Earlier this week, I started a 3,000km, two-day journey back from the other end of Europe, where I witnessed Ukrainian resilience against Russian terror in the besieged city of Kharkiv. A university lecturer told me that from a 12th storey balcony in a north-eastern suburb she had actually seen the flashes of missiles taking off from launchpads just across the frontier, in the Russian city of Belgorod. An S-300 missile can reach Kharkiv from Belgorod in about 30 seconds, so you have no time to hide. If it’s not a missile, it’s a glide bomb launched from a Russian warplane – and so, day after day, death rains indifferently down.
After more than 900 days of the largest war in Europe since 1945, Ukraine is approaching a perilous moment of truth. The Ukrainian David has courage and innovation, but the Russian Goliath has ruthlessness and mass. In an underground location in Kharkiv, I was shown highly sophisticated, novel military uses of IT and drones. With its Cossack-style innovation, the country has developed more than 200 different kinds of drone.
A joke has it that two Ukrainian activists meet for a drink:
“How’s your drone company doing?”
“Great, thanks, but how did you know I have one?”
“Of course you do!”
I find the bravery of Ukrainian soldiers constantly humbling, but they are being ground down by the sheer scale of Russia’s assault and the Kremlin’s willingness to use its own citizens as cannon fodder. Vladimir Putin has just ordered an increase of the Russian military on active service to a target figure of 1.5 million. “It’s all about the numbers,” a senior Ukrainian military intelligence officer told me. Ukraine’s daring incursion into the Kursk region of Russia has given a psychological boost, but opinions are sharply divided about its strategic wisdom.
In the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, there’s a real danger of a Russian breakthrough if Putin’s forces take the logistical hub of Pokrovsk. Ukrainians are exhausted. Trauma lurks just beneath the surface. Several times I saw the eyes of tough soldiers grow damp when they mentioned their fallen comrades. About half the country’s energy infrastructure has been destroyed. This winter will be cruel. Meanwhile, the west continues to hesitate and hold back, fearful of escalation – led (if that’s the word) in this regard by the US president, Joe Biden.
Seeing all this, Ukrainian leaders are making a new pitch. Having for two years talked only of total victory, defined as recovering all the country’s territory in the frontiers of 1991, including Crimea and Donbas, they now speak of reaching a position where Ukraine can negotiate from strength. Unlike many in the west, however, they understand that the only way to get there is to turn the tide on the battlefield: to knock Goliath sharply back on his heels, if not his arse. The insight is crucial. A central Asian leader who knows Putin well was asked by a western interlocutor whether the Russian president will negotiate. Yes, came the prompt reply, “when his generals tell him he’s losing”.
That’s what the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had in mind when he told the Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference in Kyiv last week that we need “a gamechanger to make Russia make peace”. As the UN general assembly meets in New York next week, Zelenskyy will personally present his plan to Biden. Top of the list is getting American permission to use western missiles – including British Storm Shadow missiles, which have US targeting technology – to strike more of the sites in Russia from which attacks originate. Many lives could have been saved if this had been given sooner. The head of the Kharkiv regional administration told me that in the few months since Biden – faced with a new Russian offensive towards Kharkiv this May – finally allowed limited strikes on targets across the nearby frontier, the number of S-300 missile attacks on Ukraine’s second largest city has declined. (The air-launched glide bombs, however, have not yet been impeded.)
We don’t know all the details of the Zelenskyy plan, but besides those deep strikes it will probably include a request for sustained funding, after this year’s long delayed US congressional vote of $61bn runs out; tightened sanctions on Russia and its Chinese and Indian enablers, plus the use of frozen Russian assets held in the west for Ukrainian reconstruction; and a bold bid for the shield of Nato membership to cover the roughly four-fifths of Ukraine’s sovereign territory that Kyiv actually controls.
There are two problems with this plan. First, Biden’s entire track record suggests he is likely to give only a fraction of what Zelenskyy asks. There’s a fierce argument inside his administration about the deep strikes. Future funding would depend on Congress. He has certainly not committed to Nato membership for any part of Ukraine. Incrementalism for fear of escalation has been a hallmark of the entire handling of the war by this president and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. As a Ukrainian friend nicely put it, “Ukrainians are triggered by Sullivan’s ‘escalation management’.” What odds that the old man’s approach will change dramatically now, in the twilight of his presidency?
Second, even if the US and its allies did all of this, would it produce such an effect that Putin’s generals would “tell him he’s losing”? How exactly would that be achieved? Perhaps by targeting Russia’s own energy infrastructure? Understandably, top Ukrainian officials are keeping stumm on the military details of their plans, but well-informed defence analysts wonder how much they can realistically do in the next months. At the YES conference, Col Pavlo Palisa, the commander of Ukraine’s elite 93rd brigade, spoke of the “tyranny of time”. At the frontline you need to move super fast to hit five key enemy targets as they appear, but by the time the necessary weapons and permissions come through, it’s too late and “there are now 50 targets”. At the pace the US-led west is moving, time is on Russia’s side. And, needless to say, Putin is waiting for Donald Trump to be reelected US president on 5 November.
All the more reason for the vice-president, Kamala Harris, who will inherit this major geopolitical challenge if she becomes president, and all those European allies who understand what is at stake, to urge Biden to leap over his own shadow and make the potentially gamechanging moves now. This may be the last chance to enable Ukraine to achieve something that can plausibly be called victory, which is the precondition for a lasting peace. Otherwise, Kyiv will probably be forced to sue for a cessation of hostilities sometime next year, negotiating from a position of weakness. That would not be peace, just a pause before another round of war. In Ukraine, there would be despair and fury; in the Kremlin, rejoicing; and in the rest of the world, most consequentially of all, swirling contempt for the weakness of the west.
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Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist
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