It is easy to become frustrated when politicians make statements that are blindingly obvious. Sometimes, however, it can be a useful corrective, a reminder of fundamental truths that commentary can obscure.
Russia started this conflict. Russia illegally invaded Ukraine. Russia can end this conflict straight away. To reiterate, it was Russia who started this in the first place. They caused the conflict, they’re the ones who are acting unlawfully.
These remarks to the media by Keir Starmer yesterday were prompted by Vladimir Putin. The Russian president, eternally the injured party in international relations, had warned that if Britain and America lifted restrictions on Ukraine’s use of western-supplied munitions, it would ‘mean nothing other than the direct participation of Nato countries – the US and European countries – in the war in Ukraine’.
It is of course a wild distortion of the truth, a typically Putinesque mirror representation of what is happening. The changes the West could make are minor, and go no further than our current stance of alliance with Ukraine and the supply of military and economic assistance.
Putin wants the West to believe that ‘escalating’ the war in this way will provoke a serious response by Russia, one that would be addressed directly to the United States, the United Kingdom and others, and he wants us to be haunted by the idea that this response might be a nuclear one.
The likelihood of Russia using nuclear weapons in response to more extensive Ukrainian missile strikes is low. We can never be wholly certain what is in Putin’s mind, but we do know that he has made contradictory statements about Russia’s ‘red lines’ in the past, first hinting that tactical nuclear weapons might be employed in Ukraine, then denying that he made any such suggestion. In fact Russia’s current nuclear doctrine is relatively clear and straightforward: it will not use nuclear weapons as a first strike, and would resort to them only if similar weapons were used against it or if it faced an existential threat to its territory and sovereignty. Neither of those scenarios is in prospect.
However, Putin’s remarks had another purpose, which was to reiterate and reinforce the idea that Russia is acting in the legitimate defence of its interests against Nato-inspired aggression. According to this narrative, Nato’s expansion into Eastern Europe in two waves, in 1999 and 2004, combined with the prospect of Ukraine becoming a member of the alliance, is a threat to Russia’s security and integrity. It is to guard against this threat, as well as to defend the rights of Russian minorities, that Putin has taken sustained military action against Ukraine since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. This may be a Kremlin-composed ‘alternative history’, but that does not mean it is not repeated and amplified in the West.
Given Putin’s determined and consistent portrayal of Russian victimhood, it was refreshing that the prime minister, perhaps in a punchy mood after laying down the law to trade unions on NHS reform, gave his starkly brisk summation of the nature of the war in Ukraine. Sophisticated realpolitik is an essential tool for successful diplomacy, but so too is a reiteration of the facts: Russia has spent a decade undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty and territory, in defiance of international law and norms, it has spent two and a half years waging a no-holds-barred, indiscriminate war of conquest and, for that very reason, it has the ability, if it were to so choose, to end the conflict at a stroke by stopping its campaign and withdrawing from Ukrainian soil.
It is part of a deep-seated cultural malaise that makes western democracies so keen to see all sides of a dispute that they often seem eager to condemn their own participation and interests. The war in Ukraine will not end neatly or with perfect justice, and there are messy and painful compromises ahead. The West should be prepared for that. But that does not mean we need to forget or deny the plain facts: Russia is the bad guy and started this war, and whatever actions it takes will not be morally or legally justified.
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