The Great War in Ukraine
Photo: Getty Images
One year gone, with no end in sight
by Ross Barkan
It is difficult to write about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For me, this has less to do with the geopolitical complexity of the region or even the war’s horrors, of which there are many. As the one-year anniversary of the war whisked by and my fingers lay still, I considered, for perhaps the first time in my life, the degree of impotence inherent in my work. My words, really, were going to change nothing, and that is the nature of attempting to craft an argument about slaughter abroad. Russia certainly isn’t listening to me, and the American and Ukrainian governments have their own prerogatives, freed, for now at least, from the judgments of any prying media. This is the first war in which I have felt mature enough to cobble together an analysis. I was too young for the heat of Iraq. Afghanistan began around the same time and dragged well into my adulthood. And now here we are with Russia and Ukraine, with no end in sight.
That is the point, really. My last attempt to grapple with the war’s contours came in the late summer, when I again urged an aggressive American and European-led attempt at a diplomatic resolution to save future lives. When this piece was published, it was roundly mocked because Ukraine had launched a startling and successful counter-offensive, and the talk, in America at least, had picked up that Ukraine could win the war outright, repelling Russia from not just the land they seized in early 2022 but from the Crimea entirely. To those with the most moral clarity, always the internationalists, it was a time for belief that was almost religious in its power—certainly, at the minimum, in its defiance of a darker logic. Russia could be beaten because it had to be beaten, because that is how a narrative-driven world must resolve itself. Vladimir Putin, the vile autocrat, must be punished, and he will break, inevitably, against the tidal might of the West. “If the Ukrainians don’t simply hold out against Russia but actually defeat Russia’s massive army and force it to retreat, the positive reverberations will be felt across the globe,” Francis Fukuyama wrote last September. “Populist nationalists around the world, from Viktor Orbán to Matteo Salvini to Marine Le Pen to Donald Trump, have expressed admiration for Putin’s style of strongman rule.”
“Ukraine will win. Slava Ukraini!”
President Joe Biden’s recent trip to Kyiv reflected this zeal. Biden declared that Ukraine “must triumph,” since he’s already spearheaded the more than $75 billion in American humanitarian and military aid sent to Ukraine since the start of the war. The military aid, in particular, has continued to swell, with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, making ever escalating demands that are, barring a no-fly zone, eventually met. Among congressional Democrats, D.C. foreign policy analysts, and neoconservative Republicans, this is the unshakable consensus. Disagreement is viewed with suspicion or outright hostility; since far-right, isolationist Republicans have taken up the cause of attempting to cut off American aid to Ukraine, the idea of conditioning future packages or tapering them off is met with tremendous disdain. World War II, the convenient antecedent, is trotted out, and those who attempt to rationalize endgames for the war that don’t resemble the last ten minutes of a Netflix mini-series are dismissed as Neville Chamberlains quaking in Hitler’s wake. Appeasement, the greatest of all sins—never forget.
Yet here we are. As I write this, Russia and Ukraine are suffering heavy losses in the battle for an eastern Ukrainian city called Bakhmut. The BBC calls it a “war of attrition” which means, quite plainly, the side that can endure suffering the longest will win. The crackpot realists will tell you victory is within reach, that the American proxy war with Russia must be executed, fully, if any lasting peace is to be had. Months ago, calling it a proxy war would have also kicked up a good deal of anger—Ukraine, alone, is fighting for its freedom!—but we are beyond the point of those illusions, mostly. The United States funds the war effort, gifts the intelligence, and trains the troops. This all has the taste of Vietnamization. Perhaps it will all work out soon and Russia will be brought to heel. The economic sanctions, at last, will succeed, and Russia will be broken and isolated, a great power bleeding out.