It’s time to compromise with Putin and save Ukraine

I have been up close and personal with Russia for more than 50 years, and never have I sensed the imminence of war so acutely as I do now. Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, when I worked as a translator in Moscow, the nuclear balance, terrifying though it was, gave a sense of security. From 1987 to 1997, as Moscow correspondent for The Sunday Times and then the BBC, I saw enmity melt into friendship as Mikhail Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin mended fences with the West. And in the early years of Vladimir Putin’s rule, when I worked as an external consultant to the Kremlin, war still seemed distant, despite the West’s growing sense that behind Putin’s warm gestures lay a creeping authoritarianism. Now I believe we are striding, misstep by misstep, towards a conflagration in Europe. I say striding, not sleepwalking, because everyone on both sides is fully awake, fully aware of what they are doing – yet blind to what the other side’s fears or motives might be, and stubbornly avoiding every possible chance for de-escalation. Contrast that with something I witnessed as a foreign correspondent in May 1988, when the arch-anti-communist US president, Ronald Reagan, and the Soviet communist boss, Gorbachev, strolled together on Red Square, mingling with ordinary Russians. Asked about his description of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” five years earlier, Reagan replied: “I was talking about another time, another era.” Reagan’s epiphany came after the US and Russia were on the brink of nuclear war in 1983, when he realised that the Russians were as terrified of America as America was of them. His decision to end years of confrontation was soon matched by Gorbachev’s call for “new thinking”, and within a few years the Cold War was over. What Reagan and Gorbachev did – looking at things through the eyes of their enemies – is precisely what no leader today is doing. Each side wilfully misinterprets the other’s intentions. Escalation is met with escalation. And so we edge closer to catastrophe. Imagine the consequences if Volodymyr Zelensky’s deployment of drones around Russian airports brings down a passenger plane. Or if Putin’s agents blow up a British or German factory that supplies those drones. Or a train carrying Western politicians through Ukraine is destroyed. I see no evidence that Putin wants to invade a Nato country. But so long as the war continues, he will certainly engage in brinkmanship, which is fraught with danger. It only takes an accidental spark to ignite a world war. The fact is, the best way to ensure peace is not – as the generals like to tell us – to prepare for war; it is to reduce tensions and to try to understand the other side, as Gorbachev and Reagan did. In today’s world, “new thinking” means accepting that the West’s defence posture after the end of the Cold War was perceived as threatening by Russia (even if it wasn’t intended to be) and was one of the factors that led to Putin’s reckless invasion of Ukraine. It means understanding that Russia’s fear of Nato expansion started long before Putin came on the scene. It follows that the solution to the Ukraine conflict has to include security guarantees not just for Ukraine but for Russia too. You simply cannot have one without the other. This is not “giving Putin what he wants”. It is giving Europe an updated security architecture to replace the dysfunctional one that was never properly thought through after the collapse of the communist Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. As a consultant to Putin’s Kremlin 20 years ago, I do not remember ever hearing a senior official question Ukraine’s independence. But they complained incessantly about the West’s increasing threats to Russia’s security. I remember trying to persuade Putin’s advisers that it was his undemocratic behaviour at home that made the West fear him, and that he had to liberalise as Gorbachev had done to win over the West’s trust. For the West today, new thinking means putting human lives above dogma. Andy Burnham pledges “no change” in Britain’s support for Ukraine’s continuing war effort, even though two-thirds of Ukrainians want peace negotiations, not the continuation of a war that has seen millions of their citizens killed, maimed or flee the country in the last four and a half years. And what is the conflict about anyway? Since Ukraine has all but accepted it will not join Nato, the only purpose of the war seems to be to regain lost territories. Is it not better to accept some loss of territory (at least pending referendums in the future) and let Ukraine rebuild and become a thriving but neutral nation within the Western community? Or is the West’s goal simply to punish Putin for his illegal invasion? I too would like to see Putin punished, but not at the expense of thousands of Ukrainian lives. Reagan’s gamble was to reach out to Russia even while it was governed by odious, war-mongering hardliners. If today’s Western leaders don’t do the same, the consequences of further military escalation are terrifying and entirely predictable. Angus Roxburgh is the author of ‘Moscow Calling: A Personal Portrait of Russia from Communism to Putinism’.