Maggie's Farm

“Existential” is a word perhaps a bit overused, but in this case it is accurate. Ukraine is approaching the end of the second year of a war against a larger power on not just a war of imperial conquest, but with the ultimate goal of eliminating Ukraine as an independent nation or even a separate people.

. . . Despite all the pre-war metrics, the “expertise” of the Smartest People in the Room™, every wargame that would have been run at all our war colleges would have told us that there would not be a conventional war in Ukraine is finishing up its second and going in to its third year, but here we are.

They were all wrong.

A common problem, one that well pre-dates the invasion of Ukraine, is that we have shockingly well credentialed people of influence from both parties who have an inability to understand that Russians are not Westerners. They don't think like westerners, though they may look like them.

. . . Time is always on the side of Russia, which is one of the reasons the slow rolling of weapons to Ukraine has been an exercise of malpractice of the highest degree. You are either in or out.

Two years on, "we" still are not sending a clear signal. It is amazing, really; in military might, GDP, demographics and a whole host of other reasons, Russia should not be as resilient as they are ... which is why DC & Brussels are being played so hard. They still do not understand Russia.

. . . The time for leaving Ukraine to its fate is long past. Yes, the West has a short attention span and is suffering under the dead hand of entrenched leaders with a defeatist mindset – but none of this is written.

Ukraine can still win – or at least something that can be called a win.

. . . At a relatively modest cost in our treasure and almost none of our blood, we are wearing down Russia’s ability to project power for a generation, perhaps two.

. . . The Ukrainian Air Force should already have at least 100 F-16s flying under their colors and the Ukrainian Army should have double that number of M1 Abrams per quarter (we have thousands). We should have taken the risk and sent them significant numbers of ATACMS over a year ago as well. Don't get me started about the Western European and N. American industrial base issues.

. . . No one should fool themselves about what a Russian victory in Ukraine will bring. Everyone should fully know this; absent a super-volcano sized natural disaster or another civil war, there is nothing that would prevent the USA from being brought into another pan-European war should one break out – with or without NATO.

The best way to ensure another pan-European war is to allow a Russian victory in Ukraine.

I am in stark disagreement with friends on this topic, and find myself aligned with people who, well, don’t care all that much for my other opinions – but that does not change one bit what I see clearly.

The former high-ranking CIA officer, a man who can draw on long experience in the White House Situation Room, from which covert operations are often launched, was unequivocal: “Without a doubt, the United States did not do this. There is no way the Biden administration would. If it was the Trump administration, it might be a different story. But there’s no way that Biden would ever sign off on doing something like that.”

Russia, in the words of the Foreign Policy columnist Emma Ashford, writing in June 2023, “seemed to be the most obvious candidate.” Putin, according to this logic, had blown up his own pipeline primarily to punish Europe for its solidarity with Ukraine. Further—a Putinesque twist—if suspicion could be quietly cast on Kyiv, then support for Ukraine might itself be undermined.