Russia’s undeclared war against Ukraine began February 20, 2014. Four years later about 7 percent of Ukraine remains under occupation, over 10,000 people are dead, 25,000 maimed and nearly 2 million internally displaced, even as the urban-industrial infrastructure of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (the Donbas) have been destroyed. From the start of this hybrid war Moscow has utilized every imaginable tactic of subversion and destabilization, from targeted assassinations and terrorist bombings in Kyiv to cyberattacks against critical infrastructure targets, to fomenting ethnic, political, religious and social divisiveness within Ukrainian society.
This unprovoked war came in the wake of the Revolution of Dignity, a national uprising against Moscow’s corrupted satrap in Kyiv, Viktor Yanukovych, ousted from power after he attempted to take Ukraine away from its anticipated reintegration with Europe and toward a Russian-dominated Eurasian sphere of influence. Enraged and alarmed by the diminution of his country’s influence over Ukraine, Vladimir Putin the (former?) KBG man in the Kremlin, a billionaire and seemingly president-in-perpetuity of the Russian Federation, precipitated an international crisis that festers to this day.
For not only have Europe’s once supposedly-agreed borders been undone by force (coupled with the bogus “referendum” of March 16, 2014, in Crimea) but the West’s timid response to Ukraine’s dismemberment has understandably provoked many Ukrainians to rethink whether they were right to have signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances (December 5, 1994). Following their voluntary dismantling of the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, Ukrainians were lured into believing their country’s territorial integrity and political sovereignty were inviolable, secured by U.S., U.K. and even Russian Federation pledges. They have since had good reason to reflect on their geopolitical naïveté. Likely other states – North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, India and Israel in particular – observing Ukraine’s rendering might conclude possessing weapons of mass destruction is a better guarantor of security than succumbing to empty promises, whether issuing from the Occident or the Orient.
Despite having secured temporary advantage from previous offensives against Moldova, Georgia and Crimea, Russia nevertheless erred in its pre-war assessments of Ukrainian society’s capacity to offer resistance. Irrespective of language, religion, socioeconomic status or nationality, Ukraine’s citizenry united quickly in its determination to blunt Russian designs, demonstrating a remarkable degree of self-sacrifice and patriotism. In the spring of 2014 thousands of Ukrainian “minutemen” surged toward the frontlines, while many more provided logistical and materiel support for the embattled Ukrainian military.
Their stout defense came at a high price. Yet, collectively, they checked the forces Mr. Putin was prepared to risk trying to cower Ukraine. Clearly, Moscow miscalculated and the blowback of this invasion was the ignition of a genuine Ukrainian war of independence whose outcome may well change the face of Europe, at whose gates Ukraine today stands and fights well.
Meanwhile, despite Ukraine’s pleas for help, Western governments confined themselves to scolding Moscow for its aggression, offering only non-lethal military aid. President Barack Obama refused repeatedly to provide Ukraine with defensive lethal weapons, convinced doing so would provoke Mr. Putin into a reactive escalation of the fighting. And without Washington’s blessing the Euro-Atlantic community did little.
As for Canada’s principled condemnations of Russian aggression, voiced by the Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, and his Liberal successor, Justin Trudeau, those did not help Ukraine fend off the foe. The economic sanctions imposed by many Western governments stung but were, and remain, insufficient to thwart the current Russian regime’s game plan.
Finally, on December 22, 2017, President Donald Trump signed off on a $41.5 million deal that allows Ukraine to acquire 35 FGM-148 Javelin command launch units and 210 anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), a decision former U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden described as “right” and “wise.”
What good will Javelins do? Recall this war’s history. In the summer of 2014 Ukrainian forces launched a campaign aimed to clear the occupied Donbas. They were succeeding until the battles of Ilovaysk (August 2014) and Debaltseve (January-February 2015) when they came up against the Russian Federation’s 5th and 6th Tank Brigades and 37th Motorized Infantry Brigade, deploying modern T-72B3 and some T-90A tanks. Following their rout, the Ukrainian military’s need for ATGMs became critical, with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko calling (July 28, 2015) for 1,240 Javelins. Evocatively, he explained that was the exact number of nuclear warheads Ukraine surrendered voluntarily under the Budapest Memorandum.
Ukraine is getting less than a fifth of the Javelins it asked for. Yet arming Ukraine even with this reduced number of Javelins will change the military balance between the contending armies. Why? Because the Javelin, a third-generation ATGM, has rightly been called “the U.S. military’s tank-killer missile that Russia fears most.” A sophisticated infrared-guided weapons it can be fired in a traditional direct-attack mode but also operates in a top-attack fashion, hitting a tank’s thinner top armor. Furthermore, upon contact, its warhead explodes twice – to penetrate reactive armor and then destroy the target. It can also be used against fortifications and to take down low-flying helicopters. Lastly, the Javelin is a “fire-and-forget” weapon. It hits its target even if the launcher is not kept in line-of-sight. In other words operators can immediately hide after firing or engage another target.
Commenting on why Ukraine needs Javelins, Dmytro Tymchuk, a Ukrainian parliamentarian, bluntly observed early in September 2017: “If every Rostov-Buryat schmuck realizes that you can’t just go out in your T-72 tank deployed from the Urals to shoot with impunity at the positions of the [Ukrainian] armed forces, these [Minsk] agreements… now in a state of permanent coma might… start working.”
Significantly, there is no question about the Ukrainian military’s readiness for these weapons. Over the past three years, aided by their Western partners (mainly Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Lithuania and Poland) the Ukrainian military has proactively engaged in modernization and reform, making significant progress toward achieving interoperability with NATO forces.
Even if one believes the Donbas is a frozen conflicts there are now almost 500 Russian tanks deployed there, four times as many as found in the British Army, not including additional armored vehicles in Russian battle groups troublingly positioned astride Ukraine’s international borders. Even a superficial analysis of Mr. Putin’s political behavior suggests he can start or escalate a conflict without much reference to others, including the ill-informed Russian public. Yet recognizing the damage Javelins will inflict could just be one of the few calculations that can give even a Putin a pause.
For the moment, Ukraine’s enhanced defensive potential has not been tested. Possibly, Mr. Putin is waiting for the so-called “presidential elections” of March to reaffirm his rule over Russia before he acts again. Regardless, what we can be certain of is that he shows respect only for those who deal with him from a position of strength. Having sustained a costly four-year-long war against Ukraine, and still infuriated and in denial over the Ukrainian nation’s attempt to return to its rightful place in Europe, Mr. Putin will not withdraw Russia’s troops from occupied Ukraine or begin abiding by the rules of international law, much less respect treaty obligations he has already violated.
Having lamented publicly in April 2005 over the collapse of the USSR as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” – instead of recognizing it as the welcome liberation of Eastern Europe it was – Mr. Putin is nothing but a “Soviet man” whose childhood never included hearing the memorable nursery rhyme about how “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, and all the King’s horses, and all the King’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.” Arming Ukraine thwarts the empire-rebuilding agenda of the current king in the Kremlin and so secures the peace of Europe.
Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor of political geography at The Royal Military College of Canada, and Ihor Kozak is a defense and security consultant. Both gave testimony before Canada’s House of Commons Standing Committee on National Defense (see Canada’s Support to Ukraine in Crisis and Armed Conflict, December 2017, at https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/42-1/NDDN/report-8/).