Frontline Ukraine:
Crisis in the Borderlands
by Richard Sakwa
(IB Tauris, £18.99)

THE FATHER of Richard Sakwa, professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent and an associate fellow at Chatham House, left Poland in the face of Soviet occupation in 1939 and enlisted in the British army.

Such a familial and academic background makes this impressively researched study of the current conflict in Ukraine all the more remarkable.

Sakwa allocates the main responsibility for it to the West, particularly to what he describes as the “war party” in the US and their allies in the EU. He rejects the demonisation of President Putin and assesses Russia’s response as essentially reactive. And he argues that Europe today is a more dangerous place than it was during the cold war and that there are worrying parallels, in terms of the structural component of conflict, to 1914.

Sakwa identifies three interlocking crises —all active and unresolved — the first of which is that of Ukrainian statehood.

Post-1991 Ukraine, he claims, contains two deeply conflictual perspectives. One is pluralist — recognising Ukraine as a composite country which combines several national traditions and which was only recently given its current territorial form — while the other is an exclusive nationalism.

It asserts the primacy of a Ukrainian nation of a very special kind, a smaller linguistic Ukraine whose identity was forged in conflict with both Poland and Soviet Russia from the 1920s to the 1940s and whose leadership was moulded by its association first with nazi Germany and later with US cold-war strategists.

The current Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk expressed its world view with astonishing clarity when he recently claimed that the second world war was caused by Soviet Russia invading Germany.

The second crisis stems from the ending of the cold war. Those who negotiated the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact in 1990-91 took at face value the treaty commitments by the US and Nato leaders that the latter would not seek to move east. Subsequent US leaders saw themselves as global victors with no responsibility to honour the agreements of a previous period.

US defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz spelled out the new military perspective in 1992. Under what became known as the Wolfowitz doctrine, the US had a duty to prevent any country from dominating any region of the world in a way that might threaten “unipolar and exclusive US global dominance.”

Russia saw the neutrality of eastern Europe as a guarantee of peace. For the US such neutrality was a regional challenge.

The third of Sakwa’s crises is posed by the European Union. As the EU moved territorially east, the political balance shifted. Pro-Nato, Atlanticist perspectives became dominant and the EU changed from being primarily an economic union to one which also carried military commitments. Clause 48 of the Lisbon Treaty required interoperability with Nato.

Hence the European Association Agreement presented to Ukraine in 2013 involved not just structural reform but a requirement to align its defence policy to that of the EU and thereby to Nato.

None of these crises has been resolved. They threatened peace in 2014. They still do today.

Frontline Ukraine takes the narrative up to autumn 2014. It provides incontrovertible detail on the interventions by the US State Department preparatory to the February 2013 coup, on the outflanking of those in Germany who wanted continuing dialogue and on the degree to which the Maidan movement had become overrun by fascist militias — including evidence of their responsibility for the February 18 killings.

It shows Putin’s response to be a reaction to a perceived strategic threat and the response of the eastern provinces to have been one of local mobilisation against the loss of language rights.

Today Nato emplacements are being aggressively advanced to the borders of the Baltic states and Poland and the press demonisation of Russia is increasing. The influence of the US war party — the likes of Victoria Nuland,

Samantha Power and General Breedlove — is consolidating ahead of the presidential elections. Ukraine remains in crisis.

This is why Sakwa’s book is required reading, particularly for those in the trade union and labour movement who still believe that the EU is somehow a politically neutral force for peace.

• John Foster is international secretary of the Communist Party.