One of the major attractions of becoming a diplomat is travel to different places. Of course, most diplomatic business is done in meetings inside offices, conference halls and other buildings. But diplomats need to get out and travel round the countries in which they work.
Recently, I visited the town of Loyew (Ло́еў in Belarusian or Ло́ев in Russian) with my colleagues from European Union missions. We were there to celebrate EU co-operation with the Belarus State Border Committee and State Customs Committee. The EU has a programme to provide support and equipment to combat illegal immigration and smuggling. We attended a formal ceremony to hand over vehicles and boats.
Loyew is a town of about 7,000 people on the river Dnieper, on the border with Ukraine. The Dnieper must be one of the slowest rivers in the world. The elevation of its headwaters is only about 200 metres above sea level. So there are many bends as river meanders south to the Black Sea. Loyew sits on one of the bends.
During our visit, we visited the local museum. The Red Army had forced a crossing of the river in October 1943. The museum had small rowing boats with machine guns that took up much of the boats, and photographs of Soviet troops preparing for, or recovering from, fighting.
Three thoughts came to me as I wandered round the town and museum.
First: the space of Belarus.
This may be a particular British feeling. With a total population of 55 million in a smaller land area, the population density of England is nearly ten times that of Belarus. To me, the settlements in the rural areas of Belarus appear very distant from one another.
Britain is like a creased tablecloth – the land surface is crossed by lots of low ridges of hills. We only have small plains, the largest on the eastern side of England, in East Anglia and Lincolnshire. The plains of Belarus seem to stretch on and on, but they are only a tiny fraction of the steppes of Ukraine and Russia.
As for the river Dnieper, it is over 2,200 kilometres long, twice the distance between the two furthest points of the island of Great Britain. It is six times longer than the River Severn, the longest river in Britain (which is slightly longer than the Thames which flows through London). The wide, slow moving Dnieper at Loyew makes the Thames look like a small stream.
Secondly: the madness of Hitler’s attack of the Soviet Union in 1941.
I still find hard to understand the utter madness that drove Hitler to send his troops two thousand kilometres east and south into such a sparsely populated land. You would have thought that he might have learned from Charles XII of Sweden and his journey south to defeat at Poltava in 1709, or Napoleon’s disastrous march east to Moscow in 1812.
Keeping contact between units along the front line must have required tremendous effort in itself, before even engaging the enemy. It’s no wonder so many soldiers became lost in the vast space of the plains and forests of Belarus and other parts of the western Soviet Union. Many ended up fighting as partisans behind the front lines.
And as for the generation of young Germans who were sacrificed for Hitler’s insane vanity, the winters were surely desperately miserable for them. Cold, far away from home and in a vast landscape.
Thirdly: the borders of Europe
The world’s continents are defined by the oceans. Europe is the exception.
The Atlantic Ocean is the clear western border of Europe. Of course, the British Isles are separated from mainland Europe by the English Channel. As the Prime Minister noted in his speech on the future of the European Union, that channel is important because it has shaped our psychology.
There is no obvious border to the east (and south-east) of Europe. The Urals are a border, and form a neat north-south line. But they don’t join up with the Caucasus to form a continuous border in the south east. The European landmass simply extends into the heart of Asia. Or seen from the other way round, Europe is a peninsula of peninsulas of Asia.
Where the border lies within that landmass is not a geographical question. It depends on humans. One thing that was obvious to me standing on the banks of the Dnieper at Loyew. The river may appear a vast barrier to my British sensibility, and it may be a border between Belarus and Ukraine, but it is not a border between continents.