In 1914, shortly after the very bloody first battle of the Marne, Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany had an unguarded moment with an American reporter: “We have lost the war”, he said. “It may go on a long time, but it is lost already”. This might have seemed strange to an observer at the time: Germany was in a not dissimilar position to the position that the Russian Army finds itself in today. It had advanced hundreds of miles into France and Belgium, inflicted hundreds of thousands of casualties on the allies, and controlled, by the end of 1914, most of the French coalfields that were, at the time, the heart of imperial industry in western Europe.
The problem was a simple one: By the end of 1914, it was patently obvious that neither side of the conflict, at least on the western front, could defeat the other on the battlefield. The war would ultimately be won not by the useless sacrifice of young life in the trenches, but by which side could longer endure the economic deprivations and social unrest caused by the war and the loss of life.
For the next four years, the front line moved back and forward by miles, sometimes only meters, at a time. Almost half a million young men died at the Marne in 1914. Two million total died at the Somme and Verdun in 1916. The photo above shows members of the Royal Irish Rifles on the first day of the Somme, doomed to die in a pointless offensive. In the year of 1918 alone, there were almost three million casualties on the western front, on all sides. All for an outcome that the German Crown Prince had spotted as obvious just a few months into the war. Why did nobody say stop?
In recent weeks, one might think, to read the coverage, that the Russians have finally made massive breakthroughs in Ukraine. After a four-month campaign, Ukraine abandoned the city of Avdiivka in Donetsk to the advancing Russian forces. Ukraine has begun to sound increasingly desperate for both ammo, and for men, with the foreign minister this week urging Ukrainians overseas to return and take up arms to defend the motherland. If you are a casual observer, you might think that the tide has turned decisively in favour of the Russians. Yet Ukraine is still willing to recruit yet more men, and cast them into the meat grinder. So too is Russia, with even greater cruelty and less respect for the lives it is throwing away. Neither country can particularly afford to lose so many young people.
The other problem is this: Avdiivka, finally conquered by the Russians, had a pre-war population of 32,000 people. Dundalk, by contrast, has an urban population of 43,112, if you exclude its hinterland. Russia and Ukraine have warred for months over a now-ruined city of no great significance. The idea of a crushing Russian breakthrough is propaganda – but so is the idea that Ukraine has the ability to simply turf the Russians out of Ukraine if only it gets some f-16s in the next month.
It should by now be obvious that the war we are witnessing in Ukraine has much more in common with the futility of the conflict on the western front than it has with just about anything else in the past few centuries of human history: Large numbers of lives are being lost in return for very little ground. Just as both sides on the western front deluded themselves that “one more push” might deliver a big breakthrough, so both sides in this one are determined to convince the world that their hour of victory can be at hand with just a few more weapons and a few more small victories.
This writer has always agreed with those who argue that the west – the EU, NATO, the United States, et al – have both a moral obligation and a logical self-interest in supporting Ukraine. Morally, because it is not the aggressor and because wars of aggression should be discouraged. If Ukraine were to be abandoned, Taiwan might be next, or Georgia, or any one of fifty other countries. Sometimes you have to fight one war to avoid the next six.
Self-interestedly because it is not in the interests of the west for countries to believe that they will be abandoned if it becomes inconvenient for the west to stand up for them. That’s just an invitation for small countries to seek their friendships elsewhere.
Where I increasingly disagree, however, is with the idea that Ukraine must have a blank cheque to negotiate peace only on its own terms, and that western support must remain unconditional. When it is obvious that a conflict is stalemated, and that the only likely outcome over the next year or more is the deaths of tens of thousands of young soldiers on both sides, then surely we have an obligation to do what we can to bring about peace – even if that peace is unsatisfactory.
Russia’s objectives in this conflict have, quite clearly, not been achieved. If anything, peace on the current front lines would dramatically weaken Russia moving forward: Ukraine would continue to exist, but the Ukraine that existed moving forward would be a much stronger military power, greatly more aligned to NATO and the west than it was pre-war. It may even end up in the European Union. Russia’s objective of dismantling a threat on its doorstep would have ended up achieving the precise opposite, in return for a few hundred square miles of land that it will have to, in effect, rebuild from scratch.
At the same time, Ukraine remains economically viable and largely intact. Peace on the current front lines would be a deep emotional loss, but not necessarily a strategic loss in the long term.
The alternative, of course, is years of more bloodshed with an uncertain outcome. The only certainty is that tens of thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians will die.
It is, I think, widely accepted that the first world war was an act of insanity which, in the end, collapsed four great Empires and wiped whole dynasties off the map. The irony is that had Crown Prince Wilhelm and his father sought peace in 1914, they may well have been able to achieve it on honourable terms. Ukraine and Russia can both still achieve peace on honourable terms. It’s about time that the west firmly nudged them towards the negotiating table.