The Ukraine war is entering its endgame, and Russia’s military efforts are faltering or failing. Time is on Ukraine’s side now, due to inflows of U.S. and NATO materiel and Russia’s continuing difficulties with mobilization and resupply. Now, more than ever, is the time to ratchet up diplomatic pressure and economic warfare, in order to provide Ukraine the ability to “trade sanctions for space” and bring an end to the war on their terms, not Russia’s.
It is May 16th, 2022, and it is day 81 of the Ukraine war. A series of turning points and startling military victories have put the Ukraine war, now, into its endgame footing.
As it stands, the battle of Kyiv is over, and Ukraine won. The battle of Kharkiv is over, and Ukraine won. Battles for the south of the country and for the Donetsk basin are ongoing, and there is a good risk that Ukraine is winning them. Ukrainian units in the north of the country have pushed all the way to the border with Russia.
Russia’s disinformation ecosystem, perhaps the best indicator of its strategic outlook, continues to maintain a blandly optimistic war-propaganda position that is starting to show edges of discontent and dismay as the country starts to absorb how nearly an entire battalion evaporated at the battle of Bilohorivka.
The sheer number of wounded, killed or captured Russian soldiers is straining the ability of the Russian disinformational state to keep its fundamental lies going.
American military aid is making a tangible difference on the ground in Ukraine, and Russia-friendly Republicans seem powerless to stop it. In a sign of the times that must have been quite galling for Republican lawmakers who voted against impeaching Trump for extorting Zelensky, “Cocaine Mitch” McConnell himself was out there in Kyiv doing a photo opportunity and looking fairly unhappy about it (though, to be fair, it is somewhat hard to tell with McConnell).
It’s a far cry from getting plush deals around RusAl plants in Kentucky, that’s for sure.
This is a moment when Russia is starting to very visibly falter and show weaknesses. It is the inglorious ending of a plan that stretches back six years, going back to Ukraine-oriented changes to the G.O.P. party platform in 2016, stretching through the shamefully pro-Russian Trump Presidency, extending through the Ukraine war in 2022.
That makes it extremely important, more now than ever, to maintain pressure on Russia. Let us recall the basis of this war: Russia is waging an elective, completely needless war of avowed cultural genocide and kleptocratic wealth extraction on a neighboring country less than a third its size. Its army indiscriminately bombards population centers, reduces entire cities to rubble, uses sexual violence as a weapon of war, and loots private property from civilians to support itself.
When this war ends Russia will still have an army that is several times larger than Ukraine’s army, absent a wildly improbable shift in strategic basis. Even if we repeated our historic $33 billion (now $40 billion) aid package to Ukraine every year, essentially giving them a yearly military budget larger than the entirety of Germany’s, they would still be behind Russia.
Nothing stops Russia from regrouping, re-building, and doing this again in a few years except political willpower and the support of its populace, which are not hard to engineer in a nation-state as pervaded by disinformation as Russia is. This means that Ukraine not only has to win this war, it has to win the next war, and the next; it has to not only win, but it has to win resoundingly, so clearly and incontrovertibly that it deters future wars.
Ukraine has to burn a lesson into Russia’s national memory so expensive and painful that it is undeniable, even by Russia’s nationalized disinformation industry.
That lesson needs to be: don’t fuck with Ukraine.
Teaching that lesson is the task that now confronts American policy towards Ukraine and the nations on Russia’s periphery.
A negotiated end-state to this war that rewards Russia’s aggression, even in the slightest, will be "spun” by Russia’s state-sponsored media outlets as a win in support of that future war. If the war ends with anything short of a crushing, painful loss and a stark repudiation of Russia’s imperial ambitions, we will be back here in less than a decade, judging by the length of the 2014-2022 interbellum period in Ukraine, and Ukraine and the world will have to be very, very lucky to repeat the successes of 2022 against an enemy that has learned from them.
America’s “everything but military force” approach of maximalist economic, diplomatic and partner-nation pressure we have undertaken is invalidated if Russia attains anything it can plausibly spin as a “win” out of its Ukraine war. Just as Russia’s 2016 election influence efforts in America resembled what it did to Ukraine in 2014, we’ll see in 2024 the reflections and strategic learning that Russia attains from this war.
This means America must continue to do our part, because this war is not only to protect Ukraine, it’s also punishing Russia for interference in our elections and deterring Russia from manipulating America again. The better the negotiated outcome to this war, the more solid the “don’t fuck with Ukraine” lesson is; and that lesson, by extension, protects us too.
So I believe, as an American citizen, that we need to be ready to put everything on the table at the service of teaching that lesson, including our sanctions against Russia.
As civilians, every sanction we apply, every designation we add to the SDN list, every Russian state-sponsored industry that we penalize, is another Ukrainian city that Zelensky can trade for; it’s another Ukrainian civilian whose lives we can protect for nearly free, because imposing targeted sanctions costs us so little. It’s a difference that you and I can make in this war, striking at the real lifeblood of this war, of all wars: money and greed.
As the Ukraine war enters its endgame, this is the point where our end of it needs to pick up tempo and lock in a victory for all of humankind against a genocidal nation-state-sized war machine fueled on lies and kleptocrat money.
This is not the time to go easy on sanctions against Russia’s billionaire liars, war profiteers, hatemongers, industrialized liars and genocide apologists.
This is the time to make that hurt even more.