We simply don't want to go down in history as losers. who simply didn't bother to try win, Oidsalu continues in a daily commentary originally aired by Vikerraadio.

I spent part of last weekend watching the discussions at the Munich Security Conference, which proved to be a strange experience. On the whole, much more accurate statements were made at this year's conference at last years, when China, under the gaze of the West, seemed somewhat confused with its hypocritical peace proposal.

Now, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has himself spoken about the organization of a peace conference instead, and in person, not via video link-up. He did however strike a positively military pose, and still spoke in a manner worthy of a free world leader.

All the speakers at the conference that I happened to listen to spoke exceptionally rationally, even the Republican senator from the US whom Kaja Kallas called "un-Estonian" during one of the discussion panels.

Kallas could permit herself a certain amount of swagger, however, since he likely won't be NATO's next secretary general in any case, while the audience reaction demonstrated that she was one of the undisputed superstars appearing at the conference.

Our Prime Minister's call to refrain from repeating the mistakes of the appeasement era leading up to World War Two was just one of several soundbites which even met with a standing ovation.

This time, there was a heavy pall over the conference due to the fact that while all participants seemed to be talking reasonably, this talk did not ring true, somehow.

Sound and vision did not tally. A year ago, the Ramstein coalition, ensconced in another German city, carried much more weight than this Munich echo chamber. Now, Ramstein is fading from the picture and aid is going to Ukraine. But what good are the right thoughts, if the attendant decisions remain undecided on, the actions not acted on?

The war in Ukraine, up to last year's counter-offensive by Ukraine, was for the West something of a mystical war, like something from the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Despite the atrocities that Ukraine has had endure, it can still be argued that some things went incredibly well for them at the beginning of the conflict, almost as if by magic.

We had not forecast Ukraine to hold out against Russia's initial onslaught. I could not have conceived that the Russians would so carelessly break themselves up against Ukraine's defenses; destroy themselves so purposefully. It was not expected that the West would change its tune in the first week of the war, and that the EU would morph into a military alliance overnight.

With the departure of the "magician"" Valerii Zaluzhnyi as commander of the Ukrainian Defense Forces, the time of miracles for Ukraine is feared to have come to an end, however.

In western capitals, the suppression of the counter-offensive has brought a sobering, yet sometimes invigorating effect. Nostalgia for the "magical period" of the war remains in the air even though, if you think about it, this Ukrainian martial magic was really, no type of magic at all.

In their summaries of the first two years of this war, analysts have acknowledged that the fate of the first days and weeks of the war was in fact on a knife edge. The Ukrainians were unable to defend Kyiv in an organized fashion, and were saved only by their trust which held firm in the ensuing chaos. In such an unmanageable situation, decision-making power was transferred from the General Staff to unit commanders in the field.

At the end of the day, Kyiv was saved by the sum total of the decisions of several military commanders, and which could easily have led to a different outcome. We are still somewhat spellbound by Ukraine's initial war success, or at least we pretend that the miracles we saw were normal everyday things and somehow we continue to exert the right to hope for their continuation.

Estonia was the first to recognize the need for the West to sober up from this. Last December, the Estonian government approved a strategy paper for victory on the war in Ukraine, which demonstrated via the aid of some simple calculations that no miracles are required to do so. There is no need for rash heroics. It is sufficient for the countries who support Ukraine to contribute 0.25 percent of their annual GDP as military aid to Ukraine.

In approving this strategy, the Estonian government also made a four-year funding pledge, which almost went unnoticed; it didn't take anything away from us, not even in the current situation of budgetary austerity.

It is reasonable to assume that similarly proportional commitment is also tied to political will and not to the economic scope for other allied countries. The choice should be rendered even easier by the fact that military support for Ukraine would mostly entail additional orders for the West's own defense industry firms, which in any case need to be boosted and developed in the new security situation.

During the US-led war in Afghanistan, the US spent twice as much per year, over 0.5 percent of its GDP, to fight the Taliban, for 20 consecutive years. At the same time, the Afghanistan war was much less intensive than the Ukraine war, and rather more took on the character of a police rather than military action.

The genius of Estonia's proposed victory strategy lies not in its being hugely ambitious and needing effort, but that an uncomfortable truth emanates therefrom, one which Western governments have not wanted to address head on or explain to their voters. Helping Ukraine to win requires pitifully little effort from the West.

This is more a matter of procrastination. But we don't want to go down in history as a bunch of losers who just didn't bother to try to win. In fact, there is no need to even talk about victory here; this is a matter of preserving human dignity from its most cruel of degradations.

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