The ABC of the Ukraine War

President Volodymyr Zelensky said in December 2023 that his military commanders wanted to mobilize up to 500,000 new soldiers. CNN wrote in February 2024: “As Russia makes gains, Ukraine needs more soldiers”. They have started to draft young men. The new Military Memorial Cemetery outside Kyiv will have the capacity for 150,000 burials, but most people are buried in the east on endless fields with Ukraine flags like in Kharkiv. Already in November 2022, EU’s Ursula van der Leyen spoke about a loss of “100,000 Ukrainian soldiers”. Ukraine may now have lost several hundred thousand soldiers. Russian figures point today to 500,000. A Polish general gave even higher figures. A 2023 leak from Pentagon to The New York Times estimated the Ukraine death toll to be almost five times higher than the Russian. The photo is from President Zelensky’s visit to the Lychakiv Military Cemetery in Lviv in Western Ukraine close to Poland, December 2023 (Photo: Public Domain). The dead soldiers are honored with blue & yellow Ukraine flags and with the read & black flags of the World War II Ukraine Insurgent Army (UPA) run by nationalists Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. The latter was Commander and Deputy of the Nachtigal Battalion and Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 under the German Abwehr general command, and he was Commander of UPA, while responsible for the massacres of about a hundred thousand Poles, Russians, and Jews. Today, in Western Ukraine, the Soviet era statues have been replaced by statues of Bandera and Shukhevych.

[A Norwegian version of this article was published in the Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen, a paper that has been close to the Norwegian Labor Party].

Why does the war in Ukraine continue? How will the war be stopped? To understand this, we must look to how political leaders think in Kyiv, Moscow, Washington and London. We need to understand the significance of the Ukraine War for these leaders. We have to start with the obvious, what everyone should know: The ABC of the Ukraine War.

A)     From day one, Vladimir Putin said: Russia had been faced with a threat “to the very existence of the state”. He saw the war as “existential”. And Putin’s perception is no different from others in the Russian elite, then-US Ambassador to Moscow, William Burns, wrote to his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice back in 2008. Ukraine is only 500 km from Moscow. Western forces entering Ukraine would make any defense of Russia impossible. And U.S. leaders like former Secretary of Defense and Vice President Richard Cheney have said that they wanted to break Russia into pieces. To Moscow, it became necessary to deny the West military access to Ukraine in order to survive. If the U.S. would enter Ukraine, the West would pass the “brightest of all red lines”, to quote Ambassador Burns, current CIA Director William Burns from 2008. This would be “a declaration of war”, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. The most obvious provocation ever. Despite this, the U.S. continued its military buildup in Ukraine. The U.S. actually wanted to provoke a war with Russia in Ukraine – a war that Ukraine would never be able to win. Russia has a much larger industrial base than Ukraine. It produces several times more artillery shells than the Western countries combined, which is crucial in a protracted war. Russia has more than 140 million inhabitants, while Ukraine had only 40 and many of them have fled the country. Men from eastern Ukraine, in particular, are in hiding (4.5 million) and do not want to be part of the war (see Arestovich below). Ukraine will soon have a lack of troops. Rajmund Andrzejczak, former chief of the Polish General Staff, said “Ukraine is losing this war”. It was actually clear from the first day of the war. A country like Ukraine cannot win over the much larger Russia if Russia perceives the war to be “existential”. For those who knew anything about Russian military thinking, it was clear from day one: Ukraine would lose this war, and the more weapons the West gives Ukraine, the more soldiers will die. The question is just how many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers will be killed before one is willing to enter peace negotiations.

B)     From the 90s, Russia had one key demand: “a neutral Ukraine”. Since 2008, Russia has said that Ukrainian NATO membership would lead to war, but the United States with the support from the nationalist elite in western Ukraine still pushed for Ukrainian NATO membership. The 2014-15 Minsk Agreement gave Russia a “guarantee of a neutral Ukraine” and Russia was satisfied with that, but from 2019 Ukraine included its ambition to join NATO in the constitution in direct conflict with the Minsk Agreement, while Americans and Britons had been building up militarily in Ukraine. According to Russia, this was a violation of several agreements. Russia entered with a military force on 24 February 2022. At this very moment, President Putin said: “We have been treating all new post-Soviet states with respect […]. Russia respects the sovereignty of all post-Soviet states, and we respect and will respect their sovereignty. […] It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory”, he said. But Russia cannot accept a “[Western] threat from the territory of today’s Ukraine”. Russia demanded a neutral Ukraine. Ukraine’s chief negotiator from the talks with Russia in March-April 2022, David Arakhamia, said: Russia wanted a neutral Ukraine. “In fact, this was the key point. Everything else [was] cosmetic”, he said. President Zelensky's military adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, who also attended Istanbul, said the negotiations were “successful. We opened the champagne bottle. It was completely successful negotiations”. Russia had no territorial claims, but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson travelled to Kyiv and said, according to Arakhamia, “We should not sign anything with them at all, and let's just fight”. After this, Russia lost all trust in a negotiated solution. When the West did not accept a neutral Ukraine as a buffer against Western military forces, Russia had only one option: to include the Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine in Russia to secure such a buffer. However, Russia still demands a neutral “rest-Ukraine” and the longer the war continues, the more territory Russia will take.

C)     In the U.S. leadership everyone knew that Ukraine would never be able to win the war and would never be able to retake lost land. For the United States, the war is not primarily about Ukraine. U.S. policy is to “fight to the last Ukrainian”, said President Bill Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of Defense, Ambassador Chas Freeman. Most important for the United States is to “weaken Russia”, President Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said. General Harald Kujat, former German Chief of Defense and Chairman of NATO Military Committee (2002-05) said that the U.S. is using the war in Ukraine to “weaken Russia” before the U.S. begins its war against China. For the United States, the war today is not about Ukraine, but Russia. One wants Russia to crumble. But how would the U.S. get the Ukrainian leadership accept a destructive war on its soil? To understand this, we must listen to Oleksiy Arestovych. He said back in 2019 that the best thing for Ukraine is “of course a major war with Russia and NATO membership as a result of a victory over Russia”. And he continued: “With a probability of 99.9 percent our price for joining NATO is a full-scale war with Russia”. The Americans and British had apparently told Kyiv to step up its war against the Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine to trigger a major war with Russia in order to make NATO defeat Russia to open up for Ukraine to join NATO. It was all about provoking Russia into a war, but from the first day of the war, Western media claimed that “Putin wanted to conquer Ukraine”. Despite entering Ukraine with far too small a military force to occupy the country and despite that those Ukrainian leaders said that Putin wanted “neutrality”, not to conquer Ukraine, all Western media spoke about a “full-scale invasion”, “an unprovoked attack” and that Putin wanted to conquer Ukraine. The problem is that the longer the war lasts, the more territory Russia will take and the more Ukrainian soldiers will be killed. Ukraine could have had a neutral sovereign state if one had accepted the 2015 Minsk Agreement or if one had accepted its negotiated agreement with Russia from March-April 2022. But instead, they followed British advice not to negotiate with Putin, “the crocodile”, to quote Johnson. This is tragic.

When Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg argues that one should support the Ukrainians with more advanced weapons systems to make their hand stronger “at the negotiating table”, he hasn’t understood that Russia is not the United States. The U.S. can back out and walk away from a war when it becomes too costly. The U.S. walked away from the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, when the costs of these wars overwhelmed any prospect of success. But Russia would not enter such “a war of choice”. To Russia, the Ukraine War is considered to be “existential”. One will use every means necessary to win the war. Ukraine and not even the European states can win a war over a major nuclear power like Russia, and the U.S. is unlikely to attack Russia, for example attack the Russian Naval Base at Murmansk, because in that case Russia will attack the U.S. Naval Base at Norfolk (Washington), and with the present Russian development of hypersonic missiles, Russia is in no way weaker than the United States in this respect. On the other hand, Russia is not interested in conquering others. One just wanted a neutral Ukraine and to abolish threatening weapons systems at its borders in accordance with the UN Charter (Art. 2:4).