The first casualty

As the old saw has it, the first casualty of any war is the truth.  There may not have been much actual shooting in Ukraine, but the truth has already taken a fearsome pummelling from all sides.

When Russia seized Crimea, President Obama offered the remarkable suggestion that Vladimir Putin "seems to want to rewrite the result of World War Two".  As I recall it, and I think the history books will back me up here, that war ended with the USSR in de facto control of pretty much all of eastern Europe, including a big slice of Germany.  That "result" was comprehensively "rewritten", to use Obama's term, after 1989,  as the Warsaw Pact countries all moved to independence and the USSR itself disintegrated. It was the least bloody end of an empire in recorded history.

One element of the unwinding of the Soviet Empire in the early 1990s was a multi-party agreement on the future of Ukraine, by which Russia agreed to respect that country's territorial integrity.  The fact that Russia has violated that deal by seizing Crimea has been much commented on.  However, there has been a lot less notice paid to the fact that as an inducement for Russia to let Ukraine and the other parts of its empire go quietly, the NATO allies pledged not to admit the former Warsaw Pact countries as members. That pledge has been regularly and deliberately broken in the intervening years, as NATO has taken in not only all of the Warsaw Pact countries, but also the three Baltic states that were members of the USSR itself.

A look back through history will show that Russia has always feared encirclement.  Its only natural protection is its enormous size. When invaded from the west it has always had to retreat into its own heartland, sacrificing territory and manpower in order to shorten its own supply lines and elongate those of its adversaries. Russia's sheer size, and its almost limitless supply of cannon fodder, eventually put paid to both Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. Given these precedents, it was only a matter of time before Putin (or any other Russian leader) took a stand against the relentless incursion of NATO into its sphere of influence.

While the recent negotiations were taking place in Geneva, Putin was back in Moscow doing his annual media conference, a four-hour, nationally televised snoreathon.  Some commentators took note of the fact that he referred to eastern Ukraine as "Novorossiya",  New Russia.  It might almost have been more historically accurate to call it "Starirossiya" -- Old Russia. A thousand years ago, the Eastern Slavic tribes came together in a confederation that they called "Rus", but which is now usually referred to by historians as "Kievan Rus" -- because its capital was in Kiev/Kyiv.  Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians all look to Kievan Rus as the source of their identity and nationhood.

That fact alone should have made the US and its allies cautious about taking sides here.  This dispute is like siblings bickering over their inheritance.  Best for outsiders to leave them to it.