The Russian-Ukrainian war boils down to a race between the weakening of the political will of the Western democracies and the increasingly weak military assets of Vladimir Putin's dictatorship. But that race will be a marathon, not a sprint. Maintaining that political will requires visionary leadership that most democracies lack. It calls for the recognition that our countries are also, in some important sense, at war - and the appropriate policy in the long run.
Is that what you hear when you turn on the TV in the US, Germany, Italy, Britain or France? Is it a leading issue in the Conservative Party contest to decide the next British Prime Minister, or the campaign for the Italian election on September 25, or the campaign for the US mid-term election on November 8? No, no and no. "We are at war," someone said on the radio recently, but he was an energy analyst, not a politician.
The fact that Ukrainian forces are preparing for a major counter-offensive to retake the strategically vital city of Kherson shows what a combination of Western weapons and Ukrainian courage could achieve. US-supplied High Mobility Artillery Missile Systems (HIMARS) allowed the Ukrainians to hit artillery depots, bridges and command posts far behind Russian lines. Russian forces have been redeployed from the Donbass to fend off the expected offensive, further slowing Russia's advance in the east. Richard Moore, the head of Britain's intelligence service (MI6), recently noted that Russia could be "running out of steam" in Ukraine due to a lack of material and adequately trained troops. Therefore, Ukraine has a good chance to win an important battle this fall, but is still far from winning the war.
In a campaign aimed at defeating not only Ukraine but also the West, Putin is counting on two of Russia's traditional wartime allies: Field Marshal Vrijeme and General Zima. The Russian leader is using energy as a weapon, cutting the flow of gas through the Nord Stream pipeline1 so that Germany cannot fully fill gas storage facilities before the weather turns cold. Then they will have the option to completely cut off the gas, which will push Germany and other dependent European countries into a desperate winter. High energy prices as a result of the war continue to fuel inflation in the West, while keeping Putin's war coffers full of billions of euros that Germany and others still pay for Russian gas and oil. Although few grain ships are now leaving Odessa, its blockade of Ukrainian ports has caused a food price crisis in parts of the Middle East and Africa, resulting in great human misery and potentially an influx of refugees and political chaos. These are Putin's friends, too. Even better: the Global South seems to blame the West at least as much as Russia.
Putin's cultural and political analysis of the West leads him to believe that time is on his side. In his view, the West is decadent, weakened by multiculturalism, immigration, EU post-nationalism, LGBTQ+ rights, atheism, pacifism and democracy. It cannot, therefore, compete with the carnivorous, fighting great powers that still cling firmly to the old trinity of god, family and nation.
There are people in the West who agree with him, undermining Western and European unity from within. Just read Viktor Orbán's scandalous recent speech to an ethnic Hungarian audience in Romania, when he said that Hungarians should not become a "mixed race", extensively criticized Western policy towards Ukraine and concluded that "Hungary must make a new agreement with Russia".
Although the party likely to win next month's Italian elections, the Brothers of Italy, is an indirect successor to the neo-fascist party founded in 1946, it at least supports the Western position on the war in Ukraine. However, the leaders of the Brothers' likely coalition partners, Matteo Salvini of the League and Silvio Berlusconi of Force Italy, have a pro-Putin past and cannot be relied on to take a firm stand on Ukraine, as current Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi has. In Germany, the majority of respondents in a recent survey (47 percent) said that Ukraine should give up its eastern territories in exchange for "peace." European voices urging Ukraine to agree to this will only grow louder as the war progresses. (Former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn recently joined them, although his intervention will not affect Britain's strong cross-party consensus on support for Ukraine.)
The most important are the mid-term elections in the USA. If Donald Trump announces a presidential bid based on the success of his supporters in the midterm elections, it could spell big trouble for what has so far been a rare bipartisan consensus in the US on heavy economic and military support for Ukraine. Notoriously averse to criticizing Putin, Trump told his supporters that "Democrats are sending another $40 billion to Ukraine while American parents struggle to feed their children."
What would it take to prove the Russian leader wrong about the fundamental weakness of Western democracies? Quite a lot of it. The two largest armies in Europe will be fighting in Ukraine for months, and very likely years to come. Neither side gives up; neither has a clear path to victory. All current peace scenarios are unrealistic. When you can't see how something will end, it's unlikely to end soon.
To sustain Ukrainian resistance and allow its military to regain lost territory requires stockpiles of weapons on a scale large even for the US military-industrial complex. For example, the US has reportedly already shipped a third of its entire stockpile of Javelin anti-tank missiles. According to the former deputy governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, the country needs an additional five billion dollars a month in macroeconomic support just to ensure that its economy does not collapse - almost double what it currently receives. That's before even getting into the challenges of post-war reconstruction, which can cost trillions of dollars.
If we persist in this, Field Marshal Time will be on the side of Ukraine. Putin's stockpile of state-of-the-art weapons and best-trained troops is already depleted. If the pressure continues - military experts tell us - he will resort to 40-year-old tanks and raw recruits. Western sanctions hit the high-tech parts of its economy, which are needed for supply. Can general mobilization compensate for the loss of trained soldiers? Will China come to his aid by supplying modern weapons? Can it escalate? These questions must be asked, of course, but he would be under pressure again.
In democracies, leaders must justify and explain this kind of grand, strategic commitment to voters, or they won't support it in the long run. Then it would turn out that Putin is right about the diagnosis of the weakness of democracy. Estonian Kaja Kalas sets an example of such leadership, but her countrymen already know too much about Russia. At the moment, I don't see any leader of a major Western democracy doing the same, except maybe Mario Draghi - and he's leaving.
The author is a historian, political commentator and "Guardian" columnist.
Translation: A. Šofranac
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