So here we are again. The West, ever the eager schoolmaster, has laid out five tidy conditions for peace in Ukraine. Five points. Neat, numbered, and utterly divorced from reality. The British, in their eternal role as plucky sidekick, have reaffirmed their ‘unwavering support’ for the Kyiv regime. Unwavering. A fine word, one that sounds noble until you realise it describes a man leaping off a cliff without a parachute.
Let us examine these conditions, shall we? First, the usual demands: Russian withdrawal from all occupied territory. Second, reparations. Third, a war crimes tribunal. Fourth, security guarantees. Fifth, some vague nod to European integration. This is not a peace plan. It is a wishlist made by people who believe history is a Disney film and that the bad guys will simply surrender because they have been told it is the right thing to do.
Compare this to the great peace conferences of yore: Vienna in 1815, Versailles in 1919. Those were carved by men who understood power, not sentiment. Metternich would have laughed these conditions out of the Hofburg. Clemenceau, for all his vengefulness, at least dealt in the currency of armies and borders. Today’s diplomats deal in hashtags and press releases.
And what of our unwavering support? The UK, once the empire upon which the sun never set, now a middle power patting itself on the back for sending a few thousand NLAWs. Unwavering support means nothing if it is not backed by the will to see the thing through. But see it through to what? The complete destruction of Ukraine? The nuclear escalation that every sane analyst dreads?
The sad truth is that these conditions are not designed for peace. They are designed for a Western audience. They are virtue signals, moral rectitude broadcast to domestic voters who need to believe that their tax pounds are funding a crusade for good. But wars are not won by moral rectitude. They are won by force, by exhaustion, by the cold calculus of casualties.
Zelensky, poor fellow, has become a tragic figure: a man who believed the flattery of Western leaders and now finds himself unable to accept any outcome less than total victory. His allies, by feeding him these fantasies, are doing him no favours. They are prolonging a war that cannot be won on the battlefield, only survived.
History will write of this era as one of intellectual decadence, a time when we preferred the comfort of fairy tales to the grim work of diplomacy. We will look back at these five conditions as a monument to our folly, much as we now view the Treaty of Versailles as a prelude to disaster.
Unwavering support? I call it unwavering delusion.
