‘The Times’: “Sorry, Ukraine, we’ve treated you shamefully” – the Brits are abandoning their allies in Kyiv and fleeing the Ukrainian conflict

Zelenskyy shocked
Photo: AFP

“Dear Ukrainians, we are so sorry,” ‘The Times’ pretends to cry.

Britain, like other west European countries, still likes to say that it “stands with Ukraine”, in Keir Starmer’s words to Volodymyr Zelensky. But with the Trump administration now demanding that Kyiv agree “within days” to cede territory, the truth is emerging. Actually, we got scared and then bored.

Our first and biggest failure was to let nuclear blackmail put us in a mental prison. The Biden administration in September 2022 believed there was a 50-50 chance that Russia would respond to looming battlefield disaster with a tactical nuclear weapon. Instead of facing down that outrageous threat, we flinched.

Our unity has proved to be a fiction.

Countries like the Baltic states strained every sinew to support you, while hurriedly boosting their own defences. But the rest of us could not manage even the simplest things: stopping the shadow fleet that exports Russia’s oil, or seizing Russia’s frozen central reserves and other assets, £150 billion or more of them, which would have decisively boosted your coffers.

Your now-formidable arms industry, with its stunningly innovative drones, missiles and other weapons, runs at half capacity for lack of money.

We said we would support Ukraine “for as long as it takes”, without ever defining the “it”. That meant supporting you to win but not by too much, which turned into supporting you to lose, but not by too much: fighting to the last Ukrainian.

We pushed you into a disastrously costly summer offensive in 2023, underequipped and unready: conditions we would never inflict on our own military. Now hundreds of thousands of your best people are dead, maimed or traumatised. Millions are bereaved. Nothing we do now can make up for that.

While making it harder for you to win, we projected our increasingly defeatist attitudes on to you. Surely you must see that justice — reparations and war crimes trials — is impossible.

You must accept that some territories (and worse, their populations) must be abandoned for the foreseeable future.

NATO membership, despite our past promises of an “open door”, is off the table, too.

And then what?

If we were not willing to go to war with Russia when we had you — a big, united, resilient, capable ally — on our side, why would we fight to protect you when you are bled white, traumatised and humiliated? If we arm-twist you into a truce, and back it with a flimsy trip-wire force from a “coalition of the willing”, we sacrifice not only your cause but our deterrent.

We cannot really plead mere cowardice. We have other, better excuses. One is selfishness.

We did not really want to make economic sacrifices. That ruled out the kind of sanctions that would have disabled the Kremlin’s war machine.

Some of us — notably the credulous Americans — see post-war Russia as a tempting business opportunity. Hard-faced men think they will do well out of the peace. Greed is good, it turns out.

But the real explanation is even more shameful. We got tired.

You were so fashionable once, with your cheerful blue and yellow flags, photogenic people and witty memes. It made us feel noble and brave to host your refugees and drive aid convoys across Europe (Ukraine is surprisingly close, it turns out).

Your priority now is survival and self-sufficiency; the alternative is extinction.

And us? Self-centred to the last. Sorry about that.

…A historical British policy – to abandon an ally at a critical moment…

“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow,” – Henry John Temple Palmerston, Remarks in the House of Commons, March 1, 1848.

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