Foreign Affairs
The temporary gains in Kursk may turn into a liability—unless they entice the Americans into the fray.
Ukraine recently accepted the delivery of a half-dozen F-16s, and already one has crashed. Whatever the cause—ironically, the American plane might have been the victim of an American Patriot missile—the shootdown further undermines Kyiv’s claim that Wunderwaffe offer salvation in its war against Russia.
No doubt allied arms have helped sustain Ukraine’s spirited defense against its much larger neighbor. Now Ukrainian officials are pointing to Kiev’s seizure of the Kursk region in Russia as a reason for Washington to end range limits on the use of U.S. weapons. Reported POLITICO: “Ukraine’s invasion of Russia has flipped the gloomy narrative on the war, and Kyiv is using its battlefield success to launch a new pressure campaign on the U.S. to lift the last restrictions.” Indeed, Ukrainian officials reportedly are presenting a long list of potential ATACMS (long-range missile) targets, which probably number in the hundreds, to the Biden administration.
While the ability to hit farther and harder in Russia may raise Ukrainian morale, the ground battle will determine the conflict’s outcome, and there Kiev is losing. The Zelensky government risks permanent strategic failure in the east in return for temporary tactical success around Kursk. Moscow continues to gain land in Donbas, leaving it close to acquiring that territory in toto as well as securing Crimea. Kiev possesses neither the manpower nor the materiel necessary to regain the lost lands and retain the Kursk salient. Indeed, Ukraine’s troops in the latter are in danger of capture if not reinforced, yet there are few units to send when the Ukrainian military is retreating elsewhere.
While additional Western weapons wouldn’t deliver victory for Kyiv, they could expand or intensify the war, and that is not in America’s interest. The allies’ sympathies are understandably with Ukraine, despite NATO’s reckless push to Russia’s border. Yet their first responsibility is to their own nations, which is why they never fulfilled their infamous 2008 promise to bring Ukraine and Georgian into the transatlantic alliance. No one was prepared to go to war with Russia over either country. They shouldn’t do so today.
Yet the allied proxy war is slowly erasing the line between war and peace. Ukraine is still able to resist Russia only because of allied training and weaponry. Prior to the invasion Western policymakers joked that while they could not bring Ukraine into NATO, they were bringing NATO into Ukraine, arming and training the latter’s forces. Since February 2022, NATO countries have denuded their own arsenals to supply Kiev with weapons. Moreover, US and European governments have deployed troops and other forces on the ground in Ukraine, many as de facto combatants, providing intelligence and guiding high-tech weapons—which Kyiv wants to turn on Russia proper. For Moscow the allied fig leaf separating proxy and direct war is ever shrinking.
At the same time, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to do his best to drag the US into the war. In fall 2022, he approved a plan to destroy Germany’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline while blaming Russia and insisting the incident be treated as a casus belli by NATO. After that he charged Russia with a deadly strike on Poland by an errant Ukrainian missile, demanding that the allies enter the war. A couple weeks ago he again pushed Washington to drop restrictions on the use of US weapons, declaring: “The whole naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has crumbled these days.”
Ironically, the only good news regarding risks of an expanded war is that Putin evidently believes Russia is winning. Moscow won’t respond to Ukraine’s incursion by nuking its own territory, especially when it expects to recover its losses with profit by capturing Ukraine’s invading force. Moreover, so long as the allies’ assistance is helpful but not decisive, Putin has good reason to accept higher losses in men and materiel than to bomb the U.S. and NATO into the war. (Still possible, though, might be surreptitious retaliation against US bases in Germany.)
Similar restraint is evident in Moscow’s international behavior. Putin threatened to arm Washington’s adversaries, ranging from North Korea’s Kim Jong-un to Yemen’s Ansar Allah. Nevertheless, as long as Moscow enjoys cordial or at least civil relations with other states, including South Korea and Saudi Arabia, he appears to be keeping his missiles at home. (Technical assistance for, say, Pyongyang to improve its own ICBMs, remains possible and would be much harder to detect.)
Such forbearance would be unlikely to survive a looming Ukrainian victory on the battlefield—which highlights the danger of running a proxy war against a nuclear power in a conflict along its border which it deems vital, even existential. It doesn’t matter whether the allies believe Moscow should view the issue as warranting war. What matters is whether Moscow does so. The more aggressively the allies back Ukraine, the more they risk pushing the regime toward expansion and escalation of the conflict. Putin might be willing to risk all if he comes to fear Russia’s defeat and loss of Donbass and Crimea, his government’s collapse, and/or his ouster from office.
Alas, Ukraine’s effort to ensnare the West continues. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba visited Brussels, pressing European official to lobby Washington on the issue. He explained: “I want them to go back to their capitals…to get support to finally lift restrictions on long-range strikes on all legitimate military targets in Russia.” He also urged NATO members to defend Ukrainian airspace. Kiev has been aided and abetted by congressional solons more interested in the wishes of Ukraine’s government than the security of their constituents. So far President Joe Biden has been cautious, but the tragically addled president still has the power to take the U.S. into war.
Zelensky & Co. hope he will go wild before leaving office. Per POLITICO, “‘There’s some indication now that Biden might want to do something big on Ukraine—maybe lifting some of the restrictions—before the election now that he’s not running,’ one senior Ukrainian adviser said. ‘There’s no guarantee, but we’re hearing that he’s thinking about it’.” Kiev admits to playing on Biden’s ego. An unnamed official said, “What does the Biden administration want their legacy to be on Ukraine? They have a chance to make a change. And we’re advocating they make that change now.” Others wave the bloody shirt, blaming Washington for Russian attacks. Another Ukrainian cited “the Western powers,” telling the New York Post: “I won’t go as far as to say that they’re killing our children, but they are accomplices to these war crimes because they facilitate these war crimes—they make these crimes possible.”
However, securing America’s future should be Biden’s legacy. The first responsibility of all the allied states, including the US, is to their own people. It is not just a question of avoiding war with Russia today, though that objective alone is important enough to draw back from the Ukraine conflict. Washington also should consider the security order to emerge from the war and the shifting global balance of power.
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Reflecting the arrogance and myopia prevalent in America’s capital, for decades officials have sacrificed national security in pursuit of national primacy. U.S. policy has needlessly pushed Russia and China together into a fragile but loose alliance, shifted both countries toward Iran and, even more improbably, Yemen’s Houthis, and encouraged Moscow to reengage with and Beijing to relax pressure on Pyongyang. It will not be enough for the allies to end the war. They will need to rebuild relations with Moscow and encourage it to distance itself from China.
Such a strategy would no doubt trigger much wailing and gnashing of teeth in Ukraine and some allies. Nevertheless, Russia is too important to consign to the arms of America’s potential adversaries. The U.S. and Europeans have never allowed democracy and human rights to obstruct their perceived national interests. They regularly, and many cheerfully, do business with Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia, which is more repressive than Putin’s Russia and has killed more civilians in Yemen than Moscow has killed in Ukraine. Washington pays Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s Egypt billions of dollars annually to be an ally even as it imprisons tens of thousands of its critics, far more than detained in Putin’s Russia. Having provided the wherewithal for Ukraine to kill thousands of Russian military personnel, the allies will need to manage the difficult task of kissing and making up with Moscow, at least if they want the best chance to peacefully constrain the Chinese colossus.
The Russo–Ukrainian war is a modern tragedy. Unjustly begun by Moscow, it is an outgrowth of allied arrogance, a foolish determination to ignore Russian security concerns. After more than two years of fighting the allies should work to bring the conflict to a close. Rather than further inflame the contest, they should talk with Moscow on how to restore peace. And how to prevent a similar explosion elsewhere, both in the Middle East and Asia.
