1,001 Days of War

The following story is co-published with Matt Bivens’ Substack newsletter, The 100 Days.

Imagine you hear a ruckus, go investigate, and you find there’s an enormous silverback gorilla in your neighbor’s backyard. The neighbor’s 11-year-old kid is also in the backyard — distressed, upset and yelling at the gorilla to go away! Some of the other kids in the neighborhood have also gathered to watch and to shout excitedly.

The gorilla ignores them, and continues pacing territorially over a far corner of the yard. Gorillas are several times stronger than the strongest humans; they routinely snap apart giant bamboo stalks and tear down banana trees, they can bite through a coconut, and some say they can crush a crocodile’s skull with the grip of their hands. This one is more than 6 feet tall, and is casually taking apart your neighbor’s swing set. It appears to have escaped from the neighboring zoo. In fact, a truck from the zoo has just arrived, and veterinarians and zookeepers armed with tranquilizer dart guns seem ready to step in and solve the problem.

As the only other adult around, you decide you need to take charge.

First, you tell the surprised zookeepers and vets that their help is not welcome.

Second, you call the 11-year-old neighbor boy over and hand him a baseball bat.

“This is an aluminum baseball bat. It’s a Louisville Slugger, made in America! You need to teach that gorilla a lesson!” you say. You call the other kids over, fire them up with a similar pep talk and arm them with similarly laughable weapons — hockey sticks, rocks, a hatchet.

What could go wrong?

The Washington death cult wrecks Ukraine

This might seem a silly idea, this “kids vs. gorilla” analogy. It’s totally unrealistic, right? Who could ever be so ridiculously irresponsible? What kind of a death cult would revel in arming young boys with toy weapons — just to watch them rush to a certain violent death? What’s more: If zookeepers and vets are standing by to soothe a savage beast, who in their right mind would be so arrogant as to stop them?

And yet, such is the arrogance, the ridiculousness, the utterly silly slapdash sociopathy of the Washington foreign policy establishment.

For nearly 20 years, American, French and German diplomats had warned us that Russians — not just Vladimir Putin, but all elite Russian opinion — would never stomach seeing Ukraine in NATO. (This diplomatic consensus tracks with my own experience working in Russia for nine years as a newspaper correspondent, before I left journalism to become a doctor.) The Russians perceive NATO as a hostile, anti-Russian alliance. (Go figure.) So, they don’t want its troops, missiles or spy bases on their borders — any more than we would want, say, a Russian-aligned government in Mexico to pop up and starting pointing Russian missiles at us from across the Rio Grande.

Saying “the Russians won’t stomach it” doesn’t mean they are in the moral right. But they have been consistent and clear for many years about what would happen if we provoked them. They have told generations of Western diplomats: “Stay out of Ukraine.” Importantly, before the war spun out of control, they also never asserted a right to run Ukraine or control its affairs; they indicated they would be fine with Ukraine as a militarily neutral or non-aligned state. They just didn’t want it to join an officially hostile military alliance.

President Joe Biden’s own CIA chief, Bill Burns, used to be one of those earnest diplomats, ringing those alarm bells. In secret cables from Moscow, he warned the State Department that dragging Ukraine into NATO would cross “the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” In a famous 2008 cable (courtesy of Wikileaks) titled “Nyet Means Nyet”, Burns elaborated that a major Russian government concern was that Ukraine itself was angrily divided over whether to join NATO — so much so that forcing the issue could cause a Ukrainian civil war. Such a war right next door would be a major headache for the Kremlin:

Violence and war, of course, are exactly what ensued. We barged our way into Ukraine, engineered a coup d’etat in 2014 against the elected Ukrainian president, started hyping Ukraine’s bright, post-coup future in NATO, and then brayed in outrage when Russia immediately seized the disputed Crimean Peninsula. When the inevitable and predictable full-scale civil war erupted, Moscow armed Ukraine’s pro-Russian east, while the Washington foreign policy establishment — never one to fall behind on war-profiteering or -mongering! — sought hundreds of millions of dollars to back Kyiv and Ukraine’s west.

Peace talks? Sure, they happened. “Minsk I” and “Minsk II,” in 2014 and 2015, brokered a ceasefire and laid obligations on all comers. But as Germany’s then-Chancellor Angela Merkel recently admitted, this was largely “an attempt to give Ukraine time” to build up its military — mainly with money from America. (Putin called Merkel’s statement “completely unexpected” and “disappointing.”)

Rounding up that American money was a bipartisan project. In the video below, Democratic and Republican senators visit Ukraine, wave aside Minsk I and II, and start promising to devote your tax dollars to their deranged goal of expanding the Ukrainian civil war. “Your fight is our fight! 2017 will be the year of offense!” Sen. Lindsay Graham tells the Ukrainian soldiers gathered.

Sen. John McCain chimes in, “We cannot allow Vladimir Putin to succeed here, because if he succeeds here, he will succeed in other countries.” What a surprise that McCain, the former Vietnam War POW, still saw everything through the Domino Theory:

Where did Biden fit into this? In earlier years, he had claimed to have been the main person in the Senate pushing for NATO expansion. Later, as vice president, he was Barack Obama’s point person to Kyiv, and, per the New York Times, “a champion of assistance for Ukraine.” That seems to have included the sort of military escalation that McCain/Graham favored. (Biden’s son Hunter was also then earning $1 million a year to sit on the board of a Ukrainian oil company — one of several influence peddling schemes the House Committee on Oversight says ultimately earned the Bidens at least $20 million.)

But wait: If we listened to the Washington war hawks and escalated the Ukrainian civil war — wouldn’t Russia also escalate, even more? That was what Obama kept asking.

Obama noted correctly that this would always be a losing proposition for us. America would never match the Kremlin’s appetite for a fight in Russia’s backyard — and if we were ever foolish enough to try, it would only lead to Ukraine’s destruction. As political scientist John Mearsheimer warned — way back in 2015, early on in the civil war and seven years before the full-on Russian invasion — pro-war Washington was “leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”

Obama’s skepticism had blocked those McCain/Graham bills in Congress to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry. But it had not stopped his administration from setting up a massive CIA-overseen presence in Ukraine. Per an astonishing (and clearly officially blessed) account earlier this year in the New York Times, during the 10 years (!) before the Russians finally invaded, the CIA had constructed listening posts at “12 secret locations along the Russian border.” One of those listening posts visited by the Times was a massive underground bunker that, well before the war, had already been staffed by more than 800 Ukrainian agents. Our CIA also trained an “elite Ukrainian commando force,” Unit 2245, which engaged in so much anti-Russian violent mayhem — “staging assassinations and other lethal operations” — that it left the Obama administration “infuriated.”

In fact, it seems there was real tension between Obama and his own CIA over how reckless our black ops cowboys were in Ukraine. (Again: Which side was Biden on — Obama’s or the CIA’s?)

“The Obama White House was livid,” says the Times article about a 2016 raid into Crimea by Unit 2245, a sneak attack that left several Russian soldiers dead. The CIA-trained commandos had dressed in Russian military uniforms and crossed the Black Sea at night in inflatable speed boats; Putin had denounced it as a terrorist attack, and Biden got the job of calling Ukraine’s president to yell at him about it.

“The White House crafted secret rules [in response] that infuriated the … [CIA-allied Ukrainian secret services] and that some inside the CIA thought of as handcuffs,” reported the Times. “The rules barred intelligence agencies from providing any support to Ukraine that could be ‘reasonably expected’ to have lethal consequences.”

Obama-era restraint would soon be jettisoned. Under the first Donald Trump presidency, the White House signed off on hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons for Kyiv that Obama had blocked. In fact, you may remember, it was only when the White House may have paused those shipments — even as Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into Hunter’s sketchy job at the Burisma oil company — that Congress erupted in rage and sought Trump’s 2019 impeachment.

Biden, of course, took over from Trump in 2020. The Kremlin found itself again facing one of America’s loudest champions of expanding NATO — a man up to his elbows in family corruption in Ukraine and also deeply involved in the Obama-era 2014 coup d’etat and the ensuing massive expansion of CIA presence there.

But with Trump out of power, at least the hysterical Russiagate hoax might blow over? Maybe U.S.-Russia relations could normalize? The Kremlin sought a new understanding with Biden. It apparently made little progress. By fall of 2021 — months before the Russian military invasion — Russia gave Washington a proposed draft treaty for a post-NATO security system for Europe. That offer also came with an ultimatum: Leave Ukraine alone, or we will go into it militarily, and kick you and your CIA-backed allies out.

The assertion I just made — that the Russians were provoked into the invasion by our efforts to make Ukraine a NATO client state — has often been dismissed as “Russian propaganda.” For years, anyone who would say this could be smeared as “Putin’s puppet”, a “useful idiot,” etc.

Thankfully, former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has now made this utterly explicit:

“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement,” Stoltenberg told a joint committee meeting of the European Parliament on Sept. 7, while he was still secretary general. “That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invad[ing] Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that. … [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”

So, let’s think about this for a second:

In the months and then weeks before the Russians invaded in February 2022, the Kremlin told President Biden that war could be avoided — and all Biden had to do was open up a dialogue, a true, honest dialogue, about Russian unease with NATO encirclement and proposals for a different international security system. Apparently, our reply was to condescendingly refuse — to say, “We think you’re bluffing. But if we’re wrong, and you do want a war, go right ahead, we think that’s fine.”

So, the Russians invaded. But they were indeed still sort of bluffing. The war was barely two weeks old when the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said Russia would cease military operations “in a moment,” if only Ukraine would declare neutrality and also grant autonomy to the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk (of note, Russia was pointedly not annexing those regions — not then). Ukraine’s new President Volodymyr Zelensky also said then he was open to ditching NATO and reaching a peace. He said he had “cooled down” on joining NATO, and as to the fate of Luhansk and Donetsk, “we can discuss and find a compromise on how these territories will live on.”

Moscow and Kyiv reached for conciliation after just two weeks of war? We ignored that in our media — you never heard about it — and behind the scenes we undermined it.

By just 21 days into the war, Kyiv and Moscow already had a working draft of a peace treaty, and in just a few weeks more, there was a signed-and-agreed deal! It was scuttled — at American insistence. This has been testified to now by many participants and insiders, including top Ukrainian officials involved, U.S. foreign policy scholars, former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder and former Israeli prime minister Neftali Bennett, to name but a few. (The New York Times has published draft documents of some of those peace agreements.)

Today is the 1,001st day of the war. Ukraine has been wrecked. Millions of Ukrainians have fled the country, many to avoid the draft, and polls show most of them now desperately want to trade lost lands for a quick peace.

The entire catastrophe could have been avoided — by keeping NATO and the CIA out in the first place, or, failing that, simply by humoring the Russians in autumn of 2021 and talking to them about their proposed post-NATO security treaty. The war could have been stopped “in a moment” on Day 12, if Biden had replied to the Kremlin spokesman’s offer — which, by the way, was a much better deal than Ukraine will ever get today, as Russian troops are ascendant, Ukrainian troops demoralized and the Kremlin seems poised to seize large amounts of new territory.

The war also could have been wound up 30 days or so after it started if we hadn’t interfered when Moscow and Kyiv reached tentative deals in Istanbul that first spring. And there were other opportunities for peace we rejected. Instead, we sought a conflagration at every turn.

Vetoing peace talks that could have ended the war in a few weeks? That’s the equivalent in stupidity and amorality of telling the zookeepers to put away their tranquilizer dart guns, because it’s more fun to try to teach the gorilla a lesson.

The final fire sale

In the wake of Trump’s electoral victory, there is broad consensus that the Ukraine war will now have to wind down:

The Biden administration could start that diplomatic process now. It could even take credit for brokering real peace talks.

Instead, Biden himself seems to be AWOL. He was in Brazil this week for a G-20 summit, made a little speech about the importance of clean energy and reforestation, then, to the accompaniment of maracas, wandered off into the jungle, looking as lost as ever. He later also missed the traditional photo with all of the other G-20 world leaders, apparently because of confusion about the timing of it. We haven’t heard him personally say anything yet about Ukraine.

Who’s making decisions now? That’s anyone’s guess. But war is a racket, and the focus this week is on frantically spending as many billions of dollars as possible. “Every dollar at our disposal will be pushed out the door [to Ukraine] between now and January 20th [i.e., Trump’s inauguration],” says Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “We’ve pushed out the door just recently another $8 billion.”

Suddenly it’s a free-for-all. After persistently stating we would never allow Ukraine to use long-range ATACM missiles to bomb sites deep inside Russia, Team Biden just abruptly OK’d letting Ukraine use ATACMs to bomb deep inside Russia — even as they conceded this would in no way change the fundamental course of the war.

(Q: Then why do it? A: Did you not hear we’ve only got a few weeks left to push billions of dollars out the door? This defense contractor gravy train won’t run forever!)

This week, six ATACMs were launched into Russia proper (and per the Russians, shot down). Russia has grown used to being bombed by drone weapons, and in the past two weeks Russia and Ukraine have traded hundreds of such attacks — including more than 80 Ukrainian attack drones launched into Russia, 34 of them at Moscow itself. (In May, Ukrainian drones also — this is incredible — briefly took out one of Russia’s nuclear early warning radars.)

But the ATACMs (for Army Tactical Missile Systems) are a special case. Putin had recently warned that long-range use of those particular missiles would be a qualitatively different level of American involvement, because their targeting requires the direct participation of U.S. personnel — in essence, suggesting that once Ukraine launches ATACMs, Russia would for the first time feel itself directly at war with America.

As Russia prepares for a major new offensive, we’re also learning the Biden administration has again reversed itself and will also offer Ukraine land mines — banned under international law, just like the cluster bombs we offered earlier this year.

Will any of it — the drones, the ATACMs, the cluster bombs, the land mines — make a difference for Ukraine? Not really.

Just like our earlier prestige-brand weapons, from the Abrams tanks to the F-18 fighters, this is more peformance art than meaningful military help.

It may have cost us $175 billion, but from early on, we’ve taken great care to provide mostly symbolic weapons — the functional equivalent of arming young boys with baseball bats and hockey sticks to fight an enormous gorilla. Small arms ammunition and artillery shells we’ll share cheerfully, because none of that changes the face of the war or risks the Ukrainians winning — which we don’t want because it could provoke a terrifying Russian tactical nuclear weapons response.

Otherwise, we’ve just been buffing our Ukraine flag lapel pins and LARPing. We hemmed and hawed for months before finally agreeing to “escalate” with a gift of 31 U.S. tanks — this in conflict that has seen about 4,000 tanks destroyed, has about 3,000 more tanks still in play, and with hundreds more tanks being manufactured or repaired by both sides every year. We hemmed and hawed for months before finally, proudly offering up a handful of F-16s — how many Ukraine actually has and can fly seems to be anyone’s guess, but somewhere between four and 12? — stacked up against a Russian air force of more than 1,000 fighter jets. It would be funny if it weren’t all so tragic — and if we weren’t now left waiting to see how the Kremlin will respond to what, one way or another, may well be the final months of the war.