Larry Johnson has spotted one of the many signs that “the West” is giving up on its war in Ukraine:
This week’s “No Shit Analysis” award goes to Eugene B. Rumer for his Wall Street Journal op-ed, It’s Time to End Magical Thinking About Russia’s Defeat. Only took him 22 months to figure this out. He may be a slow learner but give him some credit, he finally awakened from his dream world and is beginning to grasp that the Ukraine project is swirling down the toilet.
Eugene B. Rumer is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, Washington DC. Previously, he served at the State Department, on the staff of the National Security Council and at RAND.
Despite his pedigree, he is struggling to acknowledge reality and still feels the need to spin nonsense. Here is an example:
Putin has reason to believe that time is on his side. At the front line, there are no indications that Russia is losing what has become a war of attrition. The Russian economy has been buffeted, but it is not in tatters. Putin’s hold on power was, paradoxically, strengthened following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed rebellion in June. Popular support for the war remains solid, and elite backing for Putin has not fractured.
Yep. Russia’s economy is so battered that it is headed toward 4% growth, its defense industry is out producing Europe and the United States combined, it is manufacturing new, more deadly drones and the stores across Russia are filled to the brim. If that is “battered” give me some.
More signs that the official foreign policy establishment is throwing the towel can be found in the current edition of Foreign Affairs. There the former head of the Council of Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, is urging the Biden administration to push the Ukraine towards negotiations:
Redefining Success in Ukraine – A New Strategy Must Balance Means and Ends – Foreign Affairs – Nov 17 2023
Well, yes, the U.S., NATO and the Ukraine have lost their war on Russia. Let’s redefine that as victory and forget about the rest:
Ukraine’s counteroffensive appears to have stalled, just as wet and cold weather brings to a close the second fighting season in Kyiv’s effort to reverse Russian aggression. At the same time, the political willingness to continue providing military and economic support to Ukraine has begun to erode in both the United States and Europe. These circumstances necessitate a comprehensive reappraisal of the current strategy that Ukraine and its partners are pursuing.
Such a reassessment reveals an uncomfortable truth: namely, that Ukraine and the West are on an unsustainable trajectory, one characterized by a glaring mismatch between ends and the available means. Kyiv’s war aims—the expulsion of Russian forces from Ukrainian land and the full restoration of its territorial integrity, including Crimea—remain legally and politically unassailable. But strategically they are out of reach, certainly for the near future and quite possibly beyond.
The time has come for Washington to lead efforts to forge a new policy that sets attainable goals and brings means and ends into alignment. The United States should begin consultations with Ukraine and its European partners on a strategy centered on Ukraine’s readiness to negotiate a cease-fire with Russia and to simultaneously switch its military emphasis from offense to defense.
Defense like offense needs a certain balance of power. With a ten to one Russian superiority in artillery and air attack capability there is no way for Ukraine to hold onto any defense line. The following is thus mere fantasy:
Russia may well reject Ukraine’s offer of a cease-fire. But even if the Kremlin proves intransigent, Ukraine’s shift from offense to defense would limit the continuing loss of its soldiers, enable it to direct more resources to long-term defense and reconstruction, and shore up Western support by demonstrating that Kyiv has a workable strategy aimed at attainable goals. Over the longer term, this strategic pivot would make it clear to Russia that it cannot simply hope to outlast Ukraine and the West’s willingness to support it. That realization may eventually convince Moscow to move from the battlefield to the negotiating table—a move that would be to Ukraine’s ultimate advantage, since diplomacy offers the most realistic path for ending not only the war but also, over the long term, Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory.
That seems to presume that Russia will be done after completely taking the four oblast it has already integrated. That’s not so:
In remarks at a recent meeting on November 3 on the eve of the National Unity Day with members of the federal and regional heads of civic chambers at the Victory Museum in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin repeated once again that Russia is “defending our moral values, our history, our culture, our language, including by helping our brothers and sisters in Donbass and Novorossiya to do the same. This is the key to today’s events.”
A noted political figure from Ukraine, Vladimir Rogov who used to be a lawmaker in Kiev reminded Putin with passionate intensity, “Believe me, we, people living in the southern part of Russia, which was cut off from its roots for 30 years, are, in fact, a storehouse of the Russian people’s historical forces, which was mothballed and could not make any efforts to regenerate our great Russia.”
Putin responded by underscoring the historical fact that Novorossiya constituted “the South Russian lands – all the Black Sea region and so on” that were founded by Catherine the Great after a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire.
Those Russian lands, which the Soviets – for no good reason- submitted to Soviet Ukrainian administration, will be repatriated.
The Biden administration knows that there is nothing it can do about that and that there is only little chance to provide Ukraine with the $30 billion it will need to finance next years deficit:
Penny Pritzker, US Special Representative for Ukraine’s Recovery, has suggested that officials imagine how the country could survive economically without US aid during her first visit to Ukraine.
…
Pritzker met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the prime minister and government officials, the chairman of the parliament and American businesses. In addition, she even attended a congress of regional authorities together with Andrii Yermak, Head of the President’s Office.Ukrainska Pravda stated that her first visit to Ukraine had left “a rather disturbing aftertaste in many government offices” here.
One of the sources, familiar with the course of Pritzker’s meetings, said that she tried to “lead [them] to the idea” of how Ukraine could survive economically without American aid.
With no more money coming in to be looted from, the corrupt officials of Ukraine will lose the ability to feed their greed. They will ask why they should fight a war, and endure the resulting hyper inflation (in Russian), when there is no way left to profit from it? (machine translation):
The [growth of the dollar exchange] rate will strongly depend on the volume and timeliness of international aid arriving in Ukraine. If indeed, as the financial authorities warn, the amount of external aid will be significantly less than planned in the budget (the Ministry of Finance says that at the moment the hole is $ 29 billion), then one of the most likely ways to solve the problem may be to devalue the hryvnia – so that the budget receives more hryvnia for incoming dollars and euros of international aid.
There will come a point in time for Russia to make on offer that the Ukrainian officialdom and people can not resist. Cheap gas, lots of trade in exchange for Ukrainian official acceptance of new Russian borderlines around Novorossiya as well as political and military neutrality.
This was inevitable.
Here is what I wrote on February 24, 2022, the day Russian troops first crossed the border to Ukraine:
Looking at this map I believe that the most advantageous end state for Russia would be the creation of a new independent country, call it Novorussiya, on the land east of the Dnieper and south along the coast that holds a majority ethnic Russian population and that, in 1922, had been attached to the Ukraine by Lenin. That state would be politically, culturally and militarily aligned with Russia.
This would eliminate Ukrainian access to the Black Sea and create a land bridge towards the Moldavian breakaway Transnistria which is under Russian protection.
Novorossiya, the red and yellow parts, will not be, like I assumed, an independent country, but will become full fledged parts of the Russian Federation. Otherwise my prediction about the end-state of this war is holding up. What’s left of Ukraine, poor as it is, will have to agree to it.
Without ever increasing amounts of new money and weapons flowing into Ukraine the “West” has nothing left to counter a Russian offer. It is good to see that it is finally acknowledging that.