THE DIPLOMATIC 'OFF RAMP'

Much of current, mainstream thinking assumes that Vladimir Putin was bent on taking military action against Ukraine come what may. And that is a not unreasonable conclusion to reach after watching the president’s television address to the Russian people on 21 February. In an hour-long, rambling speech, Mr Putin argued that Ukraine was not a legitimate state – historically, geographically and politically. His argument was not just that two chunks of the Donbas should be recognised as independent states. It was that the whole of Ukraine was an artificial creation of the USSR and should be returned to Russia. If this is what Mr Putin believed, and it is a view much ridiculed for its historical distortions and post-imperial paranoia, then it is easy to argue that no amount of diplomacy could have deterred him from his course of action. Rational argument cannot defeat irrational grievance. But is that too simple? Does that really absolve Western politicians of today and yesterday of any responsibility?

Could greater efforts have been made to tie a post-Soviet Russia more closely into European security architecture? Discussions were held at various stages of bringing Russia and Nato closer, perhaps even through membership. There was a time when Vladimir Putin himself felt he had friends among European leaders, the likes of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder. I spoke to one former British diplomat recently who told me how well Mr Putin had got on with the former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and even laughed at his jokes, not a universal practice. Could more have been done then to bring Russia in from the cold?

More recently, could the West have responded more robustly to Russian aggression? Did the West do enough after Russian forces occupied parts of Moldova, Georgia and Crimea? Might Mr Putin have concluded that he could largely do what he wanted with Ukraine because the West had in the past huffed and puffed but rarely displayed enough stamina and will to blow his house down. Perhaps he saw a West that was pre-occupied elsewhere with its wars on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, bloody conflicts that reduced the appetite in Western capitals for overseas military intervention? Perhaps he saw a West that was obsessed with potential threats and challenges coming from a resurgent China that it missed what was going on closer to home?

And more recently still, did the West fail to do enough to try to resolve the rolling conflict in the Donbas since 2014? Could greater political capital have been invested in rescuing the failed Minsk agreements, designed to bring a ceasefire and political settlement to eastern Ukraine? Should it have been left to Germany and France alone to keep the so-called Normandy process going? Or were other European and transatlantic nations happy to turn a blind eye?

These are all legitimate questions that – even with the unfair benefit of hindsight – do not produce easy answers. Yet to acknowledge that is not to assert a complete failure of Western diplomacy.

Many analysts believe that Mr Putin had banked on a divided West being unable to respond to his aggression. If he had, he misjudged. As Russia built up its forces around Ukraine from November 2021, Western intelligence agencies warned increasingly what this meant. There was scepticism in Ukraine and Russia. Invasion was unthinkable, many thought. And yet the agencies – across the board – stuck to their assessments and were proven right.