We would do well to listen carefully to Russia’s stated war aims, which include but are far from limited to preventing Ukraine from joining #NATO. Others are to disarm Ukraine, rendering it defenseless; change the government, putting into place a Russian puppet; and eliminate “Nazism,” by which they mean eliminating vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism and cultural identity. These are objectives consistent with advancing #Russian World and removing a dangerous example from the neighborhood. The apparent moves by Russia toward simply annexing its conquered territories reinforce the broad thrust of these objectives, and Putin himself has made it clear he does not believe Ukraine is or should be a country. On the other hand, in March, Zelensky offered to hold a referendum that would allow Ukrainians to rescind their request to join NATO. Half a year later, Russia is still shelling Ukrainian cities. Apparently, it was not what Moscow most wanted after all.

The U.S. Strategic Interest

The other staple of the critique from the right is that the United States has no strategic interest in Ukraine, or at least none that would justify the billions of dollars sent to Kyiv to support its war effort. The latter argument can be dispensed with most readily. As of August 29, U.S. military assistance to Ukraine had totaled $13.5 billion. In Fiscal Year 2021, the federal government spent $6.8 trillion. In other words, U.S. military assistance to Ukraine had been equivalent to .2 percent of last year’s federal spending.

The real question is whether the United States has a strategic stake in Ukraine at all. The answer is yes.

Most tangibly, a quick glance at a map shows that Ukraine borders no fewer than five NATO countries. Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria would all have Russian troops on their doorsteps if Ukraine were to fall. When Moscow says it wants Ukraine demilitarized, it is unlikely that it is including its own forces in the equation. What would be the impact on the political and military posture of the countries on that new front line? No one knows, and no one should want to find out. On the other hand, the survival of free Ukraine would deprive Russia of not only the proximity but population and resources that it would use to threaten its neighborhood, and us. It was, above all, the loss of Ukraine that disemboweled the Soviet Union, and reattaching Ukraine is a prerequisite for the full revival of the Russian Empire. Altogether, if we are, by necessity, back to containment, containment with Ukraine as part of the West is to be vastly preferred over containment with Ukraine under Moscow’s control.

In the longer term, if Russia is successful in Ukraine, it will surely conclude that it can press forward at some new perceived weak spot. Critics dismiss this danger, as they dismiss the broader imperialist motivations behind Putin’s actions. Russia, the argument goes, lacks the military resources to go further. True, for today—largely because the aid we are giving Ukraine is significantly degrading Russian military capabilities. But tomorrow? Conquest, as military strategists have long observed, does not hinge on numbers. It hinges on numbers multiplied by will. If the United States and its allies abandon the Ukrainians to their fate, why would Putin not make the calculation again, once his forces are replenished, that he has enough numbers to enforce his will against spineless opponents?

Russian World is large, and the work of reconstituting it will be far from complete even if Ukraine is subdued. There would be the vulnerable Baltics, the Central Asian republics, Moldova, what remains of Georgia, perhaps even Poland and Finland. Some are (or are about to be) members of NATO and will enjoy some measure of protection on that account; some are not. However, If Putin is successful in Ukraine because he kept his nerve while the West lost its will, all will be less safe than they were. Russian generals have already spoken of the desirability of creating a land bridge through Ukraine to facilitate operations against Moldova. Former Russian president and prime minister Dmitri Medvedev, a confidant of Putin, has likewise threatened Poland.

Critics sometimes argue that U.S. resistance to the Russian takeover of Ukraine is pushing Russia into alliance with China to the strategic detriment of the United States. Yet Russia and China have already been in de facto alliance for years, holding military exercises together, working together to stymie U.S. diplomacy, and jointly firing rhetorical salvoes against the American place in the world. They are two peas in a pod, with or without Ukraine—chauvinistic, authoritarian, and revisionist imperial powers obstructed by a common adversary.

Can that alliance become stronger? Yes, but only under a specific circumstance, which U.S. and Western aid is working to prevent. Russia may need China more than ever, but China is the stronger partner. There will be no real strengthening of the alliance unless China concludes that closer association with Russia is a net plus. Is that more likely to happen if Russia succeeds in Ukraine or if it fails? Success of Putin’s adventure could also be interpreted by Beijing as a green light for the conquest of Taiwan. At any rate, Taiwan fears this, and has sent aid to Ukraine to forestall it. Open season for the authoritarian axis is self-evidently not in the strategic interest of the United States.

Nor is it the case that the United States has hastily come to Ukraine’s defense and can now back away from it without harm to us or our interests. On the contrary, the United States staked its honor on the preservation of Ukrainian sovereignty nearly 30 years ago when it became a signatory to the Budapest Memorandum. In it, the U.S., Britain, and Russia committed themselves “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “to refrain from the threat or use of force” against it. In exchange, Ukraine agreed to surrender the 1,700 strategic nuclear warheads it had inherited when the Soviet Union broke up.

The Budapest Memorandum was not a treaty obligation like NATO, but it is reasonably interpreted as a security guarantee. That the United States offered this security guarantee cannot simply be forgotten. Do we think the strategic interests of the United States will be best served by following up a demonstration of our unreliability in Afghanistan with a demonstration of our unreliability in Ukraine? When the going gets tough, the tough get going—home? Interesting. “Come home, America” used to be George McGovern’s slogan.

The Choice

Perhaps the ultimate argument for aiding Ukraine is to survey what is at stake at the highest level. Critics sometimes ridicule the pompous locution of the “rules based international order” and blithely attach Ukraine to the list of recent failed Wilsonian projects. At the end of the day, though, there are rules, once called the Law of Nations and the principles of Just War, that are deeply rooted in our civilization, long predating progressive utopianism. These rules represent an imperfect but necessary attempt to make international relations something other than an unending and merciless war of all against all. Russia has grossly violated them. The war waged by Russia against Ukraine is a naked war of conquest, an attempt to simply wipe a country off the map, the most egregious act of international aggression since Iraq annexed Kuwait by force three decades ago.

Russia has invaded a much smaller neighbor without reasonable justification and waged unremitting war on it. It has flattened cities indiscriminately; murdered civilians with their hands tied behind their backs; systematically employed torture and rape; abducted thousands of children from occupied territories and sent them to Russia; brazenly killed dozens of POWs and threatened to pseudo-judicially execute dozens more; utilized banned weapons including thermobaric bombs, cluster munitions, and anti-personnel mines disguised as children’s toys; undertaken a deliberate campaign to cripple Ukraine’s food supply and threatened to starve tens of millions of people in the Third World who rely on Ukrainian grain; vowed to eliminate all vestiges of Ukrainian culture and taken tangible steps to do so where its armies have advanced; forced millions to flee their homes, generating the largest refugee population in Europe since World War II; targeted schools, universities, maternity hospitals, theaters, museums, residential neighborhoods, and shopping malls, and threatened to unleash radiation on the world through its reckless actions near Ukraine’s nuclear power plants. To set the mood, in occupied Kherson, the Russians are putting statues of Lenin back up. When a Russian diplomat in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, recently tweeted “No mercy to the Ukrainian population,” it was less a threat than an objective description of Russian strategy since February 24. Russia has, in short, waged a war of barbarism, a war one might expect from Genghis Khan, a KGB colonel, or a psychotic spurned lover. To actively oppose this behavior is hardly to dabble in utopianism. It is to recognize that if it is successful and hence normalized, there will be hell to pay for the United States, and the world.

Continue Reading Why We Are In Ukraine Part 3: https://www.colmikehoward.com/article/Why+We+Are+In+Ukraine++Part+3