Double efforts in Ukraine but be ready to deal
Two years since Russia’s invasion, the war is at a stalemate but allies must not waver in supporting this fight against evil, writes Matthew Parris
Two years is a long time for a nation to be fighting for its life, a milestone of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine marked at the weekend. The anxiety in Ukraine is palpable.
And for many Ukrainians, two years is a personal as well as national figure. Shivering on the morning of February 18, in the famous Maidan square in Kyiv, where uprisings against the Russian puppet government first showed themselves, I watched a forlorn demonstration by army wives, their chants and banners reminding onlookers that many of their husbands have now spent all that time at the front line. Many are exhausted.
Ukraine has now lost some 70,000 soldiers. They’re not overwhelmingly young. The average Ukrainian soldier is 43. The age of conscription has recently been lowered from 27 to 25. The ceiling is 60. This has so far been a middle-aged soldiers’ war.
Younger people can volunteer and at first many did. There was optimism, even excitement. But the prospect of the trenches now brings only foreboding.
If you want to describe the prevailing mood, the word is neither despairing nor defeatist. It remains dogged, while, towards the Russians, fury and rejection are searing. This is a nation spitting with rage.
But determination is tinged with worry. President Zelenskyy may have dismissed his top commander for talking publicly about a stalemate, but General Zaluzhnyi spoke the truth and everybody knows it.
“Stalemate” is not a word that gladdens the heart. But let’s not forget that when outright victory looks beyond reach, stalemate is a damn sight better than the alternative. If stalemate is what you face, then so does your enemy.
There will continue to be small, localised gains and losses but any big Russian advance remains more or less stalled. They’re stuck, and that’s a cause for celebration. These invaders’ aim was total occupation and they were confident of achieving it. After two years, they squat on more or less the same territory they had when the big attempted invasion began.
So I invite you to a considerable effort of the imagination. Think like a Russian. Lay aside your (and my) sympathies with our own side here.
Try instead to put yourself into the mindset of those in command in Moscow. I say “Moscow” rather than Vladimir Putin because it’s my strong conviction that, though for the moment he is in charge, the leader and the gang are not the same thing. This is Putin’s war, his idea, his project and (increasingly) his obsession. He knows he miscalculated and it’s driving him mad.
I think it unlikely that his senior colleagues today inhabit Putin’s lonely and lunatic world. Of course they don’t want their country to lose, but do you honestly think they’re happy their leader got them into this? He turns 72 this year. Leaders call the tune until they don’t. But when through ill-health or mutiny - he falters, his successors will take an open look at what, privately, they already know. Think yourself into their minds. What confronts them? A sea of troubles.
In pushing back against the West their leader has thrown the Russian Federation into the arms of a much more formidable long-term threat: China. They are bogged down in Ukraine.
They’ve lost at least 120,000 troops; they may be running out of tanks; financial assets abroad have been frozen and are threatened with confiscation; sanctions have lost them their huge gas market in Europe and, with it, European dependence on Russian supply. Finland is joining Nato.
Most of the West is united in hostility towards them, and will for years be wary in our dealings; and across Europe and in the US, Canada and Australia, Russia’s reputation is shot. This is a now a pariah nation. Oligarchs and cronies have been sanctioned. And, though a wall of economic sanctions has proved sometimes porous, their economy is taking a hit.
Any empire frays at the edges, and Moscow’s faces a host of difficulties, small insurrections, local agitations and troublesome regional leaders in places often thousands of miles from Moscow. The last thing the Russian Federation needed was to get stuck in a huge and deadly war, very close to home.
Memories will still be strong of the USSR’s humiliating withdrawal from its failed adventure in Afghanistan after two years’ trying to shore up a puppet government in Kabul.
Surely nobody, even perhaps Putin, now seriously contemplates the reoccupation of the whole of Ukraine and the installation of a new client administration there. Virtually all of that nation is now energised and seething, and has found a reinforced sense of identity and purpose. If the Afghan Mujahideen (with mischievous Western help) could eject the Russians with all their military might and hang their puppet president, what could a vast and rebellious Ukraine do?
Moscow is in a bind. “Stalemate” is putting it mildly. Consciously in a few Kremlin minds, unconsciously in many more, there will be a dull ache for something they can call victory, and a halfway dignified withdrawal of claims to the three quarters of Ukraine they will never repossess.
All we and the Ukrainians need do is stay strong, banishing any supposition that Russia could ever outstare us.
It is possible simultaneously to hold in the mind two thoughts that are only superficially ill-matched. First, a redoubling of support in funds and materiel.
Second, a signal that in due course Ukraine will be ready for a deal.
Some I met there already want this. Others would be sorry to see it. Few any longer see it as preposterous.
I’m entirely unqualified to set out the sums and the weaponry required, or the terms of any final deal, though copperbottomed Western guarantees would have to accompany it. But this much I can say: Moscow must be persuaded that even if the US cuts support, Europe is willing to take up the slack, even doubling its contribution.
I don’t like the word “evil” and have rarely used it in a newspaper column. But talking to frightened young people in Ukraine I could not but feel, hanging in the freezing winter fog, a threat for which I know no other word.
If confronting this is not worth a couple of hundred quid from each of us, which is what Britain’s contribution amounts to, what price the liberty we take for granted?