Britannia Radio

Defeatism - your home is Brussels
The Times leads today’s press with this scathing denunciation of the
[French-sponsored] feeble reaction to the ongoing Russian domination
of Georgia. And as it points out these are the people to whom,
under the Lisbon Treaty are to be entrusted with future policy.

The biggest powers in the EU are in thrall to the murderous Putin’s
Russia - Germany and Italy for the gas pipelines which are set to run
to their countries and France because Putin flattered France’s semse
of its self-importance and in this he was helped by France’s long-
standing love affair with all recent dictators in Russia.

The second piece shows the more robust nature of the countries who
have experience of Russian brutality.

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THE TIMES 15.8.08
Georgia: Europe wins a gold medal for defeatism
Sarkozy's ‘peace in our time' deal is a reminder of what could happen
if the EU wins more clout
Gerard Baker

To some, China's muscular domination of the Olympic medal table is a
powerful allegory of the shifting balance of global power. A far
better and more literal testimony to the collapse of the West may be
seen in the distinctly weak-kneed response to Russian aggression in
Georgia by what is still amusingly called the transatlantic alliance.

Once again, the Europeans, and their friends in the pusillanimous
wing of the US Left, have demonstrated that, when it come to those
postmodern Olympian sports of synchronized self-loathing, team hand-
wringing and lightweight posturing, they know how to sweep gold,
silver and bronze.

There's a routine now whenever some unspeakable act of aggression is
visited upon us or our allies by murderous fanatics or authoritarian
regimes. While the enemy takes a victory lap, we compete in a
shameful medley relay of apologetics, defeatism and surrender.

The initial reaction is almost always self-blame and an expression of
sympathetic explanation for the aggressor's actions. In the Russian
case this week, the conventional wisdom is that Moscow was provoked
by the hot-headed President Saakashvili of Georgia. It was really all
his fault, we are told.

What's more, the argument goes, the US and Europe had already laid
the moral framework for Russia's invasion by our own acts of
aggression in the past decade. Vladimir Putin was simply following
the example of illegal intervention by the US and its allies in
Kosovo and Iraq.

It ought not to be necessary to point out the differences between
Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Mr Saakashvili's Georgia, but for those
blinded by moral relativism, here goes - Georgia did not invade its
neighbours or use chemical weapons on their people. Georgia did not
torture and murder hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. Georgia
did not defy international demands for a decade and ignore 18 UN
Security Council resolutions to come clean about its weapons
programmes.

And unlike Iraq under Saddam, Georgia is led by a democratically
elected president who has pushed this once dank backwater of the
Soviet Union, birthplace of Stalin and Beria, towards liberal
democracy and international engagement.

The Kosovo analogy has a more resonant ring of plausibility to it and
has been heavily exploited by the Russians in defence of their
actions. But it too is specious. It is true that South Ossetia and
Abkhazia, like Kosovo within Serbia, are ethnic-minority-majority
regions within a state that they dislike. But that's where the
parallel ends.

Unlike Serbia, Georgia has not been conducting a campaign of “ethnic
cleansing” against the people of these provinces. In the 1990s Serbia
had firmly established its aggressive intentions towards its
minorities with ugly genocidal wars against Croatia and Bosnia. And
in any case the two Georgian enclaves have been patrolled by Russian
“peacekeepers” for the past 15 years.

We need to be morally clear about what is going on in Georgia.
Perhaps Mr Saakashvili was a little reckless in seeking to stamp out
the separatist guerrillas. But to suggest that he somehow got what he
deserved is tantamount to saying that a woman who dresses in a
miniskirt and high heels and gets drunk in a bar one night is asking
to be raped.

If shifting moral blame won't relieve us of our responsibilities then
surely defeatism will. Whoever is right or wrong, the critics say, we
can't do anything about it. In the past week, the familiar parade of
clichés has been rolled out to explain why it is all hopeless. The
Russian bear, pumped up by all that oil wealth, is reasserting power
in its own backyard. The US and Europe, their energy sapped by
endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, can only stand by and watch.

There's something odd about listening to European governments speak
about the futility of diplomacy. They are the ones who usually insist
that military force alone can achieve little and who say that
diplomacy must be given a chance. But now they seem to say that,
since we can't stop Russia militarily, there is nothing else we can do.

But we can make life very uncomfortable for Mr Putin. Russia is not
the Soviet Union. Its recent (relative) prosperity depends on its
continuing integration into the global economy. It sets great store
by the recognition that it gains from a seat at the high table with
the great powers in the G8. It wants to elevate that status farther
by joining the World Trade Organisation and the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development.

Punitive measures will hurt us too, of course: Russia could cause
trouble over Iran and holds an alarmingly large quantity of US
official debt. It could play havoc with the West's energy supplies.

The Europeans don't much like the idea of any of this. So this week
they demonstrated the same sort of resolve that they showed in the
Balkans in the early 1990s, when they stood by as genocide unfolded
on their own continent.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, in his capacity as head pro
tempore of the EU, came back from a trip to Moscow and Tbilisi,
waving a piece of paper and acclaiming peace in our time.

But the one-sided ceasefire that he negotiated was more or less
dictated to him by Mr Putin. It not only left the Russian military in
place in the disputed enclaves. It allowed them free rein to continue
operations inside the rest of Georgia.

That disastrous piece of European diplomacy finally seems to have
stirred the US into tougher action. Goaded by John McCain, who has
been brilliantly resolute in his measure of Russian intentions over
the past few years, the Bush Administration at last dropped its
credulous embrace of Mr Putin and upped the ante with direct military
assistance to Georgia and threats of tougher diplomatic action.

But we should never forget what Mr Sarkozy and his EU officials got
up to this week. There can be no clearer indication of the perils
that threaten the West if the EU gets its way and wins more clout in
the world.

This, remember, is the same EU that wants to take over foreign and
security policy from member states, an institution that is always
eager to pump itself up at the expense of democratic institutions in
those member states, but which crumbles into puny submission when
faced with authoritarian bullying overseas.

It was a great Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the
modern Olympic movement on the famous principle that “the important
thing is not winning but taking part”.

The EU today seems to have adapted that slogan to fit its own desired
global role - the important thing is taking part and not winning
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TELEGRAPH 15.8.08
Russia must not be allowed to turn back the tide of democracy
By Simon Scott Plummer

The presence of the leaders of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and
Ukraine at a mass rally in Tbilisi this week provides pointers both
to the past and the future. All these countries were once part of the
Soviet empire.

As a result, all of them fear that the Russian annexation of a large
part of Georgia, and the West's weak response, presages further
trouble from a country still smarting from what it regards as
national humiliation in the 1990s.

Their participation in Tuesday's rally in support of President
Mikheil Saakashvili makes an appropriate starting-point for examining
the probable hot spots in Moscow's revanchist drive.

• Ukraine. On his return from Tbilisi, President Viktor Yushchenko
issued a decree ordering Russia to give 72 hours' notice of any
movement by its ships and aircraft based in the Crimean port of
Sevastopol.

In an obvious reference to Georgia, a statement from the country's
Security Council said that that military presence posed "a potential
threat to Ukraine's national security, particularly if parts of
Russia's Black Sea Fleet are used against third countries".

The Kremlin responded by accusing Kiev of taking "a serious new anti-
Russian step".

Mr Yushchenko has said his country has no intention of extending the
Russian lease on the base beyond 2017, the limit fixed by a 1997
agreement, and in the meantime would like to negotiate an orderly
departure. Moscow wants the 20-year lease to be renewed.

The Kremlin's dealings with its southern neighbour are coloured by
the fact that medieval Kiev was the source of Russian culture, a
sense of identification loosened by Khrushchev's transfer of Crimea
to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954 and further
weakened by independence in 1991.

Ukraine has already felt the force of Kremlin disapproval of its
Orange Revolution. In 2006, a dispute with the Russian state-owned
Gazprom resulted in a temporary suspension of gas exports.

An obvious way of trying to reassert Kremlin authority over Ukraine
would be to play on the differences between the nationalistic west of
the country and the parts of the east and south that are more
sympathetic to Russia.

However, having freed themselves from old Soviet empire, Ukrainians
are unlikely to accept submission to the new authoritarian order
created by Vladimir Putin. Russian aggression will, rather,
strengthen their sense of nationhood.

• The Baltic States. While Ukraine has merely been promised eventual
membership of Nato, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are already
anchored within it.

Unfortunately, that has not stopped Kremlin interference in their
internal affairs, whether in "championing" the rights of Russian-
speaking minorities by imposing economic sanctions or in apparently
subjecting Estonia to cyber attack following the moving of a Soviet
war memorial in Tallinn.

With Lithuania, which has a smaller russophone population than its
Baltic partners, the main bone of contention is Russian access to the
exclave of Kaliningrad.

• Poland. The most rebellious of the old Soviet satellites, Poland is
now a leading member of both Nato and the EU. But, like Estonia, it
is concerned about Kaliningrad and, along with the Czech Republic,
has been threatened with reprisals by Moscow if it hosts an American
missile shield.

• Moldova. Less prominent than the other potential hot spots, this
impoverished Romanian-speaking republic is the subject of both
Western and Russian proposals for its forming a confederation with
russophone Transdniestria. Economic pressure from Moscow is aimed at
persuading Moldova to accept the Russian peace plan.

Events of the past week have their origins in Mr Putin's Millennium
Manifesto, a 1999 blueprint for restoring Russia's status as a great
power.

The Second Chechen War, which sealed his democratic legitimacy, his
relentless buttressing of presidential authority, the rise in his
anti-Western rhetoric and now the invasion of Georgia have given
America and its allies ample a clear indication of the threat he
poses to the newly-won freedoms of eastern Europe.

Nato's ambiguous response to Georgian and Ukrainian requests to join
its Membership Action Plan at the Bucharest summit in April merely
encouraged the Russians, who had already warned of repercussions
following Kosovo's declaration of independence. The allies have an
opportunity to remedy their timidity in December, when that request
is due for review.

A thuggish Russian leadership is trying to banish a sense of
victimhood occasioned by what it sees as Western triumphalism in the
1990s. The response of Nato and the EU should be a united reassertion
of the principle of self-determination.

That applies, of course, to the Baltic States and Poland, but also to
Ukraine, a pivotal factor in European security, and to Georgia, the
brightest beacon of democracy in the Caucasus. Moscow should be
isolated diplomatically, subjected to economic sanctions and given no
occasion to pursue its usual tactic of undermining multilateral
organisations by bilateral deals.

The attempt to bring Russia into a new concert of powers has failed.
Forty years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Moscow has,
in the words of David Miliband, given "a chilling reminder of times …
we hoped had gone by". But Western leaders cannot claim that they
were not warned.