A neutral Ukraine would have prevented this mess

Another excellent interview with Alexander Mercouris (the first part was posted in my article All governments lie – so does the media. Who should you trust?). He gives a good history of the importance of neutrality in efforts to prevent war.

This issue is relevant to the current NATO-Russia conflict in Ukraine – both in terms of the events leading up to the war and the possibilities of ending the conflict.

Ukraine was founded as an independent permanently neutral state

This is not generally known as our media continually presents us with the argument that Ukraine has a right to join NATO. It ignores that for most of its independent life, Ukrainians have actually been opposed to joining NATO.

In fact, Ukrainian independence, according to early documents passed in their Parliament (the Verkhovna Rada) rejects such participation in military alliances.

The Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine specifically states:

“The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three nuclear free principles: to accept, to produce and to purchase no nuclear weapons.”

Of course, since then the membership of NATO has been raised in Ukraine – in response to NATO’s moves to offer membership. But this resulted from the continuous political debate between the Ukrainian political forces that wished to adhere to the founding principles, wanting to develop an ethnically diverse state, and to develop friendly relations with their neighbours, and those political forces influenced by ultranationalists which wished to see Ukraine develop as a, ethnically and linguistically monolithic state, that was hostile to its largest neighbour, the Russian Federation.

Since independence, these two forces have alternated in government with, for example, decisions to declare the wartime Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera a national hero, followed by decisions of the next government to remove that status. Ambitions to join NATO followed similar fortunes although polls heavily influenced, of course, by ethnic Russians living in the east who rejected the idea, have generally shown the population was opposed.

I think neutrality would have offered a lot for Ukraine’s development and its survival as an independent state. It could have developed friendly relations with all its neighbours and benefited from trade.

But this was not to be.

The political crisis of 2013/2014 with the Maidan demonstration in the centre of Kiev culminated in the overthrow of the democratically elected president and his government. This is despite the EU-brokered agreement between the president and opposition parties to solve the crisis with an early election and the development of a new constitution with guarantees of language rights to ethnic minorities. The coup was carried out by a relatively small, ultranationalist/neo-Nazi element of the demonstrators.

A civil war was inevitable and attempts of European powers to resolve that conflict peacefully and preserve the territorial integrity of the country were formulated in the Minsk Agreements. Unfortunately, these agreements were cynically used (as admitted by Merkel, Macron and Poroshenko) to buy time for the rearmament of Ukraine and a military solution to the wishes of the Donbass region for independence. The Minsk Agreement got unanimous international support from the UN Security Council. I sometimes wonder if the New Zealand government, which was a member of the Security Council at the time, understood the real agenda behind the Minsk Agreements.

Another lost chance was the rejection by the USA and Western Europe of any proper discussion of the Russian draft treaties aimed at overcoming the problems of security in Europe and the expansion of NATO, specifically of the proposals for Ukrainian membership of NATO.

I discussed these lost opportunities in my article Ukraine war – a failure of honest diplomacy and reason. Two other relevant articles are You can’t understand Ukraine without acknowledging its deep divisions and Ukraine war – a shocking failure of our mainstream media.

So it’s interesting to look back and realise what could have been. Alexander Mercouris discusses the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Austria in 1955 and its establishment as a neutral state. He also discusses an earlier lost opportunity – the rejection of proposals for the withdrawal of troops from Germany after the war and its establishment as a united and neutral country.

Of course, we do not know what Ukraine’s situation will be after this current conflict is resolved. But I hope that it will at last, and far too late, be established as a neutral state.