The West — the United States, its NATO allies, and a few other nations — have greatly aided Ukraine in its heroic resistance to the Russian invasion, now in its 11th week.
Washington and its allies have openly supplied munitions and financial assistance to the Kyiv government, and on Monday President Joe Biden signed legislation adding billions more to the cause. Ukraine’s neighbors have absorbed millions of refugees, mainly women, children and the elderly and infirm.
Less obviously, the alliance appears to have supplied the Ukrainians with crucial bits of intelligence, which may be a key reason why the Russians are losing generals at a steady pace and why the flagship of their Black Sea fleet lies on the bottom.
The ever-tightening sanctions regime has been of less immediate impact in the war itself, but matters in what Lloyd Austin, secretary of defense, has described as the U.S. strategic goal: Weakening Russia so it can’t attempt another such invasion. The sanctions, if maintained, will ultimately lead to the loss of Russia’s chief market for its energy exports, the single largest piece of its economy.
All of this is valuable. But none of it would matter if the Ukrainian military were as soft and unmotivated as the Afghan army was when the elected Kabul government collapsed last year. NATO has not, and will not, send flesh and blood to fight by the Ukrainians’ side. That fight is their burden, and they are carrying it well.
Which means that the end game is not ours. The blood shed to defend Ukrainian soil is Ukrainian, and only the Zelenskyy government has the right to decide how, when and on what grounds the war ends — and its answer may be changing as Vladimir Putin’s vaunted reset to focus on the Donbas splutters.
Biden appears to understand that. Some of our allies, less so. French President Emmanuel Macron this week said the West must avoid “humiliating” Putin.
Macron is certainly better on the Ukrainian war than the candidate he recently defeated for reelection, the Putin- and Trump-aligned Marine Le Pen, but he is wrong on this factor.
Putin deserves no easy way out of his genocidal, criminal blunder. As matters stand, he has none. Getting out requires either admitting defeat and withdrawing to whatever line Volodymyr Zelenskyy permits — which would be humiliating — or getting deposed — which would probably be fatal.
If Zelenskyy wants to hold out for the return of the Crimean peninsula and the Donbas region to Ukrainian control, that’s his call. He doesn’t need Paris (or Washington) to tell him publicly what to do. And Putin’s fate should be at the end of the list of worries.
