Miriam Cates: History will not look kindly on Europe’s handling of the Russo-Ukrainian war

Miriam Cates is the former MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.

Vladimir Putin’s armies are seizing Ukrainian land at a faster rate than at any time since the Russian invasion in 2022. Having already drastically reduced US military aid to Ukraine, Donald Trump’s proposed peace deal is on the brink of collapse, as the Americans threaten to walk away from all involvement in the conflict.

Against this sombre backdrop, Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited London on Monday in a desperate attempt to shore up support from his Western European allies.

There was no shortage of warm words for the embattled Ukrainian leader. Yet despite unwavering moral support from Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, and Friedrich Merz, there is no longer any palatable outcome of this war for Ukraine. Whether the conflict drags on for weeks, months or years, the losses suffered by the Ukrainian people are now so severe as to be unrecoverable.

Back at the beginning of the war, one solitary European leader saw this coming. Speaking in 2023, Viktor Orbán said: “Looking at the reality, the figures, the surroundings, the fact that NATO is not ready to send troops, it is obvious that there is no victory for the poor Ukrainians on the battlefield.”

The Hungarian Prime Minister has every right to say ‘I told you so.’

Orbán is Europe’s perennial pariah. The leader of Hungary’s conservative Fidesz party has been in power since 2010, having won four consecutive elections. Yet it’s fair to say that his longstanding domestic popularity is not mirrored among Orbán’s fellow EU leaders, with whom he has clashed repeatedly over issues such as immigration, LGBT rights and press freedom.

Yet nothing has caused more consternation to Brussels than Orbán’s stance on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. In February 2022, when Putin’s armies rolled into the Donbas, EU leaders enthusiastically rushed to Ukraine’s defence, supporting Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people – politically, economically and militarily – in their existential struggle against Russian aggression. Then-prime minister Boris Johnson led the charge, saying:

“We – and the world – cannot allow [Ukrainian] freedom just to be snuffed out. We cannot and will not just look away…We will work with [our allies] – for however long it takes – to ensure that the sovereignty and independence of Ukraine is restored.”

Other Western leaders expressed similar sentiments. Alone among his EU peers, Orbán’s response was more equivocal, urging the parties to pursue a diplomatic settlement rather than all-out war. Hungary welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees from neighbouring Ukraine and supported economic sanctions against Moscow, but refused to send weapons to Kyiv. Heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas, Orbán said: “Our heart is with [the Ukrainians], but Hungary has to stand up for its own interests.”

This dissent was not well received. EU leaders painted Orbán as a Russian stooge and a ‘trojan horse’ for Putin. The consensus opinion was that the Hungarian government was at worst morally reprehensible and at best being ‘awkward’, prioritising Hungary’s dependence on Russian energy above the ethical necessity – and collective responsibility – to support Ukraine.

Yet Hungarians would argue their position on the conflict is borne not only from self-interest but also from cold, hard pragmatism. In 2023 Orbán told an audience in Qatar:

“Looking at the reality, the figures, the surroundings, the fact that NATO is not ready to send troops, it is obvious that there is no victory for the poor Ukrainians on the battlefield. ..The war can be stopped only if the Russians can make an agreement with the US. In Europe, we are not happy with that, but it’s the only way out.”

After nearly four years of war, Ukraine is a nation on its knees. Military casualties are thought to number in the hundreds of thousands. The country’s infrastructure has been brought to a halt, with the population facing daily powercuts, shortages and extreme cold. Ukraine’s demographic pyramid has collapsed, as young people have fled the country in their droves. With his government immersed in a corruption scandal, Zelenskyy’s approval ratings are falling.

Ukraine is no longer a sovereign country: it is completely reliant on foreign aid not just to keep fighting, but for day to day survival. Whatever the outcome of the war, the future for Ukraine is a bleak one.

As Orbán predicted, only the Americans have any chance of brokering peace. Yet Donald Trump’s most recent peace proposal would see the Ukrainians surrender more than a fifth of their national territory, accept strict limits on the size of their armed forces and be banned from joining NATO. He also proposes that the US should take a cut of valuable Ukrainian mineral resources as part of any security deal; it is not only the Russians who sniff advantage in Ukraine’s weakness.

The two sides are still a long way from agreement, but it’s hard not to conclude that Victor Orbán was right. A diplomatic solution reached in 2026 (or later) will likely leave Ukraine in a far less favourable position than the outcome of any hypothetical negotiations back in 2022. As unsavoury as it may be for European leaders to accept, the devastation of Ukraine and its young men may all have been for nothing.

The question is why have European and British governments taken such a different view of the conflict to Hungary and the US? Why – until recently at least – have Europeans urged Zelensky to fight on, refusing to countenance anything but total victory for Ukraine, while Hungary and many US Republicans have taken a far more cautious approach?

The simplistic answer of the British press is to claim that Republicans and Hungarians are Putin-sympathisers. But perhaps a truer and more serious explanation is that while Europe has chosen to frame this war only in moral terms, Orbán and Trump have paid more attention to the facts on the ground.

In Britain and Western Europe, we have a tendency to view all post-1945 conflicts through the lens of the Second World War. From a moral point of view there are many parallels between WWII and the war in Ukraine: Putin, like Hitler, is unquestionably an evil aggresso; Putin, like Hitler, draws on a sense that his nation has been wronged. When Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, he was appeased by the West yet came back for more, in the same way as the Munich Agreement of 1938 fooled Chamberlain and Daladier and emboldened Hitler.

But while there are undoubtedly many moral parallels between the 1930s and the 2020s, that’s where the similarities end.

It was military, not moral, advantage that gave the Allies victory over Hitler. In 1939 Britain, our empire and the Commonwealth committed to total war to fight the Nazis. In 1940 the Soviets did the same, and from 1941 the Americans too. Good triumphed over evil because good – eventually – had more men and machines.

Yet 80 years on, Western Europe seems to have forgotten this lesson of history. In 2025, Europe is both unwilling and unable to engage in total war with Russia. With the exception of Poland, European NATO countries have allowed their military capabilities to decay to a point of almost laughable weakness. Our economies are undermined by debt and demographic decline and neither our governments nor our populations are willing to swap welfare for warfare.

Had Europe re-armed after Putin’s 2014 incursion into Crimea, had we been willing to set, and follow through with a military ultimatum in 2022, the situation could have been very different. But unlike in 1938, when Britain was in the process of rapid re-armament, EU nations did nothing of the sort. In 2014, average defence spend across the EU 27 was 1.2 per cent of GDP. By 2022 it had reached the dizzy heights of 1.3 per cent.

Europe chose idealism over realism, with devastating consequences for Ukraine. The EU promised the earth, while Russia has delivered scorched earth. We have given Zelenskyy enough aid to fight on, but not enough to win.

The Hungarians, in contrast, are well aware of the dangers of idealism. Hungary’s vulnerable position in central Europe surrounded by superior military powers has led to multiple invasions and loss of land. The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 drastically reduced Hungary’s territory after World War I, such that three million ethnic Hungarians live outside the official national borders to this day. Within living memory, Hungary suffered severely under occupation by the Nazis and then the Soviets. Hungarians know from bitter experience that being in the ‘right’ is of no advantage if you can’t fight.

Last week at a conference in Brussels I interviewed Orbán’s political director, Hungarian MP Balázs Orbán, for GB News. He told me that Johnson was wrong to imply that Ukraine could win the war, and said:

“There is a moral context of the story. Russia attacked Ukraine. But …if we have a strategy in which we financially support Ukraine, which turns the conflict into a proxy war between the West and Russia. How long will it take? What will be the endgame? Are we ready to get into a direct confrontation with the Russians?… No one was openly talking about these issues and look what happened. Europe spent €190 billion for 4 years. And the situation for the Ukrainians is much worse than at the beginning.”

From a geopolitical point of view, the efforts of Starmer, Macron and Merz look increasingly irrelevant. Yet domestically, our leaders have good reason to continue to pursue photo opportunities with Zelensky. In the UK, the Ukraine war remains one of the least polarising political issues, with a clear majority of British people agreeing that we should continue to support Ukraine with weapons, aid and sanctions. The majority of Brits, French, and Germans reject the idea that Ukraine should cede territory to Russia in exchange for peace. Supporting Ukraine is a vote winner for our beleaguered leaders.

Those politicians who have challenged consensus opinion by putting the conflict into historical context or suggesting that encouraging Kyiv to fight might not be the best option have been met with anger or ridicule. On a BBC Panorama programme in 2024, Reform UK leader Farage said:

“I stood up in the European Parliament in 2014 and I said, and I quote, ‘There will be a war in Ukraine’. “Why did I say that?“It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union was giving this man a reason to his Russian people to say, ‘they’re coming for us again’ and to go to war.”

Farage has always maintained that Russia is the aggressor, yet the hysterical coverage of his objectively nuanced comments has hurt him politically and allowed both Labour and Conservatives to accuse him of ‘fawning’ over Putin.

In Western European polite society there is still only one acceptable opinion on Ukraine. As with so many other consensus issues -immigration, multiculturalism, climate change, the human rights industry – the European establishment has its head firmly in the sand. Our leaders merrily parade their virtuous opinions while our continent (in the words of the new US National Security Strategy) slides towards ‘civilisational erasure.’

Across Europe, insurgent national conservative and populist parties are beginning to challenge these tired consensus positions, with growing support for Germany’s AfD, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France and, of course, Reform UK. But the conservative right must not be fooled into looking to Trump’s MAGA movement for rescue. I have no doubt that the President’s affection for Europe is real, but it is America’s national interest that Trump is ruthlessly pursuing, not ours.

My hunch is that history will not look back kindly on Europe’s strategy on Ukraine. Whatever the final outcome of this dreadful war, there is only one way to prevent further Russian aggression: Europe must re-arm, diverting spending from our bloated welfare states into industry, weapons and manpower. Macron is right about one thing, too: collapsing birth rates have left our nations in urgent need of ‘demographic rearmament.’

A number of Eastern European leaders are beginning to follow Orbán’s lead, saying the difficult things out loud. Yet in the West, neither our politicians nor our voters are ready for such a tough message. For the time being at least, ignorance is bliss. We linger on.