Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party
Reports are coming in of Ukrainian advances towards Kherson, the city in the Dnieper that Russia occupied in the first days of the war. Kherson was to have been a bridgehead across the river from which Putin’s ‘orcs’ (as Ukrainians often refer to Russian troops) were to advance towards Odessa and complete the encirclement of Kyiv.
But thanks to Ukrainian valour, western arms and intelligence and Russian incompetence, the dismemberment of Ukraine has been avoided.
Ukrainians have paid a hideous price for survival against a war machine with no compunction about grinding cities such as Sieverdonetsk and Mariupol to dust.
Kherson fell before a defence could be mounted (there are allegations that the senior SBU intelligence officer responsible for the district was a traitor) and has been subjected to a different kind of terror. The vans that show up in the middle of the night. The torture chambers. The forced confessions.
It is Kherson, too, where the Ukrainian resistance is noisiest. Collaborating officials don’t survive long. Russian reprisals radicalise more. The occupiers’ plans for a sham referendum to rubber-stamp Moscow’s conquest recede into the future. The coercion needed to carry it out appears too blatant even for Putin’s henchmen to consider worthwhile.
The war has forced us into a reckoning.
We’ve been living 32 years without direct threat. The danger terrorism poses, however serious, is of a different order: the shock of 9/11 was that a terrorist group might administer violence of the kind normally reserved to states.
‘Hybrid war’ and ‘information operations’ – new words for subversion – are just the warm up to the main act, what General Rupert Smith called “industrial war”, waged without pity by a dictatorship’s army determined to extinguish its neighbour’s freedom.
During the last six months we’ve done just enough: enough to stop Ukraine losing, but not enough to help Ukraine win. It’s not the time to single out elements of the Western alliance. While everyone has black spots, in reality everyone, egregious Orbanistan aside, has done more than they imagined they could (the Hungarian regime has opted to order a new nuclear plant from Russia).
The West – from Rzezow to the Rocky Mountains – has held. Bad blood such as that about whether Russians should be denied visas is marginal compared to the size of the task. Finland and Sweden are now in NATO, dramatically simplifying the European security architecture.
The next six months through a tough winter and into the spring will be as crucial for the war’s outcome as the last half year has been.
Russia is running out of time be able to split Europe with high gas prices: it looks now as though it won’t. Even in Germany, storage facilities are almost full, and sufficient supply has been switched to Norway until LNG plants are finished. In this round of energy blackmail, Putin has come off no better than Arthur Scargill.
The situation in Ukraine however, is still critical . Without an air force, which we have still been too timid to equip Ukraine with, it won’t be able to take significant territory back. Without more air defence, it will struggle to defend power stations and heating plants from Russian missiles as winter bites.
This timidity comes from a strategic mistake. There’s still too much of a constituency for hoping that if Russia’s armies are pushed back and Putin sues for piece, it will be possible to restore normal relations with Russia. Unfortunately, this is unrealistic: Russia’s problems, which originate in the loss of its empire and brutal military and security state, are structural.
Long term stability means we have to move beyond ensuring Ukraine wins to building up Ukraine into a strong partner in containing and deterring Russia until Russia transforms into sonmething less dangerous.
This will, to say the least, take considerable time. Until then our job is to ensure Ukraine doesn’t face Russia alone but is backed, to adapt Leonard Cohen’s words, by “l’europe entier”.