The Thin Red Line That Is Ukraine

Now that the Democrats have lost every lever of national power in the United States, the outgoing American President has finally given Ukraine the green light to use long range American-made weapons to strike inside Russia, years too late. There is little doubt that Trump will reverse this decision the moment he comes to power in a few short weeks. Ukraine is fighting NATO’s war for us and we have only a few short weeks to come to terms with what that means.

It has been a little over ten years since Russia invaded Ukraine, generating a tepid western response of superficial economic sanctions. They seized the strategically and economically important peninsula of Crimea, and waged a low key border war along the eastern region of the country for years.

It has been nearly three years since Russia took the gloves off and attacked the rest of the Ukraine, on the excuse that they need to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO so that NATO does not come right up to Russia’s borders — which it already did in Norway, Estonia, and Latvia, as well as having Poland and Lithuania border on the exclave of Kaliningrad, itself the former German city of Königsberg annexed to the Soviet Union and purged of Germans after the Second World War. Since the invasion, more border countries have joined NATO and Russia hasn’t complained, belying the message that NATO expansion was ever genuinely the concern.

The invasion was only expected to last a few days, with the Russians making a run for the capital Kyiv to decapitate the regime. The country had been led by a comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the government was not especially popular at the moment of the invasion. The attack galvanised the country, Zelenskyy became a popular war-time leader, and Ukraine resisted much more forcefully than Russia expected, successfully repelling the invaders from the capital and turning the rapid action into the most significant conventional war on European soil in generations.

Since then, numerous countries have offered billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, recognising that if Russia is not stopped in Ukraine, they will almost certainly not stop at Ukraine. Canada, with our tiny military and outdated hardware, has offered about $4.5 billion worth of military support.

Through it all, Russia has warned other countries not to cross their red lines, lest we wind up in a wider or even nuclear confrontation. Each time, the west has hemmed and hawed, worried about ‘escalating’ the conflict. Yesterday, Ukraine fired ATACMS long range US-made weapons into Russia for the first time, and Russia responded by updating its official nuclear war doctrine to link weapons fired into the country with nuclear powers that back their use.

Meanwhile, Russia has been ruthlessly attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure, kidnapping and relocating Ukraining children for adoption and reeducation in Russia, and continuing to wage total war in an effort to conquer the former Soviet republic, at a cost, so far, of a million casualties.

When NATO allies give conditions to Ukraine for the use of their weapons to avoid crossing so-called Russian red lines, we are doing a great deal more to cross those red lines than if we simply handed over weapons to them without strings attached. By telling Ukraine what they can and cannot do with each weapon, the West is effectively participating in the war to a much greater degree. By choosing what targets Ukraine can and cannot hit, the West is directly participating.

Nuclear war has nevertheless not broken out and Russia’s endless bluffs can be safely called.

Ukraine gave up all of its nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for security guarantees from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, proving that nuclear weapons had themselves been the only true guarantee of peace they had.

Now, Ukraine is fighting for its life with de facto NATO backing, ironically forced into it by an adversary who was concerned they would some day join NATO. And they are doing remarkably well, having counter-invaded Russia and seized a sizeable portion of the Kursk region, which Russia has been unable to retake.

After years of the United States in particular trying to limit what Ukraine can do with their weapons to prevent escalation, now that the Democrats are about to lose control of both the government and the military in two months, they are finally allowing Ukraine to fight back with everything they have, after having given Russia all the breathing room they needed.

Next US president Donald Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine immediately upon arrival in office. The only way to do that is to stop providing any support whatsoever to Ukraine and tell them to sue for peace.

It is clear that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has very little respect for, but a lot of ownership of, Donald Trump. Shortly after the election, Russian media aired nude photos of his wife from her former career as a porn star in a not so subtle statement on the power dynamic between Putin and Trump.

It’s also clear that Trump and his new team of corrupt misfits does not see any great value in protecting Ukraine. Elon Musk, whose new role will be to co-head the “Department of Government Efficiency”, bearing the same acronym — DOGE — as his favourite cryptocurrency, openly mocked Zelenskyy over the weekend for suggesting that Ukraine has any role in determining its own future:

Elon Musk mocks Ukraine’s independence

All of this leads us to a place of great concern. Trump has expressed his disdain for NATO for years. He wants Russia to win the war in Ukraine, whether through lack of interest or understanding of the war’s geopolitical importance, or out of loyalty or debt to Putin. His vice president has stated that he “does not care” what happens to Ukraine. His power broker, the rising kleptocrat Elon Musk, is openly mocking Ukraine’s very existence and independence.

Where we are heading is a world where NATO is no longer a functional military alliance. It will force Europe into a major period of rapid rearmament in anticipation of a full frontal conventional war with Russia, without the support of the United States. Without the Unites States there to call it escalation, perhaps Ukraine will finally then find a seat at the NATO table.

Canada will be stuck in an unsavoury place between an isolationist America collapsing under the weight of its greedy and untethered oligarchy, sympathetic to Russian expansionism, and our European allies who will need us now more than at any time since the last World War.

Will we rise to the challenge?