Will the West’s tank fleet bring Ukraine victory?

collecting and clarifying new words or expressions as they emerge in New Zealand. For until new words are trapped, scrutinised and properly defined in a reputable dictionary (in print or online), they are feral, unpredictable and confusing.

Take the current buzz-word, ‘‘cogovernance’’, which seems to have sprung from nowhere in the last few years.

You won’t find this word in the New Zealand Oxford Dictionary, published in 2005.

Nor will you find it in the online, and constantly updated, Oxford English Dictionary.

You can find various attempts to define it online, all perhaps by organisations with their own axes to grind.

Can anyone tell us where it came from, where and when it was first used, whether it is found in other English-speaking countries? No.

The current debate might be less confusing and unproductive if there were some consensus on what the word actually means: without dictionaries, words can mean everything, or nothing. Alexandra Barratt, Riverlea

This week they reset the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight. How did they know that Germany would agree to give Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine the next day?

Now we’re all doomed! No time to run! Ninety seconds is barely time to tuck your head between your knees and kiss your arse goodbye.

The Doomsday Clock was thought up in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to dramatise the threat of nuclear war. They set it at seven minutes to midnight, and have been moving the minute hand back and forth every year since to tell us how close we are to a nuclear holocaust.

It dropped to 17 minutes to midnight after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Now it’s just a minute and a half – the closest it has ever been – but everything else is being affected by inflation now. Maybe it’s just catching.

The Russians are certainly not panicking at the prospect of Leopard tanks with Ukrainian crews showing up to confront them in eastern Ukraine in a month or two (or three).

A couple of weeks ago, Moscow was hinting that this could be the step that ‘‘forced’’ it to escalate to nuclear war, but that seems to have been just the usual bluff.

Now that the Western tanks actually are coming – American M1 Abrams, British Challengers, Leopard 2s from Germany and up to half a dozen other Nato members, probably Leclercs from France – the Russians are playing it cool. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the new tanks ‘‘will burn like all the rest’’.

Some of them will burn, of course. There’s no such thing as an invulnerable tank.

But the current rate of exchange, with old Soviet tanks on both sides, is three to one in favour of Ukraine, mainly because its crews are better trained and more committed.

With better tanks than the Russians as well, the Ukrainian advantage will obviously widen. The question is, will it widen enough for Ukraine to take back more Russian-occupied territory – and if so, how much?

The new tanks are not wonder weapons, and the fact that they will come in four different types is a logistical nightmare: different ammunition, different spare parts, even different fuel in the United States’ case.

There will also not be very many of them, at least in this round of donations. A ‘‘company’’ of tanks is 14 or thereabouts, and Germany, the United Kingdom and Poland will be sending one company each.

Smaller countries like Finland and the Czech Republic are unlikely to give more, and the US is talking of about 30 M1s – two companies.

That means that the total number of Western tanks being given to Ukraine is likely to be less than 100, whereas the Ukrainians have consistently said they need at least 300 to push the Russians back towards their own borders.

Over time, they may be given more, but time does not work in Ukraine’s favour.

The Ukrainians have roughly matched the Russian invaders in the numbers of troops deployed, but that amounts to about 4% of their population, compared to only 1% for the Russians.

The Russians can therefore afford to squander the lives of their troops (and often do), whereas the Ukrainians only attack when they are confident that their casualties will be low.

Both the recapture of Kharkiv province and the liberation of Kherson were accomplished last autumn with minimal loss of Ukrainian lives, but such opportunities do not abound.

The long-planned Ukrainian winter offensive may have been cancelled because a) the ground is still not frozen hard and b) the new tanks will be in the hands of trained Ukrainian crews by spring.

The great Russian winter offensive is under way right now, but getting very little notice because it is making so little progress.

Let’s assume for a moment that the Ukrainians will wait until spring, the new tanks make a difference, and the Russians lose a lot more ground. Would that justify putting the Doomsday Clock ahead to 90 seconds to midnight?

‘‘Winning’’ in Ukraine may be an existential matter for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who has staked his reputation and perhaps even his life on making a success of the invasion, but it’s not a life-ordeath issue for the ambitious men around him. They certainly don’t want to die for him, together with their entire families.

So the Nato assessment that a Russian resort to nuclear weapons in Ukraine is most unlikely, which underpins the alliance’s decision on the tanks, is almost certainly correct.

How much of their country the Ukrainians can recapture remains to be seen, but they are at least free to try.

Gwynne Dyer is a UK-based Canadian journalist and historian who writes about international affairs.