The War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame
In 2014 the United States backed an uprising — in its final stages a violent uprising — against the legitimately elected Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych, which was pro-Russian.
(The corruption of Mr. Yanukovych’s government has been much adduced by the rebellion’s defenders, but corruption is a perennial Ukrainian problem, even today.)
Russia, in turn, annexed Crimea, a historically Russian-speaking part of Ukraine that since the 18th century had been home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
One can argue about Russian claims to Crimea, but Russians take them seriously. Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Soviet fighters died defending the Crimean city of Sevastopol from European forces during two sieges — one during the Crimean War and one during World War II.
The United States started arming and training Ukraine’s military, hesitantly at first under President Barack Obama. Modern hardware began flowing during the Trump administration, though, and today the country is armed to the teeth.
The United States is trying to maintain the fiction that arming one’s allies is not the same thing as participating in combat.
In the information age, this distinction is growing more and more artificial. The United States has provided intelligence used to kill Russian generals. It obtained targeting information that helped to sink the Russian Black Sea missile cruiser the Moskva, an incident in which about 40 seamen were killed.
Christopher Caldwell New York Times 31 May 2022
Christopher Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. He is a contributing editor at The Claremont Review of Books and a member of the editorial committee of the French quarterly Commentaire. He is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West” and “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.” Born and raised in Massachusetts, he was also a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for The Financial Times.
Kommentarer