Leave Ukraine to the Russians

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[/audioplayer]‘You can’t always get what you want,’ chorused Mick Jagger, ‘but if you try some time/You just might find/You get what you need.’ The danger with Ukraine is that the western powers will get what they want, not what we need.

I write this as one who has travelled in Ukraine, loved the country and seen that its people (though poor) are talented and energetic. Any reference I make to basket cases refers to the Ukrainian state, not the country’s human resources. What we say we want is for Russia to withdraw from Crimea and turn away from the rest of the country too, which we hope to take under the West’s wing. There follow three good reasons why such an outcome, should we get it, might not be what we need.

First (as Sir Christopher Meyer argued in the Times this week), Russian sentiment over the Crimea runs deep: deeper than some idle pretext for a power grab, and rooted in the Russian imagination. As is often remarked, Russia’s loss of this territory happened as late as 1954 and at the time was neither intended nor interpreted as a ceding of sovereignty, because Ukraine was then so firmly under the Soviet heel as to be essentially a Russian possession. It was really only after the dissolution of the USSR, when Ukraine began to drift (marginally) away from Moscow’s control, that the full significance of the redrawing of boundaries (for essentially administrative reasons) was brought home to Russians within and outside Ukraine.

This year that drift looked like gathering pace. Last month on the streets of Kiev it brought open rupture. The fresh elections that had been agreed (with EU involvement) only hours before what was tantamount to a mob-instigated coup, would have brought time to negotiate the future status of the home port of Russia’s vital Black Sea fleet and the Russian-speaking people in Crimea.