Opinion | The Best Case for Ukraine Aid

The first year of the war in Ukraine seemed to vindicate Russia hawks. The belief that Vladimir Putin was a careful chess player whose ambitions could be constrained through negotiation, the belief that Ukraine couldn’t plausibly defend itself against Moscow and therefore didn’t merit support from an already overstretched America — these ideas seemed to dissolve in the first months of war, with Putin gambling and rambling while Ukrainian arms threw his forces back.

The second year of war has been kinder to realists and doves. Russia, as in many wars before, seems stronger in a grinding conflict than it did in the initial thrusts. Putin’s regime proved resilient against the West’s economic weapons, and against internal opposition as well; the death in prison of Russia’s leading dissident, Aleksei Navalny, looks like the latest example of the dictator’s ruthless settling of accounts. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian counteroffensive of spring and summer failed: A year ago there was still hope that a Russian retreat would turn into a rout, but since then stalemate has ruled the front.

The changed situation has created a division in the hawkish argument, visible as the U.S. Congress wrangles over further aid to Ukraine. On the one hand you still have rhetoric that seems to belong more to the first year of war, claiming that Putin is clearly losing the war (“This guy is on life support,” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, told his colleagues in the Senate debate), that aid to Ukraine is a cheap, effective way to degrade and defeat an American rival without fighting the Russians ourselves.

On the other you have arguments that suggest that the tide is turning against Ukraine, that Putin is getting ever stronger (“Russia’s capacity to produce military equipment has increased tremendously,” Denmark’s defense minister warned recently), that he’ll be ready to attack the Baltics or some other NATO country soon. The strange events this week on Capitol Hill, in which Representative Mike Turner, Republican of Ohio and a Ukraine hawk, teased secret intelligence about Russian superweapons in space, felt like an attempt to boost this narrative — emphasizing Russia’s increasing strength as the reason to keep on sending money and weapons to Ukraine.

The problem with the first argument is that it doesn’t match the changing situation on the ground. The problem with the second argument is that it raises a big strategic question: If Russia has gotten only stronger since we started funding the Ukrainian war effort, doesn’t that suggest that we’ve ended up overstretched after all, just as critics warned?

I think there is a good case for continued aid to Ukraine that doesn’t rely on either exaggerating Ukrainian successes or hyping Russia’s military-industrial complex. But it’s a case that’s hard to make under the sweeping terms that have framed our support for Ukraine to date.