(Photo by Vitalii Nosach/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
In December 2016, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham addressed a Ukrainian military unit on the front lines of the Donbas war. Sounding more like the assembled troops’ commander than the elected representative of his South Carolina constituents thousands of miles away, Graham issued a rallying call.
“Your fight is our fight. 2017 will be the year of offense,” Graham declared. “All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia… It is time for them to pay a heavier price.”
Today, as Ukraine faces critical shortages of ammunition and manpower, all while losing more territory to advancing Russian forces, Graham has returned to Ukraine with new battlefield advice.
Ukrainian lawmakers, Graham said in Kyiv on Monday, should swiftly pass a new law that will lower the age of military conscription to 25. “I can’t believe it’s at 27,” Graham complained. In fact, he added, even 25 is insufficient: “You’re in a fight for your life, so you should be serving — not at 25 or 27... We need more people in the line.”
In professing a “need” for Ukraine to provide “more people” to sacrifice, Graham is being consistent. After all, he has previously bragged that so long as the US arms Ukraine, they “will fight to the last person.” But during this visit, Graham offered a new twist: whether or not the US continues to foot the bill, he said, Ukrainians should give their lives regardless. “No matter what we do, you should be fighting,” he instructed. “No matter what we do, you’re fighting for you.” To underscore his point, Graham added that further US assistance should come at least partially in the form of a loan.
Graham’s missive that Ukrainians “should be fighting” Russians – even if the US won’t pay for it -- offers a new reminder that he and fellow bipartisan war hawks see Ukrainians as cannon fodder in a proxy war that they have fueled since the Maidan coup of 2014. And his demand that Ukraine lower the age of those being sent off to die is yet another sign that Kyiv’s supposed “allies” in NATO capitals are running out of options to prolong a war that they provoked. Instead, they are reduced to offering crude decrees like Graham’s, or, in the case of French President Emmanuel Macron, empty threats.
At an emergency summit in Paris last month, Macron suggested that European armies could be sent into Ukraine to fight Russian forces. When it comes to calls on NATO to “send ground troops... nothing is ruled out,” Macron said. “We will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war.”
Macron’s fellow European leaders did not hesitate to rule him out. One day after the Paris gathering, German chancellor Olaf Scholz insisted that the participants all agreed “that there will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil who are sent there by European states or NATO states.”
In an interview last week, Macron remained defiant. When it comes to sending forces, he insisted, “all these options are possible.” And he offered a new rationale for why: a Russian victory in Ukraine, Macron said, “would reduce Europe's credibility to zero.”
Left unexplained is why Ukrainians should continue sacrificing hundreds of thousands of people for the sake of Europe’s “credibility.” But speaking to the Telegraph of London, a source close to Macron explained that the French president is focused solely on his own. In threatening to deploy NATO troops, the source said, Macron “was intent on reclaiming the European strategic leadership role on Ukraine.”
Additionally, ahead of European Parliament elections in June, where Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party is expected to beat out Macron’s, “he is offering a clear choice, which is for or against Ukraine, even if it means pushing the boat out a long way.” Biden, hoping to prolong the war at least through the November election, is undoubtedly in the same boat. The President and his aides, the Washington Post notes, are “seeking to boost enthusiasm for a war effort that President Biden had hoped to campaign on as a symbol of his administration’s leadership against autocratic aggression.”
A final factor, the French source added, is that “Macron has long been attacked for his ambiguities towards Moscow.” In real-world terms, these “ambiguities towards Moscow” mean being willing to engage in negotiations with Moscow, and even recognize its security concerns, as Macron once did before NATO’s proxy war fever became too strong to resist. Accordingly, while Macron now positions himself as being “for” Ukraine, the real-world impact of his proxy war coalition is the country’s continued destruction.
“People don’t understand how bad the front is right now,” a Zelensky adviser told the Washington Post. “The morale is low; the momentum is low. Young men are afraid they will be mobilized to die because of a lack of weapons.”
In the face of Russian advances, Kyiv and its NATO sponsors cling to the hope that the US Congress will overcome Republican opposition and approve President Biden’s requested $61 billion proxy war lifeline. “We will get that money to you as we should, so I don’t think we need to speak about Plan B today,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said during a surprise visit to Kyiv this week.
But even if that money is authorized, no amount of NATO weaponry can overcome the reality that Ukraine is running out of people to use it. Ukraine’s manpower shortage, the Washington Post recently noted, is a “strategic crisis.” Zelensky’s office has responded to the crisis with deception: after claiming that it could draw on 700,000 newly mobilized troops for deployments, “no one in the military leadership or the presidential administration has explained where those 700,000 are — or what they have been doing,” the Post noted. In one southwestern village, a front line Post report adds, “almost no men are left... and those who remain fear they will be drafted at any moment.”
In their clamor for another $61 billion in US funding, proxy war enthusiasts are overlooking what happened with the previous influx. Last summer, Ukraine attempted a counteroffensive with tens of thousands of forces and billions of dollars in NATO weaponry. Yet that widely hyped operation was such a disaster that today “[a]t the Pentagon, some officials say they do not consider last summer’s efforts to have been a counteroffensive at all,” the New York Times reports. If last year’s carefully planned counteroffensive cannot even live up to the name, what makes the Biden administration and its partners believe that the next one will be any different?
One possibility is that they simply do not care. From their point of view, so long as NATO “credibility” can be preserved – particularly during an election year – no amount of dead young Ukrainians is too heavy a price.