Ukraine Aid for Negotiations to End the War
It's past time to begin negotiations to end this disastrous war. Congress should condition further aid on the beginning of peace talks.
We Americans can always count on our politicians and press to frame issues in terms of two absolutes. In the case of Ukraine, the Biden Administration and the pro-forever wars imperialists of the military, intelligence, censorship, industrial complex want to fight to the last drop of Ukrainian and Russian blood while they pocket millions in taxpayer dollars. Their opponents, mostly Republican Members of Congress and conservative/libertarian scholars, believe we should stop assisting Ukraine’s defense and abandon the country we helped found to re-unification with Russia.
Both of these positions are nonsensical. The Biden Administration and its supporters are delusional in believing that with more military assistance, Ukraine can militarily regain the lands it has so far lost in the war. To achieve that goal, the Ukrainian military will have to attack again, but conventional military theory holds that it takes at least a three-to-one advantage in men and materiel to win an offensive campaign. Unfortunately, it is Russia, not Ukraine, that probably has a greater than three to one advantage in men and weapons. Ukraine’s failed Summer 2023 offensive proved that it lacks the resources to break the current stalemate. Even with a substantial upgrade in quantity and quality of weaponry, Ukraine is far from repeating the heady days of the Spring 2022 counteroffensive that inflicted massive losses on the Russian invaders and regained substantial lost territory. Facing serious manpower shortages, it seems that even with new weapons, the best Ukraine can hope for is to hold the current line.
As unrealistic as the proponents of more military aid for Ukraine are, those who oppose further assistance appear determined to compound the Biden Administration’s early Russia policy mistakes that utterly failed to deter the invasion. For Biden’s first year in office, his stance on Ukraine was the antithesis of Teddy Roosevelt’s advice of “speaking softly and carrying a big stick.” Biden’s officials combined blowhard rhetoric favoring rapid Ukrainian accession to NATO with appeasement by importing Russian oil, begging Russia for help with Iranian negotiations, and approving the Nordstream II pipeline. Team Biden added to this talk loudly with an arm the size of a toothpick approach the hopeless incompetence of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Ending aid to Ukraine would return America’s posture to its pre-war stance of appeasing Russia, quite likely enabling further Russian military gains and possibly substantial political advances as well.
This posture is also utterly dishonorable. The United States is responsible for Ukraine becoming an independent state after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian military personnel fought alongside Americans in both Afghanistan and Iraq losing eighteen soldiers killed in the latter campaign. Moreover, the United States has made important investments in training Ukrainian soldiers, creating the foundation for Ukraine’s successful repulse of Russia’s initial invasion.
Fortunately, the debate over additional military aid for Ukraine offers an opportunity for the United States to leverage the parties into a negotiation to end a war that has taken tens of thousands of lives, maimed many thousands more, created millions of refugees, and reduced standards of living for millions more around the world. Amending the Ukraine aid provisions in the current bill to require ongoing peace negotiations for disbursement of any further military aid appropriated for Ukraine would incentivize Presidents Biden and Zelensky to open peace talks.
Without such an incentive, both presidents will pursue the war indefinitely because both would view a request for peace negotiations as an embarrassing admission of failure. President Zelensky emotionally broke off negotiations that reportedly had been on the verge of ending the war with Russia, an agreement whose terms are said to have returned all the lands Russia had captured in its initial failed invasion. Since that decision, Ukraine has lost even more territory to Russia and lost tens of thousands of casualties. For his part, President Biden, who, through British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, encouraged Zelensky to break off the initial negotiations, shares the same problem.
Putin, too, has no reason to ask for negotiations. He is sitting pretty; the battlefield ratios are all in Russia’s favor and the Russian economy has stabilized, despite massive US and EU sanctions. For its own purposes, China is supporting Russia and Iran’s assistance has been valuable. Putin undoubtedly believes time is on his side, but the probability is high that he would agree to negotiations, just to avoid giving NATO countries further reasons to increase aid to Ukraine. And Russia also has its own China challenges.
Once incentivized to begin peace talks, Biden and Zelensky conveniently have a means to organize them. The consultation mechanism in the Budapest Amendment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed by Russia, Ukraine, the UK, and the USA, provides a useful modality for convoking Russia to a first round of negotiations.
While the opportunity to start a process to end a globally disastrous war is now, we should not hope for such an outcome from the Ukraine aid debate. The elites in Washington are far more interested in staging kabuki plays based on false dichotomies than in finding real solutions. For decades they have made millions at the expense of death and destruction in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Why would they want peace, when war pays better?