Putin Is Banking On A Failure Of Political Will In The Weak West

The Russo-Ukrainian war is coming down to a race between the weakening political will of western democracies and the deteriorating military means of Vladimir Putin's dictatorship.

-  Timothy Garton Ash

But this race will be a marathon, not a sprint. Sustaining that political will requires the kind of farsighted leadership that most democracies are missing. It calls for a recognition that our own countries are also, in some important sense, at war - and a corresponding politics of the long haul.

Is this what you hear when you turn on your television in the United States, Germany, Italy, Britain or France? Is this a leading topic in the Conservative party contest to decide Britain's next prime minister? No. "We are at war," I heard someone say recently on the radio; but he was an energy analyst, not a politician.

The fact that Ukrainian forces are preparing for a big counter-offensive to recapture the strategically vital city of Kherson shows what a combination of western arms and Ukrainian courage could achieve. US-supplied high mobility artillery rocket systems - long-range multiple-launch rocket systems - have enabled the Ukrainians to hit artillery depots, bridges and command posts far behind Russian lines. Russian forces have been redeployed from Donbas to defend against the expected offensive, thus further slowing the Russian advance in the east. Richard Moore, the head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (M16), observed recently that Russia might be "about to run out of steam" in Ukraine. So Ukraine has a chance of winning an important battle this autumn; but it's still a long way from winning the war.