Let’s think about why the United States should be on Ukraine’s side in its war with Russia.
There are three good reasons.
Russia is a threat to the USA. (Yes: We want it weak.)
2. Russia is waging a war of conquest, and we should discourage wars of conquest. (Yes: it is indeed a war of conquest, and they destabilize the world.)
3. Russia started the war. (Yes: we should discourage countries that start wars because they hurt people and are expensive.)
There are also four bad reasons for taking Ukraine’s side.
4. Russia is not a democracy. (Yes: but Russia is as democratic as Ukraine, meaning that there are elections but they are untrustworthy and whoever is elected behaves tyrannically.)
5. Russia should not have possession of Ukraine because they are different peoples. (No— they are similar, and if that were the most important thing, we’d want the Russian-speakers in Ukraine to break off.)
6. Russia has committed atrocities. (Yes, possibly, but Ukraine is equally or more culpable, probably a lot more, since press bias makes atrocities benefit Ukraine.)
7. Russia has killed lots of civilians. (Yes, but so has Ukraine, and killing lots of civilians is inevitable even in a just war.)
It’s discouraging to see how even educated people acts like a war is a sporting event where you say your side can no wrong and the other side can do no right. Ukraine is a nasty country in many ways, and we should recognize that. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be on their side. This is a particular danger for discerning people who see through the media’s pro-Ukrainian propaganda and are tempted to think we should be neutral. Conservatives, in particular, should not react to liberal hypocrisy by automatically opposing policies of the Biden Administration.
Most readers will probably take me to be pro-Russian, so let’s start with my view of the ideal outcome. My ideal is for Ukraine to reconquer the Crimea and the Donbass, to go further and conquer half of territory between the Black and Caspian Seas, and to destroy enough of Russia’s army so Russia can do little except defend Siberia against China. Let’s add that Sevastopol becomes a US naval base on a 100-year lease. Thus, instead of a strong Russia, we would face a weak Russia.
But that is fanciful. Despite the Ukrainian successes of this past month near Kharkov, I’m afraid Russia will keep pushing in the Donbass until the Ukrainian defensive line cracks and its trained soldiers are used up. Putin is shaky now, and he is the type of person who would roll for double or nothing. The war then would end with Ukrainian humiliation and half the country being ceded to Russia. Russia would end up hurt, but with its prestige restored. Worse yet, President Putin’s prestige would be restored. Russia will want to save face by winning square miles on the map, even if it can’t conquer important cities such as Kiev and Odessa.
So we need to be realistic. One realistic outcome is an immediate cease-fire conditioned on Russian withdrawal everywhere except the Donbass and near the Black Sea. Both sides could declare victory. This has much of what Russia asked for (but not the neutrality of Ukraine). Russia could kick in some money, repaid by the US and EU under the table, in exchange for the Donbass and Crimea, which would hold referenda (rigged, probably) to say they preferred being part of Russia. People would stop dying, and Russia will have learned its lesson. Not my ideal, but not a shameful compromise either. This essentially would return affairs to where they were before the war started, except for a drastic reduction in Russian prestige because of its humiliation in the attack on Kiev.
But let’s go back to the reasons for supporting Ukraine. First, three good ones:
1. Russia is a threat to the USA. We want it weak.
From 1945 to 1990, we worried that the Russians would conquer Western Europe and impose their dreary and tyrannical socialism. This would be bad in itself, and America would not be safe once the domino of Europe had fallen. Now, with the full independence of the Baltic States, Poland, and Ukraine, we have a bigger buffer zone but we should still worry. We don’t want to lose that buffer zone. A weak Russian army is a good Russian army, xcept that we do want them to be strong enough to resist China.
2. Russia is waging a war of conquest, and we should discourage wars of conquest.
War is horrible. Soldiers die, and civilians die. They are expensive. They wreck buildings and roads. When one country conquers another, it breeds bad feeling and new wars, like a family feud in Arkansas or a drug war in Los Angeles. Because we should reduce misery in the world, we should punish wars of conquest.
3. Russia started the war, and we should discourage countries that start wars, because they hurt people and are expensive.
Even a just war is horrible. When the Chechens rebelled from Russia, that caused misery, even though there is a good case that Chechnya should be a separate country. If Ukraine had started this war to reconquer the Crimea, this reason would tell us to favor Russia. But Ukraine didn’t— it was Russia that started this war. Unless there is a very good reason, nobody should fight even a just war.
All three of these reasons for supporting Ukraine are sound, and the first— the need to restrain Russian aggression— is sufficient. The four other reasons one might argue in favor of Ukraine are unsound, and it isn’t even clear which way they would cut. If we think those four reasons are what is important, we might even end up supporting Russia. But they are not. Let’s proceed to consider them.
4. Russia is not a democracy.
Ukraine’s President Zelensky has taken over all television stations and banned 11 opposition parties, besides the 2015-banned Communist Party. He has encouraged the murder of mayors in occupied areas who cooperated with the Russian occupiers— as is routine in occupied areas during wartime— arrested one major political rival and tried to arrest another, till blocked by a court. These things are undisputed; many other bad things are alleged and possibly true. Is Zelensky any better than Putin? (It would be a hard contest to judge; Putin’s enemies end up dead too.) Ukraine has also always been notoriously corrupt, like Russia, the Biden’s income from it and political interference being just one example.
True, it may be that the people of Ukraine support the war and the people of Russia do not. That would be a slightly better argument, though would still not tell us that Ukraine was morally right or that America’s self-interest was in supporting Ukraine. It’s hard to get an accurate measure of sentiment from countries in which you could be jailed for telling a reporter your position on the war, however, and that applies to both Ukraine and Russia.
5. Russia should not have possession of Ukraine because they are different peoples.
It’s unclear whether Russia and Ukraine should be separate countries, if we were starting from scratch to split up the world into nations. The languages are distinct, but over half of the vocabulary overlaps. Most of Ukraine was historically part of Russia; indeed, Kiev was the center of early Russia, before the Mongol invasion. It’s reasonable that they be separate countries; it would also not be reasonable for them to be one country.
Note, too, that if you think Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers should be allocated to different countries, then you are accepting the Russian logic of the 2022 war— that Eastern Ukraine should have autonomy— and the takeover of Crimea. Recall that elimination of Russian as an official language in Ukraine was one of the causes of rebellion in the Donbass, and that the point of the 2014 Minsk agreements was to make the Donbass provinces autonomous within Ukraine— an autonomy that Ukraine then refused to implement. Thus, if you believe separating Ukrainians from Russians is enough reason to support a war, then you think the United States should be on the Russian side, not the Ukrainian side.
(Language digression: I wish that we could use the name “Ukrainia” for Україна instead of either the Ukraine or Ukraine; see also Prof. Volokh and Ed West on “Kiev”).
6. Russia has committed atrocities.
Russian soldiers surely have committed atrocities as individuals because that’s what always happens in wars. War zones are lawless, so soldiers commit crimes. The government isn’t to blame unless it condones them or encourages them (cf. German government on the Eastern Front in World War II). So we must think about the Russian government.
The Russian government has strong incentive to prevent atrocities. Its goal is not to kill and maim Ukrainians, after all— it is to subdue Ukraine and break off the eastern part of the country. It wants to achieve that goal as smoothly as possible. Indeed, in July 2022, 1.4 million civilian refugees had fled from Ukraine to Russia, about a third of all refugees. Ukraine, on the other hand, has every incentive to lie, and even to commit atrocities and blame them on the Russians, since the Western press will studiously avoid trying to see what actually happened.
Maybe the Russians have committed atrocities, but how would we know? Both the Ukrainian and Russian governments lie. So does the Western media and the U.S. government, in favor of Ukraine. Human Rights Watch has long noted forced disappearances and torture in the Ukraine by both pro-government forces and pro-Russian militias, but the number they have checked is small. I suggest, therefore, that we use the adage cui bono— “to whom the good”— and ask which side would benefit from atrocities.
Ukraine gets the most publicity benefit from any Russian atrocities, and the publicity cost of Ukrainian atrocities is muted by Western media bias. The Russian government, and Russia citizens have no special desire to kill Ukrainians, but within Ukraine, we do see the kind of ethnic conflict that destroyed Yugoslavia. Within the Ukraine, there has been a bitter struggle between Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers. When the Ukraine became independent, Russian was one of its official languages. Later, the government eliminated Russian, an intentionally offensive blow to the minority Russian speakers. A lot of these people hate each other. Thus, it is plausible that the Ukrainian government condones atrocities against Russian speakers—-and that the Donbass rebels condone atrocities against Ukrainian speakers. This situation is further complicated because the Ukrainian government is allied with ultranationalist organizations such as Svoboda and Right Sector and the Azov regiment which seem far more likely to commit atrocities (a 2018 Foreign Policy Center article is useful on this point, being pre-war and seemingly balanced; see also the 2019 Harper’s article on Nazi symbolism in Ukrainian militias, and the 2022 Unherd one). But it’s not just the militias. Even the President of Ukraine has called for the murder of mayors of Russian-occupied cities, and such murders have occurred. I’d call the killing of civilians like that an atrocity. And there is the 2014 wiretap which the Washington Post reports former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko as saying she wished she could “exterminate them all [Ukrainian Russians] with atomic weapons.”
7. Russia has killed lots of civilians in bombing and shelling
Wars kill lots of civilians. This is part of Reason 2 above— war is bad, so whoever starts a war without very good reason is responsible for those deaths. But although a huge number of deaths are going to occur as collateral damage from purely military operations, a separate and distinct reason to condemn a country is if it kills a lot of civilians unnecessarily.
There is no convincing evidence Russia has done that. Indeed, there is no reason for them to waste shells on civilian targets unnecessarily, especially when Ukraine is ready to use that as favorable news story with the pro-Ukrainian Western press. Extra deaths of civilians is more to be counted against the Ukraine. This war has seen a lot of city fighting, which means a lot of civilian death and destruction. But fighting does not have to be in the cities. The Ukrainian army could have fought in the countryside, and abandoned the cities rather than fight house-to-house. Indeed, the stated reason why pro-Russian forces in 2014 abandoned Slovyanks and Kramatorsk was to prevent civilian casualties.
I do not condemn Ukraine for its decision to fight in the cities and cause civilian casualties. That is a good “military decision” in the sense that it helped them defend their country, because house-to-house fighting is harder on the attackers. Indeed, Winston Churchill condemned the French for not being willing to destroy Paris by fighting street to street, as he would have done in London. But you cannot choose to station your army in a city and then criticize the other side for using artillery against you.
Churches and other important buildings have been destroyed by artillery fire. That, too, is tragic. See https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2022/06/07/clues-to-the-fate-of-five-damaged-cultural-heritage-sites-in-ukraine/
Conclusion
It’s important to sort out good reasons from bad for supporting Ukraine against Russia. The main reason is the interest of Western countries— America and the European countries— in stopping future Russian aggression. To this we can add the justice of Ukraine’s cause— Russia did attack the country, after all. We should not pretend that we are supporting a morally better side when the Ukrainian forces are corrupt, authoritarian, and murderous, or that we are aiding the reconquest of the Donbass because of our support for self-determination. But those of us who are disgusted with the mendacity of the U.S. government and the Western media should not allow that disgust to blind us to the real interest of the United States in making this war a failure for Russia.
Notes:
Below are a couple of articles that I sense are dependable for the facts I use from them, but it’s difficult to know what the facts are in Ukraine, even whether to trust articles on details of public events such as language law changes. Do let me know at erasmuse61@gmail.com if I’ve gotten something wrong, and please provide a source so I can check. One reason I wrote this article was to try to sort out for myself what’s true and what’s false. Note that I have taken the evils of Putin’s government in Russia for granted and not provided evidence; I think most readers will not need examples of undemocratic practices and mysterious deaths there. What I have written is thus mainly about Ukraine.
One article I liked because it seems to be by someone who is pro-Ukrainian but honest about Ukraine’s problems is “The unique extra-parliamentary power of Ukrainian radical nationalists is a threat to the political regime and minorities,” Volodymyr Ishchenko, The Foreign Policy Center (July 18, 2018).
The 130-page Appendix 1 of Camilla Callesen’s PhD thesis has a useful timeline (with cites to newspaper sources) of events in Ukraine 2013-2018, the period when the conflict in the Donbass started and the Minsk agreements were negotiated.
Hi Eric - I realize that this comment is way late but I just stumbled on to this article.
I think you left out the two most important arguments in favor of supporting Ukraine:
1. getting rid of Putin - he is fundamentally evil and will cause trouble for as long as he is in power
2. confirming the Western powers' determination to deter or, failing that, pursue a war to an unambiguous conclusion.
In my humble opinion, success in the war consists of regaining ALL of Ukraine and establishing a demilitarized buffer zone inside Russia. I believe that this in turn will lead to eliminating Putin and also deterring China wrt Taiwan.