Jul 27, 2023 6 min read

(The second of two parts)

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, there have been debates about what sort of weapons NATO should provide Ukraine, with a desire to support Ukraine being counterbalanced by a fear of escalating the conflict. The fear is that since the Russians have nuclear weapons, it would be best not to put them in a position where they see a nuclear attack as the only alternative to losing.

There is also a fear that if NATO provides too much support, eventually Russia will fail to distinguish between Ukraine and its supporters, and NATO suppliers will be killed, drawing NATO into the war. Since Russia is currently struggling to defeat just Ukraine, it would not further Russian military goals to bring in NATO, but it’s certainly possible.

As Ukraine fought the Russians, Ukrainian requests for aid have escalated. And at each step – long-range artillery, modern tanks, training on F-16s – after some consternation, Ukraine has gotten most of what it has sought. The most recent debate is over cluster bombs, which have a relatively high failure-to-detonate rate; Russian munitions’ dud rate is as high as 40%, while the Pentagon claims modern U.S. munitions fail at a rate of 2-3%. This means unexploded bombs would be dangerous for a long time. The indiscriminate lethality of these weapons – more than half the people they kill are civilians – led to an agreement in 2008 between 100 nations, though not including the warring parties or the United States, to ban them, and that is one factor against providing them to Ukraine.

On the other hand, since they would be deployed in Ukraine, the Russians are already using them, and only Ukrainians would be exposed to their legacy, some argue that the Ukrainians should be the ones who make that decision.

The agency of Ukraine is an important factor in this debate. On the left, where critics fear the American military-industrial complex drives unnecessary wars to enhance profits and project American power abroad, critics want to end the war, but don’t articulate how that would happen, short of Ukraine accepting Russian demands. These critics act as if this war was sought by the U.S. as a means to weaken Russia, rather than a response to Russian aggression. When politicians point to the benefit of war weakening a potential rival (Russia), they are trying to broaden the support for Ukraine rather than articulating the reason for the war. It is not the U.S. that is preventing peace, but rather neither the Ukrainians nor the Russians are willing to compromise to stop the war. It would be arrogant for the U.S. to try to force Ukraine to accept an end to the war that would not achieve Ukrainian goals.

The recent attempted coup by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner group, demonstrates that all has not been going well for the Russians. On the other hand, the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive has not had the success last year’s counteroffensive had. Russia’s extensive use of mines and air superiority, as well as Ukrainian efforts to minimize their casualties, have slowed Ukrainian advances. And President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was disappointed that the recent NATO summit did not offer a defined route of entry for Ukraine.

Critics of U.S. support for Ukraine have argued that the U.S. and NATO almost forced Putin to invade, because when the Soviet Union collapsed, some American diplomats told outgoing President Mikhail Gorbachev informally that we would not allow NATO to expand east towards Russia. NATO’s acceptance of the Baltic republics and former Soviet client states, such as Poland, were seen as an unacceptable affront to Russian security. They also claim the U.S. orchestrated the 2014 coup that deposed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt but duly elected president, because he came to favor closer ties to Russia instead of the West.

While this is certainly plausible, given our history of orchestrating regime changes in countries we don’t like, the only evidence to support this was a secretly recorded phone call before the coup between the senior U.S. foreign policy advisor Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine, in which Nuland suggested that it would be better if some of the opposition leaders were not included in a government that replaced Yanukovich. But expressing what one thinks would be the best outcome to a colleague is not the same as ordering a change in government, so that’s weak evidence on which to hang a coup.

Protesters took to the streets of Kyiv when Yanukovich refused to sign an associate agreement with the European Union and announced he would work with Russia instead. After a few months of protests, violence broke out when Yanukovich brutally cracked down on the protesters, with police snipers killing more than 100 people. When the violence failed to quell the dissent, Yanukovich fled to Russia, leaving the Rada, Ukraine’s legislative body, to replace his government. Within months of Russia losing its Ukrainian ally, Russia invaded Crimea.

Wars never go as planned, and they inevitably cause a lot of damage, so facilitating an end to the war in Ukraine would be good. Russia might accept a cessation of hostilities if Ukraine allowed Russia to retain Crimea, the Donbas region remained a buffer zone, and NATO would not accept Ukraine as a member, so Ukraine would be a neutral zone between Russian and the West. Ukraine would like to take back all the territory that Russia has conquered through force of arms, including Crimea. While the U.S. should facilitate peace, we should not attempt to dictate terms. Thus far, President Biden has done a good job of supporting Ukraine without escalating the war. As Ukraine is able to deploy the more advanced weapons, maybe it can end the war by driving out the Russians, though this seems unlikely to happen in the near future. While support for Ukraine cannot be without limit, as long as the Ukrainians are fighting to restore their country, they deserve all the support we can give them.

Kent James is a member of the East Washington borough council.