BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

As the war in Ukraine drags on despite the unprecedented U.S.-led sanctions against Russia, “Ukraine fatigue” in the West is beginning to set in. Most Americans now oppose Congress authorizing further military and economic aid for Kyiv, according to a new CNN-SSRS poll. 

It is easier to keep funding and arming a country when things are going well. But Ukraine’s counteroffensive against the entrenched Russian invaders is floundering, despite the West training and equipping Ukrainian formations with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of new weapons. 

After the much-hyped counteroffensive began in early June, Ukraine lost as much as 20% of the newly-supplied weaponry in just the first two weeks. The stalled counteroffensive has dashed NATO’s hopes of a major military breakthrough against Russia, which still occupies nearly a fifth of Ukraine. 

The counteroffensive’s lack of headway, meanwhile, places President Joe Biden in a tight spot. But instead of rethinking his strategy, he is just throwing good money after bad and hoping for a miracle — an eventual battlefield breakthrough against Russian forces or political upheaval in Moscow.

Only dialogue and diplomacy can halt the war, which, unlike the previous military invasions of sovereign states by foreign powers, is having a global impact in the form of higher food and fuel prices and increased inflation. This is largely because the conflict has shaped up as a kind of proxy war between the great powers, pitting Russia against the American-led bloc.

Biden, while keeping the door to diplomacy with Russia shut, has been beseeching China to stabilize the Sino-American relationship through direct talks. The president has sent a string of senior officials to Beijing this summer, including CIA Director Bill Burns, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and “climate czar” John Kerry. The lack of concrete results from these fence-mending visits led to an unannounced trip to Beijing by Henry Kissinger, the 100-year-old former secretary of state who has encouraged the Biden administration to adopt a more conciliatory approach to China. 

The fact is that the more the United States has deepened its involvement in the Ukraine war, the more Biden has sought to appease China in the hope of forestalling a Sino-Russian axis against America. 

The American-led sanctions against Russia, however, are helping to advance China’s commercial and strategic interests, without reining in the Kremlin’s war machine or pushing Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table. A report from the Washington-based Free Russia Foundation has called China the “biggest winner” from the Western punitive measures against Moscow. 

More ominously, the failure of the world’s toughest-ever sanctions regime to bring Russia to heel could embolden China’s expansionist designs against Taiwan, especially since similar sanctions against Beijing would have even less impact. After all, China’s economy is about 10 times larger than Russia’s. Just as Putin was clear about his plans for invading Ukraine, so has Chinese President Xi Jinping been explicit about eventually absorbing Taiwan.

Yet the U.S. is still not giving sufficient priority to deterring a Chinese attack on Taiwan. The overall $1.65 trillion spending package passed by Congress late last year included $45 billion in additional aid for Ukraine but just $2 billion for Taiwan. The assistance for Taiwan was in loans, not grants. 

Meanwhile, the grinding nature of the Ukraine war shows that it has reached a stalemate on the battlefield, with neither side in a position to make significant advances, let alone achieve total victory.

Deepening America’s involvement in what is now an attritional war can only drain Western military resources. It would sap America’s strength at a time of growing security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region. Indeed, the flood of American weapons to Ukraine is already weakening U.S. military muscle in Asia.

The war, for its part, is exposing some key Western military limitations. The U.S. set out to bleed Russia in Ukraine but it is America, not Russia, that is running out of critical munitions. Biden, in a recent CNN interview, admitted that, “This is a war relating to munitions. And they [Ukraine] are running out of that ammunition, and we’re low on it.” So, he said, he was left with no choice but to send Ukraine cluster bombs. 

Diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement ought to be a natural corollary to the current military gridlock in Ukraine. The 1950-53 Korean War was deadlocked for two years before an armistice agreement was concluded. A similar long delay in reaching a ceasefire agreement in the current war would bring greater devastation to Ukraine. 

It is true that the U.S. committed to restoring Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. However, with little hope of forcing Russia to retreat from the territories it has occupied in Ukraine’s east and south, a protracted war is not in America’s interest. 

Just like the Cold War created an East and West Germany, a North and South Vietnam, and a still-existing North and South Korea, the likely outcome of the present war — however unpalatable it may seem — would be a Russian-held Ukrainian segment that serves as Moscow’s strategic buffer against NATO and a rump Ukraine aligned with (but not part of) NATO. 

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”