Can the U.S. afford for Ukraine to lose?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish, but in July he approved a law moving Christmas in Ukraine from January 7, the date in the Eastern Orthodox calendar, to the Western celebration day of December 25. See that, Moscow? All the indications are, however, that while Christmas may come sooner in Ukraine this year, it is going to be a bleak one.

Mike McCord, the comptroller of the U.S. Department of Defense, informed Congress on December 15 that $1 billion of military aid will be released by the end of the month but, without legislative authorization, there is no more money for Ukraine.

A supplemental appropriations package before Congress contains an additional $61 billion, as well as funding for Israel and for border security, but it was blocked by Senate Republicans and, with the House already in recess, there will be no movement before Christmas. Zelenskyy travelled to Washington to plead in person for continued aid but left empty-handed.

It is increasingly clear that Ukraine is facing a crisis. The counteroffensive that began amid bullish defiance in June has made pitiful progress. The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, admitted last month that the front line has become a First World War–style stalemate. Minefields and withering barrages from Russian artillery meant that Ukrainian forces were only able to advance 17 kilometers in five months. They had planned for 30 kilometers a day.

Zaluzhnyi is grimly realistic. He knows that his forces need a massive injection of high-tech equipment to change the current calculations: “The simple fact is that we see everything the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing. In order for us to break this deadlock we need something new.” Without that great leap forward “there will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”

Manpower is a profound concern. Zelenskyy has spoken of needing 500,000 new recruits, while the defense minister, Rustem Umierov, has “invited” Ukrainian men aged 25 to 60 living abroad to report for service.

GOP opponents of the proposed aid may have myriad reasons for their reluctance to send tens of billions of dollars more to keep Kyiv in the fight. But have they walked themselves through the potential consequences of the aid drying up? Have they thought not just about the next step but the one after that, and the one after that?

Here is a plausible scenario. There will be no breakthrough this year while the worst of the winter settles. Gen. Zaluzhnyi has identified one huge problem, having pinned his hopes on inflicting catastrophic losses on his opponents. “Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war.”

Vladimir Putin is operating on different metrics. A recent U.S. intelligence report suggested that, of the 360,000 personnel with which Russia began the conflict in February 2022, 87 percent have been killed or injured. But Putin is steeped in a culture that looks back with stoic pride on the loss of 27 million lives in the Second World War. If victory in Ukraine becomes a simple matter of who can bleed more, Russia cannot be defeated.

With no further American assistance, European countries can’t make up the shortfall, and Ukraine will likely wilt before a renewed Russian offensive next spring. This time perhaps Kyiv will fall, perhaps Zelenskyy will be forced to flee, or else will perish in the defense of his capital.

The whole concept of Ukrainian nationhood and identity is at risk of suppression, because we know that Putin regards it as illegitimate, an artificial construct of the Bolsheviks and an insult to the roots of his own state in medieval Kyivan Rus. Putin has called Ukraine’s existence as an independent polity “just madness.”

If Ukraine is subdued and folded into Russia’s “near abroad,” it would be an act of criminal naivete to assume that Putin will be sated. Surely his attention will turn to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania: all three Baltic states are prosperous democratic nations with Russian minorities just waiting to be weaponized to create a grievance. But all three are NATO members, protected by Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty enshrining mutual defense. Is the West prepared for a possible hot war with Russia?

The effects of Ukrainian defeat will ripple out much wider. If America effectively decides that the cost of supporting its far-away ally is just too high, how will other partners feel? What will the mood be in Taiwan? Conversely, what signal does it send to Xi Jinping as he flexes his muscles in the South China Sea? The message must surely be that the United States is reining in its global sense of purpose, and it will be read clearly in Tehran too, with its close links to Russia.

American policymakers can be forgiven for feeling the shadow of decades of imperial overstretch. One study estimates that the Global War on Terror cost the U.S. around $6 trillion, and the Pentagon reported 4,431 American deaths in Iraq and 2,354 in the deployment to Afghanistan. But that should put $61 billion into context, even when added to the $113 billion already spent.

However large these sums may be, asking whether the U.S. can afford even to have a chance of Ukraine winning the war is the wrong calculus. The real question is stark: Can the United States afford for Ukraine to lose?

Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.