The Costs and Consequences of Ukraine's Disastrous Pursuit of NATO Membership

Measuring the costs of America's 16-year long attempt to expand its liberal empire into Ukraine on the war's 2-year anniversary following Biden's refusal to negotiate peace with no end in sight.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appearing dejected, out of place and isolated among other heads of state at the July 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, where he appealed for a path to NATO membership for Ukraine but was denied yet again, getting only a pledge for more NATO troops to be deployed to the Baltic region and Poland along Russia’s northwestern borders.

This is the first installment of a three-part series commemorating the second anniversary of the war in Ukraine.

Today marks the second anniversary of the outbreak of the tragic and unnecessary war in Ukraine. Given that the war continues to rage with no sign of abating due to the continuing refusal of President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Russia, it is worth examining the costs and consequences of the war thus far. When the Bucharest Declaration was issued in 2008 declaring that both Ukraine and Georgia would join NATO, foreign policy realists warned it was the worst of both worlds as it served as a huge provocation putting Russia on notice that the US intended to expand its sphere of influence into these two nations which Russia considered part of its ‘near abroad’ and in the case of Ukraine the most important neutral buffer states protecting Russia from NATO, while postponing indefinitely any perceived security guarantee bestowed by NATO membership.

Sixteen years later, we can take measure of the disastrous consequences of Ukraine’s fanciful and misguided dream of NATO membership has had for Ukraine pushed on it by US neoliberal internationalist Democrats and neoconservative Republicans who claim to care about Ukraine while their actions have proven they view Ukrainians as nothing more than cannon fodder in an indefinite NATO proxy war aimed at weakening Russia. In 2014, Dr. John Mearsheimer warned that NATO was leading Ukraine down “the primrose path” and that Russia would “wreck Ukraine” if it attempted to join NATO. Sadly, his prediction was proven prescient with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which took place two years ago this month.

This week also marks the ten-year anniversary of the bloody CIA-backed Maidan coup authorized by then Vice President Joe Biden, that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych while this weekend marks the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The coup, which was wildly celebrated, by the Western power elite at the time, caused Ukraine to descend into a civil war that continues to rage today between Ukraine’s government and ethnic Russian separatists, who for the past two years have been backed by Russian military forces. In his February 6^th interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Putin cited intercepted Ukrainian plans for a new military offensive to retake control of the Russian-backed separatists Donbass republics as one of the two main rationales for his invasion. As it was, the Ukrainian Civil War cost the lives of over 14,000 Ukrainians, most of whom were ethnic Russians and resulted in 1.5 million refugees before Russia intervened militarily on the side of the separatists. The coup caused Russia to feel threatened by a prospective NATO member all along its western frontier provoking it to invade Crimea to secure its nuclear Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol. This Russian move, in turn, caused the Western powers to implement severe sanctions which caused Russian hopes of becoming part of the economic and security architecture of the West to largely evaporate.

Staggering Ukrainian Losses

While Western leaders and regime media have been incessant in their claims that Ukraine is winning the war and only needs one more infusion of weapon systems to defeat Russia and liberate all its lost territories including Crimea, a closer examination of the facts exposes this Western war propaganda narrative as false. Since Biden provoked Russia to invade Ukraine by refusing Putin’s December 7th, 2021 guarantee Russian troops would not invade in exchange for a written pledge from the US that Ukraine would never join NATO, Ukraine, which was already the poorest country in Europe before the war started on a per capita basis, has suffered economic devastation not seen in Europe since the Second World War. It has lost nearly thirty percent of its Gross Domestic Product with half of its critical infrastructure destroyed and half of its businesses being forced to shut down. The World Economic Forum estimates the current cost of reconstruction would total $1 trillion which is a staggering figure considering that  would take Ukraine nearly thirty years to pay off even if spent its entire pre-war (2021) government budget to pay for those costs but reconstruction cannot begin until a peaceful settlement ending the war has been finalized.  The WEF also reported that, “Approximately 20% of the country’s farmland has been wrecked and 30% of land either littered with landmines or unexploded ordnance.” Ukraine’s unemployment rate is currently just above 18%.

The war in Ukraine has also resulted in other momentous changes as it has gone from the second largest country in Europe by territory to the fourth largest with the loss of eighteen percent of its territory to Russian annexation and from the fifth most populous to the sixth with the loss of over thirty-four percent of its population over the past decade from over forty-five million to approximately thirty million over the past decade. By way of comparison, Stalin killed 15-25 percent of Ukraine’s population during the Holodomor in the 1930s and after the USSR reconquered Ukraine near the end of World War Two. Reuters has reported that due in large part to the exodus of Ukrainian refugees into Eastern Europe, the population of Ukraine may have decreased to as low as 28 million. Either way, this represents a staggering proportion of their citizens that greatly exceeds the proportional losses in population by Poland, the USSR, or China during WW2. Only German postwar population losses even come close given Germany lost 34 percent of its territory and at least one-quarter of its population in two world wars.

Ukrainian refugee camp in Warsaw. Nearly one-quarter of Ukraine’s citizens, including an estimated 700,000 draft dodgers, have fled their homes as a result of Biden’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine which could have been easily averted had he guaranteed to Russia that Ukraine would never be admitted into NATO.

Of the population reduction which has taken place since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, 57 percent have been due to refugees fleeing the country out of ten million refugees overall over the past two years of war or 24 percent of Ukraine’s prewar population. Another 41 percent of the reduction has been due to Russian annexations of the former Ukrainian oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson. Two percent of these reductions are due to Ukrainian war deaths which constitutes over 0.6 percent of Ukraine’s prewar population.  Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Gross Domestic Product has plummeted by nearly 25 percent since the Biden authorized Euromaidan coup of February 2014 while Russia’s economy has expanded by 42 percent during the same period.

As this article will demonstrate, Ukraine’s security against Russia and its territorial integrity was always dependent, not upon NATO membership, but rather upon friendly relations with Moscow, most importantly its continued commitment to remaining a neutral buffer state between Russia and the NATO alliance. NATO was once a laudable defensive alliance that may have possibly saved western Europe from falling under Soviet domination during the Cold War though it seems clear that Stalin had abandoned his World War Two-era dream of sending the Red Army westward all the way to the English Channel by 1952 with his offer of German reunification as a neutral buffer state between NATO and Soviet occupied Eastern Europe. However, beginning with the NATO aggression against the former Yugoslavia in 1999 which effectively resulted in changing the borders of Europe by force for the first time in over half a century, NATO expansions to include all of the former Warsaw Pact countries and three former Soviet republics all the way to Russia’s borders for the first time ever and culminating with NATO aggression against Libya over a decade later, Russia understandably began to perceive as an inherently offensive military alliance directed at itself. 

A year ago, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) gave an outstanding speech at the Heritage Foundation, rightly referring to NATO as part of America’s “liberal empire.” The rationale for the existence of the transatlantic alliance has always been to provide a collective defense against the perceived threat of future Russian aggression even after that threat largely disappeared for over three decades revived only by the Biden administration’s continued push to add Ukraine to its list of nearly thirty of America’s imperial European dominions, subordinating its foreign and defense policy to the whims of US dictates in the process as it has done for the past decade.  I refer to America's NATO allies as imperial dominions because the relationship we have with them is very similar to the one the British had with their formal dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in the early 20th century. When Britian told them to go to war and fight a British enemy they obediently did so. The US exerts substantial and oversized influence over the foreign and defense policy of our NATO allies not too dissimilar from that exercised by the Soviets over members of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. Sometimes the US pressures its NATO allies to pursue policies against their national interests as in the case of Germany given one of the purposes of NATO is “to keep Germany down” even when the US destroys its critical infrastructure causing an economic recession as in the case of our destruction of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines which were jointly controlled by Russia and Germany. Furthermore, German aid to Ukraine has made it a Russian nuclear target once more, making Germany much less safe and secure.

Crossing Russia’s Biggest Redline

The outbreak of the war in Ukraine was not difficult to foresee. Russia and Ukraine were amicable and collaborative strategic partners from 1991 to Feb 2014 by virtue of their joint CIS membership CIS Free Trade Area agreement and 1997 Treaty of Friendship before Ukraine’s mad and self-defeating pursuit of NATO membership transformed them from friends with close ethnic, religious and economic ties to implacable enemies.

President Vladimir Putin spoke at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 warning that NATO must not be expanded into Ukraine and calling for Russia to be included in the security architecture of Europe. Two years later, Russia offered a mutual security agreement to the US and NATO resolve all major issues between them and the Russian Federation and prevent further NATO expansion which the US never seriously considered.

The origins of the Russo-Ukrainian War can be traced back to late 2007 when President George W. Bush began pushing for Ukrainian NATO membership. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel was adamantly opposed to the idea later recalling: “I was very sure…that Putin was not going to just let that happen…From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war.” Former US Ambassador to Russia and current Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns, also warned President Bush not to include Ukraine in NATO in a since declassified memo  stating:

“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” He added that expanding NATO into Ukraine would be seen as “throwing down the strategic gauntlet,” and that “Today’s Russia will respond.”

Fiona Hill also warned President Bush in February 2008 against pushing NATO membership for Ukraine suggesting it might provoke a Russian military response. Putin publicly warned that Russia would regard any effort to expand NATO into Ukraine “as a direct threat.” Privately, he is reported to have told Bush that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” Putin has since made good on that threat.

Germany and France were able to prevent Ukraine from being given an invitation to join NATO but Bush pressured them to sign on to the Bucharest Declaration issued in April 2008 in which NATO informed the world that Ukraine and Georgia would become NATO members without providing a timeline for their accession to the Atlantic Alliance. This NATO declaration that Ukraine would join NATO was in some respects a modern-day equivalent of Imperial Germany’s Zimmerman Plan, in which they offered to ally with Mexico if it went to war with the US causing us to declare war on Germany, because it provoked Russia to engage in a preventive war to ensure Ukraine did not become a formal NATO member.

Of course, there never was any chance of Ukraine joining NATO because its NATO membership was adamantly opposed by both France and Germany. Germany continues to staunchly oppose NATO membership for Ukraine joined by Hungary, Turkey, and Slovakia. Furthermore, since the Russian invasion of Crimea and Russian support for ethnic Russian separatists in the Donbass region in 2014, Ukraine has fallen well short of the requirements for ascension into NATO due to the fact that membership requirements include not having any territorial disputes with its neighbors and not having any foreign troops on its territory meaning that Ukraine would have to formally cede all of its occupied territories to Russia in order to meet these requirements. Even today, sixteen years after the Bucharest Declaration, NATO has refused to provide a path to membership for Ukraine, causing one to wonder why Biden felt it was worth the lives of half a million Ukrainians for him to refuse to guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would never join when he had no intention of allowing them to join in the first place.

Moreover, since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared martial law in March 2022 banned eleven opposition parties, forcing all opposition TV networks to broadcast Ukrainian government propaganda 24-7 and began imprisoning and assassinating his political opposition leaders, democracy in Ukraine ceased to exist, disqualifying Ukraine from joining NATO on that basis as well. President Joe Biden’s claim that the US is fighting on the side of global democracy against autocracy worldwide has proven to be a farce, particularly in view of his own increasing authoritarian tendencies.

President Donald Trump giving a speech earlier this year in which he stated that if NATO members did not pay their fair share of defense spending, the US would not defend them from potential Russian attack. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton has said Trump told him on two occasions that he wanted to pull the US out of NATO.

The question must be asked even if Ukraine had become a formal NATO member before Russia invaded it in 2022, would the US have responded any differently than it has to Russia’s invasion of this de facto NATO member state, with which we have no formal security commitment, situated not in the center of Europe but at the furthest fringe of Eastern Europe in a border dispute in which the US has no discernable security interest? It is doubtful that it would have. While, neoconservative Republican members of Congress are fond of misleadingly claiming that a Russian attack on NATO would require the US to go to war with Russia in response to any Russian aggression against a NATO member state no matter how small, the fact is that Article Five of the Atlantic Charter doesn’t actually require the US to go to war or require the US to send troops to defend a country under attack. It only requires NATO member states to engage in “collective assistance” as is “deemed necessary” to assist a NATO member under attack by a foreign power.

This could mean the US could send non-lethal military aid to the country under attack, as Obama did for Ukraine after Russia invaded Crimea, and still be technically in compliance with its Article Five commitment. The truth is that it is one of the weakest alliance commitments in modern history on par with Britain’s Triple Entente, which was not a genuine military alliance until Britain made the decision to enter the war against Germany on France and Russia’s side in August 1914. Perhaps in furtherance of this realization, President Donald Trump reportedly told the President of the European Union at a meeting in January 2020 that he would not defend Europe if Russia attacked them while threatening to have the US quit NATO entirely.  

Thus, if Russia invaded the Baltic states tomorrow the only thing likely to embroil the US in a war with Russia would be the presence of thousands of US troops there, which serve as little more than a ‘speed bump’ as there are too few of them to defend against Russian attack, in the event hundreds of them were killed or injured. The unstated truth is that the primary purpose of the 200,000 US troops spread across the globe in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and East Asia in America’s far flung imperial outposts is not so much deterrence or collective defense but rather to serve as a nuclear tripwire to tie the hands of future US Presidents and force them to fight potential full-scale wars against nuclear adversaries even if doing so is in opposition to the overriding US security interest of national survival. The other purpose is for our troops and military bases to serve as symbols of America’s liberal empire and global reach while enabling US leaders to unduly influence the foreign and defense policies of the nations in which they are stationed much as British troops were able to do located across their empire in the first half of the Twentieth Century. In his landmark interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Russian President Putin declared he had no interest in invading Poland or the Baltics unless NATO attacked Russia first.

No Chance for Ukrainian Victory

For nearly two years, the Biden administration and its compliant state-controlled liberal mainstream media partners have propagandized Americans into believing that the $115 billion in taxpayer funding that the US has sent to Ukraine has been well worth it because Russian military losses both in terms of military equipment and personnel were far higher than Ukraine’s. However, as I have been reporting since the war began, the truth is the exact the opposite. Moreover, contrary to the collective, cognitive dissidence demonstrated by US leaders who have expressed their belief since the unilateral Russian military withdrawal from northern Ukraine in April 2022 that it could defeat Russia, Ukraine never had any hope of beating Russia.

A month before Russia invaded Ukraine, I predicted that if Russia invaded it, Ukraine’s defeat would be inevitable no matter how many weapons we sent them. Did they really expect the Ukrainian army, could march on Moscow and get Putin to sign Russia’s unconditional surrender before trying him in an international war crimes tribunal at the Hague, as I have been stating before the war, there never was any chance of Ukrainian victory no matter how many weapons the West sent it. Defeating Russia in war was a feat that the Poles, the Swedes, Napoleon and most recently the Germans with 315 army divisions consisting of the best trained troops in the world could not accomplish apart from World War One when the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 knocked Russia out of the war and forced it to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Any middle school student who looked at a map in February 2022 could have correctly predicted the outcome of this war given that Russia today is 35 times larger with an economy eleven times the size of Ukraine’s with a population five times longer with millions more reservists which it could mobilize. Ukraine is overmatched by Russia across the board militarily with Russia fielding five to twelve times more tanks, combat aircraft and artillery systems and over 8,000 more nuclear weapons (Ukraine having none). In addition, except for thousands of Polish volunteers, not a single country has sent troops to fight alongside Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression.

Ukrainian Military Losses Three Times Higher than Russia’s

Ukraine has likely lost over a quarter of a million dead . An article late last year revealed that 50,000 Ukrainian troops, including thousands of female soldiers, had one of their legs amputated due to serious injuries sustained while fighting the Russians during the first seventeen months of the war which is about the same number of French military amputees during over four years of intense combat on the Western front during the First World War.  Zelensky recently stated the Ukrainian armed forces was 600,000 strong. That's down from 1.3 million during the first year of the war leading one to wonder whether Ukrainian losses may not just be 500,000 killed and seriously wounded as a top Ukrainian official recently admitted but may be as high as 700,000 killed and severely wounded. Ukraine’s prewar army has been completely destroyed, replaced by an army of conscripts. A recent article revealed that some Ukrainian battalions and regiments had been decimated by as much as 93% of their nominal manpower strength and were being commanded by Senior Lieutenants, who typically command Ukrainian army companies.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH), an ardent supporter of Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine who served as one of the authors of the neocon Republican Plan for Victory in Ukraine that, despite its name, provides no path for victory for Kyiv.

Even many Republicans in Congress fail to comprehend the fact that without US aid, Ukraine would have been forced to accept far more favorable peace terms from Russia than it could obtain today and that it is US aid over the past two years that has resulted in an unnecessary prolongation of the war leading to unprecedented death and destruction in Ukraine. Instead, they are continuing to double-down in their blind and naïve support of Biden’s unachievable and potentially suicidal policy of supporting Ukraine “as long as it takes” to retake all of its lost territory. Three House Republican Committee Chairman recently issued their so-called “Plan for Victory in Ukraine” but failed to provide a single relevant suggestion for how victory can be achieved. The only thing they recommend is to approve the US Senate’s $60 billion Ukraine aid bill and ramp up Biden's continuing unilateral disarmament of the US military of tens of thousands of its advanced weapon despite Ukraine’s massive military losses which are likely three times higher than Russia’s which are estimated by US and UK intelligence to be around 70,000-80,000 dead. That is just a mindless regurgitation of the Biden strategy for defeat proving neocon Republicans and far left Democrats share the same hive mind mentality unable to accept the reality that Russia won the war back in 2022 and Biden and Zelensky are the only ones insisting on prolonging it unnecessarily by banning any peace negotiations with Moscow. Colonel Macgregor (USA Ret.) recently wrote an excellent article published in The American Conservative stating:

"The war in Ukraine is ending in catastrophic defeat for Ukraine and the United States. Washington confronts a world it does not know or understand. The House Republicans’ recent “Plan for Victory in Ukraine” exemplifies an acute lack of understanding. It seems certain that Russian forces will push forward to the Dnieper River and beyond. When the forward movement begins, U.S. space-based surveillance systems will detect the westward movement and sound the alarm. Yet Ukraine has no means of stopping the Russian advance.

Yuriy Lutsenko, former Ukrainian prosecutor general, appeared on Ukrainian television on January 7 and said that Ukraine had lost 500,000 dead in Washington’s proxy war with Russia. He added, “Ukraine loses 30,000 people a month in the war as killed and seriously wounded.” He further insisted that Ukrainian authorities should publish the real numbers of Ukrainian losses to show people the seriousness of the situation.

Washington’s foolish attempt to destroy Russia with the use of Ukrainian lives has produced a strategic victory for Moscow and revealed American weakness to the whole world. With the national sovereign debt approaching the threshold of default, and the progressive collapse of American societal cohesion, the potential for American military failure in action is an event Washington should avoid but seems incapable of doing so."

We often hear the false claim parroted by the liberal mainstream media that Ukraine can beat Russia because they not only have better equipment, but they also have much higher moral than Russia. In fact, Ukrainian morale is far lower than Russian morale which has risen substantially since Russia’s victory over Ukraine in its counteroffensive and the recent Russian victory in capturing the heavily fortified Ukrainian stronghold of Avdeevka, which was a key steppingstone for Russia to reconquer the rest of western Donetsk, thus fulfilling the last of Russia’s territorial objectives. A report from late last year revealed that the life expectancy for Ukrainian troops sent to the front during the Ukrainian counteroffensive was between two-three days before they were either killed or rendered combat ineffective after being seriously wounded. Meanwhile, a US Marine fighting with the Ukrainians reported that the average life expectancy of Ukrainian troops during the battle of Bakhmut was just four hours.

While it is likely true that 750,000 Russian men who fled Russia to dodge Russian military service after Russia invaded Ukraine, a recent report reveals there have been 700,000 Ukrainian draft dodgers who fled Ukraine to escape compulsory military service from a country whose pre-war population was 3.5 times smaller than Russia's. According to the report:

"Around 700,000 Ukrainians liable for military service have crossed the border since the war began on 24 February 2022. This is more than the number of Ukrainian soldiers at the front. These male refugees are not coming home any time soon. Germany, Poland, Estonia and other countries have stated that they will not deport them back to Ukraine."

Older-looking Ukrainian soldiers standing in formation. The average age of Ukrainian army soldiers is fifteen years older than US soldiers due in large part to the fact that Ukraine’s pre-war army has been destroyed and that Ukraine is running out of men to draft to fight in its ongoing border dispute with Russia.

Another article reports that the average age of Ukrainian army troops has now increased to 43 years old whereas the life expectancy of Ukrainian men has dropped precipitously to 57 years.         Assignment to the frontlines is viewed as a death sentence by Ukrainian troops due to massive Russian superiority in terms of airpower and artillery systems. It also states that according to leaked internal communications, Ukraine's air force was basically destroyed by the Russians during the first year of the war contrary to Western propaganda.

Accusations of Russian War Crimes

Despite Biden’s claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a war criminal that should be tried by an international war crimes tribunal in the Hague, there is no evidence that Russia has targeted civilians for destruction as Israel has done in Gaza. Russia has not targeted apartment buildings or schools except when Ukraine has stationed its troops in them which they did during the urban fighting in spring and summer 2022 in violation of the rules and laws of civilized warfare. Of course, there have been civilian casualties resulting from collateral damage with Russian missiles missing their intended targets. We have done the same on countless occasions during the past two plus decades of war of bombing and invading countries in the Middle East. It’s not considered a war crime under international law unless a country deliberately targets civilians as we did during World War Two.

According to the UN Human Rights Commission, the war in Ukraine has cost the lives of over 10,000 civilians as of November 21, 2023, which extrapolated to today would be the equivalent of nearly 12,000 civilians killed in 23.5 months of fighting. By comparison, Israel has killed over 27,000 Gazans in nearly four months of fighting totaling over one percent of Gaza’s total population, two-thirds of whom according to Israel are civilians, most of which are women and children. Israeli officials have admitted that two-thirds of those are civilians so by Israeli admission 18,000 total. Accordingly, Israel has been killing civilians at an average daily death rate nearly nine and a half times higher than Russia.

Strangely, the Biden administration has refrained from publicly denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal while attacking him as a “bad f***ing guy” in private and refusing to speak to him for the past few weeks for failing to agree to a permanent cease fire, the very thing Biden has adamantly opposed in his war in Ukraine for the past nearly two years. Biden also reportedly blames Netanyahu for losing millions of liberal Democrat votes who have now resorted to denouncing Biden as ‘Genocide Joe’ for supporting Israel’s alleged genocide of Palestinian civilians when in fact it is Biden’s Middle East policy which is responsible for his propitious drop in popular support in a presidential election year. While nearly 27 percent of Ukraine’s pre-war population have had to flee their homes in the wake of Russia’s invasion, 80-85 percent of Gaza’s population has become refugees since Israel invaded Gaza over three months ago.

There have been a number of reports, many of them credible, of lower-level war crimes and atrocities, committed by both Russia and Ukraine military forces but no credible reports that would suggest systematic Russian attacks against civilians as the UNHRC Ukrainian civilian death count figures attest. Zelensky continues to escalate Ukrainian military strikes on civilians using banned cluster munitions supplied by the Biden regime killing hundreds of Ukrainians in Russian annexed regions of the Donbass. Western media refuses to report these deliberate Ukrainian attacks aimed at killing their fellow citizens of predominantly Russian ethnicity.

Biden Continues to Double Down on Supporting a Lost Cause

Western leaders pinned their hopes on Ukraine’s massive summer/fall counteroffensive last year in which Ukrainian forces committed all its most advanced Russian weapons provided by the US and other Western nations apart from M-1A1 SA Abrams tanks which it feared would be destroyed by the Russians, yet it only succeeded in liberating approximately 0.25% of its territory, reportedly losing 60,000-80,000 dead in the process. Despite massive Western military assistance to Ukraine with virtually every weapon system Ukraine requested, Russia ended up capturing more territory last year than Ukraine did. With the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, all hope of liberating the rest of Russian annexed Ukrainian territory has been lost. Ukraine is now teetering on the edge of collapse with some of its most elite units refusing to attack Russian forces.

General of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhny, the most popular and effective of Ukraine’s military commanders, recently fired by President Zelensky from his position as Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian armed forces for daring to call for an armistice with Russia to prevent Ukraine from losing any additional territory after concluding the war was unwinnable for Ukraine

Meanwhile, recent news reports suggested Biden may have attempted to pressure Zelensky into holding Ukraine’s presidential election in March as required by the Ukrainian Constitution in the hopes he would be voted out of office and replaced by General Zaluzhny, commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, whom Zelensky fired earlier this month. Zaluzhny started a feud with Zelensky back in November when he called him delusional for believing Ukraine could still defeat Russia. He is believed to support the immediate negotiation of an armistice agreement with Russia to prevent Russia from overrunning large swaths of additional Ukrainian territory in the East. Biden has long had a frosty relationship with Zelensky because no matter how much money and arms the US gives to Ukraine it is never enough for him and he is always criticizing and attempting to guilt Western leaders into sending more. 

A recent poll revealed that if the election were held today two and a half times more Ukrainians would vote for Zaluzhny than Zelensky for President. However, there is no evidence to suggest that Biden is willing to do what is necessary to pressure Zelensky to restore democracy to Ukraine anytime soon. There had been rumors that if Zelensky refused to change course and continue to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers to fight an unwinnable war against Russia, Zaluzhny might lead a military coup that could overthrow Zelensky. However, since he fired Zaluzhny, Zelensky has conducted a purge of Ukraine’s senior generals loyal to Zaluzhny replacing them with his own loyalists so it appears that the opportunity for such a coup to save Ukraine may have passed.  

For the past two years, the Biden administration and its Democrat and neocon Republican allies have been claiming if you don’t support sending military aid to Ukraine, then you don’t care about the Ukrainian people. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite. President Biden, Ambassador Nikki Haley and neoconservatives in both major political parties have all but admitted that they are very happy to use hundreds of thousands of brave Ukrainians soldiers as cannon fodder to achieve their objective of weakening Russia falsely claiming it is a great deal because no Americans are dying when in fact upwards of a dozen American volunteers for Ukraine’s Foreign Legion have died fighting Biden’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. However, Biden and his allies have never bothered to explain precisely why they believe it is in the US national security interest either to weaken Russia or destroy Ukraine in order to “save it” much as President Lyndon B. Johnson called for us to do in Vietnam.

Conclusion

Apart from the humanitarian, material and economic costs to Ukraine and economic and material costs to the US and its NATO allies sacrificing vast numbers of weapons to Ukraine weakening their own security, there have also been other strategic costs which are more difficult to measure. Those strategic costs include the failure of the US to negotiate a comprehensive peace with Russia that would transform it from an adversary to a strategic partner to help neutralize its military alliance with the People’s Republic of China that might successfully deter it from blockading and invading Taiwan sparking a conflict that could escalate into a nuclear war with the U.S and its Pacific allies. Last summer, I helped former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy formulate a Ukraine peace proposal and mutual security agreement with Russia that could very well accomplish that in recognition of the fact that only by including Russia in the security architecture of Europe as Russian leaders have been requesting for the past 34 years can peace in Europe be assured. Vivek, President Trump and arguably Gov. Ron DeSantis are the only strategic thinkers to run for President that demonstrated an understanding of the lamentable strategic trade-offs the US has been making to continue to subsidize Biden’s proxy war with Russia with a couple hundred billion dollars’ worth of US taxpayer funding.

As I have noted previously, great power alliances transformed two regional wars into unnecessary world wars costing 110 million lives. Now, US membership in the NATO alliance threatens to transform Russia’s border dispute with Ukraine into a Third World War, risking the destruction of both the US and its NATO allies and the loss of nearly a billion lives. President Biden would be wise to end NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine by cutting off all aid to Ukraine until Zelensky agrees to and implements a permanent cease-fire and armistice agreement, along the lines I have long advocated, ending the death and destruction in Ukraine and the immediate threat of Russian nuclear escalation so millions of Ukrainian refugees can return home and help rebuild Ukraine’s destroyed cities. He has a moral obligation to do so not only for the sake of the American people but to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives as well.

© David T. Pyne 2024

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Executive Vice President of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. He recently served as Defense and Foreign Policy Advisor to a top-tier presidential candidate. He has also co-authored the best-selling new book, “Catastrophe Now--America’s Last Chance to Avoid an EMP Disaster” and his new book “A Nuclear Posture Review for Advanced Technology Weapons” will be published in early fall 2024. He serves as the Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com and as a contributor to “The National Interest”. Here is a link to his interview archive. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.

Recent Media Interviews

January 24th—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network to discuss this article. Here is the link to the recording.

January 25th—Interview on Living Hope Esparanza to discuss the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the coming war with China over Taiwan. Here is a link to my interview.

January 26th—Interview with Paul Jensen on KTALK AM 1640 from 7am-8am MDT to rebut Joel Skousen’s false claims about my positions on foreign policy issues and discuss the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the possibility they may escalate to World War Three. Here is the link.

January 31st—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network to discuss the increasing Chinese cyber threat, the chances of war with China over Taiwan later this year, the Iranian nuclear threat and how the US should respond to Iranian proxy attacks in the Middle East. Here is a link to the interview.

February 2nd—Interview with Jared Anderson and Holly Crowley-Rabanne who host the Tooele Happy Hour podcast to discuss what our citizens can do to help save America from an unnecessary world war with Russia and China as well as what they can do to help save their families in the event the power gets turned off for good at the start of a catastrophic war. Here is the link.

February 9th-Interview with REN TV to discuss Zelensky’s likely reasons for firing of Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valery Zeluzhny and how it will likely affect the course of the war in Ukraine.

February 14th—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network radio and TV shows to discuss the threat of a Iranian nuclear/super EMP missile launch from a cargo ship as well as the request by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner to declassify a Russian plan to put a nuclear (likely super-EMP) weapon in orbit to use to destroy US satellites on the first day of any war with them. Here is the link to the TV interview.

February 20th—Interview on RT’s Crosstalk TV program hosted by Peter Lavelle to discuss the true origins of the war in Ukraine, who is winning the war, how it is likely to end and what security arrangement can be made between Russia and NATO to prevent it from re-occurring. Here is the recording.

February 20th—Interview with Jon Twitchell on his Talk with Jon show to discuss Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the state of the war in Ukraine, Russia’s new super EMP satellites which can destroy the US and my peace plan to end the Gaza War. Here is a link to the interview.

February 21st—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Hour show on Patriot TV to discuss the news that Biden is trying to stop the Russian super-EMP satellite from being tested as well as the story that 75% of components in a North Korean KM-23 SRBM were found to be made in America. Here is the link to the interview.

February 22nd—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Radio network broadcast on 67 affiliates to discuss the effects of EMP on cellphone networks and US communication systems. Here is the link.

Upcoming Media Interviews

February 24th—Interview with former Salt Lake County District Attorney Republican nominee Danielle Ahn on her “Danielle Ahn Direct” podcast to discuss the threat of EMP attack and super geomagnetic storms.

February 27th—Interview with Jon Twitchell on his Talk with Jon show to discuss the latest developments with regards to Russia, the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza and the increasing threat of war with China.

February 27th—Interview with Nima Alkhorshid on his Dialogue Works podcast to discuss the 2nd anniversary of the war in Ukraine as well as my newly published peace plan to end the war on Gaza on fair and reasonable terms while also ending America’s proxy war with Iran.

February 27th—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Hour show on Patriot TV to discuss the NATO threat that they are considering sending an Expeditionary Force into central Ukraine to fight Russia directly and start World War Three and Russia’s threat to nuke the US and NATO if they do.

March 5th—Interview on the COL Rob Maness (USA Ret) on the Rob Maness Show to discuss the Russian super-EMP satellite threat, the potential vulnerabilities of America’s Nuclear Command, Control and Communications (NC3) system and what we can do to reduce America’s vulnerability to a nuclear/EMP first strike.

April 18th—I will be presenting an extensive briefing at the Firm Foundation Expo at the Mountain America Expo Center at 9575 South State Street in Sandy, Utah at 5pm to discuss the increasing threat of World War Three with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran and what we need to do to avert it.