[ But if the war does not end soon, its dangers will increase.
Negotiations need to begin... “To make concessions to Russia would
be submitting to aggression,”... “To make none would be submitting
to insanity.”]
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THE WAR IN UKRAINE MAY BE IMPOSSIBLE TO STOP. AND THE U.S. DESERVES
MUCH OF THE BLAME.  
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Christopher Caldwell
May 31, 2022
New York Times
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_ But if the war does not end soon, its dangers will increase.
Negotiations need to begin... “To make concessions to Russia would
be submitting to aggression,”... “To make none would be submitting
to insanity.” _

Ukrainian fighters of the Odin Unit, including some foreign fighters,
survey a destroyed Russian tank in Irpin, Ukraine, in March., Credit:
Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

 

In the Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro this month, Henri Guaino, a top
adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy when he was president of France, warned
that Europe’s countries, under the shortsighted leadership of the
United States, were “sleepwalking” into war with Russia. Mr.
Guaino was borrowing a metaphor that the historian Christopher Clark
used to describe the origins of World War I.

Naturally, Mr. Guaino understands that Russia is most directly to
blame for the present conflict in Ukraine. It was Russia that massed
its troops on the frontier last fall and winter and — having
demanded from NATO a number of Ukraine-related security guarantees
that NATO rejected — began the shelling and killing on Feb. 24.

But the United States has helped turn this tragic, local and ambiguous
conflict into a potential world conflagration. By misunderstanding the
war’s logic, Mr. Guaino argues, the West, led by the Biden
administration, is giving the conflict a momentum that may be
impossible to stop.

He is right.

In 2014 the United States backed an uprising — in its final stages a
violent uprising — against the legitimately elected Ukrainian
government of Viktor Yanukovych, which was pro-Russian. (The
corruption of Mr. Yanukovych’s government has been much adduced by
the rebellion’s defenders, but corruption is a perennial Ukrainian
problem, even today.) Russia, in turn, annexed Crimea, a historically
Russian-speaking part of Ukraine that since the 18th century had been
home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

One can argue about Russian claims to Crimea, but Russians take them
seriously. Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Soviet fighters died
defending the Crimean city of Sevastopol from European forces during
two sieges — one during the Crimean War and one during World War II.
In recent years, Russian control of Crimea has seemed to provide a
stable regional arrangement: Russia’s European neighbors, at least,
have let sleeping dogs lie.

But the United States never accepted the arrangement. On Nov. 10,
2021, the United States and Ukraine signed a “charter on strategic
partnership” that called for Ukraine to join NATO, condemned
“ongoing Russian aggression” and affirmed an “unwavering
commitment” to the reintegration of Crimea into Ukraine.

That charter “convinced Russia that it must attack or be
attacked,” Mr. Guaino wrote. “It is the ineluctable process of
1914 in all its terrifying purity.”

This is a faithful account of the war that President Vladimir Putin
has claimed to be fighting. “There were constant supplies of the
most modern military equipment,” Mr. Putin said at Russia’s annual
Victory Parade on May 9, referring to the foreign arming of Ukraine.
“The danger was growing every day.”

Whether he was right to worry about Russia’s security depends on
one’s perspective. Western news reports tend to belittle him.

The rocky course of the war in Ukraine thus far has vindicated Mr.
Putin’s diagnosis, if not his conduct. Though Ukraine’s military
industry was important in Soviet times, by 2014 the country barely had
a modern military at all. Oligarchs, not the state, armed and funded
some of the militias sent to fight Russian-supported separatists in
the east. The United States started arming and training Ukraine’s
military, hesitantly at first under President Barack Obama. Modern
hardware began flowing during the Trump administration, though, and
today the country is armed to the teeth.

Since 2018, Ukraine has received U.S.-built Javelin antitank missiles,
Czech artillery and Turkish Bayraktar drones and other
NATO-interoperable weaponry. The United States and Canada have lately
sent up-to-date British-designed M777 howitzers that fire GPS-guided
Excalibur shells. President Biden just signed into law a $40 billion
military aid package.

In this light, mockery of Russia’s battlefield performance is
misplaced. Russia is not being stymied by a plucky agricultural
country a third its size; it is holding its own, at least for now,
against NATO’s advanced economic, cyber and battlefield weapons.

And this is where Mr. Guaino is correct to accuse the West of
sleepwalking. The United States is trying to maintain the fiction that
arming one’s allies is not the same thing as participating in
combat.

In the information age, this distinction is growing more and more
artificial. The United States has provided intelligence used to kill
Russian generals. It obtained targeting information that helped to
sink the Russian Black Sea missile cruiser the Moskva, an incident in
which about 40 seamen were killed.

And the United States may be playing an even more direct role. There
are thousands of foreign fighters in Ukraine. One volunteer spoke to
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation this month of fighting alongside
“friends” who “come from the Marines, from the States.” Just
as it is easy to cross the line between being a weapons supplier and
being a combatant, it is easy to cross the line from waging a proxy
war to waging a secret war.

In a subtler way, a country trying to fight such a war risks being
drawn from partial into full involvement by force of moral reasoning.
Perhaps American officials justify exporting weaponry the way they
justify budgeting it: It is so powerful that it is dissuasive. The
money is well spent because it buys peace. Should bigger guns fail to
dissuade, however, they lead to bigger wars.

A handful of people died in the Russian takeover of Crimea in 2014.
But this time around, matched in weaponry — and even outmatched in
some cases — Russia has reverted to a war of bombardment that looks
more like World War II.

Even if we don’t accept Mr. Putin’s claim that America’s arming
of Ukraine is the reason the war happened in the first place, it is
certainly the reason the war has taken the kinetic, explosive, deadly
form it has. Our role in this is not passive or incidental. We have
given Ukrainians cause to believe they can prevail in a war of
escalation.

Thousands of Ukrainians have died who likely would not have if the
United States had stood aside. That naturally may create among
American policymakers a sense of moral and political obligation — to
stay the course, to escalate the conflict, to match any excess.

The United States has shown itself not just liable to escalate but
also inclined to. In March, Mr. Biden invoked God before insisting
that Mr. Putin “cannot remain in power.” In April, Defense
Secretary Lloyd Austin explained that the United States seeks to
“see Russia weakened.”

Noam Chomsky warned against the paradoxical incentives of such
“heroic pronouncements” in an April interview. “It may feel like
Winston Churchill impersonations, very exciting,” he said. “But
what they translate into is: Destroy Ukraine.”

For similar reasons Mr. Biden’s suggestion that Mr. Putin be tried
for war crimes is an act of consummate irresponsibility. The charge is
so serious that, once leveled, it discourages restraint; after all, a
leader who commits one atrocity is no less a war criminal than one who
commits a thousand. The effect, intended or not, is to foreclose any
recourse to peace negotiations.

The situation on the battlefield in Ukraine has evolved to an awkward
stage. Both Russia and Ukraine have suffered heavy losses. But each
has made gains, too. Russia has a land bridge to Crimea and control of
some of Ukraine’s most fertile agricultural lands and energy
deposits, and in recent days has held the battlefield momentum.
Ukraine, after a robust defense of its cities, can expect further NATO
support, know-how and weaponry — a powerful incentive not to end the
war anytime soon.

But if the war does not end soon, its dangers will increase.
“Negotiations need to begin in the next two months,” Henry
Kissinger, the former U.S. secretary of state, warned
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week, “before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be
easily overcome.” Calling for a return to the status quo ante
bellum, he added, “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be
about the freedom of Ukraine but a new war against Russia itself.”

In this, Mr. Kissinger is on the same page as Mr. Guaino. “To make
concessions to Russia would be submitting to aggression,” Mr. Guaino
warned. “To make none would be submitting to insanity.”

The United States is making no concessions. That would be to lose
face. There’s an election coming. So the administration is closing
off avenues of negotiation and working to intensify the war. We’re
in it to win it. With time, the huge import of deadly weaponry,
including that from the newly authorized $40 billion allocation, could
take the war to a different level. President Volodymyr Zelensky of
Ukraine warned in an address to students this month that the bloodiest
days of the war were coming.

_[CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL is a contributing Opinion writer for The Times
and a contributing editor at The Claremont Review of Books. He is the
author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration,
Islam and the West
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and “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
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* Ukraine war
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* Ukraine
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* Russia
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* Vladimir Putin
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* Volodymyr Zelensky
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* NATO
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* Nuclear war
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* nuclear weapons
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* Europe
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* U.S. foreign policy
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* U.S. military policy
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* Biden Administration
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* peace movement
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* negotiations
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