All Europe must have awoken this morning and heard the news with horror. Sometimes history refuses to die. The fate of 44 million Ukrainians at the mercy of Russia and its vast army is appalling to contemplate. Indeed, so wild and mendacious are the utterances of Vladimir Putin in the past 24 hours that they suggest a dictator deranged and out of control. It is precisely the danger that was forecast by strategic theorists at the dawn of the nuclear age.
As of this morning, Putin’s declared intention is to “demilitarise” Ukraine and assert Russia’s de facto sovereignty over the Donbas east of the country. The latter is chiefly an exaggeration of what Russia has done covertly since 2014. The former is hard to see other than as formal conquest. This is no longer some border dispute or separatist uprising, but the concerted assault of a great power on a substantial neighbour.
Ukraine’s friends and sympathisers have been fulsome in offering comfort and “support”. Ever since 1989, western Europe has been eager, perhaps over-eager, to welcome former Soviet bloc countries into its embrace. Many thought this a mistake. Offering Nato and EU membership up to Russia’s border was certain to inflame that country’s well-known sense of insecurity, but the risk was taken. At the same time any idea of including Ukraine and Georgia in that embrace was rightly thought a risk too far. Putin has now grotesquely proved that risk.
Russia’s attack on Ukraine might be thought an aggression so outrageous as to outrank any consideration of treaties and alliances. But though the west has offered Kyiv ferocious moral support and will of course respond with humanitarian aid, it has been adamant that it is not obliged by Nato to fight in its cause. That must be sensible. But at such times words must be used with care.
Belligerent support can look uncomfortably close to hypocrisy – as some Ukrainians are pleading. The west must distinguish outright condemnation of Russia from crowd-pleasing verbal aggression. Reality is sober. For Nato’s armies to go to war with Russia in Ukraine would for sure escalate to an atrocious cost in lives and destruction. We should also remember that the west and Nato have a dreadful recent record of such interventions, of an inability to judge their worth and when and how to end them.
No war is like any other. Ukraine is not Cuba or Afghanistan or Syria – any more than Putin is a Hitler or Kyiv’s inhabitants Nazis. I heard not one speaker in Britain’s parliament this week counselling sobriety or peace. Belligerence – even from Keir Starmer – had not just the best tunes but the only ones. Inflicting that pathetic and ineffective weapon of modern interventionism, sanctions, is not toughness but the opposite. It is pretend toughness – short of actually getting tough. That is the danger. The shriller the threats, the more cowardly seems the refusal to fight.
This is not yet a critical moment in relations between Russia, or at least its leader, and the west. It is critical in relations between Russia and a Ukraine with which it has had a long and historically turbulent relationship. There is, or was, a way out: the Minsk agreement of 2015 between Kyiv and Moscow, recognising Donbas autonomy. The failure of both sides to implement Minsk is the cause of the present collapse, but it cannot become the cause of some wider European conflagration.
Serious talk is now known to be taking place on how to reach Putin, thrashing demented in his isolated citadel. He apparently listens to almost no one, but he does listen to China’s Xi Jinping and a tiny circle of rich cronies. It is obscene that peace in eastern Europe should depend on such people. But they must be reached. That is the true failure of European diplomacy over the past 30 years.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
Join a panel of journalists, hosted by Michael Safi, for a livestreamed event on the Russia-Ukraine crisis. On Thursday 3 March, 8pm GMT | 9pm CET | 12pm PST | 3pm EST. Book tickets here
