Its time we washed our hands of Ukraine

Matthew Parris
THE TIMES

The Cold War doctrine of containment is the way to deal with Russia; decide what well protect
and let the rest rot
Ukraine? With an inward groan, I write again what I wrote about Saddams Iraq, about Gaddafis
Libya and about Assads Syria. Intervention almost always makes things worse. Dont start what
you cant follow through.
Yet here we go again, poking at a situation. President Putin, who knows us better than we know
ourselves, knows we are not serious. So to help a tottering Ukrainian defence force Britain sends
fewer military advisers than would fill a bus, with strict instructions to stay well clear of the
fighting presumably so we can recall them without loss of face if things get hot.
And via the IMF we lend Kiev not quite enough to keep their country from going bankrupt.
And we mumble about intensifying sanctions against Putins people.
The sanctions, at least, are a good idea. Vladimir Putin is a known quantity; ousted, he might be
replaced by someone far worse. Sanctions will help keep him popular at home. Do you suppose
that if Russia imposed sanctions on Britain then our prime minister would lose popular support?
That flea-bite sanctions are good for Putin is almost too obvious to need stating. We should
never have wooed Ukraine with promises of closer association with the European Union and
membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Nato, remember, was a military alliance
formed to face down Moscow. Ukraine is a vast, corrupt, unmodernised economic basket case
umbilically linked to an even vaster, paranoid, trigger-happy hooligan of a country: Mother
Russia. Some of us saw where this would lead, and so it has.
We should never have offered a guarantee of Ukraines territorial integrity: a promise thrown out
in a fit of inattention and with a carelessness that Moscow will not have overlooked.
We should never have demanded that Russia keep her hands off Crimea if we were not prepared
to help Ukraine to defend Crimea. And when we looked away and whistled, what conclusions
did we think Moscow would draw?
Protesting vigorously then piping down has set the tone for the western response to the
incursions that have followed. A pattern emerges: the West stamps its feet and demands that
Russia halt whatever is the latest advance; Russia takes no notice; we look away; Ukraine
retreats to the next line of defence; western powers stamp their feet again; after a pause, Russia
advances again; we look away again and prattle about ceasefires.
Since the February 15 ceasefire Debaltseve has fallen; probably Mariupol and Kharkiv will be
next, but it will be slow, with frequent pauses as ceasefires seem partially to hold for while; and
Moscow plays like a cat with a mouse. Were we ever prepared to go to war with Russia for any
part of Ukraine? No, of course not. We have squandered our credibility by sabre-rattling and
retreat.

What follows may sound harsh but I believe it. Harry Truman was right in 1947 when, as US
president, he threw an economic lifeline to Greece and Turkey. Thus was born the Cold War
doctrine of containment; and since the 1950s, containment proved the best way of dealing with
Moscow.
Containment still is. The Russian political psyche is a sick thing and its economy dysfunctional
and in the end incapable of sustaining Russian dreams and ambitions. The worlds best approach
is to throw an invisible cordon around the angry, stumbling quasi-empire, defend whats outside
that cordon and leave whats within to rot.
Im afraid Id leave Ukraine within: its a running sore for Moscow, and too big for western
Europe to digest and fix. The Ukrainian economy is shrinking, its currency is nosediving, its
corruption is endemic, and its industry and agriculture will take decades (and trillions) to
modernise. There are estimates that Kiev is going to need a bung of $27 billion this year alone.
Britains entire aid budget is some $17 billion. Lets leave this expense to President Putin.
A word on President Putin. The story about post-communist Russia that we in the West have
constructed is that Putin is the bad guy: Putin and his mates; Putin with his (to us) strange looks
and (to us) weird macho masculinity; Putin who, almost in person, is fomenting the trouble in
Ukraine.
But time and time again we set up these bad-guy narratives in which the nasty figure at the top
(as we see it) is not just the symbol but the source of the problem: simplistic stories that we tell
ourselves to make the world easier to understand, and (perversely) less scary because the scary
monsters have been identified and selected for attack. But as in Libya, as in Iraq, as in Syria,
chopping off the head of the state doesnt suddenly render what lies beneath amenable to
purification.
Putin loves to make himself seem exceptional but he is a product of that huge, ancient, deep,
extended, complicated, anguished thing we call Russia. It is facile to think that removing him
would fix Russia.
So leave him there. And leave Russia for what it is, beyond our understanding. And . . .
. . . here Im going to disappoint my anti-war friends. We should prepare for war. But we should
draw the battle lines where we really could, and really would, go to war. It is clear where those
battle lines are: they are along the borders of the Baltic states with Russia and Belarus; the Baltic
states are all three in Nato; and they are the frontier of the European Union.
I dont believe Moscow would even think about taking a crack at Lithuania, Estonia or Latvia if
it believed that this would lead to war with the West. There is only one way such a foolish
ambition could be nurtured in the Kremlin and it is the way the western powers are going
about things now: protest and retreat, protest and retreat, all the way down the line . . . until
gradually the feeling grows that each nibble will be followed by a further nibble, and when the
Bear finally reaches your own doorstep a kind of inevitability has raised the Bears daring,
undermined your own spirit of resistance, and led your friends to write you off as they had to
write off the places that came before.
So defend what we know we can. Cease our half-hearted defence of what we know we cant.
Pride must be swallowed. Clarity hurts. But in the end, clarity is the best security.