No one wants to talk about Ukraine any more

Apologies for this seasonal downer. Had the website such a listing, this column would surely soar to number one in The Spectator’s ‘Least Popular’ roster. For just now, few topics are a bigger turn-off than Ukraine.

Following Russia’s invasion, I got caught up in the same waves of emotion that washed over most western publics, and I say that with no regret. After relentlessly battling the prevailing cultural winds these past few years, I was relieved to feel a sense of solidarity for once. Most of us were revulsed by the gratuitous aggression, allied with an underdog whose bite proved surprisingly fierce, thrilled by a former comedian’s unexpected rise to his nation’s occasion and consumed by a weirdly addictive loathing for Vladimir Putin. Kyiv’s repelling Russia’s clumsy invasion of the capital was exhilarating. Like so many of you, in those early months I read about Ukraine every day.

I don’t any more. I bet most of you don’t either. Why, as grotesque as 7 October was, I sensed in our collective pivot to the Middle East this autumn an odd undercurrent of gladness that now we could plunge up to the neck into a different story. Ukraine suddenly seemed yesterday’s news; background news. But for Ukrainians, their war is still roiling very much in the present and is being conducted anywhere but in the background.

I’m no foreign policy wonk but I do know something about stories, and observers of international news constitute an audience, a readership. From the off, this story had a spectacular opening chapter, a classic hero – personified by Volodymyr Zelensky, but more crucially the Ukrainian people – and as wicked a villain as Shakespeare could have contrived.