For over a decade, much of the West has been pondering how to manage Ukraine’s inevitable subordination to Russia. Yes, we’ve said we stand with Ukraine. Yes, we’ve said that we will support Ukraine for as long as it takes. And yet we have consistently failed to give Ukraine the support it needs to win. We have even repeatedly discouraged Ukraine from using its own resources as effectively as possible to defend itself.
It is time to change that half-hearted paradigm. We need to recognize that Ukraine can win and that a Ukrainian victory is in the interests of the geopolitical West (and if we don’t believe that, we should say so). And then we need to devise a plan for a Ukrainian victory.
Our defeatism started with the 2014 invasion of Crimea, when the West told Ukrainians to stand down and tacitly accepted Russian control of the peninsula. On the eve of the 2022 full-scale invasion, we prepared to support a long Ukrainian guerilla war against Russian occupation and were cautious about giving the Ukrainian government weapons that we assumed would only fall into Russian hands. As the Kremlin’s tanks crossed the border, we offered President Volodymyr Zelenskyy an escape route, so he could lead Ukraine’s government in exile.
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