Ukraine: When Will It Be Enough?
Putin says the U.S. is using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. Does he have a point?
Wednesday marks the 174th day since Russia invaded Ukraine and it is worth just looking up for a moment to see where we are.
The war shows no sign of slowing and we are no closer to a resolution than we were in late February. The common theme in the West is that we will not stop until Kyiv emerges victorious in the face of the Russian aggressors, but it seems few people can define what a victory would look like.
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The standard answer from the U.S. is that Ukrainian leadership gets to define victory, which is a problem, because President Volodymyr Zelensky now vows to take back Crimea, which was annexed in 2014.
There are a few points about the war that are indisputable.
One is that Russia has a far superior military than Ukraine. Samuel Charap of the RAND Corporation told The Economist that Russia has unused military capacity. For example, Russia did not tap into the full might of its air force. He warned that the more the West keeps propping up Kyiv, the higher the stakes will rise.
“We are in a slow-moving, incremental escalation,” he said.
Russia has refused to call its invasion of Ukraine a war, and has referred to it as a special military operation. If Russia wanted to kill Ukrainians indiscriminately and seize Kyiv, it could have done so in a matter of days.
In June, Russian President Vladimir Putin told the Russian parliament that “by and large” his military “hasn’t started anything seriously yet.”
Putin also said this week that Russia will begin to sell its advanced weapons to friendly countries that he says are far superior to rivals, according to Al Jazeera.
“We are talking about high-precision weapons and robotics, about combat systems based on new physical principles. Many of them are years, or maybe decades ahead of their foreign counterparts, and in terms of tactical and technical characteristics they are significantly superior to them,” he said.
There is no doubt that critics of Putin read that quote and say it’s simply bluster from an isolated dictator who is desperate to win the propaganda war in the media.
But it is worth asking yourself: If Russia has been so degraded in the conflict and if its military was so weakened, why are Finland and Sweden in the process of joining NATO?
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It’s also worth considering: If Putin actually saw his forces losing on he ground, would he let that happen, or would he tap into the full power of his military?
The U.S. had a chance to stop the invasion if it actually considered Russia’s legitimate security concerns about an expanding NATO. Putin on Tuesday accused the U.S. of using Ukrainians as cannon fodder just to keep the war going to weaken Russia and keep its grip on the world’s stage.
“They need conflicts to retain their hegemony,” Putin said in a speech on international security on Tuesday in Moscow. “That’s why they have turned the Ukrainian people into cannon fodder. The situation in Ukraine shows that the United States is trying to drag the conflict out, and it acts in exactly the same way trying to fuel conflicts in Asia, Africa and Latin America.”
The Trends Journal magazine has called for immediate negotiations for peace, ideally led by French President Emmanuel Macron or another leader who has been in touch with Putin since the start of the conflict.
But in the meantime, it’s worth pondering why the U.S. did so little to stop the war, and why it slowly feeds Ukrainian forces weapons instead of either just cutting the military off, or giving them the advanced weapons that they have begged for. Given that fact, Putin’s claim that the U.S. hopes to keep the war going does not sound unreasonable.
I am a big fan of yours, for many years now. But you should know that Macron has lost any credibility what's so ever in anything, but in particular with Putin. He lied to Putin before the war started, as he knew that the Ukrainians were ready to attack the Donbass. He could have avoided it and work tirelessly to apply the Minks Protocol.