The war in Ukraine may be unstoppable, and the United States bears a large share of the blame

*Paromita Das
Henri Guaino, a top adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy when he was president of France, warned this month in the Paris daily Le Figaro that Europe’s countries were “sleepwalking” into war with Russia under the shortsighted leadership of the United States. Mr. Guaino was paraphrasing a metaphor used by historian Christopher Clark to explain the origins of World War I.

Naturally, Mr. Guaino recognizes that Russia is directly responsible for the current conflict in Ukraine.
Russia massed its troops on the border last fall and winter, and after NATO rejected a number of Ukraine-related security guarantees, Russia began shelling and killing on Feb. 24.

However, the United States has played a role in turning this tragic, local, and ambiguous conflict into a potential global conflagration. Mr. Guaino contends that by misinterpreting the logic of the war, the West, led by the Biden administration, is giving the conflict a momentum that may be impossible to reverse.

In 2014, the US backed an uprising — in its final stages, a violent uprising — against Viktor Yanukovych’s legitimately elected pro-Russian Ukrainian government.
(The corruption of Mr. Yanukovych’s government has been widely cited by supporters of the rebellion, but corruption is a persistent problem in Ukraine even today.) Russia, for its part, annexed Crimea, a historically Russian-speaking region of Ukraine that had housed Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since the 18th century.

Russian claims to Crimea can be debated, but Russians take them seriously. Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Soviet fighters were killed defending the Crimean city of Sevastopol from European forces during two sieges, one during the Crimean War and the other during World War II. In recent years, Russian control of Crimea appeared to provide a stable regional arrangement: at the very least, Russia’s European neighbors have let sleeping dogs lie.
However, the agreement was never accepted by the United States. On November 10, 2021, the United States and Ukraine signed a “charter on strategic partnership” in which they called for Ukraine to join NATO, condemned “ongoing Russian aggression,” and affirmed their “unwavering commitment” to reintegrating Crimea into Ukraine.

Mr. Guaino wrote that the charter “convinced Russia that it must attack or be attacked.” “In all its terrifying purity, it is the ineluctable process of 1914.”

This is an accurate depiction of the war that President Vladimir Putin claims to be fighting. “There were constant supplies of the most modern military equipment,” Mr. Putin said on May 9 during Russia’s annual Victory Parade, referring to Ukraine’s foreign arming. “The danger was increasing by the day.”
Whether he was correct to be concerned about Russia’s security depends on one’s point of view. Western news outlets frequently dismiss him.

So far, the rocky course of the Ukrainian war has vindicated Mr. Putin’s diagnosis, if not his behavior. Though Ukraine’s military industry was significant during the Soviet era, the country had no modern military by 2014. Some of the militias sent to fight Russian-backed separatists in the east were armed and funded by oligarchs rather than the state. Under President Barack Obama, the United States began arming and training Ukraine’s military with trepidation. However, modern hardware began to flow during the Trump administration, and the country is now heavily armed.
Ukraine has received US-made Javelin antitank missiles, Czech artillery, Turkish Bayraktar drones, and other NATO-compatible weaponry since 2018. The US and Canada have recently dispatched modern British-designed M777 howitzers that fire GPS-guided Excalibur shells. President Biden recently signed a $40 billion military aid package into law.

In this light, mocking Russia’s battlefield performance is inappropriate. Russia is not being held back by a plucky agricultural country a third its size; rather, it is holding its own, at least for the time being, against NATO’s advanced economic, cyber, and battlefield weapons.
Here, Mr. Guaino is correct in accusing the West of sleepwalking. The US is attempting to maintain the fiction that arming allies is not the same as participating in combat.

This distinction is becoming increasingly artificial in the information age. The United States provided intelligence that was used to assassinate Russian generals. It obtained targeting information that assisted in the sinking of the Russian Black Sea missile cruiser Moskva, which killed approximately 40 sailors.
And the US may be taking on an even more direct role. Thousands of foreign fighters are present in Ukraine. This month, one volunteer told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about fighting alongside “friends” who “come from the Marines, from the States.” It is simple to cross the line between being a weapons supplier and being a combatant, just as it is simple to cross the line between waging a proxy war and waging a secret war.

In a more subtle way, a country attempting to fight such a war risks being drawn from partial to full participation by moral reasoning. Perhaps American officials justify exporting weapons in the same way they justify budgeting it: it is so powerful that it deters.
Because it buys peace, the money is well spent. However, if bigger guns fail to deter them, they lead to bigger wars.

A few people were killed during Russia’s 2014 takeover of Crimea. But this time, matched in weaponry – and even outmatched in some cases – Russia has reverted to a bombardment war reminiscent of World War II.

Even if we disagree with Mr. Putin’s claim that America’s arming of Ukraine is the reason the war began in the first place, it is undeniably the reason the war has taken the kinetic, explosive, and lethal form it has. Our role in this is not incidental or passive. We have given Ukrainians reason to believe they can win an escalating war.
Thousands of Ukrainians have died who would not have died if the US had remained neutral. This may naturally create a sense of moral and political obligation among American policymakers — to stay the course, escalate the conflict, and match any excess.

The United States has demonstrated that it is not only capable of but also eager to escalate. Mr. Biden invoked God in March before declaring that Mr. Putin “cannot remain in power.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austins stated in April that the US wants to “see Russia weakened.”
In an April interview, Noam Chomsky warned against the paradoxical incentives of such “heroic pronouncements.” “It might feel like Winston Churchill impersonations,” he said. “However, they translate to: Destroy Ukraine.”
For the same reasons, Mr. Biden’s suggestion that Mr. Putin be tried for war crimes is completely irresponsible. Once leveled, the charge is so serious that it discourages restraint; after all, a leader who commits one atrocity is no less a war criminal than one who commits a thousand. The effect, whether intended or not, is to preclude any recourse to peace talks.

The situation on the Ukrainian battlefield has reached an impasse. Russia and Ukraine have both suffered significant losses. However, each has benefited. Russia controls some of Ukraine’s most fertile agricultural lands and energy deposits, and has maintained battlefield momentum in recent days. Following a strong defense of its cities, Ukraine can expect additional NATO support, know-how, and weaponry — a powerful incentive not to end the war soon.

However, if the war does not end soon, the dangers will grow. “Negotiations must begin within the next two months,” former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned last week, “before it causes upheavals and tensions that will be difficult to overcome.” “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself,” he said, calling for a return to the status quo ante bellum.
Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Guaino are on the same page in this regard. Mr. Guaino warned that “making concessions to Russia would be submitting to aggression.” “To make none is to submit to insanity.”

The US is not making any concessions. That would be losing face. There will be an election. As a result, the administration is closing down negotiation channels and working to escalate the war. We’re here to win. With time, the massive import of lethal weaponry, including that from the newly authorised $40 billion allocation, could escalate the war. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky warned students earlier this month that the bloodiest days of the war were on the way.