Nato’s folly

by
Robert Skidelsky
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There is only one acceptable end to the war in Ukraine. And it doesn’t involve giving Kyiv the weapons it would need to entirely drive Russia out

Aug 14, 2024

“The nation must clearly speak with one voice,” declared Baroness Neville-Rolfe, then Conservative minister of state at the cabinet office, on 20th February 2024. No remark so neatly captures the mindset of Britain’s foreign policy and defence establishment on Ukraine. 

The official view, from which Labour has never dissented, is that Britain must give Ukraine “all that it takes” to drive the Russian invader from its soil. “We need consistently and reliably to do whatever Ukraine needs to win this war,” said Grant Shapps as Tory defence minister, in May. “The British government must leave the Kremlin in no doubt that it will support Kyiv for as long as it takes to achieve victory,” said David Lammy, soon to be foreign secretary, a few months earlier.

That Putin should be penalised for an act of aggression is, of course, a respectable position; the trouble is that in Britain, and in Britain almost uniquely, it is the only position considered respectable. 

Within the Nato world only Poland and the Baltic states rival Britain in belligerence. Over the last two years, leaders of China, Brazil, Indonesia, India and South Africa have called for urgent peace negotiations. Donald Trump has famously promised to make peace “in 24 hours” if elected; Hungary and Turkey have offered themselves as mediators. Notable figures in politics and business who have called for peace talks include the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Elon Musk. The Vatican called for peace talks in March of this year, before urging Russia the “aggressor” to end its “unjust” war.

By contrast, in Britain a single position reigns. The mainstream media are all signed up members of the “victory at any price” school, with the Murdoch empire particularly bellicose. Nigel Farage was unanimously condemned when he said it was time to make peace to save lives. And this in a country with a famous tradition of dissent on foreign policy. Who now recalls John Bright’s powerful speech in Parliament in 1854 against the Crimean War, or indeed is now capable of making such a speech?

The question of why Britain should be uniquely bellicose is of great interest in its own right. The answer would surely comprise a unique British sense of guilt for appeasing Hitler at Munich in 1938, an imperial reflex of Britain as “world policeman”, and Britain’s view of itself as a moral beacon. The endlessly repeated refrain is that “appeasement never works.” Yet the idea that if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, his battered army will go on to the Baltics, the Caucasus, Moldova or Poland is plainly nonsense. The huge western conventional military superiority over Russia would ensure that any attack on a Nato state would produce certain and swift defeat. My concern, though, is less with the causes of Britain’s stand, than with the poverty of thinking it shows, and the horrific consequences of pursuing it to the bitter end.

Where bipartisanship is fully justified is in helping Ukraine resist a Russian victory, in the sense of Russia being able to conquer Ukraine, or to keep it as a puppet state. The west helped Ukraine stave off a Russian victory in 2022, and with continued western support, Russia cannot win in the sense that it expected to. Putin’s peace plan of June 2024 recognises this. Calling for the formal cession of the provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia (about 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory including Crimea) to Russia, non-membership of Nato, and an end to western financial sanctions it concedes the reality of a qualified Russian success only.

What about the avowed British goal of a Ukrainian victory? What this would mean was spelled out in Zelensky’s 10-point peace plan of November 2022, and more recently at the Ukraine Peace summit, which took place in Switzerland on the 15th and 16th June 2024. It includes complete Russian withdrawal from Ukrainian territory occupied since 1991, payment of reparations by Russia for its invasion, the trial of Putin and his government for war crimes, and guarantees against future Russian aggression. It is clear that any such outcome would require the complete defeat of Russia and a change of regime in Moscow. The best analogy would be the defeat and occupation of Germany in 1945, enabling the Nuremberg war crime trials of captured Nazi leaders. 

Ukraine cannot achieve this kind of victory at present levels of military deployment. Demographics and economics weigh heavily in Russia’s favour. A nation of 37m faces one of 144m. The Russian economy is booming, while Ukraine’s is only slowly recovering from the invasion. In this context one should notice the failure of economic sanctions to cripple Russia’s war effort. Not only has Russia opened up alternative supply routes for its energy exports, but sanctions on individuals have led to a repatriation of capital which has helped fuel Putin’s war chest.

The hope of Ukrainian victory thus rests entirely on Ukraine receiving from Nato the advanced weapons and permissions needed to give it a decisive military advantage: more UAWS (drones) more mine-breaching tools, more F-16 combat aircraft, and above all permission to “use long US long-range missiles to strike targets deep in Russia.” But it is a dangerous illusion to believe that such enhancement of Ukraine’s offensive capabilities would bring it victory, or even the upper hand in future peace negotiations, because it entirely ignores the likelihood that, in response, Russians will deploy more dangerous weapons of their own, while continuing to turn themselves into a totally militarised economy—even if that leads to stagnating or falling real incomes. 

Above all, proposals to give Ukraine weapons capable of carrying the war to the Russian heartlands totally ignores the danger of escalation up to a nuclear level. The assumption seems to be that China’s veto on the use of nuclear weapons will be binding on Russia, but it is very imprudent to expect it to hold in the event that the Russians face a catastrophic military defeat. Indeed, the defence analyst Charles Knight argues that the Ukraine war presents a greater nuclear risk than the Cuban missile crisis. Any commitment by Nato to carry the war into the heart of a heavily armed nuclear power would be an act of reckless irresponsibility. Yet this is the logic of supplying Ukraine with “all that it needs” for victory.

If we reject a Russian victory on grounds of principle, and a Ukrainian victory on grounds of prudence, we are left with the two alternatives of an interminable war or a peace deal. In the first scenario, Russia and Ukraine keep on fighting, with neither side managing to land a decisive blow but neither showing any interest in negotiation. 

This outcome is highly improbable. It presupposes that the battlelines remain static, but as George Beebe and Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft point out, “The war is not trending towards a stalemate, but towards Ukraine’s eventual collapse.” 

The recent audacious excursion of Ukraine into Russian territory is a spectacular tactical success, but does not alter the strategic reality that in the absence of escalating military and economic support for Ukraine, Russia will simply exhaust Ukraine’s capacity to fight. Thus, far from putting Ukraine in a better position in future peace negotiations, protraction of the war will worsen its negotiating position, at the expense of thousands of more lives, Ukrainian and Russian, and further destruction of its infrastructure.

So we are left with a negotiated peace. The case for wanting to bring this about sooner rather than later is moral. We in the west cannot stop Ukrainians fighting to the death if they so wish, but to encourage them to do this by holding out the illusory hopes of victory is, to my mind, grossly immoral.

It is also blind to one obvious fact on the ground. By far the most important outcome of the war so far is that Ukraine has fought for its independence, and won it—as Finland did in 1939-40. While Ukraine has been officially independent since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, in practice, its domestic politics were manipulated by the Kremlin until the Maidan uprising of 2014, which prompted the first Russian land grab—of Crimea. In any negotiated peace Ukraine is bound to lose more territory, but it will no longer be a satellite state. Independence does not require total victory.

Can Russian and Ukrainian peace requirements be reconciled? Probably not unless China and Nato—that is, the United States—brings pressure on both sides to moderate their demands. There is strong evidence that peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine soon after the invasion of February 2022 were aborted by the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, going to Kyiv, and promising Zelensky full Nato support to continue fighting. But it is the reverse which is needed now: the promise of unconditional support for a Ukrainian victory can only encourage Ukrainians to take an illusory view of their prospects. 

So what should happen? Washington should start talks with Moscow on a new security pact which would safeguard the legitimate security interests of both Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine would be offered military guarantees by the United States and its allies, even without formal Nato membership; Russia would be promised that no nuclear-capable missiles would be installed on its borders. The announcement of these talks should be immediately followed by a time-limited ceasefire in Ukraine. The ceasefire would enable Russian and Ukrainian leaders to negotiate their joint future—and the future of Ukrainians living in territory currently occupied by Russia—in a realistic, constructive manner. Thought alone cannot guarantee a good outcome, but it can help to direct action away from paths of folly and madness.