A few days ago, a utility guy came to my house to fix a technical problem. He was a healthy looking fellow about 25. He had a Slavic accent.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Ukraine.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Two and a half years,” he said. And I thought, but did not say, not wanting to challenge him, “That’s when the war started. You fled the war.”
And I thought, “Good for you.”
I note that the Wall Street Journal reports intelligence estimates that 80,000 Ukrainians and 200,000 Russians have been killed in that war. Counting both sides, perhaps a million persons have been wounded, many of them grievously.
It’s hard to imagine a million. I think of my technical guy. A million would be as many guys like him as the population of Seattle and Tacoma combined, all of them dead or wounded. And I think of Donald Trump’s being asked in the recent debate whether he wanted Ukraine to win.
“I want to end the war,” Trump said.
From the people who don’t want to end the war, I hear the argument that sending weapons to Kyiv is a “good investment” because it’s “degrading Russia” without killing Americans. I hear this ghoulish argument from Democrats. In my youth, the Democrats I knew didn’t talk this way. They were against war. In 2024, under Kamala Harris, the Democrats are the war party.
So are the mainstream media. At the Washington Post, foreign-affairs writer David Ignatius just returned from Eastern Europe. “Ukraine is bleeding out,” he writes. “Its will to fight is as strong as ever, but its army is exhausted.” Ignatius goes on. “The Biden administration’s rubric of support — “as long as it takes” — simply doesn’t match the reality of this conflict. Ukraine doesn’t have enough soldiers to fight an indefinite war of attrition.”
Ukraine is going to lose, Ignatius writes, unless the United States and its NATO allies have the will “to escalate to be strong enough to reach a decent settlement.”
Escalate. I remember that word. Lyndon Johnson escalated by bombing North Vietnam, which was supposed to lead to a decent settlement. Richard Nixon escalated by invading Cambodia. A generation later, Barack Obama escalated (without using the word) by sending more American soldiers to Afghanistan.
Escalation has not been a war-winning strategy. Nonetheless, President Biden is now being urged is to try it again, this time by unleashing missiles that can strike deeper into Russia. In reference to that threat, President Vladimir Putin says, “This will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”
That’s a nuclear power talking. Russia is a lesser power than the old Soviet Union, and we are inclined to ignore the power it still has. We think Putin is bluffing — but maybe he isn’t. For years Putin threatened Ukraine, and in 2022 he followed through with his threat. Our war party, who likes to argue that Ukraine can win because Russia is weak, also likes to compare Putin to Hitler. If we don’t stop Putin in Ukraine, they say, we’ll have to fight him in Poland. To cut a deal would be “appeasement,” the folly of Neville Chamberlain in his 1938 deal with Hitler. For years, “appeasement” was a rhetorical club for war-supporting conservatives to beat down war-shy liberals. I remember Rush Limbaugh using it. Now I hear it from Democrats.
Hitler comparisons are almost always over the top. Hitler started the bloodiest war in European history. He reneged on his deal with Chamberlain and also on his deal with Stalin. The man was in a class by himself.
Putin is a Russian nationalist who hates the idea of an anti-Russian military alliance enlisting Ukraine, which nationalists think of as Russia’s little brother. He’s a dangerous man, but we should listen to what he says. That his attack on Ukraine has been bogged down for two and a half years does not suggest that Poland, or any other NATO country, will be next. On the contrary, it suggests that Putin might welcome a deal.
Donald Trump has boasted that if he is elected, he will settle the war before he takes office. The Donald does like to boast. But it’s not a bad idea. The obvious deal would be to let Russia keep the territory it has taken, much of which is Russian-speaking, on condition that it takes no more. NATO would have to give up on admitting Ukraine to the alliance, and Russia would have to agree to leave the somewhat shrunken Ukraine alone. If Russia broke its promise, NATO could do the same.
Suggest this, and the answer you get from the war party is, “You’re giving Putin what he wants.” Actually, it’s letting Putin keep what he already has, the 20 percent or so of Ukraine, much of it Russian-speaking, that the Russian army has held since February 2022. Putin wanted all of Ukraine. The suggested deal is letting the Ukrainians keep the 80 percent they still have. Of course, they want all of Ukraine, too, but in a negotiation, what you get depends on what power you have. And Russia has a population more than four times that of Ukraine. It has an economy more than 10 times the size of Ukraine’s. It has petroleum. It designs and manufactures its own aircraft, its own tanks, its own submachine guns. It has a leader who has been willing to start the largest war in Europe in 75 years and a people who, for the most part, believe what their government tells them.
Here in progressive Seattle, we fly Ukrainian flags. “The Russians started it,” we say — even if the NATO expansion under Clinton, Bush and Obama was why Putin started it. Still, he did start it. I agree that he’s a bad guy, but the need now is not to express our feelings about bad guys, but to end a war. In the coming election, one of the major-party candidates vows he will end it. There are many reasons not to like Donald Trump, and I agree with most of them, but he’s right about this war.
All my life, America has been in and out of war. I was in grade school, junior high, high school and college during the Vietnam War. I was a young newspaper reporter during the Gulf War, a little older during the Kosovo war, and middle aged during the Iraq War. The war in Afghanistan lasted until I was well past retirement.
Americans were told that each one of these wars was necessary. Vital. Unavoidable. Good. Afterward, it came out that many of the things we were told were lies. The Tonkin Gulf resolution — our declaration of war in Vietnam — was based on a lie about an attack on a Navy ship in international waters. (It was in North Vietnamese waters.) The Second Iraq War was based on a lie that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction.” We Americans are suckers for this stuff. We watch war movies. We put up signs that say, “Support Our Troops,” and our government smiles and interprets the message as “Support Our War.”
For Americans, the fight in Ukraine has been a nice war. In a place most Americans can’t find on a map, our historic adversary is killing its former subjects. CNN shows us horrible images, but the death and destruction are not here, and the people suffering are not us or even our close friends. The war has cost us billions, but the cost has been charged to the national Visa card. Our income-tax rates are the same as before, and our military contractors are making money. An election is underway, and our politicians are making Halloween images of their opponents.
In the midst of our political entertainment, Donald Trump promises to end the war. Kamala Harris calls him an admirer of Putin. Dick Cheney, the Republican who all good Democrats despised 20 years ago — the vice president who got us into the Second Iraq War — endorses Harris.
Now the foreign-affairs correspondent of the Washington Post tells us we must pay more, do more and risk more — not for the Ukrainians to win back their country, a task that is beyond them, but “to reach a decent settlement.” And the Wall Street Journal tells us that the butcher’s bill is already more than one million wounded and dead.
Well, you can have it. I don’t want it. I remember my utility guy, and I think: He had the right idea. Get out.
Bruce,
You are wrong for several reasons. The first reason is that the political implications of appeasement which acquiesces to Russian imperialism creates a more dangerous world in the long run. A Russia that wins is one that can create havoc in Transnistria, the Balkans, and throughout Africa. The leaders have no interest other than enriching themselves to the detriment of the populace. It also sends a critical message to allies in Taiwan and Korea that western countries may not have the resolve to follow through with military commitments. Another reason why you are wrong is that you have no knowledge of either the military capability of Russia or the internal political stability of the Putin regime. Your argument is premised on both being more capable than what they are. Ukraine has been very effective at degrading logistics to Crimea, destroying ammunition dumps, utilizing drones to patrol logistical routes, and to deplete Russian armor and artillery reserves. In fact, the biggest danger to Ukraine is fickle Americans who fail to see that this is a war of attrition and resolve. Wars like this do not end quickly. It took a decade for Russia to lose in Afghanistan and we should expect the same here.
“It took a decade for Russia to lose in Afghanistan and we should expect the same here,” you write. Russia lost 15,000 dead in Afghanistan. In Ukraine, Russia has lost 200,000 dead, 13 times its losses in Afghanistan, and we’re only a quarter of the way the 10-yeas war which you expect. So let’s drop the comparison to Afghanistan.
And let’s also drop the comparison to the Munich agreement. You argue that ending the war with each side keeping what it holds would be “appeasement.” In the Munich agreement of 1938, to which your word “appeasement” refers, Hitler won the Sudetenland without a war. His casualties were zero. Here Russia would be keeping the borderlands after suffering 200,000 dead, plus a huge diplomatic and economic cost. That’s no incentive for Putin to go off and have another adventure. It’s letting him climb down, letting NATO climb down, and letting the Ukrainians live.
I remember your “fickle Americans” trope from the Vietnam War. To end a war without a victory, the war supporters said, will convince other countries not to rely on us. It’s the Hotel California argument: You have to stay in because you’re there.
The Ukrainians would not live if they are sacrificed to a Putin victory. The Kyiv leadership would be executed and the rank and file that have been fighting against Russian domination would continue to do so, suffering casualties in accelerating numbers and bitterly resenting their unreliable Western allies. Hitler didn’t win the conflict over Sudetenland, he was fed the victims of a smaller resistance as Trump would sacrifice Ukrainians to Putin.
The comparison to Afghanistan is appropriate because it was a combination of a poor economy, international sanctions, falling oil revenue, and Russian military losses that precipitated the withdrawal. And if you would listen to Russian experts on the topic, you would note that Putin learned a valuable lesson from the Afghanistan war, which was to avoid Moscow and St. Petersburg casualties. It was these casualties that precipitated the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia marching in the streets of Moscow, and there is nothing that scares Putin more than the disorder of public marches. Putin thus has relied upon professional contract soldiers drawn primarily from poorer republics of Russia and waves of Wagner prisoners. It is for this reason why the recent incursion into Kursk has substantial political implications for Putin as border patrol soldiers are 18-19 yo conscripts, not professional soldiers, and thus are drawn from a higher socio-economic classes. It is for this reason that Putin has not called general mobilization. He is weaker than what the western media portrays. Afghanistan is also appropriate in showing how sanctions take time to work to weaken a country’s ability to sustain warfare. Putin was prepared for Western sanctions as this war began, and so far has insulated the politically important Moscow and St. Petersburg from their worst effects. It will take time for the Russian people to lose faith in this regime as they slowly lose access to European goods.
The noted historian Timothy Snyder has observed that the only way to stop Russian Imperialism and for regime change is for Russia to lose, and lose badly. It is what caused the fall of the Tsar due to Russo-Japanese and WWI losses. It is what caused the collapse of the Soviet Union after Afghanistan.
It is your mistake to presume my appeasement comment is in reference to Hitler. The comment simply states that Putin is the leader of a mafia-state that seeks to enrich itself wherever in the world that it perceives weakness to exploit. It is classical imperialism. Thus, it will embed itself in the Sudan or the Congo where it can find like-minded dictators where it can siphon off mineral wealth back to Moscow and St Petersburg to build opulent mansions and yachts.
Good piece, Bruce. Hard to disagree. I have Ukrainian friends here who left after the invasion. They want the war to end as well, with relatives still there. Sadly, the Biden-Harris policy only means a perpetual stalemate. I don’t trust Trump, but a negotiated settlement may be the only answer.
Among Ukraine’s previous 44 million citizens (depleted by women, children and elderly taking refuge in the West), 17% were ethnic Russians. More than 90% or self-identified Russian men stayed in Ukraine after Putin’s invasion and are fighting off the Kremlin’s campaign to exterminate Ukrainian democracy, flawed as it might have been under Putin’s puppet regime. The Ukrainian men fleeing to the United States and elsewhere while their countrymen fight off totalitarian aggression are mostly those who don’t support alliance with Western democracy over Putin’s policies of Stalinist domination.
There’s some truth in that, but I think it’s a little hard on Ukrainians who have bailed out. There are a lot of them here in Portugal, too. Men, women, children, I don’t know if anyone has published the demographics but I’d guess the men often arrive with their families, and in any case it’s basically a matter of having placed their own welfare above the dream of an implausible victory over Russia. I sure admire those who have stayed.
Equally, I imagine the young men who desert Russia in its time of need don’t uniformly hold political views specifically supporting Ukrainian self determination, they just value their own skin over any of that. You can call it cowardice, but at any rate it “crosses the aisle.”
Imagine at the beginning of the conflict what would’ve happened if our government had said to us; ‘ We want to send billions of dollars to the Ukraine to support their war effort against Russia. Since we don’t actually have any billions sitting around, we’re going to have to raise taxes on everybody in America, immediately. You’ll shortly be hearing from the IRS on your portion which we estimate will be $10-$20,000 per household.” How much support do you think Americans would’ve given that? Instead, our government simply dodged this issue by borrowing the money. Now, the billions that we have sent to the Ukraine, which might’ve been spent on our own problems here in America, is money that we are paying interest on. If you think this is a good policy, I suggest you take out a second mortgage on your house, or negotiate a substantial bank loan, and then give away the money to all your friends to spend however they want. You can pay the interest every month on all the money that you’ve borrowed and given away to your friends.
“If Russia broke its promise, NATO could do the same.”
NATO isn’t going to fight Russia directly. Restarting NATO weapon deliveries would in end the same way as this current war. Putin knows this and would regroup and launch a third invasion. Ukraine would likely surrender.
Your argument should be focused on whether or not to support a sovereign Ukraine. Supporting the existing Ukraine government will be expensive long term and it might not work in the face of a determined Putin. Without support, the remaining Ukraine will become a vassal state like Belarus or wholly incorporated into a larger Russia. That will change the dynamics in Europe in unknown ways. Ukraine borders Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, and Romania.
Certainly there will be a negotiated settlement – what else? Do we think Ukrainian tanks will some day roll into the Kremlin?
But with Trump waiting in the wings to possibly rise to the presidency, Putin is not going to settle on terms any worse than he thinks he can get from Trump, and there’s every indication those terms would be generous. Trump is in this way sustaining the war in more or less the same way he sustains current immigration policy that his House won’t pass until after the election.
Putin’s insane war has to be treated as a threat to the civilized world. Appeasement will only be followed by more of the same.
My sytmpathies for Bruce Ramsay’s deeply felt argument; his plea has passion.
One point among others troubles me:
“The obvious deal would be to let Russia keep the territory it has taken, much of which is Russian-speaking, on condition that it takes no more.”
This is prefaced by suggesting that Donald Trump may be right in this part of what would be his his proposed policy.
Using any statement of what Donald Trump supports or claims he would do is frought. The man’s record of hoping on and off policies, beliefs, plus his lies and invented facts makes citing him as having a valid point a weak form of support.
But “let Russia keep the territory” they have amassed because most of the population there is Russian speaking? Is language enough to legitimize the Russian incursion and acquisition of a part of the Ukraine? I don’t agree with the attack that says this is appeasement. But it may be worth asking: What does the Russian-speaking population want ? If they are content with the Russians taking them over, then Mr. Ramsay’s suggestion holds war. But if not? I find it at least questionable that having lived under an admittedly flawed Ukrainian democracy the population would be content to live in autocratically ruled Russia.
Giving up the long-term of Ukraine as a NATO member leaves the country vulnerable to Putin’s repeated use of force to get his way.
As abhorrent as war may be, war is also diplomacy by other means. The historical arguments that point to Putin’s respect being limited to one thing: power, has historical backing. He has shown no sign of coming to a bargaining table. That leaves the current option of priving him to the bargaining table.
All the pro-war folks want to talk about is Putin, Putin, Putin. “Giving up the long-term of Ukraine as a NATO member leaves the country vulnerable to Putin,” says Herford. Yeah, but what of the million wounded and 280,000 dead? How many of their dead is it worth — worth to us — to have Ukraine in NATO? “As abhorrent as war may be, war is also diplomacy by other means,” writes Herford. Yes, and a knuckle sandwich is discussion by other means. “The purpose is to defeat Putin,” writes Neighbor. “If that means more war, then that’s what we need to do.” If you want to stop the war, you’re kowtowing to Putin. Never mind the wrecked cities, the piles of dead and wounded, and the risk of nuclear war. It’s all about Putin.
Herford objects to my mentioning that many of the people living in eastern Ukraine are Russian-speakers. He asks whether that legitimizes Russia’s invasion. No, of course not. But it’s a sign that loyalties may not be defined by the lines on maps. Herford suggests that “it may be worth asking” the people there what government they want to live under. That’s a fine idea, but it’s not going to happen because neither Putin nor Zelensky wants it. They want to settle it by war and, at the moment, so does the government of the United States.
Somebody needs to break the ice.
Russia imperialism has always followed the path of dislocating the original population and then moving native Russians into replace the populace. It is what Stalin did in Crimea as the Tartars were shipped to Central Asia and what occurred in Kaliningrad after World War II. It is what is now happening in Mariupol as Russians are occupying the apartments of native Ukrainians that have fled the violence in their home city. To call for elections in such circumstances shows a lack of understanding of the motives and means of Russian warfare.
Ethnic Russians in Ukraine, who constituted 17% of Ukraine’s pre-invasion population, predominantly identify as Ukrainian citizens and have remained in their country to fight off Putin’s aggression. The city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest after Kyiv, has waged one of the fiercest campaigns of resistance to Russian domination since the war began. Putin has invoked the myth of Russian persecution in restive eastern Ukraine provinces where the dregs of his provocateurs remain — mercenaries and supporters of the deposed Putin puppet regime of the Party of Regions which was driven into exile after the Maidan democratic revolution at the end of 2013.
Surely PostAlley can find smarter alternative perspectives.
As to a specific. Ramsey’s fundamental premise is “… the need now is not to express our feelings about bad guys, but to end a war.”
No, that’s not true. The purpose is to defeat Putin and to weaken him to the degree Russia can’t invade anybody else. If that means more war, then that’s what we need to do. It’s nonsense that we want to “express our feelings”. We want to stop Putin’s _actions_
I could go on, but it’s pointless since this piece is so poorly done that it wouldn’t be useful to say anything further.
No mention of Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The American response was pretty much what Ramsey suggests we should do now. And here we are. Timothy Snyder is our best American historian/pundit re Ukraine.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/why-the-world-needs-ukrainian-victory
FTS, Comrade Ramsey.
“… even if the NATO expansion under Clinton, Bush and Obama was why Putin started it.”
Way to make this the west’s fault, for failing to recognize and respect Putin’s rightful hegemony over eastern Europe. This all makes sense to you, does it?
It makes sense to me that countries that attack others have reasons for what they do. To Russian nationalists, NATO backing of the former Ukrainian SSR was a provocation. You can argue that the Russians shouldn’t have seen it that way, that NATO was within its rights to offer protection to Ukraine, and that Ukraine was within its rights to welcome NATO’s embrace — but to the Russian government, NATO’s promise of membership to Ukraine was infuriating. To recognize this isn’t “to repeat Putin’s rightful hegemony over Eastern Europe.” It’s to understand what the man thinks. If you want to negotiate an end to a war, you need to understand why your opponent fights. To jump to a moral judgment about what’s “rightful” and assign all the virtue to your side, is to keep the war going. A million wounded and dead, and more to come.
You continue to place this war into the framework of great powers, which is a mistake. Putin is St Petersburg street-thug that used his position as bureaucrat to take bribes from those doing business in Russia to make himself wealthy. Rumor has it that he is the wealthiest man in the world, even though he takes a modest salary. He took that same skillset to Moscow as a deputy to Yeltsin. He conducts his foreign policy the same way. NATO doesn’t matter, what matters is the ability to place proxies into foreign governments which would therefore allow him to bring tribute back to Moscow. It is no surprise that the former St Petersburg street thug envies the mineral wealth of Ukraine, which is concentrated in the Donbass. It really is just colonial imperialism.
No. Putin fights because he wants a client state. The prospect of NATO membership just factors into when. Don’t really want to wait until after Ukraine is a NATO member, because then it would be rather awkward to attack.
“It’s hard to imagine a million.”
Not really. Think of American deaths caused by the damn virus; also think of Orange Man and his (either) incompetence or malevolence “managing” it and us. Now by extension–his performance on Ukraine will be similar to the virus.
I can’t help thinking, Mr. Ramsey, that if your idea of appeasing surrender had prevailed in the lead up to our civil war, 1/3 or more of the states in our current union would be a separate country where slavery would still be a ‘peculiar institution’.
What do you think the present world would look like now if that had happened?
Would you gleefully condone the destruction of a democracy of, by, and for each citizen, to be replaced by the capitulation of each citizen to absolute dictatorship, in which even freedom of thought, specifically free political expression in journalism, is met with arrest, trial and imprisonment or death?
Condemning millions to never know a moment of freedom.
Leaving millions of political, freedom loving Ukrainians, who must choose to return, suffering the slow death of slavery as a conquered people, or remain exiles for the rest of their lives?
All so you can save a few tax dollars? Really?
Have you, at last, no sense of decency?
No, he hasn’t any sense of decency.
Thank you Mr.Ramsey, finally a sensible article addressing American policy in the Ukraine. I have been astonished at the lack of protest at our expansion of N.A.T.O. and the resultant war in Ukraine. We sit here fat and happy and at peace while the Ukrainians have the nation torn apart. We engineered the coup in 2014 of an elected government. We felt we could ignore Russian protests.
There was never a need for this war. I never totally agreed with the demonization of the munitions industry until this Ukraine mess. Don’t gimme any talk of Devil Putin, we do business and form alliances with people like him all the time. I now understand that the interest and pressure groups that got us into Vietnam instigated this expansion of N.A.T.O. and the mess in the Ukraine. What I cannot understand is how the peace groups in America, which always criticized U.S. involvement in overseas conflicts, sometime to a fault, are now totally silent now, supporting the war party, while wasting all their energy screaming at Israel accusing it of “genocide!”
Thank you again, Mr.Ramsey.
“…we do business and form alliances with people like him all the time.”
I used to question whether evil really exists, but the more that I educate myself on Russia and its history the more that I’m convinced that it does. Make no mistakes about it Putin is an evil man willing to sacrifice his own people to maintain his grip on the trappings of power and wealth in Russia.
Vietnam was a mistake, but it was a mistake precipitated by a legitimate fear of the terror that Stalin precipitated on Russia through his own paranoia and irrational belief in the “communist” system. Like Putin, Stalin was truly evil. The mistake was that we perceived the war as one over communism when in fact it was a war of self-determination from colonial imperialism.
Like Ramsey, you are also wrong as to the factors that precipitated the war. I’d suggest that what happened on the Maidan in 2013 is analogous to the Solidarity strikes in Poland where entire families rallied together in support of a more democratic vision for the future.
To be honest, the hypothesis that United States action was instrumental in the outcome of the revolution is right out of Russian political theory. In the Russian mind, political action is never organic, it is always at the behest of the state or conspiracy. Freewill is a fallacy in the Russian mindset. This is why demonstrations in Russia always feature paid actors.
The best explanation of how we got here comes from Yale Professor Marci Shore, who describes Euromaidan as a decision by Ukrainians that the future of their young people and their country was with the west, not under an oppressive Russian proxy. I’d invite you to watch her lecture here:
“Freewill is a fallacy in the Russian mindset.” Yes, as we’ve seen from the lengthy prison sentences handed out to protestors who dare speak out against Putin. My “that’s bullshit” comment above, by the way, was meant for Al Armstrong, not you.
As someone with partial Ukrainian heritage, your argument is beyond disgusting, Mr.; Ramsay. Maybe you should change your last name to Chamberlain. Go to hell.
Hear, hear.
This boggles my mind: You label as pro-war the people who object to Putin’s violent invasion of Ukraine. You say: “Never mind the wrecked cities, the piles of dead and wounded, and the risk of nuclear war. It’s all about Putin.” Well, yes, exactly. It IS all about Putin and his cold, Hitlerian invasion of Ukraine.
Thank you for your well conceived and objective commentary about the war in Ukraine, Bruce. Prior to seeing all the negative and insulting comments about what you’ve written, I would never have believed that I would see so many far-left Liberals hawkishly beating the war-drum. Like the Biden administration, which obviously has no plan, none of these commenters has a clue about how to actually win this war. It’s just ‘keep on killing for as long as it takes and however much it costs’ in an endless cycle of death and destruction that, of course, doesn’t touch them one bit. After Vietnam, I never thought I’d see people going for the domino theory propaganda again. But, here we are.
Thank you, Mr. Ramsey, for writing this brave and true column. And thanks too, to David Berett for his supportive and wise reply.