Two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 2024 will be a tipping point

It is often said that anniversaries are artificial landmarks with little meaning of their own, and there is truth in that. They can, nonetheless, offer a useful gauge of change. The second anniversary of what Russia then called its “special military operation” – and what Ukraine and most of the Western world now calls Russia’s “full-scale invasion” – presents a salutary reminder of where we were two years ago, one year ago, and where we are today.

Before that, though, forgive a small digression into terminology. Personally, I tend to call what happened in the early hours of 24 February 2022 simply an invasion. That is what it was: an old-fashioned invasion of one sovereign state by another. Russia’s term, “special military operation”, cast its action as something akin to a short-term punitive raid, a designation disproved many times over by the numbers of troops fielded by Russia and the fact that a war is still raging.

To speak of Russia’s “full-scale invasion”, however – as is now almost compulsory in the English-speaking world – carries a coding of its own. It is to follow the Kyiv government’s view that there was an earlier Russian invasion, in 2014, which went largely unacknowledged internationally.

Ukraine is incontrovertibly the wronged party. Russia was the invader, and however much some people, myself included, like to argue for consideration of the wider geopolitical context and insist that the war did not come out of nowhere, Russia’s action on 24 February was a flagrant violation of international rules. For the war to end without complete restitution of territory and resources to Ukraine would be an affront to justice and discredit the whole concept of international law. I want to make this absolutely clear.

But – and you will surely have sensed a “but” coming – the balance of forces as it stands on the second anniversary of the invasion is very different from how it stood on the first anniversary, in very many respects. Hopes invested in a much-touted Ukrainian counteroffensive last year to break Russia’s land route to Crimea came to nothing. In August, Zelensky summarily sacked all regional military recruitment heads amid reports of draft-dodging and corruption. The spirit of volunteerism, especially among young Ukrainians, is not what it was.

The following month, Zelensky replaced his defence minister, and he recently removed his military chief, Valery Zaluzhnyi, after weeks of damaging rumours that he had been ousted but was refusing to go.

A week ago, Ukrainian forces withdrew from the ruined town of Avdiivka – as ordered by the new commander, Alexander Syrskyi, to curb further losses. Volodymr Zelensky’s cancellation of the presidential election, which was scheduled for May, on the constitutional grounds that it could not be held under martial law, paved the way for open criticism of his leadership – from, among others, the soon-to-be sacked Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the former president Petro Poroshenko, and the mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko. These are big beasts of Ukrainian politics, clearly eyeing a post-Zelensky Ukraine.

This is not to deny Ukraine some successes. It has shot down Russian fighter planes and sunk Russian ships. It has defied a renewed Russian blockade of its ports, allowing a limited resumption of grain and other exports, and it has weakened Russian control of Crimea, attacking its naval base at Sevastopol, and scaring away Russian holidaymakers. It has unsettled Russia by flying drones over Moscow, and striking behind Russian lines, including in the city of Belgorod. But its casualties, while still a state secret, have been significant – as the new graves at Ukraine’s cemeteries testify – as indeed have Russia’s.

But Russia has largely recovered from the weaknesses that were exposed in the early months of the war. It has found new markets for its energy, it has not been damaged greatly by Western sanctions, living standards have held up, and there has been less popular opposition to the war than might have been expected. A strange mutiny last summer by the Wagner mercenary group, which had fought in Ukraine, was quashed after a tense couple of days, and leaves Vladimir Putin cruising to victory in next month’s presidential election.

Whatever the truth of the death in prison of the opposition campaigner Alexei Navalny, it will have no bearing on the election – and has only exposed how bare the West’s cupboard is as it searches for more ways to punish Russia.

Moscow has also benefited from the reluctance of the countries making up what has become known as the “global South” to take sides between Russia and Ukraine. That reluctance further solidified amid the sequence of death and destruction in the Middle East sparked by the Hamas massacres of Israelis on 7 October. Ukraine was not only deprived of the international spotlight, which it had used so effectively to present its case, but Western support for Israel unleashed accusations of “double standards”, about why the West could be at once so supportive of Ukrainian nationhood and so neglectful of the Palestinian cause. Ukrainian efforts to win support from the “global South” vanished at that moment.

The harsh reality is that Ukraine is now entirely dependent for continuing, let alone winning, the war against Russia, on Western, primarily US, material and moral support. Ukraine’s will to fight remains strong, although reports of morale on the ground are more mixed. But the coincidence of battlefield setbacks for Ukraine and fractious politics in Washington at the start of the US presidential election year threaten to reinforce each other, with potentially disastrous implications for Ukraine. Added to which, it is not at all evident that Europe, whether the EU or the European members of Nato, can bridge any gap – many of them, too, and that includes the UK, for all its bold word promises of support, say their own military stocks are depleted and they have little more to give.

The mood at the recent Munich Security Conference – renowned since 2007 as the forum for Putin’s anti-Nato tirade – was nothing like as upbeat as it had been the year before. And while warnings, voiced there by Ukraine and others, that a Russian victory in Ukraine could presage a Russian march through the Baltic States to Poland and beyond, should probably be seen as an emergency call to the US Congress to pass the stymied aid package for Ukraine, rather than real fear of a real Russian invasion. Russia’s difficulties advancing beyond eastern Ukraine hardly suggest any designs on Riga, let alone Berlin.

But to end, where I began, with the language – which has changed both in tone and in substance over the past year. A phrase heard far less often from Western leaders has been “for as long as it takes” – borrowed from Mario Draghi’s determination to rescue the euro. And in place of the confident “Ukraine will win”, the new wording is “Ukraine must win”, or, as from the Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, talking to BBC’s Hardtalk this week: “President Putin must not win this war.”

Those using the “must” formula then sometimes give reasons, such as a defeat for Ukraine would cast doubt on the whole international order; mean victory for might over right; or render Ukraine’s huge sacrifice in vain. And these considerations are entirely valid. But another word heard more often today – a word, as I know to my cost, that was barely mentioned a year ago, at least not without attracting the furious riposte “appeasement” – is “talks”.

The inevitability of compromise is accepted by a growing body of European opinion, according to a recent survey conducted across 12 European countries by the European think tank, the ECFR. Even Stoltenberg was less dismissive about the idea than before, with the standard caveat that it all depends on Ukraine.

As indeed it does. But with Ukraine’s losses mounting, its reserves and those of its European allies depleted, and political will in Washington in question, even without Donald Trump in the White House, the options are narrowing.

Will there still be a state-to-state war in Ukraine this time next year? I doubt it. And the sooner some sort of talking begins, the better – not primarily because Europe could turn back to domestic concerns, or because Joe Biden’s election prospects might be improved, or because it might somehow help Putin – but for one reason only: the survival and future wellbeing of Ukraine.