What is the U.S. end goal in Ukraine?

Josh Hammer asks the question. It’s a good one.

Hammer’s answer forms the first step in his argument in favor of the U.S. trying to coerce Ukraine into ceding some of its territory to Russia in exchange for peace. His argument proceeds this way:

First, America’s end goal should be to promote U.S. interests.

Second, our interest here is to maintain Ukraine as a truly independent buffer against Russia, rather than as a Russian satrapy. At the same time, we have an interest in seeing this conflict end.

Third, Ukraine would remain a buffer even if it lost some of its territory in the east. And ceding that territory to Russia might end the conflict.

Fourth, accordingly U.S. interests would best be served by such a settlement.

Fifth, to achieve that settlement, we should “rein [Ukraine’s president] Zelensky in a bit.”

By this, I take it, Hammer means conditioning U.S. military aid to Ukraine on its willingness to negotiate an agreement in which Russia takes some Ukrainian territory in the east, namely Luhansk and Donetsk, which together make up the Donbas. How else could we rein Zelensky in?

Hammer’s argument is well reasoned, but I see problems with it. The main problem is that Russia’s ambitions extend well beyond taking the Donbas. Its current military efforts are concentrated there because the Russian military initially was thwarted elsewhere, not because Putin has given up on total victory.

Putin has declared Ukraine an illegitimate Nazi-run entity that must be extinguished. That’s how he sold the war to his people.

That the war has already cost 15,000 Russians their lives (an estimate) and has caused substantial economic harm to Russia (inflation reportedly is at 20 percent and Russia is experiencing its worst recession in 30 years). Having inflicted this price on his people, Putin is poorly positioned to accept a settlement that leaves the “Nazis” in power and gives Russia only a relatively small slice of Ukrainian territory. Nor would such a settlement come close to satisfying Putin’s ambitions.

Moreover, Russia may be on the verge of taking control of Luhansk and is making inroads in Donetsk. Why would Putin accept a settlement that gives him only what he expects to get anyway?

This doesn’t mean the U.S. shouldn’t urge Ukraine to accept that settlement. If our only goal is to maintain a buffer state, then we should.

But conditioning aid on Ukraine’s willingness to give up the Donbas is another matter. Suppose Ukraine, believing that such a settlement would only be a prelude to further Russian aggression, resists. Do we then reduce or cut off our military aid?

If we were to do that, it would significantly improve Russia’s prospects of defeating Ukrainian defense forces in parts of the country beyond the east. In that scenario, our goal of maintaining Ukraine as a buffer would be undermined.

It’s possible that Ukraine, understanding this danger, might be coerced into offering the Donbas to Russia. But not if it sees the Donbas as only part of Russia’s designs.

And that’s how Zelensky does see it. Hammer points out that, in a conversation with Henry Kissinger, the Ukrainian president compared seeking peace by giving up the Donbas to the Munich agreement of 1938.

The comparison is overblown. Russian forces won’t be marching into Paris or bombing London. But they might march into Kiev and Lviv, and that’s what Zelensky cares about.

Taking these considerations into account, I don’t think the U.S. should play a game of chicken with Zelensky when it comes to military aid.

So far, I have accepted Hammer’s premise that the sole U.S. interests here are maintaining Ukraine as a buffer and seeing the conflict end. However, I perceive at least two other interests — deterring this sort of aggression against our friends and getting regime change in Russia.

A settlement in which Russia gained only the Donbas would probably be consistent with the first goal. As noted, Russia would have made huge sacrifices yet fallen well short of its main goals. Other potential aggressors would take notice.

The second goal — regime change — raises more complicated questions. The first is whether regime change is, or should be, our goal.

Joe Biden goes back and forth on this issue. He says Putin has to go, which I assume is what Biden believes, and then walks the statement back.

My view is that U.S. interests would be strongly served by Putin’s ouster. Putin is an anti-Western menace. A new regime would likely be more favorably disposed to the U.S. and Western Europe and less favorably disposed to China. (For a well-argued piece offering a different perspective on Putin, see this Substack article by our friend Richard Vigilante. )

The other main question is whether the absence of a settlement increases the likelihood of regime change. For reasons already discussed, such change might occur even if Ukraine cedes the Donbas in exchange for an end to the fighting. But regime change seems considerably more likely in a scenario where Russia is bogged down in that region.

It would be immoral to pressure Ukraine into continuing this devastating war in order to promote the U.S. interest in regime change. However, Ukraine wants to keep fighting; the question raised by Hammer is whether we should pressure it into quitting. In fact, regime change in Russia might be one of Ukraine’s secondary objectives, given the threat to its independent existence Russia would continue to pose under Putin.

Russian sources say that Putin is betting that the Western powers will experience Ukraine-fatigue. In the words of one well-connected Russian billionaire, Putin “believes the West will become exhausted” and that therefore its support for Ukraine will flag.

I doubt that Hammer’s rein-in-Zelensky advocacy is the product of fatigue over the war. But if Biden were to try that approach it would make Putin all the more confident that the West will stand down. Perhaps more importantly, it would enable Putin to convince his countrymen, especially the oligarchs on whose support he may depend, that it’s just a matter of time until Western fatigue enables him to subjugate Ukraine.