An open letter calling for a swift diplomatic end to the war in Ukraine was published on Tuesday [May 16th] in the New York Times. The letter’s 14 signatories consisted mostly of former U.S. military officers and other national security officials, including Jack Matlock, Washington’s former ambassador to the Soviet Union; Ann Wright, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former diplomat; Matthew Hoh, a former Marine Corps officer and State Department official; and Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff. [https://eisenhowermedianetwork.org/russia-ukraine-war-peace/]
Many are longtime critics of U.S. foreign policy and post-9/11 war policies.
The letter calls the war an “unmitigated disaster” and cautions that “future devastation could be exponentially greater as nuclear powers creep ever closer toward open war.”
While condemning Vladimir Putin’s “criminal invasion and occupation,” the letter, which notes the serial invasions of Russia by foreign adversaries, encourages readers to understand the war “through Russia’s eyes.”
“In diplomacy, one must attempt to see with strategic empathy, seeking to understand one’s adversaries,” according to the letter. “This is not weakness: it is wisdom.”
“Since 2007, Russia has repeatedly warned that NATO’s armed forces on Russian borders were intolerable – just as Russian forces in Mexico or Canada would be intolerable to the U.S. now, or as Soviet missiles in Cuba were in 1962,” the letter reads. “Russia further singled out NATO expansion into Ukraine as especially provocative.”
The missive, which appeared on page 5 of the Times’ print edition, lays out the history of warnings by key U.S. national security officials, politicians, and others about the dangers of NATO expansion in the late 1990s, and again in 2008 when then-U.S. Ambassador to Russia and current CIA director William Burns cautioned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice against pushing for NATO membership for Ukraine.
Accompanying the text is a timeline of the deterioration in relations between Moscow and the West that begins in 1990, when Secretary of State James Baker assured Russia that NATO would not expand eastwards, until Russia’s invasion in February of last year.
“NATO expansion, in sum, is a key feature of a militarized U.S. foreign policy characterized by unilateralism featuring regime change and preemptive wars,” according to the letter, which suggests that Washington’s “failed wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan have been two of the results.
President Joe Biden has vowed that Washington will continue to aid Kyiv “as long as it takes.” The letter’s signers fear that this is a recipe for escalation that could result in catastrophe.
“As Dan Ellsberg has warned courageously and unceasingly, we — the world — are at the nuclear brink again, perhaps closer to the edge than ever before. It only requires one step to go over and then our steps end forever,” Wilkerson said in the statement released by the Eisenhower Media Network, which funded the full-page advertisement. “If that’s not sufficient reason for a return to diplomacy, our extinction is at hand; the timing is all that is in question.”
To date, the United States has sent $37 billion worth of military aid to Kyiv. High-level discussions with officials in Moscow have been rare, and a number of other entities, including China, Brazil, and the Pope, have taken on the mantle of pushing for a diplomatic solution.
What Washington’s role will look like going forward is more uncertain, with recent reporting as well as revelations from Pentagon leaks suggesting that the administration will continue supporting Ukraine through the anticipated counteroffensive against Russian forces before possibly reassessing, although officials have disputed that narrative.
The letter, entitled “The U.S. Should Be a Force for Peace in the World,” urges the Biden administration to pivot towards pursuing a negotiated solution to end the war “speedily.”
“This reality is not entirely of our own making, yet it may well be our undoing,” the letter concludes, “unless we dedicate ourselves to forging a diplomatic settlement that stops the killing and defuses tensions.”
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global law, Queen Mary University London, and Research Associate, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB.
If we look back on the major wars of the prior century and forward to the growing menace of a war fought with nuclear weaponry, there is one prominent gap in analysis and understanding. This gap is to my knowledge rarely acknowledged, or even discussed, by political leaders or addressed in the supposedly independent main media platforms in the West. Indeed, the gap seems to be explicitly denied, and given a hegemonic twist, by the Biden presidency, especially by Antony Blinken’s repeated insistence that American foreign policy, unlike that of its principal adversaries, is ‘rule-governed.’
At first glance ‘rule-governed’ might be nothing more than a concise synonym for adherence to international law. Blinken makes no such claim, and even a foreign policy hawk would have a hard time straining to rationalize American international behavior as ‘law-governed,’ but rather might say, or at least believe, following Thucydides, ‘that strong do as they will, while the weak do as they must.’ Some have speculated that ‘rule-governed’ as a phrase of choice these days in Washington is best associated with a rebirthing of ‘Pax Americana,’ or as I have previously suggested a dusting off of the Monroe Doctrine that had guided U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America to proclaim after the Soviet implosion in 1991 what is in effect a Monroe Doctrine for the world, or seen from a different perspective, the NATO-IZATION of the post-Cold War world.’
Such provocative labels seems descriptive of the NATO response to the Russian 2022 attack on Ukraine, which from day one was treated by the West as an flagrant instance of a Crime Against the Peace, more generally viewed as a war of aggression, and so declared by a large majority of countries by way of a UN General Assembly Resolution ES-11/1, March 00, 2022, by a vote of 122-5, with 35 abstentions (including China and India) although without comparable support for the follow up to denouncing the attack by way of imposing sanctions, supplying weapons, and diplomatic strong-arming looking toward a military victory rather than a political compromise achieved through a ceasefire followed by negotiations.
What seems to many, mostly in the West, obvious at first glance at the Ukraine War is not so clear if a closer look is taken. There is the matter of the pre-war context of Ukrainian and NATO provocations as well as the Russian right of veto entrenched in the UN Charter, amounting to a green light given to the winners in World War II to the use of international force at their discretion when it comes to peace and security issues, and in the process ignore Charter obligations to seek a peaceful settlement of all international disputes.
The U.S./UK unprovoked attack on Iraq in 2003 is indicative of this double standard manifested by the response to the Russian attack, as were the NATO regime-changing intervention in Libya and Euro-American support for the Saudi intervention in Yemen and a host of other examples going back to the Vietnam War. In other words, ‘rule-governed’ as a practical matter seems to mean impunity whenever the U.S., its allies and friends, launch ‘wars of choice’ and accountability in relation to international law for its adversaries, particularly its geopolitical rivals, who are denied the intended benefits of their right of veto and held responsible for adherence to international law in the war/peace domain as it is presented in the UN Charter. In effect, international law is not a restraint on the U.S./NATO with respect to war-making, but it functions as a strategic policy and propaganda tool for use against adversaries. Such duplicity in deploying the authority of law is widely seen outside of the West as a glaring example of moral hypocrisy that undermines more generally the aspiration of substituting the rule of law for force in relations between the Great Powers in the nuclear age.
These is more to this exhibition of double standards and moral hypocrisy as illustrated by another related Blinken elaboration of the kind of world order he affirms on behalf of the U.S. It is his ahistorical assertion that ‘spheres of influence’ should have been thrown into the dustbin of history after World War II, and therefore the fact that Ukraine (and Crimea) border on Russia, with long intertwined historical experience, ethnic ties, and territorial instabilities be treated as irrelevant. Surely, Cubans or Venezuelans, or earlier Chileans and certainly Central Americans, would be excused if they laughed out loud, given the forcible contemporaneous efforts of Washington to deny the populations of these countries respect for their sovereign rights, including even the inalienable right of self-determination. Spheres of influence are admittedly abusive with respect to bordering societies, whether maintained by Russia or the United States, and yet in an imperfectly governed world such spheres in certain regional settings play crucial war prevention roles. They can mitigate potential geopolitical confrontations in which deference by antagonists to previously well-delimited spheres of influence can be credited with providing a brake on escalation at times of crisis. East/West spheres of influence for preserving world peace during the most dangerous crises of the Cold War, most notably at the time of the Berlin Crises (1950s), Soviet Interventions in Eastern Europe (1956-1968), Cuban Missile Crisis (1961).
Rather than dispensing with spheres of influence the wartime leaders of the U.S., UK, and the USSR in World War II recognized even during their common cause against Naziism that an anticipated post-war rivalry between the winners to pursue their distinct national interests by extending their ideological, political, and economic influence, especially in Europe, could turn dangerous. These leaders, although espousing hostile ideologies, sought agreements to avoid postwar confrontations in Europe at a series of conferences. The leaders of the U.S., USSR, and the UK reached agreements, most notably in 1945 at Yalta and Potsdam, that might have done more to prevent a slide into World War III than certainly the UN Charter and maybe even the much invoked doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD as denoting the pathology of genocidal peacemaking in the nuclear age).
These wartime agreements did not explicitly use the cynical language of spheres of influence but rather stressed the divisions relating to the occupation of European countries previously controlled by the defeated fascist states, with a particular attention given to Germany that was seen as the most culpable and dangerous actor among the Axis Powers. In this regard, alone among European states, Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany, and its capital city of Berlin was notoriously divided into West Berlin and East Berlin. For the rest of Europe, the Soviet Union was given responsibility for occupation and state building in East Europe while the victors assumed a comparable responsibility in Western Europe.
This language of division did not inhibit both ‘superpowers’ from engaging in propaganda wars with one another throughout the Cold War. Yet what it did do was to induce international prudence in a form that was respectful of these wartime assessments of control. This prudence was in stark contrast to the inflammatory response of the West to the 2023 Russian attack on Ukraine, accentuated by disdaining diplomacy, a political compromise, and openly seeking the Russian defeat so as to confirm post-Cold War unipolarity when it comes to peace and security issues. Undoubtedly, the wartime atmosphere in 1944-45 contributed to the importance of taking preventive measures to guard against the recurrence of a major war fought over the control and future of Europe. The Potsdam Conference ended less than a week before an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Harry Truman informing Stalin that the U.S. possessed a super-weapon that would hasten the unconditional surrender of Japan, as indeed it did.
Although conducted prior to the use of the atomic bomb this wartime diplomacy was fearfully aware that a future war would be far more destructive than two earlier world wars. In this sense, these fault lines in Europe were established in an atmosphere of hope and fear, but also within limits set by state-centrism and geopolitical ambition, giving rise quickly to tensions that extinguished hopes of retaining postwar international harmony, thereby dimming hopes of transcending the high-risk Great Power rivalries of the past. This led to Cold War bipolarity with its complex ideological, military, territorial, and political dimensions of intense conflict. And yet World War III was avoided, despite some close calls, in the ensuing 45 years after the end of World War II.
The idea of ‘geopolitical fault lines’ and even ‘spheres of influence’ are not well established in the practice or theory of international relations, but their existence is profoundly necessary for the maintenance of peace and security among Great Powers, and for the world generally. This relevance of geopolitical fault lines is partly a result of the failure of international law to have the capability to enforce consistently limits on the coercive behavior of the reigning Great Powers, granting them de facto impunity for acting beyond the limits of the law. In this sense, geopolitical fault lines and related agreed territorial divisions offer an improvised substitute for international law by setting formally agreed mutual limits on behavior backed by the specific commitments of Great Powers, which it is known that when transgressed result in severe tensions, and possibly catastrophic warfare, between the most heavily armed states in the world might result.
The overriding point is that the Biden/Blinken response to the Ukraine War and the rise of China are contemptuous of the geopolitical prudence and diplomatic techniques that helped save the world from a disastrous conflagration during the Cold War Era. Of course, costly warfare broke out in the divided countries of Korea and Vietnam, but in settings where there was no assent to the temporary division imposed from without and the strategic stakes of challenging these imposed supposedly temporary divisions were peripheral as contrasted with Germany where they were of the highest order. Despite this, in the Korean and Vietnam contexts, the stakes were still high enough for the U.S. to threaten the use of nuclear weapons to maintain the status quo, most menacingly in relation to Korea, and China acting on the basis of border security entered the conflict.
It goes almost out saying that geopolitical fault lines and spheres of influence are second-order restraints whose indispensability reflects the weakness of international law and the UN. Remedying these weaknesses should be accorded the highest priority by governments and peace-minded civil society activists. In the interim, spheres of influence are a recognition of multipolarity, a prelude to a more cooperative world order, and a sign that the distinctive challenges to the global public good posed by climate change and nuclear weaponry do indeed require a ‘new world order’ reflecting imperatives for leading states to act cooperatively rather than conflictually. Perhaps, the Ukraine War can yet be interpreted to produce such a transition in outlook and behavior.
His insight helps better understand the Kremlin’s position towards sensitive issues, which can in turn enable one to more accurately predict how these situations might evolve.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin gave an interview to TASS over the weekend where he shared a detailed update about regional developments in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus. It’s in Russian but can be read by anyone using Google Translate. His insight helps better understand the Kremlin’s position towards sensitive issues, which can in turn enable one to more accurately predict how these situations might evolve. Here are the points from his interview that deserve the most attention:
1. Russia No Longer Blames The West’s For Kiev’s Drone Attack Against The Kremlin
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov earlier blamed the West for Kiev’s drone attack against the Kremlin, yet Galuzin just clarified that “As we understand, these steps of the Ukrainian authorities were not coordinated with their Western masters”.
2. Moscow’s End Game In The Ongoing Conflict Remains Unchanged
The Deputy Foreign Minister reaffirmed that his side continues to insist on Ukraine’s neutral non-aligned status, its demilitarization and denazification, keeping it out of NATO and the EU, Kiev’s recognition of the on-the-ground territorial realities, and the regime’s respect of its Russian minority’s human rights.
3. The Anglo-American Axis Is Pressuring Kiev To Commence Its Counteroffensive
Galuzin is of the opinion that Kiev’s upcoming counteroffensive will have catastrophic consequences for that country and its people, but the Anglo-American Axis is still pressuring its proxies to go through with this anyhow in order to prolong the conflict and continue fighting Russia “until the last Ukrainian”.
4. Russia Is Adamantly Against Kiev’s Persecution Of The Ukrainian Orthodox Church
Kiev’s persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church represents a grave violation of its Russian minority’s human rights, which is why Moscow remains adamantly against it and will continue reminding international institutions about these crimes with the hope that they’ll pressure the regime to stop.
5. Any Provocation Against Russian Peacekeepers In Transnistria Will Be Immediately Responded To
Galuzin warned that the prior reports of Kiev’s reportedly planned provocations against his country’s peacekeepers in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria will be immediately responded to, which should hopefully prompt them to think twice about targeting it during their upcoming counteroffensive.
6. Moldova Is Dangerously Following In Ukraine’s Footsteps Via Aggressive De-Russification
Even if no provocations against Russian peacekeepers in Transnistria are forthcoming, Moldova will still remain troublesome for Moscow due to its aggressive Ukrainian-inspired de-Russification policies, thus suggesting that it could become the next regional crisis in the worst-case scenario.
7. The Kremlin Will Continue Facilitating The Armenian-Azerbaijani Peace Process
On a positive note, Galuzin ended his interview by expressing cautious optimism about the Kremlin-facilitated Armenian-Azerbaijani peace process, which he believes has a credible chance of succeeding and thus ending one of the former Soviet Union’s longest-running conflicts.
In sum, Russia remains committed to achieving the goals set out at the start of its special operation despite speculation of ceasefire talks by year’s end. Nevertheless, by clarifying that Moscow no longer believes that Kiev coordinated its bombing of the Kremlin with the West, the possibility exists in theory of holding talks with the latter’s US leader aimed at some sort of compromise. Amidst this uncertainty, Moldova is becoming more problematic while the situation in the South Caucasus might soon improve.
Last month, after visiting Moscow for the first time, I published an account of what I saw and experienced there.
In my account, one of the subjects on which I commented was the extent of visible homelessness in central Moscow. I wrote that:
It is always a challenge to estimate the level of homelessness in a society, especially when one relies principally upon one’s personal observations in the street. Many homeless persons might not be apparent to a casual observer. Also, local authorities might have taken steps to conceal the level of homelessness by, for example, confining the homeless to districts that are rarely visited by outsiders. It is therefore possible that Moscow suffers from a far higher rate of homelessness than was apparent to me.
All I can say is that, based on the criteria I normally apply in Western societies when I try to gauge the level of homelessness in a city, the number of homeless persons whom I encountered while walking the streets of central Moscow was far below what I am accustomed to seeing in Canadian and other Western cities. In ten days, during which time I walked well over 120 kilometres in central Moscow, I saw, at most, five persons who appeared to me to be homeless. Typically, when I walk for just thirty minutes in the central areas of Toronto and Montreal, I see far more homeless persons than I saw in Moscow over a ten-day period.
One of the many lessons I drew from my experiences as a Unity Project board member is that homelessness is a feature, not a bug, of capitalist systems.
Another important lesson was that many homeless persons are invisible to ordinary citizens, and that the problem of homelessness tends to be far more pervasive than a superficial inquiry might reveal.
With those lessons in mind, I decided to delve deeper into the problem of homelessness in Russia.
To that end, I visited the Nochlezhka homeless shelter in Moscow. Nochlezhka describes itself as Russia’s oldest charity providing assistance to homeless people.
I was given a tour of the shelter by Dasha Amosova, Nochlezhka’s PR specialist. At the conclusion of the tour, Dasha kindly agreed to be interviewed. The video of her interview can be viewed below. I also have posted below some of the photographs I took during my tour of the shelter.
A 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.”
From almost the opening days of the Russia-Ukraine War, a running theme among Western analysts has been that the Russian military has badly underperformed and the Ukrainian Armed Forces constantly exceeded expectations.
Few seem to have noticed, however, that the pendulum on the battlefield has shifted.
Shift for Russia in Ukraine
Recent evidence indicates the Russian side has made tactical and operational improvements that are having an impact on the ground in Ukraine.
Washington policymakers need to update their understanding of the current trajectory of the war to ensure the U.S. is not caught off guard by battlefield events – and that our interests don’t suffer as a result.
There has been no shortage of legitimate evidence to support the contention that throughout 2022 the Russian side performed much worse than most expected and that Ukraine performed better than anticipated. Russia’s initial battle plan was flawed at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels.
Moscow allocated an invasion force that was too small for the task, dispersed across four axes of advance (ensuring that none would be strong enough to succeed on its own), and was not equipped with supplies to sustain a long war.
Ukraine was more prepared for an invasion than many originally believed and took impressive action quickly to stem the Russian advance, blunting each axis, and imposing serious casualties on the invaders.
In contrast to Russian blunders, Zelensky’s troops initially performed well at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels such that Russia was forced into a major withdrawal of the bulk of its armored forces from Kyiv and Kharkiv barely a month into the war.
Russian Deployments
It was a logical and rational strategic decision for Russia to redeploy its forces to strengthen the Donbas front in April 2022. But even then, ample evidence began to pile up that tactically, there were still grave weaknesses in the Russian forces, such as the infamous May 2022 crossing of the Seversky-Donetsk river, which saw an entire battalion wiped out. All the news wasn’t bad for Russia, however, as through the month of July Putin’s forces captured a number of key cities.
After repositioning its forces, Russia Captured Mariupol, Lyman, Popasna, Severodonetsk, and Lysychansk. But exposing Russia’s ongoing operational weaknesses, Ukrainian forces launched two offensives, one of which caught Russia completely by surprise, resulting in the recapture of Lyman. The first was in the Kherson province, which started off badly for Ukraine. But while all Moscow’s attention was on Kherson, Ukraine unleashed a major drive north near Kharkiv.
Back and Forth Continues
Russian leaders had been asleep at the wheel, focusing all of their attention on Kherson and literally ignoring Kharkiv, trying to secure their northern flank with a paltry number of minimally trained national guardsmen. Ukraine exploited this mistake and drove Russian troops back over 100km to the Svatavo-Kremenna line. While still reeling from this blow, Russia faced a dilemma in Kherson city: fight a bloody defensive battle in the city or surrender it without a fight.
Russia chose the latter. By October, Russian leaders were being ridiculed in the West as having been seriously wounded by Ukraine’s twin offensives, and talk of a Ukrainian victory picked up steam, with former U.S. Army general Ben Hodges claiming Ukraine could win the war “by the end of the year” 2022.
As of November 2022, it was fair to say the Russian general staff had been outperformed by the Ukrainian general staff. Many pundits in the West concluded that Russian troops and leaders were deeply flawed and incapable of improving, believing that Russia would remain incapable tactically for the duration of the war.
What many of these analysts failed to recognize, however, is that Russia has vastly more capacity to make war, both in terms of material and personnel, and therefore has the capacity to absorb enormous losses and still remain viable. Further, Russian history is replete with examples of starting out poorly in wars, suffering large casualties, and then recovering to turn the tide. Ukraine, on the other hand, has significantly fewer resources or troops and therefore has less room for error.
Timeframe
Over the now 15 months of war, Ukraine has fought and lost four major urban battles against Russia, suffering progressively worse levels of casualties in each: Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, Soledar, and most recently Bakhmut.
When Russia was faced with city battles – Kyiv, Kharkiv City, and Kherson City – they chose to abandon each while establishing more defensible defensive positions elsewhere. Ukraine, on the other hand, chose to fight for their major cities. The results are telling.
By withdrawing from Kyiv and Kharkiv in the first month of war and from Kherson City last fall, Russia was able to relocate its force into more defensible positions, preserving its personnel from the crucible of a grueling defensive fight in urban terrain. Ukraine, on the other hand, chose to contest major cities and has now lost staggering numbers of troops – but they also lost the city itself in the end. The decision of the Ukrainian general staff to defend Bakhmut until the end may have grave implications for the rest of the war.
As far back as December, it was clear that Ukraine would not be able to keep Bakhmut. Once Russian troops advanced around the flanks of the city and took all the roads supporting the garrison under fire control, the chances of holding the city fell to almost zero. What Ukraine could and should have done is follow the Russian example at Kherson and withdraw to the next prepared defensive position in the vicinity of Kramatorsk or Slavyansk.
From those locations, the Ukrainians would again have had all the advantages: they would have had elaborately dug fighting positions, unrestricted fields of fire to attack oncoming Russian troops, and unhindered resupply routes to the rear. It would have been far more expensive for Russia to try and take those positions than it was to fight from point-blank range against the Ukrainians in Bakhmut, especially when the Russians could and did inflict severe blows on a daily basis to resupply the defenders.
As a result, Ukraine has lost literally tens of thousands of killed and wounded, along with enormous quantities of equipment and ammunition, in those four city fights. Based on a likely fire superiority of 10-to-1 on the Russian side, Ukraine no doubt suffered considerably more casualties in those fights than the Russians. But even if the cost were equal, Russia has millions more men from whom to draw more fighters and a major domestic industrial capacity to produce all the ammunition they may require.
Put simply, Ukraine doesn’t have the personnel or industrial capacity to replace their lost men and equipment in comparison to the Russians. Moreover, Russia has been learning from its many tactical mistakes and evidence suggests they are improving tactically while simultaneously expanding their industrial capacity. Even bigger than the dearth of ammunition and equipment for Ukraine, however, is the number of trained and experienced personnel they’ve lost. Many of those skilled troops and leaders simply cannot be replaced in the span of mere months.
Ukraine is now faced with a world-class dilemma: should they use their last offensive capacity in a last gasp of hoping they inflict a grave wound on the Russians defending in the occupied territories or preserve them in case Russia launches a summer offensive of their own? There are serious risks with either course of action. I assess there is currently no likely path for Ukraine to achieve a military victory. Continuing to fight in that hope may perversely result in them losing even more territory.
Supporting Ukraine
The United States must take these realities into consideration in the coming weeks and months. Washington has already provided Ukraine the lion’s share of all military and financial aide including many of our most sophisticated armor, artillery, rockets, and missiles. Biden has even authorized the release of F-16 jets. The United States cannot – nor should it – commit to sending an equal amount of support for the next year of war, should it continue that long. Europe must be willing to make greater contributions to any future deliveries to Ukraine.
Only Kyiv can decide whether to keep fighting or seek the best-negotiated deal it can get. But the United States is obligated to ensure the security of our country and people above the desires of Kyiv.
In addition to burden-shifting physical support primarily to European states, it means the U.S. must avoid the trap of agreeing to any type of security guarantee for Ukraine. History is too filled with examples of hasty agreements to end fighting that unwittingly lay the foundation for future conflicts. America must not put its own future safety at risk by agreeing to any form of security guarantee.
The trend of war is shifting toward Moscow, regardless of how upset that may make many in the West. It is the observable reality. What Washington must do is avoid the temptation to “double-down” on supporting a losing proposition and do whatever we need to bring this conflict to a rapid conclusion, preserving our future security to the maximum extent. Ignoring these realities could set up Ukraine for even greater losses – and could put our own security at unacceptable future risk.
