Russia’s plan B in Ukraine is working – now is not the moment for the West to turn away

Despite slow progress, the war in Ukraine has not reached a stalemate, writes James Nixey. But Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces can only win if the West shows a renewed commitment to forcing Russia out

Ukrainian soldiers undergoing combat training in the north of the country (AP)

When Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, was fooled recently by two well-known Russian “comics” – surely paid-up Kremlin agents – into saying she was “tired” of the war in Ukraine and that everyone would soon be looking for a “way out”, too many of her counterparts in the West would have tacitly agreed (and perhaps sympathised: she is hardly the first to be pranked by these two).

But Ms Meloni deserves no sympathy. She thought she was talking to the head of the African Union Commission so this should have been a chance to exercise statecraft and reason with the supposed representative from the Global South and argue that Russia’s war in Ukraine is nothing if not colonialist itself – a desperate attempt to maintain its empire. Russia, with an abundance of chutzpah and an absence of shame, claims that it is the West that is being colonialist in forcing its designs on Kyiv (even supposedly “Nazi-ruled Kyiv”). You have to apply to join Nato and the EU, of course, but facts like these are irrelevant.

But Ms Meloni’s admission was worse than just not showing moral leadership. She was also playing into Russia’s hands by parroting its narrative: being tired and looking for a way out of the war is precisely what Vladimir Putin now wants from the Western world.