The West was afflicted by a highly contagious, psychosomatic malady called Ukraine fatigue in the second half of 2023. Western commentators and leaders seemed to equate the failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive with the loss of the war, full stop. Enabling Ukraine to win would be long and costly, they suddenly realised. One could almost hear a childish, collective whine of “but it’s so hard.”
The Kiel Institute for World Economy reported a nearly 90 per cent drop in new aid for Ukraine from August through October 2023, compared to the same period a year earlier. Hungary and US Republicans then blocked an aggregate of about €100 billion in EU and US assistance.
Contrary to the common wisdom, the war has not settled into a stalemate but intensified over the last two weeks. On December 26th, Ukraine sank the Russian landing craft Novocherkassk in Crimea, killing 77 Russian sailors. Moscow retaliated three nights later with its most widespread bombardment of the war, killing 40 Ukrainian civilians across the country. Ukraine attacked the Russian city of Belgorod with drones or missiles, killing 25 people, a record inside Russia. The reciprocal war on cities looks set to continue.
The protagonists have stepped up guerrilla warfare, using infiltrators to stage assassinations and sabotage the other’s infrastructure. The Russian independent media outlet Mediazona catalogued 76 cases of probable railway sabotage inside Russia between February 2022 and October 2023.
At a news conference with Volodymyr Zelenskiy on December 12th, Biden rephrased his past pledge to support Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes’ to ‘as long as we can’. Zelenskiy was not reassured
Vladimir Putin demonstrated consistency and determination at his four-hour press conference on December 14th, swearing that his goals of “denazifying” and “demilitarising” Ukraine have not changed and that the war will not end before he achieves them. He still claims Odesa as a Russian city.
Compare that to President Joe Biden’s shifting rhetoric. At a news conference with Volodymyr Zelenskiy on December 12th, Biden rephrased his past pledge to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes” to “as long as we can”. Zelenskiy was not reassured.
In the second half of December, there were reports of alleged “feelers” by Putin seeking peace negotiations. US commentators jumped on the bandwagon. “Ukraine Doesn’t Need All Its Territory to Defeat Putin,” was the headline of an opinion piece by Serge Schmemann, a member of the New York Times editorial board. Ukraine could “rise from the hell of the war as a strong, independent, prosperous and secure state, firmly planted in the West,” despite the amputation of 18 per cent of its territory, Schmemann wrote. If Putin wants a ceasefire, Ukraine should “give it a try”.
[ More than 500 Ukrainians arriving in Ireland each weekOpens in new window ]
To Ukrainians facing death on the eastern and southern fronts, or from missile attacks in Ukrainian cities, such pronouncements smack of defeatism, not to say appeasement. They contradict two arguments widely heard earlier in the war: that Putin must not be allowed to profit from illegal aggression by keeping the territory he seized, and that Putin would merely exploit a ceasefire to regain strength, rearm and strike again, in the same way he used the failed Minsk accords. When, one wonders, did these arguments cease to be valid?
Sabina Higgins, the wife of President Michael D Higgins, was criticised for calling for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in a letter to this newspaper in July 2022. Today, Higgins would find herself in the company of influential US commentators. “Ukraine and the West are on an unsustainable trajectory, one characterised by a glaring mismatch between ends and means,” the former US diplomat and past president of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan of Georgetown University wrote in Foreign Affairs in November. They, too, call for “redefining success in Ukraine”.
The British-American analyst and former official at the US National Security Council Fiona Hill is a dissonant voice in the drift towards giving up on Ukraine. Whether Ukraine wins or loses is now almost entirely on us, Hill says
The background music in the US is about capitulation, and not just among Trump-supporting Republicans. Samuel Charap of the Rand Corporation and Jeremy Shapiro, research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, published a Stimson Issue Brief in December, detailing a proposed armistice in the Russo-Ukrainian war. It seems to reproach Ukraine for having “turned its back on the offer made early in the war to pursue neutrality” but does not mention that the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers at Bucha made it impossible for Zelenskiy to pursue that path.
[ Russia and Ukraine stage major prisoner exchangeOpens in new window ]
The Charap-Shapiro plan looks a lot like the failed Minsk accords which France and Germany brokered in 2014 and 2015. There is no explanation why a ceasefire, withdrawal of forces from the line of contact and a third-party monitoring mission – all of which failed in the eight years preceding the full-scale invasion – would succeed now.
The British-American analyst and former official at the US National Security Council Fiona Hill is a dissonant voice in the drift towards giving up on Ukraine. Whether Ukraine wins or loses is now almost entirely on us, Hill says.
The geopolitical costs of awarding Putin anything he can construe as a victory are enormous, Hill warns. To do so would strengthen Putin’s allies in China, Iran and North Korea. The US abandonment of Ukraine, following failed interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, would enable Putin to “present a pretty potent narrative about the US inability to maintain its commitments and forfeiting its role as an international leader”.