“The consequences of a U.S. aid cutoff would be nothing short of catastrophic,” Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European Policy Analysis, told me. “Ukrainians won’t stop fighting, but they will eventually lose the war without U.S. support. Many more innocent Ukrainians would be brutally murdered. A Ukraine under Russian control — either politically or militarily — would mean Russia at NATO and E.U. borders. It would mean a U.S. that is greatly diminished as a global leader — I think a Russian win in Ukraine is frankly the end of U.S. global leadership.”
Is Polyakova overstating the case? I don’t think so. A U.S. failure to support Ukraine now — with an aid bill that amounts to about 1 percent of federal outlays — would be the greatest self-inflicted U.S. foreign policy error at least since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and its geopolitical ramifications would be even greater.
The biggest impact, of course, would be felt in Ukraine, which has been heroically resisting a Russian onslaught for nearly two years. The Ukrainians have inflicted staggering losses on Russian invaders — a declassified U.S. intelligence estimate suggests Russia has lost 315,000 troops, injured or killed. But Ukraine has also suffered heavily, and it is struggling to hold off the incessant attacks from a much larger country whose dictator appears not to care how many of his own troops he slaughters in “meat grinder” assaults.
Russian troops, who occupy nearly 20 percent of Ukraine’s sovereign territory, continue to mount incessant attacks along the 600-mile front line stretching across eastern and southern Ukraine. While Ukraine was firing 7,000 artillery rounds per day in mid-2023, by the end of the year, it was firing just 2,000 rounds a day, compared with 10,000 rounds a day for Russia.
To make up for the shortage of shells, Ukrainian troops are increasingly employing explosive drones, but Ukraine has also lost the edge it once had in this area. Russia has been building its own drones and importing more from Iran. Mark Arnold, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general who spent three weeks in Ukraine in November, told me that “Russian drones are now dominating the airspace. These drones have become crucial in carrying out Russian deep-strike missions and disrupting Ukrainian military movements, effectively changing the dynamics of ground operations.”
The expansion of Russian artillery and drone capabilities, along with the density of Russian minefields, doomed Ukraine’s big counteroffensive last year to failure. If the disparity in capabilities continues to be grow — and that would be the inevitable consequence of a U.S. aid stoppage — Ukraine would face the possibility of Russian breakthroughs.
Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute in London told me, “The Russians are in no position to attack Kyiv today, but they could be by 2025. That is their intention. The worst-case scenario is an immediate cutoff of U.S. aid resulting in the slow deterioration of Ukrainian forces over 2024 and a collapse in 2025 as Russia expands the active front.”
The more immediate consequence of a U.S. aid cutoff might be felt not at the front but in Ukraine’s major cities, which are once again the target of a brutal Russian air campaign using kamikaze drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. Russia is ramping up its own missile production and has already received missiles from North Korea while working to acquire more from Iran.
Just as they did last winter, the Russians are targeting Ukrainian civilians, but now, rather than going after electrical and heating infrastructure, they are also focusing on Ukrainian factories that produce materiel for the war effort. The United Nations reports that between Dec. 29 and Jan. 6, Russian attacks killed 120 civilians across Ukraine and injured nearly 480 more.
These appalling losses are occurring even while Ukraine’s air-defense systems — including U.S.-supplied Patriots, U.S.-Norwegian NASAMS, the French SAMP/T and the German Gepards — are functioning with a high degree of effectiveness. But Russia is trying to exhaust Ukraine’s air-defense ammunition, and Ukraine’s military warns that its supplies are running low. Imagine what would happen if Ukrainian air defenses were not replenished by the United States: The result would be to turn major Ukrainian cities into ruins and consign countless Ukrainian civilians to the hospital or the morgue.
The argument of Republican isolationists today, just as it was before the U.S. entry into World War II, is that Europeans should deal with their own problems. U.S. allies are doing the best they can. They have already committed more aid to Ukraine than the United States has done, and that includes longer-range weapons systems (such as cruise missiles and F-16 fighter jets) that the Biden administration has foolishly refused to provide.
But with defense production capacity having atrophied on both sides of the Atlantic since the end of the Cold War, European countries are struggling to meet their ambitious goals for ammunition production. The United States has been ramping up its own ammunition output — particularly of artillery shells — and those supplies are indispensable to Ukraine’s defense. If U.S. aid isn’t forthcoming, “the European states would have to basically be willing to deplete all of their ammunition stocks to keep Ukraine supplied,” Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told me. That is a decision few European leaders would make, given the growing threat their own countries face from Moscow.
Some well-meaning Westerners fantasize that ending U.S. aid could simply lead Ukraine to agree to a cease-fire with Russia. But there is no indication that the Kremlin has given up its goal of conquering Ukraine. On Dec. 28, for example, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said the war will continue until the Russian army takes such supposedly “Russian cities” as Odessa and Kyiv. Russian President Vladimir Putin himself said on Dec. 14 that his war aims have not changed, and they include the “denazifaction” and “demilitarization” of Ukraine — code words for that country’s subjugation. Any Russian agreement on a cease-fire would not deliver peace in our time. The cease-fire would last just long enough to allow the Kremlin to regroup its forces for another push on Kyiv.
Ukrainian troops have no choice but to keep fighting if they are to protect themselves and their families from the terrible crimes committed by Russian troops whenever they occupy Ukrainian territory. Even a U.S. aid cutoff would be unlikely to end Ukrainian resistance. But it would make that resistance considerably most costly and less successful — and that, in turn, would make the United States and its European allies a lot less safe.
A Russian victory in Ukraine would not only endanger U.S. allies in Eastern Europe but also send a dangerous signal to aggressors, such as North Korea and China, that the West lacks the resolve to counter their designs. If, on the other hand, the United States continues to provide Ukraine with the support it needs, Putin could eventually be confronted with the reality that this is a war he cannot win and needs to end. U.S. security and deterrence would be strengthened immensely by a Russian defeat.
The choice of whether Ukraine survives as a free nation is now up to Congress and specifically up to congressional Republicans. (While Democrats are united in supporting Kyiv, Republicans are holding Ukrainian aid hostage to their anti-immigration demands.) It is likely to be the most momentous decision lawmakers will make in their whole careers. Let us hope — for the sake of Ukraine and the entire world — that this is one time that politics really does stop at the water’s edge. Otherwise, members of Congress will have a lot of Ukrainian blood on their hands.
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