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I think the most disturbing type of argument around Ukraine is the one that pretends to be doing it "for their own good". Like "Why don't you want peace, why don't you want peace? Why do you want your people to die?" to the victims of a dictator invading their home, bombing their cities, kidnapping their children and stealing their land. If they aren't settling for your offer it's probably because they don't think your offer is good enough to actually protect them. They're in desperation, if an offer was convincing they would take it. So why not?
They've been promised security before, they gave up their nukes for it. They sign a deal that Russia won't punch them in the face, Russia violates it twice and if they don't want to just sign another without a stronger third party guarantee, it's not because they don't want peace. It's because they know Russia can't be trusted.
They don't think American investments means much, before the war there was that joke rule of "no two countries with a McDonald's have ever been at war" which was essentially emblematic of this concept. That international business interests for peace were simply too strong for a country to overcome, and yet the war happened anyway.
If someone doesn't want to support Ukraine fine, there's lots of other bad stuff we ignore and don't help out with. But those people spreading this idea that "they must want to be invaded and die so not helping them is actually the best help", I just find that really sickening.
Let's talk about this for a second.
On the one hand, if Ukrainians want to fight to the last man, that is their right. I will not suggest they don't have that.
On the other hand, guess what? Unless your opponent is going to systematically kill you all (and there are examples of this sort of thing), defensive wars are rarely justified in terms of a cost-benefit analysis of human life. For instance, England could almost certainly have saved a great many British lives by surrendering to Hitler during World War Two.
What defensive wars do (if they succeed, which they can do even if they are technically a loss - witness the Finnish Winter War) is enable a unique culture and people group to preserve and maintain that culture and the state sovereignty that protects it. And, sadly, Ukrainian culture was already on shaky ground before the Russian invasion. But the war really accelerated that development, between out-migration to Europe and the absolute meatgrinder in the trenches. The Ukrainians understand this (which is why their conscription law blocks recruitment of young men - prime fighting age - to preserve their demographics). Continuing the war means that the already severe Ukrainian demographic problems will continue, and they might have to dip into their "seed corn" of young men. This would be a tragedy.
Ukraine will never recover from this war. It is never getting Crimea back, and it is almost certainly never getting back the areas of Western Ukraine currently occupied by Russia. Its population is shredded, its infrastructure increasingly weakening and its considerable Soviet-era inheritance largely spent. There is a possibility that they are already at the point where their best-case outcome postwar even if they did regain territory back to 2022 lines was that of a vassal or client state, clinging to the EU for dear life and trading away its vast natural resources to foreign investment firms in exchange for an influx of cash and workers to help rebuild their infrastructure...and the worst case scenario is one where they actually become a failed state, possibly losing their sovereignty again, perhaps to the Russians, but perhaps to blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers sent in to Kiev to keep the peace...or just keep the lights on.
Every single Ukrainian who dies in the trenches pushes the country as a whole a little closer to this dark outcome. At a certain point, if you wish to preserve the Ukrainian heritage, you have to ask yourself "how is this goal best served."
I agree that ultimately this is a decision the Ukrainians have to make. But it is worth considering.
Are people saying this, or are they irritated because the Ukrainians still seem hung up on getting Crimea back after a decade? (I understand the Ukrainians being hung up on Crimea, but it is probably a severe obstacle in negotiations if they really mean it.)
I agree with everything you said but I am somewhat skeptical of this:
I was not under the impression that Ukraine possessed valuable resources. The "mineral deal" thing was just a way for the US to provide some sort of security promise while maintaining strategic ambiguity. As another commenter said, rare Earths aren't actually rare, it's just that they are so diffuse they cannot be profitably extracted. Happy to be proven wrong though!
Ukraine has a lot of very fertile land, which has traditionally been a large part of their geopolitical importance as I understand it. I suppose it is probably true that if Putin plowed them all under with a new superweapon the United States could simply build more farms in Kansas but that still seems fairly important to me.
(Based on occasionally reading stuff along the lines of "Russians after heated four week long gunfight finally conquer the first room in the Razelgrazelsky Salt Mine, a hardened nuclear-proof underground facility constructed in 1984 with 100,000,000 tons of concrete to house the Soviet Union's Winter Soldier program" I believe there's also a fair amount of conventional mineral extraction potential, but I'm not sure how significant that is comparatively.)
Yeah, IIRC, Ukraine has one of the highest percentages of arable land in the world, up there with Bangladesh.
Since I like tangents... I believe that fertile land is worth less now that at any time in since the neolithic revolution. The amount of food produced per capita has never been higher, and it just goes up and up every year.
In the US alone, maize yields are up 40% since the year 2000. Milk production per cow is up 60%. Yields in other countries have increased even faster as they catch up to US standards. We still haven't fully unlocked the amazing gains that the Haber Process made possible over 100 years ago.
Empires used to be built on fertile land. Egypt was once the most valuable piece of real estate in the world since the flooding of the Nile river guaranteed food production every year. It produced enough surplus to feed the urban poor in Rome, and later, Constantinople. When Egypt was lost in the 7th century, Constantinople emptied out.
The most densely populated places in the world today are still often river valleys: The Ganges, the Nile, the Niger, etc...
But we've cracked the code. We can make our own fertilizer. We can irrigate the desert. Indio, California is the driest city in the US. And it is an agricultural powerhouse. Population may grow geometrically, as Malthus stated, but food production has grown geometrically at a faster rate.
The wheat and rapeseed fields of Ukraine matter less than ever.
A great tangent!
Yes, I think you're right. (It's also potentially interesting given the speculation that global warming will make northern climes much more arable, IIRC Russia in particular could benefit). And the more right you are, unfortunately, the more likely it is that Ukraine will suffer a worse outcome.
Ukraine also has, or had, a lot of Soviet-era technical and industrial capacity. I'm not optimistic much of this will survive the war intact and in Ukrainian hands, however.
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