Phillips O'Brien

There are ‘great powers’ and other powers. This is a truism of international relations thinking for those who espouse a ‘realist’ point of view. And for them, being a great power gives a state enormous advantages. Russia, for instance, was widely called a ‘great’ power before its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 while Ukraine decidedly was not. The results of that analysis were predictable. It was widely stated that Great Power Russia, led by strategic genius Vladimir Putin, was going to steamroller weaker Ukraine in a matter of days. After all, great powers were the alpha males of the international relations world, able to bully lesser powers and treat them as the playthings they supposedly were.

Many of those around Franklin Roosevelt were puking their guts out – but he could not have been happier. It was July 1918 and Roosevelt was crossing the Atlantic on his way to Europe on an official trip as assistant secretary of the Navy. Apart from rather forlorn attempts to sleep while the USS Dyer bobbed up and down in the deep North Atlantic swell, Roosevelt revelled in everything he experienced. Roosevelt loved being at sea and he had chosen, deliberately, to travel in a destroyer, the small nimble vessels that did much of the fleet’s dirty work. The destroyer he was on was newly constructed and manned with a green crew – which quickly showed.

I’m told that these days you can still buy pastries which look like Boris Johnson, or drink beers with Boris Johnson’s face on the label, in Kyiv. There is even a Boris Johnson street somewhere in southern Ukraine. Though it has been described as ‘nondescript’ it’s still a sign that Britain’s early support for Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, lives on in the imagination of many Ukrainians.     The tragedy is that those with the greatest ‘imagination’ about the subject are probably in the UK itself.    For all the triumphalism, back-slapping and self-congratulation, the UK is one of the least generous supporters of Ukraine in all of Europe.

Well it took two months, but the inevitable happened this week: Yevgeny Prigozhin, one time chef and later war-criminal extraordinaire for Vladimir Putin, was publicly executed in the most extraordinary way. While flying on his private jet with the upper echelon of his Wagner Group, he was shot down by a Russian military operated anti-air system. For a short period there were the weird but expected rumours circulating, asking if Prigozhin was faking his own death, or asking if the Ukrainians did it. The answer seems clear, however. Putin had Prigozhin executed for his armed mutiny two months ago. Always go with the simplest explanation.

In the last few weeks, words like ‘slow’, ‘grinding’ and even ‘failure’ have been used to describe the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive. The fact that Ukrainian forces have not broken through Russian lines and indeed have only liberated a relatively small amount of Ukraine’s occupied territory after seven weeks (though to be fair, they’ve taken about as much as the Russians were able to seize in seven months), has led some to cast doubt on the course of the counteroffensive. It has been argued that the Ukrainians launched their main offensive in early June, failed, and since then have struggled mightily to deal with Russian defences, particularly dense Russian minefields.