1. Ukraine has the right to be an independent, sovereign state with an independent foreign and domestic policy. The country is a victim of military aggression, forced to defend herself from genocidal aggressor and deserves to win. Any person for whom the values of law, including international law, and justice are not an empty phrase, should be on the side of Ukraine in this conflict as a state that has been attacked.
2. Russia is many times superior to Ukraine not only in purely military terms, but also in economic and demographic terms. Ukraine cannot resist Russian aggression for long without constant and significant external assistance. The heroism of Ukraine’s defenders and its people isn’t enough. Such assistance was promised and initially provided by the West, and this made it possible to solve the main task of the first stage of the war — to preserve independence and sovereignty. Expectations that global sanctions would undermine Russia’s military potential and limited assistance would be sufficient for a quick military victory were misplaced: Team China and third-world countries “lent a shoulder” to Putin, and the offensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the summer of 2023 was unsuccessful. The war then became “resource based,” Z fired the AFU’s commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny for saying (and writing) this, there was much handwringing, etc.
3. Team USA last year had two options: sharply increasing assistance, or, conversely, reducing assistance. Team USA chose the latter, deciding to provide assistance six months late, in volumes insufficient for military victory (perhaps sufficient for strategic defense for six months to a year), and then when the threat of the front — not the rear — collapsing loomed. The plan was dig, dig, dig in 2024 and maybe attack again in 2025.
The just-passed package will roughly double the cumulative aid we’ve given Ukraine, but at about $60 billion it’s less than one-fourth of 1 percent of GDP — around one-fortieth the size of the initial Lend-Lease appropriation. Anyone claiming that spending on this scale will break the budget, or that it will seriously interfere with other priorities, is innumerate, disingenuous or both. — Paul Krugman1
The latest batch of guns and ammo is not a response to the strategic challenges that Z babbles about below in a pow wow with Brazilian jornos. It can only push back disaster by several months. In the third year of the war, it can’t even protect Ukraine’s major cities, with the possible exception of Kyiv, from cruise/ballistic/drone missile attacks.
4. Ukrainian domestic/foreign/fiscal policy idiocy abounds2. Adopted changes to the law on forced conscription are a case in point. Maybe someone in the US embassy in Kyiv can get off his/her ass and, on the occassion of the one-year anniversary of Chervinsky’s incarceration, chat up the greasy clowns in the president’s office about ending political persecution.
Ukraine Aid in the Light of History. (The New York Times, April 23, 2024)