To the last Ukrainian: For a brief moment, Ukraine was beacon of freedom. Now, it is clear that for all our talk, no one in the West really thought they could beat Russia. Worse, it is clear that many never wanted them to.

According to Zelensky, Russian forces currently control around one fifth of Ukrainian territory, mostly in the east and the south. As he pointed out last Thursday in an address to the Luxembourg parliament, this is an area that is much larger than the entire Benelux region.

For Russia, this has come at a considerable cost. Reliable open source intelligence estimates put Russian losses at over 31,000 soldiers killed, 3,300 armoured vehicles and another 2,500 trucks destroyed, 200 lost aircraft, 175 helicopters, and 13 ships or boats. All of this for a “special operation” that was supposed to take no more than a long weekend including the victory parade, with the invaders welcomed as liberators.

Dear as this has been for Russia, for Ukrainians the price has been much, much higher. Reliable estimates of Ukrainian military losses are hard to come by, but something around half of the Russian figures is probably in the ballpark, though they could easily be much higher. Zelensky has not been totally shy in talking about losses; the other day he said the Ukrainian forces were losing 60-100 fighters a day, with another 500+ wounded, in fighting in the east.

These are staggering losses (recall that Canada lost 158 soldiers over the course of more than a decade in Afghanistan), but they don’t even begin to compare with what has happened to Ukraine’s civilians and to its cities. […]

The solidarity that NATO showed in the early days of the invasion has long evaporated. A clear schism has emerged between the countries of the east who have skin in the game — Poland and the Baltics in particular, but some plucky Balkan countries as well — and the old central European powers led by France and Germany. As usual, it has fallen to the Americans, supported by the Brits, to hold things together. Except the leaders of both of those countries have serious problems at home. Boris Johnson is facing a growing rebellion in parliament over the fallout from Sue Gray’s “Partygate” report, and he may yet be pushed from office. Across the pond, poor, elderly Joe Biden has to try to govern an America that is barely holding itself together.

All of which spells bad news for Ukraine.

There were plenty of warnings.

Biden will fight Putin to the very last Ukrainian.

President Biden confirmed that his administration is sending medium-range advanced rocket systems to Ukraine, responding to a top request from Ukrainian officials who say the weapons are necessary to curb the advance of Russian forces in the east. https://t.co/x3pPj9bwxA

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 1, 2022

A sober analysis here.

In the Paris daily Le Figaro this month, Henri Guaino, a top adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy when he was president of France, warned that Europe’s countries, under the shortsighted leadership of the United States, were “sleepwalking” into war with Russia. Mr. Guaino was borrowing a metaphor that the historian Christopher Clark used to describe the origins of World War I.

Naturally, Mr. Guaino understands that Russia is most directly to blame for the present conflict in Ukraine. It was Russia that massed its troops on the frontier last fall and winter and — having demanded from NATO a number of Ukraine-related security guarantees that NATO rejected — began the shelling and killing on Feb. 24.

But the United States has helped turn this tragic, local and ambiguous conflict into a potential world conflagration. By misunderstanding the war’s logic, Mr. Guaino argues, the West, led by the Biden administration, is giving the conflict a momentum that may be impossible to stop.

He is right.

[…]

The rocky course of the war in Ukraine thus far has vindicated Mr. Putin’s diagnosis, if not his conduct. Though Ukraine’s military industry was important in Soviet times, by 2014 the country barely had a modern military at all. Oligarchs, not the state, armed and funded some of the militias sent to fight Russian-supported separatists in the east. 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.

Since 2018, Ukraine has received U.S.-built Javelin antitank missiles, Czech artillery and Turkish Bayraktar drones and other NATO-interoperable weaponry. The United States and Canada have lately sent up-to-date British-designed M777 howitzers that fire GPS-guided Excalibur shells. President Biden just signed into law a $40 billion military aid package.

In this light, mockery of Russia’s battlefield performance is misplaced. Russia is not being stymied by a plucky agricultural country a third its size; it is holding its own, at least for now, against NATO’s advanced economic, cyber and battlefield weapons.

And this is where Mr. Guaino is correct to accuse the West of sleepwalking. The United States is trying to maintain the fiction that arming one’s allies is not the same thing as participating in combat.

Narrative shift: “Gone is the rosy idealizing lens through which each and every encounter with the Russians is typically portrayed.”