The Obama administration will be remembered for a number of disgraces in foreign affairs, prominent among them its terrible deal with Iran and its dithering over the war in Syria. Deserving of a place on that list is America’s acquiescence in Russia’s attack on Ukraine, to which the Trump administration may finally be mounting a bit of resistance.
In the case of Ukraine, the United States sat by while the Russians carried out a de facto occupation of the country’s eastern territory and simply annexed the Crimean peninsula to the south. Vladimir Putin didn’t acquire these territories by conventional invasion. If he had mounted an open conquest, he might have provoked Western indignation and inspired more help for Kiev. That is not his way. In eastern Ukraine, Moscow trained and funded pro-Russian elements within the Donbas region, urged them to violence against Kiev’s authority, and sent Russian soldiers in to control the unrest they had instigated.
It worked brilliantly—thanks first to Barack Obama’s reluctance to risk any confrontation anywhere in the world, and second to Donald Trump’s double-mindedness on the subject of Russia. The ceasefire ostensibly in place was negotiated in Minsk in 2015. But as the U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations, Kurt Volker, made clear this week, there has been no ceasefire.
“A lot of people think that this has somehow turned into a sleepy, frozen conflict, and it’s stable, and now we have Minsk agreements and there’s a ceasefire,” Volker told the Atlantic Council on December 19. “That’s completely wrong. It is a crisis.” One that worsened this year: 2017, he said, has been the most violent year since the conflict started in 2014. To date, more than 10,000 are dead as a consequence of a conflict many in the West have forgotten.
As in Syria, so in Ukraine: Russia is actively funding and inciting a proxy war on the soil of another country as Western democracies look the other way. The aim in Syria is to establish a client state; the aim in Ukraine is to grab land.
In September, Putin suggested sending U.N. peacekeepers into the region but deploying them only along the line of conflict between Russian and Ukrainian forces, 50 miles or more into Ukraine’s territory—thus in effect acceding to Russia’s occupation of the land east of that line. The Trump administration wisely didn’t take the bait.
There are two possibilities for progress in eastern Ukraine. The first, favored by Volker and most other foreign policy leaders, is to deploy peacekeepers throughout the disputed territory and so create the stability necessary for free and fair elections to determine whether eastern Ukraine should become the pro-Russian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. These separatist “republics” staged referendums in 2014 and proclaimed independence from Ukraine, but most serious observers regarded those votes as fraudulent. We doubt any deployment of U.N. peacekeepers can ensure a more legitimate outcome.
The other possibility is to face the reality that Ukraine is fighting a defensive war for its own territory. The United States and its allies can sell arms to Ukraine and give the struggling republic a fighting chance against Russian expansionism. If the conflict becomes sufficiently troublesome for Putin, he may back off. Of course, he may not. But he’s certain to stay if Ukraine remains largely defenseless and the West remains silent.
For three years Ukraine has begged the United States for defensive weaponry, but the Obama and Trump administrations wavered. The reasons for their indecision escape us. Russian tanks and artillery are on Ukrainian soil. Russian proxies create mayhem. Ukraine long sought NATO membership with bipartisan U.S. support. What reason could justify our refusal to aid the victim, other than to make nice with the aggressor?
For months, the Pentagon and State Department have urged the White House to sign off on a plan to supply Ukraine with weaponry to stave off what is in fact an invasion of its territory. Congress has long backed either the sale or provision of such weaponry to Kiev. This week, at last, the Trump administration approved the sale of some lethal defensive weaponry to our Ukrainian allies—sniper rifles, parts, and ammunition. There are further administrative hurdles, but initial signs suggest that the president himself has been persuaded by his secretaries of Defense and State to back Ukraine. The new policy may have been influenced by Canada’s decision, taken in November but not made public till mid-December, to approve arms sales to Ukraine. Others are likely to follow suit.
The first Cold War consisted of a great many hot wars and involved this nation in some terrible mistakes but also in some honorable victories. America won the Cold War by refusing to pretend that it wasn’t a war. If we are now in a second Cold War with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, we must again refuse to cry “peace, peace” when there is no peace.
