War in Ukraine latest victim of the West’s attention span

HALIFAX—Every morning, I look out into the backyard at the Ukrainian flag hanging from the clothesline. It has been there since Russia invaded the sovereign country last February. Some days when the wind is brisk, it cracks and whips like a living thing. On others, it hangs straight down, like the head of someone who has received bad news. Today, it is completely limp, a solitary flash of yellow and blue so motionless, it is as if it will never stir again. Since I hung it up there with wooden pegs months ago, the invasion of Ukraine has gone through many phases on the public clothesline of the world media. There was the initial phase of shock and outrage when it was not only the biggest story in the world, but for a time, the only story. That was when free countries around the world, including this one, competed with each other to denounce Vladimir Putin’s barbarous invasion. It was the time when Ukraine’s stocky and resolute president became an international hero and media superstar. It was a time of Glory to Ukraine, but no troops. Vlodymyr Zelenskyy was something of an anomaly. As a politician, he didn’t offer the usual bull of tepidness and talking points. Instead, he projected authenticity. A fierce, personal resistance to Putin’s invaders that inspired a nation to stand its ground against a vastly superior enemy, and fight to the death if necessary. President Zelenskyy led by example, remaining with his people in the thick of war, rather than accepting the safe haven offered to him and his family by several countries. He was such an inspirational figure that some foreign nationals rushed to Ukraine to confront the Russians, just as people once did in the Spanish Civil War. And they did it knowing that if captured, no Geneva Convention would stop the Russians from putting them up against the wall for the 17-cent solution. The next development in the story was the “what-the-hell-do-we-do-about-it” phase. To say the least, that was an evolving proposition. Before Russian troops poised on Ukraine’s borders actually invaded, Canada, for example, initially balked at sending small arms to Ukraine. Ottawa eventually shipped artillery and anti-tank weapons, working on the theory that Ukraine had fought so valiantly and effectively against the Russians, they might even win the war. Since no Western country would intervene militarily in Ukraine, despite the outrage against basic democratic principles, sanctions against Russia became the response of choice from those who didn’t want to risk expanding the war, but couldn’t stand idly by while Putin’s men murdered innocent men, women and children in Ukraine. The reason they couldn’t stand by was the devastating images sent back from Ukraine by war correspondents. Videos of body-strewn streets, blown-up daycare centres, bombed hospitals, endless refugee lines, and broken and bowed people huddled in front of the ash heaps of their former homes. So there were sanctions against Russian oligarchs, members of Putin’s inner circle, including Putin family members, some Russian bankers, etc. But it has been a game of doing a little and making it seem like a lot. Seizing an oligarch’s yacht might make good television, but it is no substitute for the aircraft and offensive weaponry the West has still denied to Ukraine. The proof that these initial sanctions were strategically minimal is that there have been so many new rounds of sanctions against Russia since then. In other words, if the initial sanctions had really been tough, there wouldn’t have been so much room to improve on them later. Nearly four months into the war, Ukraine no longer routinely leads the nightly news. On the crowded clothesline of the U.S. media, other stories have captured the public’s attention. Americans now aim their outrage at gasoline prices, over five bucks a gallon to see the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet. Uvalde, Texas, showed that Ukraine doesn’t have the monopoly on atrocities, as 19 fourth graders gunned down along with two teachers in a school. Then there is the national melodrama playing out on television screens across the country, as congressional investigators lay bare just how ruthlessly the Trump White House tried to hold on to power after losing the 2020 election. It's sedition by any other name, and judging by the recent testimony of White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, an unhinged president. The city of Bucha in the Kyiv region, pictured on April 4, 2022, where mass killings of civilians took place during the occupation by Russian troops. Photograph courtesy of Flickr And now the U.S. Supreme Court with Conservative judges put there by Trump has plunged the country into chaos by overturning Rowe vs. Wade, stripping millions of American women of their legal right to a safe and accessible abortion. Where does this leave Ukraine? As the latest victim of the West’s attention span. True, you can still catch President Zelenskyy on the occasional TV clip. And, yes, European leaders like Boris Johnson and Olaf Scholz occasionally make the trip to Kyiv for the obligatory photo op with him. And yes, NATO and the G-7 still have the rhetoric right. But the political winds are shifting. Some reports have characterized that change as “fatigue” with the war in certain quarters. Some people want the war to end, raising the question; is it Ukraine they are thinking about, or the prospect of a European winter without Russian gas and oil? “Sources say” stories out of the White House and the Pentagon are hinting that senior officials no longer believe that Ukraine can win the war against Russia. Based on Russia’s grinding pulverization of Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region, it seems like the cavalry is going rather than coming. Even the Russian use of a ship-destroying missile against a shopping-centre full of 1,000 people hasn’t been able to rekindle the public’s demand to do more, rather than less, for Ukraine. The worst of it is this. There have already been reports that some members of the military think it is highly unlikely that Ukraine will ever be able to recover territory lost to the Russians in the Donbas. Together with the view that the war must end, it is not hard to imagine that the day may soon come when President Zelenskyy will be pressured to agree to a peace that would cede Ukrainian territory to the Russian invaders. Anyone who endorses giving an inch of Ukraine to Putin in the name of ending the war is woefully off the mark. That would not be peace. That would be a piece-at-a-time. Michael Harris is an award-winning author and journalist. The Hill Times