A turning point in the war: what should follow from the US

The vote of the US Congress for helping Ukraine is the most important event, says historian and writer Anne Empbaum in a column for The Atlantic. But it is important that it will be how much Western allies will be able to show Russia that this war is not won. It's not too late because it's never too late. No results are never defined in advance, nothing never ends, and you can always influence what will happen tomorrow by making the right choice today.

The US Congress is finally making one of these right decisions. Soon, American weapons and ammunition will start coming to Ukraine again. But the delay has the price. Stretching for so many months, entering the dead end of the border reform, before returning back, the Republicans in Congress, who blocked weapons and ammunition for Ukraine, caused great damage, partly irreparable. Over the past six months, Ukraine has lost its territory, life and infrastructure.

If Ukraine was not deprived of air defense, most power plants could still be located in Kharkiv. People who died as a result of almost daily bombing of Odessa may have been alive. Ukrainian soldiers who spent weeks on the front line, normalizing ammunition, may not have been so demoralized. The delay has also changed American policy. Only the minority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, including speaker Mike Johnson, joined most Democrats to approve $ 60 billion assistance.

The fact that it is clearly a pro -Russian faction of Republicans was consolidated within Congress. The lesson is clear: anyone who tries to manipulate the United States foreign policy, whether an autocrat in Hungary, whether the Chinese Communist Party, now knows that a carefully developed propaganda campaign aimed at the right people can succeed much further because were once considered possible.

From the first days of the Russian invasion of 2022, President Vladimir Putin has been trying to conquer Ukraine with the help of psychological games as well as military force. He needed to convince Americans, Europeans, and, above all, Ukrainians that victory was impossible that the only alternative is surrender and that the Ukrainian state would disappear over time. Many Americans and Europeans - and much fewer Ukrainians - supported this point of view.

Pro -Russian influential persons - Taver Carlson, Jay Dia Vance, David Saks - supported by the army of pro -Russian trolls on X and other social networks, helped to support rumors of failures and convinced the minority in Congress to block assistance to Ukraine.

It was instructive to trace the way on social networks, in which it was falsely argued that President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy owns two yachts, as this post went up the food chain at the end of last year: from the keyboard of the propagandist through the echo of the chamber, created by the Trolls.

According to the Republican senator from North Carolina Tom Tillis, some of his colleagues during his debate for military assistance to Ukraine were worrying that "people will buy yachts for that money. " They read false stories and believed that it was true. But with the adoption of this bill on assistance, the Russian demoralization campaign has been a serious blow. It is also a failure for Russian military efforts, and not only because Ukrainians will now have more ammunition.

Suddenly, Russian military and Russian society again faced the prospect of a very long war. Ukraine, supported by the united military and economic forces of the United States and the European Union, is a completely different opponent than isolated and lonely Ukraine.

This does not mean that the Russians will quickly seem: Putin and propagandists on state television, who support it, have repeatedly stated that their goal was not to get a little unnecessary territory, but to control the whole of Ukraine. They do not want to exchange land for peace. They want to occupy Kharkiv, Odessa, Kiev and other cities.

Now, when these goals are becoming more and more difficult to achieve, a good moment has come for democratic countries that support Ukraine to review our strategy. As soon as the help package will become the law this week, the psychological advantage will be on our side again. Let's take advantage of this.

According to Johnson himself, Baiden administration should immediately put pressure on European allies so that they release Russian assets worth $ 300 billion, which they jointly own and sent them to Ukraine. There are excellent legal and moral arguments for this: money can be legally considered a form of reparations.

This shift will also make it clear to the Kremlin that it has no way back to what was previously called "normal" relationships, and that the price that Russia pays for its colonial war will only grow. It is also a good moment for Europeans and Americans to be more serious about sanctions and export control regimes imposed on Russia.

If NATO was conducting a real economic pressure campaign, thousands of people would be involved, with many screens at the Central Command Center and constantly updated reconnaissance data. Instead, this task was left at the discretion of a small group of people from different agencies in different countries who may know or not know what others do. As the American assistance of Ukrainians restored, the asymmetrical warfare, which they succeed, should be actively encouraged.

Campaign of Air and Navy Attacks that moved the Black Sea Fleet from the shoreline, raids on Russian gas and oil facilities for thousands of miles from Ukraine, recruiting Russian soldiers in , We need more, not less. Biden's administration should also listen to Johnson's proposal that the United States is supplied more - and better - high -quality weapons so that Ukrainians can hit Russian rocket launchers before the missile reaches Ukraine.

If the US did it in the fall of 2022, when Ukraine returned the territory, today the world could look completely different. This war will only end when the Russians no longer want to fight, and they will stop fighting when they understand that they will not be able to win. Now our turn to convince them, as well as our own pro -Russian group that their invasion is failure. The best way to do it is to believe it yourself.