A terrifying new world order has emerged from the conflict in Ukraine. If the West runs now, we’ll pay a high price, writes DAVID PATRIKARAKOS

By DAVID PATRIKARAKOS

PUBLISHED: 17 February 2024 

A new age was born in Ukraine. I saw its first beginnings in 2014, shortly after Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea, and then its full emergence as the Kremlin’s forces rumbled across the borders on February 24, 2022.

Putin’s act of savage imperialism unveiled a new brutal reality. The post-war world, in which states like Russia had at least to pretend to abide by basic international norms and Europe was safe under the umbrella of U.S. security guarantees, is dead.

Over the past two years, I have reported from all three fronts in Ukraine: southern, eastern and northeastern. What I have seen is not simply a land-grab by a sordid dictator, it is the emergence of a new global conflict.

Putin has returned industrial war to our continent. Once more, thousands of miles of trenches stretch across front lines.

Once more, tens of thousands of Europeans are dying on its battlefields. And back at home, we are still unprepared for what is to come.

Putin sent his army into Ukraine, assured by his assorted regime of thugs and sycophants that resistance wouldn’t last more than three days and that the would-be occupiers would be welcomed.

Of course, Ukrainians greeted the invaders not with flowers but with Western-supplied Javelin and NLAW anti-tank weapons. Their spirit and resolve stunned the world.

And in Washington, London and across Europe the strangest thing happened: Unity. We saw the bravery of the Ukrainians, and it gave us the resolve to help them.

Putin thought we would just stand by. After all, we watched him destroy Chechnya, rumble into Georgia and then steal Crimea — and we did nothing each time.

Meanwhile, he watched us lose in Iraq, do nothing while President Bashar al-Assad gassed his own people, and then finally scuttle out of Afghanistan.

The decadent West, Putin concluded, had no stomach for the fight.

But this time it acted. The United States sent billions of dollars of arms and aid. Even Europe stepped up.

Putin has always been clear. All he needs to do is wait. The West and its allies will tire; their countries are divided, their populations fickle.

The Russian leader has many advantages but, above all, he benefits from what I call the ‘despot dividend’.

Democracies plan with election cycles in mind. Their leaders can be voted out, their policies opposed.

But no one is voting Putin out. His people may suffer but they do so in silence.

Few are foolish enough to oppose his will.

Two years on, it looks as if he was right. The early days of Ukrainian successes are over. The turning point was last year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive that promised so much but delivered so little.

In February 2023, Zelensky tweeted: ‘We know that 2023 will be the year of our victory!’ However, throughout that year, Ukraine liberated just 395km2 of territory, while Russia captured an additional 683km2; it now controls 18 per cent of Ukraine.

And in those occupied territories, a process of sinister ‘Russianisation’ is underway. Receiving benefits or services without a Russian passport is now almost impossible.

Last year, Moscow’s education minister Sergey Kravtsov announced that Moscow was ‘carrying out systematic work’ to integrate children into the Russian educational system ‘as quickly as possible’.

The Kremlin knows that Ukrainian youth are its future. The longer Russia holds these areas, the more they cease to be Ukraine. For Putin, waiting is winning.

This story of how we got here is depressing for many reasons, not least because it was avoidable. First there was the lull in Ukrainian military operations in the winter of 2022-23, which gave the Russians time to build vast defences.

On the northeastern front, a battalion commander explained to me that the Russians had been able to dig three lines of defences with minefields 500 metres deep. There was no longer an easy way to break through.

Then there was the issue of the weapons. Every Ukrainian I have met is almost embarrassingly grateful for the weapons we send.

But they wondered why they always come after the window for their maximum efficacy had passed; and why they are given just enough to hold the Russians at bay, but not to drive them from Ukraine.

I still don’t have an adequate answer for them.

Why have we spent so much money and invested so many resources in Ukraine’s war effort, only to do three-quarters of what is necessary?

And, of course, the Russians have learned. While many crowed over their early blunders, soldiers on the front lines kept warning me: the Russians are not stupid.

In September 2022, a Ukrainian counteroffensive sent the enemy fleeing from the Kharkiv region. The Russians had been holding that front with just two or three understrength battalions. In 2023, they began to defend key positions with six or more battalions, with additional ones ready for rotation.

This speaks to perhaps the most important truth of this war: the numbers are inescapable. Once more, we return to the despot dividend.

According to a December 2023 U.S. intelligence report, Russia has suffered 315,000 dead and wounded — a staggering number that would have brought down almost any Western government.

But Putin is accountable to no one. During the Battle of Bakhmut — one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the war so far — I embedded with Ukrainian special forces.

They faced endless enemy attacks that they named ‘meat waves’ because, no matter how many of their soldiers died, the Russians happily continued to send more ‘meat’ to the grinder.

Despite these huge losses, Russian numbers are growing. At the start of 2023, Moscow had 360,000 troops in Ukraine. By the beginning of this year, it was 470,000, and there is talk of yet another wave of mobilisation following the Russian Presidential ‘election’ in March.

The war is becoming one of attrition: and, unless we supply the advanced weapons Ukraine needs, there will be only one winner.

By contrast, Ukraine is a democratic state with just under a third of Russia’s population. It’s hard to get accurate casualty figures because the Ukrainians rarely share them but, according to a U.S. official in August of last year, Kyiv had suffered around 70,000 dead and 100-120,000 wounded.

According to the UN, civilian deaths in Ukraine passed 10,000 in November 2023, which, given my experience of Russian attacks, seems an underestimation.

When Putin invaded, thousands of Ukrainian patriots rushed to join up. They were the best the country had to offer: smart, brave, technologically capable.

But since the beginning of last year, Kyiv has had to rely on mobilisations. Those called up to the front are often reluctant recruits, and if they are keen they are often inadequately trained.

During World War II, 22 weeks was the minimum Britain required to train a soldier for combat readiness. In 2022, such was the desperate need for troops at the front that the British-led, multi-national Operation Interflex gave Ukrainian troops a mere five weeks.

And that was for those who signed up willingly. Press gangs now operate in Ukraine.

A friend recently arrived at Kyiv train station to be greeted by a phalanx of masked soldiers looking for military-age males. Those found without papers excusing them from service were yanked off to army centres, ready for the front.

‘Hey, guys, why are you covering your faces?’ my friend asked the soldiers at the station. ‘What can I say?’ came the grinning reply. ‘Our skin is too sensitive for sunlight.’

As the war has worsened so has Ukraine’s political dysfunction. Recruitment was at the heart of a public fallout between Zelensky and former Chief of Staff Valerii Zaluzhnyi. In a November 2023 interview with the Economist, Zaluzhnyi said: ‘Sooner or later we are going to find we simply don’t have enough people to fight.’

A month later, Zelensky claimed that Zaluzhnyi had asked him to authorise a draft of 450,000 to 500,000 men — putting the responsibility for an unpopular move onto his general. It was the beginning of the end.

Earlier this month, Zelensky fired him. Many saw it as a political move. Zelensky’s popularity has plummeted — his net trust rating fell from 75 per cent in February 2023 to 44.5 per cent in January 2024 — while Zaluzhnyi is now the most popular figure in Ukraine.

Blame-shifting, finger-pointing and the fear of a popular rival: yet more problems that Putin doesn’t have to contend with.

Right now, the next six months look bleak. Talking in December about a possible end to the war, Zelensky admitted that ‘no one knows the answer.

‘Even respected people, our commanders, and our Western partners who say that this is a war for many years, they do not know.’

A military expert recently told me that if Ukraine receives the promised weaponry, it should hold its existing territory. Without it, retreat is almost certain. Zaluzhnyi’s replacement, Oleksandr Syrskyi said that Ukraine’s goal is ‘holding our positions . . . exhausting the enemy by inflicting maximum losses’.

The plan is clear: hold, reconstitute as far as possible, and hope sufficient support comes for a counteroffensive next year.

But that support is now in doubt. It is Washington’s aid that Ukraine needs most and if it has often come late under President Biden, it has at least come.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate passed a $95 billion aid bill of which $61 billion was earmarked for Ukraine. But now it goes to a Republican-held Congress.

Republican Senator Rick Scott has promised that the bill will ‘never pass in the House; will never become law’. Behind this recalcitrance sits the possible next U.S. President, Donald Trump, who still terrifies Republican lawmakers into submission. Last week he posted his thoughts to his Truth Social platform: ‘We should never give money anymore without the hope of a payback or without “strings” attached,’ he wrote. ‘The USA should be “stupid” no longer!’

All of this means that a stench of defeatism now wafts through certain sections of elite opinion.

Recently, Elon Musk, a man whose energetic ignorance of world affairs could power a fleet of his own Teslas, smugly opined that ‘there is no way in hell’ that Putin could lose the war.

‘This spending does not help Ukraine; prolonging the war does not help Ukraine,’ he said. ‘Having these boys die for nothing is wrong and needs to stop.’

It was cowardice and callousness smothered in bogus altruism. Ukrainians know what is coming if Moscow wins, and they have not only a right but a duty to defend themselves from the rape, torture and genocide that the Russians mete out.

This sort of talk must not stand because, believe me, this war is not just about Ukraine, but about the continuation of the world we helped build in the aftermath of World War II. We lost in Iraq, we lost in Afghanistan and, unless we find a little more courage, we will lose in Ukraine.

How many defeats can the West suffer without paying a severe price? The truth is, we’re paying already. Our enemies are emboldened; our deterrence shot.

The world has sundered once more. On one side is the West and its allies. On the other, a conglomeration of squalid states centring on Iran, Russia and China who want to wound us wherever they can. Ukraine is a front in this war (as is Israel) and they will attack us everywhere they see opportunity.

I say to Mail readers: you may not want war, but war is on your doorstep. Ignoring it will not make it melt away. You may not be interested in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran but, believe me, they are very much interested in you.

If we lose to Russia in Ukraine — and we do so because of our own division and lack of resolve — it will prove that all the Iranian and Russian rhetoric about the West’s weakness and decadence is right.

It will validate China’s message to the global south: ‘Hitch yourself to us because the West is finished.’

When China’s President Xi met Putin in March 2023, his words were chilling. ‘Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years,’ he declared. ‘And we are driving change together.’

Shadow foreign secretary David Lammy was right when he described Putin as ‘the ringleader of a new form of fascism’. It is vital that we recognise this.

Ukraine is the conflict of our age because in it you find everything that is forming the present and what might well create our future: U.S. dysfunction, European pusillanimity, Russian brutality, growing Chinese influence and the emergence of two clear sides.

But it has also shown what we can achieve when we are united and determined.

Two years on, Putin’s dream of conquering Kyiv remains just that. The Ukrainians, without a navy to speak of, have inflicted strategic defeat on Russia in the Black Sea (not least because of British help behind the scenes).

This war comes at a high price, no doubt, and at a time when it might seem we can ill afford it.

But if we don’t pay the price now, we will eventually be forced to pay a far higher one.

We must not abandon Ukraine.

If we do, it is not just our allies, it is ourselves we will betray.