Revisiting The Ukraine Dilemma For The US Right

There's been a steady rise in opinion favoring some sort of negotiated settlement of the Ukraine war, and although the US Right has been consistently against US support for the war, the appeasement option is no longer limited to the Right. For instance, on the 19fortyfive site,

Since it became evident a few weeks into Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine that Moscow’s troops were stopped cold outside of Kyiv, there has been a near-universal belief in the West that Ukraine would eventually win. All that was needed, many pundits claimed, was to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces sufficient numbers of weapons and ammunition. As the war now grinds towards the four-month mark, it is becoming painfully evident that the odds are stacked in Russia’s favor.

. . . Zelensky and the Ukrainian people will soon come face-to-face with the ugly prospect that continuing to fight will only bring more death and destruction to its people, cities, and armed forces – but be insufficient to stave off defeat. The truth is, military fundamentals and simple capacity are in Moscow’s favor. It is unlikely those factors change in time to avoid defeat for Kyiv and its brave people. That is the ugly, bitter reality of war.

Or this less coherent piece from the Hot Air blog:

The war increasingly looks like a straightforward contest to see which side will collapse first. The horrendous casualties taken by the Russian in close-quarters fighting around Kiev combined with promises of massive western military aid for Ukraine seemed unsustainable for Putin’s army, making them a likely loser.

But now that the war has shifted to the east and become a long-range slugfest in open terrain, the forecast has shifted. Unable to match the range of Putin’s artillery, it’s the Ukrainians who are taking horrendous casualties while Russian soldiers remain out of reach.

. . . “[E]very day that Western heavy-weapons supplies are delayed is measured in hundreds of Ukrainian casualties,” sources told the WSJ. The west may have done just enough to support the war without actually preventing Ukrainian defeat. What was the point of extending this conflict only to let the battle for the Donbas turn into a turkey shoot for the Russians?

The Right's position all along has been that support for Ukraine simply extends inflationary spending and ignores domestic problems like a baby formula shortage. There have also been echoes of the appeasemnt argument that it's a "quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing.” Ukraine is poor and corrupt, let them go.

This piece in the left-wing Daily Kos makes somewhat more sense of the argument in the links above that Ukraine is running out of ammunition -- but the ammunition they're running out of is their less effective legacy Warsaw Pact ammunition, which is being replaced by more effective NATO ammunition for the new weapons they're receiving.

Ukraine’s own ministry of defense acknowledges how much more effective NATO guns are, compared to the Soviet crap they’re phasing out (and Russia is stuck with), saying “these new [NATO 155 mm] shells are more effective than their Soviet equivalents, and hence their consumption is lower.” The accuracy is ridiculous. Russia can’t pull off stuff like this, because if they could, we’d see them release the drone footage.

Zelensky in recent speeches has referred to a bigger picture of overall progress and overall objectives:

Do you remember how Russia hoped to capture the entire Donbas in early May? It is already the 108th day of the war, it is already June. Donbas is holding on. The losses suffered by the occupiers, including in this area, are extremely significant. In total, the Russian army today has about 32,000 dead souls. For what? What did it give you, Russia?

No one can say now how long this burning of souls by Russia will last. But we must do everything to make the occupiers regret that they have done all this, and to hold them accountable for every murder and every strike at our beautiful state.

The problem remains that any negotiated solution that leaves Russia in control of Ukrainian territory will be just an invitation to try again, which was the situation after 2014. The second problem is the clear agenda of Soviet revanchism in Russian ruling circles, which isn't likely to change no matter the state of Putin's health. Slovakia, the Baltics, and Poland are most acutely aware of this, but clearly Russian ambitions have forced Sweden and Finland to abandon long-held neutrality.

So far, we still have the statement from US Defense Secretary Austin, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” More recently, he's said the US objective is "to ensure that we're providing Ukraine what Ukraine needs right now and . . . to look ahead to ensure that we're helping Ukraine to build and sustain robust defenses so that Ukraine will be able to defend itself in the coming months and years."

The problem I see at this point is that even an end state that restores Ukraine to pre-2014 borders doesn't necessarily weaken Russia "to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine". The more I study economic trends on the Russian frontier, the more I see an intent to integrate Finland, the Baltics, Poland, and Ukraine into a coherent economic zone that will establish iteslf to the detriment of Russia.

The map at the top of this post should give an idea of where things are headed, and the economic zone envisioned there definitely includes not only the Baltics and Finland, but it extends to Belarus and parts of northwestern Russia. Ukraine is simply on its southern border.

Geostrategic planning needs to accommodate this likely development, as well as likely bitter Russian opposition to it. The current Russo-Ukraine War is just a stage in that process, which I think is inevitable. But if it's in Western interests for it to take place, it must follow that the West has to ensure that Russia "can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine", which in this case it definitely will do.

As I've said, so far it looks as though Secretaries Austin and Blinken have been able to carve out an area of discretion over Ukraine where Biden can't interfere. However, future political leadership will need to account more clearly for the likely direction of developments in this emerging region, of which Ukraine is only a part.