Winners and losers from the Ukraine crisis — so far

The Winners:

1) The West and especially Nato
The predictions of the divisions between the western democracies has long been a favourite theme of commentators in London and Washington. President Macron also called Nato “brain-dead” as he tried to whip up support for his idea of European “strategic autonomy”. The Ukraine crisis showed the Euro-Atlantic community coming together after the Brexit-Trump era with Nato, the UK and leading European nations, including Britain, at its heart. Neutral non-Nato countries like Sweden or Finland with its 1,400 km border with Russia talked about joining Nato — a major defeat for Putin foreign policy.

2) Vladimir Putin
Widely derided as an authoritarian kleptocrat, Putin has had the world dancing to his tune. The Biden thesis that Europe would be forgotten as all attention should now be focused on the rising threat of China has been proven wrong. China has ambitions and is a rising power. But the world’s biggest trouble-maker using military force to prop up dictatorships from Syria or Kazakhstan lives in the Kremlin. The queue of world leaders coming to his bizarre, football pitch-wide conference table made him the centre of world attention.

3) Melinda Symons
The British Ambassador in Kyiv refused to succumb to the hysterical warnings from British ministers that all Brits should leave Ukraine. Wiser voices who know Russia and understand geo-politics like Professor Lawrence Freedman quietly wrote that an invasion was unlikely. But the BBC, and other media were seized by a 19th century jingo war fever and better judges of Russia and Ukraine were silenced.

4) Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Emmanuel Macron
The US president in contrast to his predecessor, Donald Trump, refused to buckle to Putin’s bombast about a threat from Nato. Putin invaded and annexed part of Georgia in 2008, invaded and annexed Crimea and started a still simmering mini-war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine. Under Angela Merkel, who believed she understood Putin, the Euro-Atlantic alliance was weak. Olaf Scholz openly mocked Putin in Moscow as the eternal president. Macron insisted on full respect for Ukraine sovereignty and independence. Putin’s hope he could divide and rule a splintered West proved false.

5) Boris Johnson
The Ukraine crisis wiped Partygate and Scotland Yard questioning a serving prime minister for law-breaking off the front pages. The trips by the Foreign and Defence Secretaries to Moscow commanded media attention even if the results were empty. The Prime Minister’s forays and daily proclamations on television issuing warnings to Putin or claiming an invasion was imminent pushed the weeks of negative publicity about him into the deep weeds. Labour’s double figure poll lead before the Ukraine crisis is now smaller. The Labour left, in the form of Young Labour, Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot, have blamed Nato, not Putin for the crisis. This reminder of the age-old support from some in Labour for the enemies of freedom helps Johnson.

The Losers:

1) The people of Ukraine
Ever since the Orange revolution of 2004-5 they have periodically driven out a Putin puppet president. But that has not converted into enduring economic reform, rule of law, or an end to corruption. President Zelensky, a former TV comedian, has called for the “de-oligarchisation” of Ukraine, but the oligarchs hold sway in the Ukrainian state administration and across politics at all levels. Two million Ukrainians have gone to find work in Poland much as Poles came to Britain in a pre-Brexit era. The global image of Ukraine as a nation partly occupied by Russia and prey to Russian destabilisation whenever Putin choses deters investment, tourism and hopes of Ukraine becoming a normal European country like its neighbours Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and Romania. As Mary Kaldor rightly points out, what terrifies Putin is having EU democracies on his borders. Putin can still intervene in different ways in Ukraine and maintain his military activities in East Ukraine.

2) Putin’s political network in the West
Putin has courted West European politicians. His main target has been Germany where the promise of a direct delivery of energy from Russia, in which British firms like BP and Shell are heavily implicated, is attractive to German leaders who reject coal or nuclear energy but in a relatively non-windy nation cannot rely on windmills. Putin has the former German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, on his payroll. He has also invested heavily in the English Conservative Party, buying up ex ministers and peers, as well as making direct donations via his oligarchs to fund the Tory Party. The UK capital is known as Londongrad as Russian money lines the pockets of QCs and City PR firms, and buys up high-end apartments and houses, private planes, luxury goods and hospitality. In Germany, Scholz has slapped down Schröder. The Tories have promised to clean up funding though, if the war scare continues to fade, this may not happen.

3) London and Washington news managers
The former Portuguese Europe minister, Bruno Maceas, writing out of Kyiv, noted that Ukrainians were reacting with sarcasm to the way White House news announcements of “imminent invasion” were timed to fit in with US news schedules. It wasn’t quite the movie “Wag the Dog” about inventing a war to change the domestic political agenda but, as in London, Joe Biden has diverted attention away from the disaster of his Kabul evacuation and the growing domestic political problems which will lose him control of Congress in mid-terms elections. There were several London specialists in Russia who cautioned against war-fever and talk of “imminent invasion” but they were ignored as the mainstream media took their line from Johnson spokespersons.

4) Wannabe future prime ministers
Poor Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, who is networking amongst Tory MPs and party members as a successor to Johnson if he has to resign over lying to the Commons, made a prize ass of herself in Moscow. She arrived in a fur coat and chapka, the Russian headgear used by both Margaret Thatcher and Harold Macmillan on trips to Moscow, but Moscow was enjoying unseasonably warm weather so she looked silly. She tried to get tough with the boorish, bully Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. But when he asked her if Russian troops could be stationed in Rostov Ms Truss snapped “Certainly not” only to have her sleeve tugged by the UK ambassador who told her in front of Lavrov and a laughing Russian team that Rostov was in Russia, not Ukraine.

Another touted Johnson successor, Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, said the crisis was similar to Munich in 1938, the nadir of Tory appeasement of fascist dictators in the 1930s. It wasn’t clear who was Hitler or who was Chamberlain in Wallace’s bizarre metaphor which, like Truss’s chapka, was intended to appeal to a Tory base who will chose a successor to Johnson when the moment comes.

5) President Xi
He was hoping to showcase the Beijing Winter Olympics but the Ukraine crisis has wiped the contests on artificial snow off the world news headlines. The scandal over drug-taking by a Russian ice-skater has reminded the world of how the giant Olympic circus is riddled with politics, corruption and big money, far removed from the Athenian ideal. The world is far more aware that dictators remain dictators and non-democracies threaten war as a part of their foreign policy.

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