{"id":42319,"date":"2025-02-21T21:18:31","date_gmt":"2025-02-21T17:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/?p=42319"},"modified":"2025-02-21T21:18:31","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T17:18:31","slug":"ukraine-isnt-invited-to-its-own-peace-talks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/ukraine-isnt-invited-to-its-own-peace-talks\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine isn\u2019t Invited to Its Own Peace Talks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/u><\/span><\/h4>\n

<\/h4>\n

History is full of such examples \u2013 and the results are devastating<\/u><\/span><\/h4>\n
\n

Ukraine has not been invited to a key meeting between American and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia this week to decide what peace in the country might look like.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine will \u201cnever accept\u201d any decisions in talks without its participation to end Russia\u2019s three-year war in the country.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

A decision to negotiate the sovereignty of Ukrainians without them \u2013 as well as US President Donald Trump\u2019s blatantly extortionate attempt to claim half of Ukraine\u2019s rare mineral wealth as the price for ongoing US support \u2013 reveals a lot about how Trump sees Ukraine and Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

But this is not the first time large powers have colluded to negotiate new borders or spheres of influence without the input of the people who live there.<\/span><\/p>\n

Such high-handed power politics rarely ends well for those affected, as these seven historical examples show.<\/span><\/p>\n

1. The Scramble for Africa<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In the winter of 1884-85, German leader Otto von Bismarck invited the powers of Europe to Berlin for a conference to formalise the division of the entire African continent among them. Not a single African was present at the conference that would come to be known as \u201cThe Scramble for Africa\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Among other things, the conference led to the creation of the Congo Free State under Belgian control, the site of colonial atrocities that killed millions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Germany also established the colony of German South West Africa (present-day Namibia), where the first genocide of the 20th century was later perpetrated against its colonised peoples.<\/span><\/p>\n

2. The Tripartite Convention<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t just Africa that was divided up this way. In 1899, Germany and the United States held a conference and forced an agreement on the Samoans to split their islands between the two powers.<\/span><\/p>\n

This was despite the Samoans expressing a desire for either self-rule or a confederation of Pacific states with Hawai’i.<\/span><\/p>\n

As \u201ccompensation\u201d for missing out in Samoa, Britain received uncontested primacy over Tonga.<\/span><\/p>\n

German Samoa came under the rule of New Zealand after the first world war and remained a territory until 1962. American Samoa (in addition to several other Pacific islands) remain US territories to this day.<\/span><\/p>\n

3. The Sykes-Picot Agreement<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

As the first world war was well under way, British and French representatives sat down to agree how they\u2019d divide up the Ottoman Empire after it was over. As an enemy power, the Ottomans were not invited to the talks.<\/span><\/p>\n

Together, England\u2019s Mark Sykes and France\u2019s Fran\u00e7ois Georges-Picot redrew the Middle East\u2019s borders in line with their nations\u2019 interests.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Sykes-Picot Agreement ran counter to commitments made in a series of letters known as the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. In these letters, Britain promised to support Arab independence from Turkish rule.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Sykes-Picot Agreement also ran counter to promises Britain made in the Balfour Declaration to back Zionists who wanted to build a new Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine.<\/span><\/p>\n

The agreement became the wellspring of decades of conflict and colonial misrule in the Middle East, the consequences of which continue to be felt today.<\/span><\/p>\n

4. The Munich Agreement<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister \u00c9douard Daladier met with Italy\u2019s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, and Germany\u2019s Adolf Hitler to sign what became known as the Munich Agreement.<\/span><\/p>\n

The leaders sought to prevent the spread of war throughout Europe after Hitler\u2019s Nazis had fomented an uprising and began attacking the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland. They did this under the pretext of protecting German minorities. No Czechoslovakians were invited to the meeting.<\/span><\/p>\n

The meeting is still seen by many as the \u201cMunich Betrayal\u201d \u2013 a classic example of a failed appeasement of a belligerent power in the false hope of staving off war.<\/span><\/p>\n

5. The \u00c9vian Conference<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In 1938, 32 countries met in \u00c9vian-les-Bains, France, to decide how to deal with Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany.<\/span><\/p>\n

Before the conference started, Britain and the US had agreed not to put pressure on one another to lift the quota of Jews they would accept in either the US or British Palestine.<\/span><\/p>\n

While Golda Meir (the future Israeli leader) attended the conference as an observer, neither she nor any other representatives of the Jewish people were permitted to take part in the negotiations.<\/span><\/p>\n

The attendees largely failed to come to an agreement on accepting Jewish refugees, with the exception of the Dominican Republic. And most Jews in Germany were unable to leave before Nazism reached its genocidal nadir in the Holocaust.<\/span><\/p>\n

6. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

As Hitler planned his invasion of Eastern Europe, it became clear his major stumbling block was the Soviet Union. His answer was to sign a disingenuous non-aggression treaty with the USSR.<\/span><\/p>\n

Joseph Stalin and Joachim von Ribbentrop after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. German Federal Archives\/Wikimedia Commons<\/span><\/p>\n

The treaty, named after Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop (the Soviet and German foreign ministers), ensured the Soviet Union would not respond when Hitler invaded Poland. It also carved up Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres. This allowed the Soviets to expand into Romania and the Baltic states, attack Finland and take its own share of Polish territory.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, some in Eastern Europe view the current US-Russia talks over Ukraine\u2019s future as a revival of this kind of secret diplomacy that divided the smaller nations of Europe between large powers in the second world war.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a07. <\/strong><\/span>The Yalta Conference<\/strong><\/p>\n

With the defeat of Nazi Germany imminent, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and US President Franklin D Roosevelt met in 1945 to decide the fate of postwar Europe. This meeting came to be known as the Yalta Conference.<\/span><\/p>\n

Alongside the Potsdam Conference several months later, Yalta created the political architecture that would lead to the Cold War division of Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

At Yalta, the \u201cbig three\u201d decided on the division of Germany, while Stalin was also offered a sphere of interest in Eastern Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

This took the form of a series of politically controlled buffer states in Eastern Europe, a model some believe Putin is aiming to emulate today in eastern and southeastern Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Matt Fitzpatrick<\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/span>Professor in International History,
\nFlinders University<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 14 February 2025<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History is full of such examples \u2013 and the results are devastating Ukraine has not been invited to a key meeting between American and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia this week to decide what peace in the country might look like. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine will \u201cnever accept\u201d any decisions in talks without […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42320,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[28],"tags":[27637,2440,51124,32459,2834,8697,32366,26685,51123,31567,433,30411],"class_list":["post-42319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-affairs","tag-conflict","tag-history","tag-munich-agreement","tag-peace-talks","tag-russia","tag-russia-ukraine","tag-russian-ukraine-war","tag-scramble-for-africa","tag-sykes-picot-agreement","tag-ukraine","tag-united-states","tag-volodymyr-zelensky"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/C-Ukraine-not-even-invited-to-Ukraine-Peace-Talks.-Pic-YouTube.jpg?fit=1200%2C674&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QzSF-b0z","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42319"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42322,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42319\/revisions\/42322"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}