My Ukrainian friend’s bravery is proof Putin will lose the long game

The mobile rang. Thursday morning. Ukraine number. It was a good friend. He’s one of the leading figures in the Ukrainian intelligence service. Now a Putin target, I shall call him “X”.

“Please, I ask anyone I can. Tell your political leaders in Europe they must come to Kyiv. Weapons are good. Commitment is better. When Putin invaded Georgia he stopped before Tbilisi because the West made its support clear.”

X is a man totally committed to his country. During the Russian puppet Yanukovych regime, determined to expose banking corruption, he bravely spoke out. Invited to “discuss his concerns” in Moscow he spotted the FSB trap and fled to the US.

That is where I met him. Sheltered by the CIA’s witness protection programme he sported a bizarre pseudonym. In the Gilded Age serenity of New York’s University Club his eyes glittered with determination to return to his country.

He was gathering support for legislative reform that would establish Western style rule of law, a sine qua non for attracting foreign investment in Ukraine’s crumbling infrastructure.

I agreed, with a senior Manhattan lawyer friend who had set up the meeting, to make a short presentation to a policy forum in Ukraine. Anything to help.

That is how, at 7:00am on a dank Manhattan morning, I found myself staring into X’s pre-Zoom laptop in the media room of a law firm’s midtown office waiting for our brief moment in the Ukraine limelight.

The screen went live. Suddenly, I was addressing a gathering of the great and the good around a massive horseshoe conference table that made the Putin/Macron white monstrosity look like a piddling pick up from IKEA.

X’s laptop was small, and his grasp of technology rudimentary, but onscreen, in the hotseat, flanked by Ukraine national flags, sat the unmistakable figure of President Petro Poroshenko.

Gulp! X’s talent for understatement had been, well, let’s say, considerable.

Spool on to January 2020. In Kyiv for, amongst other things, a fine opera performance, I meet again with X. He is back, ostensibly working in a law practice, but obviously close to government.

When he picked me up from my hotel to journey to a nearby restaurant his driver and bodyguard had armpits bulging with 35mm hardware.

I found not a quantum of solace in the tinted windows and armour plating of the 4×4. My friend, X, may have made it home, but he was not home free.

Next I heard, he was a big cheese in intelligence, having won the confidence of President Volodymyr Zelenskyi.

I tell this tale, not to encourage any western leader to high tail it to Kyiv. By the time this column appears the already surrounded capital will likely be in Putin’s hands. I can only hope the pre-inserted kill squads fail.

I tell it because X embodies the morality and sheer long term bloody mindedness that will make Putin’s short-sighted invasion of Ukraine a Pyrrhic victory. This game may be lost, but there is a longer game in play.

For the noble X and his countryfolk western leaders must shape up to the new European power structure Putin has engineered overnight. The real threat posed to other Baltic and neighbouring NATO states.

A threat that can only be contained by a commitment to rebuild NATO as a realistic deterrent force. Maybe Donald T had a point. Start paying your whack!

The cause of X is our cause too. It must be honoured. I can only hope his number flashes again on my mobile sometime soon.