Sen. J.D. Vance’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, “The Math on Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up,” is a classic case of muddled thinking. The junior senator from Ohio would be well advised to do some homework before expressing his opinions on a topic he obviously doesn’t fully understand.
Vance starts by asserting that victory or defeat in war is exclusively a question of numbers: “Ukraine’s challenge is not the G.O.P.; it’s math. Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide.”
To be sure, Russia has outnumbered and will continue to outnumber Ukraine in just about any category, from population size to number of missiles to number of soldiers. That’s not new or insightful. Or correct, as wars also turn on other things, such as morale, courage, perseverance, leadership and strategy — as the Persian Empire learned when they twice invaded ancient Greece and as the U.S. learned in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Vance commits a far more egregious error by ignoring the other side of the equation and failing to give any consideration to Russia’s internal conditions. But they surely matter in any assessment of Ukraine’s chances of winning or losing. The fact is that Vladimir Putin is under attack from Russian elites; most Russians are tired of the war; the Russian economy is spiraling downward; and the Russian military is suffering staggering losses. Such a state of affairs is no recipe for victory, as Russian opposition scholars, who just may know their country better than American policymakers, insist.
Vance then writes the following: “Mr. Biden has failed to articulate even basic facts about what Ukraine needs and how this aid will change the reality on the ground. … Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.”
Unfortunately, the senator confuses changing the reality on the ground — namely, the fact that the Russians are making incremental gains and bombing Ukraine’s energy infrastructure — with winning the war. These are different things. Changing the reality on the ground can mean anything from stopping Russian advances to rolling the Russians back. Vance also accuses President Biden of lacking a “viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war,” while failing to define what he means by winning.
In saying that “Mr. Zelensky’s stated goals for the war — a return to 1991 boundaries — are fantastical,” Vance implies that winning is tantamount to Ukraine’s recapturing all the territories occupied by Russia. But that’s just wrong. Neither Ukraine’s president nor Ukrainian policymakers are maximalist radicals who will settle for nothing less than a return to 1991. There are many intermediate steps between the 1991 status quo and the situation today. Some of those may be amenable to Kyiv, some may not. Either way, there’s far more room for maneuvering than Vance assumes, but only if Putin would also be willing to make concessions — which he is not.
The senator’s muddled views of Ukrainian victory mean that his elaborate assessment of U.S. production capacities versus Ukraine’s proclaimed needs is completely irrelevant. The United States may not be able to produce enough ammunition and weapons to enable Ukraine to capture Moscow (as if that were Kyiv’s goal), but it can surely continue to produce what it has already produced since February 2022 in order to bring about a change in the reality on the ground or something less than a complete return to the boundaries of 1991. In short, the senator sets up a false choice.
Vance then falls into another contradiction. First, he proudly states that “I voted against this package in the Senate and remain opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war.” Then, later in the text, he says that “The good news is that even now, a defensive strategy can work. Digging in with old-fashioned ditches, cement and land mines are what enabled Russia to weather Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive.”
Disregard the fact that Ukraine already adopted a defensive strategy weeks before Vance advised it to. What he appears not to realize is that cutting off all aid will also undermine the defensive strategy he recommends. After all, as he says, Russia greatly exceeds Ukraine’s numbers of weapons and soldiers, and Putin has demonstrated that he’s willing to sacrifice thousands of soldiers for small pieces of territory. If the senator’s mathematical approach is adopted, a defensive strategy premised on a complete cessation of U.S. aid will only encourage Putin to maintain his attacks and eventually overrun Ukraine’s defenses. If Vance supports Putin’s goals, so be it, but he should at least say so openly and honestly.
Vance’s final paragraph takes the cake: “The White House has said time and again that they can’t negotiate with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. This is absurd. The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war. The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.”
If Vance truly believes that one can negotiate with Putin — who has repeatedly stated that nothing short of Ukraine’s capitulation and transformation into a Russian province would satisfy him — then all one can do is wish him well as he follows in Tucker Carlson’s exalted footsteps, travels to Moscow and tries talking to the 21st-century’s answer to Adolf Hitler. Before he goes, it may behoove the senator to read Putin’s infamous 2021 essay on Ukraine’s nonexistence, Dmitry Medvedev’s endless rants, and the documentation detailing Russia’s formal annexation of territories still controlled by Ukraine. Descending into Putin’s parallel universe may enlighten Vance about the true meaning of absurdity.
Vance also claims that the president has no “viable plan” for winning the war — an absurd charge coming from someone with a viable plan for losing the war. More important, $60 billion would enable Ukraine to hold the front, perhaps even push back the Russians, and thereby get itself into the position of negotiating from strength, and not from a position of imminent annihilation. That may not mean winning the war for the senator, but it would make an enormous existential difference to Ukrainians.
Vance’s last sentence is his coup de grace: “The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.”
We? And what of the Ukrainians? Aren’t they doing the fighting and dying? Don’t they have a voice in fixing this mess?
And why in God’s name should they trust someone who isn’t just wrong about the war, but dead wrong?
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”