I agree with the Feb. 23 guest column by Dr. E. Martin Schotz [“Rethinking U.S. interests on anniversary of war in Ukraine”]. The war in Ukraine must end with a cease-fire between the NATO-armed Ukrainian Armed Forces and the Russian Army. Achieving this requires immediate peace negotiations between the U.S. and Russia.

NATO can’t achieve military success on the battlefield without massive escalation. Russia has seized the strategic initiative and is dictating the course of the war. President Biden fails to contend with this grim reality.

Continued war poses extreme danger, because the main warring powers are armed with nuclear weapons capable of destroying the other. The Biden administration’s efforts to increase weapons shipments to Ukraine prolongs an unwinnable war that only grows more dangerous.

The entirety of the Democratic Party caucus, including U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, and many Republicans continue voting for weapons for Ukraine. The question we need to ask them is, what is the limit of their support? How far are they willing to go?

From 2014 to 2015, a serious debate took place within the Obama administration regarding limits to military support for Ukraine. This was during the most active part of the civil war in eastern Ukraine between the coup government that seized power in Kiev in February 2014 on one side, and Russian-aligned Ukrainian separatists in the far eastern corner of the country on the other. Against the advice of aides, Obama opposed shipments of Stinger anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, noting the weapons would fall into the hands of the Azov battalion, which everyone agreed was neo-Nazi.

As recently as March 2022, a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden opposed shipments of M1 Abrams tanks and Fi16 fighter jets to Ukraine, noting the likelihood of escalation. Until July 2023, the administration opposed shipments of cluster munitions, acknowledging that unexploded ordinance would create deadly traps for civilians for years following the war’s end.

The U.S. government has now crossed each one of these limits. Each escalation has shifted the horizon of the war ever closer to nuclear conflagration.

Rep. McGovern has publicly stated his wish that the war in Ukraine not escalate. However, he is unwilling to clearly state any limit beyond which arming Ukraine would end. Why not at least take the position Obama took in 2014 and insist that U.S. weapons not be allowed into the hands of Azov? Why not tell the Ukrainians that the U.S. won’t support their stated aim of seizing Crimea, where Russia operates a naval base that has been operating under its control since 1804?

The logic of this war is one of escalation, and the two sides largely agree on what’s at stake. Abstract principles such as democracy and national sovereignty may be driving war rhetoric, but they are not driving the war. The Kremlin views the presence of NATO in Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia. As professor Jeffrey D. Sachs has pointed out, even NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg acknowledges “that it was America’s relentless push to enlarge NATO to Ukraine that was the real cause of the war.”

What distinguishes Stoltenberg and the Western powers he represents is the belief that the right of Ukraine to join NATO is so sacrosanct that it’s worth hundreds of thousands of casualties and growing to defend it.

Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin agree with the Kremlin that the outcome of war is existential for Russia. Austin has publicly stated the goal of the war is to effect a “strategic defeat” of Russia. Nuclear-armed powers do not willingly accept strategic defeat when the continued stability of the state is at stake. Austin’s rhetoric is alarming, because achieving his stated goal would likely to lead to nuclear war.

A sane and minimally just foreign policy would prioritize the continued existence of the planet above the strategic defeat of rival powers. Please contact Rep. McGovern and demand immediate peace negotiations. Stop prolonging this war with more military aid to Ukraine.

Ben Grosscup is an activist folksinger living in Greenfield.