(Dobbs) In Ukraine, Neither Side Is Winning, Neither Is Losing
All the more reason, we cannot go weak on Ukraine.
I know what I want to happen with the war in Ukraine. An undiluted, undisputed victory against Russia.
But what I want and what I see are two different things. We have been hanging our hopes on the long-anticipated summer “counteroffensive” by Ukraine’s beleaguered troops. Last month, heroically, they launched it. But we’re roughly halfway now between the end of the last muddy winter and the beginning of the next one and while their army has pushed the Russians back along some of the war’s six hundred miles of embattled fronts, they haven’t sent them packing.
Ukraine isn’t losing. But it’s not winning either.
The Russians are dug in. They have slowed down the Ukrainian counteroffensive with fortified trench lines that have held up against Ukraine’s attacks. They have crippled the Ukrainians with landmines and anti-tank obstacles stretched out for miles at a time. They have fired on the Ukrainians when they’ve pushed forward with an arsenal of artillery and mortars, helicopters and drones that Ukraine can’t match.
On the upside though, as President Zelensky says, Ukraine is taking the war to Russia. In its latest drone attack— which officially it doesn’t acknowledge— three more homemade Ukrainian “kamikaze drones” made it to Moscow. This time they hit buildings in the Russian capital’s business district, just a few miles from the Kremlin, mangling the buildings’ exteriors and sending smoke and flames toward the sky.
But what difference does it make? A few people were hurt, a few buildings were damaged. These Ukrainian drones have anxious Russian citizens looking to the skies, but they are not likely to force any change in Russia’s tactics. To the contrary, this time they triggered a retaliatory missile attack against the hometown of President Zelensky, the city of Kryvyi Rih. Unlike Ukraine’s drones, Russia’s missiles killed six people there, including a ten-year-old girl. Almost 70 more were injured, some critically. They destroyed a nine-story apartment house and a school.
And all of this is on top of Russia’s relentless barrage of missile and drone attacks against civilian targets in many other Ukrainian cities, including the capital of Kiev.
And yet Russia called Ukraine’s drone assault in Moscow a “terrorist attack.” That’s the phrase Vladimir Putin used last month too when Ukraine attacked and temporarily disabled his cherished Kerch bridge, which connects the occupied peninsula of Crimea to the mainland of Russia. Putin called that attack “cruel” and “senseless.” Given that he and his forces have launched cruel and senseless attacks against Ukraine for nearly a year-and-a-half now, and have even destroyed tens of thousands of tons of Ukrainian grain that is desperately needed in other parts of the world, there is no debate about who’s the terrorist.
And it’s not just Putin.
Yesterday the former Russian president and current deputy chair of Putin’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, reiterated Russia’s nuclear threat. "Just imagine that the offensive… in tandem with NATO, succeeded and ended up with part of our land being taken away,” Medvedev wrote in an online post. “Then we would have to use nuclear weapons by virtue of the stipulations of the Russian Presidential Decree. There simply wouldn’t be any other solution. Our enemies should pray,” Medvedev warned, “that they do not allow the world to go up in nuclear flames.”
These are the people Ukraine is up against. This is the threat the world is up against. That’s why it’s not irrelevant to tie it to domestic American politics, because as if Ukraine doesn’t have enough trouble already, it’s getting threats from more than one direction.
At a rally last weekend in Pennsylvania, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump demanded that U.S. military aid to Ukraine be withheld “until the FBI, [Justice Department] and [Internal Revenue Service] hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden crime family’s corrupt business dealings.” Until then, Trump said, “the U.S. Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional payment.” In other words, in a rerun of his impeachable effort in 2019 to withhold military help from Ukraine until its president dug up dirt on his political rival Joe Biden, Trump is back at it again, putting his political designs ahead of Ukraine’s interests and, by association, America’s.
Why does this matter? Because for tens of millions of Americans, Trump’s words are gospel. He alone won’t force a change in American policy but tens of millions who uncritically exalt him could have some influence on the politicians who represent them.
The new wild card in the war is the conference coming up this weekend in Saudi Arabia to contemplate what is being called a “peace plan.” Reportedly it has Ukraine’s approval. The United States is participating. Russia is not, although some of its allies will take part. Whether they produce anything meaningful or even make any sense at all is anyone’s guess.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, assessed the war the other day. “I think there’s a lot of fighting left to go,” he said frankly, “and I’ll stay with what we said before. This is going to be long. It’s going be hard. It’s going to be bloody.”
But Ukraine is willing to shed that blood. If it is, America cannot go weak on it. An undiluted, undisputed victory against Russia isn’t imminent, but neither is a Russian victory over Ukraine.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
very well done and very helpful. j skalet
Thanks Greg. Regrettably, yours is a clear-eyed perception of this awful war. I’m surprised Putin is not severly weakened among his chronies and already pushed out.