E-Paper
Two years of the Ukraine war: All eyes on US as fate hangs in balance
The Israeli offensive and what was seen as US complicity with Israeli war crimes shattered the moral high ground that the West occupied in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Over a century ago, the US Congress left Europe to its fate. It was the end of the First World War. The US, despite its initial reluctance, had joined the war and ensured a decisive victory for its allies against Germany. Woodrow Wilson had played a key role both during the war and in crafting a peace with the Treaty of Versailles. He put his weight behind the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations.
But the US Senate refused to ratify the Treaty, and with it, rejected the League and American participation in it. It remains one of history’s big counter-factuals. If the Senate had let Wilson have his way, and if the US had joined the League, would there have been a Second World War?
One hundred and four years after the Senate’s decision, will the US House of Representatives leave a frightened Europe to its fate? If the Senate has a constitutionally mandated role in determining the American position on any international treaty, the House is a key stakeholder in approving budgets, including security assistance.
And that is why it is in the House on Capitol Hill, in the hands of a few dozen lawmakers, that the future of Ukraine rests. This is the site of the battle between Democrats and Republicans on the future world order and America’s role in it; it is the site of the civil war within the Republicans where the old school conservatives encounter the Donald Trump loyalists committed to reducing American commitments globally; it is the site of the tussle between the executive and legislature in America’s divided government; and it is the site which will determine if Ukraine has the wherewithal to even defend its gains of the past two years or live with a de facto or even de jure division.
And this suspense comes at a time when the Russian invasion Ukraine marks its second anniversary on February 24.
The war on the groundThe Russian invasion of Ukraine, and its takeover bid of Kyiv, has not gone according to the best laid plans in Moscow, Kyiv, Brussels, or Washington.
In the first year, Moscow saw its military prowess, or more precisely, its military vulnerabilities, exposed. It saw Ukrainian nationalism take a concrete form in terms of the widespread popular resistance against Moscow’s ingress. It saw the West consolidate, leak intelligence about the imminent war ahead of the invasion to prepare the ground, and then unleash the most dramatic set of sanctions against Russia and the most generous military support package to Ukraine.
Even as Russia engaged in nuclear sabre-rattling to scare the West, and held what are widely considered manipulated referendums in territories it gained by force to legitimise its presence, the story of 2022-23 was the story of Ukrainian heroism. It was also the story of entrenched Western power which could tilt the balance in a war where it didn’t have troops on the ground. On the other side, while the year saw the deepening of the Russia-China alliance and Moscow’s attempts to win over parts of the global south and attack the West for its hypocrisy, the repeated setbacks appeared to be a lesson for great powers about the costs of adventurism and overreach. If Moscow had thought it could replace the Volodymyr Zelensky regime with a pliable government in days, the plans went awry.
But it is in year two that the equations changed.
On the ground, Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia, by the admission of Kyiv’s own military leaders, didn’t succeed and resulted in a stalemate. Internal political and administrative divisions in Ukraine deepened. Morale dipped. It lost Bakhmut last year and Avdiivka this year. Incremental and partial western military support left Ukraine short of key needs, particularly equipment and ammunition.
For its part, Russia expanded its military personnel, stepped up its defence production, engaged in partnerships with countries as varied as China, Iran and North Korea to beef up its national security arsenal, and drew resources from economic exchanges including energy trade with other parts of the world. And Moscow’s control over the south and east of Ukraine held, even as it has lost hundreds of thousands of men in the process, a sign that dictatorships have a much bigger capacity to bleed than democracies where every body has to be accounted for.
2023-2024 then has become the year of Russian revival, Ukrainian despondency, and American fatigue. It is a period that has shown the limits of power of small states when they fight territorial wars against much bigger powers. It is a period where Vladimir Putin’s grip over Russian polity has only increased, including through coercion, while Zelensky’s grip in Ukraine has weakened. It is a period when Russian war crimes stopped evoking the same outrage and Ukrainian ineffectiveness became the story. And it has been a period where Kyiv’s overwhelming dependence on a distracted and divided power, the US, came back to haunt it.
A distracted and divided AmericaThe adverse dynamic on the ground coincided with two other developments in the US.
The first is Donald Trump’s comeback. Whether he succeeds in returning to the White House or not, Trump’s rise in the Republican field meant that Trumpism became the dominant message within the party. This included a deep scepticism of America’s expensive TransAtlantic security commitments, a critique of America’s substantial financial and military transfers to Ukraine, and the re-emergence of fundamental questions about what constitutes American national interest and whether defending Ukraine is among them.
All of this played out on the Hill. In the US House, Trump’s loyalists ousted Kevin McCarthy and installed an extreme right Christian nationalist, Mike Johnson, as Speaker. The Joe Biden administration’s pleas to the Republicans to sanction aid for Ukraine fell on deaf ears. A package deal that included funding for border security (a key Republican demand), Israel (which has bipartisan support) and Ukraine (which was pushed by Democrats and moderate Republicans) couldn’t get through the Senate despite a prior agreement with the Republican leadership of the chamber after Johnson said it would be “dead on arrival” in the House. And at the moment, another security assistance package awaits the House’s approval, an approval that is unlikely to come. This has left the Biden administration furious, as one part of the US government undermines the executive’s stated global aims.
The second development was Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack against Israel and abduction of hostages, and Tel Aviv’s unprecedented, brutal and inhuman offensive against Gaza, which has left close to 30,000 dead and two million displaced.
The significance of this war for Ukraine played out in two respects. For one, the West, especially the US, got distracted. The Biden administration has spent an enormous amount of time in the past four months working on supporting Israel, including through military and diplomatic support; restraining Israel especially after Biden’s own domestic coalition fractured on the issue; building up a coalition of forces to defend movement in the Red Sea against Houthi attacks; tracking and then responding to attacks by Iranian proxies in the rest of the region; and coming up with a peace plan that includes the release of hostages, ceasefire, an Israeli commitment to Palestinian statehood that includes West Bank and Gaza, the strengthening of the Palestinian Authority as a replacement for Hamas in Gaza and the unified authority for Palestinians, normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and a commitment to reconstruct Gaza. This peace plan is far from being realised but there is little doubt that Ukraine, which monopolised global attention, has shrunk in terms of the headspace leaders in the US can give.
More importantly though, the Israeli offensive and what was seen as US complicity with Israeli war crimes shattered the moral high ground that the West occupied in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Biden’s attempts to paint Putin and Hamas in the same category, and frame Israel and Ukraine as victims, didn’t fly, for Israel was seen as a victim but was also a perpetrator of unprecedented brutality. This reinforced the suspicions in most of the Global South that America was hypocritical, leaving it with a much smaller patient audience for its lectures on Ukraine. This was visible in a recent G20 foreign ministers’ meeting — if US was on the offensive seeking condemnation of Russia in the last two G20s, it stood isolated on the question of a ceasefire in this edition of G20 chaired by Brazil. And the year witnessed an enhanced desire in most of the world to see the Russia-Ukraine sorted out through diplomacy, irrespective of the terms of the resolution.
The US administration, therefore, is getting hit from the Right on Ukraine and Left on Israel. It is getting squeezed by the House on its foreign policy priorities and pressured by the rest of the world on the disconnect between its principles and actions. And it remains cornered by Trump, who uses the Russian success as a way to reinforce his argument about America’s weakness under Biden and also to question America’s role in the war and in Europe itself.
Looking aheadIt is in this backdrop that the third year of Russia’s war in Ukraine commences. Predictions are foolish in this uncertain climate, but what is clear is that three factors will shape what comes next.
The first is the battle within the US polity itself, both in the immediate context in terms of whether the House approves a security assistance package for Ukraine and over the year in terms of Trump’s rise and possible return to White House. If the mood remains what it is, Russia has a possible reason to smile about America’s fickleness and will be eager to do a deal with Trump, whose commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial unity appears to be quite low on the priority list.
The second variable is the appetite and capability within Europe to stay the course on Ukraine. It has offered a substantial aid package to Kyiv just recently but this is unlikely to be enough to fill in for the gap the Americans will leave behind. Europe remains caught between its wariness of Trump and fear of American inconsistency on Nato, and nightmares about what Putin would do next if he succeeds in Ukraine.
The third is the internal cohesion within Ukraine. Citizens of the embattled land have shown remarkable spirit in fighting Russians but the elite consensus seems frayed, Zelensky’s popularity has taken a hit, there have been frequent changes in military leadership appointments, and Kyiv has to make some tough choices about what it is willing to give up for peace to be able to secure what it has.
How the war eventually shapes up will affect the security architecture in at least two regions — Europe and Asia. It will offer a glimpse into Russia’s staying power. It will show whether the Americans can be trusted by those it promises to secure. And it will reveal how old-style 19th and 20th century territorial battles end in the 21st century.
