Two years in, Ukraine proxy war runs on dangerous delusions

Upon the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion one year ago, the Ukrainian government and its NATO sponsors were riding high.

Ukraine’s military had recently recaptured two provinces from Russian forces, and was gearing up for a major counteroffensive closely planned with the Pentagon. A surprise call from General Mark Milley to consolidate Ukraine’s battlefield gains and engage Russia in diplomacy to end the war had failed to catch steam at the White House, which quickly dismissed the top US military officer’s inconvenient proposal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that Ukraine had proved its “invincibility,” and predicted that 2023 would mark “the year of our victory.”

This year, the mood is markedly different.

At last week’s Munich Security Conference, a gathering of the NATO foreign policy elite, “the mood was both anxious and unmoored,” according to the New York Times. Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken “tried to reassure allies,” but had “little concrete to offer apart from sunny words,” therefore making “little headway with alarmed and gloomy Europeans,” the Washington Post noted. A source close to Zelensky’s office says that the atmosphere in Kyiv is “quite grim.” As he left Munich, Lithuania’s Foreign Minister offered a plain assessment: “Things are not going well.”

The Ukraine proxy war coalition’s dour outlook follows Russia’s capture of Avdiivka, a significant victory in the battle for the Donbas region. In the eight years preceding Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian forces used Avdiivka to shell Russia’s eastern Ukrainian allies.

The New York Times, which has consistently portrayed the Ukraine proxy war in a favorable light, grudgingly described the fall of Avdiivka as “more important than it initially seemed.” This is because it came with the reported capture of up to 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers. According to frontline troops and Western officials, “the Ukrainian withdrawal was ill-planned and began too late,” factors that are “directly responsible for what appears to be a significant number of soldiers captured,” the Times reports. One soldier told the Washington Post that Ukrainian forces were ordered to “take positions that were already either lost or destroyed.”

Ukrainian leaders were already facing political resistance to proposals for mobilizing some 500,000 additional soldiers by lowering the age of conscription. Now, the Times notes, “[t]he capture of hundreds of soldiers, especially those with battlefield experience, would make the need for more troops more acute and complicate the effort to recruit more.” The episode is an embarrassment for Ukraine’s new military commander, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, whose aides falsely claimed to have overseen an orderly withdrawal.

In a different time, an additional Ukrainian embarrassment in Avdiivka would be the critical role of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, now reconstituted as the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade. The 3rd Brigade was deployed to defend Ukraine’s last positions in Avdiivka and support the withdrawal. Its commander, Andriy Biletsky, has previously said that his country’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade…against the Semite-led sub-humans.” This neo-Nazi ideology prompted Congress to ban any US assistance to Biletsky’s Azov forces in 2018. Yet even as Azov continues to play a crucial role on the battlefield with US support, both US lawmakers and establishment media look the other way.

Ukraine’s defeat in Avdiivka also illustrates its well-documented struggles with manpower and weaponry two years into Russia’s invasion. Soldiers there “were exhausted after serving without rotations for two years,” the Washington Post reports. They were also forced to ration ammunition, with “some artillery batteries fighting with only 10 percent of supply they need,” according to the Associated Press. Russia suffered significant casualties as well, but its relative size compared to Ukraine makes such losses less impactful.

Accordingly, after two years of insisting that Ukraine will retake territory, “[t]he plan now is to just keep the Ukrainian military from collapsing,” Politico reported from the Munich confab, citing more than a dozen US and NATO officials. The US military is now “quietly warning that the best the Ukrainians can hope for is a largely frozen conflict,” the New York Times reports, citing the “downbeat assessment” of briefings from Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the head of US European Command.

Ukraine’s military disadvantage was not only anticipated by the Pentagon ahead of last year’s counteroffensive, but foreseen long ago by another high-level US source.

“If you’re playing on the military terrain in Ukraine, you’re playing to Russia’s strength, because Russia is right next door,” Antony Blinken, then a deputy Secretary of State, said in March 2015. “It has a huge amount of military equipment and military force right on the border. Anything we did as countries in terms of military support for Ukraine is likely to be matched and then doubled and tripled and quadrupled by Russia.”

Now heading the State Department, Blinken and his White House colleagues have discarded that prior stance. Yet rather than take responsibility for ignoring their own warnings, the Biden administration is lashing out at House Republicans for stalling a requested $61 billion proxy war lifeline. The loss of Avdiivka, National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson declared, “is the cost of Congressional inaction.”

In fact, the loss Avdiivka is the predictable result of using Ukraine for a proxy war against a far larger and better equipped Russia, as the nation’s top diplomat predicted years ago. And rather than accept the consequences that they anticipated, the Biden administration and Congressional allies continue to offer the false hope of Ukrainian victory.

“Putin is losing this war, folks,” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis declared in support of the $61 billion Ukraine funding package. “This is not a stalemate. This guy is on life support.” All it would take to finish the job, according to Democratic Rep. Jason Crow, is to grant Biden’s funding request. “Pass the supplemental. That’s it. Let’s destroy Putin’s army,” Crow declared. “The Ukrainians know how to do that, so let’s help them do it.” On Sunday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan likewise insisted that “Ukraine can go further in retaking territory that Russia has occupied,” so long as Congress can authorize another $61 billion for “the tools that it needs.”

Yet no amount of US money can account for the West’s failure to keep up with Russia’s production of artillery and other weaponry. And even if that gap is eventually overcome, as some Western pundits insist, that still would not solve the problem that Ukraine is running out of people to sacrifice. To confront this core issue, Ukraine’s leader can only offer more deception. Marking the war’s two-year anniversary on Sunday, Zelensky made the extraordinary claim that just 31,000 Ukrainian forces have died to date. By contrast, he said, Russia has lost 500,000.

While attempting to project confidence, these claims from Zelensky and allied US proxy warriors only underscore their desperation. If Ukrainian casualties were indeed just a fraction of Russia’s, and if Russia was truly on “life support,” why then would Ukrainian simultaneously be seeking to draft 500,000 more troops, and warning that without more US support, “we will lose”? As Zelensky put it in an interview last week: “Will Ukrainians survive without Congress’ support? Of course, but not all of us.”

In assessing Zelensky’s claims about Ukrainian casualties, it is also worth recalling that his own aides recently warned that he “deludes himself,” in a manner that “worries some of his advisers.”

But Zelensky is not alone in his delusions. They are equally shared with his backers in Washington, who were so committed to using Ukraine to “weaken” Russia that they blocked an April 2022 peace deal and then shunned a call for diplomacy from Milley, their top military leader. In banking on Congress to authorize another $61 billion, their only strategy is to double down on delusion and delay a final defeat.