Putin’s evil regime won’t be defeated by appeasement
ON April 20, 1939, Hitler’s 50th birthday was celebrated with a military parade of 50,000 German troops marching through the streets of Berlin. The four-hour spectacle was about far more than marking the Führer’s birthday. It was meant to warn Western powers of Germany’s military strength, to leave it free to expand the Reich as it saw fit.
Yesterday’s Victory Day parade in Moscow was not a birthday celebration – it commemorates the defeat of Germany in the Second World War. But the intention was exactly the same as in Berlin in 1939 – to warn the West of Russia’s military might.
The invasion of Ukraine has, of course, had the opposite effect. Putin expected the fighting to be over in days. However, months on, it has become a nightmare for him, not least because it has exposed as something of a myth the might of the Russian military.
But the parade certainly has reminded us what we are up against: a deluded fascist, who has no compunction about wiping out entire cities and their populations, let alone licensing his soldiers to rape and pillage.
PUTIN’S speech itself is of little direct interest, other than as an illustration of his delusions – or, as Defence Secretary Ben Wallace called them yesterday, his “fairytale claims”.
Its contents can be summed up briefly: the West is immoral, Nato was on the point of attacking Russia, Ukraine was about to get nuclear weapons, this is a fight against neo-Nazis, the Donbas has always been Russian and the fight is a continuation of the Great Patriotic War – how Russia refers to the Second World War.
Deranged as these claims may be, they show why Ukraine matters to all of us.A man capable of making such claims the bedrock and supposed justification of his foreign policy is capable of almost anything – which is why it is imperative for all our safety that we resist him.
One could say we are now in our version of 1938, when Hitler took over the Sudetenland. Our response then was appeasement – the Munich Agreement. Hitler saw a weak West that would not stand in his way and invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia and then Poland in 1939.
The imperative today is to avoid a modern version of 1939, with Putin believing that Ukraine can be just the start of his military adventures.
Previous Western weakness, when Putin invaded Crimea in 2014 and over his support for Assad’s war crimes in Syria, sent a clear message we were indeed too supine to resist.
He doubtless expected to face only hot air in response to his invasion in February. Western sanctions will have surprised him, but sanctions alone would never be enough to force Putin from Ukraine. The critical development has been the supply of weapons.
It is admirable when the likes of Jill Biden and Bono visit Kyiv to show support, following others such as Boris Johnson and UN Secretary General António Guterres. But it is not visits Ukraine needs: it is arms.
In that respect, the UK and the US have started well.At the weekend it was reported that we will give another £1.3billion in aid and military support.
The US has also provided substantial aid. But there is much more to be done – a lesson German Chancellor Olaf Scholz needs to learn.
Germany has shamed itself in its limp response to the invasion – as polls show the vast majority of Germans believe. It is no less important that we do not even hint at some sort of imposed “peace deal” forcing Ukraine to cede territory to Russia in return for the end of Russian fighting.
In that context, French president Emmanuel Macron’s attempted “diplomacy” with Putin is disconcerting, with the implied idea that a deal can be done that does not require a full Russian retreat.
THE West’s role – its duty – must be to support Ukraine militarily and diplomatically until it decides what it wants.
Talk about an “off ramp” for Putin to save face, in the jargon of some analysts, is a fundamental misunderstanding of the lessons of history. Putin is not some rational actor with whom we can or should negotiate.
He is a fascist war criminal who needs to be defeated – or, if need be, stuck in a war he cannot win. If we help him walk away and force Ukraine to accept anything less than his defeat, we effectively say to him and others that aggression wins.
It is an unspeakable tragedy that Europe is again at war. But it was our weakness in standing up to tyranny that brought us here.We must now stand firm.
‘We must not even hint at a deal forcing Ukraine to cede territory’