For Kyiv, the war aims are clear; that is not the case for its allies
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Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
To demand a display of gratitude is to demand an acknowledgment of dependency and is an assertion of power, American psychiatrist Glen Gabbard observed in a paper on gratitude and gratification. Was that what the United States and Britain were doing when they complained in the margins of last week’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, about Ukrainian ingratitude — asserting power?
Or was it just plain irritation?
The accusations of ungratefulness by Britain’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, and the U.S.’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, seemingly were spontaneous, but they bore the hallmarks of a scripted public pushback on Kyiv as well as serving as a warning to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Whether we like it or not, people want to see a bit of gratitude,” Wallace said when asked about Zelenskyy’s anger at not being offered a formal invitation to join NATO. The British defense secretary advised a different approach would be in order.
And a clearly tetchy Sullivan argued “the American people do deserve a degree of gratitude,” when a Ukrainian activist upbraided him, suggesting U.S. President Joe Biden had withheld NATO membership because he was “afraid of Russia losing, afraid of Ukraine winning.” Sullivan snapped back: “The United States of America has stepped up to provide an enormous amount of capacity to help ensure that Ukraine’s brave soldiers have the ammunition, air defense, the infantry, fighting vehicles, the mine-clearing equipment.”
In some ways it is surprising that Western exasperation with Kyiv hasn’t bubbled much more to the surface. Western diplomats a year ago were registering irritation and saying that the Ukrainian president should tone down his censoriousness and entreaties, otherwise he risked triggering a public and political backlash. They accused Zelenskyy of haranguing his allies. And they worried he risked eroding popular support and undermining the Continent’s unity with his unrelenting and strident advocacy for ever more economic warfare on Russia than European governments could deliver with the speed he wanted.
They said that while the Ukrainian leader is good at gauging the Ukrainian public mood, he’s not so well-attuned to the public mood and how it can quickly shift in western and southern Europe, where householders and businesses worried about how they were going to survive a worsening cost-of-living squeeze exacerbated by the energy sanctions on Russia and pandemic-related soaring inflation. Going slowly was an imperative for many economically hard-pressed European governments. And they got little understanding from an impatient Kyiv — just more demands and accusations of being weak-kneed.
In June last year, NBC news reported that Joe Biden lost his temper with Zelenskyy in a phone call when the Ukrainian leader started listing all the additional help he needed after the U.S. president had just finished telling him how he’d just approved another $1 billion in military assistance. Western frustration has only mounted since with the non-stop importuning — but was swallowed at least publicly.
That was until last week. Wallace himself noted to the reporters in Vilnius: “I told them that last year, when I drove 11 hours to be given a list, that I’m not like Amazon.” The moment Ukraine received a new weapons system, he said, it immediately starts lobbying for another.
But Ukrainian resentment is also simmering at what Kyiv sees as foot-dragging by the West, hence Zelenskyy’s labeling as “absurd” the omission of a timeline for Ukraine to join NATO, which prompted the Wallace/Sullivan chastisement. As far as Kyiv sees it, Western fears of escalation — one reason for the withholding of some weapon systems — are misplaced. Ukrainian officials are dismissive of Russian nuclear threats, seeing them as empty and just aimed at scaring Western countries.
And from the Ukrainians’ perspective, Western criticism is unwarranted — after all, aren’t they fighting not only for independence and sovereignty but as freedom’s champions in a global Manichean contest between autocracy and democracy? Demands for gratitude don’t do justice to the courage and sacrifice of the Ukrainian people and Western governments are too fixated on their narrow national interests. And the advertising of Ukrainian dependency on the West stuck in the craw of many Ukrainians I spoke with as the chastisement sunk in.
And there’s justice to some of the Ukrainian sentiments. Western leaders, too, notably American and British leaders, have characterized the war as a contest between good and evil with huge stakes for democracy; they have cast it as a struggle not only for territory but between values. In that case, why be restrained in what you supply, why hold back on long-range munitions? Why delay supplying F-16s? Why prevent the Ukrainians using Western-supplied weapons to strike deep into Russia? Or as Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top commander, fumed to the Washington Post: “To save my people, why do I have to ask someone for permission what to do on enemy territory?”
But despite the high-blown rhetoric, Ukraine and many of its Western partners, but not Poland and the Baltic states, have different best-possible outcomes in mind. And that’s part of the problem giving rise to the accusations of ingratitude and Ukrainian resentment.
The allies have never agreed on any clear war aims, explaining the calibration of weaponry and what the Ukrainians and their near neighbors see as a mismatch between magniloquence and means. “We talk about victory, and we talk about standing with Ukraine to the very end — but let’s also talk about this,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis told me in an interview earlier this year as he explained his worries about the omission of defining war aims. While the Ukrainians and the Baltic states and Poland fear the westward spread of the Russian menace in coming decades, western and southern Europeans don’t share the dread — especially as the war has shown up the weaknesses of the Russian military.
For Kyiv, the war aim is clear — total victory, the restoration of all Russian-occupied Ukrainian land, including illegally annexed Crimea. Negotiations may well end the war, but there can be no Russian conditions and the peace terms will be dictated by a victorious Kyiv. That’s the Ukrainian view. Zelenskyy and his aides have vociferously ruled out compromises over territory or sovereignty in keeping with the Ukrainian leaders’ ten-point plan released last November. But the West would settle for a partial win — maybe Russia can keep Crimea and parts of the Donbas. Total victory can only really come if the Ukrainian army marches to Moscow — and that’s just not happening. In short, what we are seeing is a clash between practicality and idealism.
The mismatch between rhetoric and action gnaws at Ukrainian officials and adds to their fright that the West eventually will try to foist a deal on them. Hence the intensifying and incessant demands for more weapons and ammunition, for warplanes and missiles — it is testimony to their alarm that their sacrifices and suffering, the blood already split, will be in vain.
And with the counteroffensive bogged down, the Ukrainian worry is that the West will lose patience and finally decide the war can’t be won on Kyiv’s full terms.