Tough words won't cut it

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In their response to Trump’s support for Putin’s position on Ukraine, the leaders of the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Finland, along with the presidents of the European Council and European Commission, issued a strongly worded statement, in which they made clear their view that “Russia cannot have a veto against Ukraine‘s pathway to EU and NATO”, and “International borders must not be changed by force.” Brave words, but ultimately meaningless. Putin does not need a direct veto on Ukraine’s membership of Nato when his willing puppet in the White House has one, and has made it clear that he’s ready to use it. And the international borders of Ukraine have effectively already been changed by force. Indeed, the whole history of international borders shows that force is the most usual way in which they are changed. There are few – if any – international borders which are not the result of armed conflict at some point in the past. We might wish that the world had learned better by now, but it hasn’t, and the fine words of an assorted group of leaders don’t change that.

The situation in Ukraine remains where it has been for the last three years, with only three potential outcomes. The first is that Ukraine’s allies provide the resources, both weaponry and personnel, to defeat Russia and restore previous boundaries. There is little doubt that the capacity to do this exists, although whether it would ignite an even bigger problem is an unknown. The second is that Ukraine’s allies continue to supply just about enough weaponry to keep the war going until one or both sides – most probably Ukraine, as the smaller of the two – lose the will and the manpower to continue fighting. The third is that some sort of accommodation is reached with Putin under which new de facto, if not necessarily de jure, borders are agreed. None of these is palatable, but only one offers the hope of an early end to the slaughter.

Leaders like to be seen to be talking tough, but tough rhetoric solves little. As a statement of the way the world should be, it’s hard to fault what they say; but as a recognition of reality it’s a dismal failure. And what’s lacking above all is any sense of an understanding that the world isn’t as they want it to be – let alone of the fact that they are some of the key players who should be working to change the way the world works.

Throwing people probably wouldn't help

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Yesterday, in advance of Trump’s meeting with Putin later this week to redraw Ukraine’s boundaries, Sir Starmer warned the world that he wouldn’t trust Vladimir Putin “as far as you can throw him”. It’s another of those rare occasions when Sir Starmer has spoken half sensibly. Only half mind, because there is also a major question about the trustworthiness of Trump. And looking at the two men, if it came to a distance throwing contest, I reckon that most of us might be able to throw Putin a millimetre or two further than Trump. It’s probably something to do with the Big Mac consumption ratio.

And that’s the problem with Sir Starmer’s statement backing Trump’s interventions over the Ukraine war: neither of the two parties can be trusted. Putin’s motivation is to get US recognition of his control over as much of Ukraine as possible; Trump’s appears to be earning himself a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the bloodshed, at least long enough for him to get to Oslo and collect it, regardless of whether any peace is just or lasting. Most of Europe is saying that Ukraine must be part of any agreement – the country must not simply be carved up between Trump and Putin.

Sadly, the truth about the world in which we live (rather then the one in which we might prefer to live) is that two dictators, each heavily armed with the means to wipe us all out, meeting in Alaska can and will carve up Ukraine and, come to that, any other country that they choose (a side-deal on Greenland, maybe, as a quid pro quo?), and no-one can stop them. Without US support, unless the rest of the world – and particularly Europe – is willing to commit resources, including military personnel, to the defence of Ukraine, then the ultimate outcome is certain, with only the timescale in doubt. It’s not fair, it’s not right, it’s not just, it’s not the sort of world most of us would want, but Trump is surely right to say the cards are stacked against Ukraine. He should know – he’s the one who stacked them.

For decades, we have lived under the delusion that the world order is rules-based, but the US has always had a shaky commitment, at best, to that concept, and has abandoned it completely under Trump. The truth is that we live in a world where the powerful can and do impose their will on those less strong than themselves – Trump has merely shredded the pretence that things were otherwise. Might is right, in practice if not in theory. With the US having gone rogue, the choice is between telling Zelensky to fight to the last Ukrainian, or advising him to accept that some territorial loss is the price of peace, and concentrating on getting back the stolen children and rebuilding what’s left of Ukraine, with absolutely no guarantee that Putin won’t try and grab more of the country in a few years time. It’s not a pleasant choice, but not choosing the second means that Sir Starmer is effectively choosing the first. Slathered in a good dose of meaningless rhetoric about the evil Putin.

How we get to a position where the world can get back to at least the pretence of having a rules-based international order is a much bigger question, to which none of us have the answer. But we can at least start by asking the question, something which Sir Starmer seems unable to comprehend.

Imposing sanctions in baby steps

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The UK and EU are seriously discussing further packages of sanctions against Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, and trying to pressurise Trump into implementing further US sanctions as well. There does seem to be a feeling that the US Congress might be willing to impose further sanctions, although there is considerable doubt as to whether Trump will support it. Sir Starmer is doing his best to sound tough as he talks about ‘ramping up’ (one of his favourite phrases) economic sanctions against Putin and Russia. But hold on a minute. Over three years into a disastrous war in which hundreds of thousands have died, and there are still more sanctions which haven’t been applied yet? When he says ‘we will apply more sanctions unless you…’, what I hear is ‘we haven’t yet done everything we could’.

How effective sanctions have been – indeed, how effective they can ever be – is a question which people who can’t think of anything else to do don’t really want to discuss. The reasons for that are entirely understandable: if countries are unwilling to move to direct military aid of Ukraine, and if sanctions don’t force Russia to back down, then all that is left is a negotiation which will inevitably make concessions to Russia. It represents neither fairness nor justice, but if all that we can think of are sanctions, then we should seriously have been applying them to the maximum already. Tough talk without tough action simply condemns more Ukrainians to fight and die.

But here is the truth that they can’t or won’t admit: sanctions aren’t forcing Russia into backing down and probably never will. Telling members of the Russian regime that they can’t come to London (one form of sanctions which has been applied) isn’t actually the sort of punishment which makes them quake in their boots, and they are still obtaining most of the goods they require by other routes. There are three main reasons why sanctions are probably doomed to failure.

The first is that Russia is big. It has an abundance of natural resources, and is able to produce much of what it needs; maybe not in the cheapest or most efficient way, maybe not always to the same standards, but a big country will always be more resilient in the face of sanctions than a smaller one.

The second is that they are not being universally applied. There are still plenty of countries (including, of course, China) willing and able to supply Russia with the goods it needs. That actually reflects a deeper problem, which remains unaddressed: not all countries see the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the same simple terms as the EU / UK, namely an unprovoked invasion of one country by another. That’s not to say that they’re right in coming to a different interpretation, but whether they’re right or wrong is irrelevant to the ground fact that they are continuing to both buy and supply goods which are subject to sanctions by others. Many of us might regret that the world does not have an effective means of disciplining a rogue state, but regret doesn’t change the facts.

The third reason is that sanctions hurt the economies of those applying them, so companies are finding ways around sanctions. As trade with Russia has dropped, demand from countries aligned with Russia for the same goods has miraculously increased. Some of those countries are landlocked and the goods can only reach them by traversing Russia. The idea that they all get to their planned destination, or even that they all stay there when they arrive, is for the birds. Western companies are supplying sanctioned goods to Russia and pretending not to know, and their governments are pretending not to notice. And the capitalists make their sales and take their profits.

That sanctions will not, and probably cannot, achieve their aim is a dismal conclusion to draw, but if it’s what we are going to depend on, then implementing them in packages over a period of years and turning a blind eye to alternative supply routes doesn’t cut it. Sir Starmer’s projected strength is actually a cover for weakness.

People are more important than land

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If Donald Trump were to content himself with annexing the southern part of Ontario Province rather than the whole of Canada (initially at least, always reserving the option to return for more at some future date), he would probably see that as being a major concession to Canada. From such a perspective, Putin only seizing 20% of Ukrainian territory also looks like a huge concession. It may look like a strange definition of ‘concession’ to most of us, but it’s easy enough to see how it would look different to someone who believes that the strong and powerful should be free to exercise their strength to get whatever they want. A bully who settles for less than he could take will always see himself as being generous.

That doesn’t alter the fact that the reality remains that, unless other states are willing to commit their own armed forces on the side of Ukraine (and I really hope that they’re not), sooner or later the country will either be swallowed up by Russia or else a negotiated peace settlement will involve the de facto, if not the de jure, surrender of lands, leaving the world with another of those long term frozen territorial disputes around borders. It’s neither fair nor just, but in the absence of any means of compelling the surrender of conquered territory, it’s a hard fact. Encouraging Ukraine to fight on merely adds to the terrible death toll which has already occurred – one of the few things on which I agree with what Trump says.

It's still somewhat depressing that, even recognising that harsh reality, the debate and negotiation all seems to revolve around what land and territory should be ceded to whom, with little consideration for the people living, whether currently or formerly, in those areas. One of Putin’s demands is for Ukraine to respect the rights of Russian-speakers living in Ukraine. (Being a native Russian speaker in Ukraine doesn’t make someone a Russian of course, any more than being a native English speaker in Wales makes someone English, although it's a distinction lost on Putin.) But what about the equivalent rights of Ukrainian speakers in the occupied territories? Or even those living in those territories whose native tongue is Russian but who nevertheless consider themselves Ukrainian? What about the citizens of those territories who have been forcibly removed to remote regions of Russia – to say nothing of the children who have been abducted, adopted, and who Russia has attempted to indoctrinate into hating their own families and nation?

Land and territory are tangible; people can swap maps with different proposals as to where lines should be drawn. But land and territory have always been moved between states, usually by the exercise of force. They are ultimately less important, however, than the lives and wellbeing of people, and the right of those people to choose their own nationality and identity. I’m far from convinced that that relative importance is receiving due attention in any negotiation process, but then neither Trump nor Putin are individuals who particularly care about people.

Minds don't need to be particularly great to think alike

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Apologists for Britain’s colonial past invariably point to what they see as the ‘good’ outcomes of imperial conquest for the conquered, usually expressed in terms of systems of government, the rule of law, Christianity, cricket, and the English language. Whether these are actually ‘good’ things or not depends on perspective; the assumption that they are is itself a product of the imperialist mindset, revolving as it does around some concept of cultural superiority. Leaving that aside and assuming, for the sake of argument, that these are indeed good things, none of them actually formed any part of the original intention of conquest. That was always about access to resources, and the opportunity to use the power of the imperial state to extract wealth which could be accumulated by individuals, and much of which was repatriated to the shores of the imperial power. That wealth, taken by force from the conquered peoples, was the basis of the great wealth of the cities of the imperial powers, including, of course, Britain. In return, the natives got Shakespeare, a bargain for which they should, apparently, be eternally grateful.

Sometimes, people confuse imperialism with colonialism; but not every country added to the empire was actually heavily colonised. Some were, of course – the territories currently known as the USA being one of them. From a British point of view, the other territories most heavily colonised were places such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They’re not known as the ‘white commonwealth’ without reason. The USA (a former colony in the true sense of the word) and its constitution were founded on a number of ideas, one of which was the rejection of colonialism and imperialism, and the idea of ‘freedom’ (a word which has many different meanings). Watching that former colony lapse into its own form of imperialism ought to be surprising but is somehow not.

The methods are different in the twenty-first century; although Trump hasn’t ruled out direct military conquest, he has a clear preference for economic domination, even if his grasp of economics leaves more than a little to be desired. But his motivation – control of resources, and the transfer of wealth from other countries to the US – is a direct match for the motivation which led to the empires of the past. And blatantly so. Having got Ukraine to agree to allow half of its mineral wealth to be expropriated on the basis of a lie that aid provided was a loan rather than a gift, he has done as all bullies do when the bullied bow down before them. His conclusion from the willingness of Ukraine to give up 50% is that he didn’t ask for enough, so he’s doubled his demand. He now wants control of all of it. Along with a veto on Ukrainian policy.

His motivation for taking Greenland, although presented in terms of ‘security’ is much the same. He wants access to its resources, and his promise that Greenlanders will become rich if they allow it is as valid as his promise that US citizens would become richer by electing him; it’s a promise which is only ever intended to apply to a tiny minority. Yesterday, Putin declared that he thinks Trump is serious about taking Greenland, but thinks that it's what he described as “an issue that concerns two states and has nothing to do with us”. It’s an open invitation to Trump to view Russia’s intentions in relation to Ukraine in the same terms. The two presidents are clearly thinking along similar lines. And the opinions of others count for nothing, with either of them.

What does Putin really want?

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The Secretary General of NATO has warned Europeans that the alternative to spending more on defence is to learn Russian or migrate to New Zealand. The assumption behind it is that, without a huge increase in spending on armaments, Russia will simply over-run the whole of Europe and turn us all into subjects of its empire. There are a number of problems with that as an idea, not the least of which is revealed by a little simple mathematics.

I’m not sure how practical it is to arrange a mass migration to New Zealand, but I can’t see the New Zealanders (population around 5.25 million) being ecstatic about welcoming around 560 million Europeans to their shores, which throws most of us back on the alternative of learning Russian. It is immediately obvious that the pool of available Russian teachers is never going to be up to the task. A country of 143 million is never going to be able to impose its language on another 560 million in the twenty first century. The English government, with a population of almost twenty times that of Wales has taken 500 years to partially impose its language on us, and there is still resistance. And the numbers aren’t only problematic in terms of language teaching. I don’t know how many occupation troops would be necessary to control an additional population of 560 million, but the chances that a country of only 143 million could find enough are vanishingly small.

It would, of course, be a simple enough task for a Russian Trump; just invent some new numbers for the respective populations and claim that the problem has been solved. But if we assume that Putin might just possibly be a little more numerate than Trump (a not wholly unreasonable proposition), it follows that he would realise that military domination of the whole continent is not an achievable outcome, even if we believe that he really desires it. It is dangerous to assume that he is entirely rational, but probably less so than assuming the complete opposite, which is where most European politicians seem to be at present. Perhaps the safest assumption is that he is mostly rational most of the time, which leads naturally to the question ‘what does he really want?’.

Personal kudos and recognition – very probably. There’s no reason to assume that narcissism should be restricted to the US. He knows that he won’t be around forever, and he’d probably like to be remembered favourably by Russian historians. Personal wealth – possibly. But he already has a great deal of that, and statistics suggest he won’t be around for long enough to enjoy what he has, let alone much more. On the other hand, that is not a consideration which has ever prevented others from accumulating ever greater wealth. Land and resources – maybe, maybe not. His distorted view of history and Russia’s place in it suggests a desire to emulate the Russian empire at its height, but his experience so far in Ukraine will have taught even only a partially rational person something about the cost of that. Security – almost certainly. It is far from irrational for him to suppose that ‘the west’ really might be out to do Russia (and Putin) down. It’s not a fear which requires its sufferer to be diagnosably paranoid. The desire for security guarantees isn’t limited to Ukraine.

The bigger question is about what ‘the west’ is doing to ascertain what he truly wants and whether actions taken are likely to reduce or increase the insecurity he feels. It really doesn’t matter whether his insecurity is based on an accurate assessment of others’ intentions or not – the effect on his actions is the same either way. I cannot believe that an accommodation cannot be reached which involves reassurance and disarmament rather than threat and rearmament. Unless, that is, it’s not something which ‘the west’ actually desires.

A small price to pay

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It’s entirely understandable that so many people are clamouring for the invitation to Trump for a state visit to the UK to be withdrawn, given what happened in the 24 hours after issuing it. It’s less clear what would be achieved by withdrawing it. There is a mismatch between the expectations of the inviter (that it would happen next year) and those of the invitee (that it would happen this year). Whether it’s best to get it over with quickly or keep it hanging for a while – there is always a potential for ‘diary’ issues to create a delay if necessary – depends on one’s assessment of how Trump will be likely to react to either. That is, essentially, unknowable. The thought that the red carpet and a great deal of obsequiousness will be rolled out for the man who sought to demean and humiliate the leader of a country resisting an invasion by a larger neighbour is unpleasant to say the least. That doesn’t mean that there is no chance of it helping.

The bottom line is that, whether we like it or not (and an awful lot of us don’t), Trump is right about two things, even if his way of expressing them is repugnant. Firstly, it is not a war between equals, and in the absence of any willingness by other countries to commit forces to support of Ukraine, Ukraine will ultimately lose. The cost in money and lives to both sides will be enormous, but the trajectory is clear. The second thing about which he is right, which flows from the first, is that the immediate priority has to be to stop the death and destruction through some sort of ceasefire, and that inevitably means accepting that boundaries, for the time being at least, reflect the territorial gains made. That’s neither fair nor just for the country which has been invaded, but it does mirror most of the other borders in Europe and beyond, which are where they are because that’s where they were when the fighting stopped. It’s uncomfortable for any Welsh independentista to see a country which so recently gained its independence being dismembered by an invading force, but it takes more than hope, sympathy and an endless supply of armaments to get out of the current situation.

Trump’s approach to achieving that ceasefire, by allying himself with one party and attempting to do a deal over the head of the other, looks ham-fisted and has angered many, but how much worse it is than simply supplying ever-increasing amounts of armaments which do little more than slow Russian progress is debateable. For the long term, European security needs to be established on the basis of de-escalation and demilitarisation rather than on competing to see who can build the biggest stick. That must include an assumption that the US will no longer play a role in Europe. In the short term, the alternative facing Ukraine is some sort of accommodation with Russia or a long grinding war in which the eventual outcome will probably be worse than freezing things where they are.

The question is whether a state visit, with all its flattery and fawning over His Orangeness, will help or hinder in either the short term or the long term. It’s a question to which I don’t have an answer, and neither, I suspect, does anyone else, given the quintessential unpredictability with which the world is dealing. What is likely to be a sick-inducing spectacle for many is a small price to pay compared to that being paid daily in Ukrainian lives, and might still be better than the impact of withdrawing a rather hastily issued invitation. It could hardly make things any worse, whereas withdrawing the invitation might do just that.

Deliberate or merely incompetent?

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A lot of people are seeing the bust-up in the White House last week as having been deliberately planned in advance by Trump and Vance, with the intention of humiliating Zelensky. I’m not so sure; that would require a degree of planning and forethought which is certainly beyond Trump – this is a man who can’t stick to a script when it’s written out in front of him, let alone when he has to remember it – or Vance, whose general ignorance of history and geography seems to be matched only by his innate nastiness.

Even if they had fully intended to find a way of delivering a humiliation, did they really intend that the outcome would be a total breakdown of the relationship, or did they simply assume that Zelensky would cave in and show his subservience? One of the attributes of bullies is that they invariably assume that people will do as they are told, and are always surprised – not to say angered – when they don’t. And Zelensky’s quiet attempts to push back certainly escalated Trump’s anger. The one thing that I do believe is that Trump really wanted that deal on minerals. He may not care about Zelensky or Ukraine, but he really does care about money and about further enriching US billionaires. It's increasingly clear that Trump and Vance – the latter possibly even more than the former – believe that the US has the right to do as it wishes and that lesser states (everyone except Russia, apparently) should bow down before them. They don’t care whether people like them or not, only whether they are obeyed.

Putin has produced a range of ‘justifications’ for his invasion, and amongst them is the idea that the Ukrainian regime was a client state of the US and that the regime in Ukraine was a puppet installed and operated somehow by the CIA. The behaviour of Trump and Vance suggests that they have, in a sense, bought in to that narrative, and genuinely believed that they could dictate to Ukraine. Their belief in their own absolute power to dictate what happens outside their own borders received a nasty jolt on Friday, and a man who holds grudges (and Trump’s grudge against Zelensky for not digging up dirt on the Bidens is probably a significant part of the cause of last week’s events) is likely to become even more unpredictable as a result.

The question is what happens next. No matter how much we admire the way Zelensky stood up to the bully, to say nothing of Ukrainian courage and resistance, no lover of peace, and no true friend of Ukraine, should seriously be urging them to fight to the last Ukrainian against a numerically superior force. If Trump really does ‘turn off the tap’ of supplies of armaments, it’s hard to see how the European states can make up the resulting shortfall. We might wish it were otherwise, but Trump is actually right in saying that Ukraine is in a bad place right now. Unless other countries are going to come directly to its aid militarily – which seems as unlikely as it is undesirable – then a peace deal of some sort has to be negotiated. Trump is clearly the wrong person to broker such an agreement, but who and where is the right one? Even if Sir Starmer and Macron can devise a peace plan, will Trump accept anything that doesn’t give him what he wants?

The art of the undeal

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The flourish of Sir Starmer producing an invitation letter from the King of England from his pocket to hand to Trump was probably intended to add a little bit of drama to the event, but Sir Starmer hasn’t really got what it takes to be dramatic. He’d probably fail an audition for a bit part with his local Am Dram group, even if they were desperate for players. In any event, the idea that the letter and its content hadn’t been agreed through diplomatic channels in advance is for the birds – a public refusal by Trump of an unexpected invitation would hardly be helpful as an opening to the discussions. Still, however hammy it appeared, it ticked an important box when dealing with the narcissism of His Orangeness: it made him feel important, respected, and uniquely better than all his predecessors, none of whom was ever invited twice. (Whether Buck House and Number 10 have fully thought that through is another question; future presidents only invited once are now likely to feel slighted, especially if they compare themselves and their contribution to world affairs to the present incumbent. What one might call ‘State Visit Inflation’ risks devaluing the currency.)

The visit ticked a second box as well. Since Trump sees everything in transactional terms (usually presented as ‘what’s in it for the USA?’, but actually more about ‘what’s in it for me?’), giving him something he wants might make him better disposed to giving something in return. Or at least, that is presumably Sir Starmer’s fervent hope.

I wonder, though, whether it doesn’t rather ignore a third key characteristic of the current occupant of the White House. It doesn’t take a very detailed look at his business record to realise that this is a man who has never signed any deal which he didn’t believe that he could break at any time that it suited him. There is a long list of law suits involving stiffed suppliers and dissatisfied customers to testify to that. And it isn’t just his business dealings. This week, he effectively repudiated the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico by saying that he will override its provisions and impose tariffs anyway. His justification was that the agreement was signed by a previous administration whose leader was a fool. In an uncharacteristically honest way, he was right on both counts, although he ignored the fact that the previous administration in this case was the first Trump administration. But the real fools were the leaders of Mexico and Canada who either assumed that he would abide by an agreement that he signed, in the face of all the available evidence to the contrary, or else believed that he was just a short-term phenomenon about which they didn’t really need to worry unduly. Sir Starmer should be a great deal more wary than he seems to be about adding his name to that list of fools.

We don’t know, as yet, exactly what is in the ‘agreement’ with Zelensky over Ukrainian mineral rights, and maybe Zelensky has little choice but to sign something at this stage, but the chances of Trump honouring his side of any bargain should be assumed to be low, to put it mildly. In his attempt to dissuade Trump from getting too close to Putin, Zelensky is shouting very loudly that Putin is not a man whose word can be trusted. He's right, of course, but I wonder if he understands that Putin’s willingness to renege on any agreement probably only adds to Trump’s admiration of Putin, rather than sowing doubts. When Trump calls Putin ‘smart’, it’s a rather condescending statement carrying the unstated implication, ‘…but not as smart as me’. One of the most dangerous aspects of Trump’s unshakeable belief in his own deal-making ability is that he thinks that he can outsmart Putin. From Trump’s perspective, compared to Putin, Sir Starmer looks like a mere gnat.

Can even Trump get something right?

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The Western Mail carried a story earlier this week (which I can’t find online, but basically seems to be a fairly minor edit of this story from three weeks ago) about the problem of desertion facing the Ukrainian armed forces. We knew, of course, that the Russian armed forces were suffering from desertion as well as draft avoidance in the light of the serious level of casualties, but the media in ‘the west’ have seemingly been reluctant to report that the same issue is impacting the Ukrainian armed forces. Whilst it’s credible that Russian problems have been greater than those faced by Ukraine, it’s reasonable to suspect that the gap might not be as large as a less-than-entirely-unbiased media might have us believe. And the fact that Ukraine is suffering its own problem with a high level of desertion should come as no surprise.

It raises a much bigger – and more general – question as to whether the sort of large scale ground war for which the generals and some politicians keep telling us we should be preparing will ever be possible in the future in the same way as it was in the past. The report tells us that the US has been urging Ukraine “to draft more troops, and allow for the conscription of those as young as 18”, since the current minimum age for conscription is 25. Leaving to one side the moral issue of whether anyone should be urging a country to send even more of its people, and at an even younger age, into a vicious and bloody war where many of them will be killed or injured, I found myself wondering how realistic it is in the modern world to expect that people, particularly young people, will willingly comply with an order to go out and kill ‘for their country’. We’re not in the first half of the twentieth century when information flows could be easily controlled, and where jingoism was a fairly normal phenomenon. People – even in dictatorships like Russia – have much easier access to information about what’s happening. Pro patria mori has never been particularly dulce or decorum whatever the politicians might tell us, and that was precisely the point which Wilfred Owen was making more than a century ago. Mass conscription for a major war in the twenty-first century is likely to be problematic for any country which attempts it, with resistance running very high.

Trump has said that he will end the war on day 1 of his renewed presidency. I struggle to understand his drivers. He says it is to stop the killing, which would be a noble enough aim; but coming from a man who has no previous record of concern for anyone other than himself, it doesn’t immediately strike me as being likely. After himself, those about whom he most seems to care are other billionaires, but we know that capitalist billionaires are amongst those who most benefit from war through their investments in the arms industry. It might simply be, for Trump, a case of not spending US money to support another country. That would certainly seem to fit with his ‘America First’ outlook, even if it shows a certain ignorance of the relationship between US government spending on armaments and the overall value of shares on the New York Stock Exchange, which seems to be Trump’s only metric of economic success.

However, whatever his rationale is (to the extent that he has one at all) his conclusion that the immediate priority should be to stop the fighting and killing is difficult to disagree with. And since Ukraine does not have – and without a massive injection of military manpower and firepower from friends and allies is unlikely ever to have – sufficient forces to recapture all its lost territory, an end to the fighting necessarily implies a redrawing of boundaries, on at least a temporary basis. Expecting Ukraine to cede vast swathes of territory in order to buy peace is neither fair nor just, but in the absence of any other basis for agreeing a peace deal, it is surely no worse than the current US position of telling Ukraine to simply conscript more young people who can be ‘expended’ in an ongoing war with no obviously better outcome in sight. There aren’t many boundaries in the world which aren’t the result of a war, a treaty following a war, or arbitrary lines drawn on a map by colonial masters. 

‘Might is right’ is a lousy basis on which to run a planet, but unless and until we collectively find a better way, it’s the basis on which almost all of the world’s current boundaries exist. Supporting the idea that a free and independent country should cede territory to one autocratic bully at the behest of another autocratic bully is uncomfortable, to say the least; but encouraging Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian would feel even less comfortable. The devil will, of course, lie in the detail and in the mechanisms for ensuring the integrity of any new boundaries. But on the principle, even Trump might be able to get something right, even if not based entirely on rational analysis or concern for fellow humans.

Did Farage, albeit accidentally, have a point?

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That Nigel Farage hates the EU and sees it as some sort of evil dictatorship which enslaves its member states is hardly news. He blames the EU for almost everything that is wrong in the world. Most recently that extends to being part, along with NATO, of what provoked the Russians into invading Ukraine by daring to expand what Farage sees as the EU’s empire into parts of Europe which Russia thought in some way belonged in its sphere of influence. The choice of words is important, though: what Farage sees as EU-driven expansion to incorporate more countries will be seen by others as a case of states which have newly regained their independence choosing their own future. Whilst there’s no doubt that the existing members of both the EU and NATO were keen to draw countries in the east of Europe into their ranks, agency ultimately lay with those new members in the first place, not with the EU/ NATO. Those states were, to put it another way, exercising precisely that national sovereignty which is, apparently, so important to Farage, just in a way of which he does not approve. It’s legitimate to question whether they were making the right/ best choices – especially so in regard to the military alliance rather than the primarily economic and political one – but not whether they had the right to make them.

If the alternative was to avoid ‘provoking’ Putin, that would imply either that the states concerned agreed never to seek EU/ NATO membership, or that the EU/ NATO declined to accept them. Or even a bit of both. But there is a corollary to that – it would also mean that those states agreed to accept the effective political, economic and military dominance of Russia over them for the foreseeable future. In other words, Farage seems to see it as ‘better’ that those states cede a degree of sovereignty involuntarily to Russia than that they voluntarily share some of their sovereignty with others. Superficially, his demand for absolute sovereignty for the UK whilst limiting the sovereignty of countries to which Russia believes it has a right looks inconsistent. But it really isn’t: English nationalist exceptionalism has long held that some countries are more equal than others. And it isn’t only English nationalists – Farage is just invoking the same attitudes which led to the Munich agreement or the Yalta Conference, where European ‘great powers’ thought that they had the right to dismember and determine the future of lesser states over the heads of the people who lived there.

Whether EU/ NATO expansion did actually provoke Putin is another question entirely. He has certainly said that it was a factor, and it’s not hard to see why expanding the territory covered by NATO in particular up to the Russian borders could look like a threat, but a man who believes that large swathes of Europe historically belong to Russia – and that Ukrainians are just Russians speaking a strange dialect – could always have found another excuse to justify fulfilling his dream of reviving the Russian empire at some point. Wars are rarely caused by a single factor or event, and interpreting that expansion as a potential future threat still doesn’t justify launching a war against a neighbouring country.

But raising the question of whether NATO really did pose a threat to Russia does mean that Farage has gone to the very heart of the debate about the role of ‘defence’ in the modern world, even if almost certainly unwittingly. The nub of the argument is this: do armed blocs act as a deterrent or a threat; do they make war more, or less, likely? Specifically, if most of the former Warsaw Pact countries had not chosen to join NATO, would Putin have been more likely, or less likely, to seek to annexe all or part of Ukraine? The answer is essentially unknowable, which probably helps to explain the absolute certainty which people bring to the table when the issue is debated. Those who would have us spend ever more on armaments argue that it’s better to be safe than sorry, but it’s entirely possible that what they see as being ‘safe’ is actually the direct opposite if it makes it more likely that those who are supposed to be ‘deterred’ feel so threatened that they decide to take the risk of striking first.

What we do know, with a reasonable degree of certainty, is that using Earth’s finite resources to build ever more weapons makes those resources unavailable for other aims, and also that the long term future of all of us depends on achieving a degree of civilisation which recognises the need to share and co-operate in the way we use the Earth’s resources. Somehow, I don’t think any of that was in Farage’s mind when he opened his mouth.

Looking for the simplest explanation

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For some strange reason, people have been mocking Boris Johnson after he called for Ukraine to join the EU. This could be based on a wholly irrational expectation that he would be consistent in what he says, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s not as if it is particularly difficult to identify the inconsistencies, such as claiming that it was the EU that was provoking war in Ukraine (because we all know from so many of his utterances that the EU is the root of all evil), or that membership of the EU would have somehow prevented the UK from aiding Ukraine.

In fairness, there are a number of possible reasons why Johnson might think that Ukrainian membership of the EU makes sense.

The first is that he might actually see it as a way of undermining the EU. The size and relative poverty of Ukraine – to say nothing of what seems to be endemic corruption – would be a major challenge for the EU to absorb quickly. The logic of Brexit (although rarely expressed openly by Brexiteers) was that it was supposed to be just the start of a stampede for the door, leading to the utter collapse of the whole edifice. There are other ways of achieving the same thing – perhaps he’s being really cunning.

The second is that, as a poorer country, Ukraine would be entitled under EU policies to receive massive amounts from ‘Brussels’, although that policy depends, of course, on the richer countries being willing to pay in in the first place. It’s a bit of a cheek from a man who argued that Brexit was a means of avoiding paying into such solidarity funds, but with fewer rich countries left to pick up the tab, maybe he sees it as a way of damaging the UK’s competitors, such as Germany and France. Although it’s more likely that he simply hasn’t understood the dependency between making payments to the poorer and receiving them from the richer. Financial arithmetic was never his strong point, whether in affairs of state or in managing his own finances.

The third is that, driven as he is by an inflated sense of English exceptionalism, he genuinely believes that the EU is fine for lesser peoples and nations, but not for the great power which his fevered imagination tells him that the UK is.

On the whole, however, and following the dictates of Occam’s razor, I favour a very much simpler explanation – he was just doing what he has always done, and saying what a particular audience wanted to hear. Zelensky wants to join the EU, so Johnson supports him. He doesn’t really mean it, any more than he has ever meant most of the things he’s said. He assumed that, if he’s ever in a position of influence again (and I struggle to see how even the Tories could be that stupid), he will simply deny ever having said any such thing. It's not as if he has never done that before.

Looking in the mirror

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In August, 1704, an Anglo-Dutch invasion force seized Gibraltar from the Spanish by force of arms, during the war of the Spanish Succession. Like most wars, the conflict was eventually resolved by a series of treaties, one of the consequences of which was that a weakened Spain ‘voluntarily’ during a process of ‘negotiation’ ceded the territory of Gibraltar to England. On that basis, the rock has been ‘British’ ever since, despite a few Spanish attempts to reclaim the territory. Given two and a half centuries to make their mark, aided by a certain degree of migration and cultural dominance, the British authorities got to a position by 1968 where a referendum of the inhabitants opted to remain British rather than see Gibraltar returned to Spain. It never really settled the question though – Spain continues to claim sovereignty on the basis that the territory was stolen from it.

Lest anyone think that this makes the Spanish look like the good guys, there is a not dissimilar history to Spain’s control of a series of outposts along the northern coat of Africa, such as Ceuta and Melilla – seize them first, and worry about getting agreement from the previous owners later. And the issue goes much wider than that – the legal basis for most of the boundaries in Europe is that territory was at some point seized by the current rulers and the new ownership subsequently legitimized by forcing the losers to sign treaties recognising the new boundaries or, in the case of territories swallowed up in their entirety (such as Wales, for instance), simply allowing the passage of time to legitimise the new ownership. It is the way that European states have behaved over centuries. Among the consequences of this long-standing approach are a series of unresolved boundary disputes (including, of course, Gibraltar itself) and most, if not all, of Europe’s independence movements.

In insisting that any peace negotiations with Ukraine should start by recognising the new boundaries created by military conquest (negotiations then being about the terms under which those boundaries are recognised, rather than about whether they should be recognised at all), Putin is simply following the traditional European playbook. Seize territory first, and legitimize it later. That doesn’t justify it, or make it right, it simply underlines the fact that a few decades of relative peace have not provided any sort of answer to the question of how and where boundaries should be drawn if not by the prior exercise of military force. There is no obvious ‘good’ outcome to the current war. Ceding territory to Russia confirms the validity of Putin’s approach, and may encourage further demands in future (to say nothing of what it means for the people in the territories concerned); providing ever more armaments of increasing sophistication and destructive capability to Ukraine in an attempt to enable the recapture of all stolen territory risks an escalation whose consequences could be catastrophic way beyond the boundaries of Ukraine itself. The only certainties are that the death and destruction will continue for as long as there is no resolution, and that there will have to be some negotiation eventually.

Nothing can or should blind us to the fact that Putin is responsible for the current war; resorting to military force rather than negotiation – and consultation with the people directly affected – should never be acceptable. But nothing happens without a context, and the context in which he launched the war is nothing new. The failure to find an alternative and civilised approach to determining statehood, nationality and boundaries, with the support of the people themselves, is never going to be down to one man at one time. There are politicians across Europe who ought to be taking a long hard look at the actions of their own states over the years as well as condemning Putin.

Who's really doing what Putin wants?

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Nadhim Zahawi is clearly a man of deeply and sincerely held views. Appointed as Chancellor from the Downing Street bunker in the dying days of the Johnson regime because of his deep and long term loyalty to Johnson, within 48 hours he was equally sincere in his belief that Johnson should resign. When the subsequent Truss regime imploded, he was one of the first to express his deeply-held view that Johnson should return as PM, and then last week he told us with immense sincerity that there was no chance of a Johnson return. It’s anybody’s guess as to what his position on the question will be next week, but we can be certain that it will be deeply-held and sincere. Or, at least, as deeply-held and sincere as any other views he’s expressed.

On which subject, he told us very sincerely yesterday that striking nurses are playing into the hands of Putin. If I understand his argument correctly (and who knows with Zahawi?), Putin will be delighted if the nurses manage to maintain or improve their standard of living, but deeply disappointed if the nurses do their patriotic duty and accept a drop in their standard of living (something which all of us, except millionaires like, er, Zahawi, are apparently obliged to do as part of our patriotic duty). Now I may well be missing something here, but if Putin wants the nurses to get a decent increase whilst the UK government wants their living standards to fall, doesn’t that rather make Putin look at least a little bit like the good guy here?

In truth, I doubt that Putin is actually much bothered about nurses or any other group of workers in the UK. His main aim in relation to those countries like the UK which are supporting Ukraine is to see the population demoralised to the extent that they force their government to stop supporting Ukraine. On that basis, given a choice between a UK government which grinds down standards of living and blames the war in Ukraine, or a UK government which acts to maintain the standards of living of its population regardless of events in Ukraine, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to conclude that he’d prefer the former. By a large margin. But if the UK government wants the same outcome from the strikes as Putin, who is really playing into his hands?

Truss, Sunak, and the reluctant genie

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For a Russian nationalist like Putin, it is entirely obvious that Ukraine is not, and never has been, a country at all. It is merely a part of Russia, and its people are just Russians with a funny accent and an odd dialect which some of them insist on using instead of standard Russian. It follows that, in those parts of Ukraine occupied by his forces, it is entirely proper that the school curriculum should be replaced by a proper Russian one, that the people should be issued with Russian passports, and that the flag of Russia should be flown everywhere instead of the previous ‘regional’ flag. Since it is clearly unacceptable to have different laws applying in a single country, obviously the laws laid down in Moscow will henceforth apply in occupied Ukraine also. All this will help those people previously ‘confused’ about their identity to understand that they are Russians, and to start behaving as such.

In the real world, a strategy of Russification will have mixed effects. Those who already identified as Russian (and those of us outside Ukraine tend to forget that that is a significant proportion of the population, particularly in the east of the country) will welcome it; some will comply with varying degrees of reluctance; others will double down on their Ukrainian nationality even if (like Catalans and Basques under Franco) they express it largely in secret, clandestinely passing on their language to their descendants. Some might think that the utter destruction being wrought on the territory taken over by Russia might push more people into the third camp, but the reality is that those in the third camp are perhaps the most likely to have moved westwards ahead of the invasion (or subsequently been deported to the far-flung reaches of Russia ‘for their own safety’), leaving a population predominantly consisting of those who are either delighted or else willing to comply. That is the advantage of using military force to impose a change of nationality on a reluctant people.

But leaving aside the use of military force as the method of choice, how different is what Putin is trying to do in Ukraine from what the English conservative party is trying to do in Wales, and more particularly in Scotland? Demanding that we all accept that the UK is not a union of four nations but a single country in which the same laws should apply everywhere would surely ring a bell or two in the Kremlin. As would branding everything with the Union flag. OK, expecting the devolved administrations to be accountable to the central government in performing tasks which are in their purview would probably look to Putin more than a little bit like going soft on the rebellious natives, but abolishing the devolved parliaments without the use of force leaves the Tories forced to take things a step at a time. And attempting to eliminate any ‘local dialects’ is not a venture which has been met with unqualified success over the last four centuries, with or without violent imposition.

The crucial difference though is that without repeating the highland clearances (which is sort of what Putin is doing in Ukraine), the impact on public opinion of those remaining may not quite work in the same way. Whilst they both start from the assumption that identity can be changed by imposition and central dictat, Putin is driving out those with Ukrainian sympathies so as to leave nothing to chance. Truss and Sunak, on the other hand, are assuming that most of those Scots and Welsh who aren’t already fervent supporters of the Union will simply comply and fall in behind the new reality rather than doubling down on their own sense of identity. Only time will tell whether they are right on that, although in Scotland at least it seems highly unlikely as things stand. They seem to believe that Blair’s devolution let the genie out of the bottle; others might think that the genie would have found a way out eventually anyway. Either way, from what I remember of the myths from my childhood, genies are not often amenable to being controlled, and putting them back into bottles is not an endeavour generally accompanied by huge amounts of success. I suppose, though, that it might divert a bit of attention from the looming economic disaster.

Height, gender, and tyranny

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According to the latest despatches from the fantasy world inhabited by the UK’s Prime Criminal, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is all down to the gender of the president, Vladimir Putin. If only he’d been a woman all this unpleasantness could have been avoided. We don’t know much else about this imaginary female Russian president, although we might be better able to guess at Johnson’s assessment of her physical appearance if we knew whether she also had an imaginary husband who voted Conservative. We do know that, assuming Ms Putin turned out to be roughly the same size as Mr Putin, a shorter than average man would have become a taller than average woman, a fact which grows in importance when we learn from the Defence Secretary that Putin suffers from something called ‘small man syndrome’. It's a diagnosis which his former experience as a ski instructor and army officer clearly leave him entirely qualified to make. On the other hand, it could be his personal experience as a man only a few inches taller than Putin which gives him this amazing insight into Putin’s character; we can only guess. There is, of course, nothing new about disseminating derogatory information about the physical attributes of opponents; it can surely only be a matter of time before allegations about the imagined deficiencies of Putin’s assets in the genital department begin to circulate.

Exactly what the observations of Johnson (another not exactly giant of a man) and Wallace add to the sum total of human knowledge remains to be determined. There is an outside chance that ridiculing men who happen to be on the short size may rebound on its perpetrators which might bring some benefit in the form of light relief to observers of the UK political scene, although it could easily come at the expense of harm and hurt to innocent bystanders who also happen to be vertically challenged. And that is surely the danger in making overgeneralizations, whether they be about height or gender. 

There’s also a question about their accuracy. History tells us that some dictators and tyrants were short – we tend to think of Napoleon or Hitler – but it also tells us that some were tall. Peter the Great – one of Putin’s heroes, apparently – was 6 foot 4 inches; Syria’s al-Assad is 6 foot 2, and Saddam Hussein was 6 foot 1. And history can be misleading – most of those dictators who we tend to think of as being short were actually very close to male average height (5 foot 7) – a statement which applies to Hitler, Putin and Napoleon for instance. In truth, there is no correlation between height and propensity to tyranny observable in the world’s historical records, it’s all in the fevered imaginations of those who want to belittle (pun intended) their opponents.

So, returning to Johnson, does his suggestion that the problem is Putin’s gender bear any greater relationship with the truth? It’s certainly true that there have been fewer female tyrants than male ones, but any objective analysis ought to start by recognising that females have largely been excluded from leadership roles in most of the world for most of human history. A lack of opportunity to produce their fair share of dictators does not, in itself, prove a lack of propensity. It is, though, probably true that certain attributes are more common in males than in females – and vice versa. It is quite possible that the desire for war and conquest is more predominant amongst males than females, but greater prevalence isn’t at all the same thing as gender being an absolute determinant. It depends on the individual rather than simply on gender. To choose just two examples on daily display, being a woman doesn’t stop Liz Truss being one of the Cabinet's biggest warmongers, and being female doesn’t stop Priti Patel being probably the nastiest person ever to hold the office of Home Secretary. Whilst Johnson may be clutching at the germ of a sensible point, his innate misogyny and inability to apply any sort of subtlety to his analysis make it, ultimately, next to worthless. If Johnson had been female, would he still have become Prime Criminal - and would he still have performed even more badly than a reincarnated olive? It's one of those things which are unknowable.

Denying history

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One of the oldest ploys of colonial and imperial powers is to deny the existence of other nations which might be in any way inconvenient to them - by, for instance, daring to occupy territory in an area coveted by the colonial power. It’s often accompanied by an argument that the people concerned had no meaningful history before they were colonised. It's an approach which has been on display today from the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, who said that Ukraine “… does not have a history without the Russian people, none at all”. It’s an arrogant and dismissive thing to have said, but it reminded me of the Welsh politician who said that “…between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century Wales had practically no history at all, and even before that it was the history of rural brigands who have been ennobled by being called princes”. Lavrov is clearly a mere amateur; such a statement would have been much more effective had he found a tame Ukrainian to say it. But perhaps the Ukrainians have more self-respect.

Seizing the opportunity?

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One of the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been increasing speculation about the possible break-up of the Russian Federation. From the Washington Post, through Bloomberg, to the i, columnists have been analysing the situation and wondering aloud whether the war could provide the spur needed for some of the 22 autonomous republics currently part of the Federation to seize the opportunity to break free. It comes against a background of increasing centralisation as Moscow accretes power from the far-flung parts of its empire, and increasing Russification, as the centre tries to impose a common identity and language on a very disparate group of nationalities, and the theory is that weakening a large colonial power by breaking it up into smaller states would generally be a good thing for the world at large. But only in the case of Russia, of course. Brave patriots seeking to escape the clutch of Russia are an entirely different thing from the dangerous separatists seeking to break up other established states, such as the ‘most successful political union in history’, as unionists like to refer to the UK, without a shred of hard evidence to back up the claim. It’s worth noting in passing that some of Russia’s possessions have, in one form or another, been part of ‘Russia’ since before the UK came into existence – historical longevity is clearly not the factor which accounts for the difference in perception.

Attempted Russification is nothing new – and nor is the concept unfamiliar to us here in Wales. It’s happening in the occupied parts of Ukraine right now (and for balance, it’s worth noting that the Ukrainian government is also attempting a process of Ukrainification as well). The remaining residents are issued with Russian passports, school curriculums are being aligned with those in Russia, and the rouble replaces the Ukrainian currency. It’s something that many states have attempted to do at many times in history, usually under autocratic rulers (who tend to be rather more effective, due to their innate ruthlessness, in enforcing the rules, using as much violence as is required). And despite all the lessons of history, such rulers always tend to believe that they can succeed in rapidly eliminating any sense of national feeling which does not align with the ‘official’ state view.

History has almost invariably proved them wrong. In Spain under Franco, the Catalan and Basque nationalities and languages were viciously suppressed for a generation; it didn’t work. Whilst the personality – and ruthlessness – of Marshall Tito kept the different nationalities of the former Yugoslavia together for decades, the country rapidly imploded after his death. Closer to home, despite the Welsh language being effectively outlawed for all official purposes for centuries, a fifth of the population stubbornly persist in using it, and we now have a government committed to expanding its use. Eliminating national identity by force takes consistent effort over a long period. Conversely, gaining independence and elevating the status of the Irish language seems to have been something of a disaster for the language. Perhaps the lesson is that, in many circumstances, the oppression itself provokes a reaction, meaning that oppression may not be the best means of achieving the unity of identity that the state demands of its citizens.

It’s a lesson that it’s unreasonable to expect Putin to learn any time soon. Dictators are far too easily convinced that they can simply will things to be as they wish and impose them if necessary; by the time they realise that they’ve got it wrong, it’s already too late. A similar rule applies to world kings – imposing their will on their distant possessions in the teeth of local opposition is usually counter-productive in the end, but their misplaced sense of self-belief makes it impossible for them to realise that fact until it's too late.

Will Russia fall apart as a result of the war in Ukraine? In truth, nobody knows. It wouldn’t be the first time a movement for national independence saw the imperial power’s difficulty as their own opportunity. On the other hand – as we also know only too well – killing an empire and all the exceptionalism which goes with it is no short term project either.

Dulce et Decorum?

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In an article in yesterday’s Sunday Times, Boris Johnson confirmed in his own words the point made here on Saturday – the decisions that he and others have taken (or as his acolytes insist on putting it, ‘getting the big calls right’), to encourage Ukraine to fight for total victory over Russia rather then seeking a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement, whilst at the same time denying them the types of weaponry which might give them a chance of doing that, will lead, as Johnson himself says, to a long drawn-out war of attrition, as lives and materiel are expended by both sides in return for marginal gains of devastated territory. Johnson’s latest ‘solution’ is to provide more help training Ukrainians who can be sent to the front line to replace those being killed or wounded. Between 100 and 200 Ukrainian soldiers are currently dying every day, according to government sources there, but the true number is probably higher – whilst any war is in progress, both sides exaggerate the number of enemy dead and understate their own losses. Training 10,000 every 120 days – the target Johnson seems to be setting – doesn’t even replace the numbers being killed, let alone those being wounded as well. It’s an approach to war which keeps the conflict going until, eventually, they run out of Ukrainians to train.

I wonder if Johnson sees – or is even capable of seeing – these trainees as real people rather than numbers. They are all somebody’s sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters; they are individual human beings with hopes, dreams and aspirations. Yes, of course, the ‘fault’ lies with Putin and Russia, for launching an unprovoked, illegal and immoral assault on a neighbouring country. But that doesn’t make it right to stand on the side-lines and encourage the defenders to fight to the last Ukrainian, whilst taking the soft option of selectively supplying weaponry, training replacement soldiers, and implementing economic sanctions at a snail’s pace against the aggressor. Neither the losses being inflicted by the Ukrainian defenders nor the inadequate and patchy sanctions will be enough to force Russia to the table, which is the only way the killing can be brought to an end. In the meantime, and not for the first time in human history, a nation is left mourning the loss of a generation, as this story from Ukraine relates. The immediate priority should be to stop the slaughter rather than prolong it, but Johnson’s response sounds more like harking back to what Wilfred Owen called the old lie than a serious attempt to stop the killing.

Getting the big calls right

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The PM’s decision yesterday to cancel his attendance and speech at a conference of his own MPs and activists in Doncaster in order to visit Kyiv has not gone down well with those he was due to address. I’m not at all sure that the attendees have missed much, but I can certainly understand why Johnson might think that a city under regular attack by bombs and rockets is currently a friendlier and safer place for him than a Conservative conference. One of his northern MPs said visiting Kyiv wasn’t much of an excuse because the PM “could have gone there any time”, but that perhaps misses the importance of the timing from Johnson’s perspective. The previous day, the EU’s ‘big three’ (the leaders of the three biggest economies in the EU: Germany, France, and Italy) visited Kyiv. Pre-Brexit, the ‘big three’ would either have included the UK rather than Italy or else would have been expanded to become the ‘big four’. Either way, from Johnson’s perspective, he was in danger of being sidelined – and it would be a huge mistake to think that anything Johnson does would have been motivated by anything other than meeting Johnson’s personal need for attention and recognition.

It also helps him to turn the news coverage away from his own misdemeanours and crimes to one of the issues on which both he and his supporters are regularly claiming that ‘he got the big calls right’. It’s a claim which, notwithstanding the natural outpouring of sympathy for a European country subjected to a vicious, illegal, and unprovoked attack by a neighbour, deserves to be analysed rather more carefully than it has been.

There are, ultimately, only two ways in which wars come to an end: either one side wins a clear victory, or else a ceasefire is agreed, followed by negotiations (which may take years or even decades) aimed at signing a formal treaty. Johnson’s ‘big call’ (and that of much of what is called ‘the west’ as well) seems to be to encourage the Ukrainians to continue fighting in pursuit of complete victory whilst providing them with enough armaments only to slow the Russian advance, and denying them the key weapons which would make a victory on the battlefield possible. That is backed up by the painfully slow incremental imposition of sanctions which seem more aimed at hurting selected individuals than at rapidly destroying or undermining Russia’s ability to wage war. It’s a recipe for a lengthy war of attrition in which many more, soldiers and civilians alike, will be killed or wounded until, eventually, the losses become so great that one side or the other sues for peace. Putin is probably assuming that ‘the west’ will eventually tire of the cost and impact of underwriting Ukraine’s war effort: he may well be right; the issue is already dropping down the news schedules, to be at least partially replaced by concerns over the so-called cost of living crisis which is itself partly driven by the costs of the war. Unless ‘western’ policy (or Russian policy) changes, it’s fairly obvious which side will end up making the concessions  – the only question is over how much death and destruction it will take to get to that point. Any conclusion about whether Johnson has got this particular ‘big call’ right ought properly to be based on the extent to which the likely outcome is acceptable, and rather less on the publicity and rhetoric of the man himself.

It's a gloomy assessment, which has nothing to do with justice or fairness. There is, however, nothing particularly defeatist about asking which is the most important – the location of lines drawn on a map, or the lives of those living on either side of those lines? Stopping wars after they have started is a major challenge, but the bigger one is preventing them from starting in the first place, and investing an increasing proportion of the world’s resources in armaments doesn’t obviously seem to be the best way of promoting peace. What humanity needs is a rule-based international order accepted by all under which disputes can be resolved peacefully. One of the few certainties is that it’s too late to establish one of those once a war has started. It certainly does not help, though, when the leader of a rogue state like the UK spends so much time and effort trashing such order as does exist. Expecting others to abide by the rules in such circumstances is wholly unrealistic. ‘Getting the big calls right’ is about more than generating a few headlines which can be used as dead cats. And it’s a lot harder. Especially so for a lazy narcissist like Johnson.