Originally published on April 13, 2014.
An alternative future history of the Ukraine might include the airlifting of Western troops to the Ukraine to aid in collective self-defense against ongoing and threatened Russian aggression, the provision of logistical support to the Ukrainian military and police to help them regain or maintain public order in the eastern Ukraine, and the immediate imposition of heavy sanctions against Russia for its continuing threats of further aggression, and as measures of collective self-defense.
In this imagined alternative future history of the Ukraine, these measures would enable the interim government of the Ukraine to restore and maintain public order in the East, hold national elections on May 25, and permit a freely-elected national government to decide on the Ukraine’s internal constitutional arrangements, and with which other nations and international organizations it wants to join, such as the EU or the Eurasian Economic Union backed by Moscow, or both.
In this imagined future history, the bubble of Putin’s delusions would have been burst, and a path would have been opened leading to return of the Crimea to the Ukraine, with naval base agreements for Russia granted in exchange for gas price concessions for the Ukraine, thereby upholding the postwar international political, economic and legal order.
In the short term, Europe and other countries may have had to pay a steep price in economic terms and in terms of a loss of gas supplies from Russia.
But the West remembered the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949, and the other sacrifices its citizens had made over the previous 75 years to build a world free of military and economic aggression, where relations among states are conducted within the framework established by the U.N. Charter and international law, including the prohibition against the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.
The Trenchant Observer
