The dramatic violence in Ukraine represents a seismic shift between the West and Eastern Europe: a true clash between civilizations.

Ukraine has never been a homogeneous country; it was born of an uneasy congeries of Mongols, Lithuanians, and Poles in the 14th Century, which eventually led to the pre-eminence of the Poles. In the 17th century, most Ukrainians turned to Moscow for assistance, and after the partitions of Poland between the Prussians, Austrian Empire, and Russia, what is now Ukraine was divided in 1795 between Austria and, mainly, Russia.

After World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, there were civil wars in Ukraine, in Russia, and a war between an independent Ukraine, generally recognized in the West, and the emergent Soviet Union. Ukraine was crushed by the Red Army, and for good measure, Stalin engaged in mass repressions of Ukrainian culture and intellectuals, and millions of Ukrainian small farmers were starved to death in the infamous Holodomor, the slaughter of the Kulaks, in the 1930s. It was not surprising that many Ukrainians warmly welcomed the German invasion of 1941, until they got a clear view of the Gestapo in action.

No European country has had a more tragic history. Following the murder of 10% of the population in the 1930s, approximately a fifth of the survivors, about 7-million people, perished in World War II, including the massacre under Nazi occupiers of perhaps 90% of the Jews (who in the late 1920s had comprised 37% of the population of Odessa and 27% of the population of Kyiv, and are not 2% of the population of those cities today).

At the Teheran Conference of 1943, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin agreed that Soviet, i.e. Ukrainian, borders would be moved 200 miles to the west as a reward for the USSR’s 20-million deaths at the hands of the Nazi invaders. (As between the Big Three, the Soviet Union took over 90% of the casualties in subduing the Nazis.)

As the Red Army was going to occupy the territory anyway, the Western Allied leaders overlooked the fact that the war only began with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, which partitioned Poland. Western leaders deftly plucked France, Italy, over 80% of Germany, as well as Japan, as occupied territory to be transformed by enlightened administration into flourishing democratic allies of the West in every case, while Stalin squatted improvidently and temporarily in Eastern Europe. Poland was compensated for the loss of 200 miles off its eastern border with a 200-mile western move of its western frontier at the expense of the Germans, 8- to 12-million of whom moved westward into the comparative civility of occupation by General Eisenhower’s Western Allied armies to escape the joys of Stalinist custody.

Crimea, the former Khanate of the Mongols, was transferred to Ukraine only in 1954. It naturally rankles with the Russians today that Moscow has to rent naval bases from Ukraine in the Crimea to dock its Black Sea fleet. And Ukraine, though it has a population of 46-million, (down from 52-million in 1994 due to emigration, and a falling life expectancy because of intense pollution, poor diet, heavy smoking, pandemic alcoholism, and inadequate medical care), is in all respects a fragile state.

All of European history since Augustan times two millennia ago has been a demarcation of Western and non-Western influences, a line that fell along the Rhine and the Danube then and generally remained there for 15 centuries. When pre-Reformation Christianity prevailed, the Turks were unable to seize Vienna or gain control of the Mediterranean, while the always-divided Germans were until relatively recently unsure whether they were an eastern or western-facing people.

Germany joined the West under the sponsorship of the post-WWII American occupiers, who, unlike the British, French, and Russians, were not afraid of a united Germany. They brought Germany into NATO as a respected ally, and enabled reunification as part of the American-led victory in the Cold War. The envelopment of Germany in the West was reinforced by the admission of Poland to NATO and the European Union, where it has been successful and has enjoyed the happiest years in its long and very disturbed history.

Thus did the eastern border of the Western world arrive at the western edge of the Ukraine, independent since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, a status Moscow has never really accepted. About one third of the people in western Ukraine work or have relatives in the West. About 78% of Ukrainians are ethnic Ukrainians, to 17% Russians. About two thirds of the people speak principally Ukrainian, to about 30% who speak Russian; 75% of Ukrainians claim to believe in God, 22% are declared atheists, and of the believers, just under 40% are practicing Christians, 71% in various branches of Eastern Orthodoxy and 17% as Roman Catholics. Ukraine has never really had a day of what anyone in the West would call good government.

Almost every country that is not culturally and politically in the West has a continuous tension in its own population between nativists and Western emulators, most markedly in Russia, but also in such important countries as Turkey and India. Vladimir Putin is playing the Tolstoyan, Solzhenitsyan, nativist anti-Western card in Russia, railing against the West and pretending that Mother Russia was not shorn of its arms and legs and more than half its population at the demise of the Communist dictatorship he served.

Viktor Yanukovich, the pro-Russian president of the Ukraine, won election four years ago only because the leader thrown up by the democratic Orange Revolution, Viktor Yushchenko, split the vote and narrowly denied victory to the glamorous former prime minister, Yulia Timoshenko, whom Yanukovich put in prison (where she has remained despite widespread protest and a serious illness), as he has raped the democratic constitution. (Yanukovich was no eagle scout in his youth, having been convicted of theft and vandalism, though in a profoundly suspect justice system.)

Having negotiated a treaty of close co-operation with the European Union, whose prosperity and freedom are much more attractive to most Ukrainians than the Russian alternative, Yanukovich, under pressure from Putin, executed a 180-degree turn. Putin (whose popularity at the Sochi Olympics was clearly not very heartfelt, despite his undoubted success in bringing the games off with great showmanship and in perfect security, albeit with profligate extravagance) has backed Yanukovich. Most Ukrainians clearly oppose their government, now reduced to firing grenades and machine-gunning demonstrators, killing more than 50 of them in Kyiv on Thursday alone.

Prime Minister Harper and President Obama were right to condemn Yanukovich and threaten sanctions, ahead of Europe. Germany, now Europe’s preeminent power again, is the key. Chancellor Angela Merkel has led Europe into a sanctions policy and has warned Putin — who finally retreated on Friday after the Ukrainian parliament censured Yanukovich; and the military command, as generally happens, refused to fire live ammunition at civilians representing a popular majority. At time of writing, Yanukovich has pledged early elections, a new constitution not redacted by himself, release of Ms. Timoshenko and a transitional coalition government.

This is a great victory for the West, and for an altruistic Germany over Putin’s gangster regime in a truncated country. And it is a victory of Western principles over the fatuous urge to appeasement of the professional Europeans, exemplified by former Italian premier Romano Prodi, who last week in the New York Times, blamed much of the violence on extremists among the protesters, credited Yanukovich with having, for a time, been an exemplar of “democracy at its best,” and urged discussions with Putin to “restart … integrating the Ukraine into the rest of Europe,” as if that were not precisely what Putin was determined to prevent.

The Ukrainian drama is an important part of a much greater contest. The West must always resist oppression, and must now embrace and assist its friends in Ukraine, not only from compassion for them, but to bring closer the adherence of Holy Mother Russia to the West and to stretch the West from the Americas across the Eurasian land mass to the Far East and Australasia.

Nothing less is at stake. And led by Germany for the first time as Europe’s greatest power on the progressive side of international affairs, the West, however unstable the present compromise in Ukraine, has won a great humanitarian victory in the carnage of the streets of Kyiv.

cbletters@gmail.com

From the National Post.