Well-known Australian expatriate in Japan and former diplomat Greg Clark addressed an overflow audience at Glover Cottages on Tuesday 9 February.  Based on a recent fact-finding visit he made to Moscow and the Crimea at the invitation of Russian authorities, Greg examined whether Russia and President Vladimir Putin were getting balanced reporting in western media. During the Cold War, Moscow and its military and intelligence thugs deserved all the demonization they got. As a language student in Moscow, Greg himself was harassed by the KGB during the so-called Khrushchev liberalisation period of the early 1960s. And the number of locals killed by Soviet forces in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 could rival United States actions in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973.

But since the break-up of the Soviet Union things have changed. Russia under Putin wants to be accepted as a Western-oriented nation. Yet Moscow’s take-over of the Crimea and subsequent fighting and disruption in eastern Ukraine have blackened Russia’s profile. Ugly pro-Nazi , anti-Semitic groups have done much to prolong the fighting, forcing one million Russians to flee into Russia. Despite this, Russia accepted a cease-fire and local self-governance of the Russian-speaking districts Donetsk and Luhansk in the Minsk agreement of February 2015, and specifically endorsed Ukrainian sovereignty and administration rights. Accusations that Russia is trying to suppress the Tartar language in Crimea are confounded by daily television programs in Crimea teaching Tartar.  Yet accusations of aggression, denial of Ukrainian sovereignty and cultural genocide committed by Russia continue. Moscow faces a continuation of sanctions and an escalation of NATO military pressure, which is increased because of alleged Russian aggression against the three Baltic states. Does anyone, Greg asked, remember the West’s severe language and other discrimination against the Russian-origin minorities stranded in the Baltic states following the Soviet break-up in 1991? Details provided by Moscow were completely ignored.

Greg concluded by saying that Western fears of Russian motives in Ukraine, Crimea and the Baltic States are based on ignorance and ingrained Cold War fears. Such fears and ignorance will no doubt persist, and are very dangerous. A case closer to Greg’s home in Japan are the southern Kuriles, part of the Kamchatka Peninsula clearly ceded to the Soviet Union by Japan at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, but claimed with increasing stridency by successive governments in Tokyo.  Such claims add needless tension to Japan-Russian relations, and are of benefit only to the weapons industry. Why, he asked, do countries engage in such delusions? As observed at the beginning of his lecture, the doomsday clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists now stands at three minutes to midnight, a sombre reflection of the possibility that increasing tensions between Russia and the NATO countries could lead, accidentally or otherwise, to nuclear war.

Richard Broinowski, Rawdon Dalrymple and Greg Clark 2016

Report prepared by Richard Broinowski