February 24th, 2025 marked three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Given the uncertain future of the war, many wonder how much longer the U.S. should support Ukraine. Perhaps the more important question is, what would be the geopolitical and humanitarian cost of withdrawing?
The Russians have killed more than 90,000 and injured upward of 420,000 Ukrainian civilians and soldiers. Russia occupies approximately 20% of Ukraine’s territory, most of which Russia seized in the 2014 annexation of Crimea and War in the Donbas. While many of the people in Donbas, the territory encompassing Luhansk and Donetsk, are Russian-speaking, the majority do not support separatism.
Putin wants to capture Donbas to complete his attempted 2014 annexation of the territories. Beyond this, Donbas is a heavily industrialized region with a large coal mining industry, and its seizure would connect Russia to Crimea, a Russian military and trading center on the Black Sea. So far, the Russians have captured pretty much all of the Luhansk region, but they want to take the rest of the Donetsk region.
Map of the conflict, from BBC News.
The war directly affects people in Ukraine, especially in the East. Myroslav Bur ‘28’s family lives in a Ukrainian town bordering Russia. He said, “Russia bombs every single day. I wake up, I read the news, and it’s ten people, 20 people dead every single day.”
Russia targets critical infrastructure. Diana Razumowa ‘28, a Ukrainian Yale student, recalled her hometown, the Eastern city of Kharkiv, during the summer: “Explosions [were] going every hour…you hear alerts ten times, in the best case, per day.” Russians shelled “critical infrastructure, energy, power plants, water supplies, all communication lines,” she said. Russia has seized or destroyed more than 50% of Ukraine’s power generation capacity. Relatives of Razumova who live under Russian occupation in Mariupol “didn’t have electricity, gas, water for two months…they couldn’t contact us.”
However, the costs to Russians nearly match those to Ukrainians. Yale Professor Thomas Graham, former National Security Council advisor working on Russian affairs, said of Russia, “It is making progress, at a very high cost.” Graham estimates between 1,000 and 1,500 Russian casualties per day and added that “there’s a tremendous cost of material.”
The war also costs the United States. The U.S. designated $175 billion toward supporting Ukraine from 2022-2025, including $106 billion given directly to the Ukrainian government. Military and humanitarian aid has taken up two-thirds of this amount, while the rest has supported the Ukrainian national budget.
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Ukraine needs foreign aid, as stated by Graham, who put it bluntly: “They’re putting up a very stiff resistance, but they’re still outmanned and outgunned on the battlefield, as they have been for most of the conflict.”
Diana Razumova shared, “My cousin is serving in the Ukrainian army. He’s almost always on the front line. He […] mentioned that without US support, it would be almost impossible for Ukraine to fight.”
Ukraine requires U.S. military technology, such as weapons, defense systems, and Patriots. The Patriot defense system intercepts aircraft and ballistic missiles, but it also shoots down drones. Russia launches around 100 to 200 drones every night, targeting hospitals, apartment buildings and the electricity grid. “The only way Ukraine can survive in terms of maintaining its electricity grid is with Patriots or similar missiles from other countries,” Professor David Cameron, a Yale Political Scientist and expert in European affairs, said.
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Historian Marci Shore thinks supporting Ukraine should be viewed “not only at the level of states, but also at the level of human beings.” To explain the reconceptualization, she brought up the words of Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian human rights lawyer who won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize: “We’re fighting not for territories [but] for people who live in these territories. We will never leave these people to torture and death, we have no moral rights to do it.” As documented by the United Nations, Russian soldiers are torturing Ukrainian civilians, and it is a “common and acceptable practice” in occupied areas. Shore remarked, “Civilians are being massacred—and gruesomely tortured. 19-year-old Russian soldiers are torturing middle-aged women who speak their language and could be their mothers.”
Diana Razumova shared, “My [cousin] is in the Ukrainian army. So, his parents…and everyone who has kids in the Ukrainian military…they’re really scared. They were just taken by the Russian army, and no one knows where they ended up.” In July 2023, The Associated Press reported, “thousands of Ukrainian civilians are detained in a network of formal and informal prisons…, where they endure torture, psychological abuse and even slave labor.”
Myroslav Bur stated that in the occupied areas, “The Russian government refused providing any humanitarian help…[and] started to block access to crucial medications for diabetes, for AIDS” to people who did not obtain Russian citizenship.
This affected Diana Razumova’s family: “My grandmother was really sick, and doctors almost refused to treat her, only via the cheapest medication just because she hasn’t had Russian citizenship. She was almost 90 years old.”
To make the case for continued foreign support in the war, Marci Shore compared the Russo-Ukraine war to World War II. She said, “I think about what the Polish underground courier Jan Karski went through to bring news of the Holocaust to the Western Allies: he was tortured by the Gestapo; he escaped and allowed himself to be smuggled in and out of the Warsaw ghetto, so he could see for himself what was happening there. He pleaded with the Western Allies to believe what he said was happening in Europe.” Now, Shore said, “We know everything in real time; we’re watching it happen. It’s all right in front of us. We essentially have a live-stream into the gas chambers.”
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To uphold the rules-based international order, Graham believes that the US needs to support Ukraine. He explained, “We want a world in which countries do not feel that they can use military force to seize the territory of another state, particularly in Europe, which is of extreme strategic importance to the United States.” This international norm, Graham said, “has been established since the end of the Second World War, codified in the Helsinki Agreement [of 1975] and a number of other documents that relate to European security,” all of which Russia has been a party to.
Diplomats and historians, including Shore, believe that if Putin is allowed to take Ukraine, he will go further and attack Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary or Romania. Since Article 5 of the NATO treaty states that “an armed attack against one shall be considered an attack against all,” NATO members, including the U.S., would, then, be obligated to engage in a global war.
Myroslav Bur offered an interesting perspective on Putin’s objectives: “When you Google ‘Bahmut’ or ‘Mariupol,’ you will see that there is nothing there: 90% of infrastructure is destroyed. Towns are destroyed, cities are destroyed, there is no agricultural land. What Putin is gaining is bare land, which is not usable, it will not be usable for the next decades. So, it’s not about Putin’s idea of conquering Ukrainian territory. It is about Russian imperialism that wants to conquer Europe.”
Despite Ukrainian borders being recognized in several international treaties, like the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in his essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Putin disputes their legitimacy, arguing that “Russia was robbed.” By the same token, Putin may question post-Soviet borders again in a few years, this time concerning another neighbor. Danish intelligence warned, Russia is “ramping up its military capabilities to prepare for a possible war against NATO” and “could start a major war in Europe within 5 years” if it perceives NATO to be weak.
Former Ambassador McFaul brought up another reason why the end of the conflict is relevant to the US. In a 2023 MSNBC article, he said “were Putin to succeed in transforming Ukraine into a forward operating base, our front-line NATO allies would be threatened, demanding more American assistance, including increased deployment of our troops. This does not serve U.S. security interests, especially when we are trying to rebalance our military forces to counter China.”
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A faction among the Republicans, including Vice President J.D. Vance (LAW ‘13), Senator Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), argue that the U.S. should pull support from Ukraine and redirect resources toward American communities.
Professor David Cameron refuted the claim explaining, “It’s a rather parochial and naive notion to imagine that somehow, if we didn’t spend the money on supporting Ukraine…, we’d all enjoy having a substantial additional amount of money spent by the federal government, it just doesn’t work that way.”
Congress appropriates federal money into different spending categories, such as discretionary, mandatory, defense, and foreign aid spending. Cutting aid to Ukraine would not automatically increase the budget for domestic discretionary spending programs. After the U.S. scaled back spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was no corresponding increase on domestic social spending. Furthermore, the majority of military aid designated for Ukraine is reinvested in American communities, as it goes to U.S. arms-manufacturing companies.
From the perspective of America’s economic interests, “Europe remains perhaps the most important trading partner,” Graham said. He continued, “European countries are our most important allies and share a general view of how the world should be ordered.” Graham argued that Ukraine is a valuable geopolitical partner for economic reasons: “Ukraine contains a wealth of mineral resources, rare earths that are necessary for the production of much electronic equipment that we use at this point. It has a well-developed and a very promising IT sector and military-industrial sector. If [those sectors are] maintained, it creates a situation in which Ukraine can itself be a valuable partner in maintaining security and economic prosperity in Europe.”
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Although Cameron, Shore, and Graham all made different predictions about what the future of the war will bring, none believed either side would be willing to come to a long-term ceasefire anytime soon.
After a February 2025 conversation between President Donald Trump and Putin, the American administration expressed interest in beginning negotiations with Russia. However, as Cameron cautioned, Russia may not be ready to negotiate with good faith, “Putin might be willing to think about a ceasefire and peace talks, if and when the Russians are able to complete a takeover of Donetsk region. But we don’t know when that will happen. We don’t know whether it will happen.”
Cameron continued, “It’s easy enough to figure out a resolution that would favor one at the expense of the other. I haven’t heard any good proposal put forward that would simultaneously satisfy Russia and Ukraine.” He elaborated, “The only settlement that would be acceptable for the West would be a return of the territory to Ukraine and some kind of arrangement to provide for the security of Ukraine…Russia, of course, says we’re happy to provide that security. But no one in the West wants this to depend on Russia, obviously.” In this scenario, in exchange for some Ukrainian concessions, Russia would promise not to attack Ukraine again. Yet, history shows this promise may be feeble. In the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, co-signed by the United States and the United Kingdom, Russia offered security assurances in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. Russia still invaded in 2014 and 2022.
Cameron said that, if a ceasefire is reached, Russia cannot be trusted to follow its orders, as Putin may have a different end-goal. Thomas Graham described Russia’s “maximal goals” as “the subjugation of Ukraine or the elimination of Ukraine as a truly sovereign state.”
Marci Shore cautioned that even if a deal is struck in which Ukraine cedes territory, Putin may not stop. “If he’s allowed to take Ukraine, he will simply keep going,” she stated.
While it’s difficult to predict what kind of peace agreement will be possible, Graham believes Western actors should take steps that move Ukraine towards a solution which “leans more towards success [defined as] the emergence of a strong, democratic, prosperous Ukraine integrating into the Euro, Atlantic community,” an idea shared by most European leaders, Democrats and many Republicans.
Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski put it bluntly, “We need to convince Putin that we are prepared to stay the course, that we think this is a colonial war. These colonial wars usually take up to a decade. Anything shorter than that would be a bonus. We need to wait him out, until his economy collapses.”
Graham concluded, “continued Western support for Ukraine and continued pressure on Russia could, presumably over time, lead to a negotiation in which Russia would have to make concessions in order to reach an enduring settlement.”