The blue and yellow flag still flies high over Britain’s town squares and public buildings, signalling our unwavering and enduring solidarity with Ukraine’s war effort.
Well, in theory, anyway. For you can feel the fatigue descending now, like heavy autumn mist pooling in the bottom of a valley; a sort of strange public torpor, quietly smothering the high emotion of the early days of the war. Having leapt too quickly at the assumption that Kyiv couldn’t possibly hold out against the mighty Russian army, British public opinion then swung wildly towards what has turned out to be an equally unrealistic idea, namely that plucky Ukraine could somehow achieve a David v Goliath victory over the rusting superpower within the year. We could put up with one winter of rocketing gas bills, surely, if that was the price to be paid for peace in Europe. Only now it’s the second winter of not daring to turn on the central heating, and the stories emerging from the frontline are no longer of Ukrainian farmers cheerfully towing away stranded tanks with their tractors, but of a grinding war of attrition that could last up to a decade.
