It may also buy enough time for Europe to completely cut off Russian sources of supply so that the next time Putin goes on the offensive, he is denied the weapon of oil and gas supplies. But don’t hold your breath. The easier course would be to simply revert to the old dependency, as happened after Russia annexed Crimea.
One of my holiday reads a few weeks ago was Anthony Beaver’s story of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Apart from the appalling and ruthlessly persecuted barbarism of the Bolshevik rebellion, one of the book’s most striking findings is Lenin’s, and even more so Trotsky’s and Stalin’s, disdain for any idea of Ukrainian independence.
The Reds refused to rest until all life was drained from any notion of Ukrainian separatism, making them in this respect virtually indistinguishable from the previous Tsarist regime, which saw Ukraine essentially as part of Russia rather than a separate country at all .
Never mind that Putin holds the same opinion; perhaps more surprisingly, it is also quite widespread in some parts of Europe, particularly Germany, despite all its high-profile rhetoric to the contrary. The constant delay in arms supplies and the not-so-targeted withdrawal from Russian energy supplies only reinforces the view that Germany’s heart isn’t really in it.
The German economic model is built primarily on selling goods to the autocratic regimes of China and Russia, with cheap Russian energy as the raw material for German competitiveness. This model will not give up lightly.
It is hard to see this ending well for Ukraine. Europe simply does not have the stomach for the painful sacrifices necessary to defeat Putin – and he knows it.
This article is excerpted from The Telegraph’s Economic Intelligence newsletter. Sign up here to get exclusive insights from two of the UK’s leading economic commentators – Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Jeremy Warner – delivered straight to your inbox every Tuesday.
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