Max Boot
I wish House Speaker Mike Johnson and other MAGA Republicans who have been holding up desperately needed aid to Ukraine could see what I just saw there. In particular, I wish they had been with me on Wednesday morning in Dnipro, a bustling city of about 1 million people in eastern Ukraine. If they had been, they might be less willing to betray the people of Ukraine in their desperate struggle for survival against a barbaric invader.
The day began when air-raid alarms sounded at 5:15 a.m. Roused out of sleep, I stumbled down to the hotel bomb shelter along with other members of a U.S. delegation of policy analysts and former government officials invited to Ukraine by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. We were in Ukraine to see the important work UNHCR is doing to help the millions of people displaced by war.
That morning, as we spent hours in a bomb shelter, we saw why so many have been forced to flee their homes: Vladimir Putin keeps deliberately attacking civilian targets in the hope of breaking Ukraine’s will to resist. On Wednesday, the Russians launched 64 drones and missiles at Ukraine. Most were intercepted, but some got through. A few days later, we saw the damage to an apartment building in Kyiv where four people had been killed, 39 injured and hundreds of others forced out of their homes.
In Dnipro, we visited an apartment building where at least 46 people had died in an earlier Russian missile strike. Eerily enough, we could still see clothes hanging in a top-floor closet — visible because the entire front wall of the building was gone. Other Russian missiles have struck hospitals, schools and shopping malls in the area. These are targets of no military value whose destruction amounts to crimes against humanity.
The situation is even grimmer in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which is located only about 20 miles from the Russian border. Russian forces are constantly bombarding Kharkiv with short-range rockets. The city’s best hotel, once favored by Western journalists and aid workers, was destroyed on Dec. 30. Most other businesses remain open, but many have boarded-up windows. We visited a “subway school” held underground, because it’s too dangerous for children to go to their normal classrooms. (Most of the city’s pupils are forced into the pedagogical purgatory of online learning.) I marveled at Ukrainian ingenuity in converting five subway stations into schools but was heartbroken by the necessity to do so.
In Kharkiv’s North Saltivka neighborhood — shelled regularly by the Russians for six months in 2022 — not a building had escaped damage. Once home to 40,000 residents, this district we visited is now virtually deserted. One of the few remaining residents, an elderly woman named Nadiia, couldn’t stop crying as she recounted to me the shock of the Russian invasion nearly two years ago. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “Bullets were flying past us. I was just praying.”
I wished I could comfort her and tell her that she was safe now, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Just last month, a Russian rocket demolished another nearby building. And residents have recently been forced to flee the town of Kupyansk, just 74 miles away, because the Russians are massing for another attack there in the hope of regaining territory lost to the Ukrainians in October 2022.
Last May, when I was in Ukraine, optimism was in the air. The Ukrainians were preparing a major counteroffensive that they hoped would drive the invaders out of the country’s south and shorten the war. But it ultimately failed, and the war grinds on — with no end in sight as it enters its third year. Putin has mobilized more troops, converted his economy to a war footing, and bought weapons from Iran and North Korea. Ukraine is struggling to keep pace. “People are tired,” Odessa’s regional governor, Oleh Kiper, told us. “They don’t understand what lies ahead.”
The first cracks are beginning to appear in the facade of Ukraine’s wartime unity. On Thursday, while I was on a train from Kharkiv to Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky fired the popular commander of his armed forces, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny. The two men had long had a tense relationship. Zaluzhny was replaced by Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the former commander of land forces, who is less popular with the rank-and-file but gets along better with the president. The change of commanders was risky, but Zaluzhny’s exit was at least handled with dignity.
No matter who runs the military, however, Ukraine confronts two fundamental problems: a shortage of troops and a shortage of ammunition. The former is Ukraine’s own doing. It needs to mobilize more soldiers and to give a breather to those who have been fighting continuously for two years. But men are no longer rushing to volunteer as in the early days of the war, and an expansion of conscription would be unpopular and expensive. So Zelensky has dawdled, leading to complaints from front-line units that they don’t have enough troops to hold back the Russians’ meat-grinder assaults. Zelensky resisted Zaluzhny’s recommendations to mobilize as many as 500,000 additional troops. Now, a bill to expand conscription is finally advancing in parliament, but it will take time to train raw draftees.
The shortage of weapons, by contrast, is the West’s fault. The Western countries are collectively far bigger than Russia in both population and wealth, but they have not increased their armaments production as rapidly as Moscow has done. Ukraine is ramping up its own output, particularly of drones, but it will take years for it to develop the necessary manufacturing capacity. In the meantime, Ukraine faces an alarming shortage of ammunition: Russian forces are firing five artillery shells for every shell fired by the Ukrainians. If this disparity is not addressed soon, Ukrainian front lines might crumble. That is why it’s so critical for the United States to provide $60 billion in aid — much of which will go to U.S. defense companies.
The European Union, admittedly, just pledged $54 billion in financial aid to Ukraine, and European countries are providing far more aid overall than the United States. But Europe can’t meet Ukraine’s urgent military needs without U.S. help. Unless the United States steps forward soon, Ukraine will run low not only on artillery ammunition but also on air-defense ammunition. That could lead to greater destruction in its cities, which would spark a fresh refugee crisis and set back a burgeoning economic recovery.
Ukraine’s unheralded success in the battle for the Black Sea — employing sea drones and missiles to drive back the Russian fleet — has reopened that vital shipping route. As we discovered during a visit to Odessa, that region’s three ports are back to almost prewar levels of exports. The National Bank of Ukraine has forecast a 3.6 percent economic growth this year, but those projections will be dashed if Ukraine can’t safeguard its major population centers from Russian airstrikes.
The Ukrainians are not giving up, even if polls show that a small but growing minority — about 20 percent in December, up from 10 percent in May — are willing to make territorial concessions to the Russians if that will bring peace. Of course, Putin, buoyed by growing Republican opposition to aiding Ukraine, shows no interest in compromising, regardless of his feint in that direction in an interview last week with Tucker Carlson. So the killing continues.
“People are traumatized, but we don’t have a choice,” Deputy Foreign Minister Iryna Borovets told us in Kyiv. “We are fighting for our existence. … If the Russians win, there would be genocide.” A regional official in Dnipro pithily summed up the national mood: “We are tired but not exhausted.”
Many Ukrainians told us that they are inspired to fight on in part because they know that they are not alone — they have the support of the West. If the United States were to cut them off, it would be, among other things, a devastating psychological blow, giving Ukrainians the impression that they are being abandoned.
There is still time for the House of Representatives to do the right thing and pass the aid package that is finally advancing in the Senate. But it isn’t clear whether the speaker, in thrall to former president Donald Trump and his MAGA extremists, will even give the bill a floor vote. As Johnson (La.) prepares to make the most momentous decision of his political career, he should travel to Ukraine to meet the people whose lives and liberties rest in his hands.
Every time I visit Ukraine, I come away impressed by Ukrainian resilience and enraged by Putin’s continuing aggression. I imagine that Johnson, who professes to be a devout Christian, might feel equally moved by the suffering of the Ukrainians — and by their pleas for more U.S. support. (“We will not endure without the assistance of the U.S.A.,” Borovets warned.) But Johnson has not been to Ukraine since the Russian invasion and has not announced any plans to visit. That worries me. It’s easier to stab people in the back if you’re unwilling to look them in the eye.
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