One of the biggest problems with modern Irish political culture is the degree to which relatively sensible questions get conflated endlessly with extremism: People fear asking basic questions about immigration, for example, lest it be assumed that they are full-on “far right”. During covid, to question lockdowns and vaccine mandates was to risk being considered a full-on “anti vaxxer”. And now, in the era of the Ukraine war, almost anything short of unquestioning support for giving the Ukrainians everything they seek is often conflated with being “pro Putin”.
Yet the war in Ukraine has been rumbling on now for approaching two years. That fact alone is to Ukraine’s great credit – but it is not at all to the west’s credit. The Ukrainians have fought bravely and doggedly and held the once-vaunted Russian army to a bloody stalemate. Ukrainian and Russian blood, not western blood.
Since the war began, the west has pursued a policy of arming Ukraine to aid it in resisting the Russian advance. This policy has been – when it comes to stalling the Russians – fantastically successful. The bottom line is that despite tens of thousands of casualties on both sides, and billions of dollars in expended munitions, the front lines of the conflict have barely moved in any significant way since the first few months of the war, with the honourable and notable exception of Ukraine’s surprise Kherson counter-offensive in the spring of this year – but even that heralded just more entrenched stalemate.
It should be clear to even the most casual observer of the conflict that both sides – the Russians, and the western backed Ukrainian army – have the military resources to sustain themselves in almost perpetual stalemate, so long as western support for Ukraine holds, and neither side eventually runs out of young men’s lives to throw away.
Yet for all the support the west has given Ukraine, it has remained conspicuously reticent to give them the weaponry that Ukraine says it needs to conduct effective attacking operations. Ukraine’s summer counter-offensive did not get very far – evidence to pro-Russian eyes that the country should simply give up, but evidence to Ukrainian eyes that the west is asking it to do what the west would never do itself: Conduct a large-scale offensive operation without the benefit of an effectively dominant air force. No NATO operation would ever be conducted, the Ukrainians point out, without absolute air superiority established first. They are right about that.
The west is reluctant to give the Ukrainians air power because the west still fears the conflict escalating, and fears the Russian reaction to a comprehensive defeat of the Russian Army on the battlefield. Thus everyone appears to be in a catch-22: Nobody is strong enough to win the war, because the side that could end the stalemate doesn’t want to, and the side that wants to end the stalemate isn’t strong enough to do so.
So what’s the endgame? Hope the Russians eventually give up?
Silly as it sounds, that really does appear to be it: Western and Ukrainian hopes (to the extent that the two are united) appear increasingly to be pinned on revolts and unrest within the Russian Army undoing Putin’s adventure, rather than Ukrainian battlefield successes. Students of Russian history will be aware that the army does have something of a habit of eventually turning its guns and its anger inwards, and abandoning the front lines – but there’s little enough evidence that this is about to happen any time soon in the current conflict. Nor is there any evidence that Russia lacks the economic firepower to keep its troops supplied for at least the next few years.
Peace negotiations don’t seem especially likely either, for the simple reason that the Ukrainians have zero reason to believe that any kind of Russian settlement would be either permanent, or in good faith. Why give the Russians some land for peace now, they’d argue, when the Russians might simply use that peace to rebuild their forces for another go in 2029 or 2030?
This, I suspect, is part of the reason for the absolutism around the debate. These are difficult questions, to which there is and has been no real answer. “Support Ukraine” then has become a mantra which means precious little – it does not, after all, mean giving Ukraine the tools it needs to win. Permanent stalemate which cannot be questioned is a bad outcome for everybody – but most of all those brave Ukrainian men and women giving their lives daily in a cause which seems to carry little hope of outright victory.
It also makes all those visits by western leaders to Ukraine a little bit sickening: If “supporting Ukraine” means bleeding it slowly so as not to offend Moscow, then we should really start to question whether the support being provided is support at all.
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