Ukraine: not if but when

By Richard North - May 30, 2024

Although I’ve been fighting shy of committing to a full piece on Ukraine, that doesn’t mean that nothing is happening there.

Far from it. As I pointed out a couple of days ago, things seem to be coming to a head, with a sense that we are on the cusp of great events – and not in a good way for Ukraine.

That feeling seems to have struck a chord with the Telegraph – usually the most gung-ho of newspapers which would have had the Ukrainians storming the ramparts of Sebastopol had it been given the least bit of encouragement.

The first glimmer of this sentiment came on Tuesday evening with a piece by Lisa Haseldine, taking time out from her day job as assistant online editor for the Spectator where she also covers Russia/foreign affairs.

The piece, as it first appeared carried the sombre headline “Ukraine now knows that it has just months left to survive”, with the sub-heading: “While Britain concerns itself with the General Election, Kyiv is buckling under the force of Putin’s brutal assault”, which left no room for equivocation.

Obviously intended for the paper the following day, it stayed in place for most of Wednesday, but with the headline changed to an even more stark, “Ukraine knows it is finished”, keeping the original sub-heading and with the text unchanged.

One should have known, however, that this was so far ahead of the paper’s editorial line that the headline couldn’t possibly be allowed to remain unchanged. And sure enough, as it stands for the record, it reads: “Without Western armaments, Ukraine may only have months left” – much more in accord with the paper’s line.

As to the content, this seems to have stayed the same throughout, Haseldine’s first paragraph telling us that while politicians in Britain pontificate, a thousand miles away, outside the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s war with Russia is intensifying.

Kiev, she tells us, has been forced to redirect thousands of troops to the north-eastern part of the front line to fend off Putin’s assault, leaving its defences exposed elsewhere.

This has actually been the case since 10 May when the Russians launched their cross-border attack in the Kharkiv direction, but it was not discussed in print until 17 May – and again by Lisa Haseldine, who wrote under the headline, “Time is running out for Ukraine to snatch victory from Putin’s jaws”, arguing in her sub-heading that: “The loss of Kharkiv would be a serious set-back for Ukraine, one it may struggle to ever fully recover from”.

At the time and even now, though, I don’t think any serious commentator believed that the Russians were intending to march on Kharkiv, and events so far have tended to support their views. The Russians seem to prefer to pull the Ukrainians into their killing fields and slaughter them where they stand.

In her current piece, without going into detail, she writes of Putin consolidating his strength while the West loses interest, as a result of which she takes the view that “it looks increasingly that Ukraine has just a few months of resistance left”.

Her concluding point is a political one, where she tells us that, while the general election here rumbles on, we should not forget the war in the East: “a Russian victory in Ukraine would rewrite the map of Europe and present the continent with a threat not seen for more than 80 years”. We must not forget this, she says.

Looking at the military situation in the round, there are no dramatic developments which would indicate that a Ukrainian collapse is imminent – just the same relentless “meatgrinder” tactics which the Russians have so far successfully adopted.

Such is the pressure, though, that it is not unreasonable to suggest that the Ukrainian capacity to absorb this level of punishment must be limited and, all things being equal, the end must be near.

The issue of the moment, therefore – brought to prominence in the New York Times – is the Ukrainians seeking to use the long-range weapons supplied by the US to attack targets inside Russia – permission for which, so far, has been denied.

Other suppliers, notably France and the UK, have not been so reticent and there have been recent examples of Ukrainian attacks on infrastructure and military targets inside Russia. But, given the vastness of Russia and the resilience that nations have demonstrated historically to such attacks, one cannot help but feel that these “pinprick” raids overall will have very little strategic effect.

Certainly, it would appear that the conflict will be decided, in the first instance, by the military situation on the ground. And here, there can no longer be any doubt that the Russians have the initiative and are dominating the battlefields to the extent that it looks unlikely that the Ukrainians will be able to recover.

Nevertheless, Hamish – ever the optimist – is on the case with an article headed: “Ukraine has one last chance to save itself”, the sub-heading telling us: “Whoever wins the next election, unshackling Kyiv must be a priority”.

The view of the Telegraph’s favourite colonel (retired) is that “the US government must at last take the shackles off Ukraine by authorising strikes into Russia with its precision guided long range weaponry”, the very option which would seem to have about as much effect as Hitler’s 1944 V2 “terror” raids on London.

In any event, the argument may be moot as the latest news is that the US intends to keep its ban in place. John Kirby, the US national security council spokesman, has said: “There’s no change to our policy at this point. We don’t encourage or enable the use of US-supplied weapons to strike inside Russia”, which puts a lid on the matter for the moment.

Reflecting this reality, the Telegraph is running a series of exclusive essays from prominent international commentators imagining the consequences if Russia were successful in its war. The first piece is by former Ukrainian MP Aliona Hlivco, headed: “Putin’s plot to destroy Nato is reaching its devastating climax”, suggesting that, “A Russian victory would unleash a cascade of events triggering irreversible changes, pushing the world to the brink of chaos”.

Ukraine’s fight, she writes, isn’t merely for its existence as a nation – it’s a battle for the very fabric of the global order, arguing that it’s about “safeguarding European security”.

This, she adds, is a rallying cry heard in countless statements from Western officials, often accompanied by assurances of limited air defence and ammunition. But, she complains, as Ukraine continues to lose ground, towns, and lives, the West’s response is tepid, with its only firm stance drawn around Nato borders, where geopolitical interests overshadow humanitarian concerns.

Asking what would happen if Putin dared to cross these lines, dismissing Western threats as mere bluster, she further asks what would happen if Ukraine falls, emboldening Putin to pursue further expansion into the other former Soviet Union states that, in his view, belong in the Russian empire.

Posing the question that many people will be asking, but which is essentially unanswerable, she asks whether Nato will truly honour its pledge to collective security, or whether that promise nothing but hollow rhetoric.

Arguing that Nato’s resilience is more fragile than we think, Hlivco asserts that, if Ukraine were to fall, it would not just be the end of one nation, it would potentially bring about the unravelling of Nato and the established world order as we know it.

The unleashed cascade of events, she says, would cause unthinkable and irreversible changes, pushing the world to the brink of chaos. Established democracies would find themselves marginalised and powerless, struggling to regain unity and authority amidst the turmoil. It would take decades to rebuild the rules-based order in the new fully reshaped world.

This, she declares, is what is at stake in Ukraine: “In a modern interconnected world, our collective future is leveraged on the fulcrum that is my home country. We cannot allow it to fall”.

From the look of it, though, it seems unlikely that we will get the choice. The manpower crisis, with the acute shortage of trained soldiers, transcends any other problem and is so severe that no amount of new Western equipment will save Ukraine. It is not so much if Ukraine will fall, but when.

And if that is really the case, we must hope that Aliona Hlivco is being unduly pessimistic and that there is something left of the established world order to salvage. This will be something a new prime minister will have to confront after the general election.

Given the choice on offer, perhaps pessimism is in order.