Fatigue as war enters second year

Although Western leaders continue to publicly pledge support for Ukraine, they are privately urging its leader to negotiate for peace.

IT is a clear reflection that we are more preoccupied with our economic woes and endless political foibles than a distant war which has entered its second year.

A recent survey conducted in 28 countries by global market research firm Ipsos showed that after the Thais, Malaysians are the least bothered by the raging Russia-Ukraine war.

In comparison, people in India paid the most attention, based on 80% of responses, followed by the Japanese with 79% and the Swedes with 76%. It was 75% in the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. Concern was the lowest in Thailand at 41% while in Malaysia it was 49%.

Surprisingly, in the United States, which has now spent US$113bil (RM506bil) in sophisticated weaponry and financial aid to Ukraine, only 60% of respondents keenly followed the development of the war.

Across all the countries surveyed, the average was 64%.

The survey also revealed that the much bigger worries among people were inflation/rising prices of goods (82%) and climate change/severe weather (70%).

The results also suggested that war weariness might be setting in in Europe, with declining public support for the conflict compared with the situation a year ago, when the war began in February 2022.

In reality, the fighting has been going on for nine years and could continue for many more, with the United States and its Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) allies sending more and more costly arms to Ukraine, including battle tanks.

The mainstream media largely ignores this, but the conflict actually started on Feb 22, 2014, after the “Maidan Revolution”, the US-led coup which overthrew the then pro-Russian president Viktor Yakonovich and installed the pro-US Petro Poroshenko as Ukraine’s leader.

In April 2014, the majority Russian-speaking populations in Crimea and the two highly industrialised regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, collectively known as Donbas, voted to reunite with the Russian Federation under popular plebiscites. While Crimea was accepted, the two regions were not, resulting in declarations of independence by the Donetsk and the Luhansk People’s Republics.

This led to a war between the militias of the republics and the new government in Ukraine. By early 2022, the death toll in the Donbas was already 14,000.

Between September 2014 and February 2015, France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine signed two protocols called the Minsk agreements. They included a cease fire, the withdrawal of heavy weapons, and establishment of a security zone monitored by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The Ukrainian government pledged to amend the Constitution to allow special status for Donetsk and Luhansk and grant them greater autonomy.

But the agreements were never fully implemented and the fighting continued with about 75,000 troops facing off along a 420km-long front line.

In a shocking admission in December last year, former German chancellor Angela Merkel said the agreements served only to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military.

Today, war fatigue seems most apparent in Germany. A poll in January 2023 revealed 80% of Germans were of the view that it was more important to end the conflict quickly through negotiations instead of waiting for Ukraine to win.

Another survey conducted in nine European Union countries found that more than 60% of Austrians and Germans wanted the war to end quickly while people in the Netherlands, Poland and Portugal were strongly opposed to such an idea.

Last week, UnHerd.com, a UK-based independent news portal noted that 43% of Germans now agreed that “the problems of Ukraine are none of our business, and we should not interfere”.

Public protests are also becoming common in Germany, France and Italy.

On Saturday, tens of thousands of demonstrators turned up in central Berlin for an “Uprising for Peace” protest organised by prominent Left Party politician Sahra Wagenknecht and author Alice Schwarzer. They denounced Western arms deliveries to Kiev and called for peace negotiations instead.

On Sunday, several hundred protesters gathered outside the Ramstein US military airbase in south-west Germany, calling for an end to arms deliveries to Ukraine and peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.

Among the placards displayed were, “Americans go home” and “Stop the weapons deliveries”.

A week earlier, about 10,000 people demonstrated in Munich, Germany, outside a hotel where leaders had convened for the Munich Security Conference in which military support for Ukraine was among the main items on the agenda.

Multiple mass protests against France’s Nato membership and its continued support for Kiev have also been held in Paris and in 30 other places in the country over the past two weeks.

Thousands have also rallied for peace in the Italian cities of Genoa and Milan, demanding an end to shipments of arms destined for Ukraine.

Although public declarations from US President Joe Biden and most Western leaders are that they would support Ukraine with arms and training of its troops until it achieves victory in its war with Russia, in private conversations, the opposite is true.

According to The Wall Street Journal, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a dinner in Paris last month that his country cannot win the war and urged him to start peace talks with Moscow in exchange for closer ties with Nato.

It quoted Macron as telling Zelenskyy that “even mortal enemies like France and Germany had to make peace after World War II”.

The report noted that the public rhetoric masks deepening doubts in France, Germany and the UK that Ukraine would be able to expel Russia from Donbas and Crimea.

The WSJ also quoted a senior French official as saying: “We keep repeating that Russia mustn’t win, but what does that mean? If the war goes on for long enough with this intensity, Ukraine’s losses will become unbearable. And no one believes they will be able to retrieve Crimea.”

Media consultant M. Veera Pandiyan sees the truth in this quote by George Orwell: ‘War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.’ The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.