War is hell

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won

I’m returning to a topic I’ve not touched on for a while, because there hasn’t seemed much to say apart from, how is this still going on?

Let me start by going off at a tangent. How many wars have actually ever been won? Properly, decisively, so that they never have to be fought again? Precious few. This century, you could argue that the First World War wasn’t so much won as paused for 20 years. The carving up of the spoils of that conflict at the Treaty of Versailles laid the groundwork for the rearmament of Germany, and the start of the Second World War. (Turns out sharing a study with a home-schooling teenager during lockdown had some benefits. Who knew?)

The Balkan Wars at the end of the 20^th century led to the separation of the former Yugoslavia into its six main pre-1945 constituent states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. In this case, it could be argued, by anyone who’s visited tourist-rammed Croatia and its beautiful neighbour Montenegro, that there were winners. But at what cost? Over 100,000 people died, UN peacekeeping efforts to keep the peace didn’t, and the terms “ethnic cleansing”, “war crimes” and “massacre” entered the news bulletins.  The 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre was last month.

Where am I going with this? Watching the news coverage of the meetings in Anchorage and then Washington DC didn’t exactly fill me with hope that the senseless, unjustified war in Ukraine will be solved just because President Trump thinks he can do a deal with Putin. Even Trump isn’t sure that Putin will play ball. Why would he? He didn’t send troops and tanks into the Donbas region just to haul them all out again after three and a half years. He’s not going to agree to Ukraine joining NATO, in exchange for abandoning a region when he’s spilled gallons of his countrymen’s blood to hold it by force.

Regular readers of this column will know my opinion on Trump’s suitability to be President. Yet, for all that, he was elected democratically to lead a nation that holds that democratic ethos dear. Putin, whatever his optics might tell his people, was not.  I would love it if someone, yes, even Trump, could get Putin to abandon the fight for the Donbas (and the rest of Ukraine, which is what is long-term goal surely is), return the stolen Ukrainian children, and crucially, NOT just using any pause or ceasefire as a way of re-grouping and having another go in a few years’ time.  Anything less than this will play out in Russia as a victory for Putin.

The cynic in me, as well as the politics and history geek, knows that it’s not going to be as simple as getting a deal done. That Putin could very well have played Trump like the proverbial fiddle.

I fear, very much, that any “solution” will end up with a carve up of Ukrainian territory, with that poisonous gnome getting much of what he wants. President Zelensky, also democratically-elected, the man who stayed and fought, who didn’t turn tail and run, will end up being the one who has to give way. And that saddens me. It’s not right. It saddens me and it sickens me.

Slava Ukraini