Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) said Sunday that the United States needs to accept that Ukraine will likely need to “cede some territory” to Russia to end the fighting. Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” that he is opposed to sending more aid to Ukraine because he does not believe the country will ever be able to overpower Russia. He questioned why sending billions in aid to Ukraine is going to help the country at this point in its war against Russia, considering previous aid has yet to end the war. “What’s in America’s best interest is to accept Ukraine is going to have to cede some territory to the Russians, and we need to bring this war to a close,” Vance said. “But when I think about the great human tragedy here, hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans innocent have been killed in this conflict. The thing that’s in our interest and in theirs is to stop the killing.”
Putin has arguably already had a large chunk of what he wanted since 2014. There’s been so much time to not only reinforce Crimea and Donbas militarily, but also to change the population makeup by moving in thousands of Russian families.
I hate Putin as much as the next rational human being, but even a pro-Ukraine perspective has to reconcile with the fact that some of these formerly Ukrainian lands are now populated by a large majority in favour of being part of Russia. Even if Ukraine could gain full military control over these areas, it wouldn’t magically get rid of the separatists.
It brings up the difficult question of where to draw the line between ethnic cleansing and expelling foreign invaders. Personally I think expelling recently-settled Russians from occupied Ukraine would be a reasonable thing to do, but the longer the territory remains occupied, the harder is to justify.
The Eastern part of the country has been pro-Russia for a long time. I don’t know if it’s even a good idea to try to force them to stay part of Ukraine. Doesn’t justify the invasion, of course.