Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party.
In Kyiv, tensions between Volodomyr Zelensky and Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s army, boil over into rumours that the president wants to replace him. In Brussels, EU leaders gather for a summit to see if they can squash — or evade — Viktor Orbán’s refusal to countenance more aid. In Washington, MAGA Republicans hold American aid hostage as well.
Ukrainian frontline units are rationing ammunition. Despite their successes in building new drones to attack Russian energy infrastructure, and obtaining Anglo-French storm shadow missiles to force Russia’s black sea fleet out of Sevastopol, Ukrainian forces are on the defensive and under pressure.
If some of it is due to Russian stooges Orbán and Donald Trump, and the failure of both the EU and the US to neutralise these internal threats to their democracy and the rule of law, even robustly democratic and avowedly pro-Ukrainian Western governments share blame on two further counts: production and overall strategy.
We all let our military industries atrophy after the end of the cold war. The financial crisis further tightened spending. The UK and France, and to an extent Sweden, gambled on preserving their technological edge through the small scale production of advanced weapons systems, and in the UK’s case, aircraft carriers. The United States maintained scale, but has global commitments, and let land war on the European continent slip down its priority list.
We were warned. Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 should have sparked a renewal of our defence industrial base. The eight years of fighting until the full scale invasion of 2022 should have allowed us to learn just how much equipment is needed for high-intensity industrial land war.
The Ukrainians have assimilated the importance of having large amounts of “fires” available: in their case, mostly artillery, though Western forces tend to prefer air power. While the West has supplied a significant number of land platforms – tanks, artillery, and armoured personnel carriers – we have lagged Russia-supporting North Korea in ammunition. Pyongyang has pledged two million shells to Russia; all Europe, including the UK and Norway hasn’t managed a million for Ukraine. Though even our standard, dumb, artillery shells are doubtless better quality than the Hermit Kingdom’s, and both our and the Ukrainians’ targeting technology significantly more advanced, the lack of quantity is beginning to tell on the battlefield.
Despite two years of full-scale war, we’ve limited ourselves to sending Ukraine stocks of our old equipment and beginning the procurement of the next generation of systems. Even ignoring air power (which we have also been sending Ukraine too little, too late), we haven’t given our defence industry the production pipeline it needs to expand at emergency wartime rates, nor have we spent money the way we did during the pandemic.
Now, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and injured, and Ukraine may even lose important territory to Russia – in which its army can destroy, rape, loot, torture and kidnap children, and even conscript Ukrainians into fighting against their own countrymen.
But the cost is not only moral, as horrific as that will be: it is also strategic. The reason we haven’t moved to emergency production is that major Western capitals, including Washington, Berlin and, even London, don’t recognise this war as an emergency.
The core of the mistake is failing to realise that the 2022 invasion has brought old-fashioned imperial war back. Russia wants to destroy Ukraine’s society and independence, incorporate its resources into an extended imperial state, and use them to impose its will on the rest of Eastern Europe.
French, German, British and American policy has yet to adapt to this reality: on Tuesday, when Emmanuel Macron addressed the Swedish Defence University, he showed some movement, by pledging to do “whatever it takes” to help Ukraine win, but he still could not bring himself to accept the implication that this means Russia must be defeated. His policy is not to destroy Russian military power but to “negotiate a sustainable peace”. In the service of this naive goal, Western equipment has been rationed: Germany has not sent its Taurus cruise missiles, nor has the US dispatched the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System, nor has anyone, yet, provided jets in significant numbers.
This gets things the wrong way around. Sustainable peace would be an outcome of the destruction of Russian imperial power. Otherwise, any ceasefire will just allow its imperial state to rebuild itself for another round of fighting. For Ukraine to win, Russia must lose.
This is a taller order than we have become used to in post-war politics. Russia’s political leadership needs to understand that expansionism will be met with consequences that put their hold on power in Russia at risk. Thanks to Ukraine’s bravery and sacrifice, and the West’s overwhelming economic power, this important strategic goal can be achieved with relatively limited resources.
Estonia’s government has, in a White Paper that rightly calls for Russia’s defeat, estimated it could be done at a cost merely of 0.25 per cent of Western GDP over four years. This is less than half what we are supposed to spend on development aid — to secure a vital strategic interest. I have estimated the cost to frontline European states being able to deter Russia over the medium term somewhat more highly (at around two per cent of their GDP) It may appear somewhat base to say so, but this investment would create good high-tech industrial jobs in our continental heartlands.
The real reason we haven’t done this is psychological, not financial: we’ve yet to accept that the stable world we thought we had managed to construct after the Cold War has expired, and in today’s conditions, finessing an outcome in which Ukraine retains its independence but the Russian imperial military system is not thereby threatened with collapse requires a precision that is rarely attained in international relations.
Our choices are these: a Russian victory, accompanied by crimes against humanity, large refugee flows, decades of guerilla warfare Russian troops on the Polish border, and greater Russian subversion in the West. Or a Russian defeat, a Ukraine whole and free, growing strongly as it is rebuilt and integrated into the European economy and NATO, accompanied by instability as Russia comes to terms with the failure of Putin’s revanchist project.
The middle way ran out of time on Feb 24th 2022, as Putin announced his “special military operation”. It’s up to us to choose one of the other alternatives. We know which one Putin wants. We’d better choose the other.