Voices: We cannot fight until the last Ukrainian – it’s time to call Putin’s bluff

Become an Independent member to bookmark this article Already a member? Log in A grim, expensive, choice faces Europe and the United Kingdom. Take on Russia in Ukraine or wait for the fight to come into our homes. Prepping for Armageddon by stockpiling tins of rice pudding, water and wind-up radios will mean nothing if the fight is not taken to the enemy. Ukraine has proved this. And the suffering being endured across the country as the Trump administration has sabotaged Kyiv’s weapons systems shows how far Vladimir Putin will go to achieve his ends – a nihilistic fetish for chaos among his rivals. As Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, said this week: “Terms like hybrid warfare and grey zone threats do not accurately capture or convey to the general public what I prefer to describe as state-sponsored terrorism. “So in the face of those threats, which are not hypothetical but real, and not somewhere else but increasingly here, we have to step up and take seriously our national resilience as well as our national defence.” In real muscular terms, and in the very short term, “national defence” should include the consideration of deploying Nato forces into Ukraine to protect its civilian population. Existing anti-missile systems have been mostly exhausted. Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and civilian population, its train networks, heavy industry and data centres are all being targeted with the intent to break the will of the nation so that it will cave in to Russian demands and sue for peace. A ceasefire or even peace deal that freezes the front lines where they are might look good for Ukraine but it will be catastrophic for the West. Russia will use a window of peace to rearm, retrain, and reequip forces that are the second most proficient in the use of modern weapons on earth. State-sponsored Russian interference and terrorism will continue. Western democracies, already trying to cope with the crumbling economic aftermath of neoliberal economics and populations equally unrealistic about what free services they are “owed” by their states, will be unable to resist the Kremlin’s destablisation campaign. This isn’t hyperbole, this is the reality that will unfold because the West isn’t prepared to invest in protecting the freedoms and democracy that Vladimir Putin wants to destroy in Ukraine and beyond. There’s no case for going to war. There is a strong case for the “below the threshold” war or conflict that Russia is already prosecuting. Nato can, and arguably should, get involved in very aggressive defence of Ukraine. Not because we are morally outraged by Russia’s murder of toddlers and children, or its massacre and hunting safaris against the elderly on the streets, but because it is in the interests of the West to do so. Justin Bronk, an aviation expert at the Royal United Services Institute has taken a look at what could be done to protect Ukraine against the Geran jet-powered missiles or drones. These are the old Shaheds but capable of flying at up to 500 km/h carrying a warhead of around 90kg, painted in black and often launched in swarms. “A dedicated multinational Nato squadron of armed jet trainers could shoot down Russian drone incursions without burning through frontline fighters and scarce air-to-air missiles,” Bronk writes in a recent paper for Rusi, the military establishment’s thinktank. Ukrainian jets have shot down drones including Geran and even ballistic missiles. The 11th Separate Army Aviation Brigade recently posted a video of a rear gunner, leaning out of the back seat of a Yak-52 propeller plane, to shoot down a Russian drone in flight. Bronk argues that Nato could deploy small jet training aircraft with two seats, one for the gunner or weapons officer, to bring down Geran and other missiles and drones, in a new anti-drone squadron. Tasked with only defending Ukraine but legally able to protect itself, with say advanced Nato fighter jets like F-35 and Typhoon, a Nato squadron could plug the gap in Ukraine’s air defences and send a message to Putin that “we see see you and we raise you”. Nato, without the US, easily outmatches Russia’s military capacity. Its full force is being held back by a small nation of only 40 million. Nato, without the US, has almost twice as many aircraft in every category, than Russia. It has a bigger navy by 4.5 times and almost twice as many submarines. Russia does not appear to be afraid of being attacked by nuclear weapons, which Putin and his flunkies have threatened to use against Nato countries or Ukraine. The Kremlin is unmoved by a nuclear threat from non-US Nato – perhaps because Russia has eight times as many nukes. But also because the Kremlin understands the insanity of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. Putin knows that the West is never likely to drop The Bomb. Current evidence, though, is that places like the UK are preparing for cyber attacks and other mayhem by hoarding baked beans and loo paper. International Monetary Fund data shows that Russia’s GDP places it as number 8 in the world, below the UK and France. Add the UK into the European Union and it emerges that the bloc is the second largest economy on earth at over $27 trillion in GDP – almost 10 times the size of Russia. So far all this “superiority” has amounted to projecting fear and weakness to a bully in the Kremlin, and his fellow bully in the Oval Office. Ukraine’s parliament has long called for a no-fly zone of the kind that saved the Kurds in Iraq from Saddam Hussein and Kosovo from Serb extremism in the 1990s and early 2000s. It is time that Europe and the UK admitted to their populations that it is time to call Putin’s bluff. Fighting to the last Ukrainian is no longer an option. Join our commenting forum Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies Comments