Back to the USSR:time to draw a line
What is at stake is nothing less than the future of Europe
What price freedom? How far will we to go to defend our liberty and that of others who wish to live as we do? How much do we really care about democracy?
This surely is now the central question in the battle to save Ukraine. The post-1989 order which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, hailed as the end of history, lies in tatters.
Three decades of wishful thinking about the world after the USSR have come to a brutal end. Russia, or at least its leadership, has not changed but we were not paying attention.
We were lulled into complacency by Russian money and oligarchs with fancy yachts who championed our beloved football clubs. We allowed ourselves to become hostages to Russian oil. We persuaded ourselves that a free-market Russia had ditched its irredentist impulses. That it was cured.
Ukraine represents a massive failure of imagination by the west. After 9/11 we were haunted by the menace of Islamic terrorism from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
Terrorism is still a threat. But a Russian-occupied Ukraine poised on the outer edge of Europe represents a threat of a different order of magnitude.
What to do now is not a simple question. It does not have simple answers. It is certainly not a new question.
War and conquest are the incessant drumbeat of history. Before the nation state emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries the powerful acquired resources and wealth by subduing the weak near and far. Veni vidi vici: the Mongols, the Ottomans, the British, French, Austrian, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Belgian empires.
Then came World War II. Nazi imperialism underpinned by bellicose nationalism and a certain idea of German exceptionalism, drove the world into the most destructive conflict in history.
Out of the smouldering ruins of war evolved a global political system rooted, optimistically, in reason, mutual respect, sovereignty and territorial integrity: live and let live.
Three men (Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt) redrew the map of Europe in Yalta in 1945. We had all suffered enough. Surely we could all rub along now?
But this was not altruism. It was transactional, hard-nosed horse trading. Britain wanted Middle East oil and the trade routes to the east. America sought hegemony. Russia wanted control of eastern Europe.
What the post-war settlement actually produced was a fragile and volatile international order marked by competing ideologies and rival political and economic systems. It produced the Cold War. It has now produced Ukraine and war in Europe.
The 1994 Budapest Memorandum, signed by three nuclear powers (US, Russia, and Britain) on the accession of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty committed the signatories “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders” and “to refrain from the threat or use of force”.
We want to believe in the best in people. But optimism, we are reminded again and again, is no basis for statecraft.
Putin is an old-school bully. He is Brezhnev, Stalin, Khrushchev. He has methodically tested the west, riven by single-issue identity politics, and found it wanting: Syria, Georgia, Crimea, Salisbury, cyber warfare and dirty tricks to influence democratic elections.
Time will tell if he has miscalculated. But he continues to get away with murder.
The question now is how can America and its allies stop Putin without starting a third world war?
As the cruel logic of war unfolds with more atrocities, more women and children killed and wounded and a refugee exodus already running into millions, the pressure to do more will grow.
We should be under no illusions. Creating the most serious refugee crisis since WWII is a weapon of choice to keep Europe on the back foot and ease his victory.
Putin calculated that it would play into anti-immigrant sentiment. It has had the opposite effect. Europe has closed ranks. Ukraine will prove a turning point in the bloc’s revival as a world force.
So what should we do? Will the blockbuster sanctions now choking Russia be enough? Will supplying Ukraine with a limited inventory of weapons suffice?
The answer lies in figuring out what is in Putin’s mind. Where will he stop? Will he take the whole of Europe’s second largest country? How will he hold it if he does? Will he use Ukraine as a springboard to destabilise the Baltic states? Might he try to repeat the post-war division of Germany and partition Ukraine in a line along the Dnieper river? Would he be content with Luhansk and Donetsk and the southern ports plus a guarantees of Ukrainian neutrality and coupled with security guarantees from the west?
We just don’t know. We need to prepare for the worse and hope for the best.
A prolonged occupation of Ukraine would trigger a ferocious insurgency launched from neighbouring states reminiscent of South Africa’s neighbours in the ANC ‘s grinding war against apartheid. This would be hugely destabilising for Europe.
Economic sanctions against Russia are hurting. But will these become an electoral liability if voters in western Europe start to feel real pain as they emerge from another recession and a bruising pandemic?
If we are serious about stopping Putin, if we believe that seizing Ukraine poses a threat to the rest of Europe as it surely does, we need to think imaginatively.
First, we need to rethink our military posture. The threat to Europe is now on its doorstep. The threat to Britain lies not in the Far East but closer to home The tank is not, it seems, obsolete. China remains the long-term challenge. But vulnerable aircraft carriers patrolling the South China sea are not the priority.
Second, Putin acted believing that NATO will stand on the sidelines. We must supply President Zelensky’s forces with cutting edge weapons. This should include fast jets and a long-term commitment to equip and train the Ukrainian armed forces. We must prepare Ukraine for a long war.
Third we need to sow a doubt in Putin’s mind about how far we are prepared to go to save Ukraine. War leaders who succeed are the ones that keep the enemy guessing. We should throw everything we’ve got at Putin short of boots on the ground.
Crucially Europe and America must coordinate their aims in this war.
The blitzkrieg Putin hoped for has failed. Calling on Syrian mercenaries to prop up his struggling army is a sign of weakness. Threatening western shipments to Ukraine suggests these are having an impact.
Besieging Kyiv and pounding it into submission would be an act of madness. Taking the capital with ground forces would mean fighting street by street, house by house. Do his troops have the stomach?
Putin may resort to chemical weapons. He will not have forgotten that we marked out a red line when they were used in Syria only then to abandon it.
The bungled Ukrainian campaign may turn into an eventual political defeat for Putin. But this will take time. And Ukraine does not have time.
America, Europe and the UK have ruled out sending in troops or imposing a no-fly zone. President Joe Biden says that a clash between American and Russian forces in Ukraine would mean a third world war. It is not a risk worth taking.
But an insurgency could mean years of instability in Europe and may drive us to the same outcome if Putin stands firm.
Max Hastings argued in The Times that President John Kennedy defused the Cuban missile crisis by making secret concessions to Khrushchev. True. But Kennedy also faced him down with a naval blockade.
There are no easy choices. But the question, when we come down to it, is straightforward.
A free people in Europe in the 21st century is being subjugated by an occupying power barely 70 years after Hitler was defeated. Do we allow this to happen green lighting similar adventures elsewhere (Taiwan). Or do we do whatever it takes?