Is the West finally ready to admit defeat in Ukraine?

The Economist magazine reports this week that “Russia is slicing through Ukrainian defenses” and Ukraine is subsequently “struggling to survive.” Across the Western media, the public is being prepared for defeat and painful concessions in future negotiations. Journalists are changing the narrative as reality can no longer be ignored. Moscow's coming success has been obvious since at least the summer of 2023, yet this was ignored to keep the proxy war going.

We are witnessing an impressive demonstration of narrative control: For more than two years, the political-media elites have been chanting ‘Ukraine is winning’ and denounced any dissent to their narrative as ‘Kremlin talking points’ that aim to reduce support for the war. What was ‘Russian propaganda’ yesterday is now suddenly the consensus of the collective elites. Critical self-reflection is as absent as it was after the Russiagate reporting, following the 2016 US election.

Similar narrative control was displayed when the media reassured the public for two decades that the US was in control of Afghanistan, before it fled in a great rush with dramatic images of people falling off an airplane.

Journalists deceived the public over the past while by presenting the stagnant front lines as evidence that Russia was not gaining an edge. However, in a war of attrition, the direction of the war is measured by attrition rates – the losses on each side. Territorial control comes after the adversary has been exhausted as territorial expansion is very costly in such high-intensity warfare with powerful defensive lines. The attrition rates have throughout the war been extremely unfavorable to Ukraine, and they keep getting worse. The current collapse of Kiev's front lines was very predictable as its manpower and weaponry have been exhausted.

Why has the former narrative expired? The public could be misled by fake attrition rates, yet it is not possible to cover up territorial changes after the eventual breaking point. Furthermore, the proxy war was beneficial to NATO when the Russians and Ukrainians were bleeding each other without any significant territorial changes. Now that the Ukrainians are exhausted and are beginning to lose strategic territory, it is no longer in the interests of the US-led bloc to continue the war.

Narrative control: Weaponizing empathy

Back in 2022, the political-media elites weaponized empathy to get public support for war and disdain for diplomacy. The Western public was convinced to support the proxy war against Russia by endless messaging about the suffering of Ukrainians and the injustice of their loss of sovereignty. 

Those who disagreed with NATO’s mantra that ‘weapons are the way to peace’ and instead suggested negotiations were quickly dismissed as puppets of the Kremlin who did not care about Ukrainians. Support for continued fighting in a war that cannot be won has been the only acceptable expression of empathy. 

For the postmodernists seeking to socially construct their own reality, great power rivalry is largely a battle of narratives. The weaponization of empathy enabled the military narrative to become impervious to criticism. War was virtuous and diplomacy treasonous as Ukraine was allegedly fighting Russia’s "unprovoked" war with the objective to subjugate the entire country. A strong moral framing convinced people to deceive and self-censor in support of this noble cause. 

Even criticism of how Ukrainian civilians were dragged into cars by their government and sent to their deaths on the front lines was portrayed as supporting ‘Kremlin talking points’, as it undermined the NATO war narrative.

Reporting on high Ukrainian casualty rates threatened to undermine support for the fighting. Reporting on the failure of sanctions threatened to reduce public support for the sanctions. Reporting on the likely US destruction of Nord Stream threatened to create divisions within NATO. Reporting on the US and UK sabotage of the Minsk agreements and the Istanbul negotiations threatened the narrative of the West merely attempting to ‘help’ Ukraine. The public was offered the binary option of adhering either to the pro-Ukraine/NATO narrative or the pro-Russia narrative. Anyone challenging it with inconvenient facts could thus be accused of supporting Moscow’s objectives. Pointing out that Russia was winning was uncritically interpreted as taking its side.

There are ample facts and statements that demonstrate NATO has been fighting to the last Ukrainian to weaken a strategic rival. Yet, the strict narrative control entails that such evidence has not been permitted to be discussed.

The objectives of a proxy war: Bleeding the adversary

The strict demand for loyalty to the narrative hides the fact that US foreign policy is about restoring global primacy and not an altruistic commitment to liberal democratic values. The US considers Ukraine to be an important instrument to weaken Russia as a strategic rival.

The RAND Corporation, a think tank funded by the US government and renowned for its close ties with the intelligence community, published a report in 2019 on how the US could bleed Russia by pulling it further into Ukraine. RAND proposed that the US could send more military equipment to Kiev and threaten NATO expansion to provoke Moscow to increase its involvement in Ukraine:

“Providing more US military equipment and advice could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it… While NATO’s requirement for unanimity makes it unlikely that Ukraine could gain membership in the foreseeable future, Washington pushing this possibility could boost Ukrainian resolve while leading Russia to redouble its efforts to forestall such a development.”

However, the same RAND report recognized that the strategy of bleeding Russia had to be carefully “calibrated,” as a full-scale war could result in Russia acquiring strategic territories, which is not in the interest of the US. After Russia launched its military operation in February 2022, the strategy was similarly to keep the war going as long as there were not significant territorial changes.

In March 2022, Leon Panetta (former White House chief of staff, secretary of defense, and CIA director) acknowledged: “We are engaged in a conflict here, it’s a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not… The way you get leverage is by, frankly, going in and killing Russians.” Even Zelensky recognized in March 2022 that some Western states wanted to use Ukraine as a proxy: “There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives.”

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin outlined the objectives in the Ukraine proxy war to as weakening its strategic adversary:

“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine… So it [Russia] has already lost a lot of military capability. And a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

There have also been indications of regime change as a wider goal of the war. Sources in the US and UK governments confirmed in March 2022 that the objective was for “the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin,” as “the only end game now is the end of Putin regime.” US President Joe Biden suggested that regime change was necessary in Russia: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” However, the White House later walked back these dangerous remarks.

A spokesperson for then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson also made an explicit reference to regime change by arguing, “the measures we’re introducing, that large parts of the world are introducing, are to bring down the Putin regime.” James Heappey, the UK minister for the armed forces, similarly wrote in the Daily Telegraph: 

“His failure must be complete; Ukrainian sovereignty must be restored, and the Russian people empowered to see how little he cares for them. In showing them that, Putin’s days as President will surely be numbered and so too will those of the kleptocratic elite that surround him. He’ll lose power and he won’t get to choose his successor.”

Fighting to the last Ukrainian

Chas Freeman, the former US assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs and director for Chinese affairs at the State Department, has criticized Washington’s decision to ‘fight to the last Ukrainian’.

Meanwhile, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham outlined the favorable arrangements the US had established with Ukraine: “I like the structural path we’re on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person.” The Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, cautioned against conflating idealism the hard reality of US objectives in the proxy war:

“President Zelensky is an inspiring leader. But the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests. Helping equip our friends in Eastern Europe to win this war is also a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies, and contest our core interests… Finally, we all know that Ukraine’s fight to retake its territory is neither the beginning nor end of the West’s broader strategic competition with Putin’s Russia.”

Senator Mitt Romney argued that arming Ukraine was “diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money… a weakened Russia is a good thing,” and it comes at a relatively low cost as “we’re losing no lives in Ukraine.” Senator Richard Blumenthal similarly asserted: “we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment” because “for less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half… All without a single American service woman or man injured or lost.” Congressman Dan Crenshaw agrees that “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.”

Retired US General Keith Kellogg similarly argued in March 2023 that “if you can defeat a strategic adversary not using any US troops, you are at the acme of professionalism.” Kellogg further explained that using Ukrainians to fight Russia “takes a strategic adversary off the table” and thus enables the US to focus on its “primary adversary which is China.” Former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg also argued that defeating Russia and using Ukraine as a bulwark against Russia “will make it easier” for the US “to focus also on China… if Ukraine wins, then you will have the second biggest army in Europe, the Ukrainian army, battle-hardened, on our side, and we’ll have a weakened Russian army, and we have also now Europe really stepping up for defense spending.”

In search of a new narrative

A new victory narrative is required as a NATO-backed Ukraine cannot realistically defeat Russia on the battlefield. The most obvious is to claim that Russia has failed in its objective to annex all of Ukraine to help recreate the Soviet Union and thereafter conquer Europe. This spoofery would enable NATO to claim victory. After Ukraine’s disastrous counteroffensive in summer 2023, it was flagged by David Ignatius in the Washington Post, where he argued that the measurement of success is the weakening of Russia:

“Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance.”

Sean Bell, a former Royal Air Force air vice marshal and Ministry of Defense staffer, argued in September 2023 that the war had significantly degraded the Russian military to the point it “no longer poses a credible threat to Europe.” Bell therefore concluded that “the Western objective of this conflict has been achieved” and “The harsh reality is that Ukraine’s objectives are no longer aligned with their backers.”

The Ukrainian proxy has been exhausted, which ends the proxy war unless NATO is prepared to go to war against Russia. As NATO is preparing to cut its losses, a new narrative is required. Soon it will be permitted to call for negotiations as a display of empathy for Ukrainians.