The events preceding the start of World War II are well known. British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, returned to Downing Street from Munich on the night of September 30, 1938 claiming that he had brought “peace for our time” after signing the peace agreement with Hitler providing for the German army to march into Czechoslovakia and complete the occupation of the Sudetenland by October 10. Hitler was hailed everywhere, especially in his own country, as the greatest German politician ever.

Winston Churchill, who opposed the agreement, issued a statement soon after in which he claimed that “The partition of Czechoslovakia, under Anglo-French pressure, amounts to a complete surrender by the western democracies to the threat of force. Such a collapse will not bring peace or safety to Great Britain or France”.

Vladimir Lenin once remarked: “When a man sticks in a bayonet and strikes mush, he keeps pushing but if he hits cold steel he pulls back.” At Munich, Hitler found mush and proceeded to invade Czechoslovakia and, later, Poland, and, then, much of Europe.

The EU lost a great opportunity to secure its eastern borders

In 2008, President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia ordered the invasion of the sovereign state of Georgia after years of provocation by Russia, ostensibly to protect Georgia’s tiny rebel region of South Ossetia. Medvedev later boasted with his troops that the geopolitical situation of the region would have been different had they faltered in 2008.

In early 2014, thus emboldened, Vladmir Putin (now solidly back in the seat of the Russian presidency), took the occasion of unrest in the Ukraine to declare, with the full approval of the Russian Parliament, that Crimea was a region of Russia after a quickly-organised referendum in Crimea overwhelmingly approved the split from Ukraine. Putin’s agents are now fomenting unrest in other parts of eastern Ukraine.

Hitler’s lesson in 1938 was a textbook example of how a strong national leader can get what he wants without the need of firing a single shot. All that is needed is weakness (Lenin’s famous “mush”) on the other side. Putin is putting in place a similar subtle method of coercing Ukraine while the West hesitates.

All that is happening in Ukraine should be of primary interest to us in Malta. We are, after all, a part of the EU and our leaders attend the relevant Council meetings where the EU foreign affairs policies are decided upon.

One may recall that many of the newly-liberated countries of central and eastern Europe were, after the dissolution of the USSR, eager to join the EU, for cultural, economic and, especially, security reasons. The former German Democratic Republic was dissolved and reunified with greater Germany on October 3, 1990 after the fall of the Wall of Berlin and, thus, it also became automatically a part of the EU. After long negotiations Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania subsequently also joined the EU.

This was a triumph for the EU and the West. At first, Moscow was relaxed about these important developments. Its new leaders were more concerned with the internal troubles of their own country as they tried to come to terms with the extraordinary disruptions that they were facing following the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.

On the other hand, the EU and the West, represented by Nato, did not want to provoke the new rulers in Moscow too much. They, therefore, treaded the soft ground between the two blocs very carefully, studying each step forward with extreme trepidation given the unknown factors beyond.

In retrospect, this now appears to have been a mistake on the part of the EU and Nato. Putin, a former high-ranking KGB officer, has never been much enamoured with democratic ideas and the West. Once Russia overcame its initial troubles and became more confident and robust as its economy picked up, Putin, as prime minister and president, reverted to his old self.

Many political commentators in the West now feel that, during the period of Russia’s initial instability, the EU should have pushed wide open its doors to the central and eastern European countries. Russia was then definitely not in a position to react.

Instead, we had Chancellors Gerhard Schröder and, later, Angela Merkel of Germany insisting that no state in the East with pre-existing disputes should be admitted to the EU. As a result, Georgia was excluded and Ukraine gradually became a more difficult proposition for the EU. The EU thus lost a great opportunity to secure its eastern borders and, at the same time, guarantee the continuous flow of gas from the east to the west.

The fragile eurozone is, as a result, threatened as never before and the little gain it has made in the past months could be dramatically reversed in the coming months. If, as expected, Russia gains the upper hand in Ukraine, this would place it in full control of the energy resources transited from Russia to the EU through Ukraine, especially gas (about 30 per cent of the EU needs). This could prove to be a veritable nightmare for the EU in the not-too-distant future.

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