Opinion
As I wrote some time ago, it is beyond obvious that the only way the Ukraine war will end is a negotiated peace. Anyone who claimed even back then that Russia would be decisively defeated was kidding themselves — and condemning more Russians and Ukrainians to death. Today, holding out for a Ukrainian victory is not only fanciful, but increasingly contemptible.
Like it or not, the only realistic options Ukraine has are negotiate peace sooner, or face a grinding, bloody defeat later.
Even European leaders are grudgingly admitting it. NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg can rattle sabres all he likes, but the NATO nation with the most skin in the game is France, and they know the jig is up. American armchair strategists will, of course, sneer about “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (which conveniently ignores that France has a higher win ratio in war than the US), but it’s the French who have the most actual skin in the game.
A French military report leaked to the French media claims the opposite: ‘The most serious error of analysis and judgment would be to continue to seek exclusively military solutions to stop hostilities. A French officer summarises: “It is clear, in view of the forces present, that Ukraine cannot win this war militarily”.’
The French report bears close scrutiny because (as Macron’s anger and increasingly aggressive rhetoric shows) the French probably have more troops on the ground in Ukraine than anyone, and hundreds have been killed in Russian bombings of military planning targets. The French report continues: ‘Zelensky would need 35,000 men per month, he is not recruiting half of them, while Putin draws from a pool of 30,000 monthly volunteers. The Ukrainian failure at Avdiïvka shows that, despite the emergency dispatch of an “elite” brigade – the 3rd Azov air assault brigade – Kiev is not capable of locally re-establishing a sector of the collapsing front.’
Like the fools whose boys-playing-at-war brinkmanship plunged the world into the haemoclysm of WWI, too many Western leaders are drunk on their own ra-ra rhetoric.
Macron’s outlandish statement that sending Nato troops to help Zelensky’s regime ‘was not excluded’ was soon defused by the French Defence Minister Sebastian Lecornu who said such an option was ‘not on the table at the moment’. The Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski called for ‘asymmetric escalation’ in Ukraine – from Nato’s side. In Sikorski’s opinion, the presence of Nato troops in Ukraine ‘should not be something unthinkable’.
Except that it absolutely should be: because it would mean the first direct military confrontation between (now-nuclear) great powers since WWII. August international affairs publication Foreign Policy is aghast, too, at the notion of admitting Ukraine to NATO. Not least because doing so would vindicate a large part of Putin’s justification for launching the war in the first place.
So, what made Foreign Policy’s authors veer away from the Western mainstream on the Nato-Ukraine narrative? One of the factors was Kiev’s ongoing military failure. Here is a quote from the Foreign Policy article:
‘Turning to Ukraine, our belief that bringing it into Nato now (or in the near future) is unwise rests on several assumptions. One is that Ukraine cannot reverse the situation on the battlefield and reconquer its lost territory unless it gets a lot more weaponry and has time to reconstitute its forces after the setbacks of the past year. It is suffering from a severe (and probably irreversible) shortage of manpower and the combination of drone surveillance, artillery, and extensive Russian fortifications will make it difficult-to-impossible for Kiev to make large territorial advances. Ukraine’s cheerleaders in the West were wrong last spring when they offered optimistic forecasts about the then upcoming counter-offensive. And they are repeating this error now by suggesting that there are still lots of ways for Ukraine to turn the tide. Kiev cannot reverse the situation on the ground where the tides of battle have shifted against Ukraine.’
FP brings bad news to Zelensky’s regime: with every passing day it has a slimmer chance of ‘reconquering lost territory.’ But the leading reason for this shift to realism is not military: it is psychological. Who cares more about Ukraine? The answer to this question has become obvious in the last few months. ‘Our assumption is that Russia’s leaders care more about Ukraine’s fate than the West does,’ the article says.
This should not be taken to mean, of course, that Putin has a cuddly, fatherly affection for Ukraine. What FP means is that Ukraine simply means more to Russia than it does to the West. For Russia, Ukraine is an existential crisis: A NATO Ukraine is as intolerable a threat to Russia as Soviet missiles in Cuba were in 1962. And the US was ready to go to nuclear war over that.
In fact, FP argues, the West hasn’t been acting in Ukraine’s interests from the start.
‘Nato’s oft-repeated commitment to bring Ukraine into the alliance undoubtedly fuelled Moscow’s concerns . . . The evidence that the prospect of Ukraine joining Nato fuelled Putin’s actions is impossible to deny.’ This is a simple truth that had been denied in both Washington and Brussels for years.
The Conservative Woman
The West has nothing like the skin in the Ukraine game Russia has. Russia is not going anywhere in the territory it conquered — and held, despite fevered cheerleading about this or that “counter-offensive”. It has already begun post-war reconstruction in places like Mariupol. All the West is willing to do is throw weapons at the rapidly diminishing Ukrainian forces.
For Western leaders, especially the Biden administration, Ukraine is little more than a catspaw (and, for the Biden family, a nice little earner), a means of giving a bloody nose to the Russians. Not to mention a handy excuse to fatten the military-industrial complex. If Russia wins, it will be damaging to Biden’s and the Democrats’ prestige (and re-election chances: Americans will not be pleased to see Biden presiding over another humiliating defeat), but that’s about all. No matter what hysterical “domino theory” nonsense Western politicians babble (again).
Worse for NATO, a great many Americans are not at all willing to get into a war with Russia. Senior Republicans are already floating Europe’s worst nightmare. Utah Senator Mike Lee who serves as the Ranking Republican on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, has declared: ‘If Ukraine gets in, we need to leave Nato’
For a Europe which for eighty years has hidden behind America’s apron-strings — while simultaneously thumbing its nose at the US — being left to fend for themselves would be the ultimate nightmare.