Ukraine is paying the price for a decade of western weakness and appeasement

Editorial: President Putin exploits weakness only too well but he also respects strength and solidarity – the west’s non-existent united front has failed Ukraine

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov welcoming British foreign secretary Liz Truss in Moscow (Russian Foreign Ministry/AFP)

The sad truth about Ukraine is that the west will not fight for it. Boris Johnson, as if to underline the point, travelled all the way to a Nato meeting in Brussels, and then on to Poland, to show that he will talk tough and deploy troops there – and in any other Nato country or friend in the region – but not in Ukraine. There will be RAF patrols in Romania and out of Cyprus, there will be troops in Estonia and Poland, there will be royal navy ships in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea; anywhere but Ukraine.

Morally, the Ukrainians certainly have Britain behind them, as Liz Truss told Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. Then there is the potent threat to send British armaments to Ukraine, and that of fearsome economic sanctions – and, bizarrely, a pledge from the prime minister to overwhelm Russia’s diplomatic “bandwidth” with ever more talks. But not a single British squaddie will fire a single bullet at a Russian if that Russian puts a toecap over the frontier, as Mr Johnson puts it. Of that, all – including President Putin – may be sure.

Although the British are on the more honourable and determined end of the divided western response to Russian expansionism, the deterrence of a full military presence or defence-treaty guarantee for Ukraine is of course painfully absent. That is the problem. If the Russians believed that a war with Nato would follow any further aggression, they would not be menacing the country now.