Understandably fearful, Ukrainian leaders are reminding Europe of the ghosts of Munich in September 1938 when Czechoslovakia was compelled to accept Adolf Hitler’s demands that it surrender the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia on the basis that the German leader would demand no more.

Neither Britain, with prime minister Neville Chamberlain at the helm, nor French premier Édouard Daladier, was prepared to defend Czechoslovakia. By March 1939, Hitler’s army occupied what was left of Czechoslovakia.

Today, Ukrainian foreign minister Andriy Sybiha, considering Moscow’s promise to occupy all the Donbas region by force, has insisted “we need real peace, not appeasement”.

A recent book by Polish historian Piotr Majewski, The Munich Crisis of 1938, suggests Munich “has become a nightmare haunting many smaller countries. Fears that the West will once again abandon its allies keep many countries awake at night”.

He writes: “These are especially vivid in Ukraine, for which Western aid is a matter of life or death. They are also familiar to the nations of central and eastern Europe – Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Romanians.

“Even though their countries belong to the European Union and

© The Irish Times