Mother Russia and the West need to get talking

This week’s Mediahuis's Irish regional newspapers’ column. INM has been rebranded as Mediahuis.

Michael Commane

Russia is in the West’s bad books at present. In 2014 they annexed Crimea and they are playing a cat and mouse game with the territorial rights of Ukraine. In recent weeks they carried out large scale military manoeuvres on the Russia Ukraine border. The West saw the exercise as a serious provocation.

It is said they interfered in the US elections. They have been the number one suspect for cyber attacks on Western institutions.

And then there is Alexi Navalny, the Russian dissident and opposition leader. It is overwhelmingly accepted by experts in the West that it was Russian authorities who poisoned him with a Novichok nerve agent.

And he too has accused Russia’s President Vladimir Putin for attempting to poison him. Navalny was flown to Berlin’s Charité Hospital last August where he recovered from the attempt on his life. He returned to Russia in January. He is now serving a two and a half year sentence in a corrective labour colony on the outskirts of  Pokrov, which is approximately 100 kilometres east of Moscow.

The Russian authorities say he is a criminal and a terrorist. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Navalny’s human rights have been violated.

The West says one thing, the Russians another.

When the Iron Curtain fell and the Soviet Union collapsed there was great hope for detente between East and West.

What happened? Did we in the West patronise Mother Russia? Was it a good idea that Nato should expand so far east as Poland? How responsible is the West for creating an atmosphere that made it so easy for Vladimir Putin to become President of the Russian Federation? Did the West antagonise or belittle the Russian people?

 

Have we in the West ever appreciated what the Soviet Union did to save the world from the terror of Germany. We can easily use the term Nazis but that distracts us from the fact that it was the German State that caused 27 million Soviet citizens to lose their lives in World War II.

On Sunday, May 9 Russia celebrated its victory in what they call the Great Patriotic War.

But for what happened on the River Volga in 1942/’43 Americans might well have  been forced to nuke Germany into submission. The victory at Stalingrad, now called Volgograd,  was the significant turning point in the war.

When I was in school we heard little or nothing about the role Russia played in defeating Germany in the 1939 - 1945 war.

May is a hallowed month for Mother Russia. It was on May 8, 1945 that the Red Army’s Marshal Georgy Zhukov countersigned the unconditional surrender of Germany in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst.

It’s vital that people of good will from East and West will sit down, appreciate each other and work for peace. It is too simplistic to say all right resides with us in the West and Russia personifies evil. Mr Biden, Mr Putin, please sit down and talk to each other in trust and respect.