Three years ago, Americans were cheering on Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian military, for very good reason. Imaginative defensive tactics were thwarting what the Russians thought would be an easy walk into Kyiv with their assault.
Ukrainians were firing from tree lines to halt lines of Russian tanks, targeting Russian generals who were using their cellphones, and eventually would use torpedo-carrying submersibles, to sink at least one Russian warship and damage others. Unable to defend their naval ships, Russia relocated them to more distant ports. That against a country without a Navy, but with ingenuity.
U.S. military leaders were saying that Ukraine, with foreign matériel support but no foreign troops, was crippling the Russian military to the U.S.’s great benefit.
Zelenskyy had declined personal safe passage, remaining to be an ever-visible leader of a country that Vladimir Putin was eager to bring firmly into the Russian fold. His leadership appealed to soldiers on the front lines and to heads of state as he marshaled European and U.S. support. Women and older men were taking fighting positions, and Ukrainian spirits were high.
Ukraine contains considerable mineral and agricultural wealth, and includes Russian language speakers along its eastern boundary with Russia. But it’s not difficult to imagine that it was Ukrainians’ relatively high standard of living and its political democracy that Putin did not want to have continued on Russia’s Western border. What he wasn’t delivering at home was too visible next door.
Across this country, blue and gold Ukrainian flags were on windows and car bumpers. Did what the Ukrainians were engaged in remind Americans of their forebears’ strive for independence from the British some 250 years ago?
Then the bloom faded. The Russian military leadership got smarter and regrouped, their factories producing weapons; hefty enlistment payments attracted men from poor towns and villages.
So, too, on the Ukrainian side, many more enlistees were needed. Ukraine was able to advance into Russia, where the Russians were unprepared, square miles it still holds. Russia occupies a narrow but meaningful strip of Ukraine.
Where is this now?
In the hands of a U.S. president who was never supportive of Ukraine, who accepts Russia as being able to define and control its sphere of influence, behind an authoritarian leader who uses violence to excise his opposition.
The U.S. president is doing that by favoring the Russians with the wild claim everyone knows is false that it was Ukraine that began the war and by opposing a U.N. resolution condemning its invasion.
The president, echoed by his vice president, insisted Zelenskyy thank the U.S. for its support, something he had done on numerous occasions, and agree to give up half its mineral wealth. The president had the cameras rolling in expectation of Zelenskyy’s capitulation, but it didn’t go that way. No side of a conflict will easily talk peace after being shouted at and excused.
As he has shown, the president is transactional, although not with partnerships, shared interests or soft diplomacy. He is forcing Ukraine to give up half a trillion dollars in mineral wealth for a few vague words of support.
Since then, the president has halted military aid and intelligence sharing to force Ukraine to roll over, and has threatened the temporary legal status of 240,000 Ukrainian refugees living in the U.S. who fled Russia’s war in Ukraine. Putin, not surprisingly, is fighting even harder for as many square miles as possible.
Despite Tuesday’s ceasefire agreement - if it holds, Ukraine’s future now looks to be in the hands of European leaders who, rightly, see Putin and Russia as the Ukrainians do, as a significant threat.
What Ukraine ought to be receiving in exchange for ending the fighting are European troops along its border with Russia as a trip wire, which is what the U.S. has in place in South Korea and in Germany, backed up with U.S.-made military matériel. No U.S. troops.
As significantly, it also ought to be included in the European Union, as the 28th country to collaborate on trade and environmental issues. Putin fears all of that, working with the West, of course, but it is not NATO. We hope that European nations can pull together to make both happen.
With firm negotiations, a trip wire and EU membership might be attained. The end of the fighting must have appeal for Russia. Its broad economy would regain its strength and its leadership would be better embraced.
But the United States has a president who is handing it all to Russia with nothing in return, as polls show, turning 180 degrees against Americans with their funding and supportive spirit for a country that for three years has stood up to Vladimir Putin’s aggression. Shameful.
