Fintan O’Toole: Vladimir Putin is losing his insane war on Ukraine

The Russians have long regarded “General Winter” as one of their greatest military leaders. Vicious cold assaulted the remains of Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812. The snow and freezing winds made life unbearable for Hitler’s half-starved Sixth Army at Stalingrad in 1943.

Vladimir Putin is losing his insane war on Ukraine. A counteroffensive has liberated the Kharkiv region and Ukraine seems, for now at least, to have gained the initiative.

But this is still a long, grinding conflict, and Putin is counting on General Winter again. The difference this time is that the big chill is to do its work very far indeed behind enemy lines, as much in Cork as in Kyiv.

Putin’s gamble in Ukraine was always based on his perception of western weakness. He did not believe that the rest of Europe would be willing to endure, for the sake of a country whose very existence he doubts, the privations he can impose through his control of much of its energy supply.

The uncomfortable truth is that we can’t yet say with confidence that he’s wrong. General Winter is about to combine forces with Field Marshal Electricity Bill. They will make a formidable army.

I don’t know if there has ever quite been a war like this before, where the outcome depends so much on the pain threshold of those who are not part of it. Ukraine cannot prevail without the financial and military support of democratic governments.

Those governments rely on the tolerance of their own electorates. The battle lines thus run through our bathrooms and kitchens.

The cost of having a shower in Roscommon or cooking a pot of pasta in Rome weighs heavily on the fate of Ukraine. Our light switches count, alongside drones and rockets, as weapons of war.

It’s a strange feeling — and strange feelings create unpredictable responses. No one really knows how far a general sense of solidarity will stretch if ordinary people have to choose between heating and eating.

How will it be when governments are facing their own enraged and desperate citizens and Putin makes it known to them that if they push Ukraine to make some concessions he could see his way to pump some cheap gas?

So much rests on the answer. The stakes include the future of liberal democracy and the future of the planet.

There is a lot to be said about how badly the West misunderstood Putin and underestimated the strength of the psychic hold that paranoia about “encirclement” has over Russians. There is a lot to be teased out eventually about the conflicting and sometimes downright contradictory signals Nato gave about its intentions towards Ukraine.

But right now there is just one imperative: Putin must not win. If he does, any hope for a law-bound international order is over. The ability of the democracies to withstand the internal subversion of authoritarian populist movements (all of whom are, not coincidentally, in thrall to Putin) will be fatally undermined.

Carbon fuels

At the same time, Putin is forcing us to face a question we have avoided for far too long: can we wean ourselves off carbon fuels? This was already an existential issue — the war has made it also an urgently political one.

If we are still dependent on carbon, we are still (directly or indirectly) dependent on the criminal oligarchies and mafia states that control so much of it. Putin has made that brutally clear to us.

He remains confident that, however much we bluster about the climate crisis or the values of democracy, we will continue to suck it up — “it” being both his gas and oil and the power over us they confer on him.

These are not abstract questions. All the signs are, for example, that one of the founding European Union states, Italy, which has made great progress in cutting its dependency on Russian gas, will next week elect a pro-Putin government of the far right. That will reinforce Putin’s belief that, even as he is losing ground in Ukraine, he can still win the political battle in western Europe.

Ukrainian refugees

Not abstract either is the presence of Ukrainian refugees. Attitudes to the war will be shaped by how they are regarded by local communities, as the initial surge of enthusiasm wanes and the reality of a long commitment becomes plain.

At the end of March, the Minister for Agriculture, Charlie McConalogue, suggested that Ireland might take in 200,000 refugees. In fact, we are struggling to cope with even a quarter of that number.

Back in April, I expressed the fear that those individuals and communities who were being most compassionate would discover that “these good deeds will not go unpunished”. What I was afraid of was that the State would, in effect, leave them to deal with all the problems of a large influx of displaced and traumatised people.

Those fears are now being realised.

A small community I know well is that of Ballyvaughan in Co Clare. Ukrainian refugees now outnumber the local population, which is normally about 300 people but has now reached 700.

From what I’ve seen, those locals have been terrific — generous, caring, practically helpful in all sorts of ways. Yet they are now increasingly uneasy.

Much of the tourist industry around the village is shutting down because accommodation has been taken over for refugees. The medical centre is overwhelmed and locals find it hard to get an appointment.

The primary school has gone from having 26 pupils to having more than 50 — with no increase in capitation funding. There’s a growing sense of frustration and abandonment. It feels like decency is being exploited.

If this is replicated across Ireland and across western Europe, it could be disastrous. A two-pronged attack on ordinary people’s instinctive sense of solidarity with Ukraine — huge electricity bills and badly-organised provision for refugees — could well succeed this winter.

The defence of Ukraine has to be conducted on the home front. It requires two swift and decisive manoeuvres.

One is the protection of middle- and low-income families from rising energy bills. The other is real dialogue with, and support for, the communities that are hosting large numbers of refugees.

Ukraine’s successes on the battlefield will help to reassure the citizens of its allied countries that their sacrifices are not pointless. But they also make it ever more obvious to those citizens that this war has a long way to go.

The first glow of indignation and sympathy has faded. It has to be replaced by a realistic campaign to mitigate the problems the war creates for ordinary people in the West.

Winter is coming. Governments must act to make sure that our hearts do not grow cold towards Ukraine.