Not a stupid piece at all, it makes it points with reason, ones with which we need to engage.
For example, as best as we can tell, the Ukes are losing.
For example, there was the US $1B into a Uke election/Orange revolt.
For example, there were the plans to bring Ukraine into NATO. Is not Russia entitled to a Reactionary Gap?
Peace is not the absence of conflict, peace is the management of conflict. Trump had it managed, and now we have this fustercluck.
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Will Trump Help Ukraine Win?
The former Soviet dissident Yuri Yarim-Agaev believes he will, because you can’t make a deal with a totalitarian like Vladimir Putin.
By Barton Swaim
Nov. 22, 2024 2:26 pm ET
If you believe the media, Donald Trump’s election cast Ukrainians into a state of misery. In fact, according to every source I queried, most Ukrainians now have a halting sense of hope. Mr. Trump’s ascendancy means that the bloody standoff to which the Biden administration has consigned them for nearly two years might, emphasis on might, begin to change.
For more than a year, the U.S. administration has supplied Ukraine with enough materiel not to lose the war, but not enough to win it. Several times, and for a variety of reasons, Washington has delayed military aid authorized by Congress, often ensuring the weapons showed up too late to do much good. The administration has restricted the Ukrainian military from firing U.S.-supplied missiles beyond certain ranges into Russian territory. The justification for these and related restrictions seems to be that Ukrainian strikes on Russian targets could provoke Vladimir Putin into nuclear retaliation. The fact that he required no provocation to invade Ukraine in the first place doesn’t seem to register. The policy’s upshot was to allow the Russians to move their materiel out of range, and to maneuver and resupply with impunity.
Most unpardonably, President Biden has almost totally neglected to explain to the American public his reasons for arming the Ukrainians. Into the silence, his critics on the right have inserted a variety of arguments for not arming them: Ukraine’s government is corrupt, Russia has legitimate territorial claims against it, the war is a distraction from China, and so on. Meanwhile the war in Europe has faded from the news (how’s that for a remarkable sequence of words?), Ukrainian flags have mostly disappeared from the windows of well-wishing American homes, and the war barely figured in the 2024 election.
This week, as if to concede its failure in Ukraine in its final weeks, the Biden administration scrapped its restrictions on the use of long-range missiles. Days later six U.S.-made ATACMs hit an ammunition warehouse in Russia’s Bryansk region, on Ukraine’s northern border. The policy reversal and consequent battlefield benefits to Ukraine come grievously late, but plainly Kyiv has fight left in it. Nearly three years after its leadership was expected to flee and its government to fall, Ukraine has managed to hold off its much larger foe. Thanks to a brilliant surprise attack last summer, Ukraine occupies several hundred square miles of Russian territory in Kursk. That Ukraine has performed so well despite the fetters placed on it by the U.S. administration tempts one to think that an emancipated Ukrainian military could win the war after all.
Mr. Trump has no easy choices on Ukraine. Continuing aid would displease some of his most committed and highest-profile supporters and require him and his national security advisers to articulate America’s interests in ways Mr. Biden never did.
On the other hand, cutting off Ukraine and forcing it to accept humiliating terms would make him what Mr. Biden became after the Afghanistan withdrawal—betrayer of a viable U.S. ally. The look for Mr. Trump will be worse: Unlike Afghanistan, there are no American soldiers in Ukraine, only American hardware. And with no U.S. troops to enforce a land deal, as in South Korea, very little time would pass before Mr. Putin recommences the war. Worst of all: Just as the Afghanistan debacle of 2021 occasioned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, in turn, the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, America’s abandonment of Ukraine would, as sure as the sun rises in the east, invite aggressions elsewhere around the globe.
There is a simple reason malign regimes can be counted on to capitalize on American retreat, as the Soviet dissident Yuri Yarim-Agaev put it to me in a conversation this week. Those regimes, he believes, each serve not separate and distinct ideologies but a single one.
Mr. Yarim-Agaev, 75, was born in Russia and attended the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In the 1970s he worked in physics, chemistry and applied mathematics at the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences. There, in 1976, he joined the Moscow Helsinki Group, an association of dissident scientists, writers, intellectuals and activists who openly demanded the U.S.S.R. abide by its commitments under the 1975 Helsinki Accords and guarantee its people freedom of thought, conscience and religion. (The government of Leonid Brezhnev had signed the accords in bad faith, as everybody knew.)
Some members of the Helsinki Group, such as Yuri Orlov and Natan Sharansky, were imprisoned for years. Others, like Mr. Yarim-Agaev, were exiled. He came to America in 1980 and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford. Later he worked for major banks and hedge funds, for which he developed mechanisms to measure financial risk. Mr. Yarim-Agaev is also a longtime campaigner for human rights. Over the decades he has begun several organizations that provide dissidents in totalitarian countries with laptop computers and other publishing tools.
Mr. Yarim-Agaev isn’t famous—he lacks even a Wikipedia page. But he has earned a reputation as someone who speaks perceptively on the global aims of antidemocratic regimes. He maintains many contacts in the Russian government.
“Can I offer drink?” he asks, pointing to a table laden with bottles in his New Jersey home, about an hour from Manhattan. At first I decline, but I note bowls of nuts and pretzels on the coffee table between us. It seems ungrateful not to accept.
I’m barely able to explain what I want to ask him when he begins: “The main thing to understand about this war is that it is not a war between Russia and Ukraine. It’s a war between totalitarian bloc and democratic alliance. It’s proxy war.” (Mr. Yarim-Agaev speaks excellent English but with a pronounced Russian accent; articles, which don’t exist in Russian, often go missing.) Russia’s invasion had nothing to do with territorial claims or security concerns, he insists. “It is first and foremost war against America. Putin’s aggression is for one and only one reason: Ukraine shows democratic way of development and pro-Western way, pro-American way, and becoming ally with America and the West.”
That doesn’t sound to me like a situation from which lasting peace terms are likely to emerge.
“No,” Mr. Yarim-Agaev says, “in totalitarian country, individual leaders don’t rule. Ideology rules. . . . Stalin, Mao, they never had power. They were always first priests and servants of ideology, and they couldn’t deviate from that ideology. If they did, that would be death for them. To stay in power, they must serve it.” Mr. Yarim-Agaev cites the example of Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet premier from 1958-64, whose modest attempts to soften state control of Soviet life ultimately got him ejected from power. To ask a dictator like Mr. Putin or Xi Jinping to behave in a way that contradicts his totalitarian ideology, Mr. Yarim-Agaev says, “would be to ask him to commit political suicide. He is not going to do that.” Mikhail Gorbachev was the exception that proved the rule.
With regard to Russia and its aims in Ukraine, he says, we aren’t dealing with an individual tyrant, Vladimir Putin. “We are dealing with ideology. And you cannot charm totalitarian ideology, you cannot have a good relationship with totalitarian ideology, you cannot make deals with it.”
So the question of Ukraine will have to be settled on the battlefield? “Yes,” he says.
In Mr. Yarim-Agaev’s view, Russian objectives in Ukraine aren’t substantively different from Iran’s designs on Israel, the Taliban’s on America, North Korea’s on South Korea and China’s on Taiwan. The vast cultural and political differences between these regimes obliges me to ask him to explain what he means by that term “totalitarian ideology.”
“It’s very simple,” he begins. “There is such a thing as totalitarian socialism. Now, all those countries are forms of totalitarian socialism. Totalitarian socialism can exist in three forms: international totalitarian socialism, which we also call communism; national totalitarian socialism, which we call Nazism, and religious totalitarian socialism, which we know in form of Islamism.” What these forms of tyranny have in common is an absolute commitment to destroy democratic capitalist nations, especially America.
Accordingly, Mr. Yarim-Agaev puts forward the provocative thesis that Iran wants to destroy Israel not because it’s a Jewish state. “Iran itself claims that Israel is little satan and big satan is the United States,” he points out. “So it always aims at America, and it does it through Israel. It’s not antisemitism, although the mullahs are antisemites. It’s because Israel is democratic country and American ally.”
Those of us who grew up during the Cold War aren’t accustomed to thinking of post-1991 Russia as a totalitarian country in the way Soviet Russia was. But Mr. Yarim-Agaev thinks Mr. Putin’s regime has combined some nationalistic elements of Nazism with the symbols and tactics of unreconstructed communism—“Lenin’s tomb still sits in the middle of Red Square,” he notes—to form a kind of hybrid totalitarianism.
Today’s Kremlin doesn’t repress and control Russian citizens the way it did under Soviet communism. Yet critics of the regime have a nasty habit of dying in unnatural ways. Two years ago the renowned ballet dancer Vladimir Shklyarov was quoted on Facebook as expressing opposition to the Ukraine invasion. On the day I spoke to Mr. Yarim-Agaev, Shklyarov “fell” from the balcony of his fifth-floor apartment in St. Petersburg. Police ruled it an accident. He was 39.
Mr. Yarim-Agaev moves around the globe to reinforce his point that totalitarian ideologies of all kinds are undergirded by anti-Americanism. Wars and conflicts are happening all over the globe, but North Korea sends 10,000 troops only to Ukraine to aid Russia, and Iran sends drone technology to Russia in its war with an American ally. Iran, he says, isn’t a theocratic country, although it is ruled in part by mullahs. “It is also, and maybe more so, ruled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which is a military and not a religious force.” If Iran considered the Islamic creed the most important thing, Mr. Yarim Agaev says, “it couldn’t have good relationship with China, which persecutes its Uyghurs population. It couldn’t have a good relationship with Russia, which twice made war on Chechnya,” a mostly Muslim region. “Anti-American totalitarian ideology is the important thing.”
What about the fear of provoking Mr. Putin into the use of tactical nuclear weapons? “It’s blackmail, and nothing but that,” Mr. Yarim-Agaev says. “And first of all, all military experts say that tactical nuclear weapon doesn’t work. It is senseless—you cannot conquer with it because you shoot it in front of you and then you cannot enter the territory.” Never mind the assurance of counterattack, in which case “there would be no more Russia, and Russia knows that.”
The larger point, he says, is that Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and lesser totalitarian states—Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua—will do anything to avoid direct confrontation with the U.S. “They fight against America,” he says, “but they always fight through somebody else. They attack Israel, they attack Ukraine. China may attack Taiwan at any moment, maybe even the Philippines. But they don’t want confrontation with United States because they know that’s suicide.”
On this point I suspect Mr. Yarim-Agaev could speak indefinitely, and owing to the bourbon and a particularly addictive brand of pretzel, I am inclined to let him. But one point I need him to address: What about the argument, heard on segments of the right since the war began—Vice President-elect JD Vance has repeated the charge—that Ukraine is corrupt and certain to squander whatever aid the U.S. sends?
“Baseless,” Mr. Yarim-Agaev says. “The best proof that it isn’t so is the effectiveness of Ukraine’s army in using American weapons, which has exceeded Western military experts’ expectations. This would not have happened if significant part of our equipment had not reached its destination.” The claim has more to do, in his view, with the “completely erroneous” perception that Ukraine had something to do with Mr. Trump’s December 2019 impeachment and Mr. Biden’s election the following year. The assertion that venality is a sufficient reason for one democratic nation not to aid another in a time of war sounds particularly odd coming from political figures, like Mr. Vance, who allege corruption at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
For Mr. Yarim-Agaev, the risks of arming Ukraine, corrupt or not, are nothing compared with the peril of communicating weakness to Mr. Putin. “There is no way to pretend that Ukrainian defeat would be not one more defeat for America,” he says. “We just lost war in Afghanistan, and if we give up on Ukraine now, it’ll be followed by another loss. If Putin gets territories he already occupies, it’ll be clear victory for him, clear loss and defeat for Ukraine, and clear defeat for America.”
Giving up on Ukraine, or forcing it to accept terms odious to its people, “is incompatible with position, peace through strength,” Mr. Yarim-Agaev says, employing a phrase Mr. Trump and those around him often use. “You cannot implement policy of peace through strength by losing wars.”
