And just like that Ukraine became the “other war.”
No sooner had the scale of Hamas’s savage butchery in Israel become clear, did Ukraine’s frenemies in Congress seize the moment to renew their call to cut off U.S. military assistance to Kyiv.
FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC CRISES UPEND BIDEN 2020 CAMPAIGN PROMISE OF RETURN TO STABILITY
“Israel is facing an existential threat. Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) posted on social media.
Hawley is a member of the small but growing not-another-dime-for-Ukraine caucus on Capitol Hill, consisting mostly of conservative lawmakers who are supporters of former President Donald Trump and have become disenchanted with the slow progress of Ukraine’s much-ballyhooed summer counteroffensive. They believe it’s time for the U.S. to stop pouring unlimited resources into what increasingly looks like a stalemate.
The $24 billion President Joe Biden has requested for Ukraine to cover the rest of this calendar year enjoys wide bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. But in the House, any bill without a majority of Republican votes can be blocked from a floor vote at the prerogative of the speaker.
And the last time there was a vote on Ukraine funding in late September, it passed easily with the help of Democratic votes, but failed to win a Republican majority by 16 votes.
“A huge shift in Washington on funding the Ukraine war,” crowed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on social media. “House Republicans stripped $300 million from our country’s defense bill. The majority of the majority voted against a stand-alone Ukraine supplemental. And the CR [continuing resolution] that passed didn’t have a penny for Ukraine.”
The resistance to funding a war that shows no sign of ending anytime soon, especially among pro-Trump Republicans, comes as polls show American public support is also flagging.
The percentage of Republicans who favor more U.S. military aid has dropped 30 points to 50% since the beginning of the war in February of last year, according to a recent survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
An August CNN poll found a majority of Americans oppose additional funding to support Ukraine by a 55%-45% margin, with a bare majority, 51%, saying the U.S. has already done enough to help Ukraine.
And it’s not just in the United States that cracks in Western resolve are showing.
Slovakia, a NATO and EU member, just elected a populist former prime minister who ran on a platform of halting military aid to Ukraine and easing some sanctions against Russia.
And a Eurobarometer poll showed unqualified support for Ukraine among Europeans dropping from 67% to 48%.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was hoping for another dramatic battlefield victory this summer to galvanize support for his maximalist goals, which include expelling Russian forces from large swaths of occupied Ukrainian territory and cutting the land bridge to Crimea as a first step toward its liberation.
U.S. and NATO officials point to recent battlefield gains and argue a quick victory was never in the cards given Russia’s multi-zone defenses and its conscript army of 200,000 to 300,000 troops.
“Ukraine is making steady progress forward, and it continues to liberate key terrain from the dug-in Russian invaders,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at a meeting this month of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels. “This is a hard and dangerous fight.”
A map produced by the Institute for the Study of War shows where Ukraine has broken through Russian defenses and retaken the southern town of Robotyne, but it is quickly apparent that recaptured territory amounts to a tiny dent in the 600-mile front line with Russia.
Zelensky is battling the perception the counteroffensive is faltering and the reality of facing another winter where Russia will target Ukraine’s power plants and electrical grid to inflict more misery on the Ukrainian populace.
The U.S. is focusing on providing more ground-based air defenses and artillery rounds, while Zelensky says he needs long-range ATACMS missiles and F-16s to make faster progress.
“If we don’t get the aid, we will lose the war,” Zelensky told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) during his visit to Washington last month.
Military experts dispute the idea that Ukraine is losing or stuck in a stalemate and argue Ukrainian commanders are fighting smart, picking battles they can win while wearing down the Russians.
“The Ukrainian General Staff is running rings around the Russian General Staff,” retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe, argued in a recent interview.
Hodges cited Ukraine’s use of maritime drones to force Russia to move its warships away from their home port at Sevastopol, Crimea, headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, no small feat considering Ukraine doesn’t have a navy.
“Crimea is the decisive terrain,” Hodges posted on X, predicting that Ukraine will successfully use a “multi-domain counteroffensive” to isolate Crimea, making it “untenable for Russian navy, air force, logistics,” while limiting the ability of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet to launch missiles against Ukrainian ports and cities.
“It’s time for the West to embrace Ukraine’s way of war, not doubt it,” argues Nataliya Bugayova, an analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.
“Ukrainian forces have done what successful militaries do — they have adapted and are now advancing. Ukraine recognized the realities of Russian defenses much faster than Western policymakers, who were expecting a rapid Ukrainian breakthrough,” Bugayova writes in an essay.
“Ukraine’s ingenuity is yielding results. Ukraine maintains the battlefield initiative and its forces are advancing in Zaporizhia Oblast and near Bakhmut. Ukraine continues to liberate its territory and people and is slowly but steadily breaking through an incredibly formidable Russian prepared defense — and the Russian forces are unable to stop the advance, which is now moving in two directions.”
In its recent battle assessments, the ISW says it does not judge the war in Ukraine to be stalemated, and argues “there is no path to real peace other than helping Ukraine inflict an unequivocal military defeat on Russia.”
Anything less would only be a “temporary respite,” until Russia rebuilds and tries again.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t invade Ukraine in 2022 because he feared NATO,” ISW analysts write in a separate essay. “His aim was not to defend Russia against some nonexistent threat but rather to expand Russia’s power, eradicate Ukraine’s statehood, and destroy NATO, goals he still pursues.”
All the talk of cutting aid to Ukraine is dangerous, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper warned in a recent interview.
“I think things look a lot better if you’re Vladimir Putin sitting in Moscow. I mean, he sees a U.S. government that’s dysfunctional right now that can’t provide the aid that Ukraine needs,” Esper told CNN. “If U.S. aid to Ukraine falls, we’re like the big Jenga block at the bottom of the tower. You pull that out and a lot of other Western aid risks being lost as well.”
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“To my Republican colleagues who believe that we should pull the plug on supporting Ukraine, if you think Putin’s going to stop at Ukraine, you’re not paying any attention. China is watching everything we do,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said after the Hamas attack on Israel rekindled the Ukraine funding debate.
“It would be really ill-conceived to not support Ukraine. They have destroyed half the Russian military. We have spent less than 5% of our defense budget, and not one American has died. This has been a good investment.”
