Ukraine: what's in it for us?

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Ukraine: what's in it for us?

Pete North • 14 March 2022

Zelensky's posturing is underwritten by the West - but what's in it for us?

One thing that’s been missing from our politics for a very very long time is any estimation of the national interest. Ukraine is no different. Decisions are driven by empty virtue signalling with no thought to the strategic outcomes. With virtue signalling, it’s easy for politicians to strike a pose because it carries no cost to them, and the costs of their choices can be passed on to others. So here I have to ask, what’s in it for us to keep fuelling this war?

Politicians get to sing their “standing up for freedom and democracy” shtick, but 30 percent of the world’s grain shoots up in price or vanishes altogether – and that means African famine – and that means more mass migration. If you think we have a dinghy problem now then we’re busy making it immeasurably worse, possibly even destabilising the politics of Europe. We then have more competition for jobs, a bigger housing crisis, and energy bills that will erode our savings and make us all poor.

So what’s the alternative? Well, we could stop flooding Ukraine with advanced weapons (many of which will fall into the hands of terrorists), and push Biden’s puppet regime in Ukraine to do a deal with Russia. Every country has to find a way to co-exist with its neighbours. Only the West underwriting this war allows Zelensky to posture the way he does.

If he is pressed to to settle, he loses Crimea and a strip of disputed rust belt most people couldn’t find on a map. Though that’s bruising for Ukraine, it’s the best outcome for the rest of us. And here’s the thing. Nobody would care. Nobody cared about the low grade war in East Ukraine for the last seven years, so why do we suddenly care now? These territories were already lost.

“But somebody needs to stop this madman!”, we are told. Really? The halt of Putin’s armoured advance shows that the Russian army doesn’t have the manpower, equipment or leadership to take and hold even Ukraine. This conflict has already seriously degraded Putin’s military capabilities. Starting a conventional war with NATO would see his armies wiped out. In any case, this isn’t 1940, Putin isn’t Hitler, and this is exclusively about Ukraine.

So what about regime change and bringing the Russian economy to its knees? Well, are we so certain that whoever replaces Putin would be an improvement? Since when did bankrupting and humiliating a country improve matters? We toppled regimes in Iran, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere – and that gave us Jihadi terrorism and a massive hole in our public accounts. Putin himself is a lesson in why we shouldn’t meddle.

This war is a win win win for our establishment, but it offers us nothing. Our politicians can claim to stand up for liberal democracy and “the rules based order”, they get a pretext to push Net Zero on us, and they get to blame Russia for all the structural economic problems that were emerging long before anyone changed their profile pictures to a Ukrainian flag. Putin didn’t shut down our coal and nuclear plants. Our gifted “civil society” did that. Environmentalism is the chief weapon of war that Western elites deploy against their own people.

In the desolate empty minds of Western leaders, we are “rallying behind our democratic partner”, but Ukraine is no such thing. It isn’t in the EU, it isn’t in NATO, it’s barely a democracy, and it’s riddled with corruption, organised crime and political extremism. If Ukraine were in the EU it would be treated as a leper – subject to sanctions for its treatment of gays, and embroiled in the same rule of law disputes as Poland and Hungary. Meanwhile, the Brussels technocrats would move into do to Ukraine what they did to Greece.

Culturally, economically, politically, Ukraine is not in the European sphere. It exists as a frontier flashpoint, neither fish nor fowl. Attempts to peel Ukraine out of the Russian sphere is a long standing Western policy born of persistently hostile attitude to Russia, in place of attempting to build a functioning relationship with it, but we’ve never been willing to go the whole hog.

EU and NATO membership have been dangled in front of Ukraine, but NATO expansion has been dead in the water for some time, and the EU association agreement was in place of a formal accession consideration. We were always going to hang Ukraine out to dry, and we still will, only for the time being we’re going to keep up the pretence, further antagonising Russia, feeding a proxy war that serves only our elites – until there’s nothing left of Ukraine but rubble. Why not cut to the chase before Putin flattens Kiev?

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