The Price of Justice

There is no shortage of people denouncing any compromise with the Kremlin as downright betrayal that would set a precedent of rewarding aggression. In absolute terms, they are right. Yet justice always comes at a price: if not for the activist demanding it, then for someone else.

Ukraine’s resources are stretched to breaking point. Defense spending in 2025 has reached $70 billion, exceeding domestic tax revenues. The budget deficit hovers near $40 billion, and continued foreign aid is not a given. The cost of reconstruction has already climbed over half a trillion dollars. Public debt stands at $186 billion and keeps rising.

Almost two-thirds of Ukrainians expect the war to last for more than a year, and experts agree. President Volodymyr Zelensky underlines that his country would need all available support to fight the Russian army for another two to three years. At the same time, Ukraine’s Armed Forces are strained not only by shortages of arms and munitions but also by dwindling manpower.

Over 310,000 cases of desertion and absence without leave have been registered since 2022, with more than half occurring in 2025. Many soldiers who left cite exhaustion, psychological unpreparedness for extreme combat intensity, endless deployments, and corrupt commanders treating them as expendables. Some are ready to return once conditions improve, but only a fraction did so under the amnesty.

More than half of Ukrainian men say they are ready to fight, but a million and a half still haven’t updated their military records. After recruitment was introduced in 2024, only 8,500 volunteered in a year. Even offering $24,000 in sign-up bonuses for the one-year contracts to the youth failed to attract many. Once travel restrictions for eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds were eased, nearly one hundred thousand men crossed the border in the first two months, many to leave for good.

The grim reality is that Ukrainian resistance relies on “busification” — forcibly seizing men from streets or workplaces and pressing them into military service. The Ombudsman has acknowledged that these abuses are now systemic. Even so, Ukraine’s Supreme Court has ruled that mobilization remains legally irreversible, even when carried out unlawfully. Meanwhile, social media feeds ever more often feature violent clashes with draft officers.

The public mood mirrors this fatigue, and recent graft scandals involving the President’s closest associates hardly help. Polls show that sixty-nine percent now favor a negotiated end to the war and nearly three-quarters are ready to accept freezing the front line, even if not on Russia’s terms. Ukrainians continue to insist on security guarantees, which for them include arms deliveries and EU integration.

The dream of “fighting to victory,” no matter what, ignores these limits. Unless Western “unwavering support” includes a readiness to open a second front, what should we expect? The logic of desperation points towards lowering the draft age, extending the military duty to women, deporting draft-age Ukrainian refugees from abroad, to fill trenches, and then introducing barrier troops and field executions to prevent desertion.

The Pacifist Illusion

This bleak situation is not merely a domestic failure. It reflects the exhaustion of carrying the heaviest burden alone — and of fighting tooth and nail for material support from those who think that strong condemnations and humanitarian aid are enough to stop Russia’s invasion. The harder it gets, the more tempting it becomes for some abroad to imagine that the struggle itself must be the problem.

Hence the idea that Western arms only “prolong the suffering,” and that cutting this lifeline to Ukraine would push it to accept “necessary concessions.” It’s a comforting illusion built on flawed rationale. If words alone could end oppression, then strikes and revolutions would have been replaced with eloquence contests.

The arms deliveries do not block diplomacy but are what allow Ukraine to even participate in negotiations. President Zelensky has signaled his openness to talks and even to hard decisions. But only a side that can stand its ground can negotiate on equal terms. To disarm Ukraine would be forcing it to yield. Moscow knows this and exploits contradictions to sow confusion and divide the ranks.

The Kremlin has repeatedly rejected a ceasefire, making it clear that it is only interested in Ukraine’s effective capitulation. Even if Russia’s maximalism is partly bluff, a “frozen” conflict or even Ukraine ceding Donbass would not indeed “address the root causes” of the war, as Vladimir Putin alleges. Moscow has secured its land bridge to Crimea but lacks the resources to seize the rest of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts that it also claims. Ukraine will never recognize losses, even if formally forced to. The resentment will cement Russia as an eternal enemy, creating potential for another outbreak of conflict.

Putin’s own maxim — “If the fight is inevitable, strike first” — makes the next step predictable, looking at the map. A push toward the Russian outpost in Transnistria would trap Moldova, secure the Black Sea corridor and strangle what remains of Ukraine’s maritime trade, while also delivering Odesa, once a Russian imperial jewel, central to the mythology of the “Russian Spring.”

For European states to abandon Ukraine would bring no détente. New NATO members Finland and Sweden abandoned neutrality precisely because of Russia’s new way of “resolving disputes.” Five countries withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty landmine ban in 2025 for the same reason. Poland’s military spending is on track to triple since 2022, and the Baltics are racing toward spending 5 percent of GDP on defense. Watching a neighbor dismembered by a former overlord wouldn’t soothe but drive them to arm further.

Blind Spot

Moscow’s December 2021 ultimatum made its ambitions clear: NATO must withdraw to the 1997 borders and recognize a Russian sphere of influence in central-eastern Europe. The demand sounded absurd until the shots were fired in February 2022. But Putin’s blitzkrieg against Ukraine failed, and he holds “European ruling elites” to blame.

No one expects Russian tanks reaching Berlin. But the Baltic states, squeezed between Russia and its militarized exclave in Kaliningrad, fit the pattern. Former imperial provinces, which separate Moscow from its territory on the coast, are a tempting target. The rhetoric about “nonhistoric nations” plagued by Russophobia is already in place.

Should the Kremlin decide to bridge the Suwałki Gap — the narrow strip of Polish and Lithuanian territory between Kaliningrad and Russian ally Belarus — amid another round of Western infighting over sanctions, energy policy or common defense strategy, who would risk World War III?

Somewhere along the way, parts of the Left lost the ability to distinguish resistance from militarism. By treating NATO’s expansion as the cause of the war — and thereby finding a cure in its simple rollback — antimilitarists quietly concede that vast regions beyond Russia belong to its “natural” domain.

The core question is, If Russia gets to settle historical grievances and address “legitimate security concerns” by force, why can’t others? The actual victory for the military-industrial complex would not be shipments to Ukraine or even the rearmament programs, but a Europe in permanent crisis, where every border becomes contestable and defense spending spirals without end.

Resentful Revisionism

The real threat is not Ukrainian nationalism. It is neither uniquely sinister nor more chauvinist than that of any small state under siege. Even those most affected by the war are more often concerned with surviving the missile strikes and drone attacks. This doesn’t imply an approval of nationalist mythmaking. But fixating on the excesses of Ukraine’s cultural policies is a convenient distraction, an excuse to relativize aggression and distance oneself from what’s really at stake.

What we face now is a militarizing, expansionist petro-empire cloaking resentment in talk of “historic justice,” draping its neotraditional revival against the “decadent West,” and willing to use any means to claim its “rightful place in the world.” This politics of resentful revisionism isn’t unique to Moscow, but echoes from Washington to Beijing, and must be confronted before any talk of disarmament becomes meaningful.

Li Andersson, a former chair of Finland’s Left Alliance, has already called for an anti-fascist foreign and security policy. She rejects the illusion that fascism can be reasoned with, accepts building EU states’ defense capabilities and strategic autonomy as a precondition for peace, and upholds international law as a mechanism of prevention against authoritarian subversion.

It is, as Andersson argued, high time to offer a credible alternative in debates on security that neither surrenders to militarized neoliberalism nor fetishizes purity. The far right is surging in the polls, and defense budgets are swelling while social spending, climate adaptation, and development aid are slashed. Yet, the problem here is the elites who are exploiting this crisis to push this agenda, not Ukrainians for refusing to bow in subservience to Putin.

Resisting this course means insisting on two things. First, resilient social institutions and robust public infrastructure are as essential to withstanding shocks and those who can use them as weapons. Second, economic democracy, political inclusivity, and public control make any cause worth fighting for in the first place. As lessons from Ukraine show, without these, any talk of standing together is a sham.

No Ready-Made Solution

Everyone wants the war to end, yet no one has a ready-made solution — perhaps there are none. We owe each other the honesty this moment demands. Anything short of Russia’s full withdrawal from Ukraine is profoundly unjust and outright dangerous, but an uncompromising pursuit of justice can also bring us to the point of no return.

Survival itself — enduring as an independent nation despite Putin’s history lectures — is already a victory for Ukraine. But the story won’t end there. Greedy states attack not because they are provoked, but because they can do so. Stopping them will take more than moral force.