The other, albeit less profound, counter-argument could be the eight-year-old Iran-Iraq War in the Middle East where sharing of common sectarian belief among Iranian forces and the majority of Iraqi troops was found to be of little significance or criticality. It was during this war that Iraq responded to Iran's `Abbas-I' missile prowess with its `Abbas-II' strikes.
What looks absolutely implausible, however, is an argument that the present Ukraine situation warrants the need for drawing a parallel between the ongoing Ukraine crisis and Germany of 1939. Three quarters of a century ago, fascists and semi-fascists brutally and effectively overwhelmed the progressive, communist and socialist forces that were dominating Germany; and the present-day Ukraine is no Germany of post-World War I. Describing an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians or anti-Victor Yanukuvych forces as fascists or semi-fascists will be a great injustice to efforts aimed at articulating a fair and objective analysis of the situation; however, The Economist, a publication of high repute and integrity, seems to have lost sight of this cardinal principle of journalism by oversimplifying the situation. According to it, "Everyone in Crimea, and now across eastern Ukraine, is talking about Ukrainian fascists, but nobody has actually seen one."
That post-Cold War mutual suspicions have become acutely pronounced in recent days, weeks and months is a fact that has found its best expression in Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov's stern warning to the US. Asking his counterpart John Kerry that the US must not take `hasty and reckless steps' in response to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine's Crimea region, Lavrov warned that imposing sanctions on Russia `will inevitably have a boomerang effect against the US itself.'
Although Washington and Moscow have a convergence of interests in relation to some key areas such as checks on nuclear proliferation, international terrorism and global energy security, their perspectives on a number of other areas have been found to be tractable. Their respective interests are not often aligned: the War of Kosovo in 1999; the US invasion of Iraq in 2003; the outbreak of the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, particularly in Libya and Syria, in recent years; the Edward Snowden Affair in 2013; and the North Korean threat are some examples of their divergent interests during the post-Cold War era.
The situation in Ukraine, one of the 15 former Soviet states, is critical to the extent that many experts are expecting the possible re-emergence of the Cold War and the repeats of events of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Their fears stem from the evolving developments in Ukraine and its region Crimea despite Russian President Vladimir Putin's assurances to the West that Moscow has no plans to annex Ukraine and that he seeks a diplomatic resolution of the crisis. Piqued by his highly controversial handling of the Russia-Georgia crisis of 2008, Putin now appears to be in a mood to make a compromise on the issue of Ukraine in accordance with the sentiments of a vast majority of Russians because history tells the world that the Russians-as passionately argued by British historian Robert Service in his Russia: Experiment With a People-"barely noticed the loss of their `outer empire' in Eastern Europe in 1989 [the fall of the Iron Curtain] and did not espouse the forcible reincorporation of Ukraine and other countries of the Soviet Union after 1991"; although such optimism is diluted by the outlook of Boris Yeltsin, one of the key architects of dissolution of the Soviet Union (died in 2007), on Russia's `Near Abroad'. In his Midnight Diaries, Yeltsin says: "Moldova is inherently peaceful. The people have a positive peaceful mentality. But the scars from the collapse of the USSR remain, especially in the Transdniester region, home of the large Russian-speaking minority. Moldova can hardly resolve this problem without us." Now the question is: Can Ukraine-a home to millions of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers-resolve its crisis without Russia's help?
To be continued
The writer is newspaper's News Editor