HM Crown’s Chatham House Demands an Unending War in Ukraine

April 7, 2022 (EIRNS)—There was never a war the British Empire didn’t like; the bloodier the better, the more dead the better. So, Chatham House Royal Institute of International Affairs, the British’s Crown’s premier foreign policy think tank, publishes an April 4 article, “Ensuring Ukraine Prevails Is Now the Only Moral Choice,” insisting that the war against Russia in Ukraine must go on. There can be no slacking off, no ceasefires, no capitulation to Russia. Keep the flow of weapons coming in.

How does Senior Consulting Fellow Keir Giles justify this? Russia is waging a war of annihilation against Ukraine, he argues. The mass murder it is carrying out in occupied areas of Ukraine is both “a natural function of the manner in which Russia fights wars”—Russians are beasts after all—but also stems from the image of Ukraine that the Russians have cultivated over the past decade “for domestic propaganda,” that is, Ukraine as a fascist nation.

So Giles insists, the atrocities that Russia has committed are Ukraine’s “most powerful weapon for winning the war, by ensuring its Western friends find no excuse for slackening munitions support or pushing Kyiv to make concessions in order to end it.” The problem of a ceasefire is that once it is declared, then Western allies will slack off, Giles warns, and turn their backs on the conflict. And the Russians would use this to regroup and reorganize on the eastern front without interference from Ukraine, which it must do since Putin has completely failed militarily. A temporary ceasefire “sets the worst possible preconditions for a sustainable peace settlement.”

The danger is that well-meaning European partners might press Zelenskyy to accept a Russian offer that appears reasonable, given the horrors Russia has inflicted on the country, says Giles. But this would be “toxic” for Ukraine. Russia’s launching of this war was rooted in fantasy, although Putin’s military failures may have broken the fantasy. The “nonsensical ‘denazification of Ukraine’ ” is now only for domestic consumption. Putin is portrayed as a fantasy-ridden madman, and Giles warns, if he comes away from the war thinking he has won a partial success, this will embolden him to continue what the author says is the “first of the wars of reconquest.” So, there must be a successful outcome to the fighting in Ukraine, not just for Ukrainian statehood but also to the future of European security. The only way to secure Europe is to ensure that Ukraine prevails, and is not subjected “to a flawed and unworkable peace settlement that does no more than postpone the reckoning with Russia.” War and more war is the answer.