I have never been so wrong about a major event that was so clearly forewarned. I was convinced that Vladimir Putin would not be so reckless as to launch a full-scale conquest of Ukraine, if only for the simple reason that he would lose. I had assumed he was a cunning dictator who hated democracy, was smart enough to play on the corruption of a West enamoured of rentier capitalism and therefore had a cold measure of realities. I also thought he felt profoundly threatened by last year’s uprising in Belarus. The possible contagion of a democratic revolution there would threaten him personally, and the West’s sanctions, while not enough to undermine Lukashenko’s regime, were a close call. So I reckoned – perhaps I should say hoped – that the huge mobilisation of Russian military forces around Ukraine was a feint, whose real aim was to consolidate Russian control over Minsk, not Kyiv. This, it seemed to me, was bad enough.
It is important to hold onto one’s disbelief and the reasons for it. There is a danger in defaulting to self-regarding huff and puff, especially if you are British, with righteous declarations of how dictators must not be appeased. Putin should – and more importantly, will – be defeated. Now is the time for war, given that he has chosen it. It will be fought and suffered by the people of Ukraine, and we must extend to them solidarity and support. In the spirit of such solidarity, this also means it is time to begin to plan the peace that follows when the would-be conqueror is vanquished, and Russian forces withdraw. Ukraine’s heroic President Zelensky is right to put his country’s neutrality on the table in any negotiation. For if we do not wish to return to the old cycle that has led to this war, we have to acknowledge where we are coming from.
There were two reasons why Putin’s invasion was ‘unbelievable’. First, Ukraine is a large country with a proud people and long borders. It cannot be successfully occupied against determined patriotic resistance. Even if the Russian forces can completely subdue Ukraine’s professional army, which is not yet clear, they cannot withstand a long insurgency fed with the latest infantry weapons, night-vision rifles and drone technology, supported by US surveillance and cyber-warfare. The premise of Putin’s assault, as set out in his historically insane address, is that the people of Ukraine are really Russian. As his troops will learn, this is untrue. Nibbling off part of an oblast is one thing – seeking the conquest of an entire, functioning country that borders NATO does not make sense.
