10/17: Ukraine News Round-up
UK Think Tank: The Impending Betrayal of Ukraine
Highlights the failure of both Europe and the US to commit to victory and the high cost of the possible defeat: to Ukraine, to Europe and to the US.
US support has always been too little, too late.
This should have been Europe’s war to manage. In spite of decades of discussion about European defence, it proved too convenient to rely on US largesse. This made Europe a prisoner of US electoral factors. It also caused Europe to shirk the difficult decisions that helping win the war entailed: the big increases in defence expenditure, the 24-hour working in ammunition factories, the hikes in food and energy costs and the political risks such as seizing frozen assets. What remains now for Europe is to secure a place at the negotiating table and to argue for NATO membership for Ukraine as part of any settlement.
Failing that, the West will have years to repent the betrayal of the courageous Ukrainians, whose only crime was their wish to join the Western democratic order.
Breaking Defense: Australia sending 50 Abrams tanks to Ukraine.
The sending of Abrams represents an about-face for the government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Back in late February, Defense Minister Richard Marles told a reporter that supplying Ukraine with these tanks was “not on the agenda.”
Wash Post: Are Americans ready to give up on Ukraine?
Eminent scholar Robert Kagan outlines the flaws in the proposed negotiated end to war.
Quoted at length below.
As is so often the case, U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine has been driven by what Americans don’t want. They don’t want to wind up at war with Russia; they don’t want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year on a seemingly unwinnable war; but they also don’t want to bear the guilt and shame of letting Ukraine lose, with all the humanitarian horrors and strategic problems that entails. For all their pretense of “realism,” Pompeo and the other advocates of negotiated territorial concessions promise an outcome that conveniently solves the United States’ problems but no one else’s. The United States can impose its will on a desperately dependent Ukraine, but why must Putin go along? The advocates of peace talks with Russia simply assume that Putin will accept the outcome that best serves American needs.
That is not how negotiations work — or how these talks would go. It would be one thing if the United States, NATO and Ukraine were in a position effectively to dictate terms to Putin — as might have been the case had the Biden administration not failed to give Ukraine what it needed in the first months of the war, and as still might be the case if the administration gave the permissions and weaponry Ukraine needs right now. But it didn’t, and it isn’t. Unless Russia is demonstrably losing the war at the time when negotiations begin, these will be talks between equals and their outcome will reflect the actual state of the military situation. Therefore, the agreement will not be just. It will exact no price for Putin’s aggression. It will have to be equitable to all parties. Putin has needs, too, and chief among them will be avoiding precisely the postwar situation outlined above.
In that case, therefore, the key issues in any actual talks, in addition to drawing a new de facto Ukrainian border, will concern the size of the Ukrainian military and the nature of its relationship with the United States and NATO. The direct government-to-government military aid, the training and intelligence sharing throughout the war have been unneutral, which is to say, they have made the United States and the allies de facto belligerents. Putin will want strict limits on the aid provided to Ukraine by outside powers, particularly by the United States, assuming he is willing to tolerate such aid at all. He is also likely to demand that the size of the Ukrainian military be reduced to prewar peacetime levels, or nearly so, so they do not retain the capacity to “strike Russia itself.” Why would he demand less? Because he recognizes the injustice of his own actions?
There are two reasons Putin might acquiesce to the kind of agreement outlined by Pompeo and others. One is that he has no intention of abiding by it because he assumes that the United States and NATO will not, in fact, continue arming and protecting Ukraine, regardless of what the agreement allows. For Putin, that is not a bad bet: Given how hard it has been for the United States and other Western nations to authorize military aid reliably during wartime, it is certainly possible that Western publics will have limited enthusiasm for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Ukraine’s defense in peacetime.
The present course, in short, is unlikely to lead to a stable settlement, and certainly not the kind of peace agreement that advocates of talks assure us is possible. This is not one of those “win-win” situations. Unless something dramatic changes, this is a war that, like most wars, will be won or lost on the battlefield. We are not going to be rescued by a peace deal. Americans need to decide soon whether they are prepared to let Ukraine lose