“Whoever tries to hinder us, and even more so, to create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate. And it will lead you to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history. We are ready for any development of events. All the necessary decisions have been made in this regard. I hope that I will be heard.”
Those chilling words of Vladimir Putin, unambiguously threatening the rest of the world with nuclear annihilation if it even attempts to hinder his military aggression, have just one merit: they clarify and highlight the central reality of the Ukrainian crisis. Behind the fog of war, the lies and disinformation, the problems of divining the Russian leader’s long-term intentions, the debates over the efficacy of sanctions and the calculations of opposing military strengths, the intractable dilemma is the imbalance of power between a civilised society that has come to regard nuclear weapons as a theoretical asset of purely deterrent purpose and an autocrat of questionable mental stability who advertises his view of them as instruments of early resort.
It is a classic hostage situation, magnified to a global scale. The nation of Ukraine has effectively been taken hostage by a suicide bomber whose menaces could be a bluff, or could be genuine. His calculation is that NATO cannot afford to assume he is bluffing, and will further be deterred from action by the consideration – significant even in less threatening circumstances – that Ukraine is not a NATO member and therefore has no right to automatic military support under the collective defence provisions of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
The flaw in Putin’s nuclear blackmail is that, in a red button pushing contest, his nuclear challenge would lead to mutual assured destruction, in the jargon of the Cold War. Yet even to entertain that consideration is to participate in the insanity that considers burning the world and humanity to a cinder, including one’s own nation and people, preferable to loss of face in a geopolitical arm-wrestling competition. So, NATO is relieved of responsibility to retaliate militarily by the strict terms of its own charter and contents itself with ferrying a few hundred troops to forward positions in various member states bordering Russia.
What is driving Putin? Has his obsession with a partisan history of Russia’s relationship with Ukraine unbalanced his geopolitical views? Ukraine is not an intrinsic part of Russia, it has historically fought to assert its independence. The Sack of Baturyn shocked Europe in 1709, when Russian troops massacred the whole population of the Ukrainian Cossacks’ capital, a historical memory revived by recent Russian aggression. Russia’s religious tradition is Orthodox, Ukraine’s Catholic Uniate.
What inspires Putin’s messianic approach to rebuilding a greater Russia? Does he seek to create a legacy in history? If so, reducing his country and the rest of Europe to nuclear winter would hardly provide it. There is widespread agreement that Putin’s personality has changed, a metamorphosis generally attributed to two decades of wielding autocratic power. Is he driven by some conviction of his own imminent demise? His perilous policies are endangering the wealth of the oligarchs who are the boyars surrounding this uncrowned tsar. If the Ukrainian adventure gets bogged down, even Putin’s grasp on power could be at risk.
The obvious question arises: what if the beast, having digested its prey, looks hungrily at the Baltic states and even Poland – all NATO members? The only answer is to ramp up deterrence to more credible proportions. Donald Trump was, unusually, absolutely right to condemn European countries for skimping on their defences and their NATO dues. The complacent assumption that European war was a phenomenon confined to history books has been exposed as naive optimism. Any sensate person should have seen this coming, after the post-Yugoslav debacle and the lighting of the slow-burning fuse in Ukraine in 2013.
NATO is weakened by maverick members such as Turkey, which was non-compliant on the Libyan arms embargo and has even bought a Russian missile system, and France, where politicians echo past tantrums by urging French withdrawal from the alliance’s integrated command structure. Germany’s armed forces, under Ursula von der Leyen’s catastrophic tenure of the defence portfolio, were reduced to a pitiful condition.
Britain can boast of bringing its defence spending up to 2.2 per cent of GDP, above the NATO requirement of 2 per cent; but the reality is that this yardstick is now outdated. With the vast expense of modern high-tech weaponry, European countries need to increase their defence budgets accordingly. It is good to know that Britain is investing significantly (£6.6bn over four years) in space-related research, as well as in the Future Combat Air System, with £1.5bn also being spent over the next decade on building a “digital backbone”; but it is less good to know that the Army will be reduced to a strength of 72,500 by 2025 and a third of our 227 Challenger tanks scrapped.
Defence analysts may regard those resources as an outdated capability, but it is instructive to see that Vladimir Putin does not: massing 190,000 troops on the Ukrainian border and sending in large armoured columns suggests it is, to say the least, premature to write off such traditional means of waging war. The truth is that Britain’s defences have for too long been run by the Treasury. We need more weapons of every kind and personnel to wield them; our entire fiscal approach to defence needs to be revised radically.
Where is the money to come from? Considering that funding of defences against speculative and the more exaggerated threats from climate change is calibrated in trillions, the argument for diverting resources to defence against the clear and present danger of Russian expansionism backed by nuclear threats is irrefutable. Nor should we forget the further threat from Putin’s opportunist, unreliable ally China. With both Russia and China investing in hypersonic missile technology, America must make it a priority to catch up in this critical field.
The tragic events this week in Ukraine have been a wake-up call to the West. We were much in need of awakening after indulging in decades of self-deceit. So peaceful and prosperous was our existence that people seemed to develop a psychological need to experience insecurity and conjure threats while our society began to lose its cohesion, riven by identity politics and existential doubts. Much of that can now be seen for the narcissism it is, with a more dangerous narcissist in the Kremlin’s gilded halls openly threatening to annihilate us.
“Who is ready to fight alongside us?” asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a broadcast to his people. “I don’t see anyone.” That cry of despair echoed the similar heartbreaking appeals of many before him: the leaders of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the Hungarian rebels in 1956 – all the victims of aggression whom the rest of Europe abandoned to their fate, for the purpose of immediate survival and the hope of strengthening their resources to confront the evil from a position of strength later.
To anyone of elementary moral sensitivity it is deeply shaming not to be able to respond to the Ukrainians’ appeals in the only way that would halt Putin in his tracks. It also makes any encouragement of the Ukrainians to hold out ring hollow, like a well-fed First World War general: “Over the top, now, chaps! By God, I wish I were going with you…”
The harsh reality is that, as things stand, we cannot help Ukraine by intervening militarily; yet it is also the case that the Ukrainians themselves, by a protracted and bloody insurgency, represent the best chance of wearing down Putin, Afghanistan-style, until his own people can no longer tolerate his autocracy and his irresponsible adventures. We do not have the right to ask that sacrifice of the Ukrainian population. But if this proud, brave, fiercely patriotic people were to determine, as a matter of national pride, to resist Putin’s forces to the death, it would be an absolute moral imperative for the West to furnish them with every necessary resource.