There is bipartisan agreement that the US should use Ukraine to fight Russia to the last person in Ukraine. The only dispute is over whether the US should increasingly risk every last person on earth.

As of now any end to the war is unlikely to be on better terms for Ukraine than were on offer before Russia invaded, writes Mary Dejevsky

As of the end of February 2023, one year has passed since the beginning of Russia’s special military operation (SMO) in Ukraine. The joining of the two Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk to the Russian Federation preceded by several days the launching of the SMO on February 24.

Wars are started by political forces. They are promoted by propagandists, fought by soldiers and it is always the ordinary people that suffer. Wars are almost never about principle and almost always about profit in one form or another. The war in Ukraine, like all other wars has been sold to us as a struggle between the forces of good and evil. A simple message is repeated and in Goebel’s world, a lie, if big enough and if repeated loudly enough will be believed.

Recent polling shows that Biden’s pledge that the US will assist ‘for as long as it takes’ is a harder sell today.

The window of opportunity for a settlement has closed

At this dangerous moment, with threats of nuclear conflict looming, we need a vigorous debate about U.S. policy toward Russia and Ukraine.

We in the West like to troll Russia with the argument that Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine failed to achieve its goals. Oddly, one of the claimed goals in making that argument is that rather than stopping NATO expansion, Putin’s invasion has led to NATO’s further expansion, military-political consolidation, and military strengthening. This is odd, because Western, particularly US policy, has been built on the premise that Putin feigns fear of NATO expansion in order to engage in his own expansion. The reality, of course, is quite different. NATO is struggling to include not just Ukraine but also Finland and Sweden into the alliance, but because of NATO member Turkey’s resistance driven by the prospective new members’ support for Kurdish rebels this expansion is also going rather poorly.

A large US/NATO trained and equipped Ukrainian army is being slowly defeated by a private Russian military company and Donbass militias. From the beginning the process has been one of slow village by village slug-fest. The question I continually raise is why does the Kremlin proceed in this way when the main result is to give the US/NATO time to get involved and to supply increasingly more effective and longer range weapons to Ukraine, thus both widening the war and causing higher Russian casualties. From a military standpoint, the Kremlin’s policy is nonsensical.

The dash for the White House in Washington on Friday by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery. Scholz landed in DC, drove to the White House and was received by President Biden in Oval Office for a conversation that lasted over an hour. No aides were present. And he flew back to Berlin.