11 April 2022
Whilst coming back from the shop with today’s newspaper, I could see a neighbour on the other side of the street who was born at the gates of Mauthausen concentration camp six days before it was liberated by American troops in 1945. She intimated that she wanted a word, so I crossed the street to her, but she had a hair appointment to get to. She stood very straight, paused, then said quietly: ‘It looks as though we have let people down yet again…’ She was referring to the 1930s, and the comparison with appeasement is utterly appropriate. I still cannot see that the West had any military strategy for deterring Putin before 24 February. NATO troops, in ridiculously small numbers, are now being rushed to its eastern borders, especially on the Baltic, but this is purely reactive and defensive. If it had been done before Christmas, and at particularly sensitive border points, it would have sent a different, proactive message. We did not ‘lose’ the initiative, we never showed any.
13 April
I see that a number of heavyweights have disagreed on the Times Letters page today with yesterday’s article by Max Hastings headed ‘Only a sordid bargain will end Ukraine’s war: Defeating Putin or calling his nuclear bluff are unrealistic options’. It’s true that the article was unusually confused for Hastings. Defeatism seemed to keep bobbing up in it, but the editorial headline was a flagrant distortion of what he had written, which was: ‘I remain unhappily convinced that the war will end, or at least be paused, through some sordid bargain that does not punish Russia as it deserves.’ So he doesn’t believe this ‘bargain’ would end the war… He is fumbling here with the reality that, like a lot of people, he can’t bring himself to accept (‘Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality’): Putin is determined to occupy the WHOLE of Ukraine and is a barefaced liar, therefore any ‘bargain’ with him is worthless. Victory in the short, medium or longer term is the only course for Ukraine and the democratic world.
16 April
One really wonders whether Putin has been told the truth about the sinking of the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship. Who had the courage to tell him? An Army man, presumably…
Bellingcat tells us that Sergei Beseda, since 2009 head of the FSB’s Fifth Service responsible for intelligence about Ukraine and efforts to subvert it, has been put in prison and over a hundred of his agents sacked, basically for telling Putin what he wanted to hear in the run-up to the invasion (‘Our troops will be met with garlands’), rather than the truth. This is always a problem in an autocracy, of course. In fact it is one of autocracy’s biggest self-destruct mechanisms. As I have said, self-delusion is an occupational hazard for Russian intelligence men. It is quite possible that Beseda and his agents didn’t even know they were lying: they really ‘saw’ Ukraine as a country ready to betray itself.
A British classicist who worked at Bletchley on decoding Japanese signals during the War told me that the Japanese were so convinced their language was too hard for any foreigner to learn, that they let cats out of bags. In 1970s Britain the London branch of the KGB informed Moscow that the country was on the brink of a revolution fomented by them!
19 April
Another wonderful extended lunch with Sam2 at Polonia, Cambridge’s Polish club dating from World War 2, discussing marketing over Polish dishes and four different vodkas… Polonia was first off the starting block in this area of Cambridge with clothes, food and medical supplies for Ukraine. They are still collecting money for the refugee effort, and selling a range of fundraising cards for http://hospitallers.life, including:
On the same day, President Zelensky tells us what we have been dreading: ‘The Russian troops have begun the battle for the Donbas, for which they have been preparing for a long time. A significant part of the entire Russian army is now concentrated on this offensive. No matter how many Russian troops are driven there, we will fight. We will defend ourselves. We will do it every day.’
They will. But they are in a terribly vulnerable position, liable to be surrounded if the Russian offensive is better conducted than it was in the west of the country. The open country of the Donbas is far more favourable to tanks, and there is talk of the imminent tank battle being the biggest since 1945. It is still conceivable that the Russian advance will go to the Dnipro and Ukraine be partitioned (until Putin attacks again).
Yet there are so many imponderable variables. We simply do not know how much armour and how many state of the art weapons are getting through to the eastern front from NATO countries, we do know how badly the infantry of top-down Russia performs, we do not know what the Ukrainian Army’s big strategy is, but we do know that their soldiers are battle-hardened, have the ability to think and act for themselves that comes with living in a democracy, and their motivation and morale are second to none.
My fear is that the shift of action to the Donbas will be a mental jump too far for Europe and the U.S. (‘a quarrel in a faraway country’, God forbid); that their interest will flag and they will start talking of a deal with Putin before his army has been ground to a standstill.
22 April
I know the ‘open country’ west of Donetsk, in which some of the tank battle will rage, as ‘steppeland’, because I travelled through it on 20 June 1970 and it was so reminiscent of Chekhov’s The Steppe (although that was based on the steppe around Rostov). The weather was glorious, the train slowly undulated along, the countryside looked not much different from nineteenth century paintings. I was going to the Crimea, to visit Chekhov’s house at Yalta and catch a ship to Vienna, but had had to travel northwards from Taganrog because the whole Black Sea coast around the naval centre of Zhdanov (Mariupol) was closed to foreigners. On the warm night of 19 June I got out at a junction called Yasinovataya, just north of Donetsk. I had a meal in the station restaurant and my table companions discussed turning me over to the police as a suspicious foreigner. I showed them my passport and travel papers, then made for the train fast. I had a bench to sleep on, fully clothed, in an obshchii vagon (third-class open carriage). It was one side of a small doorless compartment that I shared with a young woman who looked like a ‘collective farm worker’. I suspect she thought I was a seminarist, because of my beard. She smiled, but never said a word. Once or twice in the night she suckled her baby. I arrived at Simferopol next day after a twenty-one hour journey, from where I got to Yalta in a taxi between two very large, sweltering ladies. I thought (the) Ukraine was paradise.
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Oh dear Patrick! Your 11th April blog shows quite clearly that you really don’t understand the function and limitations of NATO. It is not a world police force with a mind of its own. It is a grouping of sovereign nations who have come together for their own protection against a formidable and untrustworthy potential enemy. With much labour they have agreed the circumstances in which they will take military action against an aggressor and they have all signed up to go to war if any one of the signatory members is attacked. They have not signed up to go to war in defence of an unlucky third party and it would take a difficult and lengthy debate to bring all of those sovereign nations to agree on military action in support of Ukraine, not least because of the probable terrible consequences for all of Europe should they do so. That may seem pathetic, and it is possible that opposing Russia now might in the long term result in less damage than having to do so later, but that is the reality of NATO’s position.
Dear Charles,
Thank you very much for this Comment, which is very valid, indeed needed saying and could not have been better put!
You have described an organisation that has an agreed response to aggression when it happens, but no strategy behind and before it. Of course, I agree with you that NATO should not be a ‘world police force’, any more than the U.S. should be. On the other hand, brutal wars that border on European states and threaten to spill over into them, destabilise them, or commit crimes against humanity, are clearly of concern to NATO, and its intervention in the Kosovo War was decisive.
I am not alone in criticising NATO for having had no advance strategy towards, for example, Russian aggression against Ukraine, a democracy that borders on one of its member states. A ‘military analyst’ (presumably in the British Army, as he insisted on anonymity) said recently that it was time for NATO to ‘move from crisis management to strategy’, and when Emannuelle Macron said in 2019 that NATO was ‘brain dead’ and needed to start thinking of itself strategically as a geopolitical power ‘or we will no longer be in control of our destiny’, he presumably meant that in addition to the first-rate military leadership it already has, it needed geopolitical strategic leadership.
Strategy for a military organisation like NATO must be set by politicians, not soldiers, I’m sure you will agree. But how is one going to get agreement between the political leaders of NATO’s thirty member states? It is much easier to get that agreement once aggression has happened, than when only a few very clear-sighted politicians can see it coming. As with Hitler, everyone seems to have thought that Putin would never be a real danger. Hence NATO has so far been reactive rather than proactive towards him. However, it is easy to unify strategy in an autocracy, where the autocrat is also commander-in-chief of the army! What we are seeing in Ukraine is Putin’s personal strategy planned at least eight years ago, and even though it has so far been a humiliating disaster the army dare not disagree with it.
An example of an action that NATO could have taken as soon as Putin assembled his army on the Ukrainian border, well before Christmas 2021, would have been to do the same in the Baltic states or near the border of Kaliningrad: thousands of Russian troops have now been drafted from the Baltic to eastern Ukraine following the failed Kiev offensive, whereas they would certainly have been kept there if confronted by a big NATO presence. With more strategic actions like that Putin might have decided not to go ahead at all (he kept his army at the border for an unconscionable length of time before he decided). But we have had no strategy based on what we could foresee the dictator doing. Like other dictators, he only invaded once he was convinced he could get away with it. Hitler laughingly related afterwards that he did not actually have enough troops to invade the Rhineland in 1935 if European powers had threatened to stop him, and Galtieri only decided to invade the Falklands when British foreign policy had convinced him he would not be opposed.
NATO did not deter the invasion of Ukraine, a democracy bordering on its own territory, because its political leaders had no strategy to, and in that sense we ‘let people (i.e. the victims) down again’.
I hear you Patrick and you are right about the absence of NATO strategy. However, quite apart from the impracticality of deploying a substantial number of Western regular, volunteer troops in the Baltic states in midwinter when there was no appreciably increased threat to that area, your proposed action would have had no impact on Putin, since he knew with absolute certainty that the said troops were not going to invade Russia whatever he did elsewhere.
Dear Charles, Many thanks. I am genuinely shocked that deploying a substantial number of professional Western troops in the Baltic area in midwinter is such a challenge in the twenty-first century, but I take your word for it as a well-informed military man. However, why do you say that Putin ‘knew with absolute certainty that the said troops were not going to invade Russia [Kaliningrad is Russia] whatever he did elsewhere’? I fear you underestimate what drives the man: rabid paranoia. And his paranoia is what we should have played upon. Conversely, what do you think his motivation was in keeping a very substantial force by the Ukrainian border for four months in the depths of winter? I regret that I and others may have given the impression that we were criticising NATO as a military organisation for ‘letting people down again’, when it is the fault of the politicians who had no pre-invasion strategy other than economic sanctions. This invasion has happened partly because Putin assumed the U.S.’s response to the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the civil war in Donbas showed the West had become weak — and he was not wrong.