What the combatants are fighting for, why Americans should care, and what the endgame should be.
I have some longer stuff coming on the Ukraine conflict, as the debate on how to end it reaches a boiling point. It’s useful to summarize more briefly my view of the four big questions of this war: what each of the combatants are fighting for, why Americans should care, and what the endgame should be. All of these remain misunderstood and caricatured in too much of the debate, which too frequently descends into ad hominem attacks or spins off into domestic partisanship. As a point of personal privilege, I’ll submit that my assessment of the war, its aims, and its proper end has been fairly consistent based on what I wrote in March 2022, March 2023, April 2023, June 2023, July 2023, September 2023, April 2024, and February 2025 (also here).
What is Ukraine fighting for? Its survival as a sovereign state. Sure, there is a laundry list of other things important to the Ukrainians. They’d very much like all their land back. They’d like to join the EU, an economic window to the West. They’d like to join NATO, which would greatly increase their defensive security. But none of those things is essential, and as the record of the early peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in spring 2022 appears to illustrate, all of them were negotiable to Ukraine at the outset of the war. One thing was a deal-breaker, and should be a deal-breaker: any settlement must preserve not just Ukraine’s survival at the end of this war but also its capacity to deter or repel future Russian invasions aimed at extinguishing it.
Anybody who tells you otherwise isn’t really interested in peace; he’s selling more war.
What is Russia fighting for? No just cause. Of course, Vladimir Putin wants to reclaim as much of the old Soviet lands in Ukraine as he can, with particular attention to ethnically Russian enclaves and a secure route to Crimea and the Black Sea. It’s true that Ukraine’s borders and the distribution of its ethnic population are artificial products of the Soviet empire rather than organic historical developments, but it’s not as if Russia can complain that it had nothing to do with the many crimes committed against Ukraine by the Soviet Union.
As for the idea that Putin is justified in going to war because he fears having a NATO member on his doorstep, he already has Estonia and Latvia on his border (and Poland and Turkey not far away), and this war has pushed Finland into NATO. Other than Turkey, these are all former parts of the Russian empire. More to the point, NATO, with the exception of the U.S., is a defensive alliance full of decrepit militaries, and the past two decades have vividly illustrated how shallow the alliance’s political will is. The notion that NATO presents an aggressive threat to Russian security of the sort posed by an expansionist tyrant is fanciful.
Why do Americans care? First, we care because Russia is our enemy. It was our enemy before this war started, and it is likely to remain our enemy for the foreseeable future. It was our enemy back when Hillary Clinton was presenting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a “reset” button, when Barack Obama and Joe Biden were sneering that “the Eighties called” because Mitt Romney had called Russia a threat, and when Obama was promising Dmitry Medvedev “more flexibility after the election.” Three related things about Putin’s regime have become increasingly clear since the late 2000s: it has revanchist ambitions to recapture former Soviet and/or tsarist territories, it sees the existence of free and democratic states as a threat to its own internal security and conducts foreign operations against the West accordingly, and it is aligned in a de facto axis with China and Iran that is held together principally by a shared hostility to the West. Because we can neither change the Russian regime nor alter its nature, our foreign policy should aim when possible to thwart its ambitions. Putin being a rational actor within his own parameters, we can make deals with him on some narrow issues of common interest, but that’s the limit of what diplomacy can realistically expect to accomplish. It would be nice to imagine that we could break the new axis by turning Russia against China, but it’s not a plausible reading of where Putin or his likely successors think the interests of the Russian regime lie.
Second, we care because an international order in which states do not invade one another for territory or conquest — and, if they try, pay a price imposed by a large segment of the world’s economic and military powers — is in America’s interests to preserve. So is an international order in which democratic states (even those with systems far less liberal and democratic than our own) know that the United States and its allies have their back if these states find themselves on the receiving end of aggression by tyrants and terrorists. Our capacity to rally allies for any number of causes is enhanced when we uphold this principle, not because it is a moral principle but because it is a rule of common interests in the same way that every member of a community benefits from the punishment of crimes and the maintenance of public order. This is the kind of neighborhood in which we prosper.
Moreover, whether we like it or not, our credibility in imposing such costs is at stake once we have already committed to a cause. When we betray those we’ve previously supported, it is not forgotten. Consider what former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told Zelensky in 2022 about relying on American security guarantees: “There is this joke about a guy trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to a passerby,” Bennett explained. “I said: ‘America will give you guarantees? It will commit that in several years if Russia violates something, it will send soldiers? After leaving Afghanistan and all that?’ I said: ‘Volodymyr, it won’t happen.’”
How should this end? From the start of the Ukraine war, I’ve favored U.S. aid to Ukraine, but I’ve also been realistic about there being very little likelihood that Ukraine could win this war outright, on the battlefield, let alone topple Putin’s regime. Again: those would be nice things, but they are not the expected end point. However much Ukrainians wanted to fight to win, and we wanted them to win, they were fighting to survive, and we were paying to help them survive. That meant that this was always going to end with a negotiated peace, which in turn meant a peace minimally acceptable to not only Ukraine but also Russia. That probably always meant losing some Ukrainian territory — especially as parts of the country have endured long Russian military occupation — while regaining little or (more likely) none of the territory stripped by Russia in its 2014 invasion, such as the Crimean Peninsula. All along, therefore, aid to Ukraine was about allowing the Ukrainians to fight for the best deal they could get.
Moreover, even if the best deal could somehow involve Russia’s accepting Ukraine’s joining NATO, there would still be formidable obstacles to that. New NATO members must be accepted unanimously, which Ukraine at this juncture would not be. It would be difficult to reach the point at which Ukraine would qualify, let alone overcome political resistance in every corner of the alliance. Thus, Ukrainian accession to NATO should not be regarded as the thing of highest value either to Ukraine or to the United States.
Also, it’s foolhardy to try to impose a peace deal that isn’t accepted by Ukraine or isn’t accepted by the U.S. There are reasons of simple practicality for this. Ukraine cannot compel us to drop sanctions on Russia or to guarantee Ukraine’s security. We can’t compel Ukraine to, say, reduce the size of its army. Any deal that is acceptable to Russia and survivable for Ukraine will inevitably involve terms that require three seats at the table.
Every kind of negotiation has its unique dynamics; wars can be hard to settle because they involve a heightened level of bitterness and because governments cannot afford to lose face before their own people. That’s true, for different reasons, both of elected governments upheld by popular support and dictatorships upheld by popular fear and acquiescence. But some things are universal. I spent two decades as a litigator: in a lawsuit, your leverage depends on displaying your willingness to keep fighting the case until a settlement is finalized. Donald Trump’s experience in the real estate world undoubtedly should have taught him a similar lesson.
We should want lasting peace, not a prelude to more war. We should want peace soon, but a demonstrated willingness to keep fighting will make peace come sooner rather than later. These hard truths are pervasive in the history of war and conflict, and whether we like them or not doesn’t change that.