Why European leaders are experiencing the final stages of grief, as their Ukraine policy is confirmed dead

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If foreign policy is human, then war in Ukraine killed the prodigal child of Biden and many European leaders, leaving them bereaved. Confirmation of death occurred with the failure of Ukraine's 2023 summer counter-offensive. Eighteen months on, Zelensky and European leaders remain unable to break out of the cycle of grief, and Trump has unwittingly become their therapist.

Loss is devastating. I lost my mum to cancer in 2008, and it was the worst day of my life. Hundreds of thousands of people in Russia and Ukraine have had to confront a premature reckoning with grief of much younger relatives, and in many unforgivable cases, children, in the teeth of this pointless war.

Little thought seems given to them, when the polished limos glide up to the red carpets in Brussels and elsewhere, and our besuited leaders shake coiffured heads at how awful it all is.

Yet von der Leyen, Scholz, Macron and the countless British Prime Ministers since war broke out, have experienced their own particular form of grief, caused by the Biden-inspired misadventure in Ukraine. This helps to explain their inability to let go of a lifeless foreign policy.

Their dead brainchild, a belief that a smaller, economically fragile, conventionally armed Ukraine could defeat a much larger, economically robust and nuclear armed Russia.

This belief held strong with billion dollar buttresses of cash from America, Albion, Europe and elsewhere. Because the collective West is economically much stronger than lone Russia by many multiples, after all? Our cash was like the best Kevlar, or so we thought.

But then it turned out that wars are won by people, not payouts. Mostly men, but also women, holding guns, killing other humans they had never before met.

In the summer of 2023, after the uplifting success of Ukraine’s army in the second part of 2022, hopes were high of a smashing Ukrainian breakthrough. So high, the press were celebrating before the first whistle for troops to go over the top and confront the hail of bullets, on 4 June.

Yet we understood, deep down, that Ukraine didn’t have enough people or enough guns to win. Indeed, the intelligence told us that was so. And as we did not want our western children to die in the fight, that is how it proved.

The bullet of realism killed our brainchild, though hundreds of thousands more people would go on to die or be injured in a war that continued for eighteen months more.

In my diplomatic career, I was involved, in one way or another in the response, to mass casualty events around the world, including 911, the first Bali Bombing, the Indian Ocean Tsunami and Fukushima. So I’ve met a lot of a grieving relatives. And while I would never compare their feelings to those of out-of-touch politicians, their cycle of grief bears some similarity.

Firstly there is the shock and denial. In the denial stage of grief, we struggle consciously or unconsciously to acknowledge the loss, as a way to protect ourselves from the pain.

Ten days after the Ukrainian counter-offensive, after President Putin announced it was proving a catastrophe for Ukraine, the western press sprung into action to deny this was true. Read this piece by the BBC for a classic example of denial journalism.

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s wild bid to mount a coup in Russia on 23-4 June 2023 added to the press’ sense that Russia was falling apart, and that news of Ukrainian failure on the battlefield must necessarily be false.

The Institute for the Study of War on 1 July announced that attempts to play up Russia’s successful defence were an information operation. Both General Mark Milley and Antony Blinken assured us that the counter-offensive had months to run.

Zelensky ranted that western nations needed to speed up weapons’ deliveries. Biden approved delivery of cluster munitions, in the face of the international Convention on Cluster Munitions. Denmark and the Netherlands agreed to provide F16s.

Denial was in full swing.

But then came the anger. On 1 November, Chief of the Ukrainian Army Valerii Zaluzhnyi, in an interview with the Economist, admitted that the situation on the frontline had reached a ‘dead end’. Widespread recriminations followed. Ukraine’s troops were too inexperienced, the Ukrainian military didn’t have sufficient firepower. When Zelensky finally admitted failure of the counter-offensive, he blamed the tilt of western attention towards Gaza, following the Hamas Terrorist attack and the ensuing Israeli military action which killed thousands of innocents.

If only the west weren’t so flighty, Zelensky thought he should have had enough weapons to win. Now was not the time to negotiate, he told us.

And then in 2024 the bargaining commenced, in the which Zelensky, Biden, Von der Leyen, whoever was Prime Minister of Britain at that time, and new characters like Kaja Kallas, struggled to accept their policy really had died and the limits of their control.

This is the period in which Avdiivka fell after a brutal and bloody bombardment, and the Russian army slowly, and unrelentingly ground their way westwards through the Donbas. ‘twas the season of peace summits to which Russia was not invited, as any dialogue to end the war would require a terrifying reckoning with reality. Indeed, dialogue was made illegal. Ever more powerful weapons were thrown in and leaders dissembled about negotiations on the basis of strengthening Ukraine’s position. While Ukraine continued to lose territory.

And then the confrontation of the brutal and inconsolable reality of death. On 12 January, President Trump’s phone call with President Putin, and the subsequent peace talks in Saudi Arabia, finally pulled a white shroud over the refrigerated corpse of Biden’s policy, confirming it dead. This has left European leaders depressed and resentful, the penultimate stage of grief.

This period of depression and recrimination will go on until the gunfire stops and the ceasefire line is finally and mercifully drawn in Ukraine. Starmer will no doubt go to Washington next week, to tell Trump just how sad and depressed he is, and ask if there is any chance the policy cadaver can be resuscitated? He will certainly fail.

Only then, might he and other western leaders finally reach acceptance that their policy was shot through with a bullet called realism, and move on. And perhaps understand that President Trump has unwittingly become their therapist.