In Kyiv

Witnessing Ukraine's struggle + a disappointing NATO summit

History of the Present (fortnight ending 15 July 2023)

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Memorial prayers being chanted over the coffin of Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina in St Michael’s monastery, Kyiv, on 4 July 2023. She was killed by a Russian attack on a pizzeria in Kramatorsk, an entirely civilian target. There to document Russian war crimes, Amelina fell victim to another Russian war crime. Near the end of my handheld phone video you can see a photograph of her, held up by a mourner.

Kyiv – desperate for the promise of security

I spent most of the week ending 8 July 2023 in Ukraine, leaving by overnight train on the 500th day of the war. Although the weather was lovely and life in the Ukrainian capital seemed on the surface to be carrying on as usual, apart from the sandbags and air raid alarms, I found a worrying contrast with the last time I was there.

As I say in the commentary below, in five months some of those I met seemed to have aged five years. Although the fighting spirit is still very much apparent, they are exhausted and increasingly frustrated that the breakthrough has not come. And their people are dying every day.

In the commentary below, published immediately after my return and on the eve of the NATO summit in Vilnius, I urged President Joe Biden to lead the alliance in giving Ukraine a clear political invitation to join it, when the war is over. My appeal fell on deaf ears - as often happens to anyone who comments on international affairs. What Ukrainians got instead, due to the reservations of the US (above all) and Germany, is this woolly and noncommittal formula: 'We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.' 'In a position to..', 'when Allies agree...'.

Listening closely to Biden and senior officials from his administration, I'm increasingly persuaded that the underlying US strategy is to use the prospect of Israel-style security commitments, and eventual NATO membership, to incentivise Ukraine to make a peace agreement (with concomitant loss of territory). If that's what happens, the sense of anger and betrayal inside Ukraine will be strong.

I WhatsApped one of the Ukrainians who brilliantly assisted our European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) study group to ask him about reactions in Kyiv to the Vilnius summit communiqué. Reporting a general sense of disappointment (although not surprise), Sergey mentioned 'emotional remarks on going nuclear'. When I asked him to clarify, he wrote back 'As Ukraine is looking into the future, there seem to be only two secure options: either NATO or nukes. This is an attitude.' No one in Ukraine forgets that their country gave up nuclear weapons in 1994 in return for 'security assurances' from Russia, the US and Britain in the so-called Budapest Memorandum.

In fairness, it should be said that, in parallel with the Vilnius summit, individual Western countries and the G7 promised increased levels of military, technical and economic support. Unless Donald Trump is elected US president next autumn, I don't think the West will abandon Ukraine. The danger is rather that half-measures, for fear of escalation, will result in a grinding war lasting for years; an exhausted, battered, ravaged country; and Europe and the rest of the West providing unprecedented levels of support without actually achieving the secure, free and prosperous Ukraine that would be such a major long-term asset for Europe and the West.

Here, then, is my column, published first in the Guardian and then in a range of other European newspapers. It contains some glimpses from my notebooks of what we saw in Kyiv, as well as an argument about what should be done. Below that are a few more annotated photographs from our trip.

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20 years old. Died 1 April this year. One of many photographs on the Wall of Fallen Defenders outside St Michael’s monastery in Kyiv.

In Ukraine I saw a brave but ravaged land in limbo. It needs a future – it needs Nato

This commentary first appeared in the Guardian on 11 July 2023. Please use this link if quoting on social media.

Unless the US gives bolder leadership on long-term security for Ukraine at Nato’s Vilnius summit this week, historians may one day ask, “Who lost Ukraine?” And their shocking answer might be: President Joe Biden.

I say this after talking to a wide range of people in Kyiv last week, before departing Ukraine on Saturday, the 500th day of the largest war in Europe since 1945. There’s still the extraordinary fighting spirit that I found on my last visit, in February. But in five months, some people seem to have aged five years. They are exhausted. The casualties, military and civilian, continue to mount.

With other members of our European Council on Foreign Relations fact-finding mission, I witnessed prayers being chanted in St Michael’s monastery over the coffin of the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina. As she was visiting Kramatorsk to document Russian war crimes, she herself became the victim of a Russian war crime. While the Biden administration worries at every single step about escalation, Vladimir Putin has continued to escalate – notably with the blowing-up of the Kakhovka dam, which has ruined vast tracts of Ukrainian land. Ecocide complements genocide.

In a recent poll, 78% of Ukrainians said close family members or friends had been wounded or killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion last year. The pain is partly masked by the adrenaline of resistance, but after the war, the country will face widespread trauma. A priest told us about a soldier who returned after some months at the front, but could not sleep. Back home, it was just too quiet.

Senior defence officials frankly acknowledged how slowly this summer’s counteroffensive was progressing, especially against Russia’s minefields and multiple lines of anti-tank defences in the south. The big combined arms push by western-trained and equipped brigades is yet to come, but in this kind of warfare the advantage lies with entrenched defence. Crucially, Russia is stronger in the skies. Hence the constant Ukrainian insistence on the need for more air defence systems – and F-16 fighter jets.

In a survey this May, 87% of Ukrainians said they were optimistic about their country’s future, but there’s an increasingly sober mood in private. We were told that as many as one in every five Ukrainian children is now outside the country. Tymofiy Mylovanov, the president of Kyiv School of Economics, shared with us its projection that on current trends the workforce would be reduced by as much as a third over the next few years. It’s a daunting challenge to produce the jobs, housing and schools without which millions of Ukrainians will not return from abroad.

So when I say, “Who lost Ukraine?”, I don’t mean losing the war. I mean losing the peace: a country exhausted, ravaged, traumatised, still robbed of some of its territory, a land in limbo. For this is now Putin’s brutal, vengeful objective: if he can’t force Ukraine back into the Russian empire, he will try to ruin it.

Here’s where the buck comes back to the US. Its military support is essential for Ukraine to win the war. Long-term security is essential for Ukraine to win the peace. Without security, there will be little investment, fewer returnees, no successful reconstruction. And that means Nato membership for Ukraine.

While US military and economic assistance to Ukraine has been massive and indispensable, Europe is now ahead of the US in its strategic stance towards the embattled country. The EU has done what Nato has not: unambiguously committed to Ukrainian membership. As elsewhere in central and eastern Europe since 1989, this is already having a transformative impact on the country’s politics and policies. For everyone in Ukraine now has this big shared goal of “joining Europe”. Non-governmental experts and activists told us they actually wanted tougher EU conditionality, to fight corruption, strengthen the rule of law and improve governance. The EU’s four-year, €50bn support package is framing a domestic agenda of reconstruction and reform.

Europeans are also ahead when it comes to calling for a strong statement from the Vilnius summit on Ukraine’s future Nato membership. And that’s not just the central and eastern Europeans. In what one Kyiv thinktanker called a “magic transformation” of the French position, President Emmanuel Macron has come out strongly in favour. Germany is more hesitant, but Kyiv’s biggest problem is now in Washington.

Ukrainians are realistic. They know they can’t join Nato while there’s a war on. They want what they call a “political invitation”, which would be implemented only when conditions are right. As a bridge to that moment, they seek security commitments from leading Nato powers such as the US, Britain, France and Germany. These are sometimes called “security guarantees”, but as one expert explained, a more accurate description would be “security assistance guarantees”. Those powers would undertake to go on supplying the military means necessary for Ukraine to fight off the aggressor. This would be something like what the US does for Israel, but from multiple partners and with a clear path to eventual Nato membership.

At the time of writing, Biden is still not there. On Sunday, he told the CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria that Ukraine was not ready for Nato membership and that Israel-style security arrangements should be available “if there is a ceasefire, if there is a peace agreement”. He emphasised the word “if”. Cross-checking this with public and private statements by senior US officials, one detects a rather hard-nosed stance. Nato membership is to be deployed as a future reward for Ukraine negotiating the best peace it can get, probably accepting some significant loss of territory.

If this were to be the outcome of the Vilnius summit, there would be massive disappointment in Ukraine. (The morally dubious gift of American cluster bombs is no substitute for long-term security commitments, and only confuses the debate.) We already heard indications in Kyiv of growing anger against the west. Left to fight on alone for another 500 days, without a firm promise of future security, even the bravest of the brave would find it difficult to rebuild their battered, exhausted, traumatised country.

But if the west gives Ukraine the military means to win this war, adding a firm promise of future Nato membership when it’s over, then the US will end up with a Europe much more capable of defending itself against a weakened Russia. The US will then be able to devote more of its own resources to the geostrategic threat from China.

The final decision will only be taken this week, over the leaders’ table in Vilnius. Come on, Mr President, do the right, the bold, the truly strategic thing. History is watching you.

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Pictures from Kyiv

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More photos from the Wall of Fallen Defenders outside St Michael’s monastery in Kyiv. Note that the date on this section is 2016, when Ukraine was supposedly at peace after the Minsk agreement brokered by Germany and France. As Ukrainians constantly remind us, this Russian war against Ukraine didn't start last year – it's been going on for more than nine years.

Gustav Gressel (r), ECFR’s military guy, explains how Russian soldiers would probably have been burned alive inside this crude infantry protection vehicle. The doors at the back contain fuel tanks and fuel lines run under the places where the soldiers would have been sitting.

A couple of hours spent in the air raid shelter at the Hyatt hotel in the middle of the night was no great hardship for us. But if you have to do it every other night, it wears you (and your children) down. In this particular attack, the missiles went further west, killing 10 people in Lviv.

A bomb-proofed sculpture outside St Andrews Church is itself a kind of sculpture.

The street sign still says Pushkin St, but as part of the wholesale rejection of everything Russian, the street has actually been renamed after Yevhen Chykalenko, a major figure in the late 19th and early 20th century Ukrainian independence movement.

The glorious Pechersk Lavra monastery complex, now the scene of a bitter political-ecclesiastical struggle between the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, backed by the Ukrainian state, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, still loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate

That brick wall (half right), somewhat resembling a Roman viaduct, marks the dividing line between the upper part of the Lavra monastery, now effectively controlled by the Ukrainian state ('welcome to Ukrainian Lavra’ said our guide) and the lower part, still occupied by monks loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate. After the Berlin Wall, the Lavra Wall.

Father Avramy, the acting Father Superior of the Lavra monks who have come over to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine

Photograph sent us a few days later by Sergey, showing what he calls the ‘de-occupation’ of cells in lower Lavra occupied by monks loyal to the Moscow patriarchate.

One mildly surreal moment in our trip was this vernissage of specially commissioned, artworks by contemporary Ukrainian artists, who were asked to give their ‘Premonition of Victory’, together with an auction of specially labelled French champagne in aid of Ukrainian military hospitals. A vernissage for vistory.

My favourite among the paintings. The Greeting. Last work of Ukrainian artist Mykola Bilous

Yulia Magdych (l), fashion designer, at the art & champagne reception, told Sylvie Kauffmann of Le Monde: ‘if women dress well, it's so as not to fall into depression.'

The smartphone screen of someone working for the Deputy Prime Minister for Euro-Atlantic integration, the very impressive Olha Stefanishyna. Apparently they have another screen image for NATO.

Last hours in Kyiv (St Sophia’s in the background). Our ECFR study group was itself an example of Europe’s 'unity in diversity' - in the space of one minibus.

As a small reminder of what's happening every day in another part of our continent, I keep the Air Alert app live on my phone

The Air Alert app map. At night, you can watch the red warnings spreading west