The west has backed Ukraine to a degree Vladimir Putin, and perhaps the west itself, never expected in the year since the Russian president launched his invasion. The west has been Ukraine’s advocate, its refuge, its arsenal and its banker, if not its full-fledged military ally. We’ve found a way to be Ukraine’s decent friend while Ukraine is under fire.
But a harder test is coming, when the west must decide what kind of a friend it will be to a vulnerable, half-ruined country where the fighting has largely stopped, but where the war has not gone away, and may not go away for generations.
In perhaps as little as a year from now, if not sooner, the west – that vaguely defined ensemble of wealthy North American and European democracies that somehow includes Australia and Japan – will have to confront a question it has avoided: how far will we go to defend Ukraine in the long term?
In the murderous blindness of Putin and the casually genocidal talking heads of Russian TV, there is clarity about Ukraine’s future place in the world. They don’t think it should have one, except as a region of Russia with a heavily policed folkloric tinge. But what does the west think about Ukraine’s future place? If we in the west are the good guys, where is the clarity, or debate, about our capacity for the heaviest task ahead? The task is not ammunition today, as vital as that is, or reconstruction tomorrow, but to be future guarantors of Ukrainian liberties for decades to come. Do we have the will? Are we to be trusted?
Countries tend to understand each other through cliches and, for most of its existence, the west has had few to bring to bear on Ukraine. Ukraine suffered from our chronic inability to distinguish between a cliche having an element of truth and a cliche being the whole truth. In the flickering western stereotype of a country that was poor, mismanaged, corrupt, stagnant, chronically divided between a nationalist west and a pro-Russian east, there was seldom scope for a “yes, but…”
Popular uprisings in 2004 and 2014, in which intellectuals and the emergent middle class played a lead role and European bourgeois democratic ideals came to the fore, failed to alert the west that the old, simplistic framework of a nationalist versus Soviet nostalgist schism in Ukraine was breaking down. Too many in the west were still ready to believe that, in some fundamental sense, Ukraine “belonged” to Russia. When in 2014 Russia annexed Crimea and sent troops into eastern Ukraine to salvage the failing armed uprising it contrived there, there was anxiety in the west, wringing of hands and mild sanctions, but no serious consequences for Putin.
Last year’s invasion shocked the west, and provided us with an entire new set of cliches: Ukraine the brave, the defiant, the ingenious, the suffering, the wronged, screaming “Why?” over the body of a dead newborn. Ukraine, the defender of civilisational values; Ukraine, keeping calm and carrying on as the original writers of the slogan imagined, Ukraine, capturing tanks with tractors, giving a battlecruiser the finger and sinking it. Fleets of Russian tanks pouring down Ukrainian highways in rigid formation, blown apart by a handful of daring Ukrainian improvisers on quad bikes using donated western anti-tank missiles and drones ordered on the internet.
The sense of purpose and righteous mission this has generated in the west is real, and has broad public support, but it has a short time-horizon. Even the overall strength of support in the west for Ukraine since the invasion began conceals radical shifts in the west’s sense of the country. In the first few days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the scope of Putin’s ambition became clear, horrified watchers in Europe and America guessed the days to the country’s inevitable fall. A few weeks later, when Ukraine held Russia at the gates of Kyiv, there was admiration and surprise at the country’s resilience.
When the savage nature of Russian occupation emerged in towns like Bucha, a shiver of pity, anger and shame ran through the west, and support for arming Ukraine grew appreciably. The Russian retreat from Kyiv and north-eastern Ukraine raised hopes; doubts set in about Ukraine’s ability to push Russia further; in autumn, the Ukrainians swept Russia from Kherson and Kharkiv, western weapons began to flow and complete victory seemed plausible; the Russians dug in, and began, with methodical waves of missiles, to destroy the Ukrainian economy.
There will be more war. With the sacrifice of tens of thousands of fresh troops and the remnants of its much-reduced, but still large, armoury, Russia will try to hold the parts of Ukraine it has seized and take the rest of the four south-eastern regions Putin has declared belong to Moscow. Ukraine will try to drive a wedge between Russian forces in Crimea and the Donbas as a prelude to sweeping them out of the country. Neither effort is likely to succeed entirely. Russia has mobilised its people and its industry, but incompetently and half-heartedly; the west has ransacked its old stockpiles to arm Ukrainians, but done little to build up capacity to replace them. At some point in the next year or two, it seems likely the most savage, destructive phase of the Russian onslaught will peter out, without having come close to achieving Putin’s aims, but without Ukraine being able to drive every Russian soldier and sailor out of Ukraine.
This will not mean the end of war, but a settling of frontlines, with Russia holding Crimea and much of Donbas. This could lead to a truce, which could then lead to peace talks – peace talks which, given that the sides would enter into them so far apart, could go on indefinitely. “Any territorial compromises would make us weaker as a state,” Volodymyr Zelenskiy told John Simpson last week. In Russia, where textbooks have already been published showing seized or claimed territories – including areas Ukraine still holds – as Russian, Putin repeated just a few days ago: “These are Russian regions.”
How much of an obstacle to peace is this? The world is littered with grassed-over wars that stopped in a mood of hatred, unforgivingness and desire for retribution, and have not restarted, despite the lack of formal, encompassing treaties. Zelenskiy’s insistence that Russian forces must quit every square inch of Ukrainian territory, including the Russian Black Sea Fleet base in Sevastopol, could sound forever without being implemented, as could Putin’s insistence that Ukraine must be driven out of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
There is, however, a critical difference between the two sides, and it’s not simply that the Ukrainian position is just, whereas the Russian position is criminal. Ukraine rejects Russia’s invasion, but does not reject the existence of Russia, whereas Russia doesn’t accept the very notion of Ukraine as a country. Zelenskiy doesn’t trust Putin, but he doesn’t question that he’s the lawful leader of his nation, whereas Putin doesn’t see his Ukrainian counterpart as an equal, treating the Ukrainian leadership as if it had come to power illegally, put in place by and completely subordinate to the United States. No wonder Ukraine is so wary of peace talks and territorial concessions: how can it consider, say, a deal on the special status of Crimea with a negotiating partner who does not acknowledge the right to be of the rest of Ukraine?
Many of those in the west most eager for an early start to peace talks with Russia seem to believe that what is at stake is how much violently seized land Putin gets to keep. If only, writes Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher, the west had made clear at the beginning of the war that Russia need not retreat further than the borders of the land it grabbed in 2014, proper negotiations could begin. This is a misreading of Russia’s consistent message for the latter period of Putin’s rule: regardless of what bits of Ukraine Russia absorbs, it considers itself permanently entitled to a degree of control over the remainder. Russia got involved in Donbas in 2014 not because it particularly wanted to own the region, but because it seemed to offer a means to control the entire country politically – to turn it into a vassal state, like Belarus.
Russia is certain to treat negotiations with Ukraine and the west – and Putin will do his utmost to make the latter his interlocutors, rather than Kyiv – as acceptance of his conquests. The Kremlin will make talks the starting point for one-sided demands for a leading role in defining Ukraine’s future, its constitution, elections, the size of its military, attempting to join with Washington, Berlin and Paris in an imitation of the post-second world war division of Europe.
Clearly this is unacceptable; were Russia to keep, by agreement or by boots on the ground, some parts of Ukraine, Kyiv would rightly expect the west to back it in making clear it would have no role in the rest. And yet the west has barely begun to formulate a coherent vision for how its preferred future Ukraine would fit into this dangerous world. Having set the precedent in recent months, a long armistice between Russia and Ukraine might easily be punctuated not just by peace talks but by waves of Russian rockets, drones and cruise missiles launched to stunt the recovery of a painfully rebuilding country.
If Putin’s ideal Ukraine is a shrunken Russian vassal, Ukraine’s own ideal is security against Russia, and integration with the west, to which the west’s reply is: not yet. Not yet – perhaps never – to Nato, not yet to the EU, not yet to an effective air force. If the west is to keep faith with Ukraine, and encourage it to accept any loss of territory – to lay the grounds, one far-off day, for the good relations it ought to have with a better-run Russia that has learned to lose its contempt for its neighbour’s statehood – it has to make a better offer than “not yet”. It will be exceptionally difficult, since the offer would have to include a military element of peacekeeping troops or air power that will infuriate Putin, and trade terms with the EU that will be politically hard for Europe.
It will be expensive, it will be open-ended, and it will come under constant and furious political attack from inside the west and from outside. It will be hostage to the future politics of Ukraine, Russia, the US and Europe. It’s worth it. A year ago, the world doubted Ukraine’s survival; now is the time to plan how to help it live and thrive.
