(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

In the 1930s, the tops and cuffs of shirts were often made of celluloid for greater durability; decades indeed. So somewhere beneath the floor of Westminster Abbey, under the engraved words “Neville Chamberlain”, a skull in nothing other than a wing collar wears a rictus grin and taunts us: “Appeasement, huh? Czechoslovakia, huh? Not so easy is it, arseholes! Not so easy!”

It is not so easy indeed. Five days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and it is clear there will be no substantial assistance in any form from Europe and NATO to a country which has never stopped pursuing substantial alignment with NATO, despite Russia’s clear indication that it would amount to a casus belli.

Thus on January 17 Ukraine and NATO signed a technology development cooperation initiative, i.e. cyber- and automated-war cooperation, presumably the proximate prompt for Russia’s decision to invade. This was the latest stage in a series of moves towards full European integration, with the Ukrainian government reinstating its official intent to join NATO after the very murky “revolution” against a pro-Russian president in 2014. 

In September 2020 President Volodymyr Zelenskyy approved a fully revised national security strategy, including a path to NATO membership. As far as national security goes, that does not appear to have been a success. Leaving aside Vladimir Putin’s traditional rambling press conference, Russia’s decision to invade is clearly rational, though a gamble, in realpolitik terms — to attack and cut the link between Ukraine and NATO, the EU and Europe in general before a new stage of consolidation occurs. 

The gamble has worked at one level. NATO has done nothing and can do nothing to help Ukraine in military terms, unless it wants to have direct NATO-Russia military conflict. Even if this were somehow to exclude nuclear exchange by de facto agreement of both sides, this would involve a massive mobilisation. 

That can’t and won’t happen. It would have had to begin months ago, and it wasn’t. Its aim would have been to hold Kyiv, two-thirds of the way across the country and 70 kilometres from the Russian border. It would have had to involve either US/Canadian and western European troops invading a Slavic heartland to protect it from another Slavic country, or it would have had to involve nearer troop bodies, which would mean Slavs fighting Slavs. 

Did Zelenskyy imagine that NATO would come to Ukraine’s aid if the situation escalated after he signed the NATO technology cooperation agreement? If he did, why did he imagine the situation would be anything different from the plight of Georgia, when Russia launched a quick corrective invasion in 2008? The Georgian leaders — a bunch of 30-something, Economist-reading kids — appealed to the world, and the world turned its back. Two months later, the Russians were out, having made their point and secured Russian ethnic enclaves as self-declared republics.

Zelenskyy has not been so unrealistic, simply appealing for non-troop assistance and getting it in the form of sanctions, materiel and protests. How long the latter will last remains to be seen. Ukraine’s appeal for non-weapons military materiel was well founded; the country, the old USSR’s weapons manufacture hub, has warehouses of AK-47s apparently, but lacks helmets, shields and the like. Ammunition is due to run out in a week or so, it is said. 

The resistance by Ukrainians is obviously heroic. How widespread it is remains to be seen. This “plucky little Ukraine” narrative — training with wooden guns, knitting Molotov cocktails, Miss Ukraine with AK-47, etc — has a strong whiff of a PR effort about it. So many grins of people who might be about to die in street fighting! The reality is probably amid the undoubted patriotic gusto many miserable and frightened people debating whether to put up a fight or not. 

Now, in response to this global opposition — hardly global really, outside the fevered enthusiasms of the Western mainstream media, as China passively supports Russia, India remains neutral, and much of what was the Third World stays out of it (more on that tomorrow) — Russia has announced that it has put its nuclear forces on “high alert” in line with the “statement of use” it revised last year.

What that means militarily is unclear, since such forces are always on alert. But its purpose may be to remind the West that it has recently changed its “statement of use” on nukes from “only if the existence of the state were threatened” to “achieve victory in a battlefield situation”, i.e. if we want to. Russia has between 6000 and 8000 nuclear weapons, many of them “small” tactical battlefield devices.

Would Russia, facing stasis and defeat of its quick war, use three or four battlefield nukes on Ukrainian military or small cities? It would be a point of no return if it did. Even the Chinese might find that a bit much. But when this time last week you made a restaurant booking for tomorrow, did you think a Eurasian land war would start in the interim? 

Even if it escalated to that, what would or could NATO do? Launch direct strikes? With an escalation to where? If Russia is losing this war — as many are suggesting — so too is NATO as any sort of meaningful or credible force. Surely it is now just an anachronism and an absurdity, as are suggestions for mid-scale action, such as Tony Abbott’s pathetic and delusional bleat in The Wall Street Journal for NATO to impose a “no-fly zone” (it would be for the dozens of NATO jets downed by Russian missiles).

NATO’s statement on the invasion called on Russia to “stop this senseless war”, like it was the Macquarie University No Borders Peace collective. Since for Russia the war makes a great deal of sense, it is unlikely to be heeded. 

There is more to say, a lot more. This war is obviously rearranging the world — but largely by making visible shifts that occurred some time ago. In 48 hours everything may have shifted again. In the meantime, let Chamberlain, shiny wing collar pointed to heaven, have his Holbeinesque chuckle: “Not so easy is it, jerks! Not so easy!”