Ukraine: dangerous games

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/08/ukraine-dangerous-games

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It would be hard to overestimate the damage that would be done were Russian forces to intervene again in Ukraine. That country's hopes of a reasonable future would disappear into the vortex. But that would only be one aspect of a truly malign change in international affairs that would weaken Europe and Russia, undermine all our economies, and lead to a confrontation between east and west that might take years to overcome.

No doubt business would still be done, trade would not cease, and, although military spending and preparedness would increase, war would be avoided. Yet what a shrunken and soured world it would be, just at the time when the developed countries need to work together to deal with the multiple challenges which face us all. The Crimean annexation has already taken us halfway to that dismal destination, but further encroachment would complete the process. That is why the appearance in eastern Ukrainian cities of demonstrators proclaiming "republics", and demanding referendums not only on their future status within Ukraine but also on the question of whether they should join Russia, is so disturbing. It may be that these miniature uprisings – and they are, so far, very small – are being orchestrated by Russia.

That is unproven, but in one sense it does not matter whether they are spontaneous or contrived. It also does not ultimately matter whether Russia's aim, if Moscow is behind these incidents, is to exert pressure, or whether there is a deeper plan for annexation. What matters is that it would take only a few deaths as Ukrainian police oust protesters from the government buildings they have occupied to create an opportunity, a pretext or a compulsion to intervene, and then events would unroll in ways none of the actors could control. One building has been retaken without casualties, but this kind of luck may not last, particularly if there are people who would very much prefer it not to.

The Russian position is that such things were almost bound to happen, given the unrepresentative and unsavoury nature of the interim regime in Kiev. They would add, taking a delight in the hoist-by-their-own-petard moral, that the tactics of the eastern protesters are not that different from those of the Maidan protesters in the Ukrainian capital. The scale, of course, is completely different and the motivation very suspect. However, this is not a time for point-scoring.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, is right to say there are differences between the Ukrainian regions. The question he and Mr Putin have to answer is whether they want to deal with those differences in a way that helps Ukraine, or to manipulate them to dismember or to dominate that country.