Europe’s pacifist elites would rather sacrifice Ukraine than admit that they were wrong
It started well. Some months ago, before the war started, I was sitting in a kitchen listening to an Austrian and an Englishman arguing over whether Germany would ever abandon its prostrate position on Russia. The Austrian argued that norms can change quickly and that Nord Stream 2 would be finished if Vladimir Putin really tried to take Kyiv. The Englishman was pessimistic. Berlin would never change, he said.
The Austrian was right. In a measure of just how fast things can shift, Latvia’s foreign minister Edgars Rinkēvičs this week told the Politico website that he thinks Nato might even at some point soon agree to send fighter planes to Ukraine. The idea was so abhorrent to Joe Biden’s dithering White House a few weeks ago that the US publicly slapped down Poland for making the offer. Yet, here we are.
What’s changed is not just our understanding of Mr Putin’s original ambitions in Ukraine, but also the spectacular inability of his military to fulfil them.
Western intelligence, which was pinpoint-accurate on the likelihood of war, none the less expected Kyiv to fall within days, in line with Russia’s own estimation of its advantages. Instead, at the cost of an estimated 15,000 soldiers, its biggest Black Sea battleship and countless million rubles’ worth of equipment, Russia has retreated to a more modest ambition of taking a bigger bite out of the Donbas – and even there it is struggling.
This seems like the natural moment to help Ukraine press its advantage. That, surely, is the right way to read the speech made by the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, this week, in which she declared: “We are doubling down. We will keep going further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine.”
The West ought to send “heavy weapons, tanks, aeroplanes”, she said, voicing a position she has held privately for some time on the supply of planes to Ukraine’s forces – and which is supported by our Prime Minister.
Yet there’s something about Ms Truss that drives a certain sort of plaintive male just wild with rage.
The Guardian immediately published a slew of commentary claiming that the Foreign Secretary was “fanning the flames of war” and “recklessly inflaming Ukraine’s war”. Instead, these sages helpfully suggested, we ought to be thinking of concessions to “award” Russia, like recognising its annexation of Crimea and handing over south-east Ukraine.
And these defeatists have their allies abroad. Last week in Germany, 20 prominent journalists and academics wrote an open letter to their chancellor, Olaf Scholz, demanding that Berlin stop sending arms to Ukraine.
UN chief António Guterres chose this week as the right moment to hand Mr Putin a badly needed propaganda win and visited Moscow to glad-hand the Russian president – figuratively at least – across his big, shiny, anti-covid table.
The self-styled peaceniks make all sorts of arguments against the West’s involvement in the war, but among the most disingenuous is the idea that Nato’s help for Ukraine risks “escalating” the conflict and “causing World War Three”.
In fact, the biggest risk of escalation is the scenario in which Russia starts to win its war of aggression. If Moscow could show the world that Europe is weak and that Nato is a busted flush, it would have no reason not to carry on with Mr Putin’s ambition to rebuild the Russian Empire, increasingly provoking the West in a way that is far more likely to lead inadvertently to a disastrous, global war.
Instead, with Russia’s military bogged down, haemorrhaging people and equipment, and Mr Putin’s nuclear war bluffing ignored, no one serious is now talking fearfully about his army’s next target.
Still, certain Western doomsayers cannot help themselves. It’s as if they secretly crave defeat. Germany, for example, seemingly underwent a dramatic conversion to the cause of freedom when the war started. But the Englishman in the argument wasn’t entirely wrong. For all the changes we’ve seen, Berlin’s default setting is still to prefer crippling weakness over commitment to its allies.
Why, for example, does the German government have to be pushed into defending Europe and helping Ukraine on pain of humiliation at every decision point? Mr Scholz finally agreed to let Ukraine buy tanks this week after suffering a massive defeat in the Bundestag, following months of stonewalling and refusal. Yet the signs are that his government is planning to backtrack on its grand promise to bring defence spending up to Nato’s minimum of 2 per cent of GDP.
After everything – the invasion, the massacres and the rhetoric of religious war and neo-fascism emanating from Russia – Mr Scholz is still in hock to his party’s discredited, stubbornly pro-moscow establishment. And instead of hanging their heads in shame, Europe’s elites are as keen as ever to lecture this country on the importance of the “rule of law” and “democracy” if any Brexit issue arises to give them the pretext.
Nor do we need the advice dispensed from others who have been so embarrassingly wrong about relations between the West and Russia over so many years. Edward Snowden, the US intelligence whistleblower now based in Russia, has at least had the decency to pipe down since loudly panning the West’s claims that Moscow was about to invade. But others like Noam Chomsky cannot help themselves.
The Left-wing academic was at it again earlier this month, claiming incredibly that Mr Putin actually “wants peace” though, he admitted, only “on his terms”. The key move, the sage Mr Chomsky advised, would be to “try to find out” what those terms are.
This is something the former residents of Bucha have had some experience in finding out, to the eternal shame of Moscow and its apologists.
The free world has come a long way since early February, when it seemed possible that Nato was going to be a passive bystander in the fall of Kyiv. Yet too many Western elites still struggle to have the courage of our convictions, even as Ukraine’s people are dying for them.
These so-called pacifists still claim to own the moral high ground, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine has revealed that their doctrine is not really one of peace, but of prostration before power.
Even now, defeatists on the Continent are using flawed arguments to justify their refusal to help Kyiv