Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images)

It’s true, of course, that greater wisdom and vigilance, on the part of the West, could have prevented the crisis we now face. Our governments have been guilty not only of long-term complacency about the character of the present Russian government, but of a series of misjudgements during the 1990s – notably the export of a brutal and simplistic and model of capitalism – that led to the eventual rise of Putin, the archetypal “strong man”.

Economic policies that neglect the well-being of our own people have also tended to leave our societies vulnerable to the online activities of Kremlin-backed social media actors, who peddle malicious disinformation designed to weaken the West – witness their support both for the UK’s Brexit vote, and for the election as US President of Donald Trump, always Putin’s greatest admirer.

However this situation arose, though, the West now has to put recriminations aside, and focus on action to support Ukraine, and other vulnerable states in the region.

Culturally, it will certainly be difficult for western Europe to get its head round this sudden transition from a broadly peaceful continent to one whose largest military power has decided to change the political landscape by force; nor should we be ashamed of that fact.

A wounded woman stands outside a hospital in Chuguiv, Ukraine, after it was attacked by Russian forces (Picture: Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images)A wounded woman stands outside a hospital in Chuguiv, Ukraine, after it was attacked by Russian forces (Picture: Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images)
A wounded woman stands outside a hospital in Chuguiv, Ukraine, after it was attacked by Russian forces (Picture: Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images)
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Seventy-seven years of peace is an achievement, not a failure; but once broken, it can only be restored by the kind of action – serious economic sanctions at best, strong enough to bring the Russian economy to its knees, and military intervention at worst – that will exact a serious price from us in the West, as well as from Putin and his regime.

So the question that now hangs over the geopolitical landscape is simply whether the West is ready for this; or whether we will let Ukraine go – probably into years of bloody conflict between occupying forces and local insurgents – while hoping against hope that Putin has no further aggressive plans.

Some argue that no mere idea – democracy, human rights, freedom – is worth a single human life; others – not least in countries like Ukraine, where people demonstrating against a pro-Moscow president gave their lives for those ideas less than a decade ago, or in the Baltic states, where millions poured onto the streets in 1990 to embody their belief in a different future – may well have a different perspective.

The events of this week, though, mean that first our governments here in the West, and then all of us as citizens, will now have to face that same choice: to decide what that hopeful and joyful new Europe we first glimpsed 30 years ago is worth to us, a generation on; and whether we will step up to defend it at some cost to ourselves, or simply let the might of Putin’s army prevail, while hoping that its brutal force will never reach as far as our shores, our town, or our street.

Vladimir Putin has forced us to learn again that peace and freedom may ysometimes have to be defended (Picture: Alexey Nikolsky/AFP via Getty Images)Vladimir Putin has forced us to learn again that peace and freedom may ysometimes have to be defended (Picture: Alexey Nikolsky/AFP via Getty Images)
Vladimir Putin has forced us to learn again that peace and freedom may ysometimes have to be defended (Picture: Alexey Nikolsky/AFP via Getty Images)

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