Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party.
I have in my hands a piece of paper – a cheque for €10 billion. Last week’s European summit began with Neville Chamberlain and ended with Dr Evil, taking the form of Viktor Orbán.
Orbán had allowed himself to be bribed to leave the negotiating room, so that the other EU members could grant Ukraine the symbolic opening of accession negotiations, only to return – having pocketed €10 billion in EU funds, to veto €50 billion in financial aid to Kiev.
While the European Union has spent over a decade hoping the Orbán problem would go away, across the pond, Mike Johnson, the House of Representatives’ Speaker who supported Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, held up the American half of Western aid.
The Kremlin has spent decades cultivating allies across the West that it has ince used to create a permissive environment for Russian aggression. Though it had managed to buy the services of Gerhard Schröder and Francois Fillon, and the support of sundry left-wing groups, it is on the nationalist right that it has had most success (not complete success: Italy’s Gioegia Meloni has defended Ukraine resolutely in a country in which this required considerable political courage).
Now, through Orbán and Trump, the Kremlin is cashing in its chips. Unable to defeat Western-supported Ukraine on the battlefield, it’s playing Western politics to cut off its supply of money and weapons. Putin can do this because Western aid has been measured out in coffee-spoons.
There are some, including Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Adviser, and perhaps Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, who see war as a branch of industrial economics. They think that aid to Ukraine can be calibrated precisely to give it just enough support to win without also forcing Russia to lose. A rational Putin, this view maintains, will be persuaded to declare victory and leave once the cost of the invasion becomes too high, but still be able to control Russia’s political system.
This is to misunderstand war. War is characterised by tipping points at the tactical, operational and strategic level: tactical, when a decisive attack pushes the enemy into retreat; operational, when it allows a force to seize territory and interrupt the enemy’s supply (as Ukraine tried but failed to do with the main road to Crimea); and strategic, as when the strength of Ukrainian resistance prevented both Russia’s attempt to take Ukraine’s cities by subversion in 2014; and by outright force in 2022 (Ukrainians rallied behind president Zelenskyy but, had Russia achieved more on the battlefield, their equivalents of Marshal Pétain could have pushed to cut a deal).
Nor is war a predictable industrial process. Despite the best efforts of all militaries to train their personnel into fighting machines, soldiers are human beings who respond emotionally under enormous pressure. The moods and élan of individual commanders are still decisive, and that is without considering those of your enemy. Small differences in behaviour can have large and unpredictable effects.
These effects accumnulate. A force that loses territory can become dispirited and be driven back further, as happened to the Russians in Kharkiv last year. An army that captures territory and resources can put them to work to fuel further expansion. The Ukrainian Army is, right now, the West’s strongest defence against Russian expansion. If we fail to support it, Russia will incorporate its resources into its continuing campaign against us.
Yet, so far only the Baltic States, the Nordic countries and Poland fully understand the stakes. The UK, Czechia and the Dutch have provided vital help, but are not quite on a war footing. France, Germany and the United States are further behind, still thinking that if we support Ukraine for “as long as it takes”, we won’t have to deal with the consequences of a defeated Russia.
The chaos and disintegration that would accompany a Russian defeat in Ukraine would indeed pose serious foreign policy problems, but the effects of a Russian victory would be worse. These would include the human cost to Ukrainians forced to live under Russian dictatorship again, the destabilisation that a guerrilla war would produce, and refugee flows that would dwarf those of 2022.
Furthermore, the geopolitical consequences of revealing the West as unwilling to invest even a small proportion of its own resources (the Estonian government estimates the price tag as 0.25 per cent of GDP) would reverberate across the world, especially in Beijing.
Confronting Putin’s little helpers — in Europe or the United States — to send Ukraine the money and weapons it needs will take a little political courage, but the consequences of caving into his appeasers will, as they were in 1938, be many orders of magnitude worse.