Putin will not win: My encounter with Europe’s new-found optimism

In Kyiv on Friday, the annual Yalta European Strategy ( YES ) Conference convened deep beneath the embattled capital’s Intercontinental Hotel. Originally held at the storied Crimean city where, in 1945, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt redrew the map of postwar Europe, the conference was moved to Kyiv after the Russian invasion in 2014 – the name unchanged to preserve the historical resonances (and the acronym).

I was among about 300 people who crowded into a warren of reception rooms which doubles as the hotel’s air raid shelter. They included current and former prime ministers, defence and foreign ministers, policymakers, diplomats, academics, editors, foreign correspondents, commentators and several Ukrainian military leaders.

The big names included David Petraeus (the former US commander in Iraq), Boris Johnson, famous international relations scholars such as Niall Ferguson and Anne Applebaum, her husband, Radek Sikorski (Poland’s deputy PM), and the national security advisers of Britain, France, Germany and Italy. The American delegation included no fewer than three senators and five congressmen.

The biggest delegation was Britain’s – which is only fitting since, in the early days after Russia invaded in February 2022, Boris Johnson’s government led global opinion by its immediate, unswerving support for Ukraine while Joe Biden dithered. Johnson, deservedly, is hugely admired here; there will be statues of him in Kyiv long before there is ever one in London.

Volodymyr Zelensky is always the star turn at the conference, but this year he addresses it from Canada; he had travelled to North America in his unrelenting pursuit of more armaments – this time, counter-drone and missile interceptors.

There are no social events (thank goodness). The business continues uninterruptedly well into the night over two days. Apart from the Ukrainians, all participants had made our way by an arduous overnight train journey from the Polish border.

These are deeply serious people. So many conferences are full of posturing nobodies who act as if they have the weight of the world on their shoulders. These people actually do. They are deeply conscious that this war is probably the defining conflict of the 21st century – the test of whether the liberal democracies will prevail over the authoritarian states; whether international law will survive or the world will regress to Hobbesian darkness; whether – as several seasoned participants not given to politicians’ rhetoric simply said – good will triumph over evil.

The fact that, under the Trump administration, the United States has abandoned its historic role of global leadership, choosing instead a contemptible neutrality between the free world and the dictatorships, lent further gravity to the occasion.

However, Trump’s pusillanimity, combined with Putin’s ever-present threat to the nations lying on Russia’s borders, have infused Europe’s democracies with new-found solidarity – not just with Ukraine, but with one another.