I was head of the UK’s Syria team. We made big mistakes with Putin then — now they’re being repeated in Ukraine

I left because I was convinced that we had made a catastrophic mistake and left millions to death, torture and starvation. The situation in Ukraine is a direct consequence of weak western policy

In 2013, as head of the UK Foreign Office’s Syria team, I watched as our promises to intervene to protect civilians evaporated after the UK Parliament voted against military action following Assad’s chemical weapons attack. We failed to act to save lives. I left the Foreign Office because I was convinced that we had made a catastrophic mistake and left millions to death, torture and starvation.

In the years that followed, from my new role at an NGO working with democratic Syrians, I watched the death toll rise to hundreds of thousands. In 2015, Russia deployed its forces to help Assad directly murder civilians, flatten cities and blow up hospitals. The west ruled out assistance to protect civilians for fear of direct confrontation with Russia. That same fear now risks consigning Ukraine to a similar fate.

NATO’s public rejection of the Ukrainian request to close the skies was a mistake. The only way to stop Putin taking Ukraine at the expense of massive civilian losses, and to deter him from future misadventures, is to keep all options on the table to defend Ukraine. That includes direct action to close Ukraine’s skies and protect civilians, should it become necessary to prevent Ukraine’s defeat.

Putin’s war in Ukraine is a direct consequence of the weakness of western policy over the past 15 years: Weakness with respect to Russia in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, and weak responses to most foreign policy crises in the last ten years in particular — including Syria, Myanmar and Venezuela. The west has consistently failed to draw lines and to enforce them.

Putin now assumes two things: that the west won’t risk direct military confrontation with Russia — he learned this in Syria when the entry of Russian forces led to a paralysis of western policy there — and that the west will tolerate Russian annexations in the neighborhood to avoid confrontation, which he learned in Georgia and Crimea.

Each time that Putin “wins”, he is emboldened, his assumptions about western inaction are reinforced and his next nefarious foreign adventure becomes still more destructive.

If we are to protect European — and global — security, we need to buck Putin’s assumptions by protecting international law. We need to ensure not only that Putin fails to take Ukraine, but that he loses more than he started with: in other words, he should be pushed back to the pre-2014 status quo, losing Crimea and eastern Ukraine in the process.

Ukraine’s resistance has been ferocious and brave. Russian forces have not advanced as quickly as they had planned. Western support — particularly through the supply of weapons — has and will make a difference. But we saw in Syria what Putin is willing to do to win. Russia indiscriminately murdered Syrian civilians, bombed hospitals and used siege and starvation as tools of war. We are seeing some of the same in Ukraine. If it continues, the civilian death toll will soar and it will be near impossible for Ukrainian forces to prevail alone — even with a plentiful supply of weapons.

Under those circumstances, the west will face a stark choice: watch the slaughter of tens of thousands (or more) of Ukrainian civilians and the overthrow of their democratic government; or get involved more directly to protect civilians and prevent Ukraine’s defeat.

Most western commentators and leaders have ruled out direct involvement, citing risks from direct confrontation with Russia to provoking a deranged Putin to hit the nuclear button. It’s understandable — these sound scary, and it is always preferable to limit direct military engagement. But there are good reasons — moral, strategic and tactical — not to rule out closing the skies above Ukraine if it becomes clear that Russia is headed for victory at the expense of civilian life.

First, the moral case is obvious. We have seen the degree to which Russia is willing to target civilians. International law was designed to protect civilians from the horrific excesses of war, but it only works if it is enforced. As responsible democratic nations that respect the rule of law, we must shoulder some risk to save Ukrainian lives and revive a respect for International laws and norms that have been eroded over the past decade as a consequence of our failure to enforce them.

Second, a Putin victory in Ukraine would be strategically disastrous. Given the intensity of western rhetoric and concrete support to Ukraine, Russian victory would represent a defeat of the EU and NATO. It is an existential threat to democratic values. Putin will know that his threats, bullying and nuclear insinuations can win over even a united western world wielding massive sanctions and supplying arms; and that when it comes to a choice between direct confrontation or handing over democratic nations, we choose the latter. Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Finland — none will be safe.

Third, tactically, closing Ukraine’s skies to Russian aircraft will not win the war in and of itself. But it will deny Russia a potent weapon, and give Ukrainians themselves the space to limit movement of Russian troops and target Russian ground forces and artillery. Breaking the morale of Russian forces and pushing them back will become more achievable. And enabling a shift in the balance of military power is more likely to open up the possibility of meaningful negotiation and diplomatic efforts — the 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended war in Bosnia was a product of such a shift.

Every option carries risks. But the decision on whether to intervene directly to close the skies needs to take into account the risks that we have already triggered and the risk of losing Ukraine. Much is made of the danger of Putin lashing out. Yet we have already vowed to defeat him in Ukraine. And we have been transparent about the supply of weapons and who is supplying them. If we’re serious about those weapons inflicting a loss on Putin, we already face the risk of retaliation, regardless of whether we decide to close the skies. The means by which Putin loses are less likely to influence his response than the fact of the loss itself.

An attempt to close the skies will bring risks to western service personnel. That’s not a decision that any leader takes lightly. The risk must be set against the alternative. If Ukraine is overrun, the west will be stuck supporting a messy, deadly and costly insurgency for years, if not decades, with no guarantee of success. Ukrainian civilians will lose their lives day after day; Europe will have a protracted conflict on its territory; and constant Russian breaches will be another nail in the coffin of international law. A concerted effort to close the skies, on the other hand, gives a greater chance of success in a shorter timeframe, while protecting more Ukrainian civilians from indiscriminate attack.

Reza Afshar OBE is Executive Director of Independent Diplomat, a non-profit diplomatic advisory group. Previously he spent 13 years in the UK’s Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office in a range of crisis and negotiating roles before his final role as head of the team responsible for Syria policy from 2012-2013