If western countries do not shake off their lethargy, the supreme international crime, initiating a war of aggression, will become the norm
Ukraine’s ambassador to Canada was defiant if unconvincing when she spoke to the parliamentary defence committee late Tuesday.
“We are holding the line, and in some regions, advancing,” Yuliya Kovaliv said from Kyiv.
However, all the information she provided suggested that, on the contrary, Ukraine is under more pressure than it has been since the first days of the war.
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She told MPs that an alarm had sounded in Kyiv within the previous half-hour and that a cyberattack had closed down one of the biggest cellphone networks, leaving millions with no access to the internet.
She added that on the night of December 11th, eight ballistic missiles were shot down by air defence systems over Kyiv, as Russia sought to hit critical infrastructure and leave the capital’s citizens to freeze in the dark. This is just part of a wave of drone and missile attacks that have ramped up as Russia has turned one-third of its pre-war production capacity towards its war effort.
Kovaliv said that the recently passed Russian budget for 2024 allocates 39 per cent of all spending toward defence and law enforcement — the equivalent of $200 billion (roughly 10 times what Canada spends).
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was making similar points in Washington, where he met influential members of Congress to try to persuade Republican lawmakers to back a US$60 billion aid package that has been held up by demands that the Biden administration introduce tougher asylum rules to curb migration across America’s southern border.
Ukraine’s position is precarious. Even Zelenskyy admits that its much-vaunted counter-offensive “has not had the desired effect.”
Aid from the U.S. has almost run out and a US$54-billion package from the European Union faces obstruction by Hungary at a meeting later this week.
Canada has supplied Ukraine with $2.4 billion of military assistance since the war started (part of the estimated $374 billion donated by the coalition of Ukraine’s partners) but Canada has nothing much left in its inventory and the Defence Department is facing its own cutbacks.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said last month that Canada will be with Ukraine “every step of the way … with everything it takes, for as long as it takes.”
But it will take more than the $25 million of winter clothing donated in October to change the momentum on the ground. “It’s all a bit performative,” said one observer of Canada’s efforts.
Talking to western diplomats in the region, it quickly becomes clear how precarious Ukraine’s position is.
Putin’s status, which seemed so insecure six months ago in the wake of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s putative rebellion, is now rock solid. He is so confident of his position that he visited the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia last week, his first trips beyond his immediate allies since the war began.
It turns out that the invasion of Ukraine, which seemed like a huge miscalculation by Putin now appears to be paying off, according to his own twisted logic — all because the West has proved his assumption that democracies are weak, hamstrung by the need to win votes. A recent harbinger of war fatigue was the election in Slovakia, which has been a staunch supporter of Ukraine but which, under its new government, will reject a proposed aid package.
The Russian dictator has long believed that the biggest catastrophe of the century was the break-up of the Soviet Union. And he has long concurred with former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s observation that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.
The short-term goal is to keep the four annexed territories — Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk and Luhansk — as well as Crimea and to take the port of Odesa, which would effectively cut off Ukraine from the Black Sea.
Time is on Putin’s side for a number of reasons. For one thing, his tolerance for casualties is limitless. Kovaliv told MPs that the Russian Federation has lost 339,000 personnel and 560,000 tanks since the war started. Those numbers are in line with U.S. declassified intelligence reported by CNN on Tuesday, which estimated that of the 360,000 troops that entered Ukraine in early 2022, 315,000 were lost on the battlefield.
Those are astounding numbers that no democracy could tolerate.
Yet, as one foreign diplomatic source related after a conversation with a senior Russian official, even if you multiplied that number by 10 over the course of a decade, it would still be considered sustainable by this regime. “They run on a completely different software system to us. We fail to understand that in the West,” he said.
Secondly, sanctions on Russian oil have failed miserably. The G7 placed a US$60 per barrel cap on Russian oil, which is well below the world market price. Russia has taken a financial hit to the tune of about US$34 billion, but India, China and Pakistan have been more than willing customers for discounted oil that has been transported on a shadow fleet of vessels. Trade with China alone is set to hit a record US$215 billion this year. Russia remains open for business and its war machine is funded lavishly.
Thirdly, the spectre of Donald Trump hovers over the war.
“Trump is doing the job for Putin, and if U.S. military assistance ends, Ukraine will be lost,” said one diplomat.
NATO’s next summit is in July in Washington — just as the presidential election warms up. Republicans will be keen to deny President Joe Biden any wins, which suggests Ukraine cannot rely on the Americans for its survival.
That is the conclusion already reached by others like the Poles. While the U.S. donated 30 to 40 HIMARS missile systems to Ukraine, Poland purchased 468 systems as part of a massive rearmament program that it hopes will make it the strongest military power on the European continent, spending more than three per cent of GDP on defence.
The prospect of a Trump victory is deeply concerning for Ukraine’s supporters. “We are sleepwalking into a catastrophe,” said one senior foreign diplomat in the region, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his views are not official government policy.
The diplomat said he does not think Trump will pull the U.S. out of NATO but, rather, he will make support conditional on uncritical support of U.S. policy.
That uncertainty would call into question the iron-clad nature of the Article 5 collective defence clause, an ambiguity that Putin would be keen to test.
Another of the Russian president’s long-held beliefs is his country’s obligation to support Russian-speaking minorities in former Soviet bloc countries like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Moldova and Georgia. “I would be scared to death, if I was them,” said the diplomat.
Amid all these shifting tectonics Canada has been reliably long on rhetoric and short on action.
“Canada is so far behind the curve on everything. It’s a bizarre message to send to your allies in these troubled times,” said the foreign diplomat.
The biggest frustration is that, even as it introduces a new $13 billion dental insurance program, there is no credible plan to meet the requirements of what is perhaps the best insurance deal on offer — spending two per cent of GDP on defence to protect the nation’s security.
“Even if we all had to go to three per cent, it would still be cheap,” said the diplomat. “We are not helping ourselves by being so complacent. If Trump wins, the day he comes into office, we have to be able to say that we are spending two per cent, so as not to give him an excuse.”
If the U.S. nuclear umbrella is rolled up, the worry for many Europeans is proliferation on a scale that would have been unimaginable a decade ago, as the Poles, the Turks and others all seek to acquire nuclear weapons.
This is why the U.S., U.K., Canada and the European Union have to live up to their rhetoric about their “unshakeable commitment” to Ukraine.
Zelenskyy has been advocating a “domino theory” argument that if Putin wins in Ukraine, then Moldova, Belarus and the Baltics will be next.
It is very plausible and illustrates the stakes that are at play: the future of NATO, the security of Europe and the fate of the rules-based order that has protected human rights, democracy and personal freedom around the world since 1945.
If western countries do not shake off their lethargy, the supreme international crime — initiating a war of aggression — will become an accepted continuation of politics using other means.
National Post
jivison@criffel.ca
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