Boris Johnson sees Ukraine as a present day Second World War – he’s wrong

Boris Johnson’s flying visit to Kyiv on Ukraine’s National Day, exactly six months on from the Russian invasion, was of a piece with the man. It was risky, attention-seeking, warm-hearted, sincere at the time, played for effect, and undertaken with an eye, if not to his own place in history (wrongly, perhaps, I am not that cynical), then to a greater geopolitical vision of a time when Ukraine will be vindicated and Russia humbled.

The spirit of Churchill – or at least Johnson’s version of Churchillism – hovered benevolently. A sacred principle was at stake: might could not equal right. Johnson told Britons from Kyiv that all they faced was higher energy bills, while Ukrainians were “paying in their blood”.  It was a characteristic Johnsonian line calculated for the UK news headlines (which duly appeared), and redolent, no doubt deliberately, of Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears and sweat”.

There was, though, a crucial difference between the circumstances of Churchill’s speech to MPs in 1940 and Johnson’s latest appearance with Ukraine’s president in Kyiv. Churchill was preparing his fellow countrymen for a war in which Britain (and its Empire) was then the chief combatant against Nazi Germany. That war was Britain’s war, “our” war. It appeared as existential – to use the current terminology – to the British prime minister then, as Ukraine’s war does to Volodymyr Zelensky and his people now.

But this war is not “our” war, as most people would commonly understand it. The UK is not, so far as I am aware, at war with Russia, nor is it threatened militarily by Russia. The UK was not formally allied with Ukraine before the war began, nor is it now. Ukraine is not a member of the West’s Nato alliance. Nor – and this needs to be underlined, given the current propaganda refrain from Johnson and others – was Russia the first in this conflict to resort to the “energy weapon” against Europe.

Russian gas and oil were flowing unimpeded, including through Ukraine, until the EU and the UK decided the trade should stop, citing reasons of present principle and future security. In fact, the stop was only a stop to the extent that we thought we could afford it – and it came with a delay and some exceptions. But that is by the by.

The UK and the EU are now reaping the consequences. Unsurprisingly, world energy prices rocketed, with knock-on effects on many other sectors. Russia found other markets, and the Europeans (the EU and the UK) are now kowtowing to (more acceptable?) suppliers, such as Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan and Algeria. In the meantime, each country has had to decide how to protect its citizens as winter looms. Germany has warned of austerity and possible shortages. France has pegged consumer energy prices and is making production companies and the state exchequer take the hit. The UK – with no government worth the name and an energy market that makes a French-style solution difficult – is offering bits of help here and there that few understand.

At which point, just two weeks before he leaves office, Boris Johnson pipes up from Kyiv, gravely telling the folks back home that, in effect, we should be grateful. We may be cold, when the time comes, but the cause is noble. Wrap up, and think of Ukraine!

Let’s see how that argument goes down, when elderly or disabled people start dying because they were afraid to switch on their heating, or when the first wave of redundancies strikes, because energy costs have made businesses unviable. All the economic assumptions on which people have planned their lives, and not just poor people, are being upended. I’m not sure our government – past or present – appreciates that yet.

And how many people, I wonder, ask themselves, in the light of Johnson’s words from Kyiv, whose interests the UK prime minister is dutybound to represent? Those of his fellow countrymen, or those of Ukraine? Whose lives is he obliged to protect? It is easy to talk about the universality of humankind, but sometimes, as here – or so it seems to me – the interests of two groups of people are at odds.

Johnson himself argues that, in the long term, there is no contradiction: the interests of Britons and Ukrainians are the same, and the future of the West as we know it depends on the successful defence of Ukraine. More broadly, the West in general would be worse off, even a lost cause, if it abandoned Ukraine and effectively capitulated to Russia now. Fortunately for him, he will be long gone from office when the British public begs to differ, as it may well do.

For Boris Johnson and those of like mind are proceeding from a cardinal error – or so it seems to me. For personal and political reasons, or just because they have no wider vision, they are projecting on to the war in Ukraine their inherited mythology of the Second World War. This suits Johnson, with his Churchillian fixation, but it suits many others, too. Hence the cries of “appeasement” and “treachery” when anyone suggests that diplomacy might be worth a try, given the slaughter going on in Ukraine just now. They want to see the West and Ukraine as Munich 1938 all over again.

It is a supreme paradox that this Western view, absorbed wholesale by Boris Johnson, is a mirror image of the very same mistake that appears to have motivated Russia’s president to start this war. He, too, it would seem, sees Ukraine through a Second World War prism, as a land where latterday Nazis are looking to revive the contested occupations and collaborations of those years, and which would, if not checked, become a potentially lethal threat to Russia (or the Soviet Union as it then was).

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Whatever the past six months of war has taught, however, it should be that this conflict is quite unlike what happened in this part of Europe during the Second World War – whether the view is from London or from Moscow. Ukraine itself, and its future orientation – towards east or west – was not the prize then. It was a borderland that was crossed and re-crossed by rival armies.

Today’s war is more usefully seen as a last spasm of the Soviet Union’s collapse and something akin to a war of Ukrainian independence or liberation. There is no point in Ukraine winning, only to find itself dependent again. A little like Ireland and England, Ukraine’s very proximity to Russia made it harder for the greater power to let go. Second World War analogies do not help here.

What does help, or could help, is how Russia’s ill-considered decision to go to war has exposed its military and other weaknesses, both against a Ukraine fighting for its existence, but also against the West. Ukraine’s determination and the way its sense of nationhood has burgeoned since 2014 (when Russia occupied Crimea), Russia’s losses and demonstrated incapacity in the field, and the fact that it is being kept at bay by what appears to be a limited and mostly arm’s length Western involvement, should convince both sides that talks are the only option, with the single discussion being the terms of Ukraine’s delayed divorce.

This should not be impossible. But it is unlikely to happen so long as the UK and Russia continue to see their different aims for Ukraine in the light of the Second World War. Nor will Churchillian rhetoric make the British public any happier about cold homes, unpayable debts and lost jobs. They know, even if Johnson does not, that Ukraine is not their fight.