It was a tale of two cities and two speeches — Joe Biden in Warsaw, Vladimir Putin in Moscow. To borrow Dickens’ famous opening line, the worst of times was represented by the Russian leader’s wall-to- wall paranoia. The best, perhaps, was the American’s exhortations to back democracy and the rules-based order. Brief and direct, it was a message of hope.
The war in Ukraine, in Putin’s head, was caused by Nato’s attack on Russia. His twisted logic ran thus: Russia had to defend its people and its soul; Russia’s minimalist aims were to turf out the “Nazi regime” of Volodymyr Zelensky and secure the provinces of Donbas and “Noviya Russiya” — which are parts of Russia anyway, he claimed.
In his two-hour rambling discourse, Putin appeared to set his minimal territorial terms for peace — the four oblasts of Donbas and Zaporizhzhia, and Black Sea coast at least as far as the port and shipyard centre of Mykolaiv.
His rhetoric went beyond geography. In effect, he was laying down a new line of confrontation with the US, Nato and the West. He called on the Russian people to get behind the war, to serve their country — “the front line passes through your souls.” The economy must be focused on military production.
Almost as an aside, the Russian leader announced he was “suspending” negotiations for a new START strategic arms treaty. Russia would resume nuclear tests if the Americans appeared to do the same. It is not clear yet that he is actually declaring a new nuclear arms race between the two biggest players — as this raises the wrath of China.
Putin seemed deliberately to avoid discussing the fighting on the ground now in southern Ukraine, with not even a hint of the long-heralded “spring offensive.” Matters are bloody, messy and delicately poised at a number of pockets on the main front across the Donbas to Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Hundreds of lives have been lost by the day around Bakhmut and Vuhledar.
Perhaps it would be more helpful to be discussing the Spring Stalemate, or Battleground Gridlock, than a major sweeping offensive. Russia doesn’t have the capacity to generate the set of air and ground forces for a breakthrough.
The Spring Stalemate favours the Russians more than Zelensky’s forces. Russia, even by Putin’s admission yesterday, seems prepared to settle for a long war — hoping Ukraine will be drained of human forces, its economy broken, and the patience of allies, principally the US, exhausted by autumn.
It will still take months for Ukraine to be able to generate effective new armoured forces based on the Leopard2, Challenger2, and AbramsM1A1 tanks now pledged from several dozen western allies. The aim is to generate a manoeuvre army of at least 10 brigades, according to Brigadier Ben Barry of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Kyiv has asked for a thousand main battle tanks, to include those needed for reserve, and to date have about 400 pledged. Training for the tank crews is well under way.
Equipping Ukraine with a modern air force of Nato standards will take much longer. Crews have to be trained and ground crew teams of fitters and maintainers have to be recruited, trained and paid. Finding the right mix of ground attack and air defence aircraft is tricky. The F-16 is the most suitable, the Eurofighter Typhoons of the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain less so. Less prominent, but just as vital, are the needs to replace and update the forces of attack, transport and reconnaissance helicopters.
For Britain this is a practical and strategic test. Defence has been a dirty word for decades among the majority of mandarins and policy wonks in Whitehall and Westminster, and from both parties. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt did not mention it as a priority in his autumn statement, and seemed to offer only £700 million uplift in the Budget.
Rishi Sunak now seems to realise how much Britain’s defence and security depends on what it does in Ukraine — where behind the scenes it has done a lot alongside principal allies the US, France, Germany and the Nordics. More needs to be done to plug gaps, not least in its ordnance reserves, and home defence vulnerabilities by air and sea.
The next two months are pivotal for Ukraine — it could all go pear-shaped in a trice. China is about to declare on a peace plan and its support for Russia in the war – or not.
At least Beijing seems to realise as much as Washington, Paris and London that in the stakes for global destabiliser, Putin is number one troublemaker.
