Ukraine needs help. Republicans won't provide it.
Plus: A conversation with Tim Mak about new developments in Kyiv.
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By Bradley S. Klein and Scott G. Nelson
Today begins year three of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — the catastrophic continuation of a war that Vladimir Putin started in 2014 with his initial military offensive in Crimea and the Donbas. This awful anniversary, and the death last week of anti-corruption activist Aleksei Navalny, should give every American pause.
As Russia finally begins to gain ground in a new military offensive in Ukraine, and as Putin’s domestic repression intensifies, the political stakes of complacency, inaction and even worse (aiding and abetting) for the West, and particularly for the US in a most consequential election year, rise by the hour. Pausing to take stock at the war’s two-year mark must involve remembering why the West developed institutional capacities such as NATO to forestall attacks against societies that honor sovereignty and the rule of law. These attacks aim to degrade democracy, not only in Ukraine, but across the globe.
Perhaps no more clarifying example of the high stakes we face here is the fate of Russia itself. We have known for years that Putin is unafraid to kill any opponent, often in dramatic fashion — whether by defenestration, a chemical nerve agent like Novichok, or an airplane crash. The regime is now tilting from mere authoritarianism into totalitarianism, a category of political rule reserved for police states in which the populace is subservient to ruling authorities.
In the 1930s, as fascism was building in Germany, citizens were not just becoming more docile — they willed the subjugation of civil society to a vicious party apparatus that compelled obedience to a personalist regime. Putin seems not to enjoy this level of fanatical support, but his means of domestic repression may require no more than widespread public acquiescence. Whatever the means, the end result is a politics antithetical to everything to which Western democracies aspire. The longer it persists, the more it becomes a model and a source of support for would-be autocrats everywhere, including in the United States.
The stakes are further clarified by Republicans’ inaction in Congress on our long-promised commitments to fund Ukraine in its defense of its sovereignty and its efforts to evict Russian forces from the country. The just-concluded Munich Security Conference reflects Europeans’ desire to do the reverse — to take a hard look at the growing threat Putin poses to many countries, and to galvanize support for Ukraine at this decisive point in the war. It was hardly surprising that the conference was also consumed with the prospect of wavering commitment from the organization’s largest partner following Donald Trump’s remarks indicating his eagerness to withdraw the US from the alliance, and not least, to encourage Putin’s all-out assault on NATO countries.
How should US voters assess these ominous developments? How should Democratic candidates and informed political commentators address these as we edge closer to November? At the moment, it’s not clear that American political discourse — and media coverage of it — can bear the weight of these and other international developments. Yet, we must push beyond domestic sniping in our search for clarity at an ever more perilous moment. In this regard, Democrats have a strong case to make for leadership — if they re-present domestic political machinations within a geopolitical framework they understand and can articulate.
The geopolitical context of the 2024 campaign
In geopolitics, the US has long had the great fortune of being removed spatially from the most immediate threat of conventional invasion. This has contributed to a longstanding isolationist sensibility and the feeling, even among many liberals, that our politics can rest mainly on domestic matters. But as the world’s leading political and economic power, the US does not have the luxury of disengagement; flirtations with isolationism are many in our history, and none of them have ended well.
The most substantial and pressing foreign threats involve not just Putin’s revanchist imperialism, but widening wars in not one but two strategically important regions of the world — Eurasia and the Middle East. Putin’s designs on his sovereign neighbors and Israel’s escalating war in Gaza have made immensely more complicated a decisive period of transformation in the post-Cold War era. The stakes are high enough even without authoritarian creep in the Republican Party.
It's important to point out that wars of escalation take place in geopolitical environments where leadership vacuums, miscalculation, and plain incompetence abound. Putin’s successes are proportional not only to his means of domestic repression, but to the support he enjoys internationally. Yet, as CIA Director William Burns has recently written, Putin’s power base is gradually crumbling as Russian elites not aligned with Putin discover that they have backing in Europe and North America should they decide to move against the regime.
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In their refusal to take up the cause of Ukraine aid and insisting, instead, to link this critical support to an immigration reform bill that it has no intention of advancing, congressional Republicans are now transposing their cynicism from the national to the global arena, and with potentially devastating results. The cost: weakened American security at home and abroad.
The global security landscape is not as abstract as it sounds — it permits the commercial and investment flows that are critical to all economies, not least America’s. Whether Democrats can turn such obstructionist politics to political and electoral advantage remains to be seen. But it would be a mistake to assume that foreign affairs are not significant considerations to voters. The critical question remains: how to communicate the real nature of the crisis to a public intentionally distracted by fears of inflation and a porous border.
Of course, a geopolitical game changer took place last year on October 7. Hamas’s attack and Israel’s severe response to it raised the stakes to the point where numerous escalatory dynamics are now imaginable, each capable of spiraling out of control. US and Israeli intelligence sources report that Hamas was planning its bloody border incursion for some two years. This was a time when Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud supporters were consumed with efforts to narrow democracy’s scope through the circumvention of judicial power, which itself was linked to an effort to bolster the precarious political fate of a thrice-indicted prime minister. This domestic dynamic of Israeli policy towards Palestinians has grown now to involve Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Russia in a potential cascade of global proportions.
As we get further into a decisive election year, the US and Europe risk getting drawn into increasingly violent and intractable campaigns by state and non-state actors across the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Younger generations of Americans and Europeans are not content simply to accept such existential threats. Perhaps this helps explain the dual intensity and sensitivity of public protest that has broken out on many US campuses and in major cities throughout the West. The acute salience of the issue on both sides of the Israel/Palestinian divide has caught Democratic politicians off guard and left President Biden scrambling to retain a base of support that he traditionally could count on.
Introduce the potential of a devastating terrorist attack into this volatile admixture — a great worry of NATO officials of late and a possibility Trump supporters bring up disturbingly often — and the complicated could quickly turn into something far more chaotic. As evidence, consider the heated Republican responses to Houthi attacks on shipping vessels in the Red Sea, or to the January 28 drone attack on a US base in Jordan, which killed three American servicemen and injured many more. Topping it off, the US risks getting pulled back into Southwest Asia as cross-border conflicts in that volatile region intensify.
Bending to influences from the right, American political discourse continues to roil with resentments and to traffic in blame games geared to nothing more than fulfilling the vicious promise of an us vs. them, patriots vs. enemies-at-the-border/enemies-within fight. As cynical as this dynamic is, it reflects built-in weaknesses in the nation’s political institutions and widening fault lines in our political culture.
The fissures derive in part from institutional failings, like the Senate’s geographical bias favoring less populated rural states, and — in the House — decreasing electoral competitiveness due to gerrymandered districts and the power of partisan primaries in selecting extremist candidates. All of this has produced a far more radical politics on the Republican side than on the Democratic side. It helps, apparently, to be shameless.
Recourse to the stalwarts of foreign policy strategy — leveraging diplomatic power, deterring enemies with unmatched capabilities and resolve, deepening pacts with our allies and, perhaps the greatest task of all, galvanizing domestic support — seems nigh impossible for the Biden administration, given what is happening to Ukraine funding in Congress. Not only are challenges compounding; perhaps more consequentially, Americans appear incapable of confronting these challenges with sober, deliberate and non-partisan reasoning. The timing, in other words, of the “return of geopolitics” is not good.
Dems have an opportunity to campaign on GOP isolationism
Against this background, however, a list of important achievements over the past two years should be drawn up, one that can focus the Democrats’ messaging in the coming months.
Washington and Brussels have succeeded in isolating Putin through unprecedented sanctions, and they have managed to shore up our international security structures. These successes have helped to clarify the West’s priorities — individual liberty, rule of law, institutionalized power, adroit alliance building among strong economies — in the face of authoritarian creep at home and threats persisting abroad. Putin’s colossal miscalculations have turned away Russia’s reliable energy customers. Demand for its oil and gas will be hard to make up elsewhere (witness China dragging its feet on a new natural gas pipeline from western Siberia).
On the economic front, the United States is fortunate to have very favorable economic tailwinds at present, with the economy’s “soft landing” after two years of interest rate hikes now more or less assured. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO has gained two new members, Finland and Sweden, and the alliance remains internally committed — for now. Ukraine is now in talks to join the EU, a development which bodes well for continued integration on the continent. Elections in Poland last October dealt a hard blow to the country’s far-right Law and Justice Party, without question a result of Putin’s imperial ambitions.
These rapidly developing geopolitical dynamics are among the most complicated the West has ever faced. Democrats have a potential advantage here, however. The Republicans’ legacy reputation for prowess in foreign policy is belied by their consistent refusals in Congress to act accordingly. This presents Democrats with an opportunity. Their messaging needs to be sharper, more forceful and more respectful of the ways Americans are shaped by geopolitical events. Addressing directly these geopolitical considerations and the strategic calculus behind them remains a distinct challenge for the Biden administration and for Democrats campaigning. It is also an unavoidable necessity in the run-up to November.
“Congressional paralysis is causing strategic paralysis”: Tim Mak’s view from Ukraine
By Aaron Rupar
Two months after I spoke at length with Tim Mak about Kyiv’s long, dark winter, I checked in with him again Thursday ahead of the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Mak is a Kyiv-based independent journalist and publisher of The Counteroffensive. Since we last spoke, President Zelensky dismissed Ukraine’s top military official and Russia won a key battle in eastern Ukraine. We discussed those developments and the broader outlook for Ukraine as the war enters its third year. (Spoiler alert: It’s pretty grim.)
When we connected, Mak was in a Toronto airport on his way back to Ukraine after a quick trip to Canada for a friend’s funeral. We rounded out the conversation by talking about the logistics of traveling to and from an active war zone.
A transcript of our chat, lightly edited for clarity and length, follows.
Aaron Rupar
Since we last spoke in December, President Zelensky dismissed Ukraine’s top military commander, General Valerii Zaluazhnyi. What does that say about where the war is at?
Tim Mak
Zaluazhnyi made a classic political mistake, which was accidentally telling the truth when political powers don't want you to. He expressed his opinion that the war had reached a stalemate and that was not what the elected officials wanted to hear at all.
This outgoing commander in chief is seen as one of the most trusted figures in all of Ukrainian government. So this dismissal can be seen in a number of lights. One is the elected side of government saying, ‘We don't appreciate you talking out of turn.’ It could also be seen as a desire from the Ukrainian government to turn the page on the battlefield situation — one in which Ukrainians are not only losing momentum but losing towns and cities over the last few months.
Aaron Rupar
Over the past couple months it has also become increasingly clear that House Republicans really are intent on obstructing any and all potential new aid packages to Ukraine. How will that play out on the ground?
Tim Mak
On the front lines, they're already struggling pretty desperately because of a lack of artillery ammunition. They're not able to spend the rounds they need either for defense or for offense. They just don't have the stores and they've started to need to ration ammunition. It's a very serious problem, and that's the practical outcome of what's happened in the US Congress.
There's a broader strategic problem as well because the United States has a chance to turn what was once a strategic victory into a terrible strategic mistake. The Ukrainians very much do feel like they had the rug pulled out from under them. The United States encouraged them to resist and fight. And in its moment of desperation and weakness and vulnerability, the US is now saying we won't be there for them. We said we would be there for them and do whatever it takes. Not living up to that is going to have terrible consequences.
The Ukrainians will blame the United States for not being able to achieve their stated war goals. It will be a real loss for American prestige and the country’s reputation not only in Eastern Europe, not only in places like Ukraine and Poland and Lithuania and the Nordic countries, but also in places like Taiwan. You hear Chinese propaganda sources using this line of argument already. It's hard to push back against it if the United States doesn't fulfill its promises.
Aaron Rupar
When we last spoke, we talked a little bit about some of the manpower problems that Ukraine is facing — running out of able-bodied men who are willing to serve. What’s the latest on that?
Tim Mak
There's been a request by the Ukrainian military for another 500,000 troops, which is an enormous segment of society. This has not been popular with the civilian leadership of the government, and there's been some resistance to it. And that is currently working its way through the Ukrainian legislature right now.
One of the major concerns is an issue of strategic confusion. What is Ukraine's plan for victory and how do they define it? That's a real question, and one of the reasons it's a huge question mark is because it's hard to come up with a strategy when you don't know whether you can count on the support of allies like the United States. The congressional paralysis is causing strategic paralysis on the part of the Ukrainian military.
They're unable to create plans because they don't know what ammunition and equipment they’ll have. If you imagine yourself being a 25-year-old Ukrainian male, why would you want to sign up for service when there isn’t a comprehensive strategy or a goal or a vision that leaders are articulating? That's a serious problem. And I anticipate that's causing a little bit of reluctance among those who might be considering whether to sign up or not.
Aaron Rupar
People here in the US are talking more and more about the presidential race, which of course has major implications for Ukraine. What are you hearing from folks in Kyiv and elsewhere in the country about the election?
Tim Mak
It really does surprise me how much non-Americans pay attention to the minutia of US politics. They're watching for Super Tuesday to see how Nikki Haley does, since she supports Ukraine aid. Frankly, some Ukrainians are more into it than Americans, because it's not just a matter of politics for them. The question of American aid is life or death for them. It’s absolutely one of those things that will have impacts on their families. Their blood really is on the line.
Aaron Rupar
There was lots of talk this time last year about the Ukrainian offensive, which ended up being a disappointment. What are people expecting as we approach spring in terms of where the war is headed over the next two or three months?
Tim Mak
There's a lot of pessimism that it's going to be a long grind, and there's some concern that Ukrainian defenses aren't as well prepared as they should be at this point. And there are concerns that Russia might push ahead and try to launch an offensive of their own. I'm not sure they have the capabilities for it, but there are some real worries.
The Ukrainians are not in a position to launch a new offensive, in part because they don't have secure backing from their partners in the West, including the United States. So they're unable to make these longer term or medium-term plans right now. What they're doing is kind of wading and grinding through these really difficult positions on defense and trying to understand what the future holds for the state of American military aid.
Aaron Rupar
You just published a big piece on the 2022 Battle of Kyiv that I know you’re really proud of. Tell me what you learned from your reporting.
Tim Mak
We spent the better part of a year working on gathering eyewitness testimony from folks who fought and were around Antonov Airfield, which is northwest of Kyiv. And what we ultimately learned was that this epic battle over 72 hours as the invasion started really was the difference between Kyiv falling and not falling. It was the difference between the fighting we're now talking about in eastern Ukraine and the possibility of that fighting happening in western Ukraine. We're not even talking about the possibility of Ukraine winning had the battle gone a different way.
We’ve talked during this conversation about western arms, but in those early days, there hadn't yet been a large-scale commitment of them to Ukraine. And the Ukrainians resisted in any way they could with small arms against armored helicopters.
There’s even a story in our reporting about one soldier who, having run out of rounds for his rifle, decided to step on the gas of his BMW and run over Russian troops that were walking along the side of the road. That's the spirit of grit and resistance. Whether we want them to be desperate enough to have to do that is another question, but the will is obviously there. I think that's one of the major lessons from our deeply reported story.
Aaron Rupar
So now you’re heading back to Ukraine from Toronto. Tell me what that trip is like for you.
Tim Mak
From the east coast of the US it usually takes about three days to get all the way to Kyiv. A lot of that has to do with flying into places like Moldova or Romania or Poland. Tomorrow I'm going to drive into Kyiv. I have a car but at the border it can sometimes be like 12 hours waiting in line, and the drive itself is about 12 hours too from Warsaw to Kyiv. So it's a real logistical nightmare to get in and out. Usually I plan weeks ahead in order to do it.
Aaron Rupar
Is that drive from Poland into Ukraine pretty safe?
Tim Mak
I'm surprised there haven't been more strikes along that route because now it's in Russia's strategic interest to try to disrupt logistics and the movement of supplies throughout the country. But right now it's a relatively safe journey.
There used to be checkpoints in every single major or even small town along that road, and those have been removed as a hindrance to access and easy movement across the country. But they could be put up again and the situation could change pretty dramatically in a short period of time. And, of course, there's always the realization that the number one cause of death for reporters in war zones or conflict areas is car crashes. It's an unfortunate but sadly common occurrence.
That’s it for this week
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We’ll be back with more Monday. Until then, have a great weekend.
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Democrats should campaign - and ignore the other side - on Ukraine (and bringing the world together) abortion rights, democracy, gun control. The economy is the economy. While it affected every national election, these are different times. Just keep hammering away and going on the offensive. These are popular with the voters and are Democratic policies.
Trump’s anti-positions get lost in the white noise. Nothing moves the Trump poll needle. Why waste energy? Again, Democrats need to keep hammering away. A relatively small number of independent voters in battleground states will decide the election.
Putin's nihilism is certainly a central part of his strategy. And it's a huge part of his justification for the invasion of Ukraine. Whether that is the biggest treat or whether it serves to enable a more dynamic motive is a matter of interpretation, upon which we would probably differ in emphasis. But we certainly share your concern for its impact on politics, science, judgement and basic truth.