Putin’s War in Ukraine
The area that we now know as Ukraine has rarely been an independent entity. We first hear of it as part of Kievan Rus, a state established by Vikings who went east and, centred on Kiev (now Kyiv), gave their name to Russia. Kievan Rus was defeated by the ‘Golden Horde’, successor to Genghis Khan’s empire, and by 1240 Ukraine was occupied by the Mongols. Eventually the Poles and the Lithuanians expelled the Mongols and Ukraine was absorbed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. From 1386 when the heir to the Kingdom of Poland and the heir to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were the same man the two states were in a de facto union, eventually formalised by the treaty of Lublin in 1569 when the union became the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth, more usually referred to as the Polish Empire. It consisted not only of modern Poland and Lithuania but also of what is now Belarus, most of Estonia, all of Latvia and parts of Russia, Romania and Moldova. After one of the many wars and skirmishes in the region, with the Polish Empire vying with any or all of Russia, Austria, Prussia and Sweden, in 1689 the area of Ukraine east of the River Dnieper was ceded by the Polish Empire to Russia. Although there was and is much argument as to whether that ceding was legal, and the largely Russian speaking area was eventually restored to Ukraine, it is there that separatist agitation became an uprising in 2013.
For a brief period the Polish Empire was a major regional military power, until beginning in 1772 it was conquered, broken up and divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Poland ceased to exist for 150 years. The Russian sector included Ukraine, which remained as part of Tsarist Russia until the end of the First World War, which saw the reconstitution of Poland, but not the Polish Empire, although it did include part of west Ukraine. The came the Russian Civil War. There the Bolsheviks were opposed by the so-called White Russians, a mix of unreconstructed tsarists, constitutional monarchists, socialists and liberals whose only common agenda was anti-Communism. In Ukraine there was a separate civil war, from 1917 to 1921, called by some the War of Independence, and a republic of Ukraine was proclaimed, lasting only a few weeks. Various factions, some of whom wanted complete independence from Russia, fought Ukrainian Bolsheviks for control. Eventually the Bolsheviks won, General Wrangel’s White Russian army was massacred there and the Ukraine was incorporated into the USSR as the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine.
During the Second World War German invaders of the Ukraine were at first greeted as liberators, but the German civil authority’s failure to capitalise on this, despite the urgings of the Army, soon provoked resistance and the formation of bands of partisans operating behind German lines. By the end of the Second World War Germany had been defeated and Ukraine remained part of the USSR.
As for the Crimea, after the collapse of the Mongol Empire Crimea became a semi-independent khanate and eventually a protectorate of the Turkic Ottoman Empire. In 1783 in one of the many Russo-Turkish wars during which Russia slowly expanded towards the Black Sea seeking warm weather ports, Catherine the Great took the Crimea, the first Moslem territory to be lost by the Ottomans, and incorporated it into Russia. There it remained, Tsarist and Soviet, until 1954 when in a tidying-up exercise Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, effectively the dictator of the USSR, moved the Crimea from being a province of Russia into being a province of Ukraine. Given the geographic position of Crimea this made eminent sense, and as Ukraine was part of the USSR, politically it mattered not at all. Then, in 1991 the USSR dissolved and the constituent republics were allowed to decide whether to become independent or to remain as part of a Russian ‘Confederation of Independent States’, which in practice was intended by Russia to be the USSR under another name. In Ukraine in a plebiscite produced a 90% vote overall for independence, although in Crimea the vote was only 56% and a short lived republic of Crimea was promulgated, quickly stamped on by the Ukraine government.
The early years of Ukrainian independence were marked by corruption, money laundering and assorted crime with successive presidents jockeying to establish closer relations with Europe or alternatively ties with Russia. Any attempts to move closer to Europe, and particularly any intimations that Ukraine might apply to join the EU, were met with strong Russian opposition including at one stage Russia removing the subsidy on gas supplies. Various relatively bloodless revolutions in 2004 and 2013 led to the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ in February 2014 and the ousting of the pro-Russian president Yanukovych, thus exacerbating Russian concerns about its own security should Ukraine attempt to join NATO. This led to Russian occupation of Crimea the same month and formal annexation in March 2014.
It has to be said that there is a strong argument for Crimea being part of Russia, as it had been from 1783 until 1954 when it was moved into Ukraine purely for administrative convenience. Had the Soviet Union not disintegrated as quickly as it did, Crimea could almost certainly have been negotiated back into Russia. As it is, in my many visits to pre-annexation Crimea, I found all the signs written in Russian, the people all speaking Russian and most that I spoke to saying that they were Russian, with a few (and it was only a few) identifying themselves as ‘Russian and Ukrainian’. Ukraine cut off the supply of water to the north coast of Crimea and western nations condemned the annexation and expelled Russia from the G7.
What we do not hear very much about these days is the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 which said that, in exchange for giving up their nuclear weapons, inherited from the armed forces of the former USSR, the territorial integrity and independence of Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine would be respected. The guarantors were the United States, the United Kingdom and the Russian Federation.
In February 2016 Ukrainian citizens were granted visa free travel into and around the Schengen area for up to 90 days and it was clear that eventual accession to the EU was well in train. On 21 April 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine and in the parliamentary elections of July 2021 his newly formed ‘Servant of the People’ party won an absolute majority of seats for the first time in the history of independent Ukraine. Zelensky was not a professional politician, he was an actor and television comedian (he was the voice of Paddington Bear). Zelensky was elected on an anti-corruption platform and had gone a long way towards making Ukraine a modern democratic country when Russia, which was already supporting the separatists in the Donbas area of Eastern Ukraine, invaded in February 2022.
Russia does, of course, have genuine security concerns which must be recognised. I have been working in Russia and Russian near abroad for around two to three months every year for fourteen years or so, and Russians say to me ‘your Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan told our Mr Gorbachev that the West would not take advantage of the breakup of the Soviet Union – and look what has happened! NATO has advanced 1,000 miles nearer Moscow!’ Whether Thatcher and Reagan actually did make this promise is immaterial (the cabinet papers of the period are yet to be released) but that does not matter – as is often the case perception holds more weight than truth, and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania, to say nothing of the rest of Germany, all previously part of the USSR or of the Warsaw Pact or of Communist but neutral Yugoslavia, are now members of NATO. When I remonstrate that NATO is a purely defensive alliance, the Russians say ‘no it isn’t, it’s an anti-Russian alliance, it always was and it still is’. All that, however, does not justify Putin’s war.
Observing the Russian build-up of troops on the borders of Ukraine and in Belarus during the winter of 2021/22, most of us initially assumed this to be mere sabre rattling, a means of pressurising Ukraine to give up its tentative moves towards an alignment with Europe rather than with Russia. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 Russia had always regarded Ukraine as within its sphere of influence. Russia was already supporting separatist elements in Donetsk and Luhansk and it was on 17 July 2014 that a civilian airliner, a Boeing 777 of Malaysian Airways, was shot down over the contested area of Ukraine killing all 283 passengers and crew. We know that the weapon used to bring down the aircraft was a 9K37 BUK (NATO designation), a ground launched anti-aircraft missile system. The question was – who did it? While the armed forces of both Russia and Ukraine were equipped with the BUK, it was in neither country’s interests to shoot down an unarmed aircraft of a state not involved in the conflict and proceeding along a recognised and authorised air corridor. Again, the state of training in both counties was good enough to identify a civilian aircraft from one with hostile intent, so it is unlikely that either Russia or Ukraine was the culprit. The most likely answer, it seems to me, is that the separatists, having been provided with at least one BUK unit by Russia, had manned it with ill-trained amateurs who, spotting an approaching aircraft on radar, took it to be of the Ukraine air force and pressed the button. One suspects that the firer may have been taken out and shot, for rightly or wrongly the Russians got the blame.
During the 2021/22 troop build-up Russia consistently claimed that this was merely the prelude to military exercises. It was when units not normally needed for an exercise, rather than for war, started to appear that it became apparent that this was no exercise. People do get killed and injured on exercises – they go to sleep under tanks which sink in the mud, they get run over by vehicles in the dark, they light fires inside bunkers to keep warm and die of carbon monoxide poisoning, but there are never enough to warrant the deployment of a complete field hospital. That is only needed to cope with the mass casualties that may occur in war. Similarly the deployment of more logistic units than would be needed for an exercise of a few weeks added to the suspicion that what was intended was the real thing – an invasion of Ukraine. Sure enough on 24 February 2022 the war, dubbed a ‘special military operation’ by Russia began.
Either Russian intelligence was woefully wrong – unlikely – or it was unwilling to tell President Putin the truth, for there can be no doubt that the Russians thought this would be a walkover. A swift advance into the capital, Kyiv, a removal of the Ukraine government and a puppet regime installed, all over in a week or two and a bogus plebiscite with the population asking to be absorbed into Russia. All done and dusted before the West could react. Clearly there was a complete failure to understand both the extent of Ukrainian resistance and the capability for it. An initial attempt to seize the airport to the north of the capital, was an entirely sensible move which could allow heavy equipment and more troops to be airlifted in had it worked. It did not work and Phase Two began with an armoured thrust on the capital south from Belarus, one of Russia’s client states. Long columns of tanks stretched nose to tail for miles along the one road. Why on earth did they not deploy off road? They did not because they could not – the Spring Thaw, the time the Russians call the ‘time of no roads’ was early and vehicles, even tracked vehicles, leaving the road would be bogged in and unable to move. Any study of Operation Barbarossa in the Second World War would have told them that. To send columns of armoured vehicles through built-up or wooded areas without infantry ahead and to the flanks is incomprehensible, and made them sitting, or barely moving, targets for anti-tank ambushes at which the Ukrainians excelled. They were equipped with the excellent shoulder launched NLAW (Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon) originally designed by Bofors, manufactured in N Ireland under licence and supplied by the British, and also with the US equivalent. NLAW is highly effective and will knock out any known tank, and, crucially, men can be trained to use it in a few hours. After losing a large number of armoured vehicles and an unknown number of dead and wounded soldiers the advance on Kyiv stalled and was then abandoned.
In those areas briefly occupied by Russian troops from which they had been forced to withdraw, reports began to come in of mass looting, ill treatment and in some cases executions of civilians, rape and wanton destruction of property, as well as large amounts of personal kit and military stores abandoned. A properly trained and disciplined army does not behave like that. Either officers had lost control of their men, or such behaviour is institutional in the Russian armed forces (as was seen in Berlin in 1945). It was clear too that the lessons of the Georgian War in August 2008 had not been learned. Then vehicles broke down, radios did not work and tactics were pedestrian. In the end numbers told but as a result huge sums were allocated to modernise and re-equip the armed forces, particularly the army. All that money would seem to have disappeared into back pockets somewhere; it has certainly not been spent on the army.
In any military campaign, particularly one that is spread over a wide expanse of territory, it is axiomatic that there should be one overall commander, and yet at the outset the forces attacking from the north, in the east and along the Black Sea coast were commanded by the commander of the military district from whence those troops came. At any one time five different commanders were conducting operations with co-ordination, such as it was, exercised by the defence minister, Shoigu, in post since 2012. He holds the rank of army general, equivalent to full general, despite having no military experience other than in the quasi military civil defence organisation. Eventually this became clear to Putin who appointed Army General Aleksandr Dvornikov as overall commander in April 2022. Dvornikov had been the commander of the motor rifle regiment (small brigade) that reduced Grozny to rubble in the Chechen war, and was then the commander of Russian ground forces in Syria. This improved matters for the Russians somewhat but after successive embarrassments little was seen nor heard of him in the summer, and in October Army General Sergey Surovikin was appointed in his place. Originally an army officer, Surovikin fought in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, then as a captain he ordered his men to fire on anti-coup demonstrators in August 1991. Although arrested and held for some months he was exonerated by the then President Yeltsin on the grounds that he was only obeying orders. Since then he has had considerable military experience, including command in Syria, and was transferred to the Air Force as commander of aero-space forces. Command arrangements were further altered when Army General Gerasimov, the professional head of the army as chief of the general staff, was appointed overall commander with Surovikin as one of his three deputies. It is difficult to see how Gerasimov can combine the appointment of chief of the general staff with that of command at the front.
The remnants of the Russian column
The aim of the first phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was political – take the capital, the seat of government and you have taken the country. When this thrust failed and was withdrawn, the second phase was strategic: an attack out of Donetsk along the northern coast of the Black Sea. The aim there was, firstly, to create a land bridge to the Crimea. Although annexed by Russia in 2014 the Crimea had no overland link to Russia proper, all communication being either by air, sea or by a hastily constructed bridge across the sea of Azov. To consolidate the land bridge necessitated the taking of Mariupol, stubbornly defended by the Azov battalion which, once the Russians had surrounded the city on 2 March, withdrew into the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, an industrial complex riddled with tunnels and underground storerooms, ideal for defence. After initial infantry assaults were beaten back the Russians reverted to their traditional tactic of massive artillery and rocket bombardment which, according to the United Nations, destroyed ninety-five percent of the city. Civilian casualties are unknown but must have been in the thousands. The siege went on for almost eleven weeks, until 16 May 2022 when the garrison, out of ammunition, food and water surrendered. The Azov battalion had been raised from the extreme right wing Azov political party. This had little Ukrainian public support, having got less than 3 percent of the vote in the 2019 general election that brought Vladimir Zelensky to power. Despite this, the party’s rhetoric allowed Putin and the Russian publicity machine to hold the battalion as examples of the ‘Nazis’ that they claimed were in control in Ukraine, and allowed them to claim that the survivors would be treated as war criminals rather than as prisoners of war. In the event at least some have since been released in a prisoner exchange.
Although the Russians did capture Mariupol, the siege seriously delayed the timing of the advance along the coast, as instead of deploying all their forces on the next objective, Kherson, the equivalent of two divisions had to be diverted to Mariupol. Kherson was nevertheless captured on 6 March after a six day siege. This was significant as Kherson is the capital of Kherson Oblast. Ukraine is divided into twenty-four administrative oblasts, or counties, and Kherson was the only county capital captured by the Russians. The Russians hoped to continue their advance, capturing Odessa and then linking up with Transnistria a separatist-controlled slice of eastern Moldova, recognised by Russia, but by no one else, as an independent people’s republic. Had the Russians been able to do this, they would then have cut Ukraine off from the sea, inflicting massive economic damage, as the rail links to the west, to Poland, are insufficient to replace the sea routes. As it was, a mix of fierce resistance and the sinking of the Moskva the cruiser flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet by a missile supplied by the Royal Navy, stalled the Russian land advance and forced the withdrawal of the naval close blockade.
A Russian threat to sink any ships emerging from Ukrainian ports, and mining by both sides, prevented the export of Ukrainian wheat and vegetable oil (her major exports) but when it became clear that most of that wheat went to Africa and the Middle East, where Russia is anxious to make friends, Turkey negotiated an agreement. This allowed exports to continue with ships going to and returning from Ukrainian ports being inspected in Turkish ports to ensure that they were not carrying war materials. At the end of October 2022, after a Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian Black Sea Fleet base in Sevastopol, Russia withdrew from the agreement, returning a few days later when urged by the United Nations Secretary General to do so. The agreement was due to be renewed on 18 July 2023 but Russia would only agree to do so if she were readmitted into the world banking system. Exclusion from that means that Russians can no longer use international credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express and the like), Russia cannot raise loans on the international money markets, does not have access to the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, has extreme difficulty in paying for imports or being paid for exports. Readmittance was refused and Russia did not sign, promising that she would supply Ukraine’s markets herself. So far it is unclear whether this is happening, and Ukraine is making arrangements to export via Gdansk in Poland, but it will take five days to shift a load of grain or oil through Poland to the port, and then it has to be shipped out of the Baltic and through the North Sea and the Channel before entering the Mediterranean. Recent objections by Poland that exports of Ukraine grain adversely affects the Polish products have yet to be resolved. All this will add to the world price of grain and hence bread.
A counter-attack by Ukrainian troops recaptured Kherson, initially announced by a bald statement by General Surovikin on Russian television. It was painted as a tactical redeployment, as it up to a point it was, but it was also a humiliating defeat. Rumour, counter rumour, statement and counter statement are of course rife, as they are in any war zone. As both the BBC and ITV and all the major British newspapers have reporters on the ground and on the front line with the Ukrainian forces, information coming from there is more reliable than that coming from Russia. We do have news agencies and reporters in Russia, particularly in Moscow, but none embedded with the Russian armed forces. That said, one should be wary of casualty figures coming out, almost certainly understated by the Russians and, in the case of civilian casualties, possibly overstated by Ukraine.
An extraordinary development was the mutiny by the Wagner Group in June 2023. Wagner is described as a private military group, that is a body of mercenaries available for hire. The Russian government has always claimed that they are nothing to do with it, despite their presence on the front line in Ukraine. They are active in Venezuela, Mali, the Central African Republic, Syria, Libya and Niger with smaller contingents in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where they prop up thoroughly nasty regimes in return for access to raw materials including gold, diamonds, copper and coal. In the Wagner Group a man whose rank equates to private is paid the equivalent of £2,400 per month, as compared with £400 for a private in the Russian army. There has inevitably been resentment from the army, particularly from the generals, against this well-funded organisation that is not within their control. In Ukraine the Wagner contingent were not under command of the army, although they coordinated their actions with it, and many of their men were criminals promised a pardon if they completed six months active service. The leader of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was a small-time criminal who spent time in prison during the Soviet era but who became immensely rich after it by obtaining catering contracts for government institutions, the armed forces and schools. Increasingly Prigozhin was critical of the conduct of the war and especially of the minister of defence, Shoigu, and the chief of the general staff, Gerasimov, going so far as accusing them of being traitors.
Then, on 23 June 2023, Prigozhin withdrew his troops from Ukraine and marched into Rostov-on-Don, the headquarters of the Southern Military District and from where the war is being directed, without any resistance. The catalyst for this appears to have been a demand by Gerasimov that Wagner members sign contracts direct with the army. That General Surovikin has since disappeared from view would indicate that there was at least some degree of collaboration with Wagner. Prigozhin then marched on Moscow, shooting down several Russian helicopters on the way, while panic in Moscow set in with hasty defences being dug across the roads to the capital. Despite Putin’s televised announcement that this was treason, in an extraordinary reversal the Wagner advance halted short of Moscow and an agreement was brokered by the president of Belarus, Lukashenko, that allowed Prigozhin and some of his troops to decamp to Belarus with no punishment to be inflicted. Wagner troops were to have the option of moving to Belarus, being demobbed and going home, or signing up with the army. It was only a matter of time before revenge caught up with Prigozhin and on 23 August an aircraft containing him, Dimitry Utkin the co-founder of Wagner and ex officer of Russian military intelligence the GRU, and other senior Wagner members exploded in mid-air killing all ten aboard. Russia says that Prigozhin’s body was identified by DNA tests. Already rumours are spreading that Prigozhin is actually alive and living comfortably in the Caribbean. No doubt we shall shortly be told that he is living in a B52 bomber on the moon with Elvis Presley and Hitler. Whether Wagner contingents continue under local commanders is as yet unclear although recent reports from Moscow suggest that the Russian government is attempting to bring them under its control.
On the ground the latest development is the emergence of a small number of the Russian T14 Armata, a much trumpeted tank first displayed on the Victory Day parade of May 2015, when it broke down and had to be towed away. This has an unmanned turret, a 125 mm smooth bore gun, ceramic armour, explosive reactive armour, and a crew of three which was said (by the Russians) to be a generation ahead of the latest Western tanks. An original production target of 2,300 to be in service by 2020 was cancelled in 2018. It is unclear what the present production run is but it is known that there are significant production and financial problems with the project. As at present Russian armoured units have been dependant on the T72, a tank that first came into service in 1969, and despite having been upgraded several times since, is still an old tank. We await to see the contribution of the T14, but it will almost certainly still be vulnerable to the NLAW and the American equivalent, operated by determined and well trained troops.
The Ukraine front had been more or less static since the Ukrainians halted the Russian attempt to reach Odessa. There was much talk about a Ukrainian spring offensive. Spring is long gone and we are well into Autumn, but no country and no army is going to broadcast its intentions to the world, so there has been much disinformation, dissemblement, obfuscation and bluff. A Ukrainian offensive has begun, but a full scale advance cannot come until the Ukrainian armed forces are ready, and that means having the armour, the artillery, the engineers, the infantry and the air all integrated, equipped, trained and with logistic support in place.
Ukraine is now receiving tanks. The UK was the first to offer tanks, and while one squadron of Challenger 2 (fourteen tanks) and another promised will not win a war, it was a catalyst – once one country had promised, the rest of NATO came into line. The 64 ton Challenger 2 is the most modern of the allied tanks. Specifically designed to take on the Russian T90 (the latest Russian tank until the Armata) it came into service in 1998. It has Dorchester level 2 spaced armour and a 120mm gun. In the second Gulf War one Challenger 2 knocked out fourteen T72s in one action. Admittedly the latter were not the most modern mark and were manned by Iraqis, but the result does give an indication of how good that tank is. The Americans have promised the 60 ton Abrams, with British supplied Chobham spaced armour, which came into service in 1980. It may not be suitable for Ukraine as it requires two gallons of fuel per mile – no problem with US army logistic support but possibly beyond that of Ukraine. The tank the Ukrainians really want and are now getting is the 62 ton German Leopard 2, which came into service in 1979 but has been upgraded several times since, the latest modification in 2010. Despite not necessarily being the most effective of the tanks offered, there are around 2,000 of them in service with NATO armies in Europe and therefore many can be transferred to Ukraine with minimal effect on the suppliers’ own armies. Conversion from the T72 currently in Ukrainian service will take time, as will the establishment of maintenance routines, but this is well in hand both in the UK and elsewhere. Ukrainian tank crews are being trained at the British armoured training centre at Bovingdon and infantry recruits are being trained in the UK, 2,400 at a time in a five week course in four different locations.
When in defence air cover is perfectly well provided by anti-aircraft missile systems, and for most of the war, except for localised attacks, Ukraine has been on the defensive. They have the British tracked Rapier, the German Marder and the American Patriot systems. Once on the offensive, however, manned aircraft are needed and currently Ukraine fields Soviet era MIG and Soyuz, which are no match for the Russian air force. Ukraine would like the American F16 and the Biden regime did express irritation that the UK was training Ukrainian pilots on the F16 and had promised to supply some, without asking the US. No doubt that has blown over as the US has now agreed to supply a number. Pilots are also being trained in Denmark. This is all to the good, but the difference between the current Ukrainian MIG and the F16 is comparable to the difference between a Sopwith Camel of World War One vintage and a Gloster Meteor jet fighter of the latter stages of the Second World War. The RAF takes four years to train a fast jet pilot. It might be possible to convert to the F16 a MIG pilot who has experience of air-to-air combat in, perhaps, twelve months but it is difficult to see how it could be done in less. Training the pilots is one thing, establishing the highly technical maintenance infrastructure is quite another. It takes one man to fly the F16, but in a squadron of up to 24 aircraft more than 100 maintenance and support crew are needed. In peace time for every hour of flying the F16 needs seventeen hours of maintenance, although this could probably be halved in time of war. It will therefore be some time before Ukraine has the air capacity to mount an effective major offensive, although local attacks are quite likely in the meantime. Once ready, with all equipment, vehicles and aircraft integrated into its armed forces, Ukraine will have to tackle the deep minefields, anti-tank obstacles, artillery killing grounds and other defences that the Russians have had many months to prepare. Ukraine’s offensive to recover its stolen territory will not be easy and it will not be achieved quickly.
The war also brings up some legal issues. During the Second World War the USSR had not ratified the Geneva conventions, and was not therefore entitled to their protection. Post war the USSR did sign and that ratification devolved to the newly independent ex-Soviet republics when the USSR ceased to exist. Both Russia and Ukraine are therefore signatories, but in 2019 Russia withdrew from Article 90 Protocol 1, which allows for entry into a state by independent investigators when war crimes are alleged. Currently there is clear evidence that Russia is breaching the convention by ill-treating prisoners, amongst other incidents of mis behaviour, but Ukraine is breaching them too, not by ill-treatment but by ‘exposing them to public gaze’ – allowing them to be filmed telephoning their mothers, pleading for assistance and the like.
It is also worth considering whether a column of vehicles trundling through Poland carrying British anti-tank weapons for delivery to Ukraine is a legitimate military target? I would suggest that it is, and that Russia would legally be entitled to attack it, probably by missiles. What prevents that happening, at least up to now, is that it would be an infringement of NATO Article 5 leading to all of NATO being at war with Russia. Mission creep is inevitable in any war situation. It starts with advice, leading to training, then to the supply of weapons of self-defence, then to weapons of offence and then to the provision of troops and full scale war. We have not yet reached the final stage, but the British army has been ordered to train to fight in Europe. Such need not escalate to a nuclear exchange, for the Cold War stand-off of Mutually Assured Destruction – MAD – would again apply.
President Zelensky will be under pressure to negotiate, but he will not do that unless he can convince his people that they are winning, and Russia will not negotiate unless they consider themselves to have the upper hand. Another difficulty could be that Ukraine will seek to recover the Crimea and, as I have argued, the Crimea is and always has been Russian. A possible answer might be to have internationally implemented referenda in Crimea and the Donbas giving the population the choice of being Russian or Ukrainian. There are people living in the Donbas who genuinely want to be Russian, although many do not, and Ukraine might agree to cede a slice of territory east of the River Dnieper to Russia. The quid pro quo would have to be security guarantees for Ukraine and her fast track admission to NATO and to the EU. Currently we are a long way from that as a possible solution. This war will go on for years rather than months, and it is vital that the West continues to support Ukraine.
While predictions in any war are dangerous, I suspect that Russia will continue to rely on massive artillery strikes, reducing objectives to rubble before deploying increasingly young, reluctant and half trained infantry conscripts, now increased by a call up of several hundred thousand reservists and those previously exempt. The fact is that we, the UK and our allies, are now at war by proxy. We are supplying Ukraine with intelligence, and we are arming and training her soldiers. If Zelensky loses this war we may well have to fight it ourselves. The biggest danger would be for the West, in the grip of huge increases in the price of energy, and with populations that could become apathetic, to put pressure on Ukraine to come to terms before recovering the lost lands. This would be disastrous as proof that if Russia perseveres long enough NATO will fold, and the next victim of Russian aggression could be the Baltic states.
Already cracks are appearing. Slovakia, a NATO member, has recently had a general election and the leader of the party with the most seats and at the time of writing seeking to form a coalition government has said ‘not one bullet for Ukraine’. Of more concern is the coming general election in Poland where the Law and Justice party has said that if it wins it will cease support for Ukraine, largely, it is claimed, at the behest of its farmers who fear competition from Ukrainian wheat. If President Trump wins the 2024 election in the US he may well decide that the war in Ukraine is nothing to do with America and if he pulls out then France and Germany, wobbly in support of Ukraine, may well do too. And that leaves us.
Gordon Corrigan is a historian and the author of Finest Hours: Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt.
