The West is revived – Putin’s bunker beckons

How did the Ukraine crisis begin? First gradually, then suddenly. 

Less than three months ago, as December gave way to January, there was much fevered debate in Europe and beyond over the significance of the Russian forces so ominously gathered on the frontiers of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin was obviously up to no good. That was a given. But few believed that he was about to unleash an invasion of such scale and ferocity that it would invoke comparison with Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union in 1941. 

In Washington, President Joe Biden spoke of the danger of a possible Russian incursion into Ukraine, most obviously in the Donbas region, a large part of which was already controlled by Russian-backed separatists. But while this would, it was said, be resisted by America and by NATO, it was far from a done deal. Biden had much else on his mind, not least his plummeting popularity with the American public and the failure of his much vaunted Build Back Better agenda. 

In Berlin, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, having recently taken over from the much-garlanded Angela Merkel, was getting ready to celebrate the opening of Nord Stream 2, the all-new gas pipeline from Russia that was seen as Germany’s medium-term solution to fuel shortages associated with climate change. Merkel had given him her blessing and it was steady-as-you-go for the Social Democrat-led coalition. 

Such sense of panic as there was in London was confined to the sense in Tory ranks that Boris Johnson was about to be brought down by “Partygate,” a series of social gatherings in Downing Street amid the Covid-19 pandemic in which the Prime Minister had played a principal supporting role. It was only a matter of time, it was said, before Johnson’s senior colleagues left him alone in his office with a bottle of scotch and a loaded revolver. 

Across the Channel, Emmanuel Macron, just four months from presidential elections, was facing up to the unexpected challenges presented by Valerie Pécresse, a female doppelgänger from the centre-right, and Éric Zemmour, a demented populist, whose appeal to voters across the political spectrum mocked France’s claim to be a model of liberal democracy. 

The shock of the invasion hit every corner of Europe. Such were the emotions stirred that Sweden and Finland, both neutral states, have become heavily invested in helping Ukraine while reconsidering their decades-long refusal to join NATO. The Swiss are not quite ready to go that far, but even they have been moved to act, sending arms and medical supplies to aid the cause. It has even been hinted that Ireland could come out of purdah and agree either to join the Alliance or else to support France in promoting integrated EU defence. 

Speaking of which, nowhere was more out of touch during the Russian build-up than EU Central, the Berlaymont building in Brussels, where until this month the problem brewing in the East was less the prospect of an invasion of Ukraine than the ideological secession from the prevailing orthodoxy of Poland and Hungary. If Ursula von der Leyen, as keeper of the EU’s flickering flame, acknowledged a threat on the Union’s eastern flank, it was mutinous leaders in Warsaw and Budapest she had in mind, not the President of the Russian Federation.   

From his suite of offices in the bowels of the Kremlin, Putin must have watched what was happening – or not happening – with a mixture of incredulity and fascination. It was as if the West was sending him a message. He concluded that neither the US nor NATO or the EU or the UK was in any state to resist his “special military operation”. He would win, they would lose, and Russia, not America, would be back with a bang on the world stage. 

The only problem with this analysis was that it missed the point. Yes, Putin’s armies could wreak horror in Ukraine. They could kill ordinary people by the tens of thousands and reduce the centre of whole cities to rubble. But not only did the Russian’s reckless, utterly heartless war of conquest fail entirely to break the spirit of the people of Ukraine, it awakened both America and Europe from their slumber and set in motion a series of counterstrikes aimed at bringing the aggressor to its knees. 

The revival, once it happened, happened all at once. in Washington, London, Berlin, Paris and Brussels, it became possible overnight to refer to the western alliance without a roll of the eyes or an unspoken hint of irony. The latest anti-aircraft, anti-missile and anti-tank weapons were despatched; real-time satellite surveillance of the battlefield was relayed to Kyiv; sanctions were imposed to a level and depth never previously seen; and frontiers were thrown open to receive refugees by the million as they streamed to safety in the West. 

Biden, always an improbable commander-in-chief, did not so much take charge as assume his due place in the diplomatic front line. Johnson, though hampered by his weight of Russian baggage, threw off his comedy mask and worked single-mindedly to hone the British response. Scholz abruptly cancelled Nord Stream 2 and announced an unprecedented €100bn fund to rebuild German defences. As ever, Macron was something of an outlier, contacting Putin on an almost daily basis in a vain bid to make him see reason. But at home, opposition to his En Marche presidency evaporated, so that his re-election next month is now seen as a certainty. 

In the Berlaymont, Von der Leyen, aware perhaps of the paucity of her achievement as Germany’s defence minister, informed the world that the EU had agreed unanimously to fund the purchase of arms for Ukraine. It was, she said, a landmark decision. At the same time, just down the road, at NATO headquarters, Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance secretary-general, deftly coordinated preparations by its formerly moribund member states to go to war if necessary in defence of freedom. 

Most miraculously of all, Poland and Hungary ceased to be the continent’s ingrates – taking billions each year in grants from the EU but denying its right to interfere in their internal affairs – and in the eyes of many became the leading lights of European resistance to tyranny. Where there was talk of suspending the voting rights of the two until they came to heel on the issues of judicial appointments, LGBT rights and immigration quotas, now there is a general recognition that without the close cooperation of the governments of Warsaw and Budapest, nothing is possible. 

How this altered perception will play out in the future once Ukraine has been liberated and Putin written out of history is impossible to say. But for now, in the eyes of the world, Poland and Hungary have left their villainy behind and acquired heroic status. 

Not so Vladimir Putin. If the former KGB colonel, in the midst of his delusion, does experience occasional bursts of lucidity, he may yet come to see that his plan to conquer and annex Ukraine has set in motion a train of events that will halt only when Russia has been defeated and a new, more viscerally united Europe has been born, with Ukraine as an integral part. It might even be at one such moment that he recalls how Hitler’s dream of world domination ended in the nightmare of an underground bunker, with his enemies closing in and suicide his one recourse.