Ending the suffering of Ukrainians on acceptable terms won’t be easy

It is impossible not to be profoundly moved by courage and sacrifice in a noble cause. The bravery of the Ukrainian people, soldiers and civilians, is awe-inspiring. Leaving aside the battlefield, gruesome enough, none of us want to think about conditions in Mariupol and other cities. Horror has been piled on horror.

So it would seem justified to summarise the Ukraine conflict as a struggle between good and evil. Such a ringing declaration, such a powerful expression of moral clarity, will make many people feel better. But apart from those directly involved in bringing help to the Ukraine, no-one is entitled to feel better. That could become dangerously close to self-indulgence. This is not about feeling good. It is about doing good. How can we bring the sufferings of the Ukrainians to an end on acceptable terms? Those who think that there is an easy answer to that question are allowing their hearts to rule their heads.

That is especially true of those who accuse anyone who differs from them of “appeasement.” The British debate on appeasement at Munich still arouses much more heat than light. The latest book on the subject, Appeasing Hitler, by Tim Bouverie, an excellent read, argues that on balance, we should have gone to war then. 

Yet it is possible to make the opposing case. For a start, there are questions which lack a definitive answer. The Czechs had a powerful army and strong defensive positions. But would these have been sabotaged by Sudeten Germans acting as fifth columnists? A successful prosecution of a war against Germany would have required an early Allied attack, yet the French were extremely reluctant to launch one and we would not have been much more enthusiastic. If the war had started a year earlier, could we have won the Battle of Britain in 1939?

The time to stop Hitler would have been in 1936, when he marched into the Rhineland. But talk about 20: 20 hindsight. If the Nazis had held a plebiscite in the Rhineland, they would have won easily, while there was a widespread feeling, especially in Britain, that the Versailles Treaty had been too harsh  and that the Germans were entitled to some compensatory leniency.

There was also a recurrent problem. In Britain and France, most rational people thought that the world must surely be sick of war and that this would be true of a lot of Germans. But it did not include Adolf Hitler. Chamberlain was too rational to understand Hitler. Churchill, who had a capacity for daemonic insights, was much better placed to do so. This does not mean that Chamberlain was cowardly, just that he was desperately unlucky, a fate he shared with tens of millions of others.

The warmongers should also examine the figures before they castigate the reluctant war-makers. In 1938, we abandoned Czechoslovakia. In 1939, we went to war for Poland. By the end of the war, six million Poles had perished and Warsaw had been flattened. But Prague survived, while Czech losses ran at about five percent of the Polish ones. Moreover, many of the Czech dead were Sudeten Germans. It would be easy to exaggerate other Czechs’ sympathy for those victims.

We might then conclude that having Britain go to war on your behalf may not be an unmixed blessing. Almost all wars end with a different agenda to the one which predominated during the opening shots. Bismarck’s campaigns were an exception. He knew how to run wars as a surgical strike, leading to a satisfactory outcome, at least for Prussia. Otherwise, the final agenda rarely justifies any optimistic martial spirit during the early days.

There has been plenty of optimism among Western commentators, eager to kill Putin with their keyboards. Some of them think that we should urge on the Ukrainians to over-run Crimea and free the Donbass. This would leave Russia humiliated, its empire crumbling. So what would the Russians think about that, and indeed what would Mr Putin think?

He may already be in personal trouble, for the course of the war must surely have come as a rude shock to his senior entourage. Are they all cowed and intimidated? Would that still be true if Russia faced an undisguisable defeat in Ukraine? In that case, Mr Putin might be in danger of death by lead poisoning – or at least he might fear such an outcome. Tactical nuclear weapons are part of Soviet military doctrine. The cheerleaders who are urging the Ukrainians to take the offensive all insist that he would never use them. How do they know? One does not like to sound defeatist, especially in face of Ukrainian gallantry. But when battlefield nukes could be in play, caution is surely justified.

General Sir Jim Hockenbull, a recent Chief of Defence Intelligence, thinks that we are in for a few months of stalemate. He clearly does not believe that the Ukrainians are in a position to recapture Crimea. Stalemate does not sound too threatening, except for European energy supplies. But there is an obvious question. “Stalemate” is an analogy with the chess-board. If it cannot be broken, the match ends in a draw. On the battlefield, it is a much bloodier business, for it means relentless attrition and constant casualties. Is there no way to turn this battlefield stalemate into a draw, with a cease-fire on the present boundaries?

The cheerleaders insist that this would give Putin a victory and encourage him to launch further attacks on his neighbours. That seems unlikely. He has taken heavy losses in men, materiel and morale. Nato has expanded. Even if there were peace, the Americans in particular would give military assistance to the Baltic states and to Ukraine. It seems unlikely that the Russian leader would have a firm grip on power, or indeed on life.

Equally, there will come a moment when the West could once again make a cautious approach to Russia – under a new leadership, needless to say. Europe will not be safe until we can create a system of collective security which includes Russia. 

That now seems a distant prospect. Even so, there seems no point in urging the Ukrainians to press on towards unwinnable goals, and to run the risk of a dreadful escalation. Although the cheerleaders obviously believe that they have become moral combatants on behalf of a nation which they have come to love, a readiness to fight to the last Ukrainian is a curious way of expressing affection.