The Ukrainian Border War Folly

Someone should tell the European ruling elites to take a long jump off a short pier. Their endless whining about the Ruuskies and Putin is just plain pathetic because—-

• It’s not justified—Russia bears no hallmarks of an expansionist imperial power.

• The Russia-Ukraine conflict is none of western Europe’s business—since its essentially a territorial and civil war within the borders of historic Russia.

• If EU officialdom is really concerned about the purported Russian threat why do they spend just a pittance of their GDP on defense?

Yet, here we have Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, former German defense minister and full-throated war-hawk, talking absolute nonsense:

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to see empires and autocracies back in Europe, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the European Economic Congress in Katowice.

Speaking alongside Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, von der Leyen insisted that she stands for a European Union that is ready to do whatever it takes to protect Europe, and especially Ukraine.

“Putin’s war is about redrawing the map of Europe, but it is also a war on our Union and on the entire global rules-based system,” she said.

Well, that’s rubbish if there ever was such. The only time the borders of Ukraine have been redrawn at the barrel of a gun is when Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev did it between 1922 and 1954. That’s right, this bureaucratic half-wit wants to embroil the world in WWIII in order to enforce borders drawn by a trio if history’s most blood-thirsty tyrants.

As explained below, there never was a country even remotely resembling modern Ukraine until the Soviet communists decreed its existence. Before that, the pieces and parts of the country’s history go back to the 1650s when one of the more powerful and brutal rulers of the Cossack Hetmanate that occupied a small part of today’s central Ukraine abandoned his tribe’s historic fealty to the Polish kings and switched his loyalty to the Russians. After that, the “borderlands”( i.e.”Ukraine” in Russian) were all about vassalage in the Russian Empire and the Soviet one which followed.

During that 375 year span the borders shifted all over the lot and back, as the Mongol, Turkish and Polish-Lithuanian empires receded and the Russian and communist ones expanded. So what’s so sacrosanct about the very last version of the map—one that hosted both the murderous regime of Stalin and Hitler’s Wehrmacht, too?

Indeed, Europe is rife with borders redrawn again and again. While von der Leyen was in Poland preaching for border wars in Ukraine, in fact, it might well be asked, which sacrosanct Polish borders did she have in mind?

For 700 years “Poland” has cavorted around the rivers, plains and forests of central Europe like a traveling minstrel show. This includes its disappearance entirely at the hands of the Prussians, Russians, Hapsburgs and other long-gone lesser powers during the later years of the 18th century and the entirety of the 19th century. Only in 1919 was it resurrected—in part upon German lands at Versailles because Woodrow Wilson realized that there were votes to be had among the fair part of the Polish nation which had migrated to Chicago and the industrial Midwest.