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Vladimir Putin’s monstrous invasion is an attack on civilisation itself

Britain and the West must come to terms with a loss of influence and the worldwide retreat of democracy

They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone.

Will that realisation jolt us out of the smug sense of security that has soothed us these past three decades? Confident of the West’s hegemony, we have indulged ourselves in arguments about identity politics, gender fluidity and climate change. Even as Russian T80s ground across Ukraine’s sleet-flecked steppes, our embassies around the world were lecturing less enlightened peoples about the importance of COP26 and LGBT+ rights.

Now we find the world order shattered by someone who persecutes gay people and who sees COP26 as a terrific opportunity to steal business from the democracies. Russia poured £60 million into Western anti-fracking campaigns, using gullible activists to spread scare stories about contamination and earthquakes. It worked, ensuring that Europe remained dependent on Russian energy exports. Which is why, for all the huffing and puffing, the EU will not impose Iran-style sanctions.

Not that sanctions worry Putin. Even blockades, such as those imposed on Saddam’s Iraq or Castro’s Cuba, usually serve to prop up rather than to undermine the despots. Sanctions hurt the wrong people – ordinary folk in the other country and your own – while allowing dictators and their cronies to get richer. If anything, they create a siege mentality, making dissent seem unpatriotic. In any case, Putin has already inflicted more economic damage on Russia by starting a war than would be added by targeted embargoes.

So, if not sanctions, what? Direct military support? That option was in practice ruled out 14 years ago. Until 2008, it seemed possible that Ukraine (and Georgia) might join Nato, but the alliance was not ready to admit them. Nato depends on the total credibility of Article 5: potential belligerents need to know that an attack on any one member will mean a war with all 30. Unless every Nato state was prepared to go to war on behalf of Ukraine, its admission would (it was felt) have undermined the Atlantic Alliance and made other members more vulnerable.

So we are left with few options. We can throw an iron ring around the front-line Nato members, making clear that any interference – not just a formal invasion, but any incursion of Russian “volunteers” to help local separatist militias – would trigger full-scale war. And, from that iron ring, we can support the Ukrainian resistance.

Perhaps that resistance will succeed, as Finnish resistance succeeded in 1940, making the price of total victory for the Kremlin too high. Ukrainians, who suffered the worst mortality rate in the world between 1933 and 1945, seem ready to make huge sacrifices for freedom. We have seen the footage of the civilian woman in Henichesk who presented Russian invaders with sunflower seeds so that Ukraine’s national flower might grow from their corpses. We have read of Vitaly Skakun who blew himself up while destroying a bridge in Kherson, sacrificing himself like Horatius in Macaulay’s poem. We have heard the defiance of the 13 soldiers on Snake Island who chose to die rather than surrendering to a Russian warship and who fell, with almost unbearable pathos, before an ancient shrine to Achilles.

Volodymyr Zelensky has stayed at his post, a Jewish leader in a country that Putin cretinously claims has been taken over by Nazis, a native Russian-speaker who refutes, with his every breath, the pretence that that language has been repressed.

Ukraine, in short, does not look like a nation in the mood for surrender. Even if Putin succeeds in overthrowing Zelensky and imposing a puppet regime, the conflict will not end. A guerrilla war will most likely follow. Ukraine may be ill-suited to a partisan insurgency – it is hard to imagine a more different topography from Afghanistan’s – but, provided Nato’s frontiers remain invulnerable, Ukrainian maquisards would probably be able to operate from safe havens in Poland and Romania – directed, perhaps, by a recognised London-based government-in-exile. Nor will the fighting be confined to Ukraine. It seems almost inevitable that Ukrainian volunteers will carry out retaliatory terrorist attacks in Russian soil.

The usual order has been reversed: this time, the war has followed the pandemic. The consequence will be a colder, poorer, grimmer world. I am not sure we have yet grasped the extent to which both our standard of living and our relative global power are being hit.

The Second World War, as Timothy Snyder observed in his gruesome history, was fought largely in and for Ukraine. Disruption in those fertile flatlands will push up food and energy prices further. Quite apart from the impact on petrol and gas, Ukraine supplies the world with much of its grain, poultry and rapeseed oil. Add in a Russian embargo and the possibility of a trade war with China and we are looking at a massive drop in global income.

At the same time, we must come to terms with our loss of influence. Sentences that begin “What we should do in Ukraine is…” are a fantasy. We can expel Russian diplomats, hold football games elsewhere, maybe even send weapons if we are confident they won’t fall into enemy hands. But we can’t do much to alter the course of the fighting.

Our declining influence has not gone unnoticed. For two decades, Britain and America have worked to bring India into the Western alliance, recognising its nuclear status, conducting joint naval exercises, encouraging it to act as an English-speaking, democratic regional power. Yet, when the UN Security Council voted to condemn the most flagrant act of territorial aggression of the twenty-first century, India refused to join in.

The United Arab Emirates has poured investment into Britain, from housing projects to freeports, from the ExCel Centre to Manchester City. It presents itself as the bringer of peace between Israel and the Arabs. Yet, when the chips were down, it too lined up with India and China.

The truth is that democracy is in retreat worldwide and, as it ebbs, it takes with it the neighbourliness among nations to which we have grown accustomed. Every league table – the Democracy Index, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit – tells the same story. After seven decades of steady advance, global democratisation stalled at some point between 2010 and 2015, and began to go into reverse. The strongmen in their sunglasses are not throwbacks, but grisly augurs of the future. As liberal democracy recedes, so does the peaceful international order on which it rested.

It is not quite true that no two democracies have ever fought each other. There have been wars between Peru and Ecuador, El Salvador and Honduras and Israel and Lebanon. There was a brief scuffle between Poland and Lithuania in 1920. A technical state of war existed between the Western allies and Finland after 1941.

What is indisputable, though, is that liberal democracies are much less likely to launch aggressive wars than authoritarian states. Wars might suit dictators, whipping up patriotic sentiment and allowing for the repression of opposition. But they rarely serve the interest of a nation overall. It is hard to imagine a democratic Russia engaged in the present monstrosities: public opinion wouldn’t wear it.

Putin has built himself a personality cult every bit as odious to those of his neighbouring Central Asian satraps. Every year, for example, he stars in an ice-hockey competition, terrified defenders leaping out of his way to let him score goal after goal. Even as his troops left for Ukraine, they lined up to kiss his icon while bearded Orthodox clergymen swung their censers. Such propaganda is more than most men can bear. After a while, they really do come to see themselves as messianic figures, raised for a special purpose above their dispensable countrymen.

When that happens, a country ceases to be civilised. What do I mean by “civilised”? The most useful definition was given by Winston Churchill in a lecture at Bristol University in 1938: “It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained.”

As the parliaments and courts give way to the institutions of autocracy, so does the peace that they sustained. Civilisation itself is under attack in Ukraine. We shall miss it when it has gone.

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