Having resisted Putin’s invasion at the start, our leaders are now failing to articulate what is at stake if tyrants win

CHARLES MOORE15 December 2023 • 6:30pm

Walking along Whitehall a couple of nights ago, I passed a pro-Ukraine demonstration on the pavement opposite Downing Street. It was friendly, as was the reception it was given by passers-by, but it was small. 

At the stall the demonstrators had set up, I bought a Ukrainian flag. It will be my family’s third erected in our garden. We ran up our first after the war broke out, and its replacement for its first anniversary – February 22 this year. Now it is looking faded and tatty. I feel unhappily confident that we shall be needing a new one as the conflict begins its third year in two months’ time. 

It is a sad fact of human nature – and therefore of democratic politics – that we find it hard to sustain interest in something for very long, especially something which seems far away. 

At the beginning of the war, there was huge sympathy for Ukraine as Vladimir Putin attacked, and then great joy at the courage and skill shown by the Ukrainians in fighting back. Nearly two years on, nothing has happened to make British opinion change sides. We can see as clearly as ever how aggressive and brutal Putin remains, and how bravely Ukraine resists. But we definitely mind less and pay less attention. 

We – by which I mean all people, not just the British – also develop, over time, a slight resentment against a cause we in principle support. There is a bit of a “What ? Are you still asking us for more?” feeling lurking. Even in Poland, Ukraine’s most important and culturally closest Nato neighbour, this has become an issue. Currently, the Polish/Ukrainian border posts have become scenes of freezing misery as Polish farmers and lorry drivers strike over Ukrainian grain prices, which “undercut” their own. 

Comparable feelings underlie quite a lot of reaction to conflict in the Middle East. Both Israel and the Palestinians have strong supporters here, but perhaps the most common feeling is “Why do we have to pay attention to this quarrel that does not concern us?” 

My own reaction to the repeated pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London is shock that, after the most grotesque anti-Semitic massacres in my lifetime, these marches are directed against the victim – Israel – rather than the perpetrators – Hamas. Such a feeling is widely shared, but I sense that the even stronger feeling, among the great majority that is neither Jewish nor Muslim, is more of the “Why can’t they just shut up?” variety. 

This feeling is understandable, but it encourages a false moral equivalence which emboldens the worst actors in the drama. You are perfectly entitled to dislike Benjamin Netanyahu and criticise his policy, but there is no legitimate comparison between the elected government of a nation state which must defend itself and an unelected armed group that rapes and murders or kidnaps (or kidnaps and then murders) citizens of a race and nation it teaches its followers to hate. 

In the case of Russia, there are few takers in Britain for the almost pro-Putin position of some Republicans in the United States, or of Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, as he tries this week to stall EU aid to Ukraine. 

But it is telling, nevertheless, to compare our mesmerised horror at Putin’s grandiose public announcement in February 2022 of imminent attack and annexation with our lack of attention to his television Question and Answer session on Thursday night, in which he talked about “dialogue” while boasting that he now has more than 600,000 troops in Ukraine.

The presentation is different. The threat is the same; or rather, it is perhaps more formidable, since Putin has had some time to learn from his early mistakes. 

No point, really, in criticising public opinion for weakness. We in the West have our own problems which bulk large. We feel – though, goodness knows, we are still spared the worst of it – that we have supped full of horrors. All the more reason, then, for political leadership, but the ever-growing sense is that it is absent. 

Good political leadership creates possibility. It is particularly important in foreign policy because we, the public, need more guidance than on domestic issues. Boris Johnson did this very well in the first weeks of the war. He immediately articulated what was at stake. His successors, though never taking the wrong line, have tended to let the urgency of the issue drain away. 

A small but sad straw in the wind blowing in the opposite direction is the decision by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, reported in this paper. He will not, after all, send scrappage-candidate vehicles to help Ukraine. 

The idea, which he has played along with for many months, was that lots of such vehicles could be sent once handed over for scrappage under his unpopular Ulez scheme. Now Mr Khan has written to the Mayor of Kyiv to say that he cannot, after all, get them to Ukraine: it would be unlawful since there is no “direct benefit” to Londoners. Obviously legal advice matters, but one can be confident that if Mr Khan had the political will to help Ukraine, he would take the risk involved, and get credit for such an imaginative gesture. 

A wider, bigger example lies in Western reaction to the aftermath of the October 7 pogroms. As time goes on, we expend most of our political energy in urging restraint on Israel, because of the needs of the civilian population of Gaza. It can never be wrong to express concerns about such needs. But we should be reminding the world that if Hamas did not ruthlessly make Gaza its human shield as it commits murder in Israel, no Gazan civilian need die. The extirpation of Hamas would provide the only true security for Gazans. If it is to be done, it needs to be done quickly. 

Similarly, David Cameron, our new Foreign Secretary, said he was “disappointed” when the Israeli ambassador this week expressed the view that there is no prospect of a “two-state solution”. Lord Cameron did not need to endorse her remarks, perhaps, but surely he could have refrained from comment. She was, after all, stating a political reality which is absolutely plan, a reality created by Palestinian intransigence and Hamas’s brutality, not by Israel. 

Despite the manifold complications of both subjects, the importance of Ukraine and Israel/Palestine to the West is easy to explain. In both places, powers are trying, by violence, to overthrow an international order created under Western leadership. 

If they succeed, we are all defeated – on energy supply, on democracy, on the security of many other borders. 

If our leaders do not explain this, and act on their explanations now, they will lose. We shall have encouraged Ukraine and Israel to fight back only to fade away when they do so. We shall then have squandered our victory in the Cold War more than 30 years ago, and permitted the creation of a new and more horrible globalisation – a world shaped by totalitarians.

Russia, actively furnished with arms by Iran and North Korea, would have won a massive advantage which it and its more discreet but more powerful friend, China, would then exploit. Countries which now face both ways, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, would then turn against us. Islamist extremists in our midst would be emboldened. 

The EU and Britain would express rhetorical solidarity with all the good causes at stake, but be incapable of acting without the United States. And the United States, in its turn, might be run either by an old, confused lame duck, or by a man who thinks he can solve the problem in 24 hours of chat with Putin.