Sir, – Fintan O’Toole calls for the West to help Ukraine define victory differently (“The West must help differently”, Opinion & Analysis, September 5th).
But it is precisely because the West has repeatedly let Ukraine and other countries that Russia insists are subservient to it become bargaining chips that this war has happened.
The Budapest memorandum saw Ukraine turn over its stocks of Soviet nuclear weapons to Russia, in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the UK and US.
Given we are 18 months into Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine without a single 1980s F16 flying in Ukraine’s sky, its clear this guarantee is worthless. The US balks at supplying ATACMS missiles to Ukraine, lest Ukraine use them to target occupied Crimea.
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Indeed, O’Toole correctly surmises a post-Putin Russia will continue to be a dictatorship. Russian revanchism, the need to destroy a successful post-Soviet democracy on Russia’s borders, to shore up the dictatorship domestically, are the real motivations for war.
Therefore giving Ukrainian land to Russia will not end the war. As the 2014 annexation of Crimea shows, as the Czech crisis in 1938 shows, territorial concessions to dictatorships simply invite further aggression.
Ukraine must be accepted into the EU promptly – from there the idea that sanctions could be dropped on Russia save some kind of redemptive gesture from a future Russian leader is fanciful.
Russia can be defeated. Russia in 1905 assumed Japan to be backward and easy to overcome. Russia was wrong. Russia in 2022 assumed Ukraine to be a fake country, with western backers who wouldn’t “show up”.
On the first assumption, Russia has been proven so very wrong. On the second assumption, all we in the West must do is similarly prove them wrong.
As Irish people, we know in our bones the cost of throwing off the yoke of empire. If there is one thing our history demands of us, it is unwavering, unending support to our Ukrainian friends to do the same. – Yours, etc,
BRYAN O’DONOGHUE,
Glasnevin,
Dublin 9.