The recent good news from Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive has many of Ukraine’s Western supporters wondering whether enough is enough. The Russian army is seriously injured and has been revealed to be incompetent. Vladimir Putin’s regime has been chastened by sanctions and, in the Prigozhin revolt, by a genuine internal threat. Whatever the condition of Ukrainian nationalism and the Ukrainian state before the war, both will end the war militant and well-armed. The Russian bear has gotten punched in the nose, and it’s high time for NATO to encourage Kyiv to stop the fighting and settle terms with Moscow .
But the point of Western support for Ukraine is not to mete out punishments on behalf of the god of abstract international justice. Rather, it is to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and the interests which that sovereignty serves. A ceasefire now would leave Moscow with more of Ukraine than it had on February 23, 2022. A Russia that profits from aggression will remain aggressive, though it may wait for a period of Western distraction to try again. The way to suppress the Russian appetite for Ukraine is to make the present invasion not only costly but counterproductive––by advancing Ukraine’s current aim of retaking the lands that Russia annexed eight years ago.
The source of the violence in Eastern Europe is quite old: Russians have never respected the independence of those they term “little Russians.” Different regimes in Moscow have ruled most of Ukraine for centuries. Russian dominion was bloodiest under the Soviet Union, which murdered millions of Ukrainians in the Great Famine and the Great Terror of the 1930s. The end of communism did not end Russia’s desire to control its Western neighbor. Russian nationalists supported a failed secessionist movement in Crimea after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Yeltsin government successfully insisted that Ukraine give up its large nuclear arsenal even as Russia kept its own.
Of Vladimir Putin’s ventures, which include the grisly war in Chechnya in the 2000s and the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the most important for Russia’s self-image has been the campaign against Ukraine. At a November 2013 summit in Vilnius, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych reneged on a promise to sign an association agreement with the European Union. Putin had banned Ukrainian products from the Russian market and threatened worse financial pain if Ukraine left Moscow’s economic orbit. After Yanukovych bowed to Russian extortion, Ukrainians protested in Kyiv’s Maidan Square. Security forces loyal to Yanukovych shot dozens of protestors, and Yanukovych fled the country and was removed from the presidency by Ukraine’s parliament..
Putin used the political ambiguity after Yanukovych’s ouster to annex Crimea and part of eastern Ukraine. In late February 2014, armed men without uniforms took control of Crimean government buildings and installed a pro-Russian gangster as premier. The Russian Duma voted to annex Crimea on March 17. A similar unmarked Russian coup occurred in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts—although, after volunteer units from Ukraine resisted, the Russian army deployed regular troops to enforce the regions’ secession.
Western inaction and the disorganization of Ukraine’s forces after Yanukovych rewarded the Russian coups. Petro Poroshenko, elected president of Ukraine in May 2014, assented––in agreements known as Minsk I and Minsk II––to the “special status” of the Russian-dominated eastern regions. The agreements did not end the conflict, they simply redrew its lines inside Ukrainian territory.
A ceasefire today would again reward Russia for invading one of its neighbors. Russia would be encouraged to try again. Fighting Russia has dear costs for Ukraine even now. Nor is supplying weapons to Ukraine without cost for the country’s allies. But demanding an end to the fighting, under conditions which the Putin regime could plausibly claim as victorious, is unlikely to change Russia’s behavior in the long-term. Russia could try against to conquer a Ukraine that had been prematurely abandoned by its sponsors. Diminished Western resolve on Ukraine could also prompt Russia to menace European countries that the United States is treaty-bound to protect. It would prompt China to think it could invade Taiwan and other Asian countries without serious resistance. And it would encourage countries to seek the nuclear protection against invasion that Ukraine relinquished in the 1990s. To the extent that America and its allies have an interest in an unthreatened NATO, a tranquil East Asia, and nuclear non-proliferation, they also have an interest in Ukrainian victory.
Some argue that there are measures short of military defeat––for instance, a Western promise not to admit the country to NATO or to the EU––that would persuade Russia to abandon its designs on Ukraine. The argument supposes that Russia’s basic aims are defensive, and that the extension of the Western alliance into the former Soviet sphere of influence is responsible for present Russian behavior.
Leave to one side the question of whether Russia should be permitted to blackmail sovereign nations into not joining alliances and economic unions. The argument that, if the West only left Ukraine alone, Russia would do likewise ignores both the longevity and the nature of the conflict. Russia’s domination of Ukraine long predates anything like the possibility of NATO membership. It began in the 17th century, and, after a brief period of independence following the Russian Revolution, resumed after the first Soviet conquest. It was resumed yet again after the Soviets took Eastern Europe from the Nazis. Russian anxiety that Ukraine might join the West is produced by the very old Russian desire to dominate Ukraine, regardless of Western behavior. The current Russian regime’s campaign on behalf of a Moscow-led Russki Mir (“Russian world”) is not simply anti-liberal propaganda. It is a positive pledge to create a civilization based on the imagined spiritual-political unity of the Slavs. NATO may get in the way of that project, but the Russians have goals more ambitious than securing their own borders against (what they perceive as) American encroachment.
As it happens, the argument that NATO expansion invites Russian aggression is belied by Russia’s perfect record of non–aggression against NATO countries. The Russian government was not happy about NATO’s post-Soviet expansion into states of the former Soviet empire––Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and so on. But Russian unhappiness in those instances did not translate into an invasion. To be sure, Russian passivity against NATO may not last forever, and America has an interest in ensuring that no test of its reliability is ever posed by, say, a Russian move against Latvia or Estonia. But Russia’s actual choices about who to invade indicate that it is NATO’s reluctance and slowness to include certain countries that makes those countries attractive Russian targets.
Other objections to arming the Ukrainians for a decisive win do not pass muster. Some worry that sending advanced weapons amounts to escalation (indeed, the pace of the Biden administration’s arming campaign suggests the president was among the worriers). But escalation to what? An attack on NATO territory, Putin likely believes, will threaten not only his goals in Ukraine but his power in Russia. The use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine would advance certain short-term military goals while isolating the Russians from their remaining allies and possibly inviting American intervention. At any rate, the escalatory warnings have proved wrong—supplying advanced weapons to Ukraine has not made Russian aims more palpably apocalyptic, nor its tactics more obviously brutal.
I suspect a stronger motive for reluctance on the Western Right to arm Ukraine has to do with a desire to avoid so-called ‘forever wars.’ This desire has an unserious and a serious version. To the first, it should be said quite simply that some efforts just do require lengthy or indefinite commitments, because one of the belligerent parties refuses to stop. This is true in all areas of policy. One does not hear conservatives call for local governments to stop hunting down and prosecuting violent criminals because of the stubborn persistence of violent crime.
The serious version of the ‘forever wars’ objection says that America and its allies can get a good-enough result without an extended commitment. But the history of Russian behavior and our best evidence about official Russian thinking indicate that Ukraine won’t survive as a state without serious military supplies from the West. The survival of Ukraine protects NATO’s eastern border from running up against the Russian army. If Kyiv falls, the Russians need only time their next act of aggression for the term of an isolationist American president, and an alliance that has kept the peace in Europe for decades will dissolve. The subsequent arms race would be as global as the American alliances that American inaction would call into question.
A satisfactory end to the Russo-Ukraine conflict does not require regime change in Moscow. Nor does it require the promotion of democracy in Ukraine. Ukraine is a functioning state with elections and a diverse parliament. It hosts many religious communities and several ethnicities and little civil disorder. Ukraine is threatened not internally—if anything, the Russian invasion has strengthened Ukrainian nationalism and Kyiv’s authority––but externally.
The goal of the Western allies should be to alter Russian thinking about the chances of conquering Ukraine. That requires making Russia’s aggression the opposite of successful, and sending enough weapons to Ukraine to guarantee that a future act of Russian aggression will not succeed. If America and its allies are equal to the task, they may cut short this ‘forever war.’
