Bill Tallen

Writing about current events can lead to either vindication or embarrassment, because so much can change before your words are printed. I’ll accept the challenge and offer some thoughts on the Ukraine war.

Causes, historical precedents, right and wrong, our tradition of favoring the underdog, and our inherited distrust of the big bad Russian bear are all grist for the mill; I’ve gotten pulled into several discussions on all that — again — on social media over the past week. I don’t have a tithe of the word count needed to do justice to all that here, so I’ll take a different perspective.

What’s necessary now is simply to recognize current reality, as Clausewitz said, “neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature,” and then identify what we — America — can and must do about it. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, we’ve seen three years of butchery rivalling the trench war on the Western front of World War I in quality if not quantity. It’s been on a smaller scale, but that’s no consolation to the dead and maimed, which, after discounting the propaganda from both sides, are probably well over a million total. 

Ukraine and Russia were negotiating a cease fire and diplomatic settlement barely a month into the war, until the U.S. and Britain insisted that Ukraine walk out of the talks and fight on, so we bear a share of responsibility for prolonging the war. Nothing changed substantially in the next two and half years but the mounting toll of casualties, cost, and destruction. No one profited except the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about, and everyone downstream who sliced off a piece of the pie.

Here's where we are, today:

Ukraine’s population is a little more than 38 million. It is running out of military manpower, with the average age of front line soldiers at 38, while 50-year-olds are being drafted by force off the streets. Very soon it will not have enough fit, trained soldiers to occupy ground or operate the weapons with which NATO has prolonged the war. Ukraine’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2024 was about $184 billion.

Russia’s population, by comparison, is 146 million (almost four times that of Ukraine). It’s GDP in 2024 was $2.2 trillion (12 times that of Ukraine). It too has suffered heavy losses, but it has no shortage of military age males — another 1.2 million come of age every year — and has its own arms industry that is not dependent on the charity of others.

These numbers show the vast difference in military potential between the two nations. If we looked at a comparison of actual military power — tanks and guns and planes — we’d see a similar disparity, despite three years of NATO generosity.

Russia is advancing steadily, and winning; and yet, it is apparently ready to reach a settlement. 

It is not surprising that President Zelensky is trying his best to get the U.S. or NATO to send troops into Ukraine, although he frames the requests in terms of a “security guarantee” in the context of a ceasefire. Above all, to continue the fight, he needs more manpower, and Ukraine is tapped out. He does not seem to care at all about the prospect of a wider, possibly even nuclear war if his wishes are granted.

Britain and France are offering Ukraine their own troops. President Trump has refused, and for good reason. Russia has the upper hand militarily, and advances further every day that a ceasefire is not in place. It has unequivocally stated that any foreign troops that enter Ukraine will be engaged. It will not agree to a ceasefire while that prospect remains. If foreign troops actually enter the fight — on the losing side — we will then see something that has never occurred before, because adults knew better all the way through the Cold War; and that is direct (vs. proxy) war between nuclear-armed powers: Russia against Britain and France. The NATO charter cannot be invoked if Britain and France enter an ongoing conflict, so they would be on their own. But who wants to bet they wouldn’t be screaming for U.S. support? Even if we trust the restraint of all three parties, war has a logic of its own: friction, chaos, miscalculation, faulty intelligence, mistakes, and split-second, heat-of-the-moment decisions. What could possibly go wrong?

The only rational course of action is to achieve a ceasefire in place at the earliest possible moment, get both parties to enter negotiations, as they tried to do in 2022 until we stopped them, and reach a settlement that does not fully satisfy either party. It is hard to envision an outcome that does not see Ukraine giving up authority over the territories — Crimea and the Donbas republics — that Russia has taken and identified as primary objectives from the beginning; while their other territorial gains will serve as bargaining chips for those key concessions. Ukraine will be obliged to return to its prewar neutrality that offended no one except the globalists, grifters and money-launderers, European war hawks and American sentimentalists. It will mean no NATO membership now or ever. And then, the dying can stop and recovery will begin.

It’s simple, but the simple things can be hard. It is time to stop throwing good money after bad, reinforcing failure, and prolonging the killing. Let’s end it.