Ukraine: we are running out of time

Terrorism doesn’t always come wearing a black balaclava and a home-made suicide vest. It also falls from the sky. Sometimes as a hypersonic cruise missile, flying at 10 times the speed of sound; sometimes as a more primitive 3,000kg glide bomb, fitted with fold-out wings and satellite navigation.

The use of terror as an instrument of war — or as a way of defeating an insurgency against the state — is as old as conflict itself. It has two aims. The first is to break the enemy’s spirit. The second is to send a message to the rest of the world: we will stop at nothing, so don’t bother trying to intervene.

In his campaign to regain what he claims Russia has lost, Vladimir Putin has become a practised user of state terror, from the air and on the ground, where his troops have committed numerous, well-documented, high-profile war crimes.

Having failed ignominiously to overrun Ukraine in February 2022, Putin has switched tactics: digging in to defend his gains in the Donbas and the south, while raining indiscriminate terror on Ukraine’s civilian population.

Last week’s criminal attack on Kyiv’s main children’s hospital, cancer and transplant unit is a textbook example of state terrorism. The fact that terror stiffens Ukrainian resistance and glues NATO’s partners closer together does not bother him. He’s betting the farm on this war.

The attack – one of the most ferocious since the start of the war — came on the eve of the NATO summit in Washington. This was not a coincidence. Putin doesn’t do coincidence. His methods, like the calculating cruelty of an interrogator trying to break a prisoner, are cold and deliberate.

Sir Keir Starmer, in his first, and notably self-assured, performance on the world stage, has taken a lead in rallying support for Ukraine. He is well-placed to do this. Unlike many of Britain’s European partners – not to mention the US — he heads a stable government with a huge majority and a clear sense of purpose.

We are 800 days into this war. Ukraine is not losing but it’s not winning either. The same goes for Russia. Putin has placed his entire economy on a war footing. He is recruiting cannon fodder in Africa and Asia. He occasionally rattles his nuclear arsenal. Despite frontline losses running into the hundreds of thousands, Putin is not budging.

Perhaps it’s time to ask a different question.  Is this European conflict just Putin’s war or is it a Russian war — a war many Russians seem to support because it plays into the powerful narrative of the Russian “soul” and its destiny? And what does that imply for Western policy on Ukraine?  Even were Putin to be deposed, would that make much difference?

Perhaps the mythology of Mother Russia in another Great Patriotic war is too powerful a story for most Russians to resist in a country where disinformation and censorship are carefully and ruthlessly orchestrated? Without wishing to trivialise the matter, perhaps it makes the Russian heart swell with pride, just as it does in our country after an England win in the Euros.

Oleksander Mykhed is a 36-year-old Ukrainian author who joined up to fight the invasion of February 2022. He has written a searing and moving account of the invasion. Its central theme is that the baleful spirit of Russian nationalism is as much to blame as Putin and his cronies – his siloviki.

“Russian culture is an integral part of a repressive imperial machine,” he writes in The Language of War. “My hatred flows from the small things to the big ones. Every fibre is filled with it. Hatred towards the smallest particle of Russian collective consciousness and to their greatest symbols .” He adds devastatingly: “There is no ‘Russian soul’. There is just a void.”

I sympathise with Mykhed’s thesis. But I’m also ambivalent about it. My Polish mother lived in (then) Lwow, now Lviv in Ukraine when the Red Army invaded in WWII. She joined the resistance, was captured and spent two grim years in a Soviet gulag in Kazakhstan. And yet she rhapsodised about the Russian soul. We cannot consign Tolstoy, Stravinsky or even the late Alexei Navalny to a generalisation.

Mykhed is angry. Who wouldn’t be? The carnage wrought by Putin’s army in Ukraine is almost incomprehensible in 21^st century Europe. Russian soldiers have tortured and raped their way across small towns and villages like Bucha. Mass graves have been found: civilians bound and gagged and shot in the back of the head, reminiscent of the Katyn massacre of Polish officers by Stalin’s Red Army in WWII.

War changes people. They behave differently in war. Western armies are not immune to committing atrocities. It is also undeniable that without the heroism and iron discipline of the Red Army, the Allies might not have won the Second World War.

But history tells a different, darker story about Russian soldiers, beginning in World War II. The Red Army looted, killed, and raped its way through Germany, fuelled by revenge for what the Nazis had done, and booze. It did much the same to Poles, Hungarians and Romanians.

Atrocities do not just happen, nor are they inherent to any given country. Brutality among soldiers, studies have shown, tends to be the result of military culture, command decisions, frustration, lack of discipline and often using alcohol or drugs to dull the fear.

Behind a façade of normality, Russia is feeling the effects of the war. Alcoholism and crime have spiked since 2022. Alcohol consumption has reached Soviet-era levels. Violent crime is higher than at any time since 2011. Booze is one of the last items Russians will remove from their shopping basket when faced with hard times.

As sanctions bite, more soldiers die and veterans return home (many of them violent criminals released to fight in Ukraine), the problem will get worse.

So what is to be done?

Ukraine and its supporters, especially in Europe, face a wounded adversary with a deepening social crisis at home and a fanatical determination to pursue this war at any cost. Life is cheap to autocrats.

Putin sees this war as his legacy. He wants to make amends for the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Putin’s narrative about Russian glory hits home with many of his people. Losses in Ukraine and economic sanctions may, eventually, bring about a change of heart. They may even topple him. But there is no sign of that yet.

Attempts to isolate Putin on the world stage have failed, as the shameful bear hug with India’s Narendra Modi last week showed.

The West needs to up the ante — significantly. Ukraine must be given the weapons it needs. It must be allowed to use them as it sees fit. Volodymir Zelensky, Ukraine’s leader, is not a fool. He is unlikely to authorise actions which will rebound on his new allies.

Sanctions-busting oil tankers delivering oil and gas to Russia must be impeded. Businesses with links to Russian oligarchs close to Putin, like the London-based Gemcorp, an emerging markets investment group, should be targeted.

There’s always the risk of triggering a wider conflict. But Russia is a clear and present danger, not just to Ukraine but to Europe’s entire eastern flank and beyond. Putin may have more support than we’d like to think.

In Trump — now the frontrunner to be the next President of the United States, he may even find, if not an ally, then someone who won’t stand in his way. We’re running out of time.

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