Is War On the Horizon?

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

As I sit in my Kailyard I wonder often about the future.

Things are tense in Europe.

In fact, things are really tense in Europe and there are many who believe that by the end of 2022, we shall either have seen a war or be at war.

There are parallels with nearly a century ago when a tin pot aggressor with a funny looking moustache, started to annex parts of countries next to him. Fueled by a sense of injustice that saw parts of his country taken away from him, like Alsace and Lorraine, he set about the creation of a bigger Germany that saw the annexation of German speaking areas like Austria, the Sudetenland and Czech territories, and he set about correcting his perceived wrongs of post First World War settlements that had devastated and destroyed his country.
We now have something that is uncomfortably similar.

We have a man at the head of the Russian military who annexed the Russian part of the Crimea eight years ago. Fueled by a sense of injustice that saw parts of the Soviet Union taken away from him, like Belarus, the Ukraine and other newly formed countries like Georgia and many, many more, he would like to correct his perceived wrongs of post-Cold War settlements that have sought to devastate his Russia and deny his ability to rule over Russian speaking territories.

All that is missing is the funny moustache.

On the surface, this is hardly political analysis of the highest order, and it could be argued that the parallels are merely surface because the response to the aggression from the Russian Bear has been far more robust than when Hitler decided he wanted to expand his borders, but the point is easily made – we are on the brink of something, and it is not good.

There are currently 100,000 Russian troops on the Ukrainian Border. The Russians claim they have no plans to invade but they have demands. They want Ukraine to agree that they shall never join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and refuse to back down until they get that commitment.

As a sovereign state, Ukraine plan to join NATO. They also plan, at some point to cement their ties to the west. Russia claim that Ukraine is therefore the aggressor as having NATO troops on the soil of the Ukraine would amount to a provocation.

There are already troops from NATO on the soil of countries that border Russia – in the Baltic and Balkan states. You will struggle to find many in the more central European states who still look east rather than west for their allies.

The United States, now back in their role as caring about the world, have intervened and had talks with the Russians. They have, to date, proved fruitless. The Ukrainians are unhappy as they are not even invited. As a sovereign state they feel any talks about them, should include them.

The talks have been described by both sides as frank and substantive. What they have failed to do is to find a solution. There is a fragile peace in the Ukraine as the invasion eight years ago has now settled down though some Russian supporting rebels in the east who have signed a peace with the government of the Ukraine are still there and restless. In any war, they would clearly become the enemy within.
The major benefit to Russia from all of this is that the price of oil has sky rocketed and the Russian economy has benefited from that whilst having to deal with severe sanctions from the west. If the Russians make any moves in Europe that are military, the response is likely to begin with more sanctions which would really hit the Russian economy hard. Then there will be the serious contemplation of a war between the west and the east played out in the fields of Europe. This was a constant fear during the Cold War, and we believed had gone after Russia emerged from the disastrous experiment of the Soviet Union.

The Russians have also been making mischief with cyber-attacks to destabilize Ukraine whilst the west have been trying to find a solution. Their attention, now taken away from the global threat posed by China, has meant that the Russians have become much more of a global discussion than before.

But their military might has not been proven as being anything more than a toothless force as prolonged conflict in Chechnya proved. If they were to invade a larger area than the peninsula of the Crimea, would the scorn of Russian TV which has already been heaped upon and thrown at the West, be backed up by the heavy military presence bring victory after victory for Vladimir Putin to fly to Kyiv for a victory parade?

Would this, in the country that saw Chernobyl, become a nuclear war?

Right now, we do not know and for countries like Estonia, Lithuania, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, as we have celebrated the ends of European conflicts that became World Wars in the last few years, there is a disturbing specter in the East that is a genuine worry. We know what conflict looks like, in the ground. This is not a squabble but a very real threat to peace. European nations have reacted by sending increasing military hardware to the Ukrainians, Spain and Denmark with naval warships and Britain and France have committed soldiers.

The eastern part of Europe is also having to deal with a fallout in Bosnia-Herzegovina which threatens to spill back to the bad old days when Yugoslavia fell apart. That too was a war.
This is real tension which truly needs to be resolved.

Things are tense in Europe, and we do not need anyone with a funny moustache or pretensions to copy him fooling around…

A view from the new Kailyard or, how you look over there, from over here…

(Kailyard n. a cabbage patch, often attached to a school of writing – the Kailyard School – a genre of overly sentimental and sweet Scottish literature from the late 19th century where sentimental and nostalgic tales are told in escapist tales of fantasy, but here we seek to reverse it by making the Kailyard Observations of effective invective comment from that looks not to return to the past but to launch us into a better future by the one Donald worth believing…)

And today’s Scots word tae bamboozle ye…

Each time we see ye, we shall try tae leave ye wi a word o oors tae replace a word o thine. Jist fur the sake o learnin, ken!

Quaich – A two handled drinking cup often given as presents to seal a friendship.

[si-contact-form form=’2′]