Ukraine: dangerous times
News & Social Media / Post
No room for complacency
There was good reason to doubt whether Putin would invade Ukraine. The invasion thus far is turning into the very shambles many anticipated. A rational actor wouldn’t have done it. It would seem, though, that Putin is not the rational actor many took him for.
So far Ukrainian forces appear to be holding their own and they’re not going to run short of anything. Meanwhile the Russian army is having serious problems. Away from its elite units, it’s a ramshackle organisation, poorly equipped, badly trained and badly led, and with low morale. This is now becoming very apparent.
A larger ground offensive has by now lost any element of surprise. Ukraine now has prepared defensive positions and stockpiles of anti-tank munitions, having destroyed all the main bridges. It’s hard to see how an armoured thrust can succeed – and certainly not without air superiority. Ukrainian air defences have not yet been overwhelmed or defeated.
That said, having now established that Putin is not acting rationally, and having to save face, he could very well launch an all out assault, of an intensity we have not yet seen. We haven’t yet seen a “full scale invasion” that matches the hyperbole. Though Twitter pundits are convinced Ukraine is holding its own, it cannot withstand the full weight of Putin’s arsenal, and it could come down to close quarters street battles in Kiev by the end of the week.
In a fluid situation such as this, confident predictions last only a matter of hours. The trouble is we don’t know what Putin was thinking at the beginning, and how many times he changed his mind since.
This is where the West ought to be thinking about de-escalation and creating a diplomatic off ramp for Putin, instead of pumping in more weapons and openly contemplating “regime change” (thereby feeding Russian paranoia). But the EU appears to be using Ukraine as its proxy.
Ukraine has been selected to play the role of the plucky underdog and we are to believe it is a newly emerging liberal democracy because it turns towards NATO and the EU in a crisis it helped to foment. That Ukraine is a corrupt basketcase riddled with fascism (the real kind) and organised crime at the highest levels is conveniently forgotten. This evening, with all the diplomatic finesse of a Sherman tank, Ursula von der Leyen said “Ukraine is “one of us” and we want it to join the EU”. If she’s trying to provoke Putin, that’s the way to go about it.
It is the Western consensus view that Putin has failed in all of his objectives, and his underlying assumptions about the strength of resistance were wrong, thus the West can ramp up provocations and the flow of weapons, and the fact that Putin is apparently acting irrationally while in command of a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons need not distract us.
It certainly would have made sense to have cultivated Ukrainian armed neutrality before reaching this point, but to broadcast our direct involvement turns this from regional ethno-nationalist friction into a war that could potentially engulf the whole of Europe – or result in another cold war, pushing Russia into the arms of China. We couldn’t have made a bigger mess of it. As much as anything, flooding Ukraine with weapons, up to and including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles will have consequences later down the line, The threat to civil airlines from terrorist groups is considerable.
The one thing that is clear is that this war has redefined European politics. It’s clear that energy security must take precedence over green fantasies and Germany cannot outsource its security to the USA. Closer to home, now that we know what real refugees look like (ie. women and children escaping an actual war) there’s likely to be far less tolerance for the cheats who arrive in dinghies. We can also put to bed any notion that Britain has no role in Europe outside of the EU. For what that’s worth.
Hopefully this won’t escalate into something far bigger and more dangerous but the era that began when the Berlin wall came down is now well and truly over. All of the assumptions of that era, from energy to defence and trade must now be rethought. We’ve run down our army, outsourced our production and allowed our enemies to weaken us through trade. This may be a turning point in which the West can no longer afford its self-indulgence and virtue signalling. The world just got serious – and the West has been asleep.
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