Russia's war on Ukraine is Scotland's home front in new age of global insecurity – Stewart McDonald

Ukrainians are fighting and dying to protect our way of life and we must remain resolute in our support

Aki Kaurismäki’s film Fallen Leaves, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes this summer and is showing at the Cameo until the end of next week, is a distinctly Finnish rom-com. The would-be lovers, dressed in suede and tastefully muted Nordic tones, deliver every line in a monotone and smoke enough cigarettes in 80 minutes to put Dot Cotton to shame. In one scene, they make eyes at each other over a boiled egg salad before moving to the sofa where they sit, 50 centimetres apart, and look at the blank wall together in silence.

But Kaurismäki’s latest film also offers the most realistic vignette of Europe in 2023 I have seen this year. The inamorata is a lover of the radio, which serves as the background noise to her many waits: waiting to leave for work, waiting for the microwave to ping, waiting for her date to call. Each time we hear the radio, however, there is only one thing playing: updates about the war in Ukraine.

We watch her rifling anxiously through a pile of bills after losing her job while the presenter reads out the numbers of civilians found dead in Bucha. We wait with her in silence at the kitchen table, willing the phone to ring, while the radio in the background tells the story of the siege of Mariupol. Throughout the film, however, the war is only explicitly mentioned once in the script: when the woman moves to turn off the radio as she welcomes her date for dinner, muttering “bloody war”.

Ukrainian troops take part in military training in the Kharkiv region earlier this month (Picture: Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images)

Ukraine slipping down news agenda

I was struck by how vividly this film captures our relationship to Ukraine today. Almost two years after President Putin began his attempt to redraw the map of Europe in blood, almost 10,000 innocent Ukrainian civilians have been killed, entire cities have been reduced to rubble, and the architecture of international law continues to creak under the weight of the invasion and the threat of a Russian victory. But news about the war feels increasingly like background noise to our own busy and full lives. When Ukraine, with diminishing frequency, does appear on the news, it often trails behind all the other stories – Gaza, Israel, Rwanda, interest rates, energy bills – jostling for our attention.

I clearly do not mean to say that the war in Ukraine should receive top billing on every news broadcast every day and sit on the front page of every newspaper from now until a Ukrainian victory. Instead, I want only to underline the fact that all of the factors which made the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine a genuine world-historical event with global repercussions remain, and that the questions it raised about the inviolability of state sovereignty have yet to be fully answered.

We must continue to support our allies in Ukraine as they demonstrate to the Russian government – and all those watching – that the modern world has no place for wars of colonial conquest. We know that they can win. Ukraine’s allies – the UK, EU and US – outmatch Russia 30 to one and represent a bloc that is diplomatically, militarily and economically superior to their adversary. We have seen what this means in the war so far: Russia has been isolated on the world stage and seen its military capability degraded to a shadow of its pre-war status. And for what? A fraction of allies’ defence budgets – which have and must continue to grow, in no small part because of the existential threat that a nuclear-armed Russia poses to the West. We must not let up now.

Ukraine and Gaza are symptoms of instability

As Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, noted in his annual lecture last week, we are entering a new chapter in this history of global security. Our “already febrile and agitated world”, Radakin said, is entering a new stage of instability and the war in Ukraine, like the landgrabs in Guyana and Gaza, is not a cause of this instability but a symptom – a symptom of a slowly eroding architecture of international global governance, a battered old book of rules written by men long dead that fewer governments each year seem to heed.

This story is indeed a global one. I was reflecting on this during Putin’s press conference this week, when he argued that there is no comparison to be made between Gaza and Ukraine. The Russian president wants us to avoid making that link because it turns the terrible conflicts into two separate stories, rather than one which makes clear the need to reform and restore the multilateral system of international law which Putin so despises.

Governments across the West must not give Putin what he wants. David Cameron had this thought in mind during his recent trip to the United States, when the Foreign Secretary said that for the US Congress to block aid to Ukraine would be to give an early Christmas present to two people: Putin and Xi Jinping. He is right. But this sentiment must go beyond practical and financial support for Ukraine – it also means having the confidence to make the rhetorical link, as Sir Tony Radakin did, between the instability in Gaza and the war in Ukraine and taking concerted action to address the factors which made both conflicts possible.

While this may be a global story, however, I want more than anything else to stress that Ukraine represents a unique part of this tale for us in Scotland. As we listen to radio broadcasts about a land war in Europe, in cities closer to Edinburgh than Athens and as near to us as Rome, it should be clear that Ukraine represents our home front in this new age of global insecurity. People are fighting and dying just miles away from us to protect our way of life. We cannot allow it to fade into the background.

Stewart McDonald is SNP MP for Glasgow South