The most important news for Britain in the past week did not break at Balmoral. That isn’t to deny that a royal succession is a big deal. As the crowds queueing for a glimpse of the deceased monarch attest, it is huge. But hugely symbolic.
Meanwhile, in a war 1,800 miles farther east there are events of greater consequence for citizens of this country than a new head under the crown and on the stamps. Of course our kingdom will be a bit different under Charles III. But the whole world will be different depending on whether it is Vladimir Putin or Volodymyr Zelenskiy who prevails in Ukraine.
Things are not looking so good for the Russian president. A counteroffensive has captured swathes of territory from Putin’s troops, who have fled in demoralised panic. It is far too early to say that the tide has turned decisively. Ukraine’s hold on the liberated territories is not secure. Russia avenges its humiliations on the ground by redoubling indiscriminate missile and artillery bombardment.
But Ukrainian spirits are lifted and the mood in Moscow, judging by recriminations sloshing around online, has soured.
The bitterness has even spilled out in state-controlled TV studios, where distressed pundits forget themselves and refer to setbacks in “the war” when the official Kremlin lexicon recognises only a “special military operation”.
Criticism of the war effort is mostly directed at commanders. Few dare to impugn Putin himself, although it happens. A group of municipal councillors from Moscow and St Petersburg have published an open letter calling on the president to resign for actions “inflicting harm on the future of Russia and its citizens”. Putin will not be moved by that sort of thing, except to new heights of vindictive rage.
Glimmers of dissent in Russia should not be mistaken for rays of a democratic dawn. Liberal opposition has been crushed or driven into exile. The most vocal complaints about the war come from bloodthirsty bloggers, frustrated that Putin’s aim of dissolving Ukrainian nationhood into a neo-Soviet “Greater Russia” has been bungled. They do not want to concede that the starting premise – that Ukraine is a non-country wanting incorporation into the Slavic motherland but held hostage by a neo-Nazi junta – is deranged.
Nor will they admit that Ukrainian soldiers have a motivational advantage, battling for their homes against disoriented Russian infantry who were told it would be a walk in the park and fight like cannon fodder. The preferred explanation for slow progress is that the true enemy is Nato. (And it is true that Ukraine has an edge from sophisticated western weaponry.) The ultra-nationalist response is to demand more mobilisation; an even more ferocious onslaught.
That is one reason why Ukrainians are wary of celebrating battlefield success prematurely. Putin can respond to failure with redoubled atrocity or by literally going nuclear. It is not hard to conjure apocalyptic scenarios, especially when Europe’s largest atomic power station is on the frontline.
Such are the grim dynamics of Russia’s descent into totalitarian paranoia that any hope of Putin being dislodged from power brings wariness of whatever might follow. There is no successor and no mechanism for naming one. The model is a hybrid of tsarist autocracy and mafia clannishness. Communist one-party rule in the Soviet era had at least some constitutional consistency before it unravelled completely.
That is not a reason to flinch from the task of ensuring the Kremlin’s defeat. Putin triumphant is a horrendous prospect. He is following a fascist playbook that contains no template for compromise and no limit to territorial aggression. Europe needs Putinism to be seen to fail.
President Zelenskiy expressed the options with rousing efficiency in a Telegram post over the weekend. Russia replied to Ukrainian advances with missile attacks on civilian energy infrastructure. Putin threatened to cut energy and food supplies to zero. But if going without gas, water, light or food was the price of going without Putin, so be it. Thus Zelenskiy wrote, addressing the Russian president: “Cold, hunger, darkness and thirst are not as scary and deadly for us as what you call ‘friendship and brotherhood’. But history will set everything right. We will have gas, light, water and food. And all without you.”
The choice is starkly existential for Ukraine but the shape of it is the same for the rest of us. Putin’s plan – the part that has survived the catastrophic initial miscalculation of starting a war in the first place – is to weaken western resolve by pulling the energy plug. He is praying that a cold winter will induce such violent shivers in British, French and German households that solidarity with Kyiv is shaken off.
He must be proved wrong. Putin’s vindication would demonstrate to the world that western democracies have neither the will nor the means to restrain murderous dictatorship on their doorstep. To fold under Kremlin pressure would be a strategic and moral calamity for Europe – an entity that includes Britain even under a government that fetishises institutional detachment from its home continent.
UK support for Ukraine is currently a matter of cross-party consensus (queried only by the militant left faction that prefers whichever side in a conflict doesn’t get its guns from the west).
But the weather is mild and doorsteps have not yet faced the full battery of brutal energy bills. That is why the events of the past few days matter so much. Seeing is believing, and belief in a free, sovereign Ukraine is bolstered by the sight of Putin’s forces humbled.
British eyes might be a bit too misty from all the maudlin monarchism to focus beyond Buckingham Palace, but the story being written right now in Kharkiv and Izium is our history, too.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
