EU Referendum


Ukraine: where is Hygieia?


14/04/2014



000a Ukraine-014 raid.jpg

Pandora, of box fame, is so well known, that her action in opening the forbidden box to let loose its ills and pestilence on the world is part of normal, everyday conversation.

Fewer people, however, are aware that Pandora had a sister, or so my personal legend goes, the one I prefer to believe, whatever the errors (who said legends were supposed to be true?). In my legend, her name was Hygieia, and so mortified was she at the action of her reckless sibling that she pledged her life to undoing the damage she had done. Fanciful or not, it is from the name Hygieia that the modern word "hygiene" stems.

When it comes to Ukraine, therefore, the earlier events can be equated to the rashness of a Pandora, with the EU cast in that role, recklessly meddling in things it didn't properly understand, unleashing events that it could not longer control. And even if Mr Putin was lurking in the box, one can hardly be accused of supporting the contents because one deplores the action of opening the lid.

The problem now is that, when Crimea broke away from the rest of Ukraine, you just had to look at a map to know that could become the new status quo only with the very greatest of difficulty, and only with huge efforts directed at improving stability in the region.

That that was not to be became quickly evident, from the growing rhetoric of the "west", with bellicose words and actions from NATO, the European Union slipping into its "headless chicken" mode, and the United States working with its usual competence in its foreign relations, for which it is justly famous.

As a result, we have a mess, entirely predictable although, in this case, not predicted by me as I was too busy elsewhere – and it takes no skill to predict a train-wreck when the locomotive has already left the rails.

Fortunately, the military impotence of the "west" precludes any serious direct military action – which underlines the stupidity of the US military despatching warships to the Black Sea, and makes the deployment of four British Eurofighters to points east almost comedic. I am sure the Russians are wetting themselves, if only from laughter.

Nevertheless, the situation is very far from funny. As always, when politicians exercise their natural inclination to spread their incompetence as far as it will reach, people end up dying and things get broken. It is no different here. As we see the inevitable break-away of eastern Ukraine, there is a lot more misery to come.

To an extent, one could almost take the line of "wake me up when it's over", so predictable is the outcome. For all its fine words, the "west" is not going to step up to the plate and help clean up the mess it has made. You will not find a Hygieia anywhere in the ranks of western statesmen.

Thus will the people of the Ukraine suffer. But then, as we have already observed, it is always the people who suffer, which perhaps has lessons for us when we chose our own leaders. Those lessons, however, are rarely properly understood, so it is going to be a long, bloody time before the curtain finally falls on this particular tragedy.

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