The West and Ukraine. A loss of nerve?

Simon Bennett offers his reflections on the West’s approach to supporting Ukraine as it defends itself from the Russian invasion.

According to political scientist John Mearsheimer, the origins of the Russia-Ukraine war lie in NATO’s eastward expansion. This expansion provoked Russia, claims Mearsheimer. There is an alternative view. It is that Putin, a colonialist, would have launched his war on Ukraine regardless of NATO’s posture. I subscribe to the latter view.

As former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin witnessed Russia’s social, economic and political disintegration and diplomatic humiliation in the early 1990s, he dedicated himself to restoring Russia’s grandeur. To this end Putin resolved to recover the countries that had comprised the Soviet Union’s ‘near-abroad’, including the agriculture- and mineral-rich Ukraine.

Putin’s colonialism poses an existential threat to Free Europe. In 2024, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak claimed that Britain faced ‘An axis of authoritarian states with different values to ours’. Britain faced the same threat in 1939. History repeats.

Free Europe has, since Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, been in retreat. Europe’s failure to intervene in both the 2008 Russia-Georgia war and Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea has confirmed Putin’s view of the West as self-absorbed, decadent and cowardly – something to be despised and, like his political opponents, disappeared.

Had the West deployed troops to Ukraine following the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the 2022 assault on Kyiv might have been prevented and today’s murderous Donbas quagmire averted. Putin would have threatened nuclear Armageddon but in all probability would not have acted on his threat. First, because he covets Ukraine’s agricultural and mineral wealth. Secondly, because as a sentimental Russophile he would never risk contaminating Mother Russia with radioactive fallout. Why would Putin irreversibly poison a country he covets – Ukraine – and a country he loves – Russia?

In its post-2014 transactions with Ukraine, the West has too frequently substituted political theatre for tangible aid: handshakes, bear-hugs, noble words and group photographs substituting for warfighting matériel; sanctions substituting for long-range fires able to isolate the Russian army’s front lines and strike critical national infrastructure deep inside enemy territory. The West has overpromised and under-delivered. Putin and Medvedev’s nuclear sabre-rattling has had the desired effect. It has unnerved.

Examples of Western timidity in the face of Russian sabre-rattling abound. In March, 2022, the Biden administration vetoed Poland’s plan to deliver twenty-eight MiG-29s to Ukraine for fear of antagonising Putin (or ‘poking the Bear’, as some wags darkly put it). Unimpressed, Zelensky exclaimed: ‘Listen, we have a war. We do not have time for all these signals’.

Subsequently, Western powers have been slow to deliver fighters, tanks, shells and rocket artillery such as the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) and the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS). When ATACMS did eventually arrive in Ukraine the US restricted its use to eliminating Russian and North Korean forces in Kursk Oblast.

Fast forward to today and we see the same timidity in the matter of giving Ukraine the weapons it needs to win the war, such as the German Taurus short-range conventionally-armed cruise missile and the American Harpoon long-range cruise missile. The Germans are reluctant to supply Taurus first, because they are worried that Putin will interpret the missile’s use of Western navigation and targeting data as Berlin’s active participation in the war and secondly because they do not wish to see the missile used to destroy the Kerch Bridge, Crimea’s road and rail link to Russia. (Putin considers Kerch, the longest bridge in Europe, a symbol of Russia’s renaissance. It reifies Putin’s ambition).

In Germany political action is informed or, depending on one’s politics, stymied by strong pacifist undercurrents. The Americans have refused to supply Ukraine with Harpoon because of the Trump administration’s susceptibility to Moscow’s private and public lobbying, specifically Putin’s phone calls and Medvedev’s hyperbolic nuclear war rhetoric. In my 2025 book The Russia-Ukraine War – Security Lessons I note how the West failed to provide Ukraine sufficient matériel and training to ensure the success of its 2023 counteroffensive. There is strong evidence to suggest that under both the Biden and Trump administrations Ukraine has been asked to fight a proxy war in defence of western values with one arm tied behind its back. A not unreasonable interpretation of the current state of affairs is that Ukraine is being simultaneously exploited and betrayed by the West.

So what should the West do to atone for its timidity? It should listen those who man Ukraine’s front line. In his documentary 24 Hours in the Kill Zone,  John Sparks of Sky News observed: ‘One of the critical advantages that Russia has is that it has far more personnel’. Asked by Sparks ‘What do you want from Britain?’ a Ukrainian officer replied: ‘You mean, aside from personnel? Aside from soldiers?’.

While it is highly unlikely that the West will dispatch troops to Ukraine absentia a ceasefire, it could deliver a volume of warfighting matériel to Ukraine sufficient for it to achieve its war aims. Ukraine’s fighting men and women have made the hard yards and significantly weakened the Russian army. In October 2025 Britain’s Defence Intelligence reported that since 2022 Russia had sustained around 1,118,000 casualties. Even the most repressive and embedded regime would struggle to survive such a slaughter.

If the 1930s taught us anything, it is that appeasement does not deliver peace. Appeasement invites abuse and fosters instability. It sustains despots. War is to be abhorred. Sometimes, however, it is a better option than living in fear of, and prostrating oneself before ‘an axis of authoritarian states’, as Sunak perceptively described our most urgent threat. Only if Ukraine’s 1991 borders are restored can Free Europe rest easy.

By Dr Simon Ashley Bennett, Lecturer in Risk Management, University of Leicester.