With Ukraine’s survival at stake, are we losing interest in the war?

For the first time since the war in Ukraine began, the story seems to have vanished from the front pages. Does that mean there is no fighting in the Battle of Donbas, or elsewhere in Russian-occupied territory? Has the blockade of Odessa and other Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea ended? Are the arguments in the West over arms supplies, sanctions and whether to talk to Putin now over? Or is it just that war-weariness in the media is setting in?

The truth is that for some weeks the main battleground has been concentrated in a relatively small area in Luhansk province. If Severodonetsk falls, the Ukrainians could find their main force of some 20,000 men in Donbas surrounded. A war of attrition could suddenly turn into a war of manoeuvre again, with the Russians mopping up the rest of Donetsk region as well as Luhansk. The way would then be open for them to race along the coastline towards Odessa, cutting Ukraine off from the Black Sea.

Just because we are seeing less does not mean there is less at stake. It is too dangerous for all but a handful of journalists to get close to the action and so there has been less front-line reporting, especially on television. But the death toll is rising steadily on both sides: the Russians are estimated by the usually accurate Ukrainian Defence Ministry to have lost well over 30,000 dead and several thousand items of heavy equipment, including 1,300 tanks. The more cautious Pentagon says only that Russian casualties are “not insignificant”, but confirms that “nearly 1,000 tanks” have been put out of action. Ukrainian forces are thought to have lost only a quarter as much materiel — but they are now losing troops at about 60 per cent of the Russians, including many of their battle-hardened veterans. And the flow of arms from the West is still not enough to replace the attrition of equipment.

In any case, military losses are only part of the picture for Ukraine. Footage of entire villages in Donbas being annihilated by thermobaric bombs reminds us that Ukrainian civilians are still being killed every day. When President Zelensky visited Kharkiv last weekend — his first foray outside Kyiv since the war began — he found shells still falling on a city where 2,000 blocks of flats have been destroyed by artillery bombardment. The UN puts civilians killed at more than 4,000, but admits that this is a gross underestimate. The true number could easily be ten times that figure: some 20,000 may have died in the siege of Mariupol alone. Donbas, once a populous and prosperous region, is now a desert.

It is hard for people in Western Europe to grasp what it all means, and so we prefer to avert our gaze. Here in peaceful Britain, protected by our maritime moat, we turn to other problems that seem closer to home and perhaps less intractable: the cost of living crisis, party (or Party) politics, the culture wars. Americans debate gun control and abortion, while Europeans ponder whether Ukraine might be admitted to the EU sometime in the next decade. To those far from the war zone, the siege of Severodonetsk is just not urgent enough to be compelling. Our attention has wandered. Anyway, it’s Platinum Jubilee week and the first post-pandemic summer is almost upon us.

All this plays into the hands of the Kremlin. In 100 days of war, Putin’s aims have not changed one iota. Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, has just confirmed in an interview for French television that the “liberation” of Donbas is an “unconditional priority”, but Russia intends to hang onto other occupied populations too. “I do not believe they will be happy to return to the authority of a neo-Nazi regime that has proven it is Russophobic in essence,” he said. Ukrainians under Russian occupation “must decide for themselves” — in other words, Moscow still intends to carry out a rigged referendum in occupied lands elsewhere in Ukraine as well.

The fact that the West has such a short attention span means that we are in danger of allowing the Russians to snatch a victory of sorts from the jaws of defeat. A frozen conflict would be spun as a triumph for Putin. And the consequences of such a victory for the Ukrainians on the wrong side of a possible ceasefire line are unthinkable. Already up to 2 million have been deported to Russia. Given time, the inhabitants of the occupied lands in the east and south will be replaced by Russians. In the eyes of many, Putin’s decision to go to war will have been vindicated. And so the cycle will begin again.

If we do not wish extreme violence, war crimes and crimes against humanity to be normalised on the mainland of Europe, the democracies must do much more to support Ukraine in its hour of need. In concrete terms: Britain could send multi-rocket launch systems (MRLS), as the United States has promised to do. Our warrior Queen, who served in the armed forces during Second World War, would not wish her Jubilee to be remembered by posterity as a moment of dishonour and betrayal.

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