NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {D} avid Sacks, a technology entrepreneur and self-styled geopolitical analyst, is a committed critic of the West’s support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s war of territorial conquest and subjugation. His advocacy — if not in Moscow’s interests, at least against Kyiv’s — is receiving new attention in alternative media venues as Israel’s war against Hamas eclipses Ukraine in the fight for Americans’ attention.
In a recent appearance on The Hill’s Rising show, Sacks offered an argument, dutifully annotated by his chroniclers at RealClearPolitics, that Ukraine’s war is already lost, and that the sooner its Western benefactors acknowledge that fact, the better.
Citing a variety of media reports detailing the palace intrigue in Kyiv — dispatches that purport to showcase the disparate views of Ukraine’s leadership and Volodymyr Zelensky toward the war — Sacks maintained that the target of Russian aggression is turning against itself. While those reports inadvertently highlight the relative opacity of the Kremlin by contrast, they do illustrate the frustrations that contributed to some recent personnel changes inside the Ukrainian government. But Sacks sees these machinations as harbingers of something more extraordinary.
“I think now the truth has broken out, which is that Ukraine is not winning this war, the counteroffensive has been a failure, and if they don’t start doing something different, they’re headed for disaster,” Sacks declared. According to his unspecified “sources,” he insisted, Ukraine no longer has “the manpower” to maintain its resistance. If Ukraine continues to conduct its counteroffensive against the Russian onslaught per Zelensky’s wishes, he added, “there is a great fear on the part of the administration and within his own general corps that Ukraine will collapse.”
Sacks’s admonition will doubtlessly confirm the suspicions of consistent Ukraine skeptics for whom Kyiv’s collapse has been imminent since at least February 24, 2022, if not earlier. But his warning will also likely receive a broader hearing from observers of the conflict who must reluctantly conclude that the goals Ukraine set for its 2023 counteroffensive were not met.
The news from the front is not encouraging. Russia is ramping up assaults on perpetually contested Ukrainian cities like Bakhmut and Avdiivka. Western media outlets are echoing Ukrainian officials who now use the deadly word “stalemate” to describe the state of play on the battlefield. The Republican-led House can barely cobble together a coalition to fund the government, much less provide material support for Ukraine’s defense, and Kyiv’s Western European partners will reportedly fail to meet their self-set goal of provisioning Ukraine with at least 1 million artillery rounds by March 2024.
So, is Sacks correct? Not quite. Ukraine’s failure to achieve the objectives of its summer advance notwithstanding, a stalemated conflict is not the same thing as a lost conflict. And the tech investor’s perennial warning that Ukraine is on the verge of total defeat came at an awkward time for Ukraine’s critics.
On Tuesday, two Russian state news agencies confirmed that Russian forces were executing a withdrawal to “more favorable positions” on the east bank of the Dnipro River before hastily withdrawing the announcement. “The highly unusual incident suggested disarray in Russia’s military establishment and state media over how to report the battlefield situation in southern Ukraine,” CNBC observed. But the information Moscow retailed with a positive gloss appears accurate. The logic that led to this “regrouping” of Russian forces is subject to interpretation, but what it is not indicative of is a static battlefield.
Nor has Ukraine been rendered incapable of maintaining pressure on Russian forces. A campaign of partisan warfare in the territories occupied by Moscow has taken Russian officers off the battlefield. Long-range weapons continue to rain down on Russian command-and-control nodes and airfields, crippling Moscow’s ability to own the skies over Ukraine’s frontlines. As for Ukraine’s alleged manpower shortage, Kyiv’s Western-trained soldiers are still coming online. The E.U. expects to have trained 35,000 Ukrainian soldiers before the year’s end, well beyond its goal of 15,000. The 30,000 U.K.-trained Ukrainians and 18,000 American-trained Ukrainians, with more on the way, will continue to further augment the Ukrainian lines.
And yet, progress on the battlefield is likely to remain stalled, in part due to Western apathy. There’s no “silver bullet” that will restore mobility to this conflict in the short-term, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general Douglas Lute mourned in remarks provided to the Wall Street Journal on Sunday. “Our incremental approach to providing military assistance has assured that.” Creeping Western indifference toward Ukraine’s prospects risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Writing for Reuters, columnist Hugo Dixon articulated the capitulatory logic to which Sacks and his acolytes are inclined when he recently observed that the West can learn to accept a “frozen conflict” in Ukraine. While Dixon conceded the risks associated with such acceptance, he failed to reckon fully with the consequences that would accompany what amounts to de facto surrender to Russian aggression.
Before Russian forces cascaded across Ukraine’s borders in 2022, the country was already the site of one of Russia’s many “frozen conflicts.” The term describes the armed insurrections inside former Soviet republics that Russia contrives to justify the introduction of Russian forces into what Moscow regards as its “near abroad.” The Kremlin freezes and thaws these conflicts at times of its choosing, and it does so only to erode the sovereignty of its neighbors. Along with similar flashpoints in places such as Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, Moscow stoked a civil war in Ukraine to coincide with its invasion and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. There, the fighting never stopped because Moscow never wanted it to stop. The Kremlin gauges the West’s will to resist its expansionist objectives by how the West responds to the flareups it touches off.
When the Minsk process convinced Russia that it had a free hand, the Kremlin took that revelation to its logical conclusion in Syria. Moscow’s 2015 intervention in the Syrian conflict to secure its interests in the Levant inevitably conflicted with America’s and, eventually, necessitated the U.S.’s intervention in a war it desperately — perhaps even cravenly — sought to avoid. Moscow’s ultimate objective is to displace the United States from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. It advances that objective by attacking America’s allies through proxy forces loyal either to it or its rogue allies, like Iran. Moscow has been beleaguered by the war it started in Ukraine last year, but would be free to reengage in that broader geopolitical project if the West consented to the hardening of Ukraine’s frontlines.
By contrast, America and the West would not be similarly liberated by Ukraine’s dismemberment. America’s European allies are keenly aware that Russia’s frozen conflicts don’t stay frozen for long. NATO allies on the European frontier are routinely menaced by Moscow both rhetorically and, with brazen disregard for the geopolitical status quo, operationally. Those allies would demand a big, expensive, permanent NATO presence on their borders to deter future Russian aggression. In that regard, the prospect of a broken Ukrainian state on Europe’s borders suits Russia just fine. It would tie up Western resources and divert the West’s attention from other global hotspots as much (indeed, perhaps even more so) than the active conflict inside Ukraine has.
Maybe this eventuality doesn’t bother David Sacks and his supporters. It’s a fool’s errand to go spelunking into their psyches for something resembling a logical rationale for their hostility toward a country that has been targeted with genocidal violence for the crime of existing. Sacks and his supporters are right that the miraculous defense Kyiv put up in 2022 has stalled in 2023. But it would be profoundly negligent for the West to abandon the commitments it has made to its Ukrainian partners just because the going got tough. The signal such an outcome would send to the world’s revanchist powers would make the going get infinitely tougher for the United States in the foreseeable future.