It’s not often that something Nigel Farage says sounds right to me, but his comment that “there may be no young men left” to enable Ukraine to take back territory from Russia chimed with a recent conversation I had with a man in whom I place greater trust.
A Briton who works in eastern Ukraine providing medical supplies stopped by on a visit to London and gave me a bleak assessment of the state of the Ukrainian army. So many of the brave, patriotic young men who joined up at the start of the war had been killed or seriously wounded that the soldiers he deals with are mostly in their forties or fifties. Recruitment officers scour the streets: on his way to the airport, he was stopped by two.
I agree with Farage that the West has had a role in depleting Ukraine of young men. Beyond that, we disagree. He thinks the West has interfered too much in a country that is in Vladimir Putin’s backyard. I believe that our interference, far from being excessive, has been too half-hearted. You can win a war only if you fight as though your life depended on it. That’s how Ukraine and Putin have fought. We haven’t, with the result that a war that was once winnable has probably been lost.
Reliance on sanctions is part of the problem. They are the West’s weapon of choice, for they leverage its economic power while costing nothing in the currency that really matters in a time of war — blood.
They work when there is a huge imbalance of power and the country on which they are being imposed is isolated. So they helped bring about the end of apartheid in South Africa, they forced Iran to promise to stop developing nuclear weapons and they pushed Libya to hand over the Lockerbie bombers.
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In this case, the imbalance is not that great. Russian oil and gas mean that both sides can hurt each other. In order to avoid too much disruption to energy markets, western countries did not ban exports of Russian oil but set a price cap of $60 a barrel on them, which allowed the money to continue to flow.
Nor is Russia isolated. It has been able to source cars, electronic goods and weaponry from China, and chemicals, drugs and steel from India. Neighbours have ensured that it has not been deprived of western goods, either. According to Robin Brooks, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, German car exports to Kyrgyzstan have risen by 5,100 per cent since the beginning of the war. “This is not because people in Bishkek decided they love Mercedes,” he said in a webinar. “This stuff mostly doesn’t even arrive in Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan is just put on the invoice.” Similar things, he said, are happening in every country in Europe.
Russia has had no difficulty in paying for these imports. Even the mild sanction of the oil price cap has not worked, because Russia has built a “shadow fleet” of old oil tankers exploiting flaws in maritime regulations. Estimates of its size vary between 1,000 and 2,000 vessels.
Instead of furthering the West’s geopolitical aims, sanctions have done the opposite. They have driven Russia into China’s arms, deepened the divide between the West and the rest, reduced China’s economic dependence on western countries and thus rendered it less vulnerable to western pressure should it choose to attack Taiwan. They have neither changed Russian behaviour nor greatly damaged its economy. After the war began and most of the current sanctions came into force, the IMF said it expected the Russian economy to shrink by a tenth between 2021 and 2023. Instead, it appears to have grown slightly over the period.
Just as the West has pulled its punches on sanctions, so it has on the battlefield. In order to avoid provoking Putin, it has armed Ukraine grudgingly, and with strings.
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America, source of the bulk of Ukraine’s advanced weaponry, has provided just enough to stave off defeat but not enough to bring it victory. When the balance has tipped in Russia’s favour, more has been forthcoming. So it has been with each escalation — the Himars rocket-launcher, the Abrams tank, the F-16 fighter, the ATACMS tactical ballistic missile system. And America has tied one hand behind Ukraine’s back, banning it from using American weaponry to attack Russia. That has allowed Russia to regroup within its borders and attack again and again.
As Volodymyr Zelensky said in a recent interview, the West “wants Ukraine to win in a way that Russia doesn’t lose”. But if you fight a war against an adversary whom you don’t want to wound badly, you’re bound to be defeated.
Faced with the prospect that Ukraine might lose, America has once again upped the ante. In April Congress approved a huge military aid package and since then the restrictions on Ukraine’s use of weapons have been loosened. Lord Cameron has said it is up to Ukraine how it uses the weapons Britain gives it. America is allowing it to use some weapons on some targets up to 100km inside Russia — not a huge concession, since it cuts the amount of territory Russian forces can use as sanctuary by only around a sixth, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington.
Had Ukraine been given the weaponry now promised on these terms at the beginning of the war, it might have won. Now, with its army exhausted, the chances of a good outcome are greatly diminished. “Peace” talks of the sort that people like Farage call for will result in an effective Russian victory. Russia will keep a fat slice of Ukrainian territory, prevent Ukraine from ever joining Nato, hold sway over Kyiv and threaten central and eastern Europe. Ukraine will have paid a heavy price for the West’s ambivalence.
