No More Partitions

Trump and the Kremlin want to take us backwards

(An allegory of Catherine II of Russia, Joseph II of Austria and Frederick the Great of Prussia negotiating the first partition of Poland in 1772)

Fascist Russia, now under Kremlin arch-hawks, expects Trump to partition Ukraine for them. They want to go back to a dark era by legitimizing Moscow’s genocidal conquests since 2014. Ukraine and its allies must prevent such an abominable result.

Partition has a long and sordid history in Europe. It has re-shaped countries from Sweden and Denmark to Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The Ottoman empire after the First World War and Poland in the late eighteenth century are famous cases.

With Prussia as an ally, Russia under Catherine II orchestrated three partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795. (Austria joined the first and third.) As a result, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to exist as an independent state until both Poland and Lithuania were reconstituted after the First World War.

In 1919-20 the UK proposed the Curzon line to demarcate Poland and the USSR, but Poland’s government rejected it. Poland’s military success at the battle of Warsaw in 1920 resulted in the 1921 treaty of Riga which placed Poland’s border with the USSR significantly further to the east.

Moscow was deeply unhappy with this result. The Second World War effectively began for Canada, France and the UK with the August 23rd 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Hitler and Stalin whose secret protocol partitioned Poland and other European states between these two belligerent dictators.