Ukraine and the shadow of the Nazis

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There was no victory for Vladimir Putin to celebrate on Victory Day. Instead, the Russian leader is mired in a grinding, inconclusive and increasingly humiliating war.

Ahead of his big speech at the Red Square commemoration of victory in the second world war, the Russian president had three options — none of them good. He could start winding the war in Ukraine down, which would involve accepting that Russia had failed to achieve most of its objectives. He could attempt to rally the troops and the nation, but announce no major change of policy. Or he could escalate, in word or deed — perhaps by announcing a military mobilisation or hinting at the use of nuclear weapons.

In the event, Putin chose option two — which illustrates just how stuck he is. He has no quick path to victory. But defeat is unacceptable.

By once again labelling the Ukrainian government “neo-Nazis”, Putin backed himself into a rhetorical corner. After all, how can you compromise with fascism? But Putin is not the only leader who insists that he is refighting the second world war. In his own May 9 speech, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, accused Russia of repeating “the horrific crimes of Hitler’s regime”.

The second world war also looms large in the way the US and its Nato allies are thinking about the conflict in Ukraine. Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, has just accused Russia of “mirroring the fascism” of the 1930s.

A massive package of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine, which was recently passed by the US Congress, was called the “Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act”. This was a deliberate evocation of America’s Lend-Lease Act of 1941 — in which the US delivered arms to Britain to fight the Nazis.

There is an obvious danger to a situation in which both sides have convinced themselves — to some degree — that they are fighting the Nazis. It makes compromise or a peace settlement much more difficult. Hitler was not given an “off-ramp”.

The second world war ended with Russian tanks in Berlin and Hitler dead in his bunker. But Nazi Germany did not have nuclear weapons. A fight to the finish is hard to imagine in a nuclear age — when “the finish” could be Armageddon.

The reality is that beneath the rhetoric about Nazis, there is some sign that all sides have accepted that “total victory” is not possible. The Kremlin has already adjusted its war aims. The early goal of taking Kyiv and decapitating the Ukrainian government has had to be abandoned — or, at the least, put on indefinite hold. Russia is even struggling to achieve its revised war aims of the occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Faced with this situation Putin could eventually decide to end the conflict — after extracting some commitment to notional “denazification” in Ukraine and guarantees of Ukrainian neutrality. Zelensky has already signalled that he will accept neutrality, in return for some sort of western security guarantees.

But, as senior officials in Washington see it, the central problem is now territory. Putin cannot yet accept a peace deal in which Russian gains absolutely nothing — in return for thousands of dead and wounded soldiers. But Zelensky cannot accept a peace settlement that involves ceding further Ukrainian territory, beyond Crimea.

As Russia struggles, there is a growing temptation in the western alliance to adopt more expansive war aims. The official US line is that America’s goals remain the same as they were on February 24, when Russia launched its invasion. The central aim is to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression and to survive as an independent state.

But there are also influential voices in Washington, London and other capitals, such as Warsaw, who now see an opportunity to “push Russia off the world stage”, as one former US official puts it. That kind of thinking was reflected in the remarks last month by Lloyd Austin, the US defence secretary, that America was now seeking to “weaken” Russia permanently.

Achieving a permanent weakening of Russia would clearly be a big geopolitical win for the west. It would reduce the security threat to Europe, diminish China’s most important ally and give new credibility to president Joe Biden’s insistence that “America is back”.

But openly adopting a “weak Russia” policy also contains substantial risks. It increases the dangers of escalation — including nuclear escalation. And it also risks validating the Kremlin’s narrative that the war is driven by Nato’s animus against Russia, rather than Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine. That, in turn, may weaken international support for US efforts to isolate Russia.

Knowing all this, the White House is struggling to maintain message discipline in the western alliance. Escalation in rhetoric does not just risk escalation on the battlefield. It also makes an eventual peace settlement even harder to achieve.

The reality is that for all the talk of Nazis and lend-lease, the closest analogy is the Afghan war, where, over the course of a decade, the US and its allies pumped in support to the Afghans fighting the occupying Russian army. Some western officials even evoke the trench war of 1914-18, where two sides battled over an extended frontline for years.

The bleak conclusion is that the end of this war is a long way off.

gideon.rachman@ft.com