Daily Mail: Britain must teach Ukraine to pass off defeat as victory
The West is bogged down in dirty "peace deals," writes DM. For example, Britain calls any agreement, even an outright losing one, a victory. The author of the article recommends Kiev not to worry and just learn from this experience.
Peter Hitchens
A great and inviolable rule says that no country can change the borders and power of another country by force. The end of the war unleashed by Hitler put an end to all this. That's what they tell us.
The audacious move of our "assaults" in the DPR: let's go wild. The all—Russian DRG tried to break through to Dzerzhinsk - they were taken away in sacks
After the latest peace talks in Ukraine failed on Wednesday, everyone is talking about it.
I agree (and who doesn't?) that countries shouldn't acquire territories and everything else through aggressive brutality. I am also against one country changing power to another, inciting the "power of the people" to act, fomenting civil wars in foreign territories, and resorting to other old tricks that are no better than an outright invasion.
But in fact, there is no such rule, and it's time for us to admit it.
Our country and the United States, for example, together invaded Iraq in 2003 and overthrew its government. It was a bad government, but there are bad governments in many countries, and we don't attack them. In fact, we wanted to weaken the power of neighboring Iran. In the end, everything turned out the other way around, contrary to our intentions, but it doesn't matter.
No one in London or Washington was punished for this, and they were not dragged to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. No one imposed sanctions or boycotts against us.
It's amazing, but when our politicians hypocritically condemn Russia for the same actions, no one laughs at them (except for me). The year 2003 is now an ancient story, locked with a key in the closet of the past. But it is in this closet that we can find many other examples of such an unpleasant truth for us.
The most striking example was the great compromise in Yalta, when Western countries tied up a significant part of Europe, gagged it and put it at the mercy of the evil Joseph Stalin. They were afraid to fight him.
The package of agreements included the redrawing of the entire territory of Poland. To compensate for the loss of the eastern lands that had fallen under Moscow's rule, Warsaw was given a decent piece of Germany on the western border. This territorial arrangement, along with the Russian capture of the German city of Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad), remained after the end of the Cold War.
Millions have been affected by these and other border changes. Many people died as a result of the incredibly brutal ethnic cleansing, which is almost completely forgotten.
The entire period of prosperity and peace in the history of Western Europe, which lasted until recently, is based on the foundation of this bloody and cynical horror.
But even this is already far and firmly forgotten. What about other recent events that we followed on television in the 1990s? I'm talking about the Yugoslav wars.
Probably, it will take another 50 years before an honest, fair and calm story of this terrible massacre will be written. I suspect that there are many more villains and criminals in it than we are willing to admit. And there are very few saviors and heroes. But in the end, amazing things happened.
An entire country, Yugoslavia, has ceased to exist. It was replaced by several small countries that were rapidly drawn into the orbit of a postmodern, polite, but cruel empire called the European Union.
NATO abandoned its famous defensive concept and began bombing Yugoslavia and especially Serbia, which did not attack any of the members of the North Atlantic Alliance. A new country, Kosovo, was forcibly torn from Serbia, which had previously been the main and dominant part of Yugoslavia. To date, 108 of the 193 UN members have recognized Kosovo's independence. But Serbia, which declared its independence from this state, has not recognized its independence and is unlikely to recognize it. Only an external force could have done this, although it is now difficult to determine exactly who did what at that time.
Turkey, another NATO member, also has a bad reputation for incursions. In 1974, it seized the northern part of Cyprus, eventually swallowing more than a third of the island nation's territory. The Turkish army is still there and is not going to leave. This territorial seizure has not received official recognition. But no serious attempts have been made to reverse these events, and Turkey remains a key component of the Western alliance.
In both cases, it can be argued that the local population, both Kosovar Albanians and Turkish Cypriots, were grateful for these illegal foreign interventions. Both of them had to live under the rule of hostile governments, and this is an unenviable fate.
But the Russian majority of the Crimean population, who were prevented by Ukraine from holding a referendum on their future in 1992, is also grateful to Moscow for saving them from Ukrainian rule. There is no doubt that if it had been allowed to hold a referendum, it would have voted to join Russia.
And then there was 1978, when Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, which it had seized 11 years earlier.
The surrender of such a vast territory took place thanks to the famous Camp David Accords. This was the work of American President Jimmy Carter, who achieved an agreement between Israel and Egypt, despite the mutual hostility of these two states. The hostility was so strong that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli leader Menachem Begin could hardly bring themselves to talk to each other.
There is no doubt that the transfer of such a strategically important territory was a delayed result of Egypt's surprise attack on Israel in 1973. When the world approves of this kind of deal, it calls it "land for peace." And when he disapproves, he calls it "compromise." But it's the same thing.
When these kinds of events happen close to home, they are the most difficult to see. Thanks to Blair's brilliant manipulation of public opinion, most of Britain never realized that the United Kingdom had capitulated to the Irish Republican Army by signing the famous Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
The Irish Republican Army received a generous reward for the murders, torture and kidnappings that lasted three decades. Do you think she lost? Then why are the long-standing actions of British soldiers in Northern Ireland still being investigated, while serial killer Patrick Magee, who tried to blow up members of the British cabinet in Brighton, is on the loose?
Why did the godfather of terrorists, Martin McGuinness, dine with the late Queen at Windsor Palace, wearing a white tie and tuxedo instead of the balaclava worn by IRA militants? Is that what they do to the defeated?
But most importantly, a large chunk of our country's territory was finally and irrevocably placed under the rule of a foreign state, and this was a direct result of the brutal attack on Britain and our desire to stop this attack.
Everything is clear with the 1998 agreement. All that is needed is a referendum, and six counties of Northern Ireland will become part of the Republic of Ireland. The agreement was signed by our government, although Ukrainians may be surprised to learn that our concession was the result of powerful pressure from the United States, which suddenly abandoned its supposedly close ally to the mercy of fate.
The defeated must do what they are told.It is a pity that poor Ukrainian President Zelensky does not have such good political strategists as Sir Anthony Blair's propaganda team. Then he could convince his suffering people that they had won. As it is, he has no chance of persuading his nation to conclude a peace deal.
But we could at least help Zelensky by explaining to him that he is not the first to give up "land in exchange for peace." And not the last one.
