As military and political leaders of 31 member nations are gathering in Vilnius, Lithuania, for the annual NATO summit to discuss strategic security threats facing the alliance, one crucial issue will not be on the agenda. There will be no discussion about how to end the bloody war in Ukraine, which crossed the 500-day mark on Saturday. Quite the opposite, it’s becoming obvious to any serious analyst that the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the biggest war in Europe since World War II, is turning into Biden’s – and Putin’s for that matter -- Afghanistan 2.0. That is, there’s no end to it. At least for the foreseeable future. Here’s why.
The leaders of the three parties to this conflict, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States, the de facto leader of NATO want to keep going. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced on Monday that the alliance is pledging another, "multiyear package of support," amounting to over $500 million, "to strengthen Ukraine" and rebuild its defense and security sector, so that it can defend against further aggression."
BIDEN CLOSES DOOR TO NATO FOR UKRAINE, SAYS WAR WITH RUSSIA MUST END FIRST
The statement echoed the commitment expressed on Friday by President Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who vowed that the U.S. will "support Ukraine for as long as it takes and provide them an exceptional quantity of arms and capabilities." Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN in an interview on Friday that the war will not be "over" until Ukraine reclaims Crimea, an unachievable goal given the drastic disparity of forces between Russia and Ukraine and how deeply entrenched the Russia forces are in the peninsula.
U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley admitted in a press conference in November that the probability of Ukraine retaking Crimea and expelling all Russian forces "anytime soon is not high." Putin’s press secretary Dmitriy Peskov stated in a briefing on Friday that Russia is ready to negotiate on Ukraine but sees "no prospects." Putin’s ally and former President Dmitry Medvedev, who is currently deputy chairman of the powerful security council, said in May that war in Ukraine could last "decades."
Moscow and Washington are in a proxy war over geopolitical control of Ukraine and are pursuing irreconcilable policies, and neither is willing to find a compromise as they view each other as a mortal threat.
Putin views the outcome of the war as existential. Russia, which has seen its buffer zone with NATO, which Russia views as its top security threat, reduced to as little as 100 miles after the Baltic States joined NATO in 2004, has drawn a red line over Ukraine.
On Monday, Putin's press secretary Peskov warned the U.S. and Europe that Ukraine’s potential accession to NATO will have "very, very negative consequences for the entire already dilapidated security architecture in Europe," calling such as step "an absolute danger, a threat to our country." Putin has repeatedly cited NATO's expansion toward Russia's borders over the past two decades as a reason for his decision to launch an attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Washington's leaders believe that if Putin were to win in Ukraine, he would be emboldened to go after a NATO country, such as for former Soviet Baltic States or Poland, contradicting their own repeated statements that Putin’s regime is weak and that the Russian military is incompetent.
Even if Moscow and Washington were to engage in peace talks, they would never be able to reconcile their positions. Putin would probably settle for a ceasefire if Russia were allowed to keep Crimea and the four provinces it has annexed – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhiye, and Kherson. The U.S. and NATO would never agree to that, nor would they ever formally recognize these territories as Russian, Putin’s probable requirement.
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With Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive falling short of expectations, the war is effectively in a stalemate. Despite 17 months of relentless fighting, neither side is any closer to a decisive military victory over their opponent, with both sides hemorrhaging manpower. However, Russia’s capacity and manpower outmatch Ukraine’s, enabling Putin to continue a war of attrition.
Russia’s population is more than triple that of Ukraine’s and its military, despite its lack of sophistication, is still the best war-fighting force in Eurasia and a near-peer competitor to U.S. military, according the Pentagon’s own definition. Russia's economy, which Putin has sanction-proofed and transitioned onto a wartime footing, prior to the invasion has been able to support war requirements. It has weathered inflation much better than U.S. economy.
Billions of dollars in top of the line military hardware and cash poured into Ukraine by the Biden Administration has not markedly changed the battlefield dynamics in Ukraine’s favor. Russia still holds roughly one-fifth of its former Soviet satellite states. Neither F-16s nor cluster munitions will be a game changer. Here’s a sober reminder: the United States had to withdraw from Afghanistan after almost 20 years, having sunk $2.2 trillion and sacrificed 6,000 lives only to have the same brutal regime, the Taliban, reclaim power.
In December 2019, the so-called Afghanistan Papers, a trove of confidential government documents generated because of the U.S. government’s effort to understand the causes of its failed 20-year war in Afghanistan, revealed stunning facts. The Pentagon didn’t have the faintest idea about Afghanistan before invading it 2001 -- the culture, mindset, and warfighting style of its adversary. "We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing," Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general, who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. "What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."
Sadly, this unvarnished evaluation of the Washington establishment’s foreign affairs "expertise" by Ambassador Lute doesn’t apply solely to Afghanistan. Team Biden has no clue what they are doing in Ukraine, leading it into ultimate destruction by Putin.
