As I recall, his career started with a successful book about being followed as a spy by the Stasi during a stay as a British student/academic in GDR.
I always thought he WAS actually a spy of her Majesty the Queen. And what he keeps writing on this matter - as summarized by Marv - is a good, albeit indirect, proof I was right.
VG

Inviato da iPhone

Those who favour NATO’s provision of more advanced weaponry to Ukraine and a dangerous escalation of the war against Russia will for the most part welcome a a long essay by Timothy Garton in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Ash is a well known public intellectual, an Oxford professor and former foreign editor of the British conservative weekly, The Spectator.

For example, like many others expressing their solidarity with Ukraine, including on the left:

1. Ash is critical of “the strategy that Germany and France, in particular, pursued toward Russia over Ukraine after 2014”, and views their pragmatic self-interested trade and security policies as “appeasement”. It leads him to question "whether the West has the will to give this embattled European democracy sufficient military and economic support” to defeat the Russians.

2. He is a great admirer of the impassioned patriotic and military culture which has taken hold of the Ukrainian working class. "Ukrainians routinely refer to their soldiers as ‘warriors’, he writes. "The almost ritual response to the patriotic incantation 'Glory to Ukraine! is 'To the Heroes, Glory!”

By contrast, he scorns German antiwar sentiment, where "the number of that country’s Kriegsdienstverweigerer (those refusing to do military service carrying weapons) almost quintupled in 2022 and, astonishingly, included some who were already members of the German armed forces on active service. (What, you want us actually to fight?) According to Der Spiegel, many applicants said 'they had not reckoned with an armed conflict’.”

3. He characterizes the war being waged by the Ukrainian state as "an anticolonial war of national liberation just as Indians once were against Britain and Algerians against France.” He neglects to add that the Indians and Algerians were stateless, like most others engaged in the long history of national liberation struggles.

4. Ash also shares with his co-thinker Timothy Snyder an appreciation of Ukraine’s “extraordinary multicultural history”. But he notes the xenophobia which the war has also engendered at the base of Ukrainian society. “From every Ukrainian you now hear this utter rejection and even hatred, not just of the Russian president, not just of the Russian Federation, but of everything Russian, including the culture and language” and he wonders whether “given the rejection and even hatred of all things Russian, will the previously self-evident cultural fluidity between the Russian and Ukrainian languages endure?”

5. Ash warns that a negotiated end to the war which falls short of expelling Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory will meet with fierce Ukrainian grassroots resistance. “The hard fact is that even if Western leaders are ready to supply the main battle tanks and other modern armaments that Ukraine needs to win back most of its territory—which they definitely should—most of them would privately urge a halt at the border with Crimea (and possibly also, although this is less clear, at something like the pre–February 24 line of Russian occupation in the far east of Ukraine). But if Zelensky explicitly called for any such territorial concessions, he would be furiously criticized at home and face accusations of betrayal in a revived, angry Ukrainian politics.”

6. He rejects a negotiated mutual security pact with Russia and independent NATO guarantees of Ukrainian security as insufficient. "The only logical solution in the long term, and the only solid guarantee of Ukraine’s freedom from future Russian revanchism, will be for it to join NATO as well."

7. Finally, he disregards the role of US imperialism as though it does not exist. So he is able to write, without a trace of irony, that Russia’s defeat would mean that "for the first time in European history, we would have a fully postimperial Europe—that is, a Europe with neither overseas nor land empires. It would mean another great advance, comparable in scale to that after 1989, toward the goal memorably formulated at that time as 'Europe whole and free’.”

And then? “The US could concentrate more on the Indo-Pacific, including the threat from China to Taiwan. What a prize, not just for Europe but for the whole geopolitical West."

See:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/02/23/ukraine-in-our-future-timothy-garton-ash/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%2001-31-23%20Garton%20AshUkraine&utm_content=NYR%2001-31-23%20Garton%20AshUkraine+CID_90b9204539660ab7106ef97fffd415b4&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Ukraine%20in%20Our%20Future