Ukraine’s lessons for Russia and the West 

Once again, Ukraine is teaching lessons on how to deal with aggression. Its sudden incursion into Russia, temporarily occupying 400 square miles of Russian territory, has turned the tables on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.  

From its heroic stand blocking Russia’s lightning seizure of Kiev in 2022 to its daring sinking of Russia’s Black Sea flagship and other vessels of the fleet, to its dramatic recapture last year of swathes of Russian-occupied territory, Ukraine has stood tall when others more safely situated have faltered. With this brilliant counter-invasion of Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian military and people have demonstrated again their remarkable courage, skill and ingenuity in defending their homeland and their independent national identity. 

Ukraine’s security partners, led by the U.S., have often resigned themselves to Russian aggresion, and deemed it not worth resisting. Despite NATO’s promise of eventual membership for Georgia and Ukraine, and a specific security guarantee to Ukraine in 1994, the Bush-Cheney administration did nothing when Putin invaded Georgia in 2008, and the Obama-Biden administration demurred when Russia seized Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014. 

In February 2022, Russia and China announced their mutual support for each other’s aggressive intentions against their neighbors — Putin’s revanchism in Eastern Europe and Xi Jinping’s fabricated claim on Taiwan. With that “no-limits strategic partnership” backing him up, Russia massed forces along Ukraine’s border while Zelensky pleaded for Western help. 

The Biden-Harris administration, fresh off its calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, touted its intelligence assessment that Russia’s latest invasion was indeed imminent, and warned it would respond with “decisive” action. But Biden declined Ukraine’s request for a no-fly zone, citing fears of “World War III.” Once the invasion was underway, Putin stoked Biden’s paralyzing fear by repeatedly threatening the use of nuclear weapons. 

For the next two and a half years, Washington led a contingent of NATO members intimidated by Putin’s threats of escalation.  

The U.S. and Germany withheld the weapons Ukraine needed to reverse Russia’s invasion, such as battle tanks and long-range missiles, lest Putin be “provoked” into lashing out and triggering a wider war. Even after precious time, lives and Ukrainian cities were lost and Washington belatedly delivered the more capable weapons systems, it strictly limited their use by Ukraine, ensuring that U.S.-supplied missiles could not be fired into Russia. Ukraine’s long-planned counter-offensive last spring failed largely because of the absence of requested Western arms, blocked for a time by a contingent of isolationist Republicans subservient to former President Trump.

But, through all the Biden administration’s fear-ridden hesitancy and strategic second-guessing of Ukraine’s intention to expel Russia from all Ukrainian land, the nation’s will to resist and its desire to live whole and free never flagged. That was the first lesson Ukraine taught the West: that Biden’s rhetorical commitment to democracy over autocracy requires sacrifice — both the ultimate one so many young Ukrainians made on the battlefield and the less grievous financial costs societies must accept to ward off aggressors.

Yet, while Biden’s follow-through was undercut by his willingness to see Ukraine make territorial concessions, the Trump-Vance ticket fails even to recognize the moral and strategic implications of the war. Vance once said he doesn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine,” and Trump’s repeated and vague promise to stop the war “within 24 hours” would all but assure Putin’s control over much of the land he seized from Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.

In such a compressed negotiation, Ukraine would have nothing to trade with Putin except parts of its own territory. Now, thanks to Zelensky’s bold move, Ukraine can give back Russian land, which it did not intend to keep anyway, in exchange for the return of all or a substantial part of Ukraine’s Russian-occupied territory.  

In addition, manpower-scarce Ukraine now has hundreds of Russian troops to swap for the release of captured Ukrainians. Ukraine has also shown the world how a civilized nation treats captives and prisoners-of-war in accordance with the laws of war, in contrast to Russia’s war crimes and atrocities. 

It’s an important lesson on the value of leverage in war and negotiations. 

Ukraine’s lessons for victims of aggression and their allies are relevant to China’s plans to use force against Taiwan, though that would primarily be a naval and air conflict across the Taiwan Strait rather than a land war within adjoining territory. Taiwan and its presumed U.S. ally would not be seizing Chinese territory. Instead, for both defensive and deterrent purposes, important Chinese assets must be put at risk to long-range attacks. That task would fall to the United States, which alone has the capacity, having denied Taiwan the weapons and authority to defend itself by striking inside China. 

A negative lesson that Russia’s war on Ukraine taught is that the threat of economic sanctions is not enough to deter a powerful state intent on aggression and willing to pay a manageable price to achieve its military and political objectives. Only a clear and credible promise of U.S. military intervention would have stayed Putin’s hand, and only that will deter China from attacking or coercing Taiwan. 

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute.