In a compelling column Tuesday, the editor of the London Ukrainian Review, Sasha Dovzhyk, told a story about a trip she made last month back to Kiev and an unexpected reunion there with her best friend. As it happened, the friend was supposed to be on assignment in eastern Ukraine, working as a local producer for foreign journalists covering the war with Russia. But this was October 7th. It was the day Hamas attacked Israel.
So the friend wasn’t going to eastern Ukraine. The friend wasn’t going anywhere. The foreign crew with which she expected to travel left instead for the Middle East. “They leave Ukraine because the front is moving slowly,” the friend told Dovzhyk. “The journalists will be back in no time once we liberate any significant patch of land.”
The trouble is, lately, along roughly 600 miles of the front, they haven’t liberated significant patches of land. The war, in the words of Ukraine’s own top military commander last week, is stalled. “Just like in the First World War,” he told The Economist, “we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate. There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”
Not for Ukraine, not likely for Russia either. Winter is on the near horizon.
So since October 7th, Ukraine has fallen off the front page. Some days, it has fallen off every page. In the context of out-of-sight-out-of-mind, that is dangerous.
For one thing, although a great nation like ours is capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, it is only realistic to say that each day is only 24 hours long and the more time focused on the war in the Middle East, the less time focused on the war in Europe.
For another thing, we’re already dealing in the United States with short-sighted ultra-conservatives who are fighting to deny any more funding for Ukraine. Although the new Speaker of the House is hard to pin down, he might be in those ranks. There is similar right-wing opposition in the Senate. Ohio’s J.D. Vance recently wrote, “Israel has an achievable objective. Ukraine does not.” To which Washington Post columnist George Will wisely retorted, “Actually, their objectives are identical — national survival while living in proximity to enemies whose objective is national annihilation.”
National survival doesn’t even tell the whole story. As the journalist Sasha Dovzhyk wrote, “It simply won’t stop at Ukraine.” Although she and other Ukrainian writers for more than 20 months now have described the likes of torture chambers and mass graves left behind by Vladimir Putin’s forces— so the world will understand the scope of Russia’s atrocities— “What we seem to have failed to communicate to our allies is that the annihilation promised to us by Russia is not reserved for Ukrainians alone. Every few days, propagandists on Russian state television fantasize about invading Poland, the Baltic States, or Finland.” Given what we know about Putin’s aspirations, given what I’ve heard from his own lips in his own homeland about his Machiavellian ambitions, those “fantasies” might not be so far-fetched.
Which leads to what I have written many times about our connection to a war that is thousands of miles from our borders and an ocean away: what weakens our allies, weakens us. Last week I heard a talk by the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. She knows the neighborhood. She understands. “Ukrainians are fighting for us,” she told a forum called WorldDenver. “They’re not thinking of it that way, but that’s the bigger picture of their struggle. They’re fighting for their survival— as a nation, as human beings— but if they lose, we lose.”
That’s why right now Vladimir Putin must be smiling. Because naysayers would put Ukraine on a path to lose. Russia’s resources always have been richer than Ukraine’s. Now there’s a chance— especially since recent elections in eastern Europe also have produced results that don’t bode well for the nation under attack— that the underdog’s supplies will shrink. If Donald Trump is put back in the Oval Office a year from now, they will shrink even more. Then, if our allies see us wavering, they too will waver. Putin will win. “The cold-eyed men in Moscow and Beijing must be as delighted as they are astounded,” George Will wrote, “by the spectacle of U.S. populists cultivating war weariness in a nation that is shedding no blood and is spending a pittance of its wealth.”
But there is no denying, there is war weariness. President Zelensky recognized as much to Time Magazine last week: “Exhaustion with the war rolls along like a wave. You see it in the United States, in Europe.” Talk of a stalemate doesn’t help. Yet as Will points out, while this war is more than 20 months old, “Twenty months into World War II in Europe — May 1941 — Hitler was triumphant from Norway to North Africa.”
Yet at the end, Nazi Germany was in ashes and, as Will rightly says, “it was worth winning.”
For the sake of Western security, for the sake of freedom, for the sake of a stable world, this one’s worth winning too. In a parallel to Israel’s justification for fighting on in Gaza so that Hamas doesn’t win, Zelensky last weekend told reporters, “I believe that we have no right to even think about giving up, because what’s the alternative?” The answer is as clear as the battlefield is muddy: Russia wins.
The title of Ukrainian journalist Dovzhyk’s essay was, “I’m a Ukrainian, and I Refuse to Compete for Your Attention.” She shouldn’t have to. If more Americans and the western world would open their eyes to the global consequences of a Russian triumph, she wouldn’t have to.
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 also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” 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.
The stakes are so high …
Excellent essay Greg. Thank you. There are several articles circulating about the totalitarian alliance of Russian, Iran, and China to break western countries that block their expansion ambitions. And in both large conflicts, Ukraine and Gaza, the civilian tolls are overwhelming and tragic but necessay costs.