At the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, opinions in the West were virtually unanimous in condemning the Russian attack and supporting aid to Ukraine. As the war continues, however, dissonant voices have emerged on the conservative side. They have alleged that Russia’s attack was not a pure act of unprovoked aggression but was motivated by legitimate security concerns, and that the military aid to the Ukrainians should cease. This position of some conservatives is a further burden and risk for the suffering Ukrainian nation which is fighting for its life. It is also – a much lesser consideration – a problem for conservatives and for many Catholics, who have given ear to this anti-Ukrainian stance or have even accepted and promoted it. The problem is a problem of moral integrity and moral credibility. Those Catholics who have bought in to the anti-Ukrainian line have lost both. It is for this reason that this anti-Ukrainian line needs to be addressed in a Catholic forum.
The case for this line depends on not addressing or mentioning essential facts. The best way to respond to it is to describe the main features of Russia’s goals and actions in Ukraine.
The claim that the Russian atttack on Ukraine was provoked by a NATO threat to Russia gets the situation backwards. It assumes that Russia has to be threatened in order to launch a military offensive. In fact, the Russian policy is to retreat in the face of a serious threat, and to attack when such a threat is absent or can readily be overcome. This was the policy of the USSR and of the Tsars. It is known to have been the basis for Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Putin invaded Ukraine because he thought that the Ukrainians and NATO were not a threat. He despised Zelensky, who had run for office on a programme of peace with Russia. He believed that NATO would not seriously oppose his actions – as happened with his annexation of the Crimea in 2014 – and expected the Ukrainians to collapse in three days. That is why Russian army officers called restaurants in Kiev to make reservations immediately after the invasion.
Russian actions are not consistent with a Russian evaluation of NATO as a major military threat. The sole Russian tank training area was built by the German firm Rheinmetall, and Russian military production depends on machine tools from NATO countries. There were no threats of war when Finland joined NATO, although Finland has an 1,340 km border with Russia. There is no factual basis for holding that NATO was a military threat to Russia at the time of the Russian invasion. NATO armies, especially the German army, had been run down after the Cold War and were in no shape for serious armed conflict. The expansion of NATO to the east had not significantly worsened the Russian military situation. Until the Russian occupation of Donbass and the Crimea in 2014, the major NATO military powers had not stationed any significant military strength in former Warsaw Pact countries that had joined NATO. Even after 2014, the NATO forces that were moved to the eastern countries of the alliance were small forces that were intended as tripwires to deter Russian attacks, and were not a danger to Russian security.
In any case, there was no realistic possibility of Ukraine’s joining NATO at the time of the Russian invasion. Ukrainian membership of NATO was proposed at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, but the idea was discouraged by the French and Germans. There must be unanimous agreement on admitting the country to the alliance from the existing members, and a country cannot be admitted to the alliance if it is involved in ongoing territorial disputes. At the time of the Russian invasion, Ukraine was involved in a territorial dispute with Russia over Russian occupation of Crimea and the Donbass that cannot be resolved without Russian cooperation. The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was openly opposed to Ukrainian membership of NATO, and the French and Germans were quietly against it. Apprehension about Ukraine’s joining NATO cannot have been a motive for the Russian attack.
We can know what Putin’s real goals were in launching the war, because he has told us. Putin has always held that Russians and Ukrainians are a single people, that Ukraine is not a real state, and that Ukrainian nationalism is a tool used by foreign countries to undermine Russia (see e.g. his addresses of July 12th 2021 and February 21st 2022). His stated goal is to reincorporate most of Ukraine into Russia and eliminate the notion of a separate Ukrainian nationality. Conquest of Ukraine is being attempted through military attack accompanied by massive attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure, intended to destroy the functioning of the Ukrainian ecenomy and state and to destroy the Ukrainian will to resist. This technique was previously used by the Russians in Chechnya and Syria with the utmost brutality. Following conquest, the Ukrainian population will be subjected to political repression, as described by the Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti on April 5th 2022:
War criminals and active Nazis should be exemplarily and exponentially punished. There must be a total lustration. Any organizations that have associated themselves with the practice of Nazism should be liquidated and banned. However, in addition to the above mentioned, a significant part of the masses, which are passive Nazis, accomplices of Nazism, are also guilty. They supported and indulged Nazi government. ... The Bandera elites must be eliminated, their re-education is impossible. The social “mud”, which actively and passively supported it by action and inaction, must survive the hardships of the war and assimilate the experience as a historical lesson and atonement for its guilt.
... The necessary initial steps of denazification can be defined as follows:
— liquidation of armed Nazi formations (which refers to any armed formations of Ukraine, including the Armed Forces of Ukraine), ... — mass investigations to establish personal responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity, the spread of Nazi ideology and support for the Nazi regime; — lustration, publication of the names of accomplices of the Nazi regime, involving them in forced labor to restore the destroyed infrastructure as punishment for Nazi activities (from among those who will not be subject to the death penalty or imprisonment); ... — creation of permanent denazification bodies for a period of 25 years.
This is a programme of Stalinist terror that proposes to inflict mass death. Such a plan is to be expected from Putin, a former KGB officer who has always glorified the KGB and its predecessors, has presided over a rehabilitation of Stalin, and has recently suppressed Memorial, the Russian organization devoted to commemorating the Russian victims of Communist terror. It is a realistic programme, in that the stated Russian war aim of making Ukraine a part of Russia can only be achieved through the measures that it proposes. Russia has already begun to implement this plan in the Ukrainian territories it occupies, through systematic killing, torture, and deportation. These crimes have been exhaustively documented in Ukrainian territories recaptured from the Russians. Deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia on a large scale – an action classed by international law as a form of genocide - has been acknowledged by the Russians themselves. The evidence for these crimes has been made available to journalists and foreign observers, and is being collected to form the basis for war crime trials. This evidence is overwhelming and cannot be reasonably denied. The Russian propaganda line now being advanced by Russian proxies in the West is that Ukraine cannot possibly defeat Russia, and therefore that a cessation of hostilities is the proper goal to be pursued – with Ukraine’s supporters using their essential military assistance as a lever to guarantee that the Ukrainians agree to such a cessation. The refusal of the Ukrainians to agree to a ceasefire and peace negotiations is portrayed as unreasonable and culpable intransigence on the Ukrainian government’s part, which sacrifices Ukrainian lives to a vengeful and deluded pursuit of total victory over Russia.
If a Ukrainian victory over Russia is defined as a complete defeat of the Russian armed forces that would force a capitulation of the Russian state to the Ukrainians, such a victory is of course impossible. This impossibility shows that worries about Western military aid to Ukraine leading to an all-out war between Russia and NATO are baseless. Such aid cannot make the Ukrainians a threat to the Russian state itself, and hence cannot justify engagement in a war with NATO that would threaten the essential interests – and even the existence – of the Russian state and people. But a complete defeat of Russia is not the objective of the Ukrainians in this war. Their goal is to expel the Russians from the Ukrainian territories that Russia has occupied since 2014. They refuse to agree to a cessation of hostilities unless this goal is achieved. Their position is that a ceasefire that left Russian forces in occupation of parts of Ukraine would give the Russians a territorial reward for their aggression, and leave Russia in a position to continue her attacks on Ukraine as soon as opportunity offered. This is what the Russians did after taking over Ukrainian territory in the Donbass in 2014. As for concern over Ukrainian lives; the Ukrainians in the Ukrainian terrritories now controlled by Moscow are subject to completely unrestrained violence from the Russian military, including plunder, rape, execution on the spot, mass deportation, and systematic torture. All these crimes have been found to have occurred on a massive scale in territories retaken by the Ukrainians. The urgent priority for protection of Ukrainian life is therefore the recovery of the occupied Ukrainian territories.
As for calls for peace negotiations, the Ukrainians engaged in negotiations with the Russians during the first months of the war. They indicated a willingness to offer Ukrainian neutrality and abandonment of Ukrainian plans for joining NATO, in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukrainan territories occupied after February 2022 and security guarantees for Ukraine. The Russians refused these proposals. The fundamental assumption of all negotiations is in any case lacking in this situation. Such negotations aim at an agreement of some kind, and an agreement means that the parties concerned are going to conform to the terms of an agreement. There are no reasonable grounds for expecting the Russians to keep any agreements that they make, because they have always broken agreements with the Ukrainians in the past. The case of Chechnya provides an instructive parallel. In 1997, Russia signed a treaty with Chechnya promising to ‘reject forever the use of force or the threat of force in resolving all matters of dispute’. In 1999 Russia attacked Chechnya and conquered it, killing a large proportion of the Chechnyan civilian population in the process. Comparisons between Putin and Hitler are overworked, but in this case they are accurate. Hitler’s foreign minister von Ribbentrop once presented Hitler with copies of all the diplomatic agreements that Germany had signed since the Nazis came to power. To Hitler’s great amusement, it turned out that the Germans had broken every one of them. The British and French finally and reluctantly gave a security guarantee to Poland and went to war with Germany precisely because it had become clear that the fundamental assumption of all negotiations did not exist with Hitler, and hence that war was the only remaining policy available to them.
Hitler was an exceptional monster, whereas Putin is simply a common criminal. There is however another point of resemblance between them. On a tactical level Putin, like Hitler, is completely untrustworthy. On a strategic level – again like Hitler – Putin is honest about his objectives. Hitler clearly stated that his ultimate goal was German supremacy in Europe and the world, and Lebensraum in the east. Putin has stated that his goal is reconstitution of a Russian empire in most of the territories ruled by the Tsarist empire and the Soviet Union, recovery of Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe, and destruction of American hegemony in Europe and the world. In both cases, an honest statement of strategic objectives is necessary in order to gain political support from those who share these objectives, allure the public with dreams of grandeur, and prepare the population for the efforts needed to attain them. Putin has indeed resorted to trumpeting these strategic objectives in response to his setbacks in Ukraine: posters recently appeared in Moscow announcing that ‘Russia has no frontiers’.
It might be objected that a peace agreement could be backed up by Western guarantees, which would compel the Russians to keep it. But why should Russia believe that the West would honour these guarantees, after giving up on supporting the military activity of Ukraine in the present war? And these guarantees would achieve precisely what opponents of this support claim not to want, which is a commitment by Western powers to engage in direct hostilities with Russia in the (probable) event of further Russian attacks on Ukraine.
Is the limited Ukrainian goal of expelling the Russians from Ukrainian territory an achievable one? The strength of the Russian army lies in its numbers and its artillery. But numbers alone cannot be the basis of military power; such power depends on the numbers of motivated troops equipped with modern weapons and trained to use them. Since the economic strength of NATO powers greatly exceeds that of Russia, these powers are able to provide the Ukrainians with the means necessary to defeat the Russian army in Ukraine. This would be entirely manageable. The Russian army relies on railways for its logistics. If the Ukrainians were given overwhelming air defences, enough artillery and ammunition for artillery superiority over the Russians, and drones and missiles that could stop the operation of railways up to 150 kms behind the front line, the Russian army would have to leave Ukraine. These arms could never enable the Ukrainians to threaten the Russian state itself, and thus would not risk escalation to a wider war.
The criticism that Ukrainian blood is being spilled needlessly does however have some truth to it. The strategy of most NATO powers in this war is to not let the Russians win, but to not let the Ukrainians win either. Military supplies provided to Ukraine have always been just enough to enable the Ukrainians to resist Russian attacks, but not enough for the Ukrainian army to expel the Russians from their country. This strategy has been explained by the desire to avoid escalation of the war, but the wish to preserve the basic structure of the global order is probably a more important motivation. It gives the lie to the claim that the war in Ukraine is a ‘proxy war’ between the U.S. and Russia (as does the American offer to evacuate Zelensky from Kiev immediately after the Russian attack; if this offer had been accepted, Ukraine would have fallen to the Russians). If the Americans were interested in such a proxy war, they would have given the Ukrainians enough arms to win the war six months ago.
The strategy is based on a misunderstanding of Russian objectives in Ukraine. The Russians – or at least Putin - are committed to the conquest of the greater part of that country, and they intend to continue the war until they achieve this goal. The drip-feed approach to supplying arms to Ukraine leads them to believe that NATO is not fully committed to Ukraine, and gives them hope that Western countries will eventually tire of this support. In consequence, the Russians continue their desperate and bloody attacks rather than looking for a way out of the war. It is not now possible for the U.S. and the rest of NATO to abandon their policy of preventing a Russian conquest of Ukraine; such a betrayal would be too destructive to American standing in the world. The Russian and Ukrainian armies will therefore continue fighting until one of them cracks. The first side to lose the will to fight, or to suffer losses so high that effective military action becomes impossible, will lose the war. The Ukrainians will never give up fighting after the Russian atrocities at Bucha, Irpin and elsewhere; they are convinced with reason that their very survival is at stake. Russian morale and motivation is low, a shortcoming that cannot be made up for by the barbaric disciplinary measures used by the Russian army. These factors together with the limited number of trained Russian military personnel, the relatively high Russian losses in comparison with the Ukrainian ones, and the greater amount of military supplies available to the Ukrainians from NATO sources, mean that unless the Ukrainians are abandoned by NATO powers, the Russian army will be exhausted before the Ukrainian army is. This will only occur after a savage and bloody stuggle that will drain the Ukrainians and lead to the collapse of the Russian army and state apparatus. This outcome with its massive loss of life (and economic cost) could have been avoided if NATO had supplied sufficient arms to the Ukrainians at the outset.
Many conservative voices object to NATO military support of Ukraine on the grounds that its cost is excessive. For their argument to be warranted, they would need to specify how much money is enough to spend on preventing the unjust conquest of a large European state and the genocide of much of its population, and how much would be too much for this purpose. However, they fail to provide this figure. This argument is usually coupled with the claim that NATO powers have no obligation to intervene in the war between Ukraine and Russia, and that this war is none of their business. This claim fails to distinguish between there being a moral obligation to support Ukraine, and there being a moral justification to support Ukraine. It might be argued that if the NATO powers had not supported Ukraine, they would not have violated any moral obligations. That is different from saying that supporting the Ukrainians against the Russians is morally justifiable. It is the latter claim that is relevant to the situation. It is obviously true. One can hold that the ‘international rules-governed order’ to which liberals appeal in defence of Ukraine is largely fraudulent, and that globalization is an evil, and still see this. The Russian attack on Ukraine is an offence against natural justice and the common good of the community of nations, something entirely different from the current international order – whether one approves of that order or not.
All moral considerations aside, the cost of NATO military support for Ukraine is money well spent. This is true in purely financial terms for European countries. The Russian attack on Ukraine has already led European states to commit huge sums to rearmament. These expenses will last for decades if Russia prevails in Ukraine. For Eastern European countries, moreover, these arms are not just for deterrence. These countries have stated that they consider war with Russia to be inevitable if Russia wins in Ukraine. They are arming to fight such a war, whose cost will be unimaginable if it occurs.
For the United States, Ukrainian success against Russia offers great advantages. American power and prestige has suffered dreadfully because of the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. The danger now confronting the U.S. is not simply a matter of the loss of American world hegemony. It is a decline in American influence that threatens vital American interests, and promises to lead to war and instability around the globe. Enabling Ukraine to repel the Russians will avert these threats. Taiwan is a case in point. The U.S. has made a commitment to defend Taiwan against attack from mainland China. Abandoning Ukraine would make the Chinese much less likely to take this commitment seriously, and hence much more likely to attack Taiwan, with catastrophic consequences for the Taiwanese and for the world economy. People complain about the American military-industrial complex, but it is in fact the only part of the American security complex that functions properly. American foreign policy has failed in choosing where and when to resort to armed force, and the American military has usually not succeeded in bringing wars to a successful conclusion. But the American military-industrial complex has succeeded in producing good and powerful weapons. The war in Ukraine has shown how this can be used to the advantage of American interests, by providing weapons to countries that can and will use them effectively against opponents of the U.S.
American conservatives often compare U.S. involvement in Ukraine with U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and use this comparison to argue against American support for Ukraine. This comparison is absurd. The U.S. invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and its failure in these wars was due in part to local hostility to foreign invaders. It is Russia, not the U.S., that has invaded Ukraine and that faces patriotic resistance.
Some American conservative voices have claimed that the real threat to the U.S. comes from China, not Russia, and that American aid to Ukraine diverts resources from the real threat to a false one. This evaluation of the significance of the Chinese threat to the U.S. is accurate. But this threat requires the U.S. to get Europe on its side economically and politically. American economic disengagement from China, a necessity from a political point of view. will require increased economic engagement with other countries; and Europe should make up a large part of that engagement. If the U.S. reneges on its promises to Ukraine and leaves Europe to fight a savage war with Russia without American assistance, American influence in Europe will plummet, and Chinese political and economic influence will greatly increase.
It is unreasonable to object to money being spent on the Ukrainian war rather than on worthy causes at home. If military support to Ukraine were cut off tomorrow, it is unlikely that the money saved would be spent on such causes. The value of military support to Ukraine is in fact exceptional for the return it brings in comparison to other military spending. Weapons sent to Ukraine save the Ukrainians from conquest and massacre, and also make a huge contribution to the power of the U.S. and the security of Europe; unlike most weapons systems, which are paid for and then used for training or stockpiled for the rest of their service life.
Enabling the Ukrainians to defeat the Russian attack is also in the best interests of the Russian people. Ukrainian military success in the war up to the present relies on the fact that Ukraine has a functioning military and state apparatus, whereas Russia does not. Russia is run by a Mafia leader and his associates, who work on the principles of a gangster organization. In the economic sphere, the entire economic activity of the country has as far as possible been geared to enriching the leader and his gang. In the military sphere, Putin’s overriding goal has been to prevent the armed forces posing any threat to his power. He has ensured that its soldiers are ill-treated and that its officers are corrupt and incompetent. The uselessness of the Russian officer corps, and their indifference to the well-being and fighting capacities of their men, have been starkly displayed in the war. Ever since Ivan the Terrible, and especially since Peter the Great, Russian society has been based on the absolute power of the ruler and the state. Although corrupt and inefficient, this state did aim at and perform the basic functions of a state, such as military success and economic development. Putin has ended this. Like a parasitic wasp, he has hollowed out the Russian state from within - leaving an exterior that looks like a state apparatus and performs some state functions, while the substance of what presents itself as the state is devoted to quite different purposes. The traditional Russian state, horrible as it was, did at least permit the survival of Russian society. Putin’s regime in contrast cannot in the long run sustain the basic functioning of Russian society. It is too strong to be overthrown by internal revolt alone; military defeat is the only means of removing it and making possible some amelioration of the situation of the Russian people.
The case for Western support for Ukraine is a conclusive one. How then to explain widespread conservative opposition to this support?
It is partly a matter of Ukraine not appearing on the mental map of conservatives. The career of Ukraine as an independent state only began in 1991, and was notably undistinguished prior to the Russian invasion. The history of Ukraine prior to 1991 is virtually unknown to most Americans and Western Europeans. American conservatives are inclined to understand American aid to Ukraine along the lines of earlier American military interventions they do know about, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Vietnam. This is despite the fact that in Ukraine, the side the Americans are supporting is completely united, professionally led, and supported by the entire population.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s opposition to military aid for Ukraine calls for discussion. Historical factors play a role in this stance. Hungarians remember the role of the U.S. in the 1956 Hungarian revolution with bitterness. They consider that America encouraged the revolution with rhetoric about liberating Eastern Europe from Soviet domination, and then stood by and did nothing while the Hungarians were crushed. This has left them with a lasting disbelief in American claims to be promoting freedom and democracy, and a belief in Russian ability and determination to crush any opposition to their rule. In consequence, they have no trust in the American project of supporting Ukraine against Russia. They have a grievance against the Ukrainians for suppressing instruction in the Hungarian language in Ukrainian secondary schools in 2017, a measure that spelled disaster for the substantial Hungarian minority in western Ukraine. Orban is engaged in a struggle with the EU over its LGBTQetc. and immigration policies. He considers with reason that the future of Hungarians and Hungary is at stake in this struggle, and access to cheap Russian energy and other support is a trump card for him in this contest. No doubt every form of Russian pressure and bribery has been brought to bear on Hungary as well. Orban will be in an awkward position in the case of a Russian defeat.
Vulnerability to Russian pressure is also a key factor in producing expressions of conservative sympathy for the Russian point of view. From the 1930s to the 1990s the USSR made extensive use of every means of influencing Western public opinion; propaganda campaigns, front organisations, bribery, and blackmail. Putin as a KGB officer knew about this at first hand. The Russian Federation pursues the same strategy. Comprehensive media efforts, financial support of friendly political parties (France’s National Front received a loan of 9 million euros from a Russian bank), sexual favours (much appreciated by German Social Democratic politicians visiting Moscow), espionage (the head of German counterintelligence was recently removed for spying for Moscow), and blackmail are all directed at elements in the West identified as potentially favourable to Russian interests. Conservatives were identified as one of these elements (although not as the only one; European environmentalists and Greens have also benefited from Russian financial support). All these tools of influence have been directed at them. Most conservatives do not realize that they are the object of a concerted campaign of subversion, just as most Popular Front liberals did not realize this in the 1930s. As a result, conservatives who have been successfully targeted by these activities can easily influence general conservative opinion.
Finally, the vociferous support for Ukraine by liberals has induced conservatives to react against the Ukrainian cause. Conservatives are engaged in an existential struggle with liberals. They therefore instinctively suspect anything that liberals embrace, and look for chances to discredit liberal causes – a tendency that the Russians understand and exploit.
This is a mistake on the part of conservatives. Liberals are not demons. When their ideology does not get in the way, they are capable of recognizing and supporting the good. Liberal support of Ukraine gives insight into their world view. They think of all their liberal causes, including abortion, transgenderism, etc., as being like supporting Ukraine against Russia; helping innocent victims of cruel aggression in their valiant struggle against their oppressors. This self-conception is the basis of liberal self-understanding and motivation. It is also an essential foundation of liberal power. If conservatives oppose a liberal cause that is actually just, as in the case of Ukraine, they are giving a huge gift to their opponents. If they support such a just cause, the foundations of liberal propaganda against them are undermined.
