Nazi-Soviet Pact Turns 75 with Europe Still Divided

An infamous Nazi-Soviet pact that divided up Europe on the eve of World War II turns 75 on Saturday, with Moscow and the West still engaged in a scarcely hid rivalry to expand their influence across the continent.

On August 23, 1939 then Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and his Nazi counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a non-aggression pact between their two countries in Moscow.

Attached to the pact was a secret annex in which the two split Eastern Europe between them. Less than two weeks later, Hitler sent troops into Poland, launching the Second World War.

The pact was a notorious example of how spheres of influence policies, which often start as defensive steps, can lead to big countries trampling over small ones.

Even President Vladimir Putin, who openly celebrates Russia's Soviet past, has called the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact "immoral". 

With Ukraine now the centre of contention, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will visit Kiev on Saturday in her latest attempt to resolve a crisis that has claimed 2,200 lives and is once again dividing the continent.

- 'Near abroad' vs. neighbourhood -

The mere term "spheres of influence" has become pejorative, said Susanna Hast of the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding at Geneva's Graduate Institute.

But "de facto, there are spheres of influence" because larger countries have always had some sway over their smaller neighbours, she told Agence France Presse. "But we need to ask, what kind of influence?"

Some influence, she added, is seen as more justifiable, such as the export of democracy.

The European Union has sought to expand democracy through its "neighbourhood policy", under which trade deals are offered to countries which undertake democratic, anti-corruption and free-market reforms.

Russia has long held it has a special role in its former Soviet empire, what it often refers to as its "near abroad".

The latest Ukraine crisis flared up in the wake of one such EU trade pact deal with Ukraine and several other ex-Soviet states.

In November, then president Viktor Yanukovych unexpectedly pulled out of the deal, instead taking a $15-billion bailout and gas rebate from Russia, and triggering enraged protest from pro-Western Ukrainians.

Those protests eventually led to Yanukovych's ouster and the establishment of a pro-European government in Kiev.

- 'Geopolitical chess game' -

To Hast, Russia's drive to consolidate its sphere of influence would come from "feel[ing] that there is another state threatening their regional influence".

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov snapped in February that "pressuring Ukraine in one direction while warning that it faces an 'either-or' choice -- either the EU or Russia -- is essentially trying to create a sphere of influence."

Western officials have rebutted Moscow's accusations. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier retorted that "this is not a geopolitical chess game taking place in Ukraine."

Yet it would appear that Moscow views it exactly in those terms. 

Putin justified the annexation of Crimea in March not only because it had been Russian and is mostly inhabited by ethnic Russians, but to prevent NATO from taking over Sevastopol, the home port of its Black Sea Fleet.

"NATO remains a military alliance, and we are against having a military alliance making itself at home right in our backyard or in our historic territory," Putin said at the speech marking Crimea's incorporation into Russia.

Putin later referred to parts of eastern Ukraine and even its southwestern port city of Odessa a part of Novorossiya -- or New Russia, a term first attributed to the tsars as they sought to expand their holdings.

- Protecting Russian speakers -

Marking Crimea's annexation, Putin also warned Kiev that Russia would defend the interests of Russian-speakers there, saying their safety was the "guarantee of Ukraine’s state stability and territorial integrity".

Shortly thereafter uprisings broke out in eastern Ukraine, plunging Europe into its worst East-West crisis since the height of the Cold War.

Russia is accused of, but denies, arming and abetting separatist rebels, and justifies its diplomatic position on humanitarian grounds.

But Hast said its intervention in former Soviet republics now puts it in the role it had long accused the United States of playing.

"What they have done is accused the U.S. of double standards and steadily slipped into an interventionist mode themselves, starting with (Georgia's separatist region of) South Ossetia and now leading to involvement in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea," she said.

- 'Battle for Russia' -

Dmitry Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, said Russia sees ulterior motives in Western action over Ukraine.

"The Kremlin sees the U.S. goal as being not so much stopping the Russian support for the Donbass rebels, or even getting Moscow to withdraw from Crimea, but as the toppling of the Putin regime by means of economic pain and popular discontent wrought by sanctions," he wrote in a recent comment.

"It is no longer the struggle for Ukraine, but a battle for Russia," he said.