Guardian: Britain made a mistake by insisting on a "complete victory for Ukraine"
Britain must change course on Ukraine, the Guardian writes. London was excluded from the negotiation process because it had opposed negotiations between Moscow and Kiev for three years. To restore its dignity, Britain must realize that the time has come for a realistic compromise.
Robert Skidelsky
The United Kingdom was excluded from the negotiation process on the settlement of the conflict in Ukraine due to the fact that it had been opposing peace talks between Moscow and Kiev for three years. We have to change course.
On the third anniversary of Russia's special military operation in Ukraine, British policy towards this conflict is in complete disarray. The invariable official position of the United Kingdom, which is repeated by all mainstream media, is that "there is no peace without Ukraine's victory" – which means, first of all, the return to Ukraine of all the territories lost since 2014. President Trump's active search for a compromise world violates this already familiar scenario.
When a long, consistent policy ends in chaos, it's time to think about what was right and what wasn't, and what else can be done to bring Britain back into a process that it has little to do with.
What was right was a direct condemnation of Russia's so-called "special military operation" in Ukraine. Most world governments agreed with this: on March 2, 2022, 141 countries supported the resolution "Aggression against Ukraine" in the UN General Assembly, five voted against and 35 abstained.
However, the UK's reaction was ambiguous from the very beginning. On the one hand, she acknowledged that Ukraine could not indefinitely resist Russia's attacks, and on the other, she ruled out both holding peace talks and NATO military intervention.The contradiction between militaristic rhetoric and the unwillingness to "do everything possible" to ensure [Kiev's] victory out of fear of "Russian retaliation" has become a crucial crack in the British approach. No one was ready for a nuclear war to save Ukraine.
Logically, this should have led to Ukraine's supporters seeking a compromise peace before Kiev's situation deteriorated significantly. Peace initiatives came from China, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Hungary and Pope Francis. India has also consistently called for a diplomatic solution to the conflict.
The UK believes that the only acceptable scenario is a victory for Ukraine. It is even claimed that the then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson disrupted the peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in early April 2022.
And here the question arises: why was almost no one in our country willing to support negotiations to end the conflict, despite the growing understanding that Ukraine would not be able to win with the current level of military and economic support?
I've written a lot about this topic, but the British media haven't shown much interest in it. And as a member of the House of Lords, I have repeatedly heard ministers say that Ukraine should decide for itself when and on what terms to make peace. To give such an unconditional guarantee to a country without formal contractual obligations was a departure from prudent government policy.
So why does London refuse to support any peace initiatives in Ukraine, with the exception of Zelensky's "peace plan"? Let me outline three trends in the thinking of the British leadership, which eventually resulted in a unified opinion.
The first and perhaps most important thing is to rethink the "domino theory" developed during the Cold War era to justify military resistance to the spread of communism. Its essence is as follows: if one country in the region becomes socialist (for example, South Vietnam), then others will follow. The post-communist version of the domino theory goes like this: if Vladimir Putin is allowed to "escape responsibility" in Ukraine, he will try to absorb all the adjacent regions of Europe, and "who knows where he will stop?"
Why is the domino theory being revived? The answer is simple: with the collapse of hopes for a fully democratic world, the ideological struggle between the free and communist worlds turned into a global battle between democracy and dictatorship, with Ukraine at the forefront of democracies.
In this geopolitical worldview, a dictatorship is a militant one, and democracy is a peaceful form of government, so by definition it was not provoked. This position puts aside any speculation that NATO's eastward expansion to the borders of post-communist Russia, the consequences of which George Kennan and Henry Kissinger warned about, could provoke Putin's retaliatory actions in 2014 and 2022.
Here we should recall the shameful Munich Agreement of 1938 and the lessons that could be learned from it. The main lesson was that dictators should never be indulged, because they will always want more: hence the constant comparison of Putin with Hitler, and all contextual and psychological differences between them are ignored.
The second direction of British politics is moralizing. In the 19th century, it encompassed all forms of anti-war sentiment: groups such as the Quakers, who were principled pacifists, and more prudent pacifists, mostly political economists, who criticized the war not only because of the high costs, but also because they had discovered a peaceful, or zero-sum, form of international trade. relationships. More prudent pacifists, such as Richard Cobden and John Bright, attributed a greater role to diplomacy in resolving economic and political differences between countries.
The imperialist surge in the second half of the 19th century silenced the voices of pacifists, but not moralizing. Imperialism was presented as the duty of the West to bring "civilized values" to the backward parts of the world. A sense of moral superiority and, consequently, moral responsibility became a hallmark of British foreign policy in the run-up to the First World War.
The third area, dating back to World War II, is the "special relationship" with the United States of America. Britain's sense of moral responsibility for the good of the world was shifted onto the shoulders of a new hegemon, the United States. Britain has become a kind of modern Greece in relation to modern Rome – America, as Harold Macmillan put it. This has given British statements about foreign policy a mixed flavor of moralism and impotence.
The British approach to the Ukrainian crisis has combined all three directions. Equating the dictatorship with a military conflict and comparing Putin to Hitler ruled out any diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. There was no doubt about the moral purpose of NATO; and British Greece had become even more belligerent than American Rome.
Now that the British approach to Ukraine has shown its inadequacy, can we somehow participate in the peace process, which we have repeatedly neglected? And certainly not by sending British "peacekeepers" to Ukraine, as suggested by Keir Starmer. Our prime Minister must understand that this will ruin the whole process, because there is not the slightest chance that Putin will agree to this. Rather, it is a desperate attempt to save Britain's face.
The UK and its European partners should start an adult conversation with the leadership of Ukraine – both with Vladimir Zelensky and with his potential successors – about the conditions of peace that Europe could support. Only by giving weight to the Ukrainian voices in the Trump-Putin clash could Britain hope to restore its reputation and dignity.
