DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Putin pushes on in the knowledge the West will oppose him… but only so much

Dawn breaks as my train judders into Pasazhyrskyi station, punctual as always. This time, though, I am greeted neither by a swarm of Russian drones (like my last visit), nor the adenoidal whine of an air raid siren (which happens every visit).

It is spring and the sun is out in Kyiv. February’s frost-encrusted pavements have morphed into sun-drenched avenues filled with flotillas of laughing teenagers. The war remains, but under a cloudless sky.

When Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, his generals assured him they would win the war in three days. Some 809 days later, they’re still trying.

On Friday, Putin launched a brutal, surprise attack on Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv – overwhelmingly Russian-speaking and just 19 miles from the border. Conquering the city, held by the Ukrainians for more than a year, would be a huge propaganda coup. After intense fighting, the Russians claim they’ve now captured nine villages in the region.

Vadym Skibitsky, Ukraine’s deputy head of military intelligence, was unflinching in a recent interview. ‘Our problem is very simple,’ he told the Economist magazine. ‘We have no weapons. They always knew April and May would be a difficult time for us.’

We in the West must take a degree of responsibility for this growing war fatigue. Pictured: A Ukrainian soldier and tank

He’s right. Travelling across the country in recent months, I have met many Ukrainians who unashamedly say they now refuse to die in ‘Zelensky’s war’.

Morale is down – and along with it, the will to fight. People ask why they should risk their lives when so many are dying without results; when so many are bribing their way out of the draft; and when so many promised Western weapons do not come.

They have a point. Without Nato support, Russia would undoubtedly have conquered Ukraine. But as time has passed, getting that aid has become an unceasing struggle.

When, last month, the US Congress finally approved a $61billion military aid package to Ukraine that had been logjammed for months due to Republican intransigence, Ukrainian officials I spoke to were relieved.

But there was also a sadness. The delay has cost so many lives and the task of pushing Russia back is much harder now.

On the front, the troops are pleased but circumspect. ‘This is of course good news,’ says a soldier friend of mine fighting in the east. ‘But we need to make sure that Kyiv distributes the weapons properly. That it gives the right equipment to the right people fighting in the right places. And that was not always the case previously.’

Putin understands the West will give Ukraine just about enough weapons to keep him at bay  but never enough to actually push his troops back across the border. Pictured: Destroyed buildings in Bakhmut, Ukraine

We in the West must take a degree of responsibility for this growing war fatigue. As a Ukrainian officer said to me in late 2022: ‘If our partners had given us what we asked for in April, we could have finished this in June. Had we got in September what we asked for in July, we could have broken through by October.’

So why didn’t we give the Ukrainians everything they needed? The truth is that the West remains strangely unwilling to win wars. We know we must defeat our enemies, but we want to do so while also winning their ‘hearts and minds’.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, we hoped to defeat Saddam (and then the militias that replaced him) and the Taliban respectively, while bringing the Iraqi and Afghan populations with us. This was naive and we failed on both counts.

With Russia, a similar impulse is at play, but it is made worse by something more pernicious. We are being held hostage to what American sources tell me is US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s near-obsession with ‘escalation management theory’.

Ukrainian rescuers work in the courtyard of a residential building damaged as a result of a missile attack in Dnipro

Simply put, Sullivan believes that any hint of escalation must be ‘managed’. He is, accordingly, happy to arm Ukraine, but not to a degree that provokes Putin too much. If this sounds crazy, it’s because it is. And it is why, even before the Republicans began to oppose aid packages, much Western military aid was both insufficient and late.

There are many justifiable criticisms about Israel’s conduct in Gaza, but one observation I have is that Israel is fighting a traditional form of war in which the goal is total victory. And for this, the enemy – Hamas – must be utterly defeated, not courted at the same time. This way of fighting has become alien to us.

Putin understands the West will give Ukraine just about enough weapons to keep him at bay (until the recent huge delay put even that into doubt) but never enough to actually push his troops back across the border.

On Friday, Putin launched a brutal, surprise attack on Ukraine ’s second city of Kharkiv – overwhelmingly Russian-speaking and just 19 miles from the border

But we are not giving up on Ukraine yet. Two weeks ago, Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron visited Kyiv to promise that the UK would provide £3billion a year to Ukraine for as long as necessary. More than this, though, he said it was up to Ukraine to decide how to use the British weapons it received – including striking targets on Russian territory.

Cameron seems to realise that trying to appease Putin only emboldens him. The dictator needs to feel the cost of his murderous imperialism – and that cost must be most keenly felt inside Russian territory.

For now, however, the momentum remains with the Kremlin. On Tuesday, the Ukrainians uncovered yet another Russian assassination plot against president Volodymyr Zelensky, from within the ranks of his own protection unit.

Meanwhile, Russia’s latest war crime entails forcing Ukrainians in conquered territories to serve in the Russian army under the guise of ‘conscription’. With almost no training, these unfortunates often find themselves in a trench on the frontline within a week – fighting their own countrymen.

We are being held hostage to what American sources tell me is US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s near-obsession with ‘escalation management theory’

And who knows what may happen if Donald Trump – who has repeatedly signalled his unwillingness to pay for military aid – retakes the White House in November. It’s time to be realistic. Sadly, thanks to Western pusallinimity, Ukraine may already be past the point of winning this war outright. The latest injection of Western weapons should help them to stem further Russian advances – but not to reverse them. The stalemate seems set to continue.

It remains politically impossible for Zelensky to publicly offer terms. Would a British prime minister ever agree to hand Manchester or Leeds over to the enemy for the sake of peace?

But the status quo is unsustainable. I expect to hear increasing talk in the months to come of a ‘ceasefire’. Ahead of any such pause in hostilities, Kyiv must ensure as many favourable facts on the ground as possible – both in terms of territory and in the capabilities of its armed forces.

Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron, pictured with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, visited Kyiv to promise that the UK would provide £3billion a year to Ukraine for as long as necessary

As I walk through Kyiv’s Independence Square, close to where I lived during the aftermath of the 2014 revolution against Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych, I am struck by the fact that Ukraine is now the forward battalion of Western deterrence.

Never forget that it is not just Putin who is deterred when we send billions of dollars of aid to Kyiv, but China’s Xi Jinping and Iran’s mullahs.

We are now in a war against transnational autocracy. For now, Ukrainian men are dying on the front so ours don’t have to.

One day that might change. In the meantime, we must never forget the debt we owe the Ukrainians. And we must not abandon them. Our own future depends on it.