The West must help Ukraine to define victory differently

I don’t know the Russian for Make Love Not War. But something tells me I won’t have to learn it anytime soon.

I can’t find a single Russia expert who thinks that if Vladimir Putin were to die or be deposed tomorrow, he would be replaced by a democratic peacenik. Which means that everyone – including, alas, everyone in Ukraine – is going to have to find a way to live with a surly autocracy.

[ Lara Marlowe: Two weeks in Ukraine taught me there are no easy answers ]

After heroic Ukraine resistance to his all-out invasion exploded Putin’s pipedreams, the West fell into its own reveries of victory. In this wishful thinking, the Russian armies would soon collapse and Putin’s regime would fall.

Neither of these very desirable events is visible anywhere on the horizon. The fortunes of war are unpredictable, and Ukraine’s counter-offensive does seem to be making some progress, albeit at a terrible human cost. But there is little evidence that the Russian army is about to turn and flee.

One of the two main museums dedicated to memory of Great Famine has disappeared. That’s astonishing

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A hard Border is now a patriotic cause - and we laughed at the British for that kind of nonsense

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Catastrophic decline of wild Irish salmon is another of the slow scandals of Irish life

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Have we ditched the Stardust-era stereotype that the working classes are wild and reckless?

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The Prigozhin mutiny, meanwhile, showed us three things. The most active alternative to Putin was an even bigger thug. There was no viable political opposition able to take advantage of the rebellion. And Putin is still well able to liquidate anyone who threatens him.

If anything, the war has reshaped Russian society in ways that make autocracy even more secure. What the Russians call the ITshniki, the IT people, are the ones who really have fled. Much of the young, well-educated middle class – the natural nexus of democratic dissent – has vanished into exile.

In the long term this is disastrous for Russian society and the Russian economy. Brain drains, as we in Ireland know from our bitter experience of emigration, have long-lasting consequences. They shore up an established regime at home at the expense of social, political and economic dynamism. But that slow dissolution of Russian modernity is not much good to Ukraine right now – the first part of the equation is much more relevant to the war than the second.

Strange things happen in history but these prospects stretch wishful thinking into the realms of fantasy

This means, paradoxically, that even though this is entirely Putin’s war, his survival or otherwise may not be all that crucial to its outcome. The state he has shaped is now so completely authoritarian that, if he were to die tomorrow, only another autocrat could control it.

Ukraine has articulated three laudable war aims: to regain every inch of its internationally recognised territory, to bring Russian war criminals to justice and to secure vast reparations from Russia. If I were sending my sons out to fight, I too would want those to be the noble goals for which they might die.

But the first aim demands a military miracle. And the second two require, in effect, a complete collapse of the Putin regime and its replacement by one that recognises international law and can persuade Russian society to hand over maybe a trillion euro of its taxes to reconstruct Ukraine.

[ Rule No 1 in Putin’s Russia: defy him at your peril ]

Strange things happen in history but these prospects stretch wishful thinking into the realms of fantasy. Everyone who believes in democracy and decency should want them to happen. Everyone who deals in reality should recognise that they probably won’t.

What we seem to be facing instead is a war of attrition. We need to be clear what that means. It’s not just the funnelling of human flesh into the meat grinder, and the nihilistic degradation of Ukraine’s social and physical infrastructure (Unicef reported last week that 1,300 schools have been destroyed so far) and natural environment.

Wars of attrition are won by the side that produces and deploys the biggest number of effective weapons for the longest time. It does that by degrading the enemy’s capacity to produce these weapons while massively increasing its own.

Russia, for its part, can’t destroy the West’s military industrial capacity and almost certainly can’t outproduce it.

But the West can’t do the first of these things to Russia either – at least not without starting a nuclear war. So, if it is to win a war of attrition, it has to commit itself to switching huge resources into military industries for many years to come.

How long can democracies do this, with ageing populations requiring much greater social spending and the enormous costs of mitigating and controlling climate chaos? Given that the Ukraine war is now almost a decade old, is another decade of attrition sustainable?

[ Ukraine’s female soldiers: Nobody will tell you, ‘You are a chick, so you are not going to fight and save me’ ]

Can it go on until Ukraine attains those three, currently improbable, war aims? If the answer is no, the only logical strategy for the West would seem to be to help Ukraine to define victory differently.

After all, Ukraine has already scored some staggering wins. It has stopped an imperialist butcher in his tracks. It has emerged as a proud and largely unified nation. It has created itself as a European country, deeply embedded in the hearts of democrats everywhere.

Victory surely looks like the institutionalisation of those triumphs: the emergence of Ukraine as a full democracy and a member of the European Union, with international guarantees for its security and generous help to rebuild itself.

There is probably more fighting to be done in the next few months before sober reflection can make this clear. In the meantime, the fog of war should not be thickened by fantasies.