February 26, 2025 - 7:00am
European leaders are still in disarray in the wake of Donald Trump’s Ukraine interventions. Last week, the US President called Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator and excluded Ukraine from peace negotiations with Russia in Saudi Arabia. On Monday evening, the US twice sided with Russia over resolutions at the United Nations to mark the third anniversary of the war.
Responding to Trump’s comments, the UK this week announced what it claims are the largest sanctions against Russia since 2022. Yet British imports from Russia only amounted to £467 million in 2023-24, around 0.15% of Russia’s £310 billion total exports. Prime Minister Keir Starmer yesterday pledged to increase UK defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, some of which would be funded by cuts to international aid. This is still far off the 3.5% recommended earlier this month by ex-chief of the general staff Lord Dannatt, and miles off Trump’s much-touted 5% for Nato members.
At this stage, most serious analysts have concluded that sanctions on Russia have failed. They have failed to seriously damage the Russian economy, and they have certainly failed to deter Russia from military action in Ukraine or shut down its military machine. “Today’s measures will target funds going into Putin’s war chest and propping up Russia’s kleptocratic system,” the press release accompanying the sanctions states. Increasingly, the rhetoric in these statements resembles less policy language and more propaganda.
But what can the UK actually do? Starmer has this month floated the idea of deploying the British military to Ukraine. But it has quickly become clear that the country does not have the military capacity to intervene in any concerted manner. Some have suggested that Europe alone might be able to prop up Ukraine now that America is following its own path, but even with the major European powers involved there are unlikely to be sufficient troops. Poland, which has a standing army that could conceivably support Ukraine at least for a few more months, has explicitly stated that it will not be sending its troops.
The reality is that Starmer and his European friends’ project in Ukraine has run out of road. The British Government is therefore reduced to announcing inconsequential sanctions packages accompanied by increasingly shrill messaging. It now appears that the conflict has cost these countries the security guarantees from the United States, under the Nato umbrella, that they have jealously guarded for so long.
European leaders are now horrified that the United States would pivot so quickly in its international alliances. But this is often what happens when a war is lost, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the main loser of the Ukraine war, apart from Ukraine itself, is Europe.
Philip Pilkington is a macroeconomist and investment professional, and the author of The Reformation in Economics
philippilk
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeMany of the European states – especially the larger ones in the EU – have been abusing US support for decades. Their behaviour has been the equivalent of inviting a guest to dinner – spending the time insulting them – and then asking them to pay. It was inevitable that a US President was one day going to come along and give them a dressing down.
Britain has exactly the same complaint as America. We have been treated very badly by the EU which did its best to try to hobble us when we decided to leave their association. Now we are expected to pay towards their defence against an enemy that poses no threat to us. The EU should look toward itself for its own defence against Russia.
“Poses no threat”?
I’m sure the depleted Russian military that has just lost hundreds of thousands of men is capable of rolling through Ukraine, Poland, Germany and France and then crossing the English Channel and marching straight up Whitehall before we nuke Moscow.
The threat is to Eastern and Central European EU countries. They need to look to their own defence. If they want help from us, they should come to the table with an offer for us. If France want to get serious about stopping the dinghies, perhaps we can talk.
Agree with you wholeheartedly, except for placing responsibility for the dinghies on France.
Obviously the French are doing less than they could to stop crossings, because they want rid of these people, but it’s our fault that Britain is an attractive place for illegals.
Rotten as it is in places, we may regret leaving the ECHR. Far better to get clever, and do everything we can within the rules to discourage illegal migration to the U.K.
Labour and Conservatives haven’t done this because they don’t want to fix the problem. It’s malice, not incompetence.
I disagree about the ECHR. I think it abhorrent that a nation – let alone one as storied and proud as Britain – should place itself under the control of a foreign court. It is completely undemocratic and shameful.
Britain should immediately arrest and imprison anyone entering the country without a visa and deport them either to their own country, an incentivised third country willing to take them (like Rwanda) or to a long term internment camp – I like the islands off the Falklands but I’d be happy with anywhere far away from normal people.
Countries that refuse to take back their people should have all travel to the UK for all of their citizens stopped, any foreign aid cancelled and tariffs placed on their imports.
You’ve hit a very important nail on the head there.
Starmer’s kow-towing to EU commissars is sickening. They used to laugh behind the backs of UK politicians and diplomats – actually no, sometimes to their faces, as they did with Farage in the European parliament – but suddenly they need our input into European defence. They’re a bunch of absolute creeps, including Starmer.
Starmer’s GCSE jingoism can be expected to satisfy the major part of the public who still pay any attention to him. Especially attractive to those who think that martial enterprise is the same as conservative patriotism, or those who are fascinated by weapons.
Few among the public will ask what sort of war this defence spending is to make the armed services possible to fight (though the clue is in the word ‘defence’). If that’s a war of industrial production and manpower as in Ukraine, no one will ask what that means for them.
By the time his proposals come to nothing and ought to be noticed, public attention will have been distracted by their own immediate concerns.
Having sold their publics the line that Russia is a military threat to everyone in Europe, European leaders have to follow that with some sort of military activity of their own in their own countries now that they cannot do that in Ukraine, even if it is marching the troops up to the top of the hill and marching them down again, otherwise they would be discredited when peace breaks out.
And as no one likes to be gulled and made to look a fool, those among the public who have bought this line they have been sold will be happy to go along with the manoeuvres, if only as spectators.
It is interesting to watch this unfold and reminds me of the invasion of Iraq. At first, everyone carried on with their normal lives but the PM and the BBC joined together to frighten the public into supporting the invasion.
We are in the early stages at the moment. The PM has made his first speech and the BBC agrees. Any gainsayers, like Reform, are being hit with the counter, “Are you supporting the Russians? Are you a friend of Putin?” So the number of gainsayers in public – the important place, not UnHerd – will decrease steadily…until there can be only one view discussed. Everybody in public will have to agree. It could even be a Hate Crime to be againsayer.
“The reality is that Starmer and his European friends’ project in Ukraine has run out of road”
To be fair, it was actually an American neocon project, led by the likes of Victoria Nuland.
American mining companies wanted a slice of Ukraine. The military industrial complex wanted an opportunity to play with weapons, old and new. Other companies will profit from reconstruction efforts. The war afforded huge opportunities for money laundering and corruption.
The actions of European leaders, including Johnson and Starmer, are harder to explain.
We’re they useful idiots, slow to apprehend American government priorities?
Were they cynically playing their part in the neocon game?
Did they suffer from lingering Cold War paranoia?
Were they nostalgic for the sort of power Britain could project in the Crimean War?
Were they just hoping to distract the British public from other issues?
Johnson bought an expensive house sometime after his visit to Zelensky…just saying…
Amazing! And I won £30 on the lottery just after I groomed my dog. Just saying…
All I got was a timbit!
Actually, it was. whole £33.00! I’m off to the Bahamas for a week!
So hilarious. The US (when it was run by a ‘woke’ neo-con regime) started the war in Ukraine with its obvious cry-bully tactics and ordered Europe to fall in line. With Trump, the regime has changed, and no one is forcing Europe to keep pushing this pointless conflict. You’d think they’d take the chance to step back and embrace peace. Instead, like clueless pets imitating a long-gone master, the fluffed-up European poodles think it was their doing all along. Pathetic and laughable.
You, like Trump, seem to have also swallowed the Kremlin line of disinformation. For your edification I can inform you that RUSSIA started the war by invading Ukraine, firstly in 2014 and then in 2022. The conflict is not ‘pointless’ for the Ukrainian people who do not want to live under the Russian yoke – last time it happened they had c.5million killed by Stalin – Putin would happily do the same.
You, like Starmer, seem to have also swallowed the neo-con line of disinformation. For your edification, I can inform you that the US and NATO started the war by pushing into Russia’s red lines—first by backing the 2014 coup in Ukraine and then by escalating tensions until 2022. The conflict is not ‘pointless’ for the Russian-speaking Ukrainians who do not want to live under the yoke of a US-backed nationalist regime. The last time this happened, thousands were killed in Donbas by Ukrainian forces. (NATO and the neo-cons have a long track record of destruction—from the dismantling of Yugoslavia to the disastrous Iraq War, where millions died based on lies.) This history shows that Zelensky would happily do the same.
The last time that the ‘Russian-speaking Ukrainians’ voted on it they voted to be part of Ukraine not Russia. 2014 was not a coup – it was a popular revolution swiftly followed by full and fair democratic elections. What is a ‘nationalist’ regime? Sounds like a government keen to sustain its territorial and sovereign integrity in the face of brutal invasion to me!
The civil war started in 2014 by the Azov guys and their oligarch masters. Funded by USAid and the CIA, we now learn.
Indeed, you now learn from the Kremlin!
Thanks Victorivitch.
The main problem that leading to this very situation is that the elite and the mainstream media are trying to propagate this subliminal message at any cost: “You must support Zelensky and Ukraine side, if not, you’re automatically Putinists or pro-Kremlin”.
That’s all. This is when they lost the moderate electorate, period.
That message rings true to me – if you are not supporting Ukraine in its defence of a brutal invasion then you are indeed favouring Putin and his barbarous army.
Because most ardent warmongers for Ukraine aren’t particularly knowledgeable or actually interested in the region’s politics, let alone in Realism. Just follow the Boomerish propaganda about the return of the big and bad USSR. If Lib Dem twits in the Cotswolds cared just a fraction more about our decimated industrial base, decades of mass migration completely and irreversibly ruining our culture and plummeting standards of living maybe the speeches of our halfwit narcissist politicians would be slightly more threatening.
Why does our elite seem to be the most delusional and unreal?
Big lies sell.
They learnt from the best.
They are not. You should be on this side of the Atlantic!
Ukraine hasn’t lost the war.
They have won the best peace imaginable at many stages of this war.
If they have europes backing they don’t necessarily have to cash in at this point but they will now need an end game strategy.
They need to think into the future and decide if they can make happen an even more unimaginable ending point.
As to us-Ukraine development of their resources. It might be a good idea to give the us some skin in the game.
Which is probably why Europe is interested also.
But what can the UK actually do?
You could always nuke Moscow. That’d get their attention.