On February 24th, the Russian war to conquer Ukraine passed the two-year mark. Actually, no. It marked — imprecisely — the tenth anniversary of Russia’s military takeover and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula as well as the date on which Russia attacked Ukraine again.
As the Russian war on Ukraine passes into its third year, we can’t give up on Ukraine.
The outlook for Ukraine is pretty bleak. Ukrainian forces are low on artillery ammunition, Russian forces — which hold about twenty percent of Ukraine now — are taking back some of the gains made in Ukraine’s 2023 counter-offensive. The U.S. Congress has delayed, and may deny, further aid. The European Union’s parliament has approved more financial aid to Ukraine but the EU alone can’t possibly make up Ukraine’s munitions shortfall. (READ MORE from Jed Babbin: Putin Loves Biden)
What have we learned in the past two years or the past ten? Not much. It’s no surprise to those of us who have been paying attention that Russian President Putin wants to conquer Ukraine to re-assemble the former Soviet empire. His ambition has been plain since at least 2005.
We’ve known that Putin’s belief that Ukraine is essential to that restoration because his “philosopher” — Alexander Dugin — wrote in his “Foundations of Geopolitics” that unless Ukraine again becomes part of Russia, Putin may as well not bother with the other nations that escaped Soviet rule.
The hollowness of Russia’s army is an ephemeral lesson. Putin has shifted Russia’s economy to a wartime status and his military is still a threat to every NATO nation. Putin’s conscription of troops, while unpopular, may sustain the Russian army for years.
Many commentators say that Putin is weaker than he was before he launched the invasion of Ukraine. The facts dictate otherwise. He survived the one-day coup launched by his Wagner Group commander, Yevgeny Prighozin, whose death Putin subsequently arranged. The death — probable murder — of Alexei Navalny in a Siberian prison camp is another demonstration of Putin’s ruthless power.
It was a surprise that Russia didn’t establish air supremacy immediately and that Ukraine was able to score well, in the war’s early days, in air-to-air combat. But Ukraine has too few combat aircraft and too few anti-air defenses to take away Russia’s advantages in the air or to kill Russian artillery.
What we have also learned is that some — too many — Republicans have blinders on. They see Ukraine aid as something Biden wants without any other value. They created a straw man about border security to block further aid to Ukraine. It was a nice try but failed because Biden refuses to make any pretense of securing the border against illegal immigrants. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La) may not bring the Ukraine aid package — which also contains aid funds for Israel — to the House floor for a vote.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Oh) tried to justify blocking aid to Ukraine by saying last week that further aid won’t change the situation on the ground or give Putin a reason to negotiate a peace deal.
Vance’s reasoning is circular. The aid package Biden has proposed certainly won’t bring about Ukrainian victory but the absence of it is forcing Ukraine to retreat in the face of Russian advances. (READ MORE: Ukraine Is Stalemated Again)
Ukraine abandoned the city of Avdiivka last week because it lacks airpower and artillery ammunition to stave off the Russian advances.
To restore the Russian empire to its Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe, Putin needs to break NATO. NATO’s failure as an alliance is foreseeable, forced by several circumstances.
First and foremost is the fact that NATO is unwilling to support its own defense. Former president Trump was right when he bashed the NATO members who haven’t spent two percent of their Gross Domestic Product on defense. That failure goes deep and has become obvious even to some liberals in the media.
Even The Economist — a traditionally liberal newspaper that has gone nuts in support of “climate change” — has noticed. In its most recent issue, an editorial says the restoration of NATO’s strength is essential but nearly impossible. It wrote, “That means raising defense spending to a level not seen in decades, restoring Europe’s neglected military traditions, restructuring its arms industries and preparing for possible war.”
That’s because as long as Putin is alive … he won’t end his war against Ukraine.
War with Russia is far from the minds of European governments. As that same Economist editorial pointed out, twenty percent of NATO defense budgets are supposed to be spent on weapons. The shortfall of European Union NATO members (plus Norway) has amounted to $600 billion since 1991.
Trump is adding to the problem by saying that he won’t defend a NATO member that hasn’t spent enough on defense. Bizarrely, he went further saying he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that don’t meet NATO’s defense spending guidelines.
Russia isn’t about to attack the nations among the worst in failing to spend enough on defense. To reach Germany, Italy, France, and Spain — four of the worst — he’d have to first go through most of Eastern Europe, nations which for the most part are spending adequately (or more) on their own defenses.
But what would Trump do if, for example, Russia attacked Germany or one of the other worst defense spending offenders? Any of them would immediately invoke Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, requiring all other NATO nations to come to its defense. Would Trump abandon our obligations under the NATO Treaty and fail to come to their defense?
If he or any U.S. president failed to meet our mutual defense obligation under the NATO Treaty, that act would break NATO and achieve one of Putin’s most important goals.
On the other side of the coin, NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg — who has been saying Ukraine could become a NATO member — said last week that Ukraine’s NATO membership is “inevitable.” It isn’t and shouldn’t be. (READ MORE: Wars Raise Two More Critical Issues)
That’s because as long as Putin is alive — and as long as his thinking is dominated by Alexander Dugin — he won’t end his war against Ukraine.
After most of the former Soviet captive nations have joined NATO, Putin must be thinking as did Kaiser Wilhelm II in the years before World War One. Wilhelm believed Germany was being surrounded and diminished by other nations’ alliances, especially Britain’s. Ukraine should not be made a NATO member while Putin lives, and probably not after he goes.
So what is to be done? Ukrainian corruption is a frequent reason given by Republicans for refusing more aid. But the European Union gave Ukrainian President Zelensky seven policy goals to achieve in fighting corruption. In Zelensky’s very recent interview with Fox News’s Brett Baier, Zelensky claimed to have satisfied all of those goals. Are those acts enough to placate congressional Republicans? Probably not because they pay no attention to them.
Ukraine’s forces are, we know, terribly short of artillery ammunition. More needs to come from the U.S. as should the financial aid Biden promised. If congressional Republicans want Putin to win his Ukraine war, they should continue to block the aid. If they want Putin to lose, they should approve the aid Biden wants and do more.
Two points need to be made. First, as I’ve written repeatedly, we have no vital national security interest in Ukraine’s survival so we should not go to war in its defense. Second, our derivative national security interest in Ukraine demands that we support its war of survival to thwart Putin’s aggression because we have a significant interest in so doing.
As the Russian war on Ukraine passes into its third year, we can’t give up on Ukraine. Our solipsism has immersed us in news of nothing else than the 2024 election. We need to walk and chew gum at the same time. Our global responsibilities demand that attention be paid to the wars we are engaged in albeit peripherally, even if that means giving Biden a small win on Ukraine.
