I was pleasantly surprised that the House of Representatives managed to pass an aid package for Ukraine over the weekend, and we can expect the Senate to vote on it early this week. Ukrainians are fighting for the life of their nation, and they deserve all the help they can get. Although most House Republicans voted against the package, there’s still a healthy majority in the House as a whole for continuing aid thanks to the strong support of Democrats. Even Donald Trump’s resistance to further aid seemed to waver over the last week, although that’s more likely to have been out of a desire to stabilize Johnson’s leadership than due to any change of heart about Ukraine. Provided that the latest aid gets there fast enough and Ukrainian lines can hold throughout the summer, Americans will go into the elections in November with a pretty clear choice. Vote for Biden and House Democrats to continue to support Ukraine; vote for Trump and House Republicans to stop.
The pessimistic take
All of that been said, I’m not very optimistic about the situation in Ukraine for the same reason that I’ve never been optimistic about the situation in Ukraine: I just can’t see the way through to a good ending, for either Kyiv or the broader West.
The main reason is the disconnect between the West and Ukraine’s aims and the military means it has to achieve them.
Amid our jubilation over the latest aid package, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that it isn’t intended to somehow power the Ukrainians to victory. It’s designed to prevent what many experts predicted would be an imminent collapse of their lines this summer as an expected Russian offensive gets underway. Ukraine has been clearly on the defensive for a long time, the result not just of shortages of materiel but also a crippling manpower shortage. The country recently passed a new mobilization law, but societal resistance looks like it will make implementation difficult.
Even if the West could send infinite materiel to Ukraine, Kyiv still needs people to hold it and fight with it and die with it. Russia has its manpower problems too, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that in a gruelling war of attrition, the country with 144 million people is probably eventually going to come out on top over the country with 30 million people. In the long term, the math just doesn’t look good. And this isn’t just an issue with the long term, either: a key factor in the failure of Ukraine’s offensive last summer was clearly a low risk tolerance brought on by the need to conserve manpower. Kyiv is still fighting defensively today, and we shouldn’t expect that to change just because of the latest aid package.
This situation looks particularly grim when you consider what Kyiv’s stated war aims are, which is the complete restoration of its territorial integrity and ejection of all Russian forces. President Zelenksy seems to be caught in a bind: he can’t mobilize the troops and international support to achieve these ends, but nor can be abandon them. It’s only whispered in the halls of Western governments and barely acknowledged in media coverage of the conflict, but these goals were probably never realistic, and they’ve never looked less realistic than today.
Almost all wars end in some sort of negotiated settlement, and this one will be no different. Yet I’ve never heard anyone put forward a credible path to negotiations which achieve Ukraine’s aims. The conventional wisdom right now is that no negotiations are possible before the November presidential election, because Putin knows that Trump has promised to pressure Kyiv into giving the Russians what they want, which will probably amount to some formalization of its annexation of eastern Ukraine and a brief pause in fighting while Russia rebuilds for the next round.
This is all probably true. But the conventional wisdom never seems to cover what will happen if Trump loses the election. If he does, there’s no reason to think that Putin is suddenly going to give up and withdraw his forces. Trump’s possible impending victory is only one of the reasons why Putin doesn’t do that, and it’s probably not as important as the knowledge that in the long term, the math is on his side. Once Biden is inaugurated again next January, the situation will look much as it does now. There’s no magic war-winning lever that a second term president can pull that a first term president can’t. The grind will continue for as long as it continues.
The optimistic takes
Since it became obvious that the aid supplemental will pass, a few analysts have tried to spell out why the view I’ve just advanced is wrong. They argue that there is in fact a plausible route to Ukrainian victory, and that this latest aid package opens the way. I wish they were right, but I don’t think they are.
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