Russian invasion of Ukraine/Response

“ The only thing worse than waging war against a genocidal invader is losing one.

— Tim Starr [1]

Ukrainian victory

• Gideon Rose, “Ukraine’s Winnable War Why the West Should Help Kyiv Retake All Its Territory” (archive)

• Nicholas Grossman, “Russia’s Mutiny Shows Ukraine Can Win the War”, June 28, 2023 [2]

• ‘We Cannot Win’ Says Top Russian Commander

• Ukraine is winning. Now let’s finish the job

• The Yom Kippur War’s Lessons for Ukraine — and Biden

• Anne Applebaum, The West Must Defeat Russia

• The Lands Ukraine Must Liberate

• In 1936 we had the numbers to stop Hitler in the Rhineland. We didn’t. Today, we have the capacity to stop Putin by defeating Russia in Ukraine. We’re not.

• The US has a much higher stake in Russia's war on Ukraine than most people think. As Americans consider the costs of continuing to help Ukraine fight the Russians in the coming years, they deserve a careful consideration of the costs of allowing Russia to win.

US Aid to Ukraine

• How to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, Chatham House report, June 27, 2023: “The unanimous conclusion of the authors is that the only outcome to the war that can safeguard the future security of Europe is a convincing Ukrainian victory – hence, Western military support to Kyiv should be redoubled before it is too late.”

• The Real Cost of Ukraine: “What happens to Ukraine is more important to America than most people realize. American aid costs less than abandoning the country to be defeated by Putin.”

• George Packer, ‘We Only Need Some Metal Things’

• Why Ukraine needs weapons right now

Better weapons

• Putin will fold and withdraw from Ukraine if all his military objects on occupied land are destroyed with precision weapons, Kerch Bridge and other logistics infrastructure is destroyed, and the ~450k Russian soldiers in occupied Ukraine no longer have safe havens in the rear.

NATO

• Why NATO Must Admit Ukraine

• NATO Summit Madrid: Reinforcing Deterrence at This Crucial Time Is in the U.S. National Interest

• Ukraine needs NATO membership, not an ‘Israel model’

No-fly zone

• Jan Krepelka, “Libertarianism is against aggression”, 2022

• Andreas Umland, “We’re going to need that Ukraine no-fly zone after all”, July 27, 2023

Foreign policy

• Alexander Vindman, “Stop Tiptoeing Around Russia It Is Time to End Washington’s Decades of Deference to Moscow” (archive)

• U.S. Comprehensive Strategy Toward Russia

Deimperialization of russia

• Anne Applebaum, “The Russian Empire Must Die: A better future requires Putin’s defeat—and the end to imperial aspirations.”

prolonged war

• As a Ukrainian leftist, lemme tell you exactly how a ‘prolonged war’ is going to affect us: it’ll mean that we’re not being tortured under occupation, all of our cities won’t be razed to the ground like Mariupol was, and we won’t be forced to join an ethnofacist state. And don’t get me wrong. I absolutely don’t want a prolonged war. I don’t *want* to spend my nights listening to missiles explode all over my city. I don’t *want* to worry about my child having to go down to his daycare’s basement whenever an air raid alert is on. Nobody wants that. I don’t want to see constant need of friends dying. I don’t want to see my country’s economy in free fall. I don’t want to spend half my income on fundraisers to buy drones and tourniquets. If russian soldiers decided to pack up and go home TODAY I’d be the happiest I’ve ever been. But they’re not going home until they get kicked out, because their goddamn state TV hosts keep saying over and over every fucking single day that these ‘new territories’ they’ve occupied are ‘forever part of russia’. So they’re not going to suddenly give them up. And I can’t in good conscience be okay with leaving hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians stuck under Russian occupation. And I can’t risk russia freezing this conflict, stocking up on weapons and coming back to occupy all of Ukraine in a few years. So we’re stuck in this war. And it’s either a prolonged one, or one that ends with a swift russian defeat. I’d give my fucking arm for it to be the latter, but the only way we can get it is by getting adequate weapons and aid — airplanes, atacms, tauruses, and getting lots of them. And the western world is dragging its feet in giving them, no doubt given pause by cynical peaceniks like yourself, who don’t actually give a flying fuck about Ukrainians, working class or otherwise. Because, if you did, you’d probably know what happened to the working class people of Mariupol. You’d maybe realise that the mass graves in Bucha and Irpin probably won’t filled exclusively with the tortured bodies of the fucking bourgeoisie. And if you cared about the russian working class, then maybe you’d take your online crusade elsewhere and, idk, harass the Russian politicians on this app to stop sending the Russian working class into the frontlines. Or maybe you’d bitch about how Iran and China are funding this ‘prolonged war’ by providing Russia with weapons and aid, and thus killing poor Russian workers in a proxy war nobody wants.

• • The only thing worse than waging war against a genocidal invader is losing one.

• Ukraine faces a long war. A change of course is needed

• Peace and the Russo-Ukrainian War