America and NATO viewed Ukraine through the prism of Iraq and Afghanistan—two countries that seemed to lack the will to fight for themselves. They did not realize: Ukraine is very different.
“We must get aid to Ukraine NOW,” tweeted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). “No half-measures.”
“Please NATO leaders, send all MIG fighter jets that we have—70 altogether, 27 alone in Poland—to Ukraine right now. NOW!” added Michael McFaul, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia under President Obama and now a Professor of Political Science at Stanford.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must “put the Ukraine aid bill on the floor Monday for the U.S. to send desperately needed military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine now,” agreed Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah).
“Waiting on the congressional calendar is unacceptable when people are dying,” he tweeted.
Finally, albeit quite belatedly, America and NATO are arming the Ukrainians. What started out as a token gesture designed simply to show solidarity and friendship with Ukraine has morphed into a serious and sustained effort to enable the Ukrainians to fight off a brutal Russian invasion.
Will it be too little too late? Let us hope not. But it is instructive to understand why the West has been so tardy and myopic about the moral, military, and geo-strategic necessity of arming Ukraine early and earnestly.
The reason is Iraq and Afghanistan. Old generals sometimes mistakenly fight the last war. America and NATO viewed Ukraine through the prism of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The West’s two most recent wars required many American and NATO “boots on the ground” for more than a decade to achieve, ultimately, very little. Western policymakers feared that Ukraine would be another allegedly hopeless cause not worth the hassle and the expense.
The expectation was that, in the face of a vastly superior Russian military force, the Ukrainians would run, hide, and fold—just as, candidly, many Iraqis and many Afghans had abandoned the battlefield in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
“Three U.S. officials have told Newsweek they expect Ukraine’s capital Kyiv to fall to incoming Russian forces within days, and the country’s resistance to be effectively neutralized soon thereafter…
“They expect Kyiv to be taken within 96 hours, and then the leadership of Ukraine to follow in about a week’s time.”
That was written Feb. 24, in the early hours of the Russian invasion. Today, 10 days later, March 5, retired Army four-star General Jack Keane says that Russian military forces are “not even close” to Kyiv.
Ukrainians Fight. “They have not been able to encircle the city, which is their plan,” Keane told Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot on Fox News.
The Ukrainians have held them up… You just can’t give them enough credit… They’re standing off a formidable force in the north [of Ukraine], and that force has stalled.
The [Russians] have lost their operational momentum, and there’s nobody behind them.
I mean, there’s not 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 troops that they’re [the Russians] gonna be able to bring up here. They [the Russians] have committed their forces…
So when Zelensky’s screaming [that] he needs arms and ammunition, and the rest of it, we better be getting it to him.
Because he has real opportunity here to do some serious damage to the Russians, and it certainly, [will] impact what an occupation would look like.
Volodymyr Zelensky. Western policymakers, obviously, did not know or understand Ukraine. They did not know Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and they did not understand the Ukrainian people.
Far from running, hiding, and folding, Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have been profiles in courage, tenacity and determination.
“I need ammunition, not a ride,” said Zelensky when the United States offered to evacuate him from the country, warning that Russian mercenaries had been sent to find and assassinate him.
France 24 reports from Kyiv:
“Our fighting spirit is 120 percent. We’re ready to defend our country. “We’re not going to surrender. Never,” says Mikhail, a military engineer.
“Eight years of war in Donbas and still Putin hasn’t admitted his troops were there. But in those eight years, the Ukrainian military has learned how to fight its vile enemy. And now the Russians are suffering heavy losses.”
Another soldier says, “We’re not afraid. We’ve grown tired of fear. We have no other choice but to defend our country. We have to win for our next generation of children—for our future and our freedom.”
The New York Times reports:
In a matter of days, Kyiv went from a busy, cosmopolitan European capital to a war zone—with many citizens abandoning their day jobs and taking up the arms being shipped in en masse.
Now, the newly armed civilians and members of various paramilitary groups are fighting under the loose command of the military in an organization called the Territorial Defense Forces.
“The national call to arms and the mobilization of ordinary citizens to repel the Russian invader does not have any obvious parallels in recent global conflicts,”Mats Berdal, a professor of conflict and security studies at King’s College London, said.
Indeed, Ukraine ain’t Iraq or Afghanistan, and Western policymakers should have known this. Iraq and Afghanistan were, in many ways, civil wars within existing countries. Ukraine, by contrast, is being invaded by a foreign country, Russia, that seeks to conquer and subjugate it.
Ukrainians recall the horrid brutality of life under Soviet occupation during the Cold War, notes Eugene Bondarenko, a lecturer at the University of Michigan’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literature.
Thus they see Russia’s latest attempt to subjugate them “as nothing less than an existential threat… Putin has come to destroy Ukrainian culture, language, society and statehood. That’s why Ukraine fights,” Bondarenko explains.
Cohen and Clausewitz. “Why did so many highly intelligent and educated observers get so much wrong?” asks Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
In large part because of the conventional Western “focus on technology at the expense of the human element in war.” Cohen references Carl von Clausewitz’s classic On War to understand why Ukraine ain’t Iraq or Afghanistan.
“War,” Cohen writes, echoing Clausewitz,
is a contest of wills; it is unpredictable; it is the domain of accident and contingency; nothing goes as planned; and events are smothered in a fog created by misinformation and fear.
Patriotic fervor, hatred of the invader, and knowledge of place and home weigh a great deal, and thus far so they have.
But a passionate desire for freedom and independence, coupled with an indomitable will to win, can carry a people on so far.
Brute Russian force and a clear Russian willingness to commit war crimes ultimately will prevail—unless America and NATO can rush arms and equipment to Ukraine fast enough to alter the political and military equation.
Will the West succeed or will it be a day late and a dollar short, as they say? We don’t know. Time will tell. Stay tuned.
What we do know is that the war in Ukraine is very different from the recent American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the West needs to respond accordingly.
Feature photo credit: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky (L) and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin (R), courtesy of Newsweek.