British troops could uphold a ceasefire in Ukraine and keep Europe safe - Alex Cole-Hamilton
Over Easter this year, at an army base in the forests of Western Ukraine I met a Greek Orthodox Chaplain named Father Taras.
He has served for 10 years on the eastern front since Russia’s initial incursion into Eastern Ukraine and as a man of God, he has never carried a gun. I asked him if many soldiers at the front attended his services, to which he replied, “Not really, mostly they just want me to hear their confession, because they think they’re going to die.”
Such is the weary resignation of the armed forces of Ukraine. They are prepared to hold out to the last so that they might preserve the freedom and the territorial integrity of the country that they love. They are fighting for all of us.
On Monday, I watched Volodymyr Zelensky’s artful redux of his Oval Office meeting with Donald Trump. Considering the outrageous way in which he was treated the last time he was given an audience there, he handled himself impeccably.
On the horizon, however, is the prospect of a meeting less palatable even than the bullies of the Oval Office. A trilateral sit down with Trump and Vladimir Putin himself.
So far Zelensky has greeted that possibility with real poise, but the prospect of being forced to shake hands and sit down with the Butcher of Bucha and Irpin, the man in whose name countless battlefield atrocities have been committed, nightly air raids on civilian targets have been perpetrated and in whose name thousands of Ukrainian children were kidnapped, must be utterly repellent.
But if military victory is beyond reach for either side, then this can only be ended through diplomacy. And by necessity, such meetings must take place.
The challenge of finding a deal that is agreeable to each party in terms of where the new Russia-Ukraine border should lie, the prisoner exchanges, the return of kidnapped children, is astronomical.
It is when it comes to the maintenance of a just and lasting peace that Britain's role really matters. Ukraine was given security assurances by the West in 1994 when it first became an independent state and was beseeched by the international community to give up its stockpile of nuclear weapons. Those assurances turned to ash on the morning of 24th February 2022 when Russia launched its full scale assault.
Zelensky and the Ukrainians can only be expected to stop fighting with a new kind of guarantee. One such proposal would be for a "Coalition of the Willing", made up of Ukraine's allies, to send troops to be garrisoned on the Ukrainian border to uphold the new frontier.
This is a long way from sending troops into battle against Russia - the Ukrainians have done an excellent job of that without us - but it would involve us playing a role in keeping the peace, locking in the support of international allies and ensuring that Putin is not minded to chance his arm again.
All of this feels like a tall order, but given that Ukraine managing to reclaim all its lost territory on the battlefield seems a long shot, it appears that some kind of compromise may regrettably be where we end up.
I’m not giving up on outright victory for Ukraine, I would dearly like to see both the EU and America use their full economic might to bring Putin to heel, but short of that, and to secure a reprieve for Father Taras and the brave soldiers of Ukraine, any kind of settlement must be underwritten with the military protection of Britain and her allies.