The West didn’t want Ukraine to lose, it also didn’t want Russia to lose.
French President Macron visits German Chancellor Scholz and makes several shocking utterances, one being that Ukraine should be allowed to strike inside Russian territory with Western-supplied weapons. Canada publicly gives Ukraine permission to do so with Canadian weapons. Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Blinken finally seems to concede the same point, saying that Ukraine may ‘adapt and adjust’ its use of the weapons it gets i.e. striking targets inside Russia if needs be. As Russian forces have increasingly launched ordinance from inside Russia’s own declared borders, the West has belatedly reacted with such resolutions. The question is why did it take so long and what was the concern in the first place.
Most commentators explain it as follows — although the West didn’t want Ukraine to lose, it also didn’t want Russia to lose. If that sounds like a mystifying and contradictory principle, it translated into a concrete outcome on the ground: de facto Russian occupation and retention of a clear swath of Ukrainian territory in the east and south. Trouble is, Moscow didn’t accept the tacit offering. Instead Putin powered forward and began bombing deep inside Ukraine, attacking civilian centers in cities and ultimately making moves on Karkhiv. As a result, after two years of war, the West’s position has begun to shift, first with Eastern European and Baltic states followed now, it seems, by Canada, France, even Germany and possibly the US.
What were they afraid of in the first place, this notion of Russia ‘losing’. So what if Russia lost — what fear-filled scenario haunted top Western leaders, like Biden, so much that they sacrificed thousands of Ukrainian lives, civilians and military, to avoid the outcome of Russia losing? Again, most commentators intuited that scenario as fear of Russia disintegrating, fracturing into regions — intuited because none of the foot-dragging Western leaders actually articulated their fear openly.
