Supporters of Ukraine aid have spent several weeks shouting “Putinist” and “Russia-lover” at any of God’s creatures who don’t immediately assent to their geopolitical visions. If they ever come back to talking about facts on the ground they assert that failure to support Ukraine will lead to Putin’s inevitably invading Moldova or Poland.
But what exactly is their plan for Ukraine going forward? The U.S. is now years behind in restocking its inventory of shells. The organized donation of war matériel from nations like South Korea ahead of the 2023 counteroffensive cannot be repeated. The Ukrainian armed forces never mastered and quickly abandoned the combined-arms techniques to make the most out of the most advanced weapons systems loaned to them. The Ukrainian army is now a severely diminished force. Despite postponing elections far off into the future, the Ukrainian parliament cannot pass its latest, and unpopular, conscription bill. A one-off remark by Emmanuel Macron about the West sending troops to Ukraine was rebuffed by governments in Berlin, Warsaw, and Washington, D.C.
It was realists who warned over a decade ago what the drift of Western Ukrainian policy would mean for Ukraine. “The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path,” John Mearsheimer said in 2015, “and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.” So it has come to pass.
Ukraine-aid supporters like to talk in highly moralistic terms. But there is nothing more morally flippant than ignoring reality, or refusing to reconcile your desired ends with the means at hand. I wonder for how much longer they can manage the intellectual tension of denouncing those who “blame America first,” as they call a larger and larger share of their own countrymen Putinists, and accuse them of stabbing Ukraine in the back.