On the menu today: Ukrainians see the sudden shift in U.S. policy toward the region, sigh, shrug, and go on with the fight to ensure their continued right to exist. If NATO membership is out, then there’s another European alliance that may prove to be a worthwhile substitute. A Kremlin spokesman laughably declares, “No one can dictate anything to any country, and we are not going to do that.”
The Next Steps for Ukraine
Kyiv, Ukraine — A question I get from readers at home is how the Ukrainians are reacting to the abrupt changes in U.S. policy toward Russia. One friend described a Ukrainian official’s mood as “ready to commit seppuku.”
Halyna Yanchenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament and chair of a committee on investor protection, was at the Munich Security Conference last week. Referring to Christoph Heusgen, the German diplomat and chair of the conference who shed tears, she said, “He did what a lot of other men felt.”
But there’s also a certain “so be it” determination to Ukrainians in the past week. They’ve always been the underdogs, and they’ve had all kinds of things go wrong in the course of defending their country. That the new U.S. president furiously denounced their leader as a “dictator” while never quite mustering any irritation over Vladimir Putin and Russia’s actions is just par for the course. Putin has always insisted Ukraine is not a real country (more on that below), and thus there is no realistic chance of a lasting peace with an enemy that seeks to destroy you and wipe you off the map — no more realistic than expecting Israel to negotiate a lasting peace with the leaders of Hamas.
The Ukrainians fight on, because they have no other realistic choice.
Yanchenko added that there’s also a recognition that if the U.S. is no longer going to be such a reliable partner to Europe and the guarantor of the continent’s security, then Europe may well need a new ally with a lot of experience in fighting the Russians.
In a dark week, there was one intriguing little wrinkle. Reuters, reporting from Moscow:
Asked if Ukraine could one day join the European Union, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “This is the sovereign right of any country.”
“We are talking about integration and economic integration processes. And here, of course, no one can dictate anything to any country, and we are not going to do that.”
Peskov added, though, that Russia’s position was different when it came to Ukraine joining military alliances.
“There is a completely different position, of course, on security-related issues related to defense or military alliances,” Peskov said.
First, it’s a refreshing change to hear anyone at the Kremlin refer to Ukraine as an independent and sovereign country in any context — even government spokesman blather — as Vladimir Putin has spent years insisting that Ukraine is not a real country and is merely a delusional and temporarily broken-away portion of Russia.
This Russian notion of on-again, off-again sovereignty sounds something like being a little bit pregnant. Either a country has the right to make its own alliances and relationships or it doesn’t. If somebody in Moscow gets to veto your defense treaties, you’re not really sovereign.
If Ukraine can’t get into NATO — and apparently President Trump was willing to make that concession to Putin before the negotiations even started — then European Union membership would be the next best option. EU membership would tie free Ukraine closer to Europe and help the Ukrainian economy thrive so they can finance what will likely be an expensive armed wall of defense against Russia.
It is also worth noting that the European Union treaty has a mutual defense clause, declaring, “If a member state is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other member states have an obligation to aid and assist it by all the means in their power.” (It has probably never been tested in the way that the future status of Ukraine and Russia would.)
Ukraine applied for EU membership shortly after Russia invaded, and the union formally gave Ukraine “candidate status” on June 23, 2022 — that’s actually the fastest that process has ever run, and supposedly the talks for membership are supposed to be “fast tracked” this year.
For Austria, Finland, and Sweden, the road to EU membership was the quickest, with only one year and eleven months between the start of negotiations and accession in 1995. But on average, it’s taken about nine years for each of the 21 current members that underwent the accession process to join the EU.
It’s hard to begrudge the EU wanting to take its time for this process, as it turned out Greece had made up its economic numbers when it joined. But Ukraine needs the stability and advantages of EU membership as soon as possible, not six years from now.
For Ukraine, EU membership means a lot more foreign investment, belonging to one of the planet’s most prosperous economic communities, and freer travel to the rest of the continent.
For the European Union, admitting Ukraine means it gets a new economic tie to a consumer market for 40 million people and the supplier of 20 percent of the world’s grain; it also gains access to all of those rare earth metals that the United States wants. And while the EU is not a military alliance, admitting Ukraine means a closer tie with a country with a battle-hardened, nearly million-man army that has spent the past three years killing lots of Russians.
If another Iron Curtain is descending across Europe, I want as many people as possible on the free side of it.
You notice Putin, bully that he is, hasn’t picked a direct fight with any NATO member. (Russia is willing to engage in other forms of conflict, like jamming GPS signals, stealing border marker buoys, and sabotage and assassination plots across Europe.)
He knows that a direct fight would be biting off a lot more than he can chew — and his army’s already pretty chewed up. (You can find the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense’s estimate of Russian casualties here; even if you think these are exaggerated, if you cut the Ukrainian estimates in half, Russia has still suffered considerably more troops killed and wounded in three years of war than the U.S. did in nearly 20 years of the Vietnam War.)
The battlefields of Ukraine have proven to be a bloodbath for the Russian army, and Russia’s demographics looked really lousy before they marched hundreds of thousands of young men directly into the line of fire. The Atlantic Council studied Russia’s population numbers and birth rate — just 1.4 children per woman — and concluded that by launching the war in Ukraine, “Putin has turned a daunting crisis into a cataclysm.” In July, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called Russia’s declining birth rate “catastrophic for the future of the nation,” and Russian legislators have proposed a ban on “propaganda of conscious refusal to bear children.”
But NATO membership for Ukraine was always going to be a tall order. Membership requires, among other things, unanimous agreement among existing NATO members — very tough to get with Viktor Orbán of Hungary, among others. The U.S. State Department has declared that, for NATO membership, “the nations must be good neighbors and respect sovereignty outside their borders,” and implied in that is that a country must have clear and internationally recognized borders; NATO wants to know exactly what territory it is treaty-obligated to defend, down to the last square mile or kilometer.
What Missing $100 Billion?
In Trump’s Truth Social post Wednesday blasting Zelensky, he charged that “half the money we sent him is missing.”
The good folks at CSIS do their best to get the sense of what Trump, and ultimately Zelensky, were talking about:
Q: What did President Zelensky say that started this controversy?
A: In an interview with the Associated Press on February 2, Zelensky stated:
When I hear that America gave Ukraine hundreds of billions [of dollars], 177, to be more precise . . . as the president of a warring country, I can tell you that we received just over 75. . . . We are talking about specific things, because we got it, not with money but with weapons. There is training, there is additional transport, there are not only prices for weapons. There were humanitarian programs, social, etc. . . . $100 billion of these 177, we never received. When it’s said that Ukraine received $200 billion to support the army during the war, that is not true. I don’t know where all the money is. . . .
Q: So, what did Zelensky mean when he said Ukraine had only received $75 billion?
A: It’s unclear how he did the math, but there are several plausible explanations.
Most likely, he added the value of announced military equipment ($34.1 billion for drawdown, $33.2 billion for USAI, and $6.3 billion for Foreign Military Sales). That comes to $73.4 billion, close to the $75 billion Zelensky cited. However, not all that equipment has arrived, so calling it “received” is not accurate. “Committed” would be better.
Zelensky might be using calculations done by the Kiel Institute in Germany, which tracks global support for Ukraine. Their number for U.S. military aid through October 31, 2024, is $64.5 billion; adding the $5.9 billion announced since then brings the total to $70.4 billion, close to the CSIS calculation.
As noted yesterday, according to the U.S. government’s special inspector general for Ukraine aid, as of September 30, 2024, “The U.S. Ukraine response funding totals nearly $183 billion, with $130.1 billion obligated and $86.7 billion disbursed.”
To the extent anyone can figure out where these guys are getting the numbers they’re throwing around, the $100 billion is the gap between what was announced and promised, and what has arrived so far. A chunk of that figure is not missing, it’s in transit.
ADDENDUM: This trip, the alternating RAT-TAT-TAT and BOOM sounds of the Ukrainian air-defense systems over Kyiv are louder and clearer than in past trips — I don’t know if that’s an indicator that they’re in a different location now or just busier.