MONDAY marked three years to the day since Russia rolled into Ukraine, and what better way to mark the occasion than with a lavish conference? In scenes more resembling a Hollywood awards ceremony than a political conclave, Sir Keir Starmer told his fellow luminaries at the ‘Support Ukraine’ event that the whole of Britain stands behind the beleaguered nation, ‘from His Majesty the King to the NHS workers volunteering in hospitals in Ukraine to the communities that took Ukrainian refugees to their heart’. He stopped just short of making a heart sign with his hands.
But just like the best Tinseltown spectacles, behind the performance there was very little of real substance. Tomorrow, Starmer is set to fly to Washington to present his grand plan for Ukraine: Up to 30,000 British and European troops on the ground backed by spy planes, drones and satellites to monitor Russian troops, and warships in the Black Sea to deter further attacks. All, of course, supported by the US, which is to act as a backstop.
Never mind that the number of fully deployable military personnel in the British army has been dropping steadily over the last few years, down from 22,749 in 2020 to 18,398 today. No wonder that one European official has already told Reuters that 30,000 troops is on the ‘high side‘.
A French military official said there was little sense in talking numbers at this stage, because the plans are so embryonic. As has been highlighted in these pages, 30,000 would in any event fall woefully short of the numbers needed to enforce lines on the ground, making the plans toothless from the get-go.
France’s President Macron, adding to the bluster, told an audience at a social media Q&A session ahead of his meeting with Trump on Monday that he planned to tell the American President not to be weak: ‘Trump, I know him. I respect him and I believe he respects me’, Macron postured. ‘I will tell him: deep down you cannot be weak in the face of President [Putin]. It’s not you, it’s not what you’re made of and it’s not in your interests.’ No wonder body language between the two leaders at the press event was so awkward.
Even the Ukrainians aren’t keen on the idea of Western troops in their country. Over the weekend Mikhail Podolyak, the top adviser to Ukrainian President Zelensky, told Polish radio that plans for a Western peacekeeping force ‘do not seem very realistic scenarios for now’. Rather, he called for the money and weapons to keep flowing.
For his part, Zelensky has called for the creation of an ‘armed forces of Europe’, and for Ukraine to be granted admission to Nato, even offering to resign his position in exchange if that’s what it takes. Clearly he was put up to such demands by his pals in Europe – plans for a European army have been in the Brussels pipeline for decades; former Defence Minister Liam Fox called it a ‘vanity project’ in these pages as long ago as 2016.
The phrase ‘like headless chickens’ springs to mind.
By contrast, the Americans have been crystal clear: No Nato membership for Ukraine; Ukraine may have to give up some territory; Europe must manage defence in its own region.
Echoing President Eisenhower’s concern, following World War II, that Europe was making ‘a sucker out of Uncle Sam,’ in mid-February Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told the press: ‘Like President Eisenhower, this administration believes in alliances. But make no mistake, President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.’
Hegseth’s much-overlooked Q&A, which followed a Nato Ministers of Defense Meeting in Brussels, was heavily laden with the words: realism, realistic, reality.
‘I think realism is an important part of the conversation that hasn’t existed enough inside conversations amongst friends,’ he said. ‘But simply pointing out realism, like the borders won’t be rolled back to what everybody would like them to be in 2014, is not a concession to Vladimir Putin. It’s a recognition of hard power realities on the ground after a lot of investment and sacrifice first by the Ukrainians and then by allies and then a realisation that a negotiated peace is going to be some sort of demarcation that neither side wants.
‘Reality exists.’
Hegseth’s tone was echoed by Vice President JD Vance on Friday, in a spat with historian and columnist Niall Ferguson on X.
Ferguson had tweeted, comparing the invasion of Ukraine with aggression against Kuwait. In the parlance of the younger generation, Vance quickly ‘clapped back’, excoriating Ferguson with a lengthy and detailed reply spelling out the facts on the ground.
‘What is Niall’s actual plan for Ukraine?’ Vance asked. ‘Another aid package? Is he aware of the reality on the ground?
‘President Trump is dealing with reality, which means dealing with facts.’
One of those facts was painfully obvious: ‘Ending the conflict requires talking to the people involved in starting it and maintaining it.’ This used to be a left-wing talking point. After all, it’s the very essence of democracy. But in their panicked bid to be taken seriously on the world stage, to ‘act tough’, Starmer’s government announced on Monday that they would be rolling out yet more sanctions on Russia-linked individuals, even banning them from the UK.
In what can only be described as the ultimate irony, security minister Dan Jarvis said: ‘Border security is national security, and we will use all the tools at our disposal to protect our country against the threat from Russia.’
Surely this was not the sort of border control JD Vance had in mind when, during his Munich speech, he urged European leaders to get a grip on mass immigration. That speech was all about the need to remember the values that we fight for when we defend Europe from threat. Yet in its zeal to protect our country against Russia our governments have abandoned those most basic values, and nowhere is this more painfully apparent than in the 1,700 sanctions levied against individuals.
Take the case of Graham Phillips, a British citizen sanctioned by the British government for nothing more than criticising Ukraine on YouTube. Taking up his case in the Daily Mail, Peter Hitchens wrote: ‘Mr Phillips seems to be the only British person living who does not have any human rights. The penalties he suffers are unlimited. No date has ever been set for his release from them.
Hitchens added: ‘A punishment which can be imposed without a jury trial, and which has no knowable end, is surely just the sort of thing Vladimir Putin likes. Do we fight Mr Putin by behaving like him? Surely not. Free the Mariupol One. His treatment is a stain on our justice.’
It’s also turning Britain’s judicial system into kabuki theatre. Phillips attempted to fight the measures in the High Court, only for the case to collapse when the judge set to preside found that he himself had been placed by the Kremlin on a sanctions blacklist that prevented him from entering Russia – proving that these measures do much more to escalate tensions than they do to bring about peace.
Others have argued that sanctions are nothing more than ‘government-backed discrimination’, not least as they are often levelled against the relatives of designated individuals, as well as the individuals themselves.
‘This is collective punishment, which would be impermissible if the UK were at war,’ wrote Michael Swainston KC in The Times.
One such target is Anzhelika Khan, wife of Russian businessman German Khan, who in January this year lost her appeal to have sanctions against her overturned on the grounds that they were unlawful because she has no connections to the Kremlin. The judge simply disagreed that they were unlawful, and that was that.
As Swainson noted: ‘Gone are convention rights to quiet enjoyment of property, respect for family life and livelihood, freedom of thought and expression, access to justice and effective remedies. Discrimination is fine, if the Foreign Office says so.’
Another is the family of Uzbek businessman Alisher Usmanov, whose two sisters and nephews were placed on the sanctions list for nothing more than the ‘crime’ of being related to a rich man with Russian citizenship. The UK followed the EU’s lead in placing sanctions on the family, yet the EU quietly dropped sanctions on one sister, Saodat Narzieva, just six months later.
The other sister, Gulbahor Ismailova, remains on the sanctions list to this day, despite British legal experts finding that Ismailova never owned any assets through trust set up by her brother, and her taking steps to waive any rights to those assets in the future.
Even Politico has pointed out that the evidence used to place individuals on the sanctions list is often ‘slipshod‘ at best, based on little more than media articles about the individuals. It found that many of those articles were machine-translated and are therefore open to misinterpretation, while others were written by AI chatbots.
It is time that European leaders read the room and got real. If Starmer had an ounce of political acumen, he would look for an easy way to align Britain more closely with Washington without losing any strategic ground. Dropping these reputation-harming sanctions would be a great place to start. Instead we get bluster and pomposity and sabre-rattling. We get tweets from the Home Office brashly proclaiming: ‘Today and every day for the next 100 years: we stand with Ukraine and will stop at nothing to safeguard the UK’s national security.’ Every day for the next 100 years? Is there a land border in Europe which hasn’t shifted in the last 100 years? Does Starmer imagine he will still be in power then?
Bluster and pomposity won’t change facts on the ground, nor will lecturing the leader of the free world on the need to act tough. If Europe is to avoid a hot war with Russia, our leaders must start by listening – to their enemies, yes, in diplomatic talks, but more importantly to their friends. The Trump Administration is sign-posting loudly and clearly which direction it would like to lead the free world in taking. America is taking active steps to reclaim democracy, free speech and human rights; we should do the same. After all, without those, what is peace good for?
