Stalemate

Vladimir Putin's Path To Victory, kind of...

Stalemate: Vladimir Putin’s Path To Victory

Not total conquest or anything like it, but, sick to the bottom of my heart, I fear that Vladimir Putin has a clear path to some kind of victory in his war against Ukraine: stalemate. For Russian, a score-draw written in blood while they occupy roughly a fifth of Ukraine is a win; for Ukraine it is a bitter defeat.

On Day Two of the Big War, February 25^th last year, I was arrested by a Ukrainian soldier, Vlad Demchenko, on suspicion of being a Russian spy.

Once freed by Ukrainian intelligence, the SBU, I poured myself a gin and tonic strong enough to kill a small horse and tweeted a video that the person who was in trouble was not President Volodomyr Zelenskiy, not even me, despite my rough old day, but Vladimir Putin because he had not sold this war to his people.

            A year and a half later, my optimism is beginning, not to feel like ashes in the throat, but to darken. Diplomatically, with all the wrong people, Putin is on the front foot. The master of the Kremlin was given a right royal welcome by the Chinese Communist Party at Chairman Xi’s sickening “TyrantsRUs” fest in Beijing the other day.

True, the Russian killing machine suffered three military defeats in places beginning with K last year. It failed to take Kyiv. It had to pull back from Kharkhiv oblast in the east. And it withdrew from Kherson in the south. This year the story has been grim for Ukraine. The counter-offensive is costing buckets of blood. Moving forward in the new battlefields of the twenty-first century is extraordinarily difficult because drones mean that the enemy knows what you are up to within seconds of you doing it. The Ukrainians were first to seize on the power of drones to spy on the enemy. The Russians have caught up, big time.

Away from the frontline, the West is distracted, evilly so, by, first, Hamas’s massacres, killing more Jewish life in one day since the Nazis. And now the West fears over-reaction by the unsteady and extremist Israeli government of Bibi Netanyahu. Worse, faced with Putin’s psychopathy, our presidents and prime ministers hesitate to commit the West’s full power to stop him. While the rhetoric from Washington DC, London and Berlin is strong, the delivery is weak. When it comes to sticking it to Putin with the heavy metal the Ukrainians need, our leaders twitch behind their net curtains, hesitant, fearful. Putin smells their fear and snaps his teeth. Meanwhile, he is on the move again.

            Last year’s optimism was grounded. I went to Bakhmut seven times, five with Vlad and his pals, twice under my own steam.

Notwithstanding incoming Russian artillery, I was awed by the fighting spirit of the Ukrainian army. And the jokes. In a trench in Bakhmut, I was given a cup of tea. Vlad noted that on my mug was written: “Best Grandma.” Chris Occhicone, a great photographer from New York, cracked: “heh, John, you can be a grandma if you want to be. That’s why Ukraine is fighting this war.” We collapsed into giggles. The Russian army was a mile away.

As I write, the Russians are attacking again on the eastern front, throwing fresh meat towards Kupiansk and Avdiivk. Know this: Putin doesn’t care about losing his own people. Remember, he started his reign in September 1999 by getting his secret police to blow up Russians in their Moscow apartment blocks and blaming it on Chechen terrorists. The evidence is compelling that this was a black operation by the FSB/KGB. To repeat: Putin doesn’t care how many Russians die so long as they fear him.

The Russians have fresh millions of artillery shells coming from North Korea while the United States and Europe are running out of ammo and not doing enough to counter the lack. One source in Ukraine who goes to the front all the time told me that, recently, one commander lost 66 Ukrainian soldiers killed in one day; that not one but four British Challenger Two tanks have been knocked out of commission; that the war is going badly. I’m not standing over these claims. But my source is a true friend of Ukraine and his anxiety was real, not fake. A second source is Major Bohdan Krotevych, Chief of Staff of the Azov Brigade, a former captive of the Russian army, no pussy he. Some days ago, he warned that the Russians were coming at the Ukrainian lines in the east, full on. A third is my great friend, Vlad Demchenko, the guy who nicked me on Day Two. This summer, on a break from fighting with Special Forces, Vlad told me over a bottle or three: “It’s bad, John.”

By the way, we were joined by a pal, James, who was a Piccadilly Cowboy – also known as the Household Cavalry – in Iraq in ’91. James and Vlad hit it off. It was only when he left that I told Vlad he had been drinking with Major James Hewitt. Here’s a video of why he stands by Ukraine.  

For the moment, the Ukrainians are holding on. The good news in a bleak picture is that, finally, the Americans have supplied the Ukrainians with ATACMS rocket artillery. In plain English, last year US HIMARS rocket artillery gave the Ukrainians the edge. With a range of roughly 40 to 50 miles, they knocked out a ton of Russian artillery depots. The Russians moved back their ammo dumps, adapted and pressed forward. The ATACMS the Americans have now delivered are not top-of-the-range, nothing like it, but the Ukrainians can now punch targets 90 to 100 miles away. They opened the batting by knocking out nine Russian attack helicopters in the very east of occupied Ukraine. But the word on the street in Ukraine is that the Americans are dribbling ATACMS, not delivering enough, again, in a timely fashion. When you are fighting for your life and your supply chain is controlled by timid old maids, frightened of upsetting a psychopath, you are entitled to being depressed.

And the mood in Kyiv is bleak.  

           

When the Big War started, Zelenskiy told the world: “I don’t need a ride. I need ammunition.” The West gave him some but nothing like enough. Ukraine may start to lose ground, not because they are not fighting hard but because the Russian killing machine is stronger. Putin’s friends in Pyongyang and Tehran and Beijing have passionate intensity; our leaders lack all effectiveness.              

               Once again, to punch home the point, the West’s rhetoric is good; their delivery rubbish. Joe Biden – whom I admire - has failed to give Ukraine artillery, tanks and F-16s in a timely fashion, time and again. My best working hypothesis for this pattern of behaviour is that the West Wing does not want to fight Trump or a lookalike next year against a backdrop of a Ukrainian victory leading to the ousting of Putin leading to chaos in Russia leading to some of its mighty arsenal of nuclear hands falling into the wrong hands. Such as, for example, Islamist Chechens. Far better, one Ukrainian MP in Kyiv told me last year, explaining Washington’s sick-think, for a Ukrainian victory to be proclaimed on November 5^th, next year. That is: the day after America votes.

But this secondary fear does not address the primary threat: that Russia could start winning, or rather, stalemating the war, long before that. And Putin is not just Ukraine’s enemy. Brexit, then Trump, then the weaponization of the Syrian exodus to power up Europe’s far right: these are just some of Vladimir Putin’s greatest hits. For his next trick, please note that Russian dark power has replaced the French in the Sahel. We must expect a ton of desperate Africans flocking to Europe, pushed and pulled by the Kremlin’s sticks and carrots. I’m a Sweeney and every person of Irish ancestry must – or should – understand that the urge to run from famine and chaos has nothing to do with the colour of your skin. But the far right, funded by the Kremlin’s dark gold, will tell you different.

Vladimir Putin is our mortal enemy. The longer he stays in power, the greater the chance that he can destroy our way of life, our democracies, our peace of mind. If we don’t stand to this psychotic evil, he will prevail.

Meanwhile, the machinery of the United States government is broken. The only fix to buy some time locked out aid to Ukraine. My friends in Ukraine fear Donald Trump with reason. He is, wittingly or not, Moscow’s man. This summer I told them Trump won’t win. And now the bookies favourite is not Biden, but Trump.   

In Berlin, Chancellor Scholz mimics Biden’s timidity. These two old spinsters remind me of the previous Director-General of the BBC, Tony Hall. They control machines of great power but are afraid to get out of second gear. Imagine an old lady in an Abrams tank, thinking it were a Morris 1000, bewildered and afraid to make 20 mph on the road to Eastbourne. Although, to be fair, the American and the German lack Hall’s peculiar margarita of po-faced sanctimony and moral squalor. The Europeans don’t have the muscle to prevent stalemate. Across Europe – and whatever Nigel Farage may tell you, Britain is in Europe – we have been partying on the back of the peace dividend for far too long.

            As a cub war reporter, I reported on both the Czech and the Romanian revolutions for my old paper, The Observer. Driving across the length of Romania on Christmas Eve, 1989, the revolutionary mood at that time was electric.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven… Blah Blah Blah…”

I even wrote a book about it, although my title was banal, The Life And Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu. It should have been called Christmas With The Ceausescus.

             Whatever. That was then. Tyranny is back, big time.

If you doubt me, look at what Hamas has just done in Israel. The massacre of innocents by the Islamist death cult is a thing of evil. It is also, if you are Ukrainian, an evil distraction. And a cunning one too.

            The world is beginning to forget Russia’s evil war.

            Winter is coming

Unless the West switches on its power, stalemate is coming too.

John Sweeney’s Killer In The Kremlin is published by Penguin Books.