Daily Mail / UK
By PETER HITCHENS
Is Ukraine stuck? Wars can be very unpredictable – especially in their early weeks – but there are a lot of signs that Ukraine has run into political and military trouble.
It is not that its forces are likely to be defeated or that the Russians are about to sweep into Kiev. Far from it. They are in a mess too.
It is that the large-scale recapture of the land lost to Russia in 2022 looks less and less likely as the days shorten. Those who invested heavily in a summer offensive against Russia have so far been disappointed. And what then?
The USA is still (wisely) dead set against involving itself directly in the war, so what will break the stalemate? Does this just have to go on and on filling graveyards and doing severe economic damage to Ukraine and Europe? With what aim?
I am no military expert. I haven’t fired a proper gun for about 40 years and was not much of a shot when I did. (I sometimes whiled away late shifts on quiet nights in Parliament by using the rifle range which for all I know is still somewhere under the House of Lords.)
Wars can be very unpredictable – especially in their early weeks – but there are a lot of signs that Ukraine (one of its soldiers pictured above) has run into political and military trouble.
But I can sniff the wind as well as anyone, and when the mighty US magazine Foreign Affairs publishes a major article with the title Will The West Abandon Ukraine? (to which the answer, in my view, is ‘quite possibly’) I think something is going on.
I’ve never been able to grasp what Britain’s interest is in sustaining a costly and risky war in South-East Europe between two corrupt and ill-governed hunks of the old Soviet Empire. A lot of US Republicans, not just the ghastly Trump, are also doubtful about the point of it.
Then there are recent reports of growing friction between Ukraine and Poland’s government. I’m surprised this has not happened before, given the fairly recent (80 years ago) violent history between the two neighbouring peoples, in an area where events 500 years ago can still stir up bitter enmities.
And there is the current scandal of alleged corruption in Ukrainian military recruiting offices. This is no shock to anyone, as you can barely breathe in Ukraine without encountering corruption. But the point is that it suggests people in quite large numbers are paying to avoid fighting.
At the same time a lot of men of military age, banned by law from leaving Ukraine at the moment, are being caught trying to slip across the frontier with Romania. Which suggests that quite a few are getting through, and that this is a major difficulty for a country which has suffered terrible military casualties.
Honestly, if this war had not been so widely portrayed in crude storybook terms as a super-simple fight between total good and total evil, which it isn’t, we might have reached this stage before. But better late than never.
If our concern is truly for the people of Ukraine, then we would be much better occupied promoting a lasting peace than in fuelling and paying to prolong a war in which actual Ukrainians die and suffer, and gain nothing much in return.