A Difference of Opinion

There seems to be a difference of opinion. In his address to Congress, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy outlined his goals in the war with Russia quite clearly. Victory means a return to the pre-2014 borders and the enemy is Russia. Many in Washington and the United States more broadly think the U. S. should do whatever President Zelenskyy wants in furtherance of that goal in opposition to that enemy. As David Ignatius observes in his Washington Post column, President Biden’s view is somewhat different. There are distinct limits to what the U. S. will provide Ukraine:

This war almost surely won’t end with the total elimination of Russian war power, which helps explain why Biden actively resists the rhetoric of “total victory.” He said so explicitly in Wednesday’s White House news conference, when a Ukrainian reporter asked whether he would give Kyiv long-distance missiles that could strike Russia and provide Ukraine “all capabilities it needs [to] liberate all territories rather sooner than later.”

Biden answered that giving Ukraine such potent attack weapons “would have a prospect of breaking up NATO.” He said that NATO allies are “not looking to go to war with Russia. They’re not looking for a third world war.” Biden put it in terms of what other allies want. But avoiding a direct conflict between the United States and Russia, even as we support Ukraine’s resistance, has been one of the president’s central war aims.

and Putin is the enemy:

There’s another subtle tension in how these two leaders envision this conflict. For Biden, it’s about stopping Vladimir Putin and what Biden called the Russian president’s “unprovoked, unjustified, all-out assault on the free people of Ukraine.” Once Putin realizes “it’s clear that he cannot possibly win this war,” Biden said, then Zelensky can “decide how he wants to end this war” and seek a “just peace.”

Zelensky offered a somewhat different formulation. Like dozens of Ukrainians with whom I’ve talked during two visits to Kyiv this fall, he appears to see the enemy not simply as Putin, but Russia itself. “The Russians will stand a chance to be free only when they defeat the Kremlin in their minds,” he told Congress. He described Ukraine’s success as a victory for Europeans — the free, Western world that Ukraine has wanted to join for centuries. “The Russian tyranny has lost control over us. And it will never influence our minds again,” Zelensky said.

Journalist Francisco Toro urges the United States to pursue the more maximal objectives:

Thankfully a complete—or near complete—victory for Ukraine is no pipe dream. Thanks to Western backing, Ukraine’s technological edge on the battlefield is proving decisive in ways Moscow failed to anticipate. The latest $1.8 billion weapons package making its way to Ukraine will only deepen the imbalance. Russian forces’ morale and material problems are real and worsening, and Putin has few options for addressing them. And while control over an increasingly russified Crimea looks likely to remain unresolved even in the best-case scenario for Ukraine, the prospect of repelling Russian forces from the whole of the Donbas no longer looks like a pipe dream.

Which are all good reasons to hope President Biden means what he says when he pledges to help Ukraine. Ukraine did not choose to begin this conflict, and nor did the West. But together, they can choose to win it.

What’s the U. S. interest? I might say that a prosperous Russia at peace with its neighbors and thirty years ago I thought that goal was achievable. I no longer believe that. I have more confidence in saying what is not in the U. S. interest:

• global thermonuclear war
• an even more nationalist regime in Russia
• extermination of the Ukrainians as an ethnicity
• a Ukraine that is a permanent U. S. dependency
• partition of Russia into a score of statelets, all squabbling with one another and their neighbors

Control of the Crimean peninsula and its role as the protector of ethnic Russians everywhere have been Russian policy goals for 200 years. The Russians are unlikely to relinquish them to sue for peace with Ukraine. Any of the outcomes in the list above are more likely than that.