Vasyl, a burly, tattooed infantry commander who lost a leg to a Russian mine on the eastern front, sits swinging his remaining leg on the edge of the treatment table in the ‘Unbroken’ rehabilitation clinic in Lviv. He’s been inside the Russian trenches fifty times, he tells me. I ask him what Ukraine needs for victory. Answer: “Motivated people.” His T-shirt proclaims ‘No sacrifice, No victory.’ After we shake hands and I wish him luck, he suddenly jumps off the table and starts skipping at amazing speed, his blue skipping rope whizzing around under his one foot, while he looks at me with a
broad grin, as if to say: ‘here’s your answer.’
Makysm, a sturdy marine and professional sniper who lost a foot to a hidden Russian mine on the southern front, is less exuberant. The minefields are terrible and the Russians well dug into their defensive positions. And, he adds, “the Russians have more men.” Victory will come if Putin dies or there’s a coup in Moscow. Otherwise, “this war can continue for years or even decades.”
According to American estimates, Ukrainian fatalities in the first one and a half years of this full-scale war exceed the entire US losses in two decades of involvement in Vietnam. I visited the military cemetery in Lviv to lay flowers on the grave of a volunteer soldier called Yevhen Hulevych who I had met in this beautiful western Ukrainian city last December shortly before he was killed near Bakhmut. I was shocked to see that the forest of fresh graves had almost doubled in size since I was last there. There were now 520 fallen from this one city, including three women — all medics. But Ukraine is running low on people ready and able to fight.
Before I travelled to Lviv in early October, I spent two months in the US. Opinion polls showed a worrying decline in support for continued funding of Ukraine. Sitting in a Washington airport hotel with nothing better to do, I switched to Fox News. A so-called comedian was joking about AI. Her riff went like this: “Biden typed into ChatGPT ‘how to screw the American middle class’ and the answer came back ‘send $75
billion to Ukraine’.” With the unprecedented toppling of the House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, partly because he worked with Democrats to get more money for Ukraine despite a threatened government shutdown, the issue is now fatefully entangled with hyperpolarised US politics.
I was told it’s unlikely that Ukraine will get its invitation to join NATO at the 75th anniversary summit in Washington next July because that might cost Joe Biden — or, if he steps aside, another Democrat candidate — votes in November’s presidential election. ‘You’re getting us into another forever war!’ Donald Trump would shout. And a second Trump presidency would be a disaster for Ukraine.
All this was before Hamas’ attack on Israel began another terrible war which will be at the very centre of American attention. It will absorb most of Washington’s diplomatic and political time and may take some of the funding and the military equipment that might otherwise have gone to Ukraine. In signalling his unconditional support for the US in its battle against Hamas, the Ukraine president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is obviously well aware of that danger.
What’s the right conclusion from these two worrying trends, one on the Russo-Ukrainian battlefront and the other in distant Washington? I think it’s clear: Europe must do more. That’s also how we persuade the US to stay the course and go on offering the kinds of weapons, ammunition and other equipment that only the world’s only military hyperpower has.
Europe should do more in terms of military support. Britain has led in this respect, but its own — anyway diminished — stocks of arms and ammunition are running low. Germany, following a very slow start, has overtaken Britain to become Ukraine’s second-largest supporter after the US. Honour to a country which, to do this, has had to jump over its own shadow. But Chancellor Olaf Scholz is still given to nervous hesitation about each particular weapon system — most recently, declining to send German Taurus missiles, even though the United Kingdom, France and the US have already sent comparable weapon systems. Of course, the escalation risks always have to be weighed carefully. But this is not how you help a country win a war.
As important is gearing up European defence industries so we can continue to supply the almost Second World War-levels of arms, ammunition and other equipment that Ukraine will need. When I met the then Ukrainian defence minister earlier this year in Kyiv, with a delegation from the European Council on Foreign Relations, we were already discussing the country’s needs for the next counteroffensive — in the summer of 2024 — and quite possibly one after that. The heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, the brother of the mayor of Kyiv, put it vividly. If you can’t land a knockout blow, he said, you need to have the stamina to go twelve rounds.
Above all, though, Europe needs to lead on economic, social and political support for Ukraine. In moments like this, people always reach for the metaphor of a ‘Marshall Plan’, but by its very name, that suggests the US will play a leading role. The American public is just not ready for that any more. Nor do I see why Europe should expect the US to do the lion’s share nearly 80 years after the end of the Second World War. Ukraine is in Europe, after all, and Europe has a very large economy of its own. If we succeed in the reconstruction and European integration of Ukraine, a bread basket of the world with a significant potential for economic development, Europe will be the biggest beneficiary.
The metaphor of a Marshall Plan is also wrong because this has to be done very differently. What might be called the 3Rs — reconstruction, reform and reaching for EU membership — have to be conceived of and implemented together. Reconstruction can’t wait until the end of the war. People need homes, schools and hospitals now. Nor can reform of the Ukrainian State. On that, there are some concerning signs, such as an apparent reversal of the decentralisation, which was an important element of the country’s post-2014 renewal. Nor can the first steps of getting closer to the EU. The EU needs to start an incremental process which, at each stage, creates a positive incentive: you reconstruct, you reform, you gain more access; you gain more access, that helps you reform further, that boosts reconstruction; and so on.
I returned from Ukraine and, before that, the US, strongly persuaded that this is what we in Europe must do. The alternative — unfortunately, now almost as probable as it is bad — is that the West will eventually settle for a so-called ‘peace’ which involves Ukraine effectively losing a large chunk of its sovereign territory. This would not be peace, but a semi-frozen conflict. Just a pause before another round of war, very much as we have seen it for decades in the Middle East. In the meantime, however, it would enable Vladimir Putin to declare victory at home and, therefore, stay in power longer; send precisely the wrong message to Xi Jinping over Taiwan; and feel like a terrible defeat to every Ukrainian. The memory of soldiers like Yevhen, who have paid the ultimate price, and the sacrifices of those like Vasyl and Makysm, demand better.
Timothy Garton Ash’s most recent book is Homelands: A Personal History of Europe
