Memory of 1938 hangs heavy in Munich as Ukrainian president calls for action

‘Has the world forgotten its mistakes of the 20th century?’ asks Volodymyr Zelenskiy as invasion looms

Ukraine crisis – live coverage

Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the west should send more arms and impose preventive sanctions on Russia immediately. 

Photograph: Andreas Gebert/Reuters

Patrick Wintour in Munich
Sun 20 Feb 2022 

Just 20 minutes walk from the ornate Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where world leaders gathered this weekend for the Munich security conference, lies No 12 Arcisstrasse, the shuttered brown ornamental building known as the Führerbau.

On a cold grey Sunday morning, the building, now temporarily closed and in disrepair, has a forbidding air. Near the steps at the front is a small plaque with the bare inscription in German, Czech and Slovak: “In this building, on 29 September, 1938, the Munich agreement was signed, which led to the smashing of the Czechoslovak republic.”

No mention is made of the signatories, including Adolf Hitler and then British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who, fearful of a renewed European war, appeased Hitler by agreeing to cede the Sudetenland. Hitler had promised this was his last territorial claim in Europe. The empty building, its interior preserved, stands as a monument to the ability of diplomats to misread their opponent.

Back in the conference hall, this history hung heavy. No speech was complete without a reference to the threat of a return to war in the heart of Europe, or to an impending refugee crisis.

No one was foolish enough to compare Russia to national socialism, but underlying every discussion was the question of Vladimir Putin’s true intentions and whether the western response is moral and a sufficient deterrent, or instead a betrayal and a repeat of the appeasement of the 30s.

In his mercurial address to the conference hall on Saturday, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, did not hold back in what he described as “his own horrible history lessons’’. Referencing the Russian-backed separatist shell that damaged a nursery school on Thursday, he said: “Seeing a shell crater in the schoolyard, children have a question: has the world forgotten its mistakes of the 20th century?

Profile

Armed forces of Russia and Ukraine, compared

Russia

Army: 280,000, including 2,840 tanks and 6,920 fighting vehicles; 150 Iskander ballistic missiles; 4,684+ artillery; 1,520 surface-to-air batteries.

Navy (just the Black Sea fleet): 6 submarines; 6 warships; 35 patrol ships.

Air force: 1,160 combat planes, 394 attack helicopters, 714 air defence systems.

Ukraine

Army: 145,000, including 858 tanks and 1,184 fighting vehicles; 90 Tochka ballistic missiles; 1,818 artillery; 75+ surface-to-air batteries.

Navy: 1 warship, 12 patrol and coastal ships.

Air force: 125 combat planes, 35 attack helicopters; 6 medium TB2 drones; 322 air defence systems.

Source: International Institute of Strategic Studies

“What do appeasement attempts lead to? How did the question ‘Why die for Danzig ?’ [a French anti-war slogan coined in 1939] turn into the need to die for Dunkirk and dozens of other cities in Europe and the world, at the cost of tens of millions of lives?”

He then twisted the knife by saying there was no threat of war in Europe – the war was already under way: “How did it happen that there is a war ongoing and people are dying in Europe in the 21st century? Why does it last longer than World War II? How did we get to the biggest security crisis since the cold war?”

Zelenskiy had answers that the doting western security establishment might not have applauded so vociferously if they listened harder to his withering attack on their collective failure. He blamed “selfishness, self-confidence, irresponsibility of countries at the global level. As a result, some commit crimes, and others stay indifferent. Indifference that results in complicity. This is your contribution to the security of Europe and the world.”

He said: “Ukraine has been Europe’s shield for eight years. For eight years, it has been holding back one of the largest armies in the world.” Yet the door to the EU and Nato had not been opened. The promises to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty enshrined in the Budapest memorandum in 1994 seemed worthless.

“The current policy of appeasement,” he said, “has to be turned into one of guarantees of security and peace”. He called for the west to send more arms and to impose preventive sanctions nimmediately. He revealed he had challenged western leaders who said they were 100% sure that an invasion would occur.

“What are you waiting for? We don’t need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen and after our country will be fired on, or after we have no borders, or economy.”

On Sunday morning, the former president of Estonia, Kersti Kaljulaid, gently picked up Zelenskiy’s challenge, asking Charles Michel, the European Council president, if at the very least the EU should be more proactive. “Are you ready personally to give Ukraine an emergency invitation to fast-forward discussions on accession to the EU? It would give the EU a unique chance at this difficult time to gain some advantage. Right now the EU is very united, but very reactive.”

Kaljulaid did not get an answer in the affirmative.

Although Michel claimed Putin’s strategy was backfiring by creating unprecedented transatlantic unity – the common dominant public theme at the conference – the source of his circumspection about enlargement partly lay in history.

The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, reflecting a longstanding scepticism in parts of Germany about Nato enlargement to the east, pointedly told the Munich conference that Ukraine’s membership is not on the foreseeable agenda, and he had told Putin as much. Although Scholz insisted he would not be naive in his diplomacy, and defended the principle of national self-determination, he clearly hopes his statement takes Ukraine closer to effective future neutrality, and that this might assuage Putin. It did not please Zelenskiy, who witheringly dismissed the idea as Munich 2.0.

But Putin wants the pledge in writing, and again history plays a role in his thinking. Russian mythology holds that Russia in 1990-91, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was promised no Nato enlargement to the east. The more subtle truth, meticulously charted by the historian ME Sarotte in her book Not One Inch, judges no such offer was made by George Bush, even if it was discussed by advisers. But Putin has his casus belli, and it may be there will be no compromise, no pledge in writing, no piece of paper, that will lead to peace in our time.