DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Putin pushes on in the knowledge the West will oppose ... trends now
Dawn breaks as my train judders into Pasazhyrskyi station, punctual as always. This time, though, I am greeted neither by a swarm of Russian drones (like my last visit), nor the adenoidal whine of an air raid siren (which happens every visit).
It is spring and the sun is out in Kyiv. February’s frost-encrusted pavements have morphed into sun-drenched avenues filled with flotillas of laughing teenagers. The war remains, but under a cloudless sky.
When Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, his generals assured him they would win the war in three days. Some 809 days later, they’re still trying.
On Friday, Putin launched a brutal, surprise attack on Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv – overwhelmingly Russian-speaking and just 19 miles from the border. Conquering the city, held by the Ukrainians for more than a year, would be a huge propaganda coup. After intense fighting, the Russians claim they’ve now captured nine villages in the region.
Vadym Skibitsky, Ukraine’s deputy head of military intelligence, was unflinching in a recent interview. ‘Our problem is very simple,’ he told the Economist magazine. ‘We have no weapons. They always knew April and May would be a difficult time for us.’
We in the West must take a degree of responsibility for this growing war fatigue. Pictured: A Ukrainian soldier and tank
He’s right. Travelling across the country in recent months, I have met many Ukrainians who unashamedly say they now refuse to die in ‘Zelensky’s war’.
Morale is down – and along with it, the will to fight. People ask why they should risk their lives when so many are dying without results; when so many are bribing their way out of the draft; and when so many promised Western weapons do not come.
They have a point. Without Nato support, Russia would undoubtedly have conquered Ukraine. But as time has passed, getting that aid has become an unceasing struggle.
When, last month, the US Congress finally approved a $61billion military aid package to Ukraine that had been logjammed for months due to Republican intransigence, Ukrainian officials I spoke to were relieved.
But there was also a sadness. The delay has cost so many lives and the task of pushing Russia back is much harder now.
On the front, the troops are pleased but circumspect. ‘This is of course good news,’ says a soldier friend of mine fighting in the east. ‘But we need to make sure that Kyiv distributes the weapons properly. That it gives the right equipment to the right people fighting in the right places. And that was not always the case previously.’
Putin understands the West will give Ukraine just about enough weapons to keep him at bay but never enough to actually push his troops back across the border. Pictured: Destroyed buildings in Bakhmut, Ukraine
We in the West must take a degree of responsibility for this growing war fatigue. As a Ukrainian officer said to me in late 2022: ‘If our partners had given us what we asked for in April, we could have finished this in June. Had we got in September what we asked for in July, we could have broken through by October.’
So why didn’t we give the Ukrainians everything they needed? The truth is that the West remains strangely unwilling to win wars. We know we must defeat our enemies, but we want to do so while also winning their ‘hearts and minds’.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, we hoped to defeat Saddam (and then the militias that replaced him) and the Taliban respectively, while bringing the Iraqi and Afghan populations with us. This was naive and we failed on both counts.
With Russia, a similar impulse is at play, but it is made worse by something more pernicious. We are being held hostage to what American sources tell me
