The temperature plummets and Kyiv turns into old man Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow. The golden onion domes, the Stalinist Kreshchatyk Street, the 90s office blocks and the woods tumbling down to the Dnipro are all crusted with snow. The most beautiful city in all of Europe just gets yet more lovely – then the mad neighbour bangs on the wall.
They call the air-raid siren “Putin’s lullaby”. A few weeks ago, Ukraine marked the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine in 1933. No one knows how many people died, because no one counted. One estimate is that seven million people starved to death.
Vladimir Putin noted this evil date by sending 70 Iranian Shahed drones to Kyiv. Say what you like about Putin – he’s a pleonexic serial killer – but he does love an anniversary. Back in 2006, his most fearless critic, Anna Politkovskaya, was shot dead on October 7. This year Hamas was responsible for the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and they carried it out on October 7. It is, of course, Putin’s birthday.
The west seems set on giving the master of the Kremlin the best of presents by awarding him effective control of a fifth of Ukraine. That seems a bald and bold statement, given the west’s uplifting rhetoric of standing by Ukraine, most recently articulated by Lord Cameron, here on his first trip out of King Charles Street.
But in war, deeds count for more than words. Let’s talk tanks. The British have given the Ukrainians 14 of our main battle tanks, the Challenger II; the Germans and the other Europeans 60 Leopard tanks; the Americans 31 of their Abrams tanks. That tots up to 105 tanks. The Ukrainians have knocked out 2,000 Russian tanks, but the Kremlin has around 8,000 left.
Let’s talk ammo. The North Koreans have supplied Russia with one million artillery shells. Europe has now announced that it will not be able to supply the promised 300,000 shells a year. Cameron, by the way, offered Ukraine nowt. The “axis of bad” has passionate intensity; the west lacks all conviction.
The evidence is growing that there is a kind of secret annex to the west’s stated policy of standing by Ukraine. So the full, unarticulated policy is: we will stand by Ukraine but we will not give it enough weapons to defeat the Russian invaders for fear of Putin falling and that leading to chaos in Russia.
The secret annex is costing an ocean of Ukrainian blood. It is also foolish because it does not understand the true nature of Vladimir Putin’s ambition, that he is waging a great, endless conflict against the west and one he means to win. Bob Seely, the Tory MP and former British Army Intelligence Corps officer, has written a grimly fascinating piece in Foreign Policy setting out that the Russians are both making traditional war, voina, against Ukraine and also waging struggle or bor’ba against the west. The struggle takes many forms: subversion, corruption, undermining belief in democracy, weaponising conflicts in places like Syria, Israel/Palestine and Africa, all of it aimed to break the west.
The problem is that if we let Putin win a kind of victory in Ukraine, then the struggle element of his strategy will only get worse.
There has been a lot of talk of stalemate, but the historian Tim Snyder made the elegant point that the US alone has the firepower to put six new queens on the board. What is lacking is not resources. The economies of the USA, the EU and Britain are, taken together, 25 times richer than Russia. What is missing is the will to fight so hard that Putin will lose in Ukraine.
If he is humiliated, China, India and the global south will take note. Russia will, too. But if the west lets Putin keep a fifth of Ukraine, then his struggle against liberal democracy will be on steroids.
Thus far, the master of the Kremlin has been extraordinarily successful, far better than Stalin or Brezhnev in upending western power: fears about immigration, Brexit, then Donald Trump, then, maybe, Trump again. Putin’s Russia is a chaos engine, heading directly at us, out to destroy our way of life. And we are letting him get away with it.
