On Wednesday evening, by the statue of Alanbrooke outside the Ministry of Defence, a small group of Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Byelorussians and others held one of their thrice-weekly demonstrations in Whitehall.
“If Ukraine falls,” a Ukrainian demonstrator, Yurko Kondratuk, told ConHome, “the next war in Europe will be in Moldova, and you will see African soldiers fighting for Russia.”
Russia’s so-called African Legion, successor to the Wagner Group, will operate in Burkina Faso, Libya, Mali, the Central African Republic and Niger.
Here is a direct threat to French influence in Africa, which plainly has something to do with President Emmanuel Macron’s recent conversion from appeasement to bellicosity.
As in the 1930s, when it was almost impossible to get other leaders to realise, until he attacked them, that appeasing Adolf Hitler would only embolden him, so now it is hard to persuade politicians and their electorates to admit the gravity of the threat posed by Vladimir Putin.
On becoming Chief of Britain’s General Staff in June 2022, a few months after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, General Sir Patrick Sanders said in his first major speech:
“In all my years in uniform, I haven’t known such a clear threat to the principles of sovereignty and democracy, and the freedom to live without fear of violence, as the brutal aggression of President Putin and his expansionist ambitions. I believe we are living through a period in history as profound as the one that our forebears did over 80 years ago. Now, as then, our choices will have a disproportionate effect on our future.
“This is our 1937 moment. We are not at war – but we must act rapidly so that we aren’t drawn into one through a failure to contain territorial expansion. So surely it is beholden on each of us to ensure that we never find ourselves asking that futile question – should we have done more?”
At beginning of this week, Ben Wallace, Defence Secretary from 2019-23, exhorted us in an interview with Times Radio to do more.
Wallace called on both Labour and the Conservatives to promise in their election manifestos to raise defence spending to three per cent of GDP: “You don’t invest at five to midnight. You start investing now.”
And Wallace agreed with Macron that we should “not rule out” deploying NATO troops in Ukraine, for “part of deterrence is ambiguity”:
“You know, keeping our adversary guessing about how far we would go and what we do. That’s what Putin does masterfully. He keeps everyone guessing. It’s very important that we never shut off avenues. Doesn’t mean to say we necessarily will, but it’s also important that we keep people guessing.
“You know, ruling out things is often how our adversaries like to push us into corners. And I think the best thing is to make sure he realises that we think that what he is doing in Ukraine is very, very serious. I think President Putin, and we saw just from the sham election, is the closest to Adolf Hitler we’ve had in this generation…people need to wake up to quite how dangerous he is.”
In Germany, Rolf Mützenich, Chairman of the Parliamentary Party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, was this week likened in the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to Neville Chamberlain.
Mützenich had proposed that the Ukraine conflict be “frozen” in its present state. Boris Pistorius, the German Defence Minister, objected that this would “only help Putin”, and Annalena Baerbock, the Foreign Minister and a Green, has likewise indicated her opposition to a policy of appeasement.
But for fear of annoying Putin, and indeed Social Democrats such as Mützenich, Chancellor Scholz has so far refused to supply Taurus missiles to Ukraine.
Putin knows the Germans well, having as a young man spent several years as a KGB officer in East Germany, where in 1989 he experienced the collapse of Soviet power. Two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he requested protection from the local tank commander for the KGB headquarters in Dresden, but was told: “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.”
Moscow under Putin is far from silent, will stop at nothing to reverse the traumatic collapse of 1989-90, and has long endeavoured to detach Berlin from the West by building an exclusive relationship founded on cheap energy supplied through the Nord Stream pipelines, of which the two Chancellors before Scholz, Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel, were strong supporters, with Schröder serving, indeed, as Chairman of the venture.
The Poles and Ukrainians had literally been circumvented: Berlin saw greater profit in doing an exclusive and as it believed durable deal with Russia.
This was the policy which came crashing down in ruins when the Russians launched their attack on 24th February 2022. Scholz himself recognised, three days later, in his Zeitenwende speech, that the times had changed.
But Scholz is a hapless figure who stumbles from one embarrassment to the next. His coalition is pitifully weak, with prominent figures within it who yearn to appease Putin at Ukraine’s expense, by giving the aggressor most of what he wants.
There is also a pro-Russian element in German public opinion to which extreme parties of the Right and Left appeal with some success, and of which Scholz too, at the head of the much diminished Social Democrats, feels he must take account.
Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven, whose career in the German foreign service culminated as Ambassador to Poland from 2020-22, has warned in an interview with Leon Mangasarian for The Spectator of the danger, if a truce were struck with Putin, of
“Ukraine turning out to be a giant Kosovo: a country permanently living on a foreign drip, whose finances and economy will collapse without outside support.”
That would shake the EU and NATO to their foundations, and encourage Putin to embark on fresh adventures.
Every European country, including the United Kingdom, needs to spend more on defence, which will mean conveying the unwelcome news to voters that less can be spent on welfare: a message which politicians are understandably reluctant to deliver, even when urged to do so by Ben Wallace.
But beyond the question of money lies the question of willingness to take casualties, and being known to be willing to take casualties.
Putin, after all, compensates for Russia’s economic weakness by his horrible readiness to shed the blood both of Ukrainians and of his own troops, with Russian opponents also likely to pay with their lives for defying him.
An aggressor of this type cannot be deterred by paying him cash, or other people’s territory, to go away. He will at once be back for more.
But who in a properly functioning democracy can sanction the shedding of blood required for the defence of freedom? Only the nation state can do so. NATO works because it is an alliance of sovereign nation states, each committed to defend any member who is attacked.
Many in the German political class have long hankered to be European rather than German. This is an understandable reaction to recent history, but it prompted the unrealistic belief that the nation state had become, or at the very least would soon become, redundant.
In the peaceful, globalised system which Germans and many others hoped was being born, it was easy to imagine the sinews of nationhood had become obsolete, and could be left to atrophy, mere relics of an unhappy past. As long as the economy worked, and there was no return to the mass unemployment which assisted the rise of the Nazis, all would be well.
So in Berlin, it was easy to maintain that the German economy could flourish with defence costs paid by the Americans, the Russians providing energy supplies and the Chinese buying vast quantities of German manufactured goods.
Until 1989, the West Germans were more than ready to do their bit to repel any incursion by the Red Army. Since that time, they have allowed their armed forces to fall into a lamentable state of neglect, as have many other NATO members.
Some believed the EU would fill the military gap, but that has palpably not happened, and there is no prospect of it happening in time to deter Putin. Only NATO acting as a strong alliance of nation states, demonstrating by its steadfast support of Ukraine its refusal to tolerate Putin’s gangsterism, can do that.
In order to preserve NATO we shall need in the coming years to prove to the Americans that we Europeans are not mere spongers. The Poles are among those who already understand this.
Britain has never been able to win a serious war without allies. Always we have depended on coalitions of the willing, people who will turn up and fight. Blücher turned up in 1815, and if it comes to it, I have no doubt his descendants will turn up too.
Meanwhile, as proof that Chamberlain has not actually taken charge of the German Social Democrats, it would be a good idea to supply the Taurus missiles.
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