Europe should answer Vladimir Putin’s escalating “shadow war” against the continent by redoubling its support for Ukraine, the historian and Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash has argued.
Writing in the Guardian, Garton Ash said the Russian president is intensifying both his full-scale war on Ukraine and a hybrid campaign against the rest of Europe. The principal aim of the second, he wrote, is to break European backing for Kyiv so that Russia can subjugate Ukraine — an outcome he said Putin regards as existential for Russia’s future and for his own.
Garton Ash said European states should prepare as far as they can against every form of hybrid attack, but that the core of their response ought to be more support for Ukraine. Ukraine, he argued, is Putin’s primary target, and it is there — rather than in “a contest of a thousand hybrid pinpricks” — that Russia can meaningfully be defeated and deterred.
The columnist cited a new book, Warum Russland nicht aufhören wird (Why Russia Won’t Stop), by the German historian Martin Schulze Wessel, which he said places Putin’s policy within a far older Russian tradition of territorial expansion and the pursuit of hegemony, combined with a religiously framed imperial ideology.
According to Garton Ash, the book recalls Putin saying in 2016 that “Russia’s frontier ends nowhere”, and in 2025 that “wherever the boot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours”.
The columnist wrote that west Europeans, imagining they have consigned brute territorial imperialism to history, tend to look for another explanation — such as Nato’s eastward expansion — while Finns, Estonians and Poles know better. He said Schulze Wessel concludes that despite its weaknesses Russia is “the most dangerous country in the world”, adding that some in Asia might dispute that claim but that Russia is certainly the most dangerous country for Europe.
Garton Ash also highlighted the book’s argument that Russian expansion has historically been enabled by cooperation with other great powers and halted when it met equal and opposing powers. Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House last year, he wrote, the United States has stopped being the latter and has at times resembled the former — leaving Europe to carry that role.
Europe, including the UK, has now provided more aid to Ukraine than the US, according to the columnist. He said Europe’s combined economies are ten times the size of Russia’s, with Germany’s alone twice as large.
Germany, he wrote, is now central to that European effort. Cumulatively since the start of the full-scale war in 2022, it has been the largest individual country donor after the US, and figures from the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine support tracker show it has given twice as much as Britain or France.
With Kyiv and Odesa under daily attack from ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones, Garton Ash pointed to the tracker’s air defence figures: Germany has donated 19 systems, among them five of the US-built Patriot batteries — two more than the US itself has supplied.
He recalled arguing in the war’s first year that Germany “has a unique historical responsibility to help defend a free and sovereign Ukraine”, and said that at the time he felt strongly it was not yet meeting that duty. Now, in the fifth year of a conflict that has already outlasted the first world war and shows no sign of ending, he said he can state without hesitation that it is.
That assessment, he wrote, rests not only on the scale of Germany’s support and its own higher defence spending — projected by the German finance ministry to reach €154bn (£130bn) in 2028, roughly equal to Russia’s total estimated military expenditure this year — but also on political will.
He credited Chancellor Friedrich Merz with showing that will, and courage, by travelling by train from Germany to Ukraine on the evening of 3 October, the 36th anniversary of German unification, accompanied by a strong delegation that included defence industry leaders. Russian bombardment of civilian targets in central Kyiv, among them Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences and bridges over the Dnipro River, continued regardless — a fact the columnist suggested Moscow may have known about in advance.
Garton Ash noted the tangled history between Germany and Russia, including the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, and recalled that in the first and second world wars some Ukrainian nationalists saw a German-Russian conflict as a route to independence, only to encounter imperial German colonialism and then Hitler’s genocidal fascism. He described a democratic Germany leading efforts to support an independent Ukraine’s place in a wider European community of free countries as something not merely redemptive but inspiring.
Precisely because Putin recognises Germany’s centrality, the columnist wrote, it is a principal target of his hybrid war — from explosive-laden drones at Leipzig airport, which the German government has firmly attributed to Russia, and assassination threats against defence industry bosses, to covert political interference and disinformation.
As Ukraine faces its hardest winter yet, he said three interlinked things will be tested: Germany’s willingness to stay on what he called the right side of history, the capacity of democracies to sustain a fight against a dictatorship, and Europe’s ability to remain united.
He acknowledged ample grounds for pessimism. Merz is unpopular at home, he wrote, while Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the party currently setting the pace in German politics, would abandon Ukraine to Russia. In France, National Rally presidential candidate Marine Le Pen says her country cannot afford to keep giving so much to Ukraine. Solidarity is also fraying on the Polish right, where two smaller parties sound frankly anti-Ukrainian, and in one Italian opinion poll last month more than half of respondents opposed continued weapons deliveries to Kyiv.
In Brussels recently, Garton Ash found a large audience that appeared steadfast in support of Ukraine — until the discussion turned to using Russian frozen assets held in Belgium. With severe damage being inflicted on Ukraine’s economy, including grain exports through the Black Sea, he cited expert estimates that as much as €100bn in additional support for Kyiv may be needed in 2027 alone, at a time when hard-pressed European taxpayers are in no mood to provide it.
Putin, the columnist concluded, believes decadent European democracies will crumble before the iron determination of an imperialist strongman, and it is Europe’s task to prove him wrong.
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His new book, Europe in 7½ Chapters, is published next week.
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