This week marks 1,000 days of war in Ukraine. The i Paper has the stories you need to read to understand how we got here, what happens next – and what you can do.
1,000 days of war, explained | Modern war evolves | Fears over Trump-Putin deal | How you can help Ukraine | Ways Europe could step up
Why not accept that Ukraine’s east is now lost to Russia and put an end to a vicious stalemate that will save lives and money and stabilise relations with the nuclear-armed Kremlin?
Because to do so, and fall in with an agenda being pushed by the incoming Trump administration but driven by Vladimir Putin, would be as daft as Tulsi Gabbard’s “aloha” approach to the biggest conflict in Europe since World War Two.
Gabbard is the Trump pick for Director of National Intelligence. An army reservist with no experience in foreign affairs, or in intelligence, she will be responsible for overseeing 18 spy agencies.
Soon after Putin ordered a full-scale invasion on Ukraine, she posted on Twitter: “It’s time to put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha, respect and love, for the Ukrainian people by coming to an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country – i.e. no military alliance with Nato or Russia…”
Let’s examine that. Moldova is a neutral country but Russian troops still occupy its Transnistria region. Moldova’s government has accused the Kremlin of trying to wreck its recent referendum on joining the European Union and presidential elections with a vote-buying scam and vast spending on media manipulation.
Russia has interfered in the UK’s Brexit vote, and US elections since 2016. It is also using proxy groups and gangsters to conduct a campaign of sabotage across Europe, including the UK, according to several western intelligence organisations. Two men were charged last April in the UK with trying to set fire to a warehouse storing aid for Ukraine. Similar plots have been foiled in Germany, Sweden and the Czech Republic.
Russia invaded Ukraine, it said, partly to protect the rights of the ethnic Russian population in the country’s east. It did the same when it invaded Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014.
If Russia prevails and keeps hold of the territory it has taken by force in eastern Ukraine, there is little chance that Putin’s imperial fantasies will stop there. Kaliningrad is a Russian enclave about 500 miles from the edge of Russia proper, sandwiched between Lithuanian and Poland. If, or rather when, Putin decides he wants to destabilise the former Soviet colonies in the Baltics, he has a readymade excuse and will manufacture an ethnic danger to his countrymen in Kaliningrad and rush to their rescue with another invasion, this time of Lithuania or Poland.
Moldova is at risk. Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia too. Poland remembers the years when it fell under the Soviet Union’s yoke without the warm nostalgia of the Kremlin. Hungary is vulnerable to Russian influence and its president appears keen to become a subject of the Kremlin again. Putin fan Viktor Orban, a loyal “useful idiot” of the Soviet era, seems to recall the crushing of the anti-Soviet Hungarian uprising with tanks in 1956 with some warmth. In short, Europe’s eastern flank is vulnerable.
But Russia’s modern Tsar has a more powerful reason to feed his fetish for expansion. Whether it’s Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine or the Baltics, the evolution of democracy, economic success and freedom in areas very close to Russia are existential threats to Putin’s rule. No Russian who peers over the border fence from his kleptocratic gangsterland of poverty and fear can fail to ask: “Why haven’t we got that?” Pretty soon that question becomes a political movement and even a revolution.
Putin won’t stop at Ukraine because he cannot.
The only option for the West to prevent wider instability and danger of outright war between Russian and Nato is to stand with Volodymyr Zelensky in refusing to give up land to Russia. The Crimea was his beachhead for an invasion further into Ukraine. Ukraine cannot be allowed to become a launch pad for further aggression.
Ukraine will not do any deal to cede its east that does not guarantee security with a Nato force on its frontline with Russia, which Putin will not countenance. War will therefore continue.
If Ukraine is abandoned, as threatened by the Trump administration, then the Kremlin may, eventually, capture Kyiv.
Success like that will only drive Putin’s wider ambitions and he will harnesses the entire Russian economy to war with 40 per cent of the budget now going on the military.
Gabbard is on record defending Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a defence of his own nation’s vital national security interests. Ukraine, she has said, is a corrupt kleptocracy.
Nato, meanwhile, appears to be under threat from a new Trump administration which would further serve the interests of the Kremlin.
Putin could not have asked for better right now. His own troops are being mauled in Ukraine, he’s having to ask North Korea for men and ammunition, and all of this while fighting an enemy that’s had only piecemeal and limited support from the West.
If Ukraine loses American aid then Russia may take a chunk of its territory, rest, rearm and reorganise its troops, and branch out further into Europe.
Ideally, for Putin, this is the moment when further support for Ukraine, which is also bleeding out, is called into question. There are no comfortable answers to the conundrum of Ukraine. But the worst is any kind of Putin victory.
Sam Kiley is the former defence and security editor at Sky News and is writing a book about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
This week marks 1,000 days of war in Ukraine. The i Paper has the stories you need to read to understand how we got here, what happens next – and what you can do.
How weapons have changed since Russia invaded Ukraine – and what’s coming next. From devastating anti-tank weapons to autonomous drones, the Ukraine conflict has transformed the way wars are fought. But it is also serving as a sobering warning to the West that it must prepare to fight in radically different ways. Click here to read
How a Trump-Putin peace deal is sparking fear in Kyiv. Senior Kyiv official concedes that the President-Elect could force a harsh deal to end the war as a third of Ukrainians would now accept giving up land to Russia for peace. Click here to read
The seven ways Europe could step up to help Zelensky. Europe is facing growing questions over how far it can – and will – go to help Ukraine fight back. Click here to read
1,000 days of war in Ukraine – what’s happened and where we are now. Hundreds of thousand of Russians and Ukrainians have died since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February. Click here to read
How to help Ukraine, from where to donate to hosting a refugee. Organisations continue to support Ukrainians – both in Ukraine and in the UK. Click here to read
Liz Truss needs to take her own advice, and cease and desist