When Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked war against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the conventional wisdom was that he would win in three days and Russia would occupy and rule Ukraine.
It turns out that everybody was wrong. Ukrainians fought back bravely and valiantly, with very limited weaponry and ammunition, and stopped Putin in his tracks.
When it became clear that Ukraine had a chance of holding its ground and standing up to Putin, we began to slowly provide the weapons they needed. By the end of fall 2022, Ukraine had used those weapons to successfully regain 52 percent of the territory that Russia occupied. The consensus at that point was that, with additional weapons, Ukrainians can succeed in expelling all Russian troops from their territory.
It is both financially and morally right to support Ukraine now.
It turns out that that consensus about how the war could end was also wrong. We are now stuck in a quagmire where neither side is decisively winning.
The problem now is that time is firmly on Putin’s side. After two years of funding Ukraine, some in the US and our allies are concerned about the long-term strategy and impact.
The prime minister of Hungary and Putin’s ally in the European Union (EU), Victor Orban, has used his position to block and stall EU funding of Ukraine.
Putin, on the other hand, does not have this type of problem. As long as he continues to export oil, he will receive hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue, which he uses to buy ammunition from North Korea, drones from Iran, and upgrade missile factories in Russia.
He is also not sympathetic to the loss of human life. According to Ukrainian sources, 435,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or injured since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Putin is not subject to the same constraints as political leaders in the West. He does not need to compete in elections—he simply kills his opponents. He is not constrained by the scrutiny of the media, courts, and public opinion because he controls them and holds them in fear.
The one thing that he does not control is the outcome of the war in Ukraine. If Russia were defeated, the Russian people would question why their strong man is so weak, and why they endured such a monumental loss of life and dramatic economic damage for such an ill-founded military cause. If this were to happen, this would be the only circumstance under which Putin could lose power.
He would probably be jailed, lose his money, and maybe even his life.
That is why Putin will never back down in Ukraine.
However, if we back down and stop supplying military aid to Ukraine, Ukraine will lose. Putin will have achieved what he set out to do in the first three days when he started the war.
Make no mistake—he is not stopping with Ukraine. He has made it very clear that he is not happy with the Baltics or even Poland being independent. However, unlike Ukraine, these countries are members of NATO, meaning that under our treaty obligations, if he invades, then we have an obligation to defend them, meaning we would go into a direct war with Russia.
Putin is banking on the possibility that we will balk at that prospect. He is hoping that the pundits will fan out across media networks to say, “Why should we be going to defend Estonia?” when the majority of Americans can’t even find it on a map. Listening to the political debate now about funding Ukraine, I can easily imagine a scenario where a decision can be made not to honor our treaty obligations, giving Putin a free ride into the Baltics. There is nothing to suggest that Putin will stop there. The US will be drawn into the conflict whether Americans like it or not.
However, this scenario is preventable. We need to continue to support Ukraine and enable them to win. We don’t need to just dig into our own pockets. In addition to the budget money that has been debated, there are approximately $350 billion of Russian Central Bank reserves that have been frozen around the world. These funds can be confiscated and used for the defense and reconstruction of Ukraine.
At the moment, the US uses 5 percent of its military budget to aid Ukraine. If the scenario I outlined above were to materialize, we would end up spending 20 times more. It is both financially and morally right to support Ukraine now.