We keep saying Ukraine must win. Has it become an empty promise? It Will Take More Than Mere Rhetoric to Change the Course of This War

By: Jared Sloan (2L)

Photo Credit: Creative Commons

Listen to Ukrainians, and you will understand the stakes of this war. In May, Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Tkach articulated them thusly: “We can either fight for Ukraine against Russia, or we will be overrun and forced to fight for Russia against Europe.”

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson finally seemed to understand the stakes when he passed the latest (and seven months overdue) round of U.S. aid for Ukraine: “I think that Vladimir Putin would continue marching through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Balkans next. […] To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys.”

President Joe Biden understands the stakes, and he is deeply aware of the historical echoes. Paying tribute to the heroes of the D-Day invasion on its 80th anniversary, he asked, “Does anyone doubt — does anyone doubt that they would want America to stand up against Putin’s aggression here in Europe today?”

With full respect to President Biden, I will go one further: Does anyone doubt that those Allied troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy – including the almost 400 Canadians who laid down their lives on that world-altering day – would want us to be doing more to save Ukraine? To do all we could to ensure Ukrainian victory rather than just enough to stave off Ukrainian defeat?

This is not to underplay how inspiring and impressive Ukraine’s war effort has been to date. Russia has been forced to expend enormous military assets, including upwards of 600,000 soldiers estimated to be dead or wounded. The Ukrainian people – fighters and civilians alike – have proven astoundingly resolute and resourceful in beating back a much larger foe whose laundry list of alleged war crimes includes the mass abduction of children, systemic sexual violence against men and women, and relentless strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in a bid to make the coming winter months insufferable for the civilian population. 

For nearly three years, Ukraine has kept up the fight even as it has suffered its own brutal losses; the Ukrainian military is now drafting up to 30,000 people per month in order to keep pace with an enemy which has at times been willing to incur upwards of 1000 casualties per day to gain minimal territory. Ukraine’s technical ingenuity has created asymmetric advantages; as the great Anne Applebaum recently wrote in The Atlantic, “This can’t be said often enough: Ukraine, a country without much of a navy, defeated Russia’s Black Sea fleet.” When Russia’s full-scale invasion started, Ukraine essentially had no domestic arms industry; this year, it has $10-12 billion in weapons manufacturing capacity but now lacks the funding to reach that potential. Ukrainians still largely believe they can win the war but they are becoming more receptive to the idea of ceding some portion of their territory in a peace deal, particularly if such a deal were to include security assurances from the West.

Since February 24, 2022, we have been living through the great moral battle of our time. The actions taken by Ukraine have been heroic; the actions taken by its allies, while requiring far less valour, have mostly been very commendable. The leaders of the Western world, with Mr. Biden at the forefront, have shown admirable strength and unity in the face of Putin’s barbaric aggression. But there is something which has been consistently lacking in our collective response and which I desperately hope would be present in a Kamala Harris administration (knock on wood) – that is, the stomach to do what is necessary to actually win.

To borrow again from Ms. Applebaum’s excellent piece, what has fundamentally plagued the West’s support for Ukraine is “our lack of imagination. Since this war began, we haven’t been able to imagine that the Ukrainians might defeat Russia.” Sadly, it seems to me that the story of this conflict – the past, present, and, if we are not careful, the future – is, in many ways, the story of a continual failure of imagination by the West.

It was the failure to imagine a way to respond more assertively to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Georgia, intervention in Syria, and especially his initial land grabs in Crimea and the Donbas region. It was the Obama administration’s persistent refusal to supply Ukraine with lethal weapons to push back against pro-Russian forces, even as figures such as Senator John McCain were shouting, “For God’s sake, can’t we help these people defend themselves?”

In the lead-up to Russia’s full-scale invasion, it was the failure to imagine what Ukraine’s army was truly capable of – and what it could have been capable of had it received a fuller complement of Western military equipment (air and missile defence, battle tanks, fighter jets, long-range missiles, etc.) in advance of the Russian onslaught. As Adrian Karatnycky wrote in Foreign Policy last year, “Had a well-armed Ukraine fought back with full force, Russia’s massive territorial gains could have been avoided, and we might have been spared such Russian-perpetrated atrocities as Bucha, Irpin, and Mariupol.”

It was the failure to imagine a strategy that would have given Ukraine the best chance to force a resolution as soon as the opportunity arose (and it seems clear that late 2022 was the moment of maximal opportunity) rather than leading it into an unsustainable war of attrition against an opponent with a greater supply of manpower and munitions. Recent battles in eastern Ukraine have been some of the deadliest of the entire war, with Russia continuing to make gradual gains in strategically significant locations.

Now, with Ukraine’s stated goal of recapturing all territory within its 1991 borders looking increasingly far-fetched, many in the West seem to think it is time for Ukraine to come to the negotiating table. It is not in itself an absurd idea, but it yet again betrays our failure to imagine how we will truly get to a just outcome. Vladimir Putin continues to call for Ukraine’s unconditional surrender and continues to tell his people that all of Russia’s war aims will be achieved. He is planning to draft over 130,000 additional soldiers by January, and to dedicate a staggering 40% of government spending to defence and security in 2025. His war machine has been substantially bolstered by his autocratic friends, and he may have North Korean troops on his front lines by the end of the year. Does this sound like someone who is itching to cut a deal?

As the scholar Robert Kagan argues in a recent op-ed, “Absent a substantial change of course soon, there might be no salvaging Ukraine’s chances, and no prospect for getting any kind of deal with Putin short of Ukraine’s effective surrender.” This is the frightening truth: for all that we have invested in Ukraine, materially and morally, our current approach is amounting to a slow, bloody march to defeat. It is time to see that we “are not going to be rescued by a peace deal,” as Kagan puts it, but only by greater ambition, risk tolerance, and a determined effort to move the dynamics of the war in Ukraine’s favour. 

Joe Biden vowed that he would not bow down to Vladimir Putin; more than any of his other accomplishments as president, that is his great contribution to history. If, mercifully, Kamala Harris is elected his successor, let us hope that history will remember her as the president who rallied the global alliance of democracies to redouble our commitment to Ukraine, and turned Ukrainian victory from rhetoric to reality.