Ukraine Gets Kicked to the Curb
After almost two years, is the war in Ukraine nearing its end?
In just a few months it will be two years since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. Throughout that time, the US government, as well as many other NATO countries, have supported Ukraine with large amounts of military and financial aid, all the while insisting that aid will continue for however long it takes for Ukraine to beat Russia. Recent reports have countered that longstanding narrative, however, and it appears as though the West’s support for Ukraine is beginning to falter.
Anonymous Sources
In early November, NBC News reported that “U.S. and European officials have begun quietly talking to the Ukrainian government about what possible peace negotiations with Russia might entail to end the war”. The article cites two anonymous sources, a current US official and a former US official who are both “familiar with the discussions.”
In late November, Bild, a German newspaper, reported that the US and Germany, two of Ukraine’s biggest arms suppliers, intend to push Ukraine to negotiate not by directly asking — or let’s be honest, telling — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to do so, but by constricting the flow of arms packages the two countries send to Ukraine.
“[B]oth countries…have decided to force the government in Kyiv into talks with Putin's regime by restricting the quality and quantity of their arms deliveries,” reads an article about Bild’s original report from The New Voice of Ukraine.
“If constricting weapons supplies fail to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table, Washington and Berlin have a Plan B, a source in the German government told BILD.”
The article then quotes the anonymous German official as saying “What Berlin and Washington are striving for as an alternative to negotiations is a frozen conflict, without agreement between the conflicting parties”.
[Note: Bild’s original report is behind a paywall, which is why I’ve linked to The New Voice of Ukraine’s article instead.]
The US and German governments have denied the allegations of withholding arms to Ukraine, however, and publicly both countries maintain that they intend to continue supporting this war. It was recently reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz’s coalition government intends to double its military aid to Ukraine in the coming year, and US President Joe Biden has also requested for Congress to pass a new aid package that would provide Ukraine with more than $60 billion in aid.
At the time of this writing, that bill remains stalled in the US House of Representatives, but during a recent surprise visit to Ukraine, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced a $100 million arms package for Ukraine and told Zelensky that the US is with him “for the long haul”. More recently, the Biden administration announced another $175 million arms package and also urged Congress to approve more funding for Ukraine because what has already been authorized is practically at its end — which is why Presidential Drawdown Authority was used for both of the recent arms packages, but that is also reaching its limit.
Loss of Men and Support
It may or may not be true that the US, Germany, and other European governments are quietly pushing Ukraine to the negotiating table, but what is observably true is that support for Ukraine among many western populations, particularly in the US, has been on a decline for at least the last several months. That decline in public support is likely making it increasingly unpopular for western politicians to continue funding Ukraine’s war effort.
Take Slovakia, for example, which recently went through parliamentary elections. Those elections resulted in a victory for Smer-SSD, a left-wing political party that campaigned on ending aid to Ukraine. In early November, the new Slovak government “rejected a plan to provide Ukraine with a military aid package that was approved by the previous government,” according to Antiwar’s Dave Decamp. While Slovakia has provided Ukraine with far less aid than many other countries, this latest development is still a notable shift in sentiment and policy.
Another country that has ceased providing aid to Ukraine is Poland, which is particularly notable due to the ardent support the Polish government showed to Ukraine from the very beginning of this conflict. The decision to stop arming Ukraine came amid a dispute over Ukrainian grain shipments into Poland and other European countries.
“Ukraine is like a drowning person who can pull you to the depths,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said at the time. “If a drowning person causes harm and drowns us, he will not get help. We have to look after our interests and we will do it effectively and decisively.”
However, Poland’s new prime minister Donald Tusk, who was just sworn in on Wednesday, has said he will rally the West in support of Ukraine.
It’s not just the US and much of Europe that has seen a decline in support for this war, either. Support among the Ukrainian population has begun to wane in recent months as well, albeit at a much slower pace; and understandably so, considering this war effects their country directly. According to a recent Gallup poll, “Three in five (60%) Ukrainians interviewed in July and August said they want Ukraine to keep fighting until it wins,” but that number “is slightly muted from what it was in September 2022, when 70% of Ukrainians said they wanted their country to keep fighting”.
The Gallup poll also shows that those in eastern and southern Ukraine — the parts closest to the front lines — lean more in favor of negotiating some sort of peace deal sooner rather than later, but overall a majority of the Ukrainian population appears to still support this war.
However, support for a war only means so much when a nation lacks the capability to fight one — let alone win — and that’s the situation in which Ukraine has been increasingly finding itself lately. The Ukrainian military has put up a decent fight (though let’s not pretend like the US and NATO funding this war and supplying Ukraine with massive amounts of military aid isn’t a factor in that), but after nearly two years of brutal fighting, it’s struggling to maintain the amount of manpower it needs to continue the war.
As The Guardian recently noted while reporting on changes the Ukrainian government intends to make to its conscription policy: “In the first months of the war, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians volunteered to fight…But as the war has dragged on, most people who are willing to fight have already signed up, and many of those already at the front are injured or exhausted.”
It has also been reported recently that the average age of Ukrainian soldiers is currently over 40 years old — a fact that severely highlights just how many young Ukrainian men have already been killed or injured during the course of this conflict. It also highlights the increasingly desperate state of the Ukrainian military.
This shift in morale has also made its way to top Ukrainian officials, and Ukrainian President Zelensky has begun to notice the lack of support he’s been receiving from his military, his western backers, and even from his own aides and advisors.
“Nobody believes in our victory like I do,” Zelenksy said during a recent interview with Time Magazine. “Exhaustion with the war rolls along like a wave. You see it in the United States, in Europe. And we see that as soon as they start to get a little tired, it becomes like a show to them: ‘I can’t watch this rerun for the 10th time.’”
Yet, according to the Time article, Zelensky refuses to consider negotiating an end to the war, and his stubborn insistence that Ukraine will somehow eventually win has started to cause members of his inner circle to become frustrated with him.
“He deludes himself,” a close aid to Zelensky told Time. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”
The pressure Zelensky must be feeling is clearly beginning to weigh on him, as his calls for continued aid are increasingly appearing to come from a place of desperation. Just last month, Zelensky asked western government’s that may be struggling to continue providing his country with financial support to “give [Ukraine] a credit, and we will give you back money.”
Most recently Zelensky visited the US in an attempt to plead with Washington to provide more aid. During his visit he met with President Biden, US lawmakers, and even some defense contractors — a move which highlights who really benefits from the US’s constant warmongering.
To make matters worse for Ukraine, the downward trend in support for the country’s fight against Russia has been exacerbated by the ongoing conflict that recently erupted in the Middle East, which has drawn attention away from the war in Ukraine. President Joe Biden has said the US can and will continue aiding Ukraine while also aiding Israel in its war against Gaza, but if the recent reports are true and the Biden administration really is considering limiting arms shipments to Ukraine, then prioritizing aid to Israel may serve as a good excuse to do so.
Failed Counteroffensive
The shift in the West’s support for Ukraine may have only recently come to light, but the prospect of Ukraine winning this war was always an improbability. By all accounts, the Ukrainian military performed much better than what was expected, particularly early on, but as the war has progressed it’s become all too apparent that Ukraine is incapable of overcoming Russia’s defenses and reclaiming the significant amount of territory it has lost during this conflict.
The reality of this situation began to set in earlier this year when Ukraine’s counteroffensive failed to result in any meaningful gains.
That counteroffensive — which was supposed to start in the spring of this year but didn’t actually get underway until June — was meant to retake Russian controlled territory and revitalize western support for Ukraine which would have put the country in a much better position both militarily as well as from a public relations standpoint. Instead, the failure of the counteroffensive likely sped up the decline in support for Ukraine that we’ve seen from the West recently.
One of the worst aspects of the unsuccessful counteroffensive is the role that the US government played in pressuring Ukraine into fighting it, despite knowing that the Ukrainian military would be unable to break through Russia’s defenses. That fact first became evident from classified Pentagon documents which were leaked onto to the social media platform Discord before the counteroffensive was even launched, and it has only been confirmed further since then.
“When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring, Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons…that it needed to dislodge Russian forces,” The Wall Street Journal reported in July. “But they hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day.”
In other words, the US knew that the Ukrainian counteroffensive would be a failure from the very start, but it convinced the Ukrainian military that it was worth fighting anyway. In doing so, the US government created a situation which led to far more Ukrainian casualties than there otherwise would have been. That fact showcases the reality that the US’s involvement in this war was always about achieving foreign policy objectives more than it was ever about defending Ukrainian lives or sovereignty.
Not only did the US push Ukraine into fighting a counteroffensive that it knew it couldn’t win, but as many Ukrainian soldiers were being killed, US officials were telling media outlets that Ukraine was too “casualty averse”.
Pawns aren’t supposed to question the moves of the chess player, after all, and if some of them have to be sacrificed for the player to achieve a better standing in the game, then so be it. As cold as it sounds, that is more or less how the US empire perceives Ukraine.
Half of a year after the Ukrainian military first launched it’s counteroffensive, no one can honestly say that Ukraine is in a better position than it was this time last year — despite all of the backing it’s received from the West. Now, even Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, has admitted that the war is currently a stalemate.
With the lack of men, equipment, and public support that Ukraine is currently seeing, as well as the possibility that the US, Germany, and other NATO countries may soon cease providing support, it seems very unlikely that Ukraine will be able to put up a meaningful fight for much longer.
Peace Was an Option
At any point during the last year and ten months, the US and other NATO countries could’ve worked to seriously negotiate a peace deal.
It’s true that doing so may have resulted in gains for Russia — any actual attempt at peace would necessarily include reasonable concessions from both sides, after all — but it’s also true that it would’ve prevented the loss of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. (That’s not even mentioning all of the destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure, the erosion of any liberalism or democracy that ever actually existed in Ukraine, and the billions of dollars and the massive amount of military vehicles and equipment the West has lost in this proxy war.)
Given the incessant rhetoric we heard about the importance of “defending” Ukraine against Russian aggression, you’d think our leaders would’ve worked to get as few Ukrainians killed as possible instead of actively sabotaging peace deals and pushing Ukraine into fighting a counteroffensive they knew would inevitably fail. However, as I said before and which should be obvious to just about everyone by now, the US’s and NATO’s involvement in this war was never truly about coming to Ukraine’s defense.
To be fair, there were some top US officials, such as General Mark Milley — the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time — who suggested that Ukraine was in the best possible position to negotiate prior to the failed counteroffensive. Ironically, General Milley’s suggestion of peace was drown out by the insatiable hawkishness of the so-called diplomats in the State Department.
The US could’ve prevented this war by assuring Russia that Ukraine would not join NATO, by pushing Ukraine to actually implement the Minsk agreements, or by otherwise working to ease the tension that had been building between the West and Russia in the months and years leading up to Russia’s invasion. Instead of preventing this war, however, the US empire actively prevented peace talks almost immediately after the war started.
In August of 2022, it was reported that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to a tentative peace agreement in March of that year, but that agreement was sabotaged by then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson — and he did so on behalf of the US empire. Johnson reportedly urged Zelensky to stop negotiating, saying that even if Ukraine was ready to sign a peace deal, the West was not.
At the beginning of this year, the allegation that the US and other western governments were sabotaging negotiations was confirmed further when former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet said that the West “blocked” his attempt to strike a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
That the US empire undermined peace talks early on has since been confirmed by both Russian and Ukrainian officials as well.
Had Ukraine followed through with those negotiations, the country would likely be far better off than it is now. At the time of the peace talks, Russia was willing to return to the territorial lines that existed before its invasion in February of 2022, but if negotiations were to resume now, it’s very unlikely that Russia will give up the large amount of Ukrainian territory that is currently under its control.
The Callousness of the Empire
To be clear, the US and its NATO allies knowingly provoked this war, and then actively sabotaged peace negotiations. After all of that, the US empire then pushed Ukraine into a counteroffensive that was always going to fail, all in an attempt to damage Russia economically and militarily (I won’t weigh in on whether or not I think that it has, as that isn’t pertinent to this article).
The managers of the US empire knew that Ukraine would eventually lose this war, but they still did everything they could to prolong and exacerbate the violence because of the geopolitical benefits they hoped would come from it. And now that Ukraine has served its purpose, they appear more than willing to kick the poor eastern European country to the curb.
This, despite all of the impassioned cries to “stand with Ukraine” in order to “defend democracy” that we heard early on, was always the real intent of the US empire. Ukraine was nothing more than a pawn in a geopolitical game that was decades in the making, and the loss of an entire generation of young Ukrainian men was perceived as a small price to pay to help maintain global US dominance.
Regardless of whether the US and other NATO countries end up pushing Ukraine to the negotiating table now or further down the line, it will always remain true that all of this could have been avoided were it not for the machinations of the US empire. Moderate concessions and reasonable negotiations could’ve saved tens of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian lives, but the gears of the US war machine begin to rust without constant, bloody lubrication. It appears as though it doesn’t matter where that blood comes from, whether its from Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia or Ukraine.
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