Who Lost Ukraine?

Nothing has shamed me as an American more than the way President Donald Trump has treated the most recent victim of unprovoked Russian imperial aggression.  Ukraine’s only transgression was its one-time existence as part of a defunct empire that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, hopes to restore.  Despite three years of savage, often gratuitous slaughter, the mass rapes, the kidnapping of tens of thousands of children, and a 1994 commitment – signed by the U.S. and Russia – guaranteeing the “independence and sovereignty” of this fellow democracy, Trump has blamed Ukraine for Russia’s invasion.  He has falsely branded its courageous leader a dictator, stooping even to berate his sartorial choices.  He has demanded Ukraine’s sovereign wealth as payment for aid the previous administration bestowed as grants.  And even while purporting to broker peace, he mused that “Ukraine may be Russian someday.”

His predecessor, Joe Biden, gave full-throated rhetorical and material support to Ukraine as it surprised the world beating back the full weight of Russia’s military.  He slapped sanctions on Russia, shipped massive quantities of weapons to Ukraine while persuading reluctant European countries to do likewise, and promised Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that the U.S. would “continue to stand by you every step of the way.”

Given all this, it seems almost unbearable to compare the fate that Ukraine now faces with what might have been had Vice President Kamala Harris won the election last November.  The reality, however, is that Ukraine’s prospects for maintaining its territorial integrity and political independence are steadily diminishing.  And the fault does not lie with Trump but with his predecessor.  Ironically, Trump may be better positioned than Harris would have been to prevent Ukraine from joining Belarus as a Russian vassal state.

Ukraine has been steadily losing ground to the Russian juggernaut since 2023.  With a population that has declined from 42 million to 28 million since the invasion compared with 146 million Russians, its ability to sustain its military in adequate numbers has become increasingly difficult.  Russia, on the other hand, has been able to replace withering battlefield losses with prisoners and, more recently, by effectively renting the army of its ally North Korea.

Despite all the sanctions, Russia’s economy is actually growing.  Russia is the third-largest oil producer in the world and its gross domestic product is at least 11 times that of Ukraine, which remains the poorest country in Europe.  It appears that Russia can now produce enough tanks to replace its ongoing losses in battle.

With no prospect of any other country putting combat boots on the ground in Ukraine to directly challenge a nuclear-armed adversary, Putin’s war of choice can last as long as he chooses.  His economy can fund the military campaign, and to the extent popular opinion matters in Russia, its public still broadly supports the invasion.  Russia remains able to avoid deploying young, poorly trained conscripts to the front-line meatgrinder, which might undermine that public support.

As a result, Putin will end his war when he decides the price of further territorial conquest is higher than he wants to pay.  Biden’s (or Harris’s) evangelizing for Ukraine would ultimately matter as little as Trump’s heartless treatment of an irredentist Russia’s latest victim.  Putin will relent on terms that allow him to claim victory on the ground, keep his options open for further conquests down the road, and seek to replace Zelenskyy with a figure more congenial to Russian interests.  Russia’s history of violating “peace” agreements is long, as is the West’s history of tolerating those violations.

Consequently, the prospect of Ukraine ever joining NATO crosses a Putin red line no matter who leads the U.S.  Kamala Harris might have been more willing than Trump to let the U.S. join a multinational peacekeeping force.  But how effective can such a force really be in the absence of a commitment like Article 5 of the NATO founding treaty, which treats an attack against one member as an attack against all?  Ukraine’s border with Russia is one of the longest in Europe; add Russia’s satrapy Belarus to the picture and you have a 2000-mile perimeter to defend.  Indeed, the name “Ukraine” derives from the Slavic word for “borderland.”

Because of this, any defensive positions established by peacekeeping forces in Ukraine will be a Maginot Line that Putin can circumvent as easily – more easily – than the Germans did in World War II.  Would a President Harris be so much more likely than Trump to confront a Russian military challenge that did not directly threaten U.S. or allied troops?

Now let’s rewind the clock back to late summer 2022.  Ukraine had not merely neutralized Russia’s advance on Kyiv but shoved its army out of over 50% of the land it had captured following the invasion.  The eastern cities of Kharkiv and Kherson were back in Ukrainian hands.

To put this in perspective, after Ukraine’s “Maidan Revolution” ousted pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 and Ukraine sought closer ties with the European Union, Russia annexed Crimea and its operatives took over parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions – collectively known as the Donbas – that border Russia to the east.  Following sham referenda, Russia annexed the Donbas in September 2022.

At that point, however, Russia had lost Kharkiv and Kherson to Ukrainian forces and its army was on the back foot.  Ukraine’s success stemmed in part from Russian overconfidence and the surprising disarray of its army.  The Russians invaded Ukraine with fewer than 200,000 troops (by contrast, today Russia is estimated to have more than 500,000 soldiers in and around Ukraine).  It expected Kyiv to fall within days and so did the U.S., which offered to whisk Zelenskyy out of the country – an offer that was famously refused.

Thanks to Ukrainian military skill and fortitude, and stockpiled U.S. weaponry provided by previous administrations (including President Trump in his first term), Ukraine destroyed about half of Russia’s invasion force during the first six months of the war.  By August 2022, the Russian army in Ukraine was exhausted, retreating, unreinforced, and caught behind rudimentary defensive positions along an extended front line.  The Russian navy’s flagship, the near billion-dollar cruiser Moskva, lay at the bottom of the Sea of Azov.

By the end of 2022, however, the counteroffensive had stalled.  Ukraine would try again the next summer, but made few gains.  In the meantime the Russian army was learning from its mistakes, bolstering its forces after Putin ordered a broad mobilization in September 2022, and began making gains of its own by 2024.

What stopped the Ukrainians when Russia was vulnerable?  The lack of advanced weaponry was likely decisive.  Using the High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), which the U.S. began supplying in small numbers in June 2022, Ukraine claimed to have destroyed 50 Russian ammunition depots as well as command posts.  This surely played a large part in the Russian army’s failure.  But the U.S. forbade Ukraine from using the weapon, which has a range of 50 miles as supplied, to strike targets in Russia.  Unsurprisingly, Russia withdrew its depots and command posts into its own territory.

Ukraine had also sought Bradley armored fighting vehicles, Abrams tanks, F-16 fighter jets, and the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS).  For the most part, these weapon systems could not have helped Ukraine’s 2022 counteroffensive; deployment and training cycles are too long.  The ATACMS, however, were an exception – they could have quickly proven decisive and the U.S. had them stockpiled in substantial numbers.

ATACMS would have allowed Ukraine to isolate Crimea.  The peninsula’s infrastructure has been critical to transport of resources from mainland Russia to occupied regions in southern Ukraine.  ATACMS would have allowed Ukraine to destroy or at least disable the critical rail line over the Kerch Strait Bridge.  It could have eliminated every significant Russian arms depot even as these were pulled back behind the border.

Lacking resupply and still suffering from poor organization and leadership – Ukraine may have killed nearly a dozen Russian generals by September 2022 – a widespread collapse of the Russian army might have been unavoidable.  Of course, Russia’s own military performance over the last year demonstrates that war is never static and professional, well-resourced militaries can recover.  But gradual deployment to Ukraine of better armored vehicles and, more crucially, F-16 fighters might have made it impossible for Russia to regain the initiative.  Ukraine’s growing qualitative edge, in other words, might have offset Russia’s inescapable quantitative superiority.

In the event, the U.S. did not supply Ukraine with ATACMS and Abrams tanks until a year after its counteroffensive stalled, and did not permit targeting of Russian military assets outside Ukraine until late 2024.  The first Bradley vehicles arrived in 2023.  The U.S. approved the transfer of F-16 fighters in August 2023 but the first jet did not actually arrive until 2024.  By then Ukraine, not Russia, was on the back foot.

Counterfactual history is a dangerous and arguably pointless exercise.  But even without might-have-been speculations, it remains puzzling why the Biden administration dithered so persistently over delivery of critical weapons that it did, ultimately, deliver.  A common refrain since February 2022 has been that the U.S. gives Ukraine enough military aid to not lose but not enough for it to win.  Between the onset of war and when the U.S. finally approved the transfer of critical weapons or permitted their effective battlefield use, the only change was the strategic value to Ukraine’s struggle.  Putin never signaled that Ukraine’s possession of this or that weapon would now be tolerated – quite the opposite, his threats grew more menacing and specific.  Yet the exquisite calibration persisted until Biden left office in January.

So, all right, let’s indulge in counterfactuals.  Suppose Ukraine had received all it asked for on realistic time lines.  Would it have beaten the Russians?  It’s all too easy to imagine victory scenarios that ignore the Russian military’s demonstrated capacity to regenerate and improve.  And it’s inconceivable that Vladimir Putin would have simply conceded defeat.  He might even have resorted to nuclear weapons, although experts consider that unlikely given the limited military advantage they could confer and the escalatory risks of their use so close to NATO countries.

What was “lost” by the Biden administration’s feckless hesitancy was not Ukraine, which is still far from defeated, but an opportunity for settlement on terms that might have allowed it to retain most of its territory and secure its future through NATO entry.  The price would have been Crimea.  Long part of Russia, it was ceremonially transferred to Ukraine in 1954 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Ukraine’s union with Russia.  More than 80% of Crimea’s population identifies as ethnically Russian.  The Russian naval base in Sevastopol, established in 1783 following the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Empire, hosts its Black Sea Fleet.

Objectively, at today’s remove, trading Crimea for NATO membership and retention of a reconquered Donbas would have given Ukraine a tremendous victory, reversing most of Russia’s incursions since 2014 and ensuring the country’s long-term territorial integrity.  Whether Ukraine and its U.S. cheerleaders would have seen it that way is another matter.  Politically, of course, Zelenskyy would have to be perceived as getting dragged kicking and screaming into such a compromise by a wise but tough Dutch uncle.  After heroically and astoundingly beating Goliath, even the appearance of rewarding the Philistine would have been anathema to Ukraine’s jubilant, suffering public.  The outsider who underwrote their victory would have to convince them.

It is unlikely Biden would have risen to the occasion.  By 2023 he had become too politically invested in his own soaring rhetoric as Ukraine’s champion.  Laudable as his defense of democratic values may have been, it was also increasingly a facet of his political persona that distinguished him from skeptical Republicans and a resurgent Trump – who, as early as 2023, boasted that he could end the conflict in a day and refused to voice support for Ukraine.  The war had become a wedge issue as presidential campaigning and the political temperature began heating up.

The Dutch uncle Ukraine would have needed, unfortunately, turned out to be Trump – who comes two years too late and one victory short.  Despite his unfounded personal animus toward Zelenskyy and his readiness to stomp the victim, Trump is right to seek a quick end to a war that Ukraine now cannot win.  A President Harris, by contrast, would more likely have continued Biden’s escalatory gradualism that has already doomed Ukraine to military stalemate, at best, and undermined support for Zelenskyy; by late 2024, Ukrainians’ trust in Zelenskyy had dropped to 52%, down from 90% at the start of the war.  The sooner Ukraine can begin to recover its economic footing and its many dispersed refugees, the more difficult it will be for Putin to influence (by means legitimate and malign) the next election to his benefit.  Devastatingly, therefore, Trump may be more likely than his defeated opponent to obtain terms that protect the future of an independent Ukraine, but not the brighter prospects that might have been won had the fleeting opportunity not been lost.