Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063
edit: sorry this is really long.
I think it’s clear that NATO support for Ukraine is not altruistic (it is simply not how international politics functions) but the Ukrainian people as such certainly do, in my eyes, have an ethical right to self-defence. If I were Ukrainian, I would want NATO weapons because they give me a better chance of fighting off the invader. After all, it’s not like the 2022 invasion was the first bit of tension between Ukraine and Russia post-independence, it makes sense to try and form a counterbalancing alliance with the ‘far’ imperial power to counter the ‘close’ one, it’s a common thing to do. e.g., Mali allying with Russia to counter French influence, Armenia allying with Russia to counter Turkish-Azeri aggression, and so on and so forth.
I think what I find disagreeble about peoples’ attitudes on here is their attitude towards the Ukrainian people’s struggle. Yes, ok, I also hate the far-right elements in the Ukrainian military and don’t care at all that they got smashed in Mariupol, but I certainly do care about the RIGHT TO SELF-DETERMINATION which is being denied to so many Ukrainians (there is clear evidence that outside of Crimea even Russian-speaking Ukrainians almost entirely oppose the invasion). Likewise
Yes, NATO does not care about Ukrainians, but an invasion was not the ‘logical’ response from Russia, and as per existing evidence was based on a complete misunderstanding of the realities on the ground in Ukraine from the Russian leadership which has become increasingly isolated and personalist (around Putin) in the past two decades but especially since COVID. There were a vast number of less escalatory and mutually destructive potential paths for the Russian leadership to have taken. After all, this war has gone terribly for Russia compared to their initial aims. Putin claimed (wrongly) that Ukrainian national identity was a Bolshevik creation with no real support, yet now a fervent Ukrainian national identity exists now more than ever before in both the east and west of the country. Putin thought Russian-speaking Ukrainians would rally to his side, yet he has pushed them into the arms of the Ukrainian state more than ever before. Putin was afraid of Ukraine becoming aligned with NATO, yet now he has pushed them into the arms of the west completely and permanently. The invasion has killed tens of thousands of young Russian men, has caused considerable capital flight, large-scale brain drain, and empowered Prigozhin and other mercenary/sub-state militias (including Kadyrovites and such) to the point where a mercenary group was within a few hours of marching on Moscow(!) before deciding it wasn’t worth the effort (Prigozhin is still strong enough to be allowed to potter about diplomatic meetings, if you need any indication of the dire state of the Russian state). Putin claims to be conducting de-Nazification yet his policies since 2014 have uniformly strengthened the position of the far-right within Ukrainian state + society.
Plus the conduct of the Russian Army and its affiliated elements has been extremely inhumane. I would not say there is evidence of genocide, no (though the large-scale kidnapping of Ukrainian children and their Russification, if true on a systemic scale, would be an act of genocide-I do not think there is enough evidence to say either way yet), but there is evidence of systematic and systemic abuses on a VASTLY larger scale than we have seen from the Ukrainians. It is a catastrophe of Russia’s own making.
To get back on topic (sorry), I do not see how you can admonish Ukrainians for supporting any means for their national self-defence. They have every right to resist the invasion and to not want part of their homeland (territory and ‘land’ is important in all national identities/mythologies), no? There is no contradiction between supporting this right to self-defence and self-determination and hating the Nazi groups which, unfortunately, have an outsized power within the Ukrainian military (but do not completely control the state-Zelensky is Jewish and a Russian-speaker!). Yes, Ukrainian national mythology has its share of far-right and general awful elements to it, but unfortunately that’s common in a lot of Eastern Europe and as per studies Nazism and antisemitism do not have more support in Ukraine than in Russia or the rest of Eastern Europe. There has been plenty of polling/surveying on these topics in Ukraine. There is more so just a lack of understanding as to what the Banderites actually did in WW2, not real support for their actions/Nazi collaboration. That’s bad but not what some are saying on here.
Do you support the right to self-determination for Ukrainians in the Donbas region? Do you support their right to live in peace, free from artillery bombardment and being terrorized by far-right paramilitary groups? Or do you only support the rights of Ukrainians that the state department tells you to care about?
I don’t think that is in any contradiction w/ my comment whatsoever.
I think a peace deal involving referendums in these areas (not under military occupation-creates unfair and unfree conditions for a referendum e.g., as in Crimea!) would identify the actual will of the people in these parts of the Donbas. I expect heavily that Crimea above all would vote to leave Ukraine and I think it has every right to do so ethically-speaking, though I do not think the referendum was carried out in free/fair conditions.
Ukraine had even better terms than that under the Minsk agreements. They refused to hold to the terms and stop shelling Donbas, even after they signed a ceasefire twice. After the invasion there was another attempt at peace talks, it ended with Ukraine dragging their own negotiator into the street and shooting him in the head. Late last year Zelensky signed a decree making it illegal to negotiate peace with Putin. The few times Ukraine has retaken a major area they immediately begin purging “collaborators and traitors”. If Russia pulled back it’s military Ukraine would just immediately invade those areas, regardless of any agreements they signed.
I’m not philosophically opposed to your idea, it really would be the best outcome. It’s just impossible to actually implement.
I think that is just a fundamentally one-sided understanding of why the Minsk Agreement failed to be honest. It was a poorly-written, unimplementable deal that neither side took seriously. It’s not like the D/LPRs and Russia were saints here. Indeed, there also isn’t much reason to believe the D/LPRs were, beyond the first year or so, really representative of the people in the region’s desires, since the original independent-minded leaders were replaced by those much closer to Russia. FURTHERMORE, the Minsk agreement was simply too unpopular in Ukraine for any government to survive implementing it. Ukrainians largely viewed the D/LPRs as Russian proxies (to what extent they are is arguable, but they certainly were less so as time went on and never were even to start with) and, in large, abhorred this sort of Russian influence.
It wasn’t just because Ukrainian state was war-mongering and poor baby Russia was forced to step in. This is not to say at all that the Ukrainian Government made no mis-steps in the build-up to the war-yes, they definitely did, and the Ukrainians simply didn’t believe Putin would be rash or stupid enough to launch such an invasion until very close to the time so never really backed down from a maximalist NATO position and didn’t prepare properly for early-war defences. But it’s not like you are saying. Both sides caused the failure of Minsk, and neither side was ready to adhere to it.
Then why did Ukraine sign the two separate Minsk agreements if they never intended to follow them?
Peace with Donbas was popular with Ukrainians. In the most recent elections the candidate that ran on a platform of peace with Donbas won the election and became president. Zelensky then went to the front and gave his “I’m not some loser” speech to Ukraine’s militants on the front to try to deescalate the war. Once he failed to reign in his paramilitaries he began agitating for more war.
You are correct that it’s unlikely that a Ukrainian government could survive implementing peace with Donbas. This isn’t because it was unpopular with the people of Ukraine but because it was unpopular with the people in power. After the US-backed coup far-right elements were placed in positions of power in the Ukrainian government, especially in the police and military. If that failed, the US could have once again opened the floodgates of money from NGOs to anti-government protestors and replaced whoever the Ukrainian people elected with a more “pro-democratic” leader.
You’re right that overall the central Ukrainian government wanted war too much to abide by the ceasefire treaties they signed. I just don’t think that excuses them. Wanting war too much to do peace is literally what I’m criticizing Ukraine for.
To clarify my stance, I want the war to end as soon as possible so that all the people on the ground can stop killing each other for no reason. I also agree that Russia invading was, in addition to being wrong because war is bad, incredibly stupid and needlessly damaging to their own position (I was one of the people saying they wouldn’t launch an invasion because it seemed like it would backfire). We’ll see how the economic and geo-political damage ends up shaking out in a decade or so, I imagine. And of course it’s understandable for Ukrainians to take up arms to defend their land, though it will likely only prolong the suffering, especially if we agree that life on the ground under the Ukrainian state would be little better than living under the Russian one. I also recognize that Putin claiming the war was necessary for de-nazification etc was the equivalent of pretending to care about human rights to sell the war to the populace; yes there are nazis and the far right is a huge problem in Ukraine, but that isn’t something Russia actually cares about (beyond a potential insurgency, anyway).
However, the point of my comment was not to condemn Ukraine. Instead, it was to point out that the US is not interested in helping Ukrainians (something we clearly agree on), and that in fact they are more than willing to sacrifice them in a conflict to achieve their own ends, namely isolating/weakening Russia and opening up Ukraine to even more voracious imperial extraction.