Voice of Ukraine

From: Maia Mikhaluk in Kyiv (959th day) — Timothy Snyder’s article, To Be or Not to Be, explains the essence of Ukraine’s victory plan and the reasons for Western partners’ ongoing slowness in helping Ukraine.

“Russia will make peace only when Putin believes that Russia is losing.” (Destroying ammunition depots and military airfields in ruzzian territory will help Ukraine get into the proper position for negotiations.)

“This is realism. Using the word “negotiations” in any other sense is misleading, since the Russians themselves have made clear, over and over, that their goal is the humiliation and the destruction of Ukraine as a first step towards a world order in which such actions are normal. There is a thought which one hears outside of Ukraine to the effect that one can simply choose negotiations at any point without appropriately altering the power position. This is not realism. It is wishful thinking.

One cannot simply choose to negotiate with a power that openly seeks to bring about the end of your nation and state. First you have to show that the attempt to destroy you will end in failure”.

Here are some of reasons for delays of help mentioned in the article:

• Americans are hindered, in their evaluation of this war, by their own initial underestimation of Ukraine — since we thought it must immediately lose at the beginning, we still have trouble switching to the idea that it can and must win.
• The Russians understand our (American) weaknesses perhaps better than we do ourselves, and their successes in this war are almost entirely a result of their successive victories in psychological warfare. For Russians, national and individual psychology is an attack surface. And so on every occasion Ukraine asks for something from the United States, as for example right now in the victory plan, Putin changes the subject to vague threats that might concern us, so that we can experience personal anxiety. Where American leaders believe that they are managing escalation, Russians know that they are managing (our) anxiety. This is what they do, and they do it well. They do it with fervent determination, because they believe in it, and they know that it is their one chance to win.
• In this war, Putin has not only managed our anxiety, he has created entirely new rules of war that too many of us now take for granted — even though they have no precedent and are absurd. It somehow seems like the correct journalistic practice to refer to Ukrainian weapons as NATO or American weapons, even though when weapons of American or European origin are used by other countries we do not apply that term. Nor do we refer to weapons used by Russia but built in North Korea and Iran as North Korean and Iranian weapons. It somehow seems normal that the war should be fought only on Ukrainian territory (doesn’t it?), even though this contravenes all strategic logic, any basic sense of justice, and the international law of war concerning self-defense.