Last Christmas, I asked the Prime Minister a question about peace. I asked: “We would all like to see a lasting peace emerge for Ukraine in the new year … but what will the Government do to deter Russia from restarting its imperial war of aggression following any peace deal?”
One year on, we are in much the same position as last year. There is still talk of a peace deal, but with no real inclination on the Russian side to stop fighting.
Christmas is sometimes associated with the 1914 Christmas truce on the western front. That fraternisation between British and German soldiers was spontaneous, haphazard, very patchy, and frowned upon by the chain of command. It didn’t happen everywhere; the fighting was fierce on Christmas Day at Givenchy, for example.
Fast forward 111 years. The drones in Donetsk continue the killing on Christmas day 2025, just as the guns in Givenchy continued to bombard the enemy on Christmas day 1914.
So where are we with the efforts to have a negotiated peace in Ukraine?
President Trump seems determined to have peace at any price. He pays no heed to the fact that peace negotiations happened ten years ago after the Russian takeover of Crimea, only for Russia to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. I saw some of the effects for myself months later, when I visited Kyiv and Bucha.
When asked whether Europe could help end the war, Trump says of us: "They talk but they don't produce. And the war just keeps going on and on."
Generally speaking, Trump needs to leave peace-making, and get back to working on his golf handicap. But on this, he may have a point. Europe – including the UK – talks tough, but has not properly backed it up with economic measures.
Why is it that since the full scale invasion of Ukraine, almost half of all Russian diesel exports have been transported on UK-insured ships? These exports have been worth more than £24 billion to Vladimir Putin’s war machine.
Ten years ago, Paddy Ashdown was writing following the invasion of Crimea by Russia. He wrote in February 2015:
“Our greatest lever still lies in economic means rather than military ones".
Given Europe’s economic power and its military shortcomings, it seems to me that while Ashdown was talking about economic means “still” being our greatest lever in 2015, it is still our greatest lever in 2025.
We should be re-arming ourselves to deter aggression and arming Ukraine to defend itself. Yet the instrument that we should be using to bring Putin to the peace table should be principally the economic one.
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