Reflections on Ukraine

What did I do

I held out for a month without commenting on Ukraine (with few exceptions). This was done with the purpose of gathering my thoughts in the face of algorithmic incentives to just keep pushing, and to reflect on my genuine beliefs on the topic. I thought that breaking up a chain of continuously reinforcing my own arguments might move me pretty significantly. Now I'm going to try to reconstruct the main arguments behind my support of Ukraine and linger on wedge issues which I'd generally take a strong stance on but want to leave open for real investigation.

Note: This is a simple argumentative exercise and not my definitive take on these questions.

Main Arguments

• Claim: The West should support Ukraine as long as they keep fighting, with the best we can offer them, while avoiding direct military confrontation (and subsequently, nuclear war) with Russia.
  • Supporting Arguments:
    • 1: Ukraine is a sovereign nation under attack.
      • Such an attack blatantly violates international law
      • International law needs to be upheld to preserve a relatively stable, functioning world order and not descend into chaos, anarchy and misery
      • The only way to uphold international law is to deter potential aggressor's, which means that current aggressor's need to be punished for their digressions
    • 2: Supporting Ukraine saves lives
      • Russia's goal is to incorporate Ukraine into their "civilizational realm". This is not a land war, but a war aimed at the eradication of the very concept of a Ukrainian nation. Thus, it is unlikely that a future-proof end of the bloodshed can be negotiated from a position of weakness.
      • That is unless, you accept simply surrendering the whole of the country to Russia, which also runs into problems as:
        • Russia does not treat people in occupied territories well, on the contrary, examples like Bucha and Mariupol show just how inhumane and uncaring for human lives they are.
        • It is unlikely that Russia would simply stop after taking Ukraine. If anything, their aggressive posturing towards the rest of Europe would be reinforced with such a success.
        • In general, if we allow a country to take territory by inflicting huge loss on it, it will create the incentive structures for similar incidents to happen in the future
      • That means, that giving the Ukrainians the means to get to a peaceful settlement is the only viable option for the preservation of human life.
    • 3. Supporting Ukraine is the moral thing to do
      • If a country gets unprovokedly invaded by a hostile nation with the intention by the other nation to wipe it off the map, moral intuition suggests that we should help that country.
      • In the particulars, Ukraine is a democratic country which is getting invaded by an authoritarian Russia out of imperial ambitions. The Ukrainian cause is to get the Russian invaders permanently out of the country and join the west to prosper in the future, while the Russian cause is that they should have an empire because they have the military power to create one. They do not offer any positive, aspirational or moral case for why they should control the territory and the people within it.
        • To make things even more straightforward, the Ukrainian nation has been endorsed and guaranteed by both the west and Russia in the Budapest Memorandum, for the high price of Ukraine giving up the third biggest nuclear stockpile in the world. The West had guaranteed to stick up for Ukraine (through shady formulations, but nonetheless) and it should live up to that responsibility.
    • 4. Supporting Ukraine is in the West's security interest
      • This ties back into the argument about international law, as rewarding such a blatant attack on a nation creates the precedent for future attacks.
      • Russia can also use the justification it used for Ukraine on other European countries such as Moldova or the Baltic states, which is definitely not in the European security interests.
        • Incidentally, taking Ukraine also makes it practically easier to attack these countries (bigger manpower pool, a direct route to Moldova, the biggest European army now out of play, etc.)

Wedge issues (debating myself)

• How direct should Western military involvement be?
  • Should it be as indirect as possible, not giving cause to Russia for escalating the conflict?
    • // Russia doesn't need cause for escalating the conflict, and de-escalation can only happen if both sides work on it, which the Russians have actively disproven.
  • Should we look towards more direct military involvement in order to force a defeat of the Russian army and show strength.
    • //There probably are limits where Putin would actually use nuclear weapons, which has to be avoided.
      • /// The answer to nuclear blackmail cannot be to submit to it, because else the nuclear state will just keep on aggressing undeterred, until we are no longer willing to pay the price for it.
        • //// But the potential for nuclear war cannot simply be dismissed by this.
• What is the optimal path to peace/end result?
  • Is it a pragmatic, negotiated peace with territorial concessions made by Ukraine, but with security guarantees?
    • // This option does not seem palatable to Russia. So if we'd have to make them acquiesce to such a solution, why not go for one which has better end results for the Ukrainian people?
  • Is it a full defeat and retreat of the Russian armed forces?
    • // This is unpractical as:
      • // It would require substantially more direct western military intervention (which gets us back to the first contested part).
      • // Such a brutal defeat could seem so regime-threatening to Putin that he'd actually pull the nuclear option.
        • /// Which brings us back to the point about not submitting to nuclear blackmail.