Tide Turns on Ukraine War Support

By Rick Boettger

Konk Life is no longer the only media allowing an intelligent discussion of the Ukraine war.  The New York Times has not only begin to report on more of the almost daily setbacks for Ukraine, but allows opposition arguments in the Comments section of its online articles.  And for the first time, on September 18 the majority of the comments favored negotiations, as Ukraine has no chance.

The main opposition comments approved of for printing online by the Times state the long term futility and continuing severe damage to Ukraine, in infrastructure and manpower, as more and more engineers and farmers are lost to the battlefield, either by fighting or in death.  The pro-war argument is that Ukraine only needs more long range missiles to bomb enough of the Russian nation to cause Russia to give up and leave.  The anti-war says that not only would NATO have to give the missiles, but the satellite targeting info, and even the technicians necessary to handle the advanced electronics. This would make it no longer a proxy war, but a direct war of NATO (including the US), killing Russian civilians in their own country, and virtually guaranteeing Russia’s use of tactical nukes if we really did kill enough of them to threaten their position there.  As to the nuclear threat, pro-war says, let’s take the chance Putin is bluffing.

The main reason for pro war remains Vietnam’s Domino Theory, that if Putin wins in Ukraine, Poland and the rest will fall like well, dominoes.  Against this the NYT allows readers on its website to argue (as I have) that if Ukraine can barely win a small portion of a border country filled with Russian sympathizers, how on earth would they have any chance against a full NATO country devoid of Russians?  It’s Crimea, the Donbas, maybe the Russian part of Moldova (Transnistria), and out for Putin.  The argument that “winning” would encourage Putin to do more of the same ignores how much the Russians have paid for just this relatively small war compared to taking on Poland or the Baltics, against a fully committed NATO.  If anything, Putin and Russia have already learned never to do anything like this again.

The other reason is, of course, that Ukraine is fighting for Democracy.  While the NYT still does not allow any of its writers to criticize Zelinsky in its pages, it allows us commenters to list the obviously non-democratic nature of Ukraine: no elections, no opposition parties, no opposition media or even independent columnists, only the state religion, closed borders to its men escaping (like old East Germany).  When this is pointed out, none of the hooray for Democratic Ukraine posters counters with any objections to these facts.

The NYT has itself stopped using the manta “unprovoked aggression” supported only by “friends of Putin,” and a decreasing number of commenters have stopped as well.  The negotiators point out the facts that the West betrayed its promise not to expand NATO in exchange for taking down the Berlin wall, as admitted and criticized by such eminent Cold Warriors as George Kennan over the decades that NATO has swallowed most of the former Soviet countries and engulfed Russia to its borders.  And in the NYT, not a  single commenter yet has admitted being a Trump supporter, or having any love for Putin.  Pro-negotiators are people like me who fought against the Evil Empire in the Army Security Agency as an O4B2L Russian linguist, and then got the Fulbright business and law professors program to Moscow stopped after my own dispiriting semester there taught me the new Russians in 1991 were too untrustworthy to do business with.

Following are two of the pro-negotiation comments I submitted that were approved and printed online, representative of the level of disagreement allowed and tenor of discussion.  The first was in response to a pro-war commenter, “Reg,” who said that Ukraine had pulled out of the April 2024 peace negotiations with Russia held in Istanbul of their own volition, citing a long NYT article on peace conference possibilities:

Reg, the June 15 NYT article did not report on Boris Johnson’s scuttling the talks on April 9 by showing up and stopping Ukraine from further negotiations, saying to continue the war, the West would supply the arms. This was divulged by two of the Ukrainian negotiators, as reported initially in a Kyiv newspaper, of course with Zelinsky’s permission. And in other US papers. As here, the comments responses included a number of readers’ pointing it ou

A second was printed, but not answered, as requested, by the journalists reporting on the advanced weaponry demanded by Ukraine.

This is vitally important coverage. We need to have a good understanding when we are debating what kind f weapons to send. I have one important question for the journalists: which of these systems do indeed require US or NATO technicians to operate them? Russia’s Medvedev maintains that NATO would not only be supplying the bombs, but also the guidance (satellites) AND even the technicians, because Ukrainians don’t have the extensive technical training needed to operate them. Thus the war advances from Ukraine as proxy to a direct war of NATO vs. Russia, with US and NATO directly killing Russian citizens on their homeland. Is this true?

While answers by the NYT writers are rare, the lack of response supports my inference that Medvedev is correct.

The only comments of mine rejected were those in which I report, as here, on the proportion of commenters on opposing sides of the war.  This makes me suspect that the comments section is the NYT’s way of finally allowing discussion of the war without outraging their readers and losing subscribers.  On the rare occasions when they have, e.g, reported on Hunter Biden’s undeclared foreign payments, they have been excoriated by their readers, saying this kind of news should not be printed, only stories about Trump family foreign dealings.  It may be the NYT comments editors do not want to be found out for what is indeed happening.  Right now, their readership has NOT been demanding that commenters be muzzled the way the official NYT journalists are.  I too want to avoid poking that hornets nest.

My silly hope is that the self-censored liberal press is having a glimmer of misgiving about their current bias.  Remember, NYT used to have a Public Editor who would call themselves out for this.  Maybe the plea by the ousted senior editor James Bennett, now with The Economist, writing there, has gotten to them:  “The Times’s problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favor one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.”  In their online Comments section, debate rises on.  As it does in Konk Life.

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