Western audiences want simple stories with a clear narrative and characters they can cheer or boo. The Russian invasion of Ukraine once had them all. They say you can reduce literature into seven basic plots. The Ukraine war captivated us because it was following the ever-popular plotline of “overcoming the monster”.
There is a terrifying villain — the minotaur, Grendel, Dracula, Sauron, Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort or, in this instance, Vladimir Putin. His merciless forces appear unstoppable — and how telling it is that Ukrainians call Russian soldiers “the orcs”. The triumph of evil is surely imminent.
But wait. An unlikely hero, in the tradition of Frodo Baggins and Harry Potter, steps forward. Volodymyr Zelensky did not want to be a war leader. He trained as a comedian not a soldier, and ran for the presidency of Ukraine with the practical promise “to bring professional, decent people to power”, not on blood-drenched fantasies of imperial expansion. Yet Zelensky, the Ukrainian armed forces and the Ukrainian people have been hobbits to the Russian orcs. They found inner reserves of strength and ingenuity to defeat the dark lord in the battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv. They made a mockery of his conceited pretensions by assassinating his generals and sinking the Moskva, the pride of the black-hearted villain’s Black Sea Fleet.
Hubris was punished, virtue rewarded and the monster was on its knees howling in pain. And then? Stalemate.
Deadlock has no role in the great plots of literature. We want emotional satisfaction, not armies facing each other in the Donbas and – against the demands of our inner script editor – the Russians advancing rather than fleeing. We prefer to switch channels rather than see them using vast reserves of Soviet-era artillery to reduce cities to hellscapes, slaughtering civilians and inflicting heavy losses on the Ukrainian defenders.
In a land that suffered the worst the Communists and Nazis could inflict, the Russian forces are matching the barbarism of the 20th century dictators. But far from being outraged or incited into action, we yawn. For all our pious incantations of “never again” after Auschwitz, we turn away.
The popular notion that the hated “mainstream media” is out of touch with readers and viewers could not be more wrong. The web allows editors to know exactly how many people click on a news story, and how much of it they read.
In March and April, reports from Ukraine dominated British news online, including the sites of popular papers like the Daily Mail. On the day of writing this piece, Ukraine did not feature in the top 10 most read stories on the BBC website. The punters wanted to read about the heatwave, pop stars and railway strikes, not an emotionally unsatisfying conflict in a far-away land.
A poll of European public opinion by Datapraxis and YouGov found that significantly more people wanted the conflict to end as soon as possible than for Russia to be punished and held to account for violations of international law.
As President Macron said, in a phrase that should follow him to the grave: “We must not humiliate Russia so that the day the fighting stops, we can build a way out through diplomatic channels.”
I understand the weariness. Everyone wants peace, not least the people of Ukraine who have borne so much injustice.
Restraint must surely be in order. After all, no one can say for sure that Putin would never become the first leader since 1945 to order a nuclear strike.
Nor can Europe easily or cheaply replace Russian gas and oil and, without abundant energy, modern societies buckle.
But the great turning away from the Ukrainian struggle is not just selfish and parochial. It is foolish. If Moscow wins, we will be living with a permanent fear of war and all the financial and psychological costs that would accompany the inevitable rearming. Instead of debating what to do if Putin launches a nuclear weapon against a Ukrainian target, we will be asking what to do if he attacks a Nato country and opens the door to World War III.
We might be yearning for peace, but Putin has shown no desire to compromise. Instead he invokes the colonial spirit of Peter the Great and dreams of sending his armies westwards.
The Ukrainians remain far from defeated. Russia is short of men in the Donbass. It can bomb from the safety of a cowardly distance, but its armies can barely advance and are wide open to a counter attack in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine. The Ukrainians could push them back, but they need Western governments to supply them with the artillery pieces, shells and warplanes.
Governments act under pressure from voters. The public needs to shake itself out of its privileged and dilettantish lethargy and realise that this isn’t a story with a happy ending but a hard, cold conflict that will determine the fate of Europe.
