Ukraine picks the losing camp
Conflict in the Middle East has eclipsed news coverage of the “ongoing grinding conflict” in Ukraine, say Zachary Yost and Matthew Bryant. Its war has “quickly gone from a euphoric cause célèbre to a now embarrassing catastrophe that is best shoved in the closet and forgotten about like all the rest of America’s decades of costly foreign-policy disasters”.
In the early days of the conflict, any suggestion that Ukraine would achieve anything short of total victory against Russia was met with “howls of protest and vitriolic accusations of being a Kremlin stooge”. Now even mainstream news is starting to acknowledge that “the writing has been on the wall for some time”.
When Russia invaded, its war aims were probably limited to coercing Ukraine away from Nato membership and securing the interests of Russian people living in Ukraine. When negotiations in 2022 were “quashed by the US and UK”, Ukraine declared that nothing short of total victory, including the reclamation of Crimea, would be acceptable. In response, Russia realised that, to win the war, Ukraine would effectively have to be “neutralised by force” and began to annex oblasts and incorporate them into Russia, “effectively burning the ships behind [it] and ensuring that it was going to be invested in the conflict for the long haul”.
Despite early victories against an ill-prepared Russian army, the situation has now turned against Ukraine. The US and the West have already “scraped the bottom of the barrel” to arm Ukraine, and that barrel is now empty. European goodwill towards Ukraine has been collapsing, and Ukraine has been losing out in the conflict for limited American resources.
Scholar John Mearsheimer had long warned that this would happen. In 2016, Mearsheimer warned that Nato policies were “leading the Ukrainians and the Georgians down the primrose path”, “provoking the Russians” with one hand, while holding out the idea that the West would come to their rescue in the event of Russian aggression. “You believe much too much in the US,” he said.
Some Ukrainians are starting to wake up to the “grim reality”. As former Ukrainian presidential adviser and now Zelensky rival Oleksii Arestovych recently remarked, “In the conflict of globalists and realists, we made a bet on the wrong side. We shed blood to end up in the losing camp”.
It may not be too late to “salvage an acceptable compromise and forge some semblance of peace”, but that means “accepting the reality of Ukraine’s untenable position”.