In June 1963, at the height of the Cold War, US President John F. Kennedy gave the definitive speech of his political career. He journeyed to a contested European capital under threat from Russia. West Berlin, he announced, was the frontier of freedom and liberty. In standing up to the man in the Kremlin, then Nikita Khrushchev, Kennedy stated he was at one with the West Germans. “As a free man, I take pride in the words Ich bin ein Berliner (I am a Berliner)!”

Sixty years on, at the beginning of this week, President Joe Biden echoed JFK’s famous visit with one of his own. It will be the defining moment of this presidency. Even as air raid sirens sounded, from the centre of contested Kyiv, Biden announced that President Zelensky and all Ukrainians “remind the world every single day what the word courage means. You remind us that freedom is priceless. It’s worth fighting for, for as long as it takes. And that’s how long we’re going to be with you, Mr. President, for as long as it takes”.

With these words, Biden closed the pages on Ukraine’s incredible triumph of survival during the last year. It is a timely reminder that symbolic, at-risk gestures matter: Gandhi on his Salt March, Churchill in the blitz with his cigar, Kennedy at the Berlin Wall, Biden inspecting still-warm missile craters in Kyiv. Simply by taking the hazardous trip, Biden made a strategic move of international significance. Putin was furious: by comparison, his state of the nation address to Russia was limp and lacked fire. Some of his audience (yes, even Mr Lavrov) were nodding with tedium. Biden temporarily robbed Moscow of any initiative, but his words also focussed on the future. 

Vendors of armchairs for retired generals have had a busy year

The Black Sea contains 131,000 cubic miles of seawater. I would not be surprised if a similar amount of ink has been used in assessing the war in Ukraine to date. Vendors of armchairs for retired generals and geopolitics professors have had a particularly busy year since 24 February 2022, yet it is to the future I wish to turn. The Russian leader has nailed his colours to the mast. He is in this for the long haul. As my friend, the historian of Stalingrad Iain MacGregor, noted in The Spectator this week, Putin’s obsession with military history has so far blinded him. He forgets that the conflict that made the USSR — the Great Patriotic War of 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945 — was won because Russia was initially fighting on its own territory for national survival. This is why France in 1914-18 prevailed at such high cost, and why Ukraine will today. When at stake are your own fields and farms and cities, your families and people, then no price is too high. 

The war in the east continues, not because Putin has no “off-ramp”, but because he doesn’t want one. The Great Dictator, hypnotised with his predecessor, Josef Stalin, has been looking for today’s Stalingrad. He thought he might have found it in Mariupol, but Russia’s capture of the stinking ruins has failed to be in any way decisive. An ordinary soldier, called up to defend his homeland wrote, “This is an unending Hell. I live in a casement at the bottom of this fort with the light on, day and night. You can’t go out for fear of shell fragments, which fall daily … when will this veritable martyrdom end?” The soldier was French, writing from Verdun in June 1916, where another life and death struggle started 107 years ago this week. Casualties to date suggest that Putin does not care about human life, whether Russian or Ukrainian. Instead, he is searching for a place of glorious struggle, where through sheer willpower, at staggering cost, his forces will prevail. So far, there has been no Putingrad in this war. He would like one, for the sheer intimidation value this would bring his war machine in the future. 

In the past, interpreting a Western reluctance to intervene as weakness, Putin pocketed small wins in Georgia, the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk and Donbas regions. He could have continued to nibble away with more “bite-and-hold” military attacks. Instead last February he ran out of patience and chose all-out war. Nothing in his rhetoric now suggests a wish to compromise or retreat. It is difficult to see any eventual outcome in terms of a quick-fix ceasefire or armistice, of the kind that ended the Korean War in 1953. Would the rest of the world be prepared to police a massive demilitarised zone (DMZ), possibly for decades? I surmise the staggering military and economic commitment required would be off-putting. In any case, the many atrocities in Bucha, Irpin and elsewhere have hardened resolve for a more conclusive end, without voluntarily ceding any sovereign territory 

One of the lessons from Munich in 1938 is that peace at any price — as some on the left and right wish today — does not dissolve the antagonisms, desire for more “living space” or extra-judicial killing. This was why peace-making stumbled so often in the Balkans. Peace has to be imposed with mutual consent and then enforced, for it to work. So far, neither Russia nor Ukraine has any incentive to agree to a settlement which goes against their interests. 

History also suggests the temporary fix of an unresolved ceasefire, with the West retrospectively acknowledging Russian landgrabs elsewhere, would set a dangerous precedent for other ongoing confrontations. I am thinking of disputes over seabed terrain and minerals between Russia and the West in the Barents Sea of the Arctic; the Russian minority of Transnistria in Moldova; Moscow’s annexation of Georgian territory in Abkhazia and South Ossetia; Greece and Turkey at loggerheads over oil reserves in the Aegean and terrain on Cyprus. That is before any attention is turned to Iran’s regional aggression in the Gulf, North Korean sabre-rattling against its southern neighbour, or that of China towards Taiwan. In this fractured 21st century, any diplomatic outcome in Ukraine has to be put into a wider context, as Fiona Hill, the go-to Putin expert in Washington D.C., observes. 

Moscow will negotiate only when further escalation is beyond reach

In over twenty years of Putin-watching, I assess that any offer to negotiate from Moscow will merely be an exercise in exploring Ukraine’s weaknesses. How much is Kyiv willing to concede? How far can Putin push Zelensky and his allies? Unable to match the quality of Western weaponry on the steppes of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s hope is to outmatch its opponent with sheer numbers, wearing down Kyiv’s allies with a protracted campaign. After all, the Great Patriotic War taught Stalin that quantity has a quality all of its own. Stalin’s successor will supplement this with a protracted media campaign aimed at breaking the unity of the Western powers arrayed against him. Meanwhile, the Russians are continuously escalating, often via a rabid, nightly information war on TV. The West’s graduated response, first with anti-tank weapons, then HIMARS missiles, tanks and this year (I predict) aircraft, has been to prevent Putin from gaining “escalation dominance”. The assessment is that Moscow will negotiate only when further military goals and escalation are beyond reach.

There are opposing schools of thought in the West. I have jousted with most of them in print and on television news programmes during the last twelve months. There are those in the United States who assess that Ukraine is not America’s fight. Some are isolationist politicians of the left and right, who assess that whilst “Ukraine is not America’s friend, neither is Russia America’s enemy”. Then there are think tanks like Defense Priorities, who conclude that amongst “America’s narrowly defined national interests”, Europe should lead in countering Russia and shoulder the majority of defence spending in NATO. China is by far the greater menace, to where all US security efforts should be directed. Sascha Glaeser has set out their case succinctly in The Critic. 

Whilst the aforementioned are logical and traditional viewpoints, more bizarre are those who really believe there are fascists in Kyiv. Not even Putin believes this cynical rhetoric. He recently criticised Zelensky for awarding the Ukrainian 10th Separate Mountain Assault Brigade the honorary title of “Edelweiss”. This was a blatantly fascist “brand”, he claimed. All countries award their military units honorary titles for special achievement. In fact, the Ukrainian unit joins others from Croatia, Poland, Germany, Austria and neutral Switzerland in adopting the alpine flower as its badge. Even as he attacked the humble edelweiss as a badge of fascism, Putin would have been aware that his own 17th Rosgvardia Special Purpose Detachment had proudly worn this title and the edelweiss badge from 2011-16. 

There are those in the West who buy the Kremlin’s argument that somehow the Ukraine war is the fault of America, NATO or the EU for expanding into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. We are in danger of overlooking the fact that the ninth anniversary of the Russo-Ukraine conflict falls this month. Yes, it’s much older than you think. Back in November 2013, the Moscow-oriented Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a deal for greater integration with the EU. In so doing, he went against the majority opinion of his nation, who considered themselves Europeans, and triggered mass protests, which Yanukovych attempted to put down violently. His armed forces opened fire on the demonstrators in Kyiv. We now know that Russia supplied uniformed snipers to pick off a “Heavenly Hundred” of their leaders. Street protests erupted and continued for months, reaching a bloody climax between 18–22 February 2014. 

At this stage, Yanukovych abandoned his 345-acre private estate, complete with sauna and private zoo — a stark contrast to the grinding poverty of many Ukrainians — and legged it to Russia with an alleged $32 billion dollars in cash, conveyed across the border in a convoy of trucks. In the hope of a comeback, some of this money was used to fund separatist movements in eastern Ukraine. This historical record is not contested: a warrant for his arrest and the freezing of his assets was ordered by the EU for the embezzlement of state funds on an industrial scale. What followed was the invasion of Crimea, infiltration of the Donbas, and the murder of 283 passengers and 15 crew aboard a civilian airliner on 17 July 2014.

Ukrainians and other east Europeans look back further in time to the Yalta Conference of 1945, when Europe was split into two spheres. That is the divide to which Putin wishes to revert, but not what the rest of Europe wants. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were once part of the Russian Empire and USSR. In 1990-91 they chose independence, understanding the repressive evils of Russian administration. Later, they applied for NATO membership, not because the Atlantic alliance was proactively expanding, but because they still feared Russia. 

More correctly, the Baltics feared the uncertain foreign policies of post-Soviet Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev made the decision to end the Cold War. Yeltsin did not want to reincorporate any of the former Soviet states, but both were concerned more with internal reform than plotting Russia’s role in the wider world. The Baltic states foresaw problems if the Gorbachev-Yeltsin reforms were reversed, which is exactly what came to pass. The new arrivals were preceded into NATO for the same reasons by the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999 and accompanied by Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004. 

We now know that when he was still a government official in St Petersburg, Vladimir Putin was part of a clique who believed that the old Soviet Union should be reassembled. In his state of the nation address of April 2005, the master of the Kremlin stated his view that the collapse of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. The implications of these revanchist views only hit home when Putin made his incendiary at the Munich Security Conference on 10 February 2007. In it, he advertised his view of Russia’s right to dominate the security of eastern Europe, and he asserted Moscow’s determination to challenge American unipolarity in the world. 

Yet, even today, Europe’s left views Ukraine as a wrestling match between two traditional great powers. Such is wishful thinking. Russia, with its population of 145 million and GDP of $800 billion — less than one per cent of the world’s total — is no world power, nor does it have the means to be one. It might have been in the past, but it is currently the world’s most underperforming economy, given its natural resources, level of industrialisation and population size. The United States is not trying to expand its borders, or annex anywhere; it might have been in the past, but it is not doing so today.

For these reasons, both of Putin-directed expansionism and Western notions of self-determination, Russian aggression in Ukraine is set to last for months, possibly years. Ukraine’s fight for survival is not unlike France fighting the German invasion of 1914-18. Both sides have dug trenches to protect their troops over the winter months, whilst ammunition and equipment stocks dwindle. There is currently a shortage of shells (for Ukraine) and other equipment, such as medicines, drones and tanks (for Russia), as there was with the weaponry of the day in the first full year of war, 1915. 

Ukraine’s defence is tied to one man, as much as Russia’s war is to Putin

It was the tipping point, which ensured the mostly-European conflagration would be drawn-out and bloody. In that year alone, Germany lost 485,943 out of a population of 64 million; France 349,000, from a population of around 40 million; whilst Britain suffered 113,102 military deaths from a nation of 43 million, the same size as Ukraine today. Both Britain and France were sustained by their empires and friends across the seas in terms of personnel and resources. Thus, if history is any guide, Ukraine’s defence of its homeland will be bloodier yet. Images from the current fighting around Bakhmut, for example, with its muddy trenches, matchwood trees, rusting tanks and barbed wire, resemble the Western Front. With Ukraine firing up to 6,000 shells daily and Russia nearly 20,000, both sides are running short of munitions, as are Ukraine’s allies. 

As conventional warfare has returned to Europe on a scale not seen since 1945, all nations are revising upwards their needs for peacetime stocks of equipment and ammunition — and possibly manpower. The bigger wheels of history warn us that whenever a new technology arrives, be it rifled guns, shrapnel shells, steam power, railways, the telegraph, machine-guns or aeroplanes, governments use the opportunity to whittle down their conventional forces. They let innovation, not flesh, take the strain in military power. We find ourselves in this cycle today, where “old school” weaponry like tanks and artillery have been sacrificed for drones and cyber capabilities, in the certainty that another large-scale conflict is impossible in the modern era. 

With the threat of a low-tech attritional war, alongside high-tech manoeuvre, Britain is not the only country finding that its anticipated annual spend on defence has not only been thrown out of kilter, but is entirely in unknown territory. Yet, any support for Ukraine, whether high- or low-tech, is entirely justified, if even half of British defence secretary Ben Wallace’s claims are true, that “97 per cent of the Russian army is involved, two-thirds of their armor is out of commission, destroyed or broken, and their combat capability reduced by 40 per cent. This has a direct impact on the security of Europe”. 

As 43 million versus 145 million, Ukraine is a smaller nation than Russia, but she has a far larger coalition behind her. Both nations were suffering from a “brain drain” beforehand, and they saw a massive exodus of their monied classes when hostilities commenced. However, Vladimir Putin hopes that these demographics will force Ukraine to capitulate, because he can (to use Napoleon’s old phrase) “spend more lives” than can Volodymyr Zelensky. Yet, every assessment from monitoring deaths and funerals on social media, counting kills on video footage and itemising graves, has concluded that both sides have probably lost over 100,000 killed. The Russians will all be soldiers or mercenaries; the Ukrainians will include the many civilian victims of air raids and massacres. 

Chinese and Iranian interventions will not tip that balance in Russia’s favour. Neither are natural medium-term partners for Moscow, and both are motivated by the chance to distract and dilute American resources away from their own regions. On the other hand, Kyiv’s allies are solely focussed on supplying the modern weapons that will help push Putin’s hordes out of Ukraine. This year will see Western tanks and jets (again, I am predicting their deployment), operated by Ukrainians, contesting the fields and clouds. However, a Ukrainian win is not a foregone conclusion. Upsets lie ahead. Both sides are fast learning how to best integrate new technologies. Russia, for example, is now deploying maritime kamikaze drones to destroy bridges and air-launched drones alongside its tactical rocket strikes, to soak up Ukraine’s air defence missiles. 

Russian aggression is tied to Putin personally. His oligarchs and generals, whose numbers dwindle as they are replaced, die in battle, sport dangerous aftershave, take the wrong tea, stumble on stairs or tumble from tall buildings, are themselves nervous and tiring of the struggle. Look at their faces on television. Few of them see victory on the horizon. Over 50,000 of the Russian fighters in Ukraine belong to private military companies of the oligarchs, especially the former jailbirds of the Wagner Group. There is evidence of infighting between them and the Russian Army. This may trickle back to Moscow, for Putin is dependent on the military muscle of his friends. If they desert him, he is vulnerable.

Whilst Putin may not actually be ill, medical experts observe that he appears less well than a year ago. What if, like Stalin, Putin suddenly expires, is overthrown or otherwise incapacitated? He has no obvious successor. Russia might be torn between the hawks who want to continue or extend the war and the doves who wish it to end. A year on, our attention has already shifted to scenarios of a post-Putin Russia.

President Zelensky, too, is vulnerable. It is impossible to imagine Ukraine’s resilience without the bravery of the man in Kyiv. His nightly broadcasts to his citizens have forged the nation as never before. Zelensky’s refusal to flee and demand that he needed “ammunition, not a free ride” inspired the world. He offers us a beard, sweatshirt and cargo pants, but our mind conjures up a spotted bow tie and whiff of Churchillian cigar smoke. Putin’s spies and assassins have tried to kill him many times. What if they succeed? Is there another figure of similar stature to continue the fight? Thus, Ukraine’s defence is tied to one man, as much as Russia’s continued attacks are to Putin.

To date, there is no evidence that Russia intends to use nuclear weapons. Despite the angry words from Moscow, no preparations have been made, no launchers or signature protective equipment have been deployed. We would know. Our satellites, spies and digital eavesdropping would tell us. Military powers do not choose to use weapons of mass destruction without first protecting their own side. The West and Ukraine, for their part, have no intention of mounting a land campaign beyond the ante-bellum frontiers of 2014. This is not a conflict with the Russian people, many of whom have Ukrainian roots, but with the Putin-led aggression in Ukraine. Yes, military operations always bring the unexpected, but World War III is not around the corner. There are the faint hearts in all the NATO nations who would prefer to submit to Russian bullying than risk wider war. So far, the Ukrainians have denied the former KGB colonel his Putingrad, They will continue to do so, provided their allies — we in the West — remain strong and resolute behind them.