Behind the scenes, Adolf Hitler provided enough aid to ensure Franco’s likely eventual victory. But he did not send quite enough immediate help either to antagonize his European democratic rivals, or to ensure a quick victory for the Nationalists that might have created a powerful and independent Iberian fascist rival bloc to his own.
The Soviet Union ostensibly countered fascist supply chains. But Joseph Stalin had even more strings attached to his aid. He systematically favored communist recipients and harassed and often eliminated their socialist and anarchist allies in the Popular Front.
Stranger still, even before the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact of 1939, Hitler and Stalin were already secretly aiding each other’s rearmament in their shared hatred of Western European democracies. It would take years of research to fathom all of the subtexts and agendas behind the great powers’ interventions in the Spanish Civil war.The same labyrinth of plots and twists will likely prove true in the present Ukrainian war. Ostensibly NATO and the EU are staunch Ukrainian allies. But powerful German interests remain worried about their tenuous energy supply lines from Russia and are not so ready to cut off all trade with Putin.
China seems all in as a Russian benefactor. But it is sending mixed diplomatic signals as it weighs lucrative gas and oil deals with an increasingly isolated Putin against endangering its profitable mercantile trading with the West. Before the war, plenty of Ukrainians from its majority Russian-speaking borderlands were playing both sides during the ongoing turmoil. As with the Spanish Civil War, Ukraine ostensibly is a war between elected governments and autocracies–but with deal-making and intrigue on both sides.
Related: Orwell’s Bad Republicans.