What does it take to defend a democracy? Ask the people of Mariupol, a city whose name is already synonymous with the extraordinary price people will pay to stand up to overwhelming force. A month after the first artillery assaults on a place I knew as a bustling port city, it is now reduced to a shell of destroyed buildings and besieged residents, risking their lives to scavenge for food for the children, cut off from the outside world and whose last defence against a pitiless aggressor is the refusal to capitulate.
The stories of heroism and despair are already hard to read, but too important not to know about. Since the invasion the ferocity of war in Ukraine has shown the face of bravery — especially its stubborn, diehard leader Volodymyr Zelensky upbraiding a feeble West for its equivocations and its tendency, even now, to will the victory of plucky Ukraine against Moscow but flail when it comes to the scale of support.
President Biden arrives in Europe this week trailing clouds of uncertainty. The White House is a lot better at ruling out risky options than it has so far been in honing a clear edge to its response. And while there is sense in the world’s “global policeman” constraining moves which look counter-productive or risk escalation, this crisis will soon demand more than a list of things Nato cannot do.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have lived in an era when it was easier to be a dove than a hawk. The easy clap-line on any panel show was to suggest that money being spent on defence or the nuclear deterrent was a waste (ironically the audience when I was on BBC Question Time a couple of weeks ago were insistently asking why we had not spent more).
It was more convenient to go along with a line on Putin that he could be contained or simply ignored. “Were you surprised?” is the question a lot of us who covered the region get asked about the invasion. To which one answer would be no, because the one thing pretty certain about a despotic leader who has had a couple of goes at invading another territory is that he will do it again, and Putin has been a serial abuser of Georgia and Ukraine. But yes, the brute force and cruelty shocks, even if it does not wholly surprise. Liberal democracy needs security to thrive and deter its opponents. Putin has gambled on the West’s collective weakness — a bet too far, but one grounded, not without reason, on a view that democracies were tired of being tough and preferred a quiet life of enrichment and disassociation from the unpleasant realities of threat.
It is true Iraq and Afghanistan turned to quagmires which seeped confidence from the alliance of liberal democracies. But history does not allow for time out from crises or decisions. Germany is soul-searching, having learned from its own abrupt volte face on energy dependence on Russia. Strategising with caution on how to deal with a nuclear-armed Russia is prudent, but it will be counter-productive if it leads to paralysis. That, as the former Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev pointed out to me this week, is precisely what brandishing it as a threat is intended to achieve: if any mention of the “nuclear option” intimidates Western public opinion, Putin will indeed have won. Resisting that path will take self-belief and grit in the West as well as calculation about how to deploy any levers to end the war or at least cauterise the killing spree. It means bidding farewell to the dream of lasting peace easily secured and cheaply maintained. And while the blessing of democracy is that argument about everything is permitted, it means putting aside our more partisan feuds because the most potent weapon against the resolve of the outside world is division.
I visited Mariupol in the days of early Ukrainian independence when it was a quaint port city with fountains, ramshackle old houses and parks. Today, I recognise their outlines in images of scarred landscapes: the blue church domes and a theatre, bombarded while being used as a civilian shelter. It is the imagery of urban destruction that reminds us of how fragile freedom is and how punishingly high the price can be of defending it. If we indulged the illusion that the stability of democracies spreads by benign happenstance, we are learning it does not and that too much is at stake in Ukraine and beyond to commit that error again.
