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What will be left of Ukraine after Russia and the West are done with their proxy war?
It's hard to get good numbers as both Russia and Ukraine lie about everything. But it feels that Ukraine is exhausted and will soon lose this war. My heuristic for this is reading between the lines of the news. Every optimistic story about Ukraine's war effort in the last year has failed to bear fruit. And nuggets of facts go unchallenged, such as the average age of Ukraine's soldiers now being 42.
The U.S. estimate as of August (according to Wikipedia) is that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed with another 120,000 wounded. I would treat this as a floor, personally. The Ukrainian forces at the start of the war were 200,000 regular soldiers and 100,000 paramilitary. I think it's safe to say these troops have been utterly gutted. The size of the Ukrainian army is reportedly 800,000 today but at this point it must be nearly entirely conscripts. Conscripts with an average age of 42. To channel George Carlin, think of the average 42 year old. How would they fare in a trench? Now realize half of Ukrainian soldiers are older than that.
Millions of people have fled Ukraine. The population (as of 2022) had already declined from 51 million to 36 million within the 1991 borders. It is likely much lower today. We will soon see the first instance in more than 150 years of a country losing half its population. (Either the Potato Famine or the Paraguayan War seem like the last potential candidates for this happening).
What people don't realize is how incredibly RARE this is. The population of other war-torn regions such as Afghanistan and Iraq has skyrocketed. You can't even see the conflicts on a population chart. Syria had a brief decline but has rebounded and is now higher than ever before. The population of Russia dipped during WWII by about 10% but by 1955 had rebounded again to an all-time high.
The combination of low fertility, huge emigration, and war deaths will depopulate Ukraine to a degree that hasn't been seen in modern times.
I have to ask, at this point, why does the West still support Ukraine? Yes, it's very convenient that Ukraine is willing to destroy itself to hurt Russia. But, as a utilitarian, I am very skeptical of the benefits of "grand strategy" type decisions like this. The world is complicated. If we let Putin have the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine will he then demand the Polish-speaking parts of Poland? No. It's not like this war has been a resounding success. Furthermore, he could die tomorrow.
But the deaths suffered by Ukrainian conscripts (and yes Russian conscripts too) are very real. We are trading the deaths of real people for theoretical future benefits. And we are destroying an entire country in the process. Why not go to the bargaining table and end this cruel and pointless war?
Ideally Ukraine will be a part of NATO as its allies fund its reconstruction. Even better if it means the death of current Russian regime. No better message for every other tyrant eyeing the lands near them.
"Both sides lies" is a meaningless platitude. Perun covered this exact topic 2 weeks ago and argued that Ukrainians are still incredibly supportive of fighting Russia, though they recognize that its going to be hard and grinding. Russians are harder to poll due to fear of state punishment for the "wrong" opinions, but even then, there's less support on the Russian side for fighting the war to its conclusion than there is on the Ukrainian side. He also doesn't ignore all the things "between the lines", talking explicitly about the average Ukrainian soldier's age issue in the linked video.
Supporting Ukraine is an affirmation of the post-WW2 status quo in which war for the sake of expansion will not be tolerated. Russia may fear Ukraine slipping from its control, but the reason Eastern Europe did that is precisely because Russia has acted on this notion of spheres of influence. Moreover, every dead Russian, while tragic, and every spent ruble on military equipment is part of the cost that Russia will have to deal with. No better cost-effective solution for depleting the resources of an expansionist and corrupt system.
Moreover, you know why Putin won't demand the Polish parts of Poland? Because Poland is in NATO. That's precisely the threat of Ukraine after the 2014 revolution, it may join America's umbrella and then it can never be touched.
Peace would be nice. But, and I recognize that I have less stake in the issue given that I'm not losing people myself over the issue, I believe it would still be good for the Ukrainians to continue fighting. I support giving them as much as they ask for and more.
I very much dislike the current Russian regime, but I also very much dislike the Ukrainian one. Ukraine is more free in many ways in Russia, but the current Ukrainian regime came to power by overthrowing a democratically elected leader, and once it had come to power, it attempted to use military force to prevent aggrieved supporters of that overthrown leader from seceding. To me that is much the same "tyranny eyeing the lands near them" as what Russia is doing.
Is there any good reason to not see it this way?
Are you referring to the 2014 Crimean referendum? I have qualms about a referendum on a topic directly impacted by the Russians importing their own into that land and deporting the Tatars for centuries, but even setting that aside, Crimea was recognized by all side to be part of Ukraine. It is not the same for a nation to insist its territory remain part of it and a nation to invade another with the goal of yoking the recipient because it has strategic interests to do so.
What makes the territory belong to the nation in the first place? Either it is raw force, in which case there is no point debating the morality to begin with, or it is some sort of argument from legitimacy. But how can one argue for the legitimacy of preserving previous territorial integrity after a violent revolution overthrows a person whom a bunch of the country had voted for?
Clearly borders themselves do not have a legitimacy that transcends all other considerations. If they had, then the breakup of the USSR would have been illegitimate to begin with. So we probably agree that in some cases changes of borders are legitimate.
So the question is, did the government that come to power in 2014 in Kiev have a legitimate claim to all of the territory that it claimed, despite the fact that many people living in that territory did not want to be ruled by that new government?
I do not insist that the answer is necessarily "no". But consider this scenario, by way of comparison. Let's say that Trump gets fairly elected in 2024, no fraud. A variety of anti-Trump groups then rebel and overthrow the Trump administration by force. Trump flees the country. Soon afterward, a bunch of secession movements break out in red states. The new DC government claims that the territorial integrity of the US cannot be violated and threatens military force to stop the secessionists.
In this example, who would be right and who would be wrong?
Of course, it would be fair to say, it is not quite so simple. Consider a version of the above scenario that continues with some nuclear power's military forces entering Texas on the grounds of helping the secessionists. Who is right and who is wrong then?
At the least, I will claim that this is not a simple black and white moral question.
I would certainly hope that the post-Maidan government sought to ratify its legitimacy after Yanukovich fled. If parts of Ukraine desire to secede, that desire should probably be listened to. But I don't consider it unreasonable for the government to assume that anyone wanting to do so has to engage with the existing systems in place to depart, not automatically be considered independent since a non-democratic change just took place. I understand the concern that they wouldn't agree, but there is nothing wrong with at least trying.
Considering that previous referenda (1991, 1994) in which Crimea overwhelmingly voted for independence and then greater autonomy from Ukraine were ignored by the central government, what grounds did they have to believe that they would fare better this time after a government got couped in that was explicitly against their ethnicity and chosen political representatives? (And then, consider the reasonably widespread repressions against the pro-Russian population that even Amnesty noted before almost getting cancelled for it.)
I wasn't aware of this, and I think my comment suggested my lack of knowledge about the Crimean independence issue. This is a fair rebuttal to the point. I don't think this changes my view that Kiev and Moscow's relationship to Crimea aren't equivalent enough to call both of them tyrants in the same measure, and I do endorse the idea that if Crimea wants to be free, Ukraine should seriously consider letting them be as such.
I'm not familiar with the repressions you're speaking of, got a link?
The main repressions story I was thinking of was this, but there was also an older report just shortly after Euromaidan. The "almost cancellation" incident, however, actually was a much later story about the Ukrainian army garrisoning in civilian objects from after the war broke out, which I had mentally conflated with the previous ones; sorry about the mistake.
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