If there was any lingering doubt that Europe and the US were right to resist Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it was extinguished by last week’s coup attempt by his psychopathic stooge Yevgeny Prigozhin. For Putin represents not just an external aggressor. In his own country, his rule brings warlords, mercenaries, unspeakable atrocities, chaos and disintegration. He is now clearly incapable of respecting anything except force and the prospect of annihilation.
However, one significant thing emerged last week: the possibility of the west actually winning this war outright and soon, meaning the early expulsion of the Russian invaders from the territories they have occupied since 2014 and the incorporation of an independent Ukraine into both Nato and the EU.
Sixteen months ago, this appeared a remote possibility. The brave resistance of Volodymyr Zelensky, with our support, stopped the whole of Ukraine being immediately overrun and its democratic government toppled. But expelling Putin’s armies and mercenaries entirely and quickly seemed almost inconceivable. Now, you can see how it might easily happen: by the fall of Putin at any moment, and the collapse of the Russian will and ability to maintain vast disorganised forces abroad facing massive resistance. Since this acute vulnerability has been brought about by Ukrainian resistance with escalating western support, it is a total vindication of our policy.
Swap Joe Biden with Donald Trump, and Emmanuel Macron with Marine Le Pen, and just think what might have happened. Even if Zelensky had survived the first Russian onslaught, he would have lacked the military and diplomatic resources to resist the full occupation of Ukraine’s eastern provinces. Months ago, the US and/or the EU might have brokered some kind of ceasefire and negotiations further dismembering Ukraine and bolstering Putin—and preventing the rump of democratic Ukraine from engaging with the EU and Nato. The Minsk accords went a long way to doing precisely this after Putin’s last invasion in 2014. We could have seen a rerun on steroids.
In all this, British policy has been exemplary. We led from the front and never hesitated to back Zelensky and Biden. Our pressure on Macron and Olaf Scholz was for European unity not disunity. We stood for the highest common denominator of resistance, not the lowest. And despite the public rhetoric hostile to asylum and refugees, we took more than 100,000 Ukrainian refugees in the months following the invasion in a state-sponsored scheme which mobilised the best of British civil society. And we did all this in virtually complete agreement between government and opposition, across three weak and unstable premierships, barely missing a beat.
The remarkable—but largely unremarked—point about Britain’s Ukraine policy over the past two years is that it represents the qualities we appear to have abandoned in almost every other sphere: statecraft, good leadership, domestic consensus behind objectively sound policy and successful international engagement.
When people say Britain is now an global laughing stock, think Ukraine. When they say we are headed entirely in the wrong direction, think Ukraine. When they say we are unstable and in perpetual crisis, think Ukraine. We may marvel at the contingencies which made all this happen under the quartet of Johnson, Truss, Sunak and Starmer. But giving credit where it is due, even Johnson didn’t allow Brexit to undermine Nato; nor did his apparent fondness for Russian oligarchs lead him to follow Trump in praising Putin. It was Macron, not Johnson, who said that Nato was brain dead, and sought to negotiate with Putin on the eve of the invasion. And think what Jeremy Corbyn would have done in Starmer’s place.
All of which ought to make us just that little bit more optimistic that having got one big thing right even in the depths of Brexit and Johnson, maybe we can get more big things right when we have a much better government. However cautious and uncertain it starts out. Roll on Starmer.
