The Observer view: The forgotten war

Vladimir Putin has been murdering Ukrainians for 1,564 days and counting; thousands more if you start when he annexed Crimea. Today, President Zelensky sits down with Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz in Downing Street to talk about ending the war. This is not just a catch-up among friends but a moment to be seized.

Putin sells the war at home as having been forced on him by fate; as Mother Russia’s response to an existential threat from Ukraine, Nato and the West. He knows it’s nothing of the sort. His true motive is to sustain himself in power by throttling democracy in Kyiv in case it proves contagious. Brainwashed by a bogus reading of Russian history that denies Ukraine’s right to statehood, Putin thought his full-scale invasion would be quick. Four years later Ukraine has long since fought him to a standstill and there are now signs that the balance of power on the battlefield is shifting in Kyiv’s favour.

Not everyone shares this view. Writing in this paper today, the émigré Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security apparatus, warns that the chances of a popular uprising against Putin are vanishingly slim. A palace coup by the “men with guns” who surround the president is not out of the question, but it could install in power a nationalist cadre even more addicted to war than Putin himself. In a more likely scenario, Soldatov writes, the war drags on for at least as long as the eight-year Iran-Iraq conflict of the 1980s. It’s true that Putin has suppressed all hope in Russia. In 26 years in power, he has reduced his people to learned helplessness. But it is also true that the tectonic plates of this conflict are shifting in three measurable ways.

First, the Russian economy is buckling. A letter from the finance minister Anton Siluanov last month made clear that defence spending is heading for an unsustainable $26bn overshoot this year. Interest rates are at a 20-year high and the Kremlin’s propagandists are in a losing battle with rising prices and taxes.

Second, the EU has changed gear. Péter Magyar’s historic victory over Viktor Orbán in Hungary’s recent election deprived Moscow of its favourite western stooge. Orbán had vetoed a €90bn (£77.8bn) loan to Ukraine intended to compensate for American disengagement from the war effort. Magyar has withdrawn that veto. European money is flowing to Kyiv and a Ukrainian economy that was facing collapse is functional again.

Third, Ukraine itself has developed a new mindset, less fatalistic, more focused on the possible. And what is possible turns out to be nothing less than the creeping humiliation of the Russian army with homemade drones, including unmanned ground vehicles that can take back territory without the deployment of a single pair of combat boots.

At the very least, this is a moment of relative weakness for Russia and relative strength for Ukraine and its European allies. It is a time for the four men gathered today in London to put aside the timidity and incremental thinking that have hobbled European action in Ukraine’s defence for far too long.

Russia under Putin is a rogue nation the size of a continent, implacably opposed to progress, supported by an autocratic superpower to the east and a mortal threat to the democracies to the west. More than half a million Ukrainians have died for their sake and President Trump is not interested in riding to their rescue as his forebears did in 1917 and 1941. America under his successors may be more gracious, but there is no sense in assuming it will be more generous.

The time has come for Europe, independent of the US, to pledge whatever it takes to win back Ukraine’s full sovereignty and territorial integrity and erase any doubts in Moscow that the rest of the continent, if threatened, will fight back.

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Photograph by AP