Could Ukrainians ever trust a Putin peace deal?

Last week at the Buxton International Festival I joined a big audience for an onstage interview with Anna Reid. She’s a writer who specialises in Eastern European history, was once the Economist magazine’s correspondent in Ukraine, and made her name with a brilliant book, Borderland, which was both a portrait, a history and an appreciation of that country long before it entered the western public consciousness. It’s still worth reading today.

But at Buxton she was introducing her latest book, A Nasty Little War: the Western Intervention into the Russian Civil War, which opened the eyes of many in the audience (including me) to an almost forgotten but serious and grisly conflict straddling the end of the first world war. The Allies, led by Britain and France and including the United States, tried to snuff out Lenin’s Marxist ascendency. The adventure was a military disaster (the White Russian forces, which we supported, being incapable of seizing control) and a political embarrassment.

This is perhaps why I (and perhaps you?) had never heard of this war. Won or lost, we British are inclined to forget conflicts (the Boer War? The whole of Irish history) that were not our finest hours. But Reid had wider and deeper thoughts to convey, too, about Russian history and Russia’s world view today. She was asked, of course, about the present Ukraine war, and over a drink with her afterwards I pursued this. What kind of a peace was achievable?

Anna’s is not a crudely death-or-glory view but her love for Ukraine is strong and her sympathy with the Ukrainian cause is total; it’s fair to say she doubts an enduring peace is achievable while Vladimir Putin is in charge. Whatever the terms of a deal (she thinks), Putin could not be trusted to honour them.