Occasionally it is useful to check in on matters of foreign policy impacting citizens and investors. One of the few places where I know something that others might not concerns the country of Ukraine, and its war of self-defense against Russia’s invasion. I’ve spent a great deal of time in Ukraine, speak with Ukrainian friends and acquaintances every day, and am generally well-informed about the war’s progress. If you don’t have a ton of time to read the essay in full, suffice it to say: I’m confident that Ukraine will win.

THE BIG STORY

Update on the War in Ukraine

An essay on what's happening in Ukraine, and why it's important to support the country.

More than a year and a half has passed since Russia invaded Ukraine. The invasion surprised many who did not expect it to happen. Its course surprised many more, who expected (as did Russia) that Ukraine would be swiftly defeated, and incorporated into Imperial Russia.

That did not happen. Instead, Ukraine fought back, driving the Russians out and away from Kyiv, and back from Kharkiv, and back from Mykolaiv (a city few had heard of before the war’s start) — then, back from Kherson. After a brutal fight for the city of Bakhmut, which Russia eventually and with great difficulty wrested from Ukraine, Ukraine mounted a counteroffensive, hoping to cut the land bridge Russia had established to Crimea. That counteroffensive has been slow going, but it continues unabated.

I was one of the few who knew that Ukraine would fight back against Russia, and that it would fight capably. Still, it was a pleasant surprise to see how badly Russia’s military performed. As of writing, Russia has not been able to to secure air superiority in Ukraine, let alone the air dominance U.S. and NATO doctrine seeks to accomplish before starting large-scale ground operations. It is on the defense, which is easier to prosecute than offense; but it is also riddled with corruption and despair.

Spending time in Ukraine — visiting and living there since 2015, and having a great many friends and acquaintances there (some of whom are now dead from the war) — I learned an important fact about the place and its people. Whatever Ukraine’s understanding of itself and Ukrainians’ understanding of themselves was in 2013, since the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, Ukrainians have bought into a vision of their country and culture that is diametrically opposed to the Russian vision of culture and country. This is because Russia’s vision of culture and country does not have room in it, as Ukrainians have seen, for an independent Ukraine, or Ukrainians. Ukrainians are locked in an existential struggle — one that they cannot afford to lose, or they will lose everything: their land, their homes, their identities, and possibly their lives. Russia wants a bit of territory.

To live in Ukraine and know Ukrainians is one thing; that’s an important piece of information that a person can use during considerations such as, for example, “I’d like to start a business in Lviv,” or “Uzhgorod is a beautiful city and perhaps I’ll buy an apartment there. Prices are lower than in Salzburg or Krakow.”

But to know that Ukraine will beat Russia required another piece of knowledge and a set of experiences that I picked up elsewhere: Afghanistan. There, a very badly equipped but similarly-resolved group of fighters, the Taliban, took on a much larger and more powerful force. That force was one of which I was a part. For over two years, first as an Executive Officer with a line rifle company with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and second as the Company Commander of a line rifle company with the 10th Mountain Division, I planned and led patrols and operations to defeat the Taliban, and build up strength in the Afghan Army, National Police, and Border Police.

We all know how those efforts turned out.

I was betting on Ukraine to win before Europe and the U.S. showed up with weapons and equipment. I was betting on Ukraine because I’ve already seen how powerful the human spirit is when it refuses to submit. People who do not understand the human spirit will write or talk about negotiation, or how Russia’s proximity to Ukraine gives it an advantage the U.S. didn’t have against the Taliban, and a bunch of other essentially irrelevant or misguided considerations.

In a war such as this one, the only question is: will a country’s people fight? So long as the answer is “yes,” that country cannot be defeated; not by Russia, not by the U.S., not by anyone. In early March of 2022 when I traveled to Lviv to help that city stand up local defense forces with two other veterans, we saw citizens collecting empty wine bottles to be filled with petrol to employ as Molotov cocktails. The city and its surroundings were busy with volunteers creating makeshift fighting positions and checkpoints. This was a fight people had prepared for, emotionally, and were ready to begin — with or without tanks from the West, or F-16s.

To the question, then, of why the U.S. or Europe ought to arm Ukraine if it will fight and win on its own— a valid question — there is a simple answer. Fighting with knives and partisan groups and IEDs and Molotov cocktails is far more difficult than with artillery and tanks and jet aircraft. The weapons of the West compresses the timeline of Ukrainian victory; it saves civilian lives, and reunites refugees with their families, and preserves the lives of soldiers, and protects those brave humans who do things few American service members have imagined since World War One — clearing trench lines under heavy artillery fire. Providing Ukraine with weapons and ammunition is a moral good; and it is not wasted as were the weapons and ammunition we provided other countries of people who were ultimately unwilling to use them.

Russia is a country I do not know well enough to talk about in great detail. But I did know that its military wasn’t as formidable as people say, as early as 2016, when I began writing a piece about how Russia’s capabilities were being overstated both by Russian propagandists, and proponents of the U.S. military. Studying Russia’s performance against Ukraine in 2014-15 in Ukraine, I had access to interview veterans and soldiers who had faced them, and had a very different understanding of their capabilities than people relying only on English language open-source reporting.

Knowledge is power, information is power. Assumptions can be terrible liabilities. Assuming (as many did, even those who should have known better) that Russia had a powerful military when its military was badly organized bordering on incompetent blinded the U.S. to the possibility that providing assistance could make a difference. Had the U.S. given it the robust weapons, equipment, and assistance that it has since February 24, 2022, Ukraine would likely have defeated Russia outright by now.

But the idea that Ukrainians will stop fighting Russia — for the first time in 400 years, they will quit the conflict and become the brothers Putin and his supporters would like the external world to imagine — is a bad assumption. The idea that Russia will begin promoting military leaders for competence and intelligence over loyalty and venality in a system that depends on “kompromot” for advancement is a bad assumption. The idea that Russia, which has very little to gain from the war continuing, (and everything to gain from a peace on any terms) will have an infinite appetite for war with Ukraine is a bad assumption. And the idea that there is such a thing as a “stalemate” in a thing as fluid as war is a bad assumption.

The arguments about what will happen if the U.S. stops supporting Ukraine or offers less support to Ukraine are tedious and sad. What will happen then is Russia will advance and take more territory in the short term, and further ethnically cleanse Ukraine, and encounter more and greater resistance, and delay their inevitable defeat. Russia and its supporters are betting against humanity, and that’s the one bet that always sure to lose in the long run.

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