As elsewhere in central and eastern Europe since 1989, this is already having a transformative impact on the country’s politics and policies. The EU has done what Nato has not: unambiguously committed to Ukrainian membership. While US military and economic assistance to Ukraine has been massive and indispensable, Europe is now ahead of the US in its strategic stance towards the embattled country. And that ultimately means Nato membership for Ukraine is critical. Without security, there will be little investment, fewer returnees, no successful reconstruction. Long-term security is essential for Ukraine to win the peace. Its military support is essential for Ukraine to win the war.
Here’s where the buck comes back to the US. For this is now Putin’s brutal, vengeful objective: if he can’t force Ukraine back into the Russian empire, he will try to ruin it. I mean losing the peace: a country exhausted, ravaged, traumatised, still robbed of some of its territory, a land in limbo. So when I say, “Who lost Ukraine?”, I don’t mean losing the war. It’s a daunting challenge to produce the jobs, housing and schools without which millions of Ukrainians will not return from abroad. Tymofiy Mylovanov, the president of Kyiv School of Economics, shared with us its projection that on current trends the workforce would be reduced by as much as a third over the next few years. We were told that as many as one in every five Ukrainian children is now outside the country.
In a survey this May, 87% of Ukrainians said they were optimistic about their country’s future, but there’s an increasingly sober mood in private. Hence the constant Ukrainian insistence on the need for more air defence systems – and F-16 fighter jets. Crucially, Russia is stronger in the skies. The big combined arms push by western-trained and equipped brigades is yet to come, but in this kind of warfare the advantage lies with entrenched defence. Senior defence officials frankly acknowledged how slowly this summer’s counteroffensive was progressing, especially against Russia’s minefields and multiple lines of anti-tank defences in the south. A priest told us about a soldier who returned after some months at the front, but could not sleep. The pain is partly masked by the adrenaline of resistance, but after the war, the country will face widespread trauma. In a recent poll, 78% of Ukrainians said close family members or friends had been wounded or killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion last year. While the Biden administration worries at every single step about escalation, Vladimir Putin has continued to escalate – notably with the blowing-up of the Kakhovka dam, which has ruined vast tracts of Ukrainian land. As she was visiting Kramatorsk to document Russian war crimes, she herself became the victim of a Russian war crime. With other members of our European Council on Foreign Relations fact-finding mission, I witnessed prayers being chanted in St Michael’s monastery over the coffin of the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina.
0 kommentar(er)
