Four years after the so-called full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is very hard to disentangle oneself from all the clichés, lies and reflexes in which the war is enmeshed. I have never lived through a ‘full-scale war’, nor served as a soldier in any war, big or small, so perhaps it was always thus. The Nazis much admired British propaganda in WW1 and Goebbels used it as a model. The great sin in war is to be objective, and this lesson has been well learnt by the protagonists in this one – the Russians, Ukrainians and Ukraine’s allies in Europe and (till recently) Washington.

The great danger in forswearing efforts at truth is that what is imagined may come to pass, with the lies leading to the truth of a ‘full-scale’ war.

In the case of Ukraine, the ‘news’ points my feelings and my intellect in different directions. On the one hand, one reads almost daily about the suffering and heroism of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians – of relentless Russian bombing, of kidnapped children, of schools forced underground, and of course the testimony of Ukrainian refugees. The atrocities of the Russians, ventilated wherever possible, arouse one’s moral indignation.

But I have long since learnt that courage and suffering, while rightly evoking admiration and pity, do not of themselves validate the cause for which they are incurred. An action can be brave without being good; suffering is piteous without being necessary.

We in Britain remember our war dead as having given their lives for freedom; the Germans remember theirs as victims of tragedy. Yet the soldiers on both sides fought equally bravely. Russian troops have also fought bravely in the Ukraine war, but we are never, or rarely, asked to admire their bravery, because their cause is deemed evil.

One can say a lot about ‘cause’. In legal terms, the Russians ‘caused’ the Ukraine war by invading an independent country. They should not have done so; there were better, more patient ways of wooing Ukraine back into the Russian fold, where bits of it had lived for centuries.

In addition, it was a miscalculation. Supposedly started to prevent Ukraine joining NATO, it has added two new members to the Alliance and made most of Europe anti-Russian. Conceived as a ‘special operation’ lasting a few weeks, it has turned into the biggest war on the European mainland since 1945.

But efforts at truth would also acknowledge that the US and NATO provoked Russia by actively working to prise Ukraine from its orbit in order to complete their victory in the Cold War.

And does the West bear no responsibility for a war lasting years, with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, dead or injured on both sides, and much of Ukraine’s economy in ruins? Did it not promise Ukraine ‘all it takes’ for victory over Russia? Would not the war have ended years ago but for such promises? Was the cause of what the West defines as Ukraine’s independence worth the cost in lives? Will the probable outcome justify the deaths, bravery, suffering?

A few of us, in this country, as well as on the continent of Europe and in the US, have been calling for a negotiated peace almost from the day the war started. We have resisted the comparison between Putin and Hitler. We have simply been cancelled. Nothing must be allowed which will weaken the national resolve to stand by Ukraine. Press self-censorship and disinformation in this proxy war have equalled, and even exceeded, that during the ‘real’ war against Hitler. Now Trump has broken up the united front. Russia, he says, was not the cause (or at least not the only cause) of this ‘unnecessary’ war. And for that he has been excoriated by all right-thinking people in our part of the world.

I am driven once more to reflect on the mature wisdom of an essay by the young John Maynard Keynes when he was a student at Cambridge in 1904. War, he writes, should be approached with ‘much prudence, reverence and calculation’, and that includes the propaganda which is its messenger.

‘Our power of prediction is so slight, our knowledge of remote consequences so uncertain, that it is seldom wise to sacrifice a present benefit [i.e., peace] for a doubtful benefit in the future.’ Moreover, ‘it is not sufficient that the state of affairs we seek to promote should be better than the state which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition.’

Was the humiliation of Russia sufficiently bad in 2022 to justify its invasion of Ukraine? Were Russian demands on Ukraine following the invasion so intolerable as to justify Ukraine’s armed resistance? Above all, was the state of affairs which the West sought to promote sufficiently better to justify its provoking Russia and prolonging this dreadful war for four years?

Read on: Susan Watkins, ‘An Avoidable War’, NLR 133/134.