The Ukraine war has now crossed the one-year mark. Through January 2023, the United States has allocated $113 billion to this effort, including $67 billion in military assistance. By comparison, our military assistance to Israel is $3.5 billion annually and the entire Ukrainian gross domestic product is less than $200 billion. Several hundred thousand people have died, 17.6 million people have been displaced and are in need of humanitarian assistance and energy/commodity markets have been disrupted worldwide, causing pain and hardship to many – including us. Americans should be asking: What is the endgame? In my opinion, the only rational endgame is a negotiated settlement that trades Russian security for a free and independent Ukraine and ends the suffering for the Ukrainian people while extracting the United States from a situation that can get much worse very quickly.
Consider the following: Do we really believe we can win a war in Russia’s backyard through a corrupt proxy Ukrainian regime? The definition of “winning” is not defined. President Zelensky said the war will not be over until Russia is pushed out of every inch of Ukrainian territory and Ukraine recaptures Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. This definition of winning is not consistent with current U.S. thinking and will almost definitely lead to a much wider, bloodier conflict.
At one point, President Biden defined winning as regime change in Russia. So the bottom line is we have no idea what the endgame of the war looks like. To add to this chaos, consider the fact that Ernst and Young ranked the Ukrainian regime as among the three most corrupt of 43 countries they surveyed. Transparency International ranked Ukraine the second most corrupt in Eastern Europe, behind only Russia. In January 2023, Ukraine was forced to publicly terminate the president’s deputy chief of staff, the defense minister, the deputy commander of the National Guard and dozens of senior officials for corruption and misuse of mostly U.S. taxpayer dollars. Of course, our Congress is only now getting around to figuring out it needs some kind of oversight and audit on all this money.
We all fully understand why the world would be outraged at Russia’s actions. Without condoning these actions, any smart negotiator will try and understand the other side as well. Right or wrong, the Russian view of history is different from ours. As you may know, NATO was formed in 1949 as a collective defense system against the Soviet Union, which in turn formed an alliance with the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe. When the Cold War ended in 1990, a reunification agreement was signed where Russia agreed that East Germany could join NATO as part of the pre-existing West German membership.
From here, opinions diverge. The Russians quote U.S. Secretary of State James Baker committing that “NATO would not expand one inch further to the East.” German Defense Minister and future NATO Secretary General Manfred Worner is on record saying, “The fact that we are not ready to place a NATO army outside Germany gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.” However, no such agreements show up on the official reunification documents, and NATO has denied they were implicitly agreed to. Russia, of course, disagrees.
Starting in 1999, NATO began rapidly expanding east toward Russia, adding former Warsaw Pact countries. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined in 1999, followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004. Albania and Croatia joined NATO in 2009, Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020. Each expansion was met with strong protests from Russia, as NATO closed in on its borders. In 2010, Putin warned that Ukraine joining NATO would close Russia in on all sides and prove “a direct security threat” to his country. In 2014, President Obama seemed to agree, saying that NATO membership for Ukraine was not on the table.
With that as background, fast forward to October 2020. Zelensky met with UK’s Boris Johnson and stated his intention to develop a NATO membership plan, again with Russia objecting. In March 2021, Zelensky further stated his intent to take back Crimea by all means, including military. Shortly thereafter, in March, NATO began one of its largest military exercises ever, in 12 countries and with 28,000 troops. Russia criticized NATO, deployed troops to its western border and began a massive buildup. Things escalated from there, culminating in Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejecting a Russian request in January 2022 to keep Ukraine out of NATO and Russia sending troops into Ukraine shortly thereafter.
The intent of this piece is not to endorse one view or the other but to provide the background to understand that a war with no end that could easily spin out of control and already has impacted every part of the globe is not the answer. At $113 billion, the United States has been the single biggest funder of the war – the next largest are Germany and the United Kingdom, at around $6 billion each – and has the right to demand a solution and a timetable. The basis for this solution may be as simple as Russia withdrawing troops deployed since 2022 in exchange for Ukraine not joining a Western military alliance. That is no different than it would be if a Chinese military alliance moved steadily north from South America and threatened to put bases in Mexico. I doubt we would stand by and watch it happen. So act Mr. President, and show the leadership America has always shown in these situations.
“Reddy or Not” is a periodic column representing the opinion of Lucky Dog Publishing owner Rom Reddy but not necessarily the opinion of the newspaper. In keeping with the paper’s philosophy of publishing all opinions, the publisher welcomes responses, which must be limited to 300 words and will be published on a space-available basis.
