It’s Time to Acknowledge Reality and End the War in Ukraine
Whether you agree with them or not, there were really three arguments for supporting Ukraine when Russia initially invaded.
1) In 1994, in return for giving up its non-functional nuclear weapons to Russia, Russia pledged to respect Ukraine’s territory and the United States then, and in the following years, essentially told Ukraine that we’d back them up if they were invaded. We didn’t invite Ukraine into NATO. We were clear about telling them that we weren’t pledged to go to war to protect them. However, we did say we’d aid them if Russia invaded. So, you could definitely make the argument that we had a moral obligation to live up to our word.
Well, all sorts of numbers get tossed around, but MOST estimates seem to assume that we’ve set aside somewhere around 175 billion dollars’ worth of aid for Ukraine. However you slice it, it’s a staggering amount of money and far more than any other nation has given. So, we have already lived up to our side of the bargain when it came to the security assurances we offered to Ukraine.
2) Another argument we heard early on was that funneling all money into Ukraine would badly bleed the Russian military and certainly both countries have lost large numbers of men:
That being said, the combat losses for both sides are held so close to the vest and are so steeped in propaganda that the general public doesn’t have any idea what the real numbers look like. Did Russia really lose 800k men or was it 200k men? Has Ukraine lost 30k or 300k? Without looking at classified data, all of which is held by people with agendas to push, none of us can entirely know what’s true and what isn’t.
Still, if our goal was to bleed Russia, we have every reason to think that we have already achieved it, although it’s fair to question how much sense it ever made in the first place given how much it cost. It’s one thing to fund an insurgency, which is a much smaller expense, but funding a large army is staggeringly expensive. Given the amount of money we spent and the limited threat Russia’s military posed to our NATO allies even before the war, arguing that the money we spent on this was worth it is an extremely dubious assumption.
3) Perhaps the most important point was that between the harsh sanctions we put on Russia and the military aid we were giving to Ukraine; Russia could be pushed back. If Russia had lost the war, Ukraine would have obviously remained intact, and Putin could have very well been overthrown. The problem with this is that despite some early successes, the sanctions proved to be ineffective over the long haul and Russia has a lot more manpower than Ukraine. Everyone was hyped up for a huge counter-offensive from Ukraine in late 2023 that supposedly had the potential to turn the tide of the war. It failed and other than some relatively minor Ukrainian captures of Russian territory and advances by Russia, the battle lines have mostly stayed the same since then.
There’s no strategy that has been offered to the public to explain how Ukraine might win other than NATO rolling in, which is a bad idea for a wide variety of reasons. Just as a starter, do you think there’s any appetite in America to put our troops on the ground in a shooting war with Russia over Ukraine? The answer is obviously, “Absolutely not.”
In other words, the “strategy” the Biden administration was pursuing at the end of his time in office was to pour hundreds of billions into Ukraine and encourage them to hold out and wait for a miracle. Of course, the most likely outcome of that strategy without direct American intervention would be for Ukraine to eventually LOSE a war of attrition and have Russia swallow the whole country. Along similar lines, without the United States pouring money and military aid in indefinitely, Ukraine is likely to fold and have Russia eat its entire nation.
Meanwhile, the debate around Ukraine spends an inordinate amount of time focused on secondary issues.
Is Zelenskyy a dictator? Should he hold an election or put it off until the war is over? How popular is Zelenskyy really? Did Russia have good reasons to invade Ukraine? Are Ukrainian politicians stealing large amounts of aid we’re giving them? Who should be involved in the peace negotiations? Do the Ukrainians have Nazis in their ranks? What would we do if another country invaded us? Who’s going to be involved in the peace process? Is Europe going to be happy? Is Trump too friendly with Putin?
Yet, when you get down to the core issues, things get much clearer.
The fact of the matter is that Ukraine can’t continue stalemating Russia without enormous amounts of outside help. The United States is no longer inclined to keep giving them that help, and we’re certainly not interested in putting boots on the ground. Europe very much seems to want the war to continue, but without us involved, they’d need to dramatically increase their levels of aid or put their own forces on the ground to hold off Russia, neither of which they seem inclined to do.
This means that we’re headed toward one of two likely potential outcomes: Either Russia is going to overwhelm Ukraine long-term and conquer the whole country OR there’s going to be a peace treaty. Given that Russia is in a good position because they’ve been winning the war, in order to make peace, they’re highly likely to insist on keeping much of the territory they’ve captured along with demanding a promise that Ukraine won’t join NATO. On the other hand, Ukraine has very little leverage and the best they can probably hope for is to get some of the territory Russia holds back along with perhaps some European forces on the ground, sort of like we do in South Korea to keep North Korea from getting any wild ideas about invading in the future.
What alternative to this is there other than the United States invading Russia, which realistically, just isn’t going to happen, or continuing to spend hundreds of billions more for years on end hoping for a miracle that’s unlikely to ever come? That would be an incredibly expensive approach that would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths and there’s still a significant chance it would end with Ukraine entirely under the control of Russia. That may not sound appealing to some people, but this isn’t a movie where Tom Cruise or Keanu Reeves will go on a secret mission to capture a super weapon, punch Putin in the face, and come back to a victory parade in the center of Kyiv after Ukraine achieves victory.
The real world is ugly and messy and sometimes the bad guys do win. The fact of the matter is that Ukraine has been on track to lose this war for quite a while now and their negotiating position is likely to get worse, not better, if they decide to hold out. It would be great if it wasn’t that way, but like it or not, that’s just reality and it’s time that was acknowledged with a peace deal.
When I read articles by the neo-cons that want more support for the Ukraine War, I have to ask "How many people need to die before they figure out that this war is a waste of time?"
Seriously, I think the neo-cons would be cheering the war on if 80% of the Ukrainians were dead.
Good essay, John. In a situation of hard choices on the opposite side of the world, a peace treaty makes all the sense in the world. We don't have to like it, but unless we had some vital American interest at stake, we are not going to invade Russia. I suppose if we attacked Kamchatka we could draw off some of the Russian army, but what would be the end game? I agree that if Europe feels that Russia is an existential threat, they could and should gear up and defend Ukraine. I seem to recall that the EU economy combined is nearly the size of the US, time for them to step up. One of our heroes, Douglas MacArthur, said, "you can't win a land war in Asia." Vietnam certainly proved he was right. I believe Anthony Blinken was a big trigger for this war, with his idiot statements about bringing Ukraine into NATO, that and our fossil fuel companies looking for new markets. Russia/USSR has been plagued with evil leaders, Stalin being the worst, but Putin is a greedy gangster like the Nazis were.