Ukraine and Israel and the Two Joe Bidens
Luke Skywalker woke me up and told me to go to the bomb shelter, so there I was. It was 3:30-ish in the morning, in a conference room in the basement of the Radisson in Odesa’s beautiful central district. I had arrived in Ukraine several days before, after a 19-hour train ride from Warsaw, to conduct a week of interviews and site visits to learn more about the impact of the war. After about 45 minutes, he gave us the all-clear. “The air alert is over. May the Force be with you.” About an hour later, just after I’d managed to fall asleep again, Luke once more rousted me, sending me back downstairs for another hour of waiting.
Skywalker was speaking to me through the Air Alert app, to which actor Mark Hamill lent his voice for the English-language warning. The app allows you to input your location in Ukraine and warns you when there are incoming strikes on that area. Fortunately, for me at least, the strikes on Odesa were not close to where I was that night.
The afternoon before, as I sat at lunch with a group of local government officials and activists, all our phones went off. Every one in the nearby park, too. I sat up, ready to get to cover, but no one moved. They listened. They knew the telltale sounds of a nearing strike, and they heard none. One in our group, a woman from Odesa who had been a wine importer/exporter before February 2022 but since then had become a local guide, translator, and community organizer, characterized what she thought many Ukrainians were feeling at the time. “We know we can have victory. We know the cost. We believed in this victory when it made no sense, but now it’s within reach.” Others around the table began tearing up as they nodded in agreement.
In 2022, I wrote a piece for The New Republic arguing that supporting Ukraine’s defense is in line with progressive values and important for the U.S. left. A year later, I wanted to follow it up with another piece, and this time I felt it necessary to go to Ukraine, to at least get as much of a feel for the situation as a week would allow. What I would not do is spend a few days and then return to gravely opine on what I’d learned “while on the ground.”
I arrived with a set of questions. Why is the counteroffensive going so slowly compared to last year? Are Ukrainians still willing to fight? How is morale? Do they see themselves as proxies? Are negotiations to end the war possible? What should solidarity with Ukrainians look like now? What are the stakes for U.S. security of the outcome of this war that for nearly two years was the focus of the Western world?
The Ukrainians I spoke with acknowledged that the 2023 counteroffensive was moving much slower than the previous year’s, whose surprising effectiveness had convinced many, Ukrainians and others, that complete victory was achievable. Some explain this by noting that Russian troops were not as well dug in last time, and its recruits were far greener. In the past year, Russian forces have been able to dig into positions and create vast, multilayered minefields in the eastern portions of occupied Ukraine, all of which makes for much slower going for Ukrainian forces. The people I talked to believed that, with continued support—especially the provision of Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, which President Joe Biden agreed to send in late September, after months of hesitation—they can slowly bring more Russian-controlled territory in range and potentially force a better outcome. How that exactly will happen is unclear.
According to Ukrainian and U.S. sources, cluster munitions—which, because of the risks of harm to innocents, were controversial in the United States when the Biden administration announced in July that it would send them—made a difference in advancing the Ukrainian counteroffensive, in holding off a Russian countercounteroffensive, and as a demining tool. U.S. officials have acknowledged concerns about the harm unexploded ordnance can do to civilians, but they argued that areas where the cluster munitions are being deployed are already heavily mined, and they will be off-limits to civilians for a long time.
Ukrainian government officials are treating oversight and end-use monitoring of U.S. and allied military support as sacred, according to one official. They know that the world is watching to make sure that weapons supplied by the United States and its allies are not proliferating into the black market, and that any evidence that this was happening would diminish Western public support for continuing those supplies. To date, there is no evidence of end-use diversion; there have been efforts by Russians to take weapons lost on the battlefield to try to prove diversion, officials say. Potential smuggling is a concern, but right now the smuggling routes are going into Ukraine, not out. That could change at some point.
Up until now, the theory of the case for the United States and the European powers has been to support Ukraine as it gains the strongest possible position on the battlefield, which will put the Ukrainians in the best possible position for negotiations. With the war having ground to effective stalemate, we appear to have reached that point, with Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, admitting as much in an early November interview.
Those involved in the fighting were not saying any of that, at least not in September. They were very clear on what was and was not needed to win the war. “F-16s are expensive, need ammunition, easy to shoot down, a waste of money,” said Mamuka Mamulashvili, the commander of Ukraine’s Georgian legion, a unit of about 1,600 Georgians and a collection of volunteers from a dozen other regions, including Japan and Latin America. (The Americans and Brits don’t last long, he told me. They like sleeping in beds.) What the war effort really needs right now, he told me, are High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, shells; ATACMS missiles; and other ammunition, not big, sexy items like F-16 fighter jets.
We were sitting at a picnic table in a former summer camp on the outskirts of Kyiv, near swings and a jungle gym. He’s been fighting the Russians since he was a 14-year-old kid, he tells me. He’s in his mid-forties now, a large man, who reminded me of a more fit Nick Frost. Every few minutes, one of his troops whizzes by on an electric scooter fitted with big off-road tires. The unit is testing them out for use in the field, Mamuka said. They can go 50 miles on a single charge, move quietly, and carry 300 pounds of weight, more than enough for a soldier and gear. Another example of the innovations this war has produced, in response to the requirement to do more with less.
In Kyiv, apart from a few armed troops, patriotic posters, and recruiting stations, one would barely even know that there’s........
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