The West egged you on and then let you down
DEC 13, 2025
I’ve been waiting to write this piece for months in the hope that I would be proved wrong. The reaction from my Ukrainian friends suggests that I got the timing right.
A version of this was published in The Times on Wednesday
Вибачте, Ukraine, we’ve treated you shamefully
After saying we’d back you for as long as it took, we were cowed by Putin and then grew tired
Dear Ukrainians, we are so sorry. Britain and other west European countries, still like to say that they “stand with Ukraine”, as Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer told Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday. But with the Trump administration now demanding that Kyiv agree “within days” to cede territory to the invader, the truth is emerging. Actually, we got scared and then bored.
Our first and biggest failure was to let nuclear blackmail put us in a mental prison. The Biden administration in September 2022 believed there was a 50-50 chance that Russia would respond to looming battlefield disaster with a tactical nuclear weapon. Instead of facing down that outrageous threat, we flinched. We never sent you the weapons you needed to press home your advantage.
Our allies in Europe’s east, their senses sharpened by their own geography and history, were clear: the only way to exorcise Russia’s imperialist demons was wrenching political change following a full-scale military defeat. Ukrainians felt the same. Sure, victory would have its dangers. But defeat spelt hell.
Seen from western Europe though, that was far too risky. A defeated Russia could mean chaos, perhaps civil war, loose nukes, terrorism and economic upheaval. A stable post-Putin regime might turn its ire on us. We backed off.
Our unity has proved to be a fiction. Countries like the Baltic states strained every sinew to support you, while hurriedly boosting their own defences. But the rest of us could not manage even the simplest things: stopping the shadow fleet that exports Russia’s oil, or seizing Russia’s frozen central reserves and other assets, €200 billion or more of them, which would have decisively boosted your coffers. Your now-formidable arms industry, with its stunningly innovative drones, missiles and other weapons, runs at half capacity for lack of money.
We said we would support Ukraine “for as long as it takes”, without ever defining the “it”. That meant supporting you to win but not by too much, which turned into supporting you to lose, but not by too much: fighting to the last Ukrainian. We pushed you into a disastrously costly summer offensive in 2023, underequipped and unready: conditions we would never inflict on our own military. Now hundreds of thousands of your best people are dead, maimed or traumatised. Millions are bereaved. Nothing we do now can make up for that.
The more we displayed weakness, the more we encouraged Putin to keep going. Yes, the damage to Russia’s economy is colossal, as are its casualties. But Putin won’t stop until he is stopped. We won’t do that. Perhaps you still can. We would appreciate that, because our own defence and deterrence, on current form, will not be ready for at least a decade.
While making it harder for you to win, we projected our increasingly defeatist attitudes on to you. Surely you must see that justice — reparations and war crimes trials — is impossible. You must accept that some territories (and worse, their populations) must be abandoned for the foreseeable future. Nato membership, despite our past promises of an “open door”, is off the table, too.
We added insult to injury with magical thinking. Russia, surely, will be sensible and accept a compromise: a “just and lasting peace”. In truth, we have ensured that any ceasefire will be neither.
And then what? If we were not willing to go to war with Russia when we had you — a big, united, resilient, capable ally — on our side, why would we fight to protect you when you are bled white, traumatised and humiliated? If we arm-twist you into a truce, and back it with a flimsy trip-wire force from a “coalition of the willing”, we sacrifice not only your cause but our deterrent.
We cannot really plead mere cowardice. We have other, better excuses. One is selfishness. We did not really want to make economic sacrifices. That ruled out the kind of sanctions that would have disabled the Kremlin’s war machine. Some of us — notably the credulous Americans — see post-war Russia as a tempting business opportunity. Hard-faced men think they will do well out of the peace. Greed is good, it turns out.
But the real explanation is even more shameful. We got tired. It was inspirational to see how you cared about the freedom, democracy, legality, sovereignty and dignity we take for granted. We encouraged you to fight for them. You were so fashionable then, with your cheerful blue and yellow flags, photogenic people and witty memes. It made us feel noble and brave to host your refugees and drive aid convoys across Europe (Ukraine is surprisingly close, it turns out). But it all feels so 2023 now. What about Gaza? Sudan? The economy? Migration? Our attention span just wasn’t long enough.
Like a bad boyfriend weaselling out of a relationship, we make this about us, not you. We want to stay friends. We hope you will be good neighbours, and a good loser: no revenge killings please. The truth is that you have moved on. You are beyond feelings of disappointment or betrayal. While you now actively (and rightly) mistrust the Trump administration, you regard western Europe’s political leaders as irrelevant. Your priority now is survival and self-sufficiency; the alternative is extinction.
And us? Self-centred to the last. Sorry about that.
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Edward with the late great Boris Nemtsov:
In other things, I wrote about the over-hyped National Security Strategy for CEPA. My thoughts on Tom Stoppard RIP andall other past columns are also unpaywalled on the CEPA website.
I am leaving CEPA at the end of the year and will be writing more often for Foreign Policy instead.
I also will be launching a new specialist Baltic states thinktank. Details to come.
“We added insult to injury with magical thinking. Russia, surely, will be sensible and accept a compromise: a “just and lasting peace”. In truth, we have ensured that any ceasefire will be neither.”
My God this is so desperately sad to read.
I’ve never seen him write such a bleak article.
When you approach Europe, you first see cowardice. When you are amidst Europe, you see cowardice. When you depart Europe, the last thing you see is cowardice.