Vladimir Putin might have been weakened by the Wagner rebellion, but last week’s rocket attack on a pizza restaurant in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk showed that it’s business as usual for the degenerate regime in Moscow.
The immediate fate of Putin is of less concern than ensuring Kyiv has the weapons it needs to expel the invaders, and end the carnage and the destruction of its infrastructure and culture.
The prominent Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina, 37, died on Saturday from the injuries she suffered in the restaurant attack; the seventh fatality from the outrage.
Her latest book, War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, an English-language nonfiction work about the invasion, is due to be published soon, though probably not in Ukraine, in the current circumstances. Her death, and the reports of Russian advances in the Luhansk region, situated along key Russian supply routes, shows that Ukraine is still very much fighting for its survival.
It’s too soon to say whether its spring/summer offensive is going to plan. We do know it will be a horrible slog, as Kyiv’s forces probe for weaknesses across minefields. But Western reluctance to ensure Russia’s defeat is undoubtedly impeding Ukraine’s chances. In addition to reports of some Western arms and equipment malfunctioning, or not being in a fit state to use, the delays in sending key weaponry to Ukraine is prolonging the conflict.
The Biden administration has withheld the long-range Army Tactical Missile System that could help the Ukrainians target Russian bases and supply lines in Crimea; the use of F-16s that would allow Ukrainians to defend their troops from Russian Ka-52 attack helicopters is six months off.
Volodymyr Zelenksy warned this weekend of “dangerous messages coming from some Republicans”, thus finally articulating what many have been wondering out loud for months: what happens if the war is still going on at the end of next year, and an isolationist Republican like Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis is elected president?
This brings us to the subject of wider security issues. Ukraine has argued all along that its fight has implications for the security of the entire continent. If it fails to stop Russia’s imperial ambitions, the argument goes, then Moldova, the Baltic states and even Poland might be next.
You might not believe that. Europe has Nato, after all.
But last week a group of 10 Russia and security experts writing for the Chatham House think-tank questioned the assumption that Nato’s famed article 5 mutual defence arrangement really would guarantee the security of its eastern members. They note that Article 5 states that Nato members agree, in the event of an armed attack on another Nato member, that each “will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking… such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area”.
With DeSantis or Trump in the Oval Office, who’s to say the US wouldn’t exclude the use of armed force in its response to Russian aggression against Estonia or Poland?
It’s another reason why the West should shed the fear of losing – ignore Russia’s nuclear blackmail which will only encourage the future use of such threats – and arm Ukraine to the teeth now.
Defeat might also be the shock therapy Russia needs to re-evaluate what it has become under 20 years of Putin and his money-grabbing cronies. A klepto-fascist mafia state with imperial delusions.
As Russia watchers like John Lough, a former Nato official and currently an associate fellow, at Chatham House, have suggested, Russia’s decisive defeat over its Ukraine invasion, mean “it would have to confront its own failings and problems”.
That’s not to say the carrot and stick can’t be applied. The West could influence events in Russia by highlighting the economic benefits of closer ties with G7 countries. Whether Putin would still be there – and whether it’s possible to negotiate any sort of peace while he remains in power – is debatable.
But the pressing moral imperative is to stop people like Victoria Amelina from being killed while they’re eating a pizza.
In addition to possibly hastening Putin’s demise, Yevegeny Prigozhin’s Wagner organisation of murderers-for-hire, which has plundered, tortured and killed from Syria to Ukraine, by way of Africa, has by its actions and even its title – a tribute to Hitler’s favourite composer – demonstrated the moral degeneracy of Russia, the danger it represents, and why Ukraine and the West has to win this fight.
