Russia and Ukraine, two years later
Last week, Alexie Navalny died in a Russian prison. His exact cause of death isn’t known, but it’s no mystery who is responsible for it. He had been a prisoner of Putin’s since January 2021. For most of the last decade, he had been arguably the most well-known face of opposition to Putin in Russia. Putin clearly saw him as a potential threat, which is why he had imprisoned him in 2013 and poisoned him in 2020.
It was a small miracle that Navalny survived the poisoning. He spent several months outside of Russia, but chose to go back. He was immediately arrested upon his return and remained in jail until his death. To say he had guts would be a huge understatement. Knowing that he would be arrested and likely die in prison, he went back to Russia anyway.
In response to his death, Biden announced sanctions on more than 500 individuals and entities in Russia on Friday. I doubt it will make a huge difference in the war, but it’s still worth doing. This week marks the two year anniversary of Russia’s illegal and unjust invasion of Ukraine. Lately, things have been looking bad for Ukraine, much worse than they were a year ago. Despite that it’s important to remember that Russia was expected to take over the entire country within a week. No matter how it ends, Ukraine has done way better than anyone thought possible.
The sanctions that have been imposed by Europe and the US haven’t worked out as well as was hoped, but it’s wrong to say they have failed. Europe is no longer dependent on Russia for oil or gas. That alone makes the sanctions worthwhile. By design, the sanctions have largely not touched oil and other minerals out of the desire to avoid large economic shocks. That’s understandable, but it always meant whatever sanctions were imposed would be limited in their effect.
Having lost Europe as a customer, Russia has had to become much more dependent on China. That may be worth doing today, but it probably will have consequences for them in the future. Russia may well become a colony of China and be at their mercy for a long time to come. Whatever China wants, Russia will have to do whether they like it or not.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, NATO has become stronger and more unified than ever. Anyone who thought it was obsolete was dead wrong. Sweden and Finland have now joined. Europe has also become more aware of their lack of defense capabilities and has begun an effort to fix it. That will take time, but it’s a good thing and needs to happen.
The will to support Ukraine is there in Europe, they just have to build up the capacity. In the US, there is the capacity and I do think more aid to Ukraine will be approved. Support for it in Congress is overwhelming, even in the House. That’s why I don’t think it’s tenable for Mike Johnson to just refuse to let anything come up for a vote. I don’t care what he or any other House Republican says, there will be huge pressure on them from the Senate and White House to do something and many House Republicans will demand it as well.
If aid to Ukraine is allowed to come up for a vote, it will pass easily. Trump and his minions in Congress notwithstanding, not every Republican has embraced Putin. In the future, though, I can’t say I’m optimistic about that continuing. When the Senate passed the Ukraine aid bill, all but two of the Republican Senators who voted for it were elected in 2016 or before.
A large majority of House Republicans were elected in 2016 or later, including Mike Johnson. The only Republican president they know is Trump and most of them have adopted his anti-Ukraine/pro-Putin stance. Going forward, there will inevitably be fewer Republicans who were in office before their party embraced Trump and Putin.
I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I have to say something nice about Mitch McConnell. He has been very good on Ukraine and is the reason the aid bill passed with substantial Republican support. Absent his leadership, few Republicans would have supported it and it would have gone nowhere. I still think he’s terrible and has done more damage to the Senate than anyone else, but I have to give credit where it’s due.
We really are at a pivotal moment. Ukraine badly needs US aid. Without it, Russia will almost certainly continue advancing. Providing the aid doesn’t guarantee anything, but not providing it all but guarantees a Russian win. It really is that simple.
The idea that the US should push Ukraine towards some kind of peace deal now is ludicrous. Putin has no reason to pursue any kind of deal. Russia has been advancing and he is betting on Trump winning and giving him a green light to do whatever he wants. Absent something game changing happening between now and November, he’s not going to change course. Some kind of deal will probably need to be reached eventually, but it’s not going to happen soon.
Contrary to what aid opponents claim, providing aid doesn’t prevent a deal. The best kind of deal would be when Ukraine is on the offensive and pushing Russia back. If such a deal was reached it would have much more favorable terms for Ukraine, which is what we should all want. It may also serve as a deterrent to any future aggression from Russia. As of now, I’m not worried about Russia invading any other countries, but if the US abandons Ukraine, I might have to reconsider.
Putin’s bet is that Europe and especially the US don’t have the stomach to support Ukraine for very long. Unfortunately, that’s not a crazy bet, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s entirely up to the US and Europe to decide what they’re going to do. If either or both of them give up, that’s a choice.
I find the idea of the US already giving up to be beyond pathetic. The economic fallout here has been miniscule compared to Europe and elsewhere. Not a single US soldier has set foot in Ukraine. The amount of aid the US has sent to Ukraine is a tiny fraction of the federal budget and a microscopic fraction of the US economy. Yet some people here are already claiming to be exhausted and not wanting to continue anymore.
The aid to Ukraine has been very well spent. It has helped deplete an enemy of ours’ military and has exposed it as being way less than a well-oiled machine. At the same time, another country’s military is doing all the fighting for us. That’s an amazingly good deal.
Respectable arguments against Ukraine aid
Of all the arguments against providing aid to Ukraine, there are some that I think are legitimate and I want to address two of them here. When reading or listening to someone who is opposed to aiding Ukraine, I have a baseline that I consider minimally acceptable and will automatically tune out anyone who doesn’t start from it. It’s a good way to tell who is an honest broker from who is a crank, hack or bad person.
The baseline is very straightforward. Putin is a murderous dictator who started the war in Ukraine. I don’t care what mistakes the US, NATO, Ukraine and/or Europe made from 1989 through 2022. Putin invaded Ukraine because he chose to. He’s set in his ways and has been for a long time. In his eyes, Ukraine is not a legitimate country and belongs to Russia. With him in charge, Russia was always going to go down a bad path.
If anyone argues that the war is anything or anyone else’s fault other than Putin, I don’t care what else they have to say, I won’t listen. It’s entirely possible to argue that despite Putin’s awfulness and culpability in starting the war, aiding Ukraine is still not something the US should do. I don’t agree with that, but it is a legitimate position to take and I will accept and respect it.
The argument against further aid to Ukraine that I find the strongest is that it distracts from our biggest fight, which is China. By getting heavily involved with Ukraine, the US is not paying attention to the most important challenge. The US has limited resources and capabilities and every bit of it that’s spent on Ukraine can’t be spent on China. That’s the simplest and crudest version of that argument. There are others out there who could give way more detail, but I’m not one of them so I’m going to leave it at that.
Broadly speaking, I agree with that premise. China is the much bigger challenge. That’s true not just because of the size of their economy and their integration with the world economy, but dealing with China is vastly more complex than dealing with Russia. Russia’s economy is small. Their integration with the world economy is limited and has only gotten smaller since 2022. Russia’s ambitions are regional while China’s are global.
Europe will need to take the lead in dealing with Russia militarily, but they lack the capacity to do that right now. That will change, but it’s going to take time. In the interim, the US has the biggest military capacity and is the only country that can supply Ukraine with the weapons they need right now.
In any event, the US is perfectly capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. It’s possible to prioritize China and still support Ukraine. While Ukraine isn’t directly related to anything China is interested in, it’s not completely irrelevant either. China needs a strong Russia because Russia is antagonistic towards the US. The US needs a weaker Russia for that same reason.
I have no doubt China is closely watching how the US handles Ukraine. China wants to take Taiwan, but is not guaranteed to do it. Ukraine and Taiwan aren’t the same, but the former could give some clues as to how the US would respond to Chinese aggression against the latter. The consequences for the US and the world of China invading or blockading Taiwan will be galaxies greater than Russia invading Ukraine. Providing aid to Ukraine is a much easier task than dealing with the fallout of China invading or blockading Taiwan.
If the US is unwilling to support Ukraine after just two years despite not having any military involvement, that can only encourage China. If the US is so internally divided and consumed by domestic tribalism that they can’t do the bare minimum with Ukraine, the desire to do anything about Taiwan may be non-existent. At least that could be China’s not unreasonable conclusion if the US abandons Ukraine.
The other argument against aiding Ukraine that I want to address is old fashioned isolationism. That idea has been around in the US from the beginning. It fell out of favor after World War Two and hasn’t returned since for good reason. It still has adherents and their numbers have grown since the invasion of Iraq turned out so badly.
Someone who is a consistent isolationist isn’t indifferent to bad things happening abroad. They don’t condone atrocities or praise dictators. They just believe the US shouldn’t be involved in world affairs absent being attacked. They may favor free trade and diplomatic relations with other countries, but will oppose joining organizations like the WTO, NATO and the UN. They will also oppose interventions abroad, including invading Iraq and aiding Ukraine and Taiwan.
A consistent isolationist wouldn’t approve of Russian or Chinese aggression, but wouldn’t want to oppose it as long as it wasn’t directly threatening the US. If Russia wants to recreate the USSR, who is the US to tell them no? If China wants to take Taiwan, why should the US stop them? The US is not a charity and should worry about its own problems.
The problem with isolationism is it’s pure fantasy. It may have been the case that the US could stay out of foreign affairs in the 1700s and 1800s, but that was a long time ago. The US tried isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s and it didn’t go well. The US can try to ignore the world, but the world won’t ignore the US.
Taiwan is an easy example of how unrealistic isolationism is. Taiwan is a major source of semiconductors for the world, producing a large majority of them. If China took over Taiwan, they would instantly gain control of a product that is used in virtually everything electronic. The economic impact of that can’t be overstated.
With control over semiconductors, China could use that as leverage for all kinds of things. They could use it as a cudgel against anyone not to their liking, including the US. Alternatively, let’s say Taiwan decided to destroy their semiconductor making capacity so China couldn’t get it. That would mean a large majority of the world’s semiconductor manufacturing capacity would vanish overnight. Can you say global depression? If China moves against Taiwan, the US will be significantly affected by it no matter how much isolationists wish otherwise.
If the US chose to ignore China and Russia it would encourage them to be more aggressive. Inevitably, war would break out in Europe and Asia. I don’t care how much isolationists want to put their fingers in their ears and say “I can’t hear you,” the US would be dragged into those wars. Just as wars in Europe and Asia dragged in the US during the 1940s, another war there will do the same, mark my words.
American Putin admirers
While I can respect those two arguments against aiding Ukraine, those arguing them are the exceptions. The rule is that those arguing against aid to Ukraine aren’t doing so on consistent isolationist or strategic grounds. They’re doing it because they admire Putin and see him as an ally in their fight against people they hate. The MAGA and right-wing culture warrior crowds have decided since Putin hates the left, Democrats and wokeness, they like him.
In their eyes, Putin is defending their values against those people. Putin invaded Ukraine because he had no other choice. NATO, the US, Europe and Ukraine forced him to do it. As this piece illustrates well, those ideas are widely believed among right-wing culture warriors and MAGA followers.
Putin is a hero. He is the only thing standing between them and wokeness ruling everything. Putin himself has taken notice of that and has tried to exploit it.
MAGA and right-wing culture warriors are taking their own personal obsessions and projecting them onto the world. Russia-Ukraine has become a proxy for woke versus anti-woke. They’ve become so consumed by their hatred of domestic opponents that they’ve thrown their lot in with a foreign dictator.
Trump has long been an admirer of Putin. He sees an authoritarian strongman doing whatever he pleases and wants to be like him. It wasn’t long ago when he was one of the few people on the right praising Putin, but now he’s among the vast majority. Trump aside, Tucker Carlson is Putin’s biggest American booster. He recently visited Moscow and “interviewed” Putin. He went to a grocery store there, “toured” the city and declared Russia to be a better place to live than the US.
I’ve never been a fan of the phrase, “America, love it or leave it,” but I can make an exception here. Those in the US who admire Putin and think he embodies all of what they like should try living in Russia for a little while. I don’t expect any of them to actually do it because they’re just loudmouths and keyboard warriors. If they ever do they’ll be in for a rude awakening.
What they’ll immediately discover is how much lower living standards there are. They’ll quickly realize to their shock and dismay that Biden is no dictator. God bless America because here, you can say Biden is a dictator and the worst person on earth and not have to worry about being arrested for it. If Putin ever does something they don’t like and they speak out against it, they’ll learn the hard way that freedom of speech doesn’t exist everywhere. I doubt any of them will last more than five minutes in a gulag.
One thing very noticeable about the bulk of the anti-Ukraine/pro-Putin crowd is that they’re horrible people in general. They’re not just repulsive and crazy on Ukraine, but are like that on everything. Some of the biggest faces of the anti-Ukraine/pro-Putin crowd include Trump, Trump Jr., Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, RFK Jr, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance, all of whom are human garbage.
Just because some bad people support a cause doesn’t mean it’s wrong. That said, when virtually everyone supporting it is awful, it should give pause to any non-awful person who thinks it’s a good idea. If the only faces of a cause are sociopaths, grifters, cranks and trolls, it’s worth asking why that is and why so few, if any, reputable people support it.
Those who favor ending aid to Ukraine who aren’t reprehensible really should think long and hard about who they want to throw their lot in with. If Ukraine is abandoned and falls to Russia, history won’t look kindly on those who pushed for it. Those who think they’re promoting peace by letting Putin get his way are going to be sorely disappointed when they discover Ukraine is just the beginning of his ambitions.