Putin starts war in Europe — the West wrings its hands
We could see it coming. Russia’s rough beast has been slouching towards Ukraine for months, even years. But it was still hard to believe that it had actually arrived. Ever since 1945, there has been a feeling in Europe that we are somehow immune from war. The Balkans conflict was seen as an aberration – an unresolved hold-over from the immediate post-war era. In fact, it was a warning. In the United States, the UK and France, identity has increasingly been defined in terms of race, gender and sexuality. In Ukraine, as in the Baltic states, it remains a matter of life and death.
Russia, under Vladimir Putin, is asserting itself, convinced that the Rodina – the Motherland – is incomplete without Ukraine. On the opposing side, Ukraine, having been a founding member of the Soviet Union, is determined to hold on to its hard-won sovereignty.
Putin is a calculating man. He likes to think two steps ahead. He clearly believes that he can get away with an invasion of his neighbour, and the challenge facing the West is to prove that he is wrong.
Yet how is that to be done? Words aside, the only response of which we are so far aware is the certainty of sanctions. But sanctions – the continuation of diplomacy by other means, as Clausewitz might have put it – punish a deed that has already been committed; they do nothing to prevent it. Russia will hold on to what it wins. Backed (he believes) by China’s President Xi, Putin will batten down the hatches and attempt to wait out whatever sanctions the West may impose.
Earlier today, Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary-general, listed the ways in which the Alliance is preparing for any next move Putin might make. Reinforcements are on their way to Europe’s eastern flanks, with more troops, ships and aircraft promised in the coming days. If the Russian leader thinks he can take on a fully re-awakened Nato, he is fooling himself. But then again, it is possible that he has been fooling himself for months, and in the meantime Ukraine is disappearing into the Russian maw.
It may be that the best hope for peace lies within the Kremlin itself. Intelligence sources have suggested that many of Putin’s top military commanders are in at least two minds about this latest, supremely rash act of aggression. Members of the Russian Parliament are bound to be uneasy. The country’s oligarchs, though presently in thrall to Putin, are sure to be anxious about their billions. And in the nation at large, Russians, who have endured decades of economic privation in the midst of high-level corruption, are disturbed, anxious and unhappy. This is not their war, it is the Kremlin’s war.
Might it be, as Putin morphs into the totally irrational Hitler of late 1944-45, that a group of conspirators in Moscow will move out of the shadows and bring his blood-soaked reign to an end? We can only hope.
Failing any such coup, an assault by Nato is not on the cards. That needs to be understood. Such a step would be consequential in ways not seen since 1914 and 1940. If nothing else, Putin’s scarcely-veiled threat to use nuclear weapons if the West interferes with his plans must give us pause.
Is he mad enough to launch ballistic missiles against the US and its allies? Who can say for sure? What if, as defence secretary Ben Wallace let it be known the other day, Putin has gone “full tonto”? What do we do then? Is it possible that Putin is factoring our perception of his mental state into his gameplan?
In Europe, Wallace and Stoltenberg look to be providential choices. Along with Ukraine’s brave President, Volodymyr Zelensky, they look to be the right men in the right place at the right time. And they are not alone. In London, Boris Johnson has adopted his well-practised bulldog look. In Paris, Emmanuel Macron’s bold but hapless attempts at diplomacy gave way this morning to a vow that French sanctions would be as aggressive as Russia’s troop movements. Germany, too, has stiffened its resolve, turning off the gas taps from Russia at the same time as it turns up its anti-Putin rhetoric. However unsurprisingly, the view from Brussels, as voiced by its largely ceremonial High Representative Josep Borrell, is that Europe must stand united in its darkest hour.
All eyes, of course, were bound to turn from Europe to Washington. What would Joe Biden do? The President has said several times that America is not going to put boots on the ground in Ukraine. He has ordered the reinforcement of US forces in Poland and the Baltic and may even announce the creation of an Air Force base within easy striking distance of Ukraine. But so far the only “hard” talk from the Leader of the Free World is of sanctions, the impact of which would take months to be fully felt.
The cruel truth may be that the United States will sit on its hands as Russia swallows up Ukraine. Biden will undoubtedly talk up a storm, but, like Britain, like France and like Germany, the US is not about to go to war. Events could, of course, intervene. Putin might choose to force open a landlink through Lithuania to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, or he might choose to position forces in Ukraine or Belarus that directly threaten Warsaw. But for the moment, Defcon-3, with America at high alert, is the most we can expect.
It is not impossible that Putin will be satisfied with whatever gains he makes in the next few days and that, even in his madness (is he suffering from a brain tumour?), he will not order an advance into Nato territory, thus triggering conflict on an epic scale. If that should prove the case and he called a halt to major operations after absorbing Donetsk and Luhansk, how would the West respond?
War rarely follows a straight course. It goes its own way. Politicians and diplomats struggle to regain control, and meanwhile priorities shift and definitions of what victory and defeat mean are subject to change. All that can be said for certain in the eerie vacuum that has opened up between hope and reality in Ukraine is that everything we knew to be true last year is no longer true in 2022.
Jens Stoltenberg warned today of a “new reality and a new Europe”. He was right. As the BBC’s indomitable Lyse Doucet remarked from Kyiv this lunchtime, “the sirens have spoken”.