Over the last three or four decades, the enemies of what might be called “the west” have changed, and come and gone. But in the process, they have all learned something: You cannot hope – at least for the moment – to defeat the west on the battlefield. You can, however, expect to outlast it in the court of public opinion. This is a lesson that the Ukrainians, through no fault of their own, are in the process of learning.
How the Government of Russia might best be described is an open question: On paper, it is a democracy just like Ireland. In reality, nobody seriously imagines a scenario where the President of Russia might be removed in an election by the people of Russia through their votes. It has never happened. Russian leaders, once anointed, tend to be removed either by voluntary retirement, natural death, or at the point of a bayonet. This security of tenure means that, for all intents and purposes, Vladimir Putin’s personal survival is not at stake in any hardship he demands of the Russian people. In the course of the war in Ukraine, he has demanded of them the hardship of facing western sanctions. He has conscripted their sons, and often poorly equipped those sons, before sending them off into the teeth of Ukrainian and western weapons. According to his latest speech, 600,000 Russians now sit shivering in trenches in Ukraine in the dead of winter, praying that the artillery or the drones hit some other trench.
In the west, meanwhile, the only lives to have been lost in the conflict are those who volunteered themselves to go and fight as individuals to aid Ukraine, such as Graham Dale from Raheny, who lost his life fighting for the Ukrainians this week. By any standards, western military expenditure on the war has been relatively light: The single biggest contributor, the United States, has spent a mere $75billion since the start of the war aiding Ukraine. This sounds like a lot at first blush, but in total it is actually less than 10% of what the US spends on its own military every single year.
Europe has paid in other ways: Ireland and Poland, for example, are two countries who have disproportionately felt the impact of displacement, with floods of Ukrainian refugees arriving into both countries. While this can be legitimately debated in terms of its impact on Ireland and Poland, nobody should so much as dare to think that either country has sacrificed as much in this war as the Russians or the Ukrainians. By comparison, what we’ve been asked to do to help, while inconvenient and perhaps at times unwise, is relatively little.
It should also be noted that the Ukrainians have used western aid about as well as they might be expected to: They have been asked to do something almost unprecedented in post world war two military history – to win a war without any meaningful air superiority. They are outnumbered, and under-equipped in terms of artillery and aircraft relative to the invading Russians, and despite this they have fought to an effective stalemate. Indeed, their one great military failure – this summer’s vaunted “offensive” – was probably a military failure borne out of the need to demonstrate “progress” to increasingly shallow and inattentive western audiences, who quickly – like Donald Trump – get bored of not “winning”.
Despite all of this, the Ukrainians are finding it harder and harder to get the relatively meagre (in the context of western defence budgets) aid they need. Why?
The simple answer is that Putin and others like him now know the west’s great weakness: You cannot beat us, but you can bore us into defeat.
In our democracies, public attention moves fast from one problem to some other, sexier problem. Much of the energy once devoted to flying Ukrainian flags is now devoted to flying Palestinian flags, or, to a lesser degree, Israeli flags. That conflict – despite its much smaller scale and objectively smaller casualty numbers – is now the one the public cares about, and the one politicians are judged on. Sending more money to Ukraine in a stalemate is derided as wasting money without a result – ignoring the fact that when you compare the size of Ukraine and Russia, stalemate is a result. And not one anyone expected before the war.
Putin need not worry about any of this. He has no need to satisfy voters, and no election coming up next year. Joe Biden does.
The risks here are obvious: Abandoning Ukraine is obviously an idea that is growing in popularity (and is certainly popular with many readers). But we should recognise our own patterns of behaviour as a civilisation, for the simple reason that our enemies are certainly learning to recognise them. If the Russians can simply wait out the west, until it gets bored and fickle, others will expect to be able to repeat the trick. If we were never prepared to back a long defensive war, then we should never have backed a short one either.
Given the time of year it is, it might be worth reminding western voters that a Zelensky is not just for Christmas. It’s for life. And adopting a country, just like a puppy, only to abandon it when you get bored, is a great moral wrong.