Two years after his monstrous invasion, it’s time to seize the $300 billion of Putin’s assets frozen overseas — and hand it to heroic Ukraine
TWO years after Vladimir Putin launched his vile and unnecessary attack on Ukraine, I can tell you exactly how it will end. The war will end as it began. It will end with the total rout and humiliation of all the experts who said that Ukraine was fated to lose.
With the right military, political and economic support — and they will get it, eventually — the Ukrainians will win this war. They will push Putin’s miserable forces out of their homeland. They will achieve the destiny in which they passionately believe, and they will vindicate their right to be a free, sovereign, independent European country.
They will show the world that there is a difference between a democracy and a tyranny, between a country where you defeat your opponent at the ballot box, and a country where you lock up your opponent, illegally, and then murder him in a labour camp. When that victory comes, it will be a truly glorious moment, for Ukraine and for the world. It may take time. But I believe ve that it is now the Ukrainians — not Putin — who have time on their side.
Whenever you feel downhearted about the he sufferings of the Ukrainian army and people, e, just remember what they have already dy achieved. Whenever you feel ready to listen en to the unwitting peddlers of Kremlin propaganda, aat and to believe the nonsense that Putin ‘cannot afford to fail’ or that Russia is somehow ‘too big’, think back to those first st few hours, days and weeks.
Do you remember how it all began? I do. o. At about 5.45am on February 24, 2022, in Downing Street, I was patched through to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, e, and I had before me sheets of material that at gave the same utterly grim prognosis.
In Washington, Paris, Berlin, all the Nato to capitals — the view of defence intelligence ce was clear.
They could see the 115 Russian battalion tactical groups, massed on the border, only a few short hours’ drive from Kyiv.
We could hear their chatter, we could hear them as they revved their tanks and took their forward positions.
We could all see the balance of forces; and the view was that the Ukrainians might fight gallantly, but that it was hopeless — and that they would be flattened like the Polish cavalry before the Panzers of Adolf Hitler.
The general view was that it would all be over in a week; in fact, there were some Western voices that were so despairing of Ukraine’s ability to fight, so mesmerised by Putin’s alleged invincibility, that they said it might be better if the Ukrainians just gave in, surrendered their country and agreed to become a satrapy of the Russian dictator.
After 31 years of independent existence, the young Ukrainian state was going to have its neck wrung like a chicken. That was the view of Western defence experts.
Well, two years later we can say, with Churchill: some chicken, some neck.
FROM the moment of Putin’s invasion we massively exaggerated Russia’s strength in our minds, and we are making the same mistake today. We chronically underestimate the achievements of the Ukrainians.
Putin has lost 315,000 Russian soldiers killed or wounded; two-thirds of his pre-war tank inventory has been destroyed; and he has been expelled from Kyiv and Kharkiv and Kherson — more than half the territory he originally occupied.
He began this conflict with a reputation for possessing the second most fearsome military machine in the world; after 24 months, it is clear that he has the second most fearsome military — in Ukraine.
The Russian president has been forced to impose conscription in his own country, and to put down a violent rebellion, led by his former lackey, Yevgeny Prigozhin, whom he then publicly assassinated. He is now running a wartime economy in which 40 per cent of GDP is spent on trying to subjugate the Ukrainians and effectively wipe them off the map — and still he can’t do it. Those heroic Ukrainians fight on.
Look at the Black Sea, where Putin has suffered a string of embarrassing losses — his vessels defenceless against being rammed by Ukrainian naval drones — so that about a third of his fleet is now out of action. The Ukrainians have been so successful at sea that their exports are now back up to pre-war levels.
Two years into this war the path to Ukrainian victory is clear. They have the heart and the will to win.
What they need is simple, and we in the West have it in our power to give. They need the right military, political and economic support.
Putin has a big and general strategic weakness, in that he is trying to defeat and hold down a country that fundamentally wants to be free. We all know that when you occupy someone else’s territory there is an asymmetry of risk. To protect themselves from insurgent attack, Putin’s forces have to be lucky the whole time; Ukrainian forces only have to be lucky once.
The Russian leader also has a particular weakness. Unlike many other theatres of conflict, Ukraine has one pivotal point, a place where Putin’s ambitions are most vulnerable — and that is Crimea. He simply cannot afford to lose the Crimean peninsula. It would mean a massive loss of face, domestically and internationally, the end of his ambitions to take back the port of Odesa, and — realistically — the end of his plans to take back Ukraine altogether.
Yet his positions in Crimea are extremely vulnerable. The Ukrainians have already shown what they can do, with the attacks on the Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol.
WITH the right equipment, they could begin to kick so savagely at Putin’s Achilles’ heel that he would be forced to limp off the field, or to sue for a deal that would — at the very least — restore the Ukraine of two years ago.
To that end the Ukrainians need more ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems), of which they now have only a limited number, and with restrictions on their range and use. They need more cruise missiles, such as the Storm Shadow supplied by the British, the French Scalps and the German Taurus.
And they need far more Nato 155mm shells that have a range of about 40km. They also need a more consistent and co-ordinated plan of support that combines mass training of the Ukrainian army by Nato countries — both for officers and other ranks — combined with a strategic and long-term programme to supply the munitions they need.
In the past few days, the Ukrainians were forced to make what I believe was a sensible tactical retreat from Avdiivka. Bear in mind that this Donbas city was being viciously contested, and swapping back and forth, even when I first visited Ukraine as Foreign Secretary in 2016; so its importance has been greatly exaggerated this week.
The reason they have temporarily given up Avdiivka is that the Russians were firing ten shells for every one that the Ukrainians could fire back. That is because those shells are £ 3,200 a pop, and the Ukrainians now have them in short supply — and the answer is obvious.
The West is stepping up its production of munitions, and here in the UK there is now talk of a Beaverbrook — the newspaper baron and peer who dramatically escalated aircraft production in World War II — to drive the manufacture of the necessary weaponry. We need such a figure and, above all, of course, we need to keep the cash coming; and it is.
If you look at the numbers, it is simply not true to say that Western support for Ukraine is flagging. The EU has given about £39 billion in military assistance, the U. S. about £35 billion and the UK is now in third place among the national donors, behind the U. S. and Germany.
Yes, I am certainly concerned about what is happening in Congress, and the delay to the vital £47 billion package of aid. But I am also optimistic that the U.S. will do the right thing. The American people have made huge sacrifices for freedom and they know it. They have pulled European chestnuts out of the fire in two World Wars and one Cold War.
They don’t want to be lectured or hectored. In the end, I am sure that U.S. lawmakers will continue to see the massive strategic advantage — to America — of ensuring a Ukrainian victory.
Look what U.S. support has achieved so far — at a cost of only about 5 per cent of the U.S. defence budget, and without so far costing the life of a single U.S. soldier. By supporting
Ukraine, they have done more damage to the armed forces of Russia — the principal military rival of the U.S. — than ten years of Russian fighting in Afghanistan.
They have greatly strengthened Nato, the traditional vehicle for U.S. power in Europe, not least since Nato now boasts two new vital and previously neutral members in Finland and Sweden.
They have achieved one of the most important long-term goals of U.S. foreign policy — to get the Europeans to share more of the burden, and to spend more on their own defence.
They have exposed a fundamental strategic rift between Moscow and Beijing, in that Chinese President Xi Jinping has now publicly and privately slapped down Putin’s bluster about nuclear weapons, and exposed that threat for the nonsense it is. Above all, by giving effective support to Ukraine, the Americans continue to send a message around the world — not least to Beijing — that it does not pay to try to solve disputes by force.
So I am confident that in the end the U.S. will continue to be the arsenal of democracy, and that we simply need time before this war ends, and on terms favourable to Ukraine. It may not happen this year; we may have to wait until 2025 or 2026 — but the industrial might of the West is so vastly greater than Russia’s that with strategic patience this can only end one way.
To accelerate the process we need to keep making clear to Russian strategists that they have lost; that if their plan was to take Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, it has been an abysmal failure.
We need to ram the point home that Ukraine has chosen to be democratic and European, rather than rejoin an Asiatic empire.
ANd that means ensuring that we continue to integrate Ukraine into the Western clubs, the EU and Nato; the Washington Nato summit this summer should make it clear that Ukrainian membership is now on an irreversible path.
To tighten the vice around Putin’s fundamentals, there is one final measure that is long overdue. It is absurd that he still has $300 billion (£237 billion) of assets frozen overseas, much of it held in Belgium in an institution called Euroclear. It is time to take those assets and give them to Ukraine. It is ridiculous to claim that Putin has ‘sovereign immunity’ from such expropriation. What about the sovereign immunity of the Ukrainians, whose lives and hopes he has wantonly plundered and destroyed?
There are several ways in which it would be not only morally right but legal to take that cash — by setting it off, for instance, against a Western loan to the Ukrainians for the rebuilding of their country. The time for talking about this is over. Putin continues to maim and murder indiscriminately. We should do it forthwith.
I am not saying that the loss of the $300 billion would instantly bring him to his knees — but it is not a trivial sum, and its loss would be another well-timed blow.
This war is unremittingly bleak, and after two years we all ache for it to end. But history, geography and time — as well as justice — are on the side of the Ukrainians.
Give them the wherewithal — the military, political and economic support — and they can and win.