Tank You Very Much
For many reasons, defending Ukraine means defending ourselves. Their fight is our fight too.
Free the Leopards
It's almost hard to believe we're closing in on the one-year anniversary of the start of the War in Ukraine. On the eve of his invasion, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was supremely confident in the ability of his military forces to quickly overwhelm his much smaller and weaker neighbor. Almost all Western analysts agreed. The disparity in air power alone should have been decisive.
But apparently word they were finished before the war even began never got to the Ukrainians. Not only did they fail to roll over in the face of the onslaught, but they crushed the pincer of the invaders headed toward their capital of Kyiv and drove the Russian forces in the north out of their country entirely, back into the safe haven of Belarus.
In the east, the fighting was much harder. Putin was able to leverage the Russian positions in the areas of the Donbas he had seized in 2014 to penetrate further into Ukraine, overrunning the port city of Mariupol and threatening another key city, Kharkiv. In the south, the vital port of Odesa was also preparing to be attacked. Kherson fell.
Despite the heroics in the Battle of Kyiv, things looked bleak for Ukraine. But they held. And as the summer wore on, they gathered their forces and counterattacked, liberating all of Kharkiv Oblast and a large portion of Luhansk Oblast in the northeast. In the south, Ukrainian forces retook Kherson and drove the Russians back to the other side of the Dnipro River. By the onset of winter, the lines had solidified across the front, and the fighting had devolved into the most brutal kind of trench warfare not seen in Europe since World War I.
Which is where the question of tanks comes in. Ukraine actually had a fairly substantial armored force of a little over 800 tanks at the beginning of the invasion, mostly older Soviet-era T-72 models. But almost two-thirds of them have been destroyed in the constant fighting, and the T-72s sent to them from other former Soviet satellites, especially Poland, haven't been able to completely make up the losses. Best estimates now have the Ukrainians with about 300 serviceable front-line tanks of their own, plus whatever number of captured Russian tanks they've been able to recondition.
Supplemented by Western arms, especially HIMARS and tube artillery, it's a decent (and now battle-hardened) force. But it's likely not enough to repel what is sure to be another offensive by the Russians come the spring, if not sooner, let alone adequate for the Ukrainians to mount an effective counteroffensive of their own. The best estimates say they need twice that number to have enough combat power to punch through the hardened Russian lines and retake Mariupol, the key to unlocking the Russian front.
All of which is well known to military strategists on both sides, of course. Which explains the Russian reaction to the announcement by Germany, after weeks of wrangling, of their willingness to finally release Leopard II main battle tanks for transfer to Ukraine, including from Germany itself. Barely a day had passed after the announcement before yet another barrage of Russian drones and missiles rained down on Ukrainian civilian targets.
Someone was very, very mad.
And for good reason. The Leopard II is an excellent tank, more than a match for anything in the Russian inventory, and there are over 2,000 of them in Europe. There is no question but that the West can give President Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians the 300 tanks they've been asking for, and quickly. (We're also chipping in with modified M1A2 Abrams tanks, but they'll be much slower to get to the battlefield.)
What's more, as more than a few analysts have noted, the Ukrainians seem to be able to train up on new weaponry in about a third of the time as everyone else. And not only have they proven to be fast learners, but remarkably adaptable and innovative, too. Time and again, they've made the most of what they have at hand and given the Russian invaders, who still maintain tremendous superiority on paper, all they can handle, and more.
All of which means we could be seeing a turning of the tide. At least on the ground, Europe's deadliest ground war since the fighting in the Balkans during the 1990s may be entering, if not an end game, and least the end of the beginning. There is no way to know how long or how hard the fighting will be until Ukraine can reclaim all of its territory. There are sure to be more twists and turns to come. But at the very least, Western resolve has proven to be up to the task.
At least for now.
Russia, Russia, Russia
Were it simply a matter of defeating the attempted conquest of one sovereign state by another, the story so far would be fairly clear. But there's a lot more going on than simply a tyrant's territorial ambitions, or even his apparent determination to, in some way, reconstitute a lost empire. What the former KGB officer in the Kremlin is up to goes beyond battlefield glory. It's not even limited to his immediate geopolitical ambitions.
Ultimately, the long-term aim of Russian policy is to undermine the rules-based world order which grew out of the Enlightenment and replace it with the ancient principle of might makes right.
But there's one problem: the United States. As long as we remain the leader of the Free World (and we are), there is no end to the inconvenient hurdles in the way of the Russian oligarchy Putin depends on for his own power and wealth. Pesky things like financial regulations get in the way of money laundering, bribery, human trafficking, illicit drug dealing and what have you -- the standard litany of skullduggery in organized crime.
What's more, American military might is a deterrent to just the kind of "special operation" Putin is attempting in Ukraine. Too little noted is what the Donbas actually represents, economically. It's the industrial heartland of Ukraine, as well as its primary source of valuable raw materials. It's not for nothing Yevgeny Prigozhin has been so intent on using the Wagner Group to grab the area around Bakhmut; it's the location of numerous valuable salt mines.
But a direct military challenge to the United States would be a foolhardy endeavor, as surely Putin has known all along, even before he came a cropper in Ukraine. Instead, he's employing the same tried-and-true playbook which the Russians have been employing since the earliest days of the Soviet Union: internal subversion.
It can be, if unchecked, a very successful strategy. And the longer its pursued, the more effective it can become. If you keep hammering away at the very idea of objective truth, keep planting doubts, continually attack the wedges and stratifications in any society, eventually you can get at least some kind of result, if not total victory. Paralysis is good enough. The key to exercising soft power is to make it self-sustaining, so your target does the work for you and you can then use their very strength against them.
Putin is, after all, a judo aficionado.
And that's what the Russians have been doing to us in their latest subversion operation since at least 2014. They've been vigorously pursuing the use of social media, fake websites, propaganda assets and the like quite effectively. But the latest wrinkle in their shenanigans has resulted in the arrest of former FBI agent Charles McGonigal, who at one time -- and during a crucial period -- was the head of counterintelligence at the New York field office. It's one of the more blatant efforts by Putin's cabal to stick their fingers in the pie, so to speak.
There's a lot to unpack in McGonigal's arrest. Fortunately, the historian Timothy Snyder, who has been sounding the alarm on the Russian operation all along, has done a very useful deep dive on the subject for us. I highly recommend you take the time to read the whole thing: The Specter of 2016 - by Timothy Snyder - Thinking about... (substack.com)
The important takeaway is to understand we're under assault, too. We don't suffer as the Ukrainians do, shivering in the cold and praying that strange swooshing sound in the sky isn’t the last thing they ever hear. Putin isn't shooting at us. But their fight is our fight, because their enemy views us as a common foe. Defeating democracy in Ukraine goes hand in hand with defeating democracy in America, and vice versa. In both cases, it's the institutions which must be destroyed.
And the course the development of those institutions has taken in Ukraine provides our ex-KGB nemesis with a particularly sneaky lever to pull.
Oh You Kids
The most serious problem Ukraine has been contending with since the fall of the Soviet Union, at least until the invasion itself, is corruption. There's no denying the reality of it. It also should come as no surprise. Given the rampant corruption in the USSR, and how pervasive it was at all levels of Soviet society, it was inevitable their most tightly-held satellite would internalize what was known as blat -- essentially, "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours."
Efforts to reign in the corruption met with mixed success from the beginning of Ukrainian independence. It got so bad under Viktor Yanukovich -- who, to be fair, was freely elected president by the Ukrainians, although not without the same kind of interference in their election as we saw in ours in 2016 -- the country nearly descended into civil war. His ouster was the first step in Putin resorting to hard power after soft power had failed.
In any event, the problem of corruption now serves as a valuable talking point for Russian misinformation specialists to use in penetrating American political discourse. And in some circles, it's working. More than a few members of Congress are using potential corruption as a reason to deny Ukraine further military and humanitarian aid, as well as buying into the Russian claim of Ukrainian illegitimacy. And some of them are now in positions of power on key House committees.
But there are two important points to be made. First, the Ukrainians themselves are well aware of the problem of corruption and have progressively been trying to deal with it. In fact, President Zelenskyy was elected on an anti-corruption platform, and immediately made it the central effort of his administration while, simultaneously, seeking to arm his country to defend itself from further Russian aggression. And by all acccounts, he's not only been sincere in his effort, but largely succeeding: U.S. Officials Overseeing Aid Say Ukrainian Leaders Are Tackling Corruption - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
The second point is a little broader. We seem to think of all democracies in the light of our own. We expect them to work the way ours does now, even though we've been at it ourselves since 1789. We've had a lot of time to work out the kinks -- and it hasn't always been easy. In fact, we didn't resolve the biggest questions until the Civil War, and even then it took decades before Teddy Roosevelt introduced the civil service as we know it today. Before then, things were, to put it bluntly, pretty wild.
Ukrainian democracy, born in the collapse of a totalitarian state, is just a little more than 30 years old. At a similar point in our history, we ourselves were just a few years out from a foreign invasion which had occupied our capital and burned the White House. The spoils system made winning elections virtually (and sometimes literally) a blood sport. Two attempts at creating a central bank had failed. We were ruthlessly violating treaties to seize the land of Indigenous peoples. We still held slaves.
Considering where they came from, how their independence came about and where they are in the arc of their development, it's hard to fault the Ukrainians for trying. Unlike us, they don't have a sea to separate them from their former masters. They've never been fully free to pursue democracy on their own terms -- ironically, until now. In a very odd way, the war has, in a real sense, liberated them.
Which is really why their fight is our fight. No matter what isolationists, or Putin apologists, or right-wing radicals, or chaos merchants or just plain grifters have to say, we do have an ultimate reason, even beyond our obligation to defend the West, for standing with Ukraine. We have a moral reason to see them win, and Putin lose.
Liberty.
Odds and Ends
Of course, our own democracy can always use a little work. As much as we're being messed with, we can often be our own worst problem. Fortunately, we have good people who believe we're our own best solution: One Woman Is Holding Politicians Accountable for Nasty Speech. It’s Changing Politics. - POLITICO
On the economic front, we're almost certainly in what's called a rolling recession. And it may be evidence we're in the process of a soft landing already: PCE inflation December 2022: Key Fed measure eased, spending declined (cnbc.com)
For all the talk of Trump's fading star, the RNC election was, well, Trump vs. Trump vs. Trump. Guess who won: Ronna McDaniel re-elected to fourth term as RNC chair (axios.com)
There's a bit of refreshing self-awareness on the Left these days, although this one has some bad language (they can't help themselves): "OMG Stop Freaking Out!!!" is a Bad Response to Right-Wing Freak-Outs (substack.com)
And finally, there may be more than one way to get from here to there: Souped up Hall thrusters might get people to Mars - Futurity
See you next week.
Kevin J. Rogers is the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute. He can be reached at director@modernwhig.org. ___________________________________________________________
The Modern Whig Institute is a 501(c)(3) civic research and education foundation dedicated to the fundamental American principles of representative government, ordered liberty, capitalism, due process and the rule of law.
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