What price freedom? | thearticle

What price freedom? How far will we to go to defend our liberty and that of others who wish to live as we do? How much do we really care about democracy? These surely are now the central

questions in the battle to save Ukraine. The post-1989 order which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, hailed as the end of history by the political theorist Francis Fukuyama and

others, lies in tatters. Three decades of wishful thinking about the world after the USSR have come to a brutal end. Russia, or at least its leadership, has not changed — but we were not

paying attention. We were lulled into complacency by Russian money and oligarchs with fancy yachts who championed our beloved football clubs. We allowed ourselves to become hostages to

Russian oil and gas. We persuaded ourselves that a free-market Russia had ditched its irredentist impulses. That it was cured. Ukraine represents a massive failure of imagination by the

west. After 9/11 we were haunted by the menace of Islamic terrorism from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Terrorism is still a threat. But a Russian-occupied Ukraine poised on the outer edge of

Europe represents a threat of a different order of magnitude. What to do now is not a simple question. It does not have simple answers. It is certainly not a new question. War and conquest

are the incessant drumbeat of history. Before the nation state emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries the powerful acquired resources and wealth by subduing the weak near and far. Veni vidi

vici: the Mongols, the Ottomans, the British, French, Austrian, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Belgian empires. Out of the smouldering ruins of the Second World War came a global political

system rooted, optimistically, in reason, mutual respect, sovereignty and territorial integrity: live and let live. Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt redrew the map of Europe at Yalta in 1945.

We had all suffered enough. Surely we could all rub along now? This was not altruism. It was purely transactional, hard-nosed horse-trading. Britain wanted Middle East oil and trade routes

to the east. America sought global hegemony. Russia wanted control of eastern Europe. What the post-war settlement actually produced was a fragile and volatile international order, marked by

competing ideologies and rival political and economic systems. It produced the Cold War. It has now produced the Ukraine war. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum, signed by three nuclear powers

(US, Russia, and Britain) on the accession of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty, committed the signatories “to respect the independence and sovereignty

and the existing borders” and “to refrain from the threat or use of force”. We want to believe in the best in people. But optimism, we are reminded again and again, is no basis for

statecraft. Putin is an old-school bully. He is Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev. He has methodically tested the West, riven by single-issue identity politics, and found it wanting: Syria,

Georgia, Crimea, Salisbury, cyber warfare and dirty tricks to influence democratic elections. How can America and its allies stop Putin without starting a third world war? As the cruel logic

of war unfolds with more atrocities, more women and children killed and wounded and a refugee exodus already running into millions, the pressure to do more will grow. We should be under no

illusions. Creating the most serious refugee crisis since the aftermath of the Second World War is Putin’s weapon of choice to keep Europe on the back foot and ease his victory. Putin

calculated that it would play into anti-immigrant sentiment. It has had the opposite effect. Europe has closed ranks. Ukraine will prove a turning point in the bloc’s revival as a world

force. So what should we do? Will the sanctions now choking Russia be enough? Will supplying Ukraine with a limited inventory of weapons suffice? The answer depends on Putin’s intentions and

how far he is willing to go. Will he take the whole of Europe’s second largest country? How will he hold it if he does? Will he use Ukraine as a springboard to destabilise the Baltic

states? Might he try to repeat the post-war division of Germany and partition Ukraine in a line along the Dnieper river? Would he be content with Luhansk and Donetsk and the southern ports,

plus a guarantee of Ukrainian neutrality, coupled with security guarantees from the West? A prolonged occupation of Ukraine would trigger a ferocious insurgency launched from neighbouring

states, reminiscent of South Africa’s neighbours in the ANC’s grinding war against apartheid South Africa. This would be hugely destabilising for Europe. Economic sanctions against Russia

are hurting. But will these become an electoral liability if voters in western Europe start to feel real pain as they emerge from another recession and a bruising pandemic? If we are serious

about stopping Putin, if we believe that his seizure of Ukraine poses a threat to the rest of Europe, as it surely does, then we need to think imaginatively. First, we need to rethink our

military posture. The threat to Europe is now on our doorstep. The threat to Britain lies not in the Far East, but closer to home. The tank is not, it seems, obsolete. China remains the

long-term challenge. But vulnerable aircraft carriers patrolling the South China Sea are not our priority. Second, Putin acted believing that NATO would stand on the sidelines. We must

continue to supply President Zelensky’s forces with cutting-edge weapons. This could include fast jets, certainly a long-term commitment to equip and train the Ukrainian armed forces. We

must prepare Ukraine for a long war. Third, we need to sow a doubt in Putin’s mind about how far we are prepared to go to save Ukraine. War leaders who succeed are the ones that keep the

enemy guessing. We should throw everything we’ve got at Putin, short of boots on the ground. The blitzkrieg Putin hoped for has failed. Calling on Syrian mercenaries to prop up his

struggling army is a sign of weakness. Threatening western shipments to Ukraine suggests these are having an impact. Sunday’s attack on the Yavoriv military base just 15 miles from Ukraine’s

border with Poland — a NATO member — where British and foreign instructors have been training Ukrainians, is a significant escalation. But it also suggests growing anxiety in Moscow about

the way the war is going. Besieging Kyiv and pounding it into submission would be an act of madness. Taking the capital with ground forces would mean fighting street by street, house by

house. Do his troops have the stomach for that? Putin may resort to chemical weapons. He will not have forgotten that we marked out a red line when they were used in Syria, only then to

abandon it. The bungled Ukrainian campaign may turn into an eventual political defeat for Putin. But this will take time. And Ukraine does not have time. America, Europe and the UK have

ruled out sending in troops or imposing a no-fly zone. President Joe Biden says that a clash between American and Russian forces in Ukraine would mean a third world war. It is not a risk

worth taking. But an insurgency could mean years of instability in Europe and may drive us to the same outcome, if Putin stands firm. Max Hastings argued in The Times that President John F.

Kennedy defused the Cuban missile crisis by making secret concessions to Khrushchev. True. But Kennedy also faced him down in public with a naval blockade. A free people in Europe in the

21st century is being subjugated by an occupying power, just 77 years after Hitler was defeated. Do we allow this to happen, thereby green-lighting similar adventures elsewhere (e.g.

Taiwan)? Or do we do whatever it takes and pay the price of freedom? A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important

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