As war in Ukraine drifts out of the headlines, it reaches a point of maximum danger. Can the parties be led towards compromise and settlement, or will their desperation, coupled with war fever by nonparticipants, drive the conflict into wider escalation and risk of catastrophe?
The British government has offered Kyiv what it calls unwavering support. Boris Johnson has thus delegated his policy on Ukraine to Kyiv’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. This includes the ambition to drive Russian troops from all of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea and Donbas. Russia’s weight of numbers is already making such total victory and a return to pre-2014 borders ever less plausible. It would also require a massive uplift in western aid over a long period of time. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has already dubbed it the US’s proxy war against Russia.
At this point in the war, the gamble is of a different nature. When Ukraine turned back the initial Russian advance, western aid appeared both crucial and glorious. In recent months the balance of military power has shifted into stalemate. France and Germany are now showing caution. Like most of Nato, they are giving Kyiv military and humanitarian assistance, but they rightly regard the war as one of Russian expansion. They do not use Joe Biden and Johnson’s language of a grand conflict involving the whole of the west.
As ever more lethal “defensive” weapons are delivered by western powers to Ukraine, Russia’s complaint of a proxy war looks ever more plausible, and Vladimir Putin will continue to rattle his nuclear arsenal. If he can flatten entire Ukrainian cities with bombs, why not with nuclear howitzers? Western hawks have spent their lives practising for such a confrontation. You can sense they are eager to test Putin’s mettle – at a safe distance from home. The hawks must know he will not withdraw from all of Ukraine. So why not see how far his nuclear bluff can be called?
As today’s wars drag on, their effect on public emotion ebbs and flows, while vested interests flex their muscles. When the Soviets occupied eastern Europe after the second world war, the west’s discipline was absolute. It followed George Kennan’s doctrine of containment, not rollback. The Soviet suppression of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 was not contested. A nuclear confrontation was agreed to be unthinkable. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and the ageing Andropov’s moment of madness in 1983 (when the Kremlin, spooked by a Nato exercise, almost launched a nuclear strike) saw military chiefs in paralysed excitement. Recent studies have shown how close the world came to disaster, averted only by frantic back channels, secret compromises and split-second decisions.
Had the 1982 Falklands war been settled by UN trusteeship before the San Carlos landing – as it almost was after the sinking of HMS Sheffield – hundreds of lives could have been saved, not to mention the £60m a year still being spent on Fortress Falklands. In Afghanistan in 2001, the then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld advised President George W Bush to go in, punish the regime and immediately get out. He was ignored by the “nation builders”, who proceeded to impose a vast imperial apparatus on Afghanistan and wreck it. These critical turning points are forgotten in war histories.
From the moment a conflict becomes hot, war fever distorts reason with emotion. Fuelled by the media, it poisons every bid for peace with the cry, “too many have died to allow compromise”. Strategy is distorted, too. Just as we were told in 2003 that Iraq was planning a missile assault on Britain, so now we must believe that Putin is a similar threat to our security.
The doctrine of cold war containment, tacitly agreed by Moscow and Washington, held to the scrupulous avoidance of an east-west confrontation between the major powers. Everything else was subordinate. Now we are at just such a turning point.
Whatever settlement is reached in eastern Ukraine, it will be a compromise. Johnson and Britain have done their duty to common humanity in helping a foreign state, not an ally, resist an outrageous Russian aggression. Putin has barely advanced on his 2014 incursion, though advanced he has. Therein must lie the realm of compromise. If Johnson feels unable to plead for peace, he should at least stop yelling for war. The next chapter in Russia’s dealings with Ukraine must be for those two countries to decide.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist