The war in Ukraine has been going on for nigh-on three years at enormous cost in lives lost as well as severe negative knock-on consequences for the whole world.
Given the propaganda war that has accompanied the shooting war, it is impossible to know the true number of casualties suffered by each side. Estimates suggest around 100,000 deaths each, with many more seriously wounded.
As is usual with wars, the fatalities are concentrated among young, working-class males – cut down in their twenties before ever having the chance to marry sweethearts or raise families. Cannon fodder. So a lot of people were up for Donald Trump strong-arming both sides into ending a conflict that long ago turned into an attritional blood-fest in the mud.
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, a day after the British Government had declared the Covid emergency at an end. That pandemic itself hit us straight after four years of traumatic post-referendum gridlock over Brexit. A British public weary of grade one crises would therefore certainly be inclined to welcome a reasonable peace deal.
Yet the deal that Trump is steering towards is not such a reasonable deal but rather an emboldening victory for Russia’s thug leader Vladimir Putin. And that is a highly dangerous disgrace.
Trump’s latest comments should disgust decent people everywhere. Asked about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky being disappointed to be shut out of talks between the US and Russia, Trump replied: “Well, you’ve been there for three years…You should never have started it.”
That aside could have come straight out of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, in which the rewriting of history was a key weapon of “Big Brother”.
It is an oversimplification to say appeasement always leads to escalating further aggression. But it usually does. In 2014, Putin annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea and despite some sanctions and lots of huffing and puffing from Western leaders, he got away with it.
Eight years later, he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine with the aim of absorbing it into a “Greater Russia”. He won’t achieve that this time around – the deal with Trump will probably just allow him to keep the roughly 15% of Ukraine he has managed to seize.
That will be enough for him to hold victory marches in Moscow and for the Russian public to celebrate their homecoming heroes. Putin’s murderous tyranny will be cemented more securely in place and his ideological aim of restoring Greater Russia with a vast “sphere of influence” across Eastern Europe will remain intact too.
He will probably bide his time before having another bite, perhaps understanding that to make a fool of Trump while he is still in the Oval Office would be a risk too far. But nobody should doubt that he will attack again if there is still breath in his body a few years down the line.
Perhaps it will not be Ukraine next time but the eastern fringes of a Nato member state as he calls the bluff of the famous Article 5 which purports to treat an armed attack on one member as an attack on all members.
Would an isolationist America really react like that? It will not only be Putin who doubts it but also the European countries in Nato.
And the complacency of Europe on defence is in its own way as shameful and dangerous as Trump’s tummy-tickling of Putin. A continent of half a billion people, boasting no fewer than four of the G7 top world economies, has taken a free ride on US security guarantees for far too long – ignoring countless warnings to stand on its own two feet.
Europe’s combined military might is an embarrassment. Only Poland – which spends 4.1% of GDP on defence – and the Baltic states of Lativa, Estonia and Lithuania, which spend around 3% each, emerge with much honour. Britain, at 2.3%, is marginally more committed than Germany or France – 2.1% each. But let’s not kid ourselves we are in a different league.
Our flabby and flaccid societies are going to have to change fast, taking vast sums out of welfare budgets and ploughing them into the military. Signing-off fit young adults onto a lifetime of dependency on account of their worries over their “mental health” will have to stop. So will an irresponsible immigration policy that floods societies with foreign national populations whose prime loyalties stay with their countries of origin.
Just perhaps there is some method in Trump’s madness – a lulling of Putin before he snaps shut a trap on some “deal” that suddenly makes sense. But none of us should count on that. The odds are that plucky Ukraine is being betrayed. And the real fault does not lie in the stars and stripes but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
