Introductory remarks: Ted
Snider, a U.S. foreign policy columnist, discusses the horrors of this
war and the high numbers of deaths of Ukrainian soldiers, which
Washington and its Western allies rarely mention. The Zelensky regime
keeps a heavy lid of secrecy on the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers but
rather emphasizes the heavy losses the Ukrainian army is inflicting upon
the Russian fighters. The war is proving a great disaster for the
Ukrainians. The only sensible way is to let diplomacy work and the
two sides seek an end to the war by negotiations. However, Washington
had its objectives in mind, and it prevented Ukraine from entering into
any negotiations with Moscow or any compromises to that end.
-- Nasir Khan
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by Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute, Aug 21, 2023
Getting a count of Ukraine’s dead that isn’t the
output of someone’s propaganda machine is difficult to do. But the
number of dead is indisputably a horror. Measuring the maiming of
Ukraine solely in deaths, though, is an injustice to the depth of the
Ukrainian wound.
It is not just that using tens of thousands as the unit in
which to measure the dead may be an understatement meant to maintain
morale and keep Ukrainians fighting with the political West providing
support. Deaths may be the worst way to scar a nation, but they are not
the only way to scar a nation.
The promise that the sacrifice of soldiers in the
counteroffensive would be worth it has been deflated and hope has been
lost. The payment in lives it purchased is little, and a senior western
diplomat told
CNN that “for them to really make progress that would change the
balance of this conflict, I think, it’s extremely, highly unlikely.”
The result is despair. An August 10 report from Kiev in The Washington Post
begins with the words, “This nation is worn out” and continues with the
hopeless observation that “Ukrainians, much in need of good news, are
simply not getting any.”
Reports of Ukrainians lining up to fight in the early days
of the war have been replaced by reports of Ukrainians doing everything
they can to elude the draft. On August 11, Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed
every director of a regional military recruitment center. Though
reports focused on the crackdown of corruption, the real news was what
the corruption was selling. Those who were willing to volunteer have
gone to the front and fallen; those who are left have seen the price and
no longer want to go. The heads of the recruitment centers were fired
for taking bribes to help them. They were fired for “exploiting their
positions to enrich themselves through draft evasion schemes.” Zelensky described
the “cynicism” and “treason” as the “illicit enrichment” and “unlawful
benefit” for the “illegal transfer of persons liable for military
service across the border.”
But death and despair are not the only costs. So too are loss of limb and loss of mental health. A Washington Post article
of August 15 describes “Bodies ripped to pieces. Arms and legs mangled
beyond recognition” from mines and “the mental anguish of amputating
limb after limb after limb.” The Wall Street Journal recently reported
that between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians “have lost one or more limbs
since the start of the war” before saying that “the actual figure could
be higher.”
There are also unconfirmed reports of high numbers of suicides in the Ukrainian armed forces. A New York Times piece called “The Hidden Trauma of Ukraine’s Soldiers”
reports on the “crisis of wounded psyches, in addition to broken
bodies, among Ukrainian soldiers.” The report says that the need for
“treatment for psychological trauma…far outstrips Ukraine’s ability to
address it.”
There is no sign of an end to the horror. But what comes next for Ukraine may be worse.
Russia may not stay on the defensive forever. After a
counteroffensive comes the next offensive. Russia has been staying on
the defensive, allowing Ukraine to walk into their prepared positions
and be devoured. As the Ukrainian armed forces become frustrated and
reduced, Russia may be biding its time to turn the counteroffensive into
the next big Russian offensive.
There has apparently been unofficial chatter in Russia
about the inevitability of a future Russian offensive. Former general
Konstantin Pulikovsky is said to have commented that “there will
definitely be an offensive. But it usually begins when we feel that the
enemy is really exhausted.” On August 15, Russian defence minister
Sergei Shoigu told a security conference in Moscow that Russia says was attended by 26 defense ministers and 75 countries that “Ukraine’s military resources are almost exhausted.”
Writing in Asia Times, Stephen Bryen says
that “The Russians have been holding out instead of starting a big push
to finish the war, trying to wear down the Ukrainians…But war planners
in Moscow know how to count, and it could be they now see opportunities
for a big offensive.”
While emphasizing their defensive stance, Russia has
reportedly been quietly advancing in the north. Though Russia has not
called it an offensive, Ukrainian officials claim
Russia is “amassing vast numbers of troops and equipment along the
northern frontline in Ukraine,” as well as hundreds of tanks, artillery
systems, and rocket launchers.
Military analyst and ret. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis has repeatedly pointed out that,
even if Ukraine were to launch and win a counteroffensive, the rate of
casualties and deaths would be so high, they would “have spent [their]
last remaining force with which to conduct offensives” or future
operations, leaving them vulnerable to a Russian offensive.
If the goal, as U.S. President Joe Biden always says,
is to put Ukraine in the best position “on the battlefield [to] be in
the strongest possible position at the negotiating table,” then that
opportunity has twice passed. It passed in the days before the war when
Ukraine could have kept all its territory and avoided all of the deaths
in exchange for an American promise not to admit Ukraine into NATO when
Moscow presented its proposal on security guarantees. It passed again in
November 2022 when Ukraine recaptured massive amounts of territory, and
military analysts warned of an inflection point at which Ukraine could
likely not capture more territory but could lose more territory and more
lives.
The third opportunity is now. The counteroffensive is
failing and pushing it further may just be setting the battlefield for a
Russian offensive.
One day, Ukrainians, every one of whom will have known
someone who was killed or wounded in the war, may remember in despair
that Russia would likely have called off the war for a promise of
Ukraine’s neutrality, which is less than the U.S. demands of Cuba.
Zelensky was willing to make that promise in negotiations in the first
weeks of the war. Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the
Quincy Institute, reports
that the large majority of Ukrainians opposed joining NATO in every
poll that asked the question before 2014. In 2008, when NATO opened the
door to Ukraine, 58% of Ukrainians opposed it. As late as May 2022,
three months into the war with Russia, still only 59% of Ukrainians said they would vote to join NATO.
They will also remember in despair that all of the
territories now annexed by Russia, excluding Crimea but including an
autonomous Donbas, could have remained part of Ukraine. Sociologist
Volodymyr Ishchenko, a leading scholar on radical movements in Ukraine,
says in a recent article
that “on the eve of the invasion, the largest opposition
party…advocated Ukrainian neutrality and the full implementation of the
Minsk Accords.” At the height of the political crisis over the
implementation of the Minsk Accords, Ishchenko reports that only 26% of
Ukrainians supported the “No” campaign.
Ukrainians may one day remember that, after they had
negotiated to their satisfaction in Belarus, again in negotiations with
then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, and yet again in Istanbul,
they fought on in service of a wider American war that led to all their
deaths, broken bodies, and broken minds.
If the war goes on, all of this will likely only get
worse. If the goal is to negotiate before Ukraine is in an even more
vulnerable position and before it is even more wounded, then the time to
end the fighting and negotiate a diplomatic settlement is now.
