Why is the UK so invested in fighting a proxy war against Russia?

In the minds of British elites, the “Great Game” between Britain and Russia never ended

Guest post by Lord Robert Skidelsky.

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Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections of November 2024 has torn up the liberal script for ending the Ukraine war. This was to offer Ukraine unconditional moral and material support till it achieved victory, defined minimally as recovering the invaded territories of Crimea and Donbass.

Even before Trump’s election, the script had subtly changed into “doing what it takes” to give Ukraine the best possible bargaining position for peace talks with Russia. This shift recognised that unless the level of Western support was massively beefed up, Ukraine would be defeated. In the face of military reverses and with no expectation of additional military aid from the Biden administration, president Zelenskyy too has abandoned his maximalist position and now pins his hopes on diplomatic pressure to induce Russia to negotiate.

Trump’s second coming promises to to replace passive war policy with active peace diplomacy. It is likely to bring about a ceasefire, possibly by the spring. That the peace terms remain vague is less important than that it will stop the killing. Once the killing engine is stopped, it will be very hard to restart it.

I have been one of a handful of advocates in the UK for a negotiated peace. On March 3, 2022, I co-signed a letter to the Financial Times with former British Foreign Secretary David Owen which urged NATO to put forward detailed proposals for a new security pact with Russia. In the House of Lords on May 19, 2022 I called for the resumption of the “Ankara peace process”, the abortive bilateral tasks between Russia and Ukraine which took place soon after the start of the war. On July 10, 2024 seven signatories joined me in a letter to the Financial Times arguing that “if peace based on roughly the present division of forces in Ukraine is inevitable it is immoral not to try now”. Such views were not attacked or censored, they were simply “cancelled” — excluded from public discussion. The only frontline political advocate of peace negotiations in Britain has been Nigel Farage, the leader of the British Reform Party.

The tormenting question remains: did it take hundreds of thousands of killed, wounded and maimed to bring a compromise peace within reach? Why didn’t diplomacy kick in sooner? All nations have their own stories to tell about themselves. The clash of their stories can cause or inflame wars. It is the traditional task of diplomacy to adjust conflicting interests so that nations can live in peace. Diplomacy failed signally to do this in the run up to the war and was virtually silent in the war itself.

Why was this? The reason is that whereas diplomacy is good at adjusting differences of interest in a framework of shared values, it helpless in face of a conflict of values. Here we get to the heart of the explanation of why this war started, why it has gone on for so long, and why the questions of state behaviour which it raises remain unresolved. Quite simply, Ukraine has been the battleground for two conflicting moral narratives. Much suffering was needed before the vista of peace came into view.

The Russian story

Putin has given two reasons for invading Ukraine, with different emphases at different times: to prevent the further eastward expansion of NATO, and to liberate the Russian population of Ukraine from the “Nazi” Ukrainian dictatorship established in Kyiv in 2014. Western policy and opinion makers believe these reasons to be fraudulent, simply an excuse for Russia to regain lands it had lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But this is much too simple.

First, it ignores the fact that for Russian policy makers national security is inseparable from the existence of buffer states like Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. This is because there are no natural obstacles — stretches of ocean, ranges of mountains — on the historical invasion routes to Moscow. Any military encroachment on the former Soviet space is ipso facto a breach in Russia’s own security.

The collapse of the Soviet Union gave an opportunity of detaching Russia’s thinking on national security from the existence empire. But this would have meant a new security system to replace the old NATO-Warsaw Pact divide. This was never forthcoming.

The reason was not just the surge of Western triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but the Western perception of NATO as a defensive alliance, formed to deter Soviet aggression. Most of us simply cannot recognise in NATO any kind of embodiment of the traditional Russian fear of the invaders’ “encircling claws” depicted in Borodin’s Prince Igor. That is why we have been largely insensitive to the historical reflex activated by NATO’s eastward expansion, as well as specific “out of area” actions like the bombing of Serbia in 1999 and the American- led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was these aggressive deeds which made NATO’s Bucharest Declaration of 2008 that “Ukraine and Georgia will be in NATO” dismaying and alarming to Russians. How could we in the West, with the notable exception of diplomats like George Kennan and Henry Kissinger, not have understood that when Russia had regained its strength it would set out to in one way or other to redress the balance of security in its own favour?

The second reason given by Putin for the invasion — to liberate Ukraine’s Russian population from Kyiv’s “Nazi’ rule” — strikes most Westerners as even more phony, simply an excuse for illegally annexing parts of Ukraine. To understand why this strand of his propaganda resonates so strongly in Russia, we must bear in mind the Russian interpretation of the Maidan uprising of 2014 which overthrew the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich. What we understand as a popular rising against a corrupt despot was interpreted by the Russians as an American-orchestrated coup d'état against an elected leader, which brought to power in Kyiv extreme Ukrainian nationalists intent on demolishing Ukraine’s historic link with Russia. Putin’s repeated assertion that Ukrainian nationalism was an alien implant reflected the widespread Russian belief that Ukraine had no independent history, and therefore no right to an existence separate from Russia.

The crucial hole in the Russian story is obvious: Russia’s failure to accept as valid any nationalism in their historic “space” other than their own. Russians were not wrong to see a Western, and particularly American-led, plot to detach Ukraine from Russia. But they could not explain popular support for it in the streets of Kyiv.

The British story

Britain has been America’s cheerleader in Ukraine policy, more bellicose even than the United States. Again history gives an explanation.

Modern Britain has never been “isolationist” in the sense that the US was till the Second World War, because till well into the 20th century it had a world empire which needed defending. In 1852, the Foreign Secretary Lord Granville outlined the British principles of foreign policy as follows: “It is the duty and the interest of this country, having possessions scattered over the whole world, and priding itself on its advanced state of civilization, to encourage moral, intellectual and physical progress among all other nations”.

When Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister, said in Chicago in 1999 that “the spread of our values makes us more secure”, he was simply echoing Lord Granville. Far-flung empire was gone, but not the far-flung sense of responsibility for the good of the world, now underpinned by American power, to which Britain could still hope to make a modest contribution.

With the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Russia replaced France in British eyes as the big disturbing power, with the containment of Russian ambitions becoming the principal aim of British foreign policy. This chiefly involved propping up the decaying Ottoman Empire which controlled the strategic Dardanelles Straits, but also, at various times, excluding Russia from Iran and Afghanistan. It was only at the end of the 19th century that the rise of Germany dictated suspension of the “Great Game” between Britain and Russia. But the Great Game was not just a balance of power game: fear of Russia was also dictated by hatred of Tsarist autocracy. We can see in these 19th century stereotypes the embryo of the modern Western view that democracy is the peaceful, despotism the warlike, form of the state.

The clash of British and Russian worldviews was carried forward into the military and political structures of the Cold War, with the US inheriting Britain’s place as world policeman and moral beacon, and the Soviet Union seeking its own security in territorial control of eastern Europe and the export of communism. Britain’s Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin played a pivotal role in the creation of the NATO alliance in 1949, which, building on Britain’s wartime “special relationship” with the United States, bound the American republic to the defence of Western Europe against potential Soviet aggression. Nuclear war between US and Russia was narrowly averted in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

An important further reason for current British bellicosity is the equation of Putin and Hitler. British foreign policy is still dominated by the shame of the Munich Agreement of 1938, by which Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain ceded the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, and thereby helped unleash the Second World War. When the Egyptian leader Col. Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, prime minister Anthony Eden agreed with opposition leader Hugh Gaitskell that it was “exactly the same as we encountered from Mussolini and Hitler before the war”.

The equation of peacemaking with appeasement helps explain the collapse of the non-interventionist tradition in British foreign policy represented by the 19th century free-traders. Compare Chamberlain’s defence of the Munich Agreement in September 1938 — “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying out gas marks because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing” — with the conviction of present British policy and opinion makers that if Putin “got away with” with it, Europe’s freedom and security would be in jeopardy.

One answer to this is that Putin has not “got away with it”. To believe that his depleted armed forces, after the battering they have taken in Ukraine, are poised to strike at NATO Europe is as paranoid as the Russian fear of NATO encirclement.

But the image of Putin as Hitler offers no escape from the stark alternative of either a Russian or a Ukrainian victory. That is why there has been so little appetite for active peace diplomacy in Britain.

The coming of peace

At some point genuine Western admiration for Ukraine’s struggle for its independence has morphed into a proxy war against Putin’s Russia, with only cursory attention to Ukraine’s own best interests. The West’s promise of unconditional support for a Ukrainian victory has undoubtedly prolonged the war by blinding Ukrainians to the realistic prospect of a limited victory which nevertheless might secure them genuine independence. Unforgivable are British and American promises to give Ukraine “all it takes” for victory, when they had no intention whatsoever of doing so. Specifically, Ukraine was diverted from pursuing further peace talks with Russia in March 2022 by then-British prime minister Boris Johnson, who, visiting Kyiv on April 6, 2022, told Zelenskyy that NATO would support Ukraine to the hilt if it went on fighting.

Which brings us back to Donald Trump. Both those who applaud and those who attack his approach to international relations describe it as “transactional”. Supporters argue that it will enable Trump to “do deals” with dictators in America’s interest; opponents deplore its lack of a moral dimension. What both positions ignore is that peace itself is a moral objective — in Christian teaching, it is the highest good. Pope Francis has frequently called for negotiations to end the Ukraine war, most recently in his 2024 Christmas message. It is the refusal of our hawks and their passive camp followers to recognise the moral claims of peace which is the biggest danger facing the world today.

Lord Skidelsky is an independent member of Britain’s House of Lords. He has taught international relations at the School of Advanced International Studies, Washington DC, and at the University of Warwick, UK. He is best known as the world’s leading authority on the economist John Maynard Keynes.