Essay | Ignore the Defeatists. America’s Strategy Is Working in Ukraine.
As summer turns to fall, the news from Ukraine has been harrowing. Across the country, Russia has been attacking civilian targets, destroying residential buildings, schools and hospitals. Russia has been steadily degrading Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, ensuring that Ukrainians have a very hard winter ahead of them. In the next few months, fresh waves of Ukrainian refugees could well be pouring into Europe.
Most ominously, Kyiv has not had the military momentum on its side since the summer of 2023. Back then, Ukraine’s counteroffensive petered out, yielding to some basic Russian advantages in manpower and materiel. Russia is currently lurching forward in Donbas in eastern Ukraine. It has discovered novel methods for waging this war, repurposing old stock into precision-guided “glide bombs.” The results on the ground have been devastating.
Amid the distressing footage of damaged cities and murdered civilians, a common refrain in the U.S. and among allies has been that we lack a strategy or endgame for the conflict, that our war aims are unclear. In October 2023, two Republicans, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas and Sen. James Risch of Idaho, published an open letter accusing the Biden administration of failing “to articulate a strategy outlining how U.S. assistance to Ukraine will help them achieve victory over Russia.” Vytautas Landsbergis, foreign minister of Lithuania, echoed the sentiment this past July, declaring that “we finally need a strategy that will lead to Ukraine’s victory in this war.”
There is certainly plenty to criticize in how the U.S. and its allies have approached the war. Judged in retrospect, the decisions to withhold (and then provide) one or another weapons system have often been baffling. With too much reluctance, the U.S. sent to Ukraine the Himars rocket system, ATACMS missile system, Abrams tanks and F-16 fighters. A more resolute commitment to providing weapons before and right after Russia’s 2022 invasion would undoubtedly have benefited the embattled country.
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But no combination of tanks and jet fighters and missiles could itself have ended the war. And we will wait in vain for a simple victory in Ukraine. To be truly beaten, Russia and President Vladimir Putin would have to be beaten at home, a massive and massively dangerous undertaking.
And, in fact, the U.S. and other countries supporting Ukraine have embraced (but not always articulated) a clear strategy: They have applied a formidable array of military, diplomatic and economic means to the crucial goal of containing the revanchist power of Putin’s Russia. They have executed this strategy with energy and determination, to the great benefit of Ukraine, and its future prospects are bright—but only if we have the patience to stick with it.
To understand the merits of this strategy, we must go back to the beginning of the story.
Russia’s war against Ukraine began in 2014. Unhappy with a Europhilic revolution in Ukraine, Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014 and infiltrated eastern Ukraine with mercenaries and later with Russian troops. The U.S. and its European allies responded to the invasion with a series of half measures. The West’s economic sanctions, which may have prevented Russia from going further into Ukraine, were not enough to get Russia to exit Ukraine.
For years, a holding pattern prevailed. Russia let the guns fall mostly silent in 2015. The West maintained its sanctions and normalized relations with Moscow. The symbol of normalization was Germany’s Nordstream 2 pipeline deal with Putin, which Washington greenlighted in early 2021. Russia pretended to be content with its occupation of Crimea and parts of Donbas, and the West pretended that it had resolved the upheaval in Ukraine. All implicitly accepted that the absence of a visible war equaled the absence of war.
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In this period, the West saw little need to disturb the status quo. It offered Ukraine no meaningful path to joining Europe. An agreement between Ukraine and the European Union was signed in 2014, but EU membership was unavailable to Kyiv. NATO membership was also unavailable. While keeping NATO out of reach, the West did almost nothing to arm Ukraine.
An exception to the rule was the U.S. under Donald Trump, who allowed the shipment of Javelin antitank rockets to Ukraine in 2019. (Trump withheld the weapons for months while his surrogates pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to provide negative information on Joe Biden—a turn of events for which Trump was impeached.) Once delivered, the weapons proved instrumental in the battle of Kyiv at the start of the 2022 war.
Such assistance notwithstanding, Ukraine was effectively on its own in the lead-up to Russia’s massive invasion.
The scale and brutality of the attack exposed the West’s delusions. At first, the U.S. and many other countries expected Ukraine to lose the war and prepared for an insurgency within a Russian-occupied Ukraine. When Ukraine held its own, a more energetic Western strategy came into focus.
It was not a strategy to defeat Russia, a nuclear power with a formidable conventional military and a dictatorial leader hellbent on war. Nor was it a strategy to rid Ukrainian soil of every Russian soldier, a laudable aim in theory but a very difficult undertaking in practice.
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The strategy has three pillars. The first is to furnish Ukraine with weapons, intelligence and help with targeting. This has been an enormous initiative, comparable to the Lend-Lease program for U.S. allies in World War II and encompassing the contributions not just of the U.S., France, Britain and Germany but of dozens of other countries, from Canada to South Korea.
Ukraine’s strength is the aggregate will of these countries, which command vast financial and technological resources. They have not hidden their commitment to Ukraine; they have proudly advertised it.
The second pillar has been to tighten ties to Ukraine. NATO membership may be elusive, but several countries are moving toward long-term, formalized military partnerships, precisely what the U.S. and the countries of Europe refused to do between 2014 and 2022.
Though these partnerships are subject to the push and pull of domestic politics, their trajectory traces an upward curve. In July 2023, the G-7 issued a joint declaration on long-term security guarantees for Ukraine, and since then over a dozen countries, including the U.K. and the U.S., have signed bilateral security agreements with Kyiv. The shared goal of these pacts is to end the war on the best terms possible for Ukraine and to ensure a peaceful future by making the country powerful enough that Russia will never invade again.
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Finally, Ukraine is entering Europe. The depredations of the conflict will make it an arduous journey. Wars do not render countries more democratic, more enlightened or more demographically secure, and Russia is doing everything it can to undermine Ukraine’s societal foundations.
But Ukraine is not giving up on Europe, and Europe can no longer afford the benign neglect it cultivated for Ukraine in the 1990s and even after the Russian invasion of 2014. Europe’s own well-being depends on its ability to integrate Ukraine. It would be a catastrophe for Europe if Ukraine became a failed state or a Russian colony the size of Texas, bordering five members of the EU and NATO.
This three-part strategy has succeeded. In 2014 and early 2015, Ukraine lost two battles—at Ilovaisk and Debaltseve—after which it sued for peace. Over the last two and a half years, Ukraine has lost still more battles. Russia took the city of Mariupol, it took Bakhmut and Avdiivka, and for the past few months it has been inching forward in the Donbas.
Yet in this war Russia has lost more battles than it has won. It lost the battle for Kyiv. It lost the battles for Kharkiv and Chernihiv. Ukraine took back Kherson in the fall of 2022 and, astonishingly, has just taken a few hundred square miles of Russian territory, holding a section of Russia (near the city of Kursk) for over a month. Relying on its own technological know-how and stock of drones, Ukraine is hitting military targets and degrading infrastructure deep inside Russia. In no way does Kyiv need to sue for peace.
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Too much attention is paid to the weaponry Ukraine lacks and to the areas in which its military has fallen short. But the country has a growing military arsenal, from defense-industrial capacity that will come online in 2025 to the lived experience of its soldiers and officers, who are on the avant-garde of 21st-century warfare.
In February 2022, Russia occupied some 11% of Ukrainian territory. After the deaths of countless Russian soldiers, Russia now occupies just some 18% of Ukrainian territory. The numbers chart Russia’s humiliation in this war—its strategic quandary and ultimate dead end.
Through rhetorical sleight of hand, Putin is constantly projecting the aura of victory. It is a mask he is skilled at wearing.
For the U.S. and other countries committed to Ukraine, the Cold War holds valuable lessons. Its essence was the containment of Soviet power, which was always messy and difficult. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, many thought that the Soviet Union was pulling ahead in the 1970s, that it was gaining ground and self-confidence and might win the Cold War.
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By the 1980s, the fallacy of such reasoning was apparent, underscoring the value of not reading too much into news cycles and of not inferring too much from the status quo. Now the West is again containing the spread of Russian power. This is a strategic necessity, and it will demand Cold War-style patience. In Ukraine, such patience will be rewarded.
The one certainty about the coming election in the U.S. is that there will be a new administration. If Vice President Kamala Harris is elected, she will not necessarily stick with the old approaches. If former President Trump is elected, he may relish the image of himself as his predecessor’s mirror opposite. Either new president would likely conduct a review of U.S. policy toward Ukraine and would ask what could be done differently and what could be done better.
But whoever wins the election should recognize that the strategy of containing Russia is working. It has not come at an exorbitant cost, and it has produced remarkable cooperation among partners and allies across the globe. The transatlantic edifice of support for Ukraine (so often alleged to be cracking) has held firm. And in the U.S., Republicans and Democrats have more often collaborated than diverged on Ukraine. It was a Republican Speaker of the House who brought forward the most recent military aid package. Almost all House Democrats voted for it, and President Biden happily signed it.
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U.S. policy toward Ukraine may have been chaotic in the early days of the war, but since 2022 it has coalesced into an effective, sustainable strategy. Today more than 80% of Ukraine remains sovereign and independent—an astounding achievement against a brutal, determined and much more powerful adversary.
If the next president, whether Trump or Harris, can expand U.S. assistance to Ukraine while cajoling allies to do more, Ukraine may be able to make some modest progress on the ground. If all the next president can do is hold the line and continue containing Russia, that would be a major accomplishment too.
Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at Catholic University and is currently the Richard C. Holbrooke Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. His most recent book is “Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability.”
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Appeared in the September 14, 2024, print edition as 'Ignore the Defeatists. America’s Strategy Is Working in Ukraine'.
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