Panic of the proxy warriors

For the first time since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, President Biden has expressed alarm that Congress will fail to authorize the US weaponry that keeps the proxy war alive.

“It does worry me,” Biden said this week, after the ouster of Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy left the White House’s latest $24 billion Ukraine package in limbo. If Congress won’t deliver, Biden suggested that he will circumvent the normal appropriations process: “There is another means by which we may be able to find funding, but I’m not going to get into that right now.”

Biden’s “acknowledgment of concern… was a departure from the confidence he expressed” in a phone call with NATO allies just one day prior, the New York Times noted. And despite the president’s private assurances, the last-minute Congressional decision to strip Ukraine spending from the government shutdown deal “freaked everyone out” in Europe, a senior US diplomat says.

Ukrainian officials are the most agitated. “If we don’t get the aid, we will lose the war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky informed a group of Senators in Washington late last month. And when Zelensky departed the capital, “he was more visibly anxious than he had been in previous meetings with Biden about the future of U.S. support,” a senior administration official disclosed.

“We are freaking out,” Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, a senior Ukrainian lawmaker and former deputy prime minister, says of the US funding freeze. “For us it is a disaster.”

This is not Klympush-Tsintsadze’s first dire warning about the Ukraine conflict. Another came in late 2019, when Zelensky had not yet fully caved to Ukraine’s far-right, and was still engaged in French/German-brokered talks to implement the Minsk peace accords. If Zelensky agreed to follow Minsk as designed by allowing elections in the breakaway Donbas republics, Klympush-Tsyntsadze warned, “this would be like implanting yourself a cancerous tumor.”

Having viewed Russia-aligned eastern Ukrainians – and the peace accord signed to re-integrate them – as a “cancer”, it is consistent that this Ukrainian lawmaker is now “freaking out” at a potential reduction of the US weaponry that has been used to bombard them for more than nine years. Since the Maidan coup of 2014, the US has provided critical support to the Ukrainian nationalist-driven war on eastern Ukrainians, and their concurrent refusal to implement the Minsk peace deal that Kyiv reluctantly signed the following year.

According to Ukrainian lawmaker Yaroslav Zheleznyak, the funding limbo underscores that “objectively, we have simply become hostages of their [the US] internal politics.”

These warnings from Ukrainian lawmakers, Politico notes, reflect a “concern in Kyiv that Ukraine has become a tool of US domestic politics.” This “concern” illustrates a cruel irony of the Ukraine conflict: while claiming to resist a Russian takeover, Ukrainian politicians have allowed the US to effectively hold their country hostage.

As former Ukrainian government official and diplomat Andrii Telizhenko recently told me: “The Ukraine government became, within the nine years after the coup in 2014, fully controlled by the US government and by the G7 ambassadors.” US officials were “telling us who to fire, who to hire, what department to cut, what department to inform, what department to bring more money in.”

“Americans are highly visible in the Ukrainian political process,” Bloomberg columnist Leonid Bershidsky observed in November 2015. “The U.S. embassy in Kyiv is a center of power, and Ukrainian politicians openly talk of appointments and dismissals being vetted by U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt and even U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.” According to Ukrainian parliamentarian Nikolay Tomenko, the US government even “provided evaluation of ministers with whose progress they are satisfied.”

Accordingly, the current “concern in Kyiv” about becoming a US “tool” comes nearly ten years too late.

For Ukraine, another consequence of being hostage to Washington is a faltering counteroffensive launched under heavy US-led pressure, despite the awareness that Ukrainian forces lacked the proper training and air power. As Zelensky explained shortly before the NATO summit in June, “we have to show results, but every kilometer costs lives.”

By the end of September, Ukraine had sacrificed many lives with very little kilometers to show for it. According to a tally in the New York Times, in nine months of intense fighting this year, just 500 square miles of territory has changed hands. Russia – despite being mostly on the defensive – has yielded a net gain of 188 square miles.

Marina Miron, a postdoctoral researcher in war studies at King’s College London, noted that Ukraine’s counteroffensive has played to Russia’s advantage. The Russians are “not losing anything by not moving forward,” Miron said. “The whole strategy in Ukraine is for the Russians to let the Ukrainians run against those defenses, kill as many as possible, and destroy as much Western equipment as possible.”

The availability of that Western equipment appears to be dwindling. Speaking to the Telegraph, a senior UK military official warned that “we’ve given away just about as much as we can afford,” and have “run dry” on Ukraine’s critical needs, including air defense and artillery. Western weapons, British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey concedes, are “looking a bit thin.” According to Rob Bauer, chairman of NATO’s military committee, when it comes to Europe’s military stockpiles, “the bottom of the barrel is now visible.” Halfway into a year-long plan to provide Ukraine with one million artillery shells, the EU “has provided only one-quarter of that,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

During a visit to Kyiv this week, European Union foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell vowed that his bloc would “continue supporting and increasing our support” to Ukraine. But at an EU summit days later, Borrell acknowledged that “certainly Europe cannot replace the US.”

If Ukraine’s European allies are indeed running low on weaponry, then they are not only underscoring the need for peace talks with Russia, but undermining a key talking point of those who wish to prolong the war. NATO and Ukrainian leaders often claim that Russia is not only a threat to Ukraine, but the rest of Europe. Yet if that were really the case, why would Europe give away the weaponry that it would need to defend itself against Russian invaders – all the way to “the bottom of the barrel”?

Without more money from Congress, the Biden administration is unsure how long current US stockpiles can last.

According to White House spokesperson John Kirby, existing weapons packages will be enough to either arm Ukraine for another “couple of weeks” or a “couple of months,” depending on battlefield conditions. “Time is not our friend,” Kirby said.

While Western equipment may be in limited supply, the prevailing imperative to weaken Russia at all costs continues to make Ukrainian lives openly expandable. As Dutch defense minister Kajsa Ollongren recently put it at the Warsaw Security Forum: “It is very much in our interest to support Ukraine. Because they are fighting this war, we’re not fighting it… Supporting Ukraine is a very cheap way to make sure that Russia with this regime is not a threat to the NATO alliance.”

While NATO military support may face new uncertainty, Ukrainians can at least rely on Western proxy warriors for one streadfast commitment: a willingness to demean and sacrifice their “very cheap” lives.