People
seeking peace in Ukraine once celebrated the Austrian State Treaty of
1955 as a model. Alas, that wasn’t the best analogy. Austria was (and
is) a post-imperial rump state already occupied after the Second World
War by several armies, none of which had real aims to remain there, and
even less desire to fight over it or for Austria’s handful of
irredentists. Neutrality later made sense.
Some
form of multinational agreement to respect Ukraine’s neutrality might
have been accepted by Vladimir Putin. But NATO wasn’t having it.
Wishful
thinkers have since turned to promoting a Finland-type result for
Ukraine. What was that? Not what Finland has recently done by joining
NATO but rather by settling for an imperfect resolution of the Winter
War in 1940. John Lukacs has written:
To
Stalin the suggestive and yet imprecise phrase ‘spheres of interest’
meant an entirely free hand over what had fallen to his side across the
new German-Soviet border. So he and Molotov forced the unfortunate
envoys of the Baltic states in Moscow to accept the stationing of
Russian garrisons and naval establishments on their territories. The
Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians had to accept, hoping that despite
these military concessions their – minimal – civic independence could
prevail. Farther to their south the Soviet-occupied portions of Poland
were simply annexed to the Soviet Union. Having dealt with the Baltic
states, Stain almost immediately turned on Finland, also allotted to his
‘sphere of interest’. Again the main issue was territorial and
military, a demand for frontier changes and for at least one Russian
naval base. There was at least one reason for the former: the Finnish
frontier after 1920 ran very close to Leningrad. The Finns knew that;
they were not altogether unreasonable; yet it was soon evident that what
Stalin wanted was their consent to come within his sphere of interest –
that is, empire. He, rather than the Finns, broke off negotiations. He
ordered the faking of an ‘incident’ along the Finnish-Russian border;
using that as a pretext, on 30 November he went to war with Finland.
This
was a war between two states: an enormous and brutal Russia, a bitter
and brave Finland. Yet Stalin gave it an ideological packaging.
Employing a gaggle of exiled Finnish Communists whose ‘government’ he
established on the Finnish-Russian border, he used the pretext of
assisting that ‘people’s government’ against the ‘reactionary’ regime in
Helsinki. But this war soon developed into a sorry business for the
Russians. Their army and their air force performed miserably. It took
nearly three months for the Russians to summon enough might to break
through the main defense line of their so much smaller opponent. By
early March the Finns were constrained to sign a peace treaty. That
paper, significantly, contained not a word about the ‘Finnish people’s
government’, the pretext and the packaging with which the Winter War had
begun. Finland lost some land, an important town, and a naval base, but
her independent existence remained, alone among the lands in Stalin’s
sphere of interest….
In
1945 Stalin’s Russia was the greatest power in Eurasia, one of the two
rulers of the entire globe, the only equal of the United States. That,
too, would not last – again, mostly because of Stalin’s character. In
1941 he failed because of his excessive trust in Hitler; after 1945 he
failed because of his excessive suspicions of the United States…. Had he
accepted the American idea that the eastern part of Europe occupied by
his armies would be governed by governments dependent on and respectful
of Russia but not Communized and cut away from the rest of Europe (as
happened to Finland, a unique case, principally because of Stalin’s
respect for the Finns), there would have been no cold war…
No
such respect or trust appears detectable today as regards Russia and
Ukraine. Short of a full change in government in either country (or in
the political composition of NATO), it’s hard to see how this ends well.