No clear vision of victory clouds in U.S. debate on Ukraine

ANALYSIS: President Biden has framed it as an existential fight, one that requires sustained U.S. funding for Ukraine in order to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin from overrunning Eastern Europe with a 21st century blitzkrieg.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said that the U.S. wants to see a Russian military weakened to the point it’s no longer a threat to its neighbors. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said last year that the administration wants to put Kyiv in the strongest possible negotiating position when the two sides inevitably come to the negotiating table.

Numerous administration officials have voiced some variation of an even more vague — and potentially quite expensive — position.

“We will continue to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” Mr. Austin said late last month.

So far, the administration’s clearest definition of an endgame for the Ukraine–Russia war is a world in which Kyiv has pushed Mr. Putin‘s invading army forces out of its territory and reclaimed all its sovereign, internationally recognized ground.

But even that goal is murky at best: Will the U.S. insist that Russian troops vacate Crimea, which they’ve held since 2014? Is a Ukrainian military operation to retake the peninsula even feasible? Or is the idea of a liberated Crimea merely the opening Ukrainian position in eventual peace talks with the Kremlin?

Nearly two years into the war, none of those questions have truly been answered, and the lack of clarity has left the future of U.S. military aid to Ukraine very much in doubt. Republicans in the House are demanding that the president articulate a clear path to victory for Ukraine before they sign off on the administration’s stalled $61.4 billion funding request. Republicans in both the House and Senate also want more money for U.S.-Mexico border security as part of any Ukraine funding package.

From Mr. Biden on down, the administration is sounding the alarm and casting the Republican position as a literal danger to mankind. The president painted an almost apocalyptic future of a world without more American taxpayer money for Ukraine, one in which it will be American GIs, not Ukrainian soldiers, doing the fighting and dying to defend U.S. and Western interests in Europe.

“If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there. It’s important to see the long run here. He’s going to keep going. He’s made that pretty clear,” the president said during a speech at the White House. “If Putin attacks a NATO ally — if he keeps going and then he attacks a NATO ally — well, don’t have today: American troops fighting Russian troops, American troops fighting Russian troops if he moves into other parts of NATO.”

Republicans, meanwhile, argue that it’s both fiscally responsible and morally just to insist that the U.S. sketch out a path to peace before committing tens of billions more dollars to a conflict that could drag on for years — especially given Moscow’s historic willingness to throw countless bodies into battle rather than admit defeat.

They also contend that the administration should provide a detailed accounting of how the $111 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine so far has been spent.

“I reiterate that President Biden must satisfy congressional oversight inquiries about the administration’s failure thus far to present clearly defined objectives. … American taxpayers deserve a full accounting of how prior U.S. military and humanitarian aid has been spent, and an explanation of the president’s strategy to ensure an accelerated path to victory,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, wrote in a recent letter to the White House. “In light of the current state of the U.S. economy and the massive amount of our national debt, it is our duty in Congress to demand answers to these reasonable questions, and we still await the answers.”

The president’s funding package, which also included $14 billion for Israel in addition to $61.4 billion for Ukraine, was blocked in the Senate last week and negotiations on a way forward continue. The prospects of any more American aid to Ukraine are now in question, with the administration warning it will run out of money by the end of the year.

Defining victory

If “victory” is a return to the post-Soviet Union, 1991 borders of Ukraine, some analysts warn that’s little more than a pipe dream.

Restoring those borders would involve pushing Russian forces out of Crimea and areas of Ukraine‘s Donbas region, which Russia and its proxies have effectively controlled for years.

The Russian side has also spent the past 22 months fortifying deep defensive trenches in those areas. Ukraine‘s widely hyped counteroffensive last fall failed to make much of a dent in those positions and fueled a new round of questions about whether either side could ever score a decisive win.

“There is literally, physically, no path to that objective,” said retired Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, now a senior fellow at the think tank Defense Priorities, which advocates for a more restrained U.S. military role abroad.

There’s little argument that U.S. aid thus far has helped Ukraine protect Kyiv and other vital cities from the Russian invasion. Aside from the occasional drone strikes, life has returned to something resembling normalcy in much of the western parts of the country.

Ukraine also has inflicted huge damage on the Russian military, with an estimated 50,000 Russian troops killed since the war began and another 20,000 mercenary fighters also killed. Russia has lost more than 11,000 pieces of military equipment during the fight, according to an analysis earlier this year by the military blog Oryx.

Those massive losses would seem to fulfill one policy aim put forth by the administration so far. In April 2022, with the war less than two months old, Mr. Austin said that weakening Russia is an explicit U.S. goal.

“We want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country able to protect its sovereign territory. We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” he said at the time.

But such a strategy may be reaching the point of diminishing returns. Russia seems to be able to replenish its stockpiles, including with foreign-made military equipment such as Iranian drones and foreign-made artillery shells. Mr. Putin has ordered several call-ups of reservists to replace those killed or wounded in action.

And despite the huge losses and embarrassing battlefield setbacks Russia has suffered, British intelligence officials warned earlier this month that Russian forces are making “creeping advances” through the Donetsk province in eastern Ukraine — an area formerly seen as ripe ground for Ukraine‘s counteroffensive.

Perhaps counterintuitively, sticking with Ukraine for “as long as it takes” could actually shift the balance of power even more firmly in Russia‘s favor, Col. Davis argued.

“The longer this war goes, the stronger Russia gets, conventionally,” he said. “They’re so big they could absorb those [heavy casualties]. … And they’re getting combat experience at every level.”

Political battles

Other specialists say that it is little surprise Republicans are demanding a clearer path to victory before signing off on more U.S. aid. The administration, they argue, has done a poor job of articulating exactly what America’s goals are in Ukraine, how they can be achieved, and the time frame for doing so.

“The administration’s larger failure is that it continues to refrain from telling Congress, the American people and quite possibly Ukraine and our NATO allies what its objectives for Ukraine are,” Stephen Blank, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, wrote in a recent article for The Hill.

“Beyond public and congressional ignorance of the administration’s policy, the lack of clarity has rendered the mission vulnerable to Republican charges that there is little rationale for authorizing new funding to Ukraine. We now have an impasse that can only further undermine Ukrainian capabilities, if not morale, while the Biden administration’s hands are tied for several weeks or months,” he wrote. “This is a clear policy failure and a failure towards our partners and allies. This delays and undermines the transfer of funds and weapons essential for Ukraine to survive, let alone win.”

The massive distraction brought on by the Israel-Hamas war, and the need to focus attention and resources on Israel’s fight, has only weakened the urgency of the Ukraine campaign.

Other specialists, however, say that the amounts of money in question pale in comparison to what the U.S. has spent in past conflicts that ended up accomplishing little in the way of long-term policy objectives.

“The United States spent trillions of dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with very little to show by way of positive developments in either campaign,” Michael John Williams, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, wrote in a recent analysis. “In stark contrast, Kyiv has judiciously utilized U.S. and international assistance to significantly weaken what the U.S. Department of Defense calls a ‘near-peer competitor.’”

“While fiscal responsibility is commendable, the failure to provide Kyiv with an additional $61.4 billion to uphold the liberal world order and significantly degrade the Russian military is a short-sighted decision with far-reaching consequences for national security,” he wrote.