In Ukraine, the summer often brings surprises. Nobody predicted that at the end of August 2022, Ukrainian forces would begin the offensive that would push the Russians out of Kherson in the south; a few days later, they struck in the north-east around Kharkhiv and ejected the Russians from most of the territory they had taken in that area at the beginning of the war. In June 2023, the Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin unexpectedly launched a one-day revolt that shook Vladimir Putin’s regime to its foundations. Two weeks ago, we were again surprised when Ukrainian tanks rolled into Kursk oblast and occupied an area a third of the size of Cambridgeshire.
The rationale behind the offensive was fivefold. First, President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to secure sufficient territory to exchange for Ukrainian lands in the south and south-east when it came to negotiations. Second, he sought to establish a buffer zone to protect the population on the other side of the border from incursions. Third, the Ukrainians wanted to draw off some of the Russian forces currently inching forward in the Donbas region. Fourth, they planned to test Russia’s much-vaunted “red lines”. Finally, they hoped to change the narrative of the conflict, which had stagnated into a war of attrition that Ukraine was slowly losing.
It is too early to tell if any of these objectives will be met. The Ukrainians achieved both strategic and tactical surprise. Even two weeks into the operation, the Russian response has been sluggish. That said, the enemy has not yet withdrawn substantial forces from Donbas; in fact, it continues to advance there. There is still a risk that Zelensky’s gambit might backfire if the Russians eventually bring in artillery and the pattern of the past two years repeats itself.
What the operation has exposed beyond doubt, however, is the military and political fragility of the Russian regime. Not only did their defences give way at the first touch, but the population has reacted in a curiously subdued way to what is, after all, a violation of their sovereign territory. Russian society seems to regard the Ukrainian forces with the same passivity as they did Prigozhin’s mutineers. There has been no mass mobilisation. To the fury of Russian commanders, parents are objecting to the deployment of their conscript sons even for the defence of the motherland. Contrast this with the spontaneous Ukrainian response to the invasion of their country in February 2022.
Zelensky has reminded us that Russia is beatable. The tsars were defeated in Crimea in 1856 and in Manchuria in 1905; in the 1980s, the Soviet Union performed no better in Afghanistan than Britain had in the 19th century. Each of those defeats was followed by a turn for the better (albeit regrettably brief) in Russian domestic politics. The Crimean War forced the tsar to emancipate the peasants; defeat by Japan precipitated the first moves towards constitutional government; and the Afghan debacle helped bring down the communist dictatorship. We have an interest in seeing not only a Ukrainian victory but a Russian defeat.
Britain has some capacity to make this happen. Sadly, after making an exceptional contribution to the survival of Ukraine at the start of the war, we have fallen behind. On 17 August, Zelensky said the UK’s leading role in supporting Ukraine had “slowed down” and that “barriers”, such as the withholding of “long-range capabilities”, prevented Ukraine from further weakening Russian positions. Britain’s military contribution, which was once surpassed only by the US, has long been overtaken by Germany, but the “long-range capabilities” that Zelensky wants are a matter of permission: Britain has supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine, but it is not allowed to use them to strike targets within Russia. Keir Starmer’s new government is not to blame for this state of affairs, but it will be responsible for a failure to correct course now.
The government urgently needs to do two things. First, to increase defence expenditure, probably to about 3 per cent of GDP (back to where it was in 1994). This would fund the additional conventional and nuclear capabilities necessary to maintain strategic deterrence against Russia. This will take time. Secondly, we must supply the Ukrainians with the capability to force Russia to withdraw from their country, or at least to maintain the momentum of the Kursk operation. Some of this can be done immediately, such as lifting restrictions on the use of the British-supplied Storm Shadows.
With a range of at least 250 kilometres and a warhead twice the size of the American ATACMS cruise missile, the Storm Shadow is particularly suited to attacking deep-bunker complexes at long range, such as headquarters and ammunition dumps, or large infrastructural targets such as bridges. We have seen how Ukraine destroyed or seriously damaged three crossings over the river Sejm, greatly restricting Russia’s ability to reinforce that side of the Kursk salient. Storm Shadows could enable them to repeat this pattern in the neighbouring Bryansk and Belgorod oblasts. Russia’s mobility would be greatly curtailed, its command and control and logistics threatened, and Ukraine could wage a war of movement inside enemy territory instead of trying to batter its way through well-prepared defences in the south and south-east.
This would be particularly important at a time when the Russians are not fighting from prepared positions, as in Donbas, but scrambling to meet an unexpected threat. The missiles could also support the use of drones attacking softer targets – such as aircraft – that are left out in the open. Russia will begin storing this equipment under some form of protection as soon as it can, so the Ukrainians will need more lethal weapons to destroy it. Finally, the Storm Shadows could enable Ukraine to attack the airfields from which the aircraft carrying Russia’s dreaded “glide bombs” take off, creating an aerial buffer zone.
Britain has the ability to help Zelensky create the space he needs to protect Ukraine from some of Russia’s most effective weaponry, and perhaps even to take enough Russian territory to force the Kremlin into withdrawing from his country. This makes the insistence on restricting the Storm Shadows very puzzling. If it is to avoid crossing Russian “red lines”, then these were flouted as far back as late 2022 when the Ukrainians ignored them to recapture parts of the oblasts recently annexed by Russia, and they have been comprehensively erased by the Kremlin’s muted reaction to the Kursk operation. If the strategy is to force Ukraine to settle for the partition of their country, this is not only unjust but shortsighted. We know from past performance that giving Putin a win only encourages him to come back for more.
It is worth reminding ourselves what is at stake. If Putin is not defeated and forced to withdraw from Ukraine, this will endanger much more than just the viability of that country. It will enable the Russians to reconstitute their forces facing the Baltic states and Finland, constituting a threat that we will have to face without support from Kyiv. The Ukrainians are thus fighting not only for their own sovereignty but our security as well. Their army is one of the best guarantors we have against future Russian aggression. All they ask is our help. We should give them what they need.
[See also: The history of English rioting repeats itself]
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This article appears in the 21 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Christian Comeback