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This is no time for the US to stop funding Ukraine [1]
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Date: 2024-02-08
A burly Ukrainian special-operations soldier told me that last summer, and it’s lingered with me ever since. The setting of our conversation is a big reason why: We were at a kitchen table in the midnight black, dancing shadows from the candlelight between us giving his words a sort of dark clout. Electricity in the port city of Kherson had remained spotty since the Ukrainian military liberated it from Russian occupation some months prior, and it had given out just as soon as we sat down for the interview. So we illuminated the space with a lone wax candle and the glow of our iPhones.
“What I see sometimes is that Europe and America are getting tired from the Ukrainian war. I would like to correct them. They’re not getting tired from the Ukrainian war; they’re tired of the Russian war. They came here, remember? We’re just defending ourselves.”
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The wear in his voice has stuck with me, too. He wasn’t angry so much as frustrated, even bewildered. Once he finished with me, he was back to planning yet another raid with his team on fixed Russian positions across the Dnieper River. Some of his fellow operators in the adjacent living room were constructing homemade drones. They’d all been at war for 18 months at this point, with no end in sight. And here he was, trying to field questions with grace about things said by oblivious strangers from across the sea.
The idea that the greater world doesn’t understand the gravity of the soldier’s charge is a resentment as old as war itself, of course, though perhaps it’s proven particularly apt with the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. What began as a regional dispute a decade back with the annexation of Crimea and land grabs in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine metastasized into something larger and more ruinous with Russia’s full-scale invasion two years ago this month. For a stretch there, Ukraine seemed the center of everything: Europe’s shield, the front line of democracy, all the rest.
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Then time passed. The war persisted. Russian offensives stalled out; Ukrainian counteroffensives made gains, though not as much as internet mystics had foreseen. New global hot spots emerged. America and the West continued to supply Ukraine with weapons and aid, but often in lesser amounts than had been requested. The Biden administration’s cautious stance toward the conflict revealed itself through a deliberate policy of half measures and limited packages, leaving Ukrainian leaders in the difficult position of thanking their benefactors in one breath and asking for more in the next. Kremlin propaganda began to make the headway the Russian army could not, as talking points about Ukraine being a fake country, or full of neo-Nazis, or a money-laundering operation for NATO, spread with alarming zeal.
And now further US aid to Ukraine hangs in the balance in our Congress, delayed by domestic issues that have nothing to do with our ally or its war for self-determination. Strong forces in the Republican Party once led by Ronald Reagan advocate for appeasing Russian President Vladimir Putin in the name of peace, while the Democratic top aides to President Biden — so committed to half measures when Ukraine was advancing — now tell American lawmakers on Capitol Hill that without our continued support, it’d be a matter of weeks or months until Russia broke through Ukrainian defensive lines.
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In two short years, Ukraine has become something of a forgotten war. Which is remarkable, even by the low standards of the American attention span.
Some people I know on the ground in Ukraine reject the weeks-to-months estimate as hyperbolic. A Ukrainian army officer speaking on the condition of anonymity assured me last month that “there are many battles to come. Our leaders are not stupid; we know how to stock.”
Ukrainian soldiers next to a Russian tank outside Bakhmut, where a Ukrainian brigade counterattacked and regained control in January. TYLER HICKS/NYT
Ukraine continues to get support from European allies, who just kicked in 50 billion euros in grants and loans. Still, there’s no substitute for US military aid. One needn’t be a strategic expert to understand that. Just watch a few viral videos of HIMARS rocket-launching systems striking faraway command posts, or loitering-munition drones blasting apart deep bunkers, or, most recently, a pair of Bradley armored fighting vehicles destroying a large Russian T-90 main battle tank in an open snowy clearing, which could belong in a dystopian film about an alternative Cold War that didn’t keep cold, except it’s real, and it happened in 2024.
“We need artillery ammunition in large quantities,” Senior Lieutenant Olena Bilozerska of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence texted me. “They’re necessary to break through the enemy’s defenses. We must surpass Russia in this number.” She also pointed to the significance of long-range missiles such as the ATACMS and air defense systems like the PAC-3 interceptor that protect cities and civilians — but it’s artillery that comes up time and time again, no matter who I ask, no matter their rank or assignment or where they are along the front. Some estimate a ratio of 10 artillery shells fired by Russian forces for every round the Ukrainians now manage.
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“I feel like we’re fighting with one arm tied behind our back,” an American military veteran now serving in the armed forces of Ukraine told me. “Candidly, it’s embarrassing, as I’m the lone foreigner in an all-Ukrainian battalion. The voices we hear the most from Washington are either trying to prolong this as long as possible — thank you, military-industrial complex — or want to walk away and hand Russia the keys.”
Another US veteran who’s fought in Ukraine broke down when trying to describe the psychological effect of a heavy artillery bombardment. His squad got trapped in a marsh in Kharkiv Oblast, he said, pinned under a barrage of 152mm rounds, and it lasted hours. He’d been lucid and calm detailing operations in minefields, his own shrapnel wounds, and the death of a friend, but the memory of this shelling from the Russians proved too much. “It’s all they have,” he said a couple of times after regaining himself. “It’s all they use.”
American support for the war has waned since the unifying days of spring 2022, when Ukrainian resolve — and sound tactics — defied the invasion attempt, when President Volodymyr Zelensky said he didn’t need a ride but ammo, when most every cable news host was broadcasting live from the rooftop of a Kyiv hotel. It’s also become a partisan litmus test. According to Gallup, a plurality of 41 percent now believe we’re doing too much to support Ukraine, up from 24 percent in August 2022. Some 62 percent of Republicans responded this way, compared with 14 percent of Democrats.
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Skepticism by Americans toward intervention and our defense complex is well warranted. It’s one consequence of our various post-9/11 follies. But skepticism is not the same thing as reflexive rejection. Skepticism requires consideration and treating situations as distinct from one another.
First, we do not have troops in Ukraine. While it’s true, according to the military news website Task & Purpose, that at least 46 Americans have died in the war, including more than 30 US military veterans, they’ve all been volunteers who entered Ukraine of their own volition, against the express wishes of our government.
Second, this is the defense of a democracy, not the propping up of one from the top down. Ukrainians have fought for theirs, earning it and all its flaws, enduring failures and achieving successes since gaining independence in 1991, from the Kuchma protests to the Orange Revolution to 2013′s Maidan social uprising.
A soldier outside Bakhmut on Jan. 29. TYLER HICKS/NYT
Last summer, during an interview about private-industry ammunition plants, Ukraine’s Minister of Strategic Industries Alexander Kamyshin touched upon some of his country’s growing pains.
“I know we disappoint the whole world with all these corruption cases,” he said, referencing the then-recent scandal of some regional military commissioners abusing their positions for financial gain. “But we still must fight the greatest war of [this] generation. The war that we thought would never happen in our lives. And if the US and its people keep supporting Ukraine, we’ll make this war never come back again.
“Because I don’t want my kids to fight with Russians.”
It’s amazing how many of these conversations, both over there and back here, find their way to the vision of tomorrow to which we aspire for our children. A friend I served with in Iraq told me recently how wary he is of our involvement with Ukraine. His son is nearing military age, he explained, and he doesn’t want the young man to be sucked into another “forever war,” as occurred with our generation of soldiers.
Forever war. It’s a term lifted from a 1974 science-fiction novel, and it became a type of catchall during the latter half of the war on terror, a way to neatly refer to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and beyond without getting bogged down in the particulars. The nebulousness sometimes irritated Beltway insiders, but that’s part of why I liked it — it gave everyday people accessible language to contend with armed conflicts they were so often told they didn’t know enough about to speak on.
The term has found new life after our withdrawal from Afghanistan, with critics from both the hard left and the hard right using it to attack President Biden, especially since July 2023, when he said, “Our commitment to Ukraine will not weaken. We will stand for liberty and freedom today, tomorrow, and for as long as it takes.”
“Forever war” is catchy, no doubt. But is it applicable here?
In 2021, David Sterman, a senior policy analyst at the think tank New America, examined the concept in a report entitled “Defining Endless Wars.” “Endlessness emerges,” Sterman wrote, “when a belligerent adopts objectives it lacks the capability to achieve and at the same time is not at risk of being defeated.” Two key aspects of a nation mired in endless war, he found, are “unclear or unstable objectives” and the understanding that any consequences for losing the war would be minimal.
That doesn’t describe Ukraine’s war, which is for its very survival. Putin has repeatedly said that he doesn’t believe a Ukrainian state should exist. As for its aims, President Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders have compiled a 10-point peace plan that they’ve been citing for well over a year now. Ukraine fights, as the special-operations soldier in Kherson told me, in the pursuit of peace.
Interventionism and isolationism are not binary choices. The Banana Wars may have largely been imperial adventures that most benefited American fruit companies, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have entered World War II. The military invasions in the 1980s of Grenada and Panama were both condemned by the United Nations General Assembly as violations of international law. That doesn’t mean helping end a genocide in the Balkans a few years later wasn’t a just cause.
Accepting that Ukraine is not Afghanistan or Iraq but something else altogether requires a bit of intellectual humility from Americans. It also requires listening to the Ukrainian people. Peace and calm are not the same, though it can often seem that way to the faraway and comfortable. I have a deep-seated desire for peace in Ukraine and beyond. But it would not be peace to allow Russia to raze entire cities in conquest and deport Ukrainian children for forced adoptions and cultural reeducation camps. It would be many things, but it would not be peace.
In 1943, in the midst of World War II, George Orwell looked back at the Spanish Civil War, which he had fought in, as the precursor of the global conflict. “The outcome,” he wrote, “was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin — at any rate not in Spain.” It’s hard not to see something similar happening now to Ukraine, anywhere but Ukraine.
President Biden with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office on Sept. 21, 2023. DOUG MILLS/NYT
Even now, two years after the invasion, 74 percent of Ukrainians remain against territorial concessions, according to a recent poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. Yet over here, Gallup found that 43 percent of Americans believe territorial concessions should be made if they help end the war.
How generous we prove with others’ agency, others’ land. How frivolous we can be with our allies’ lives.
President Biden doesn’t think of America as a country that gives up so easily. “We just have to remember who we are,” he said during last year’s State of the Union address. “We’re the United States of America. And there’s nothing — nothing beyond our capacity if we do it together.”
“If we do it together.” Are we capable of being that country? Are we capable of being the country some Ukrainians think we are, or at least need us to be?
Time will tell. For those holding the line in Ukraine, there’s a fleeting amount of it to spare.
Matt Gallagher is the author of four books, including “Daybreak,” out this month, a novel about the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
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