Ukraine is doing the unthinkable: winning its war against Russia. I doubt it will achieve its war aim of removing all Russian soldiers from all its territory, especially Crimea, but it certainly has Russia on the run.
For the first two years of the war, the Europeans, and especially Biden, simultaneously poured billions of dollars of weapons for the country’s defense and restricted the use of those weapons so heavily that the inevitable result was a bloody stalemate and a forever war.
Fighting Russia until the last Ukrainian died. It was deeply cynical.
My own attitude to the Ukraine War was mixed, but it could be summed up pretty easily: fighting to the last Ukrainian in a war destined to remain a stalemate was immoral, and I still believe that Ukraine will have to concede some token territory in the Russian-speaking eastern flank to end the war.
I think Trump was right to require the Europeans to put their money where their mouth is on the war. He didn’t cut off arms for Ukraine, but has weaned them from US support, selling the weapons they can pay for and imposing few restrictions on how they use them.
The unanticipated result has been that Ukraine has become one of the premier military innovators in history, because necessity is the mother of invention. While the United States still dominates the world in what is called “exquisite” military technology, Ukraine now dominates in cost-effective weaponry and tactics.
We should, and I mean this seriously, buy weapons and expertise from the Ukrainians, as some Gulf countries have.
Ukraine’s mastery of battlefield drones is already legendary, and they keep getting better in a way that a big, lumbering and corrupt Russian military cannot. Much of that has to do with the massive diversity in Ukraine’s drone industry, and its direct connection to the troops at the front, who can get tweaks to the drones directly from the manufacturers without long, drawn out procurement stumbling blocks.
It’s more SpaceX than ULA or Boeing. Rapid iteration.
It’s not just battlefield drones, though, at which Ukraine has begun to excel. It is striking deep into Russia in a way that it couldn’t when Biden was helping direct the war, and mostly with its homegrown drones. Putin is personally scared of these drones, and he should be. He has been hiding out, and had to negotiate a cease-fire with Ukraine to cover the time of the “Victory Day Parade” on May 9th, and he still looked quite strained and quickly exited, with the shortest parade in recent memory.
One problem that Ukraine had was that the US had no strategic interest in defending the country. However just its cause, it was always Europe’s war, and Ukraine served more as a money laundering operation for Democrats than as some sort of strategic bulwark against the Russian Bear, which really poses no military threat to the United States or ever, really, NATO.
It’s ludicrous to believe that a military that can’t defeat Ukraine, even when it had supply lines immune to attack, poses any serious threat to Europe.
But now Ukraine has something to sell, and something very valuable at that. It has technology and expertise that we need badly, as has been shown in the Iran war. Like Israel, it has a unique niche that when combined with US military mastery in most areas of warfare, is a force multiplier.
In other words, it is becoming a strategic asset, not a supplicant.
Our beef with Russia is more than Putin is a bad man who runs a bad regime, not that he presents much of a threat to us. If Biden’s strategic aim was to cut Russia down to size, that aim was achieved in 2022-23. As far as I can tell, the European aim is to have a boogieman to rally against. Eastasia, as it were.
Which is ironic, since the real strategic threat is China, the country that the Europeans want to ally with now.
Ukraine is not just having success on the battlefield. It has changed the strategic equation, and it has done so in response to Trump’s skepticism about the war.
Trump, perhaps inadvertently, did them an enormous favor by weaning them off US charity.
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