Fred Kagan is on the warpath as usual:
Americans and Europeans must understand that Ukraine’s independence is of vital import – for ourselves as well as Ukraine – and must act accordingly. That is also the best way to deter Putin.
Kagan’s column is as wrong as can be, but it is useful as a window into the mindset of Russia hawks. First, he begins by exaggerating the stakes by making it seem as if Ukraine’s existence as an independent state is at risk, and then he exaggerates the importance of that independence to the West (“vital import”). If Russia takes any new military action in Ukraine, it is extremely unlikely to extend to the invasion of the entire country, and it isn’t going to occupy or absorb all of it. Russia hawks have to oversell the threat and they have to inflate the interests that the US and its allies have at stake, because otherwise their preferred policy of confrontation would make no sense. His main recommendation is having the US and NATO make a commitment to fight for Ukraine, which is as fanciful as it is wrongheaded. It is fanciful because there is rightly no appetite in the US or most of Europe to fight a major war for a non-ally, and it is wrongheaded because it would be a ruinous war that serves no US or allied interests.
Kagan argues that an independent Belarus and Ukraine are valuable because they created a “buffer” between Russia and central Europe, but it doesn’t seem to occur to him that having them as a buffer between Russia and NATO is exactly what Moscow wants. In other words, the Russian government is opposed to NATO involvement in Ukraine and further NATO expansion because they want to have that buffer. They believe Ukraine is being turned into a Western satellite, and they don’t like that. It doesn’t make sense for them to eliminate that buffer and create more places where their territory borders on NATO. It’s also worth noting that a “Russian takeover of Ukraine” would provoke a significant insurgency, which Western governments would presumably support, and that would become a huge drain on Russian resources for years and possibly decades to come.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
Yes, it is clear that Russia has no intention of “taking over” Ukraine. They will simply split the country in half, taking the valuable heavy industry section and the access to the sea, leaving an economically non-viable rump state in the West. They’ll only do that if Ukraine attacks the Donbass, which, unfortunately, is pretty much a done deal. It’s a “Hail, Mary” on the part of Zelensky, but it’s the only option he has and he has been encouraged by the CIA and the neocons like Kagan to take it.