In the summer of 1940, when Great Britain was fighting Nazi Germany alone, Winston Churchill asked to borrow a few dozen aging American destroyers to defend the English coast from imminent invasion. Churchill wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Mr. President, with great respect, I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now.”

Today Ukraine is fighting Russia alone. American aid—never timely or sufficient, but enough to help keep Ukraine alive and Russian invaders at bay—is about to run out. U.S. shipments will stop in the next few weeks. Without American artillery, ammunition, missile systems, tanks, armored vehicles, humanitarian aid, or funds for reconstruction, Ukraine will be left to face the Russian onslaught with diminishing odds of survival. The Biden administration has asked Congress to vote for another $61 billion in aid for Ukraine. So far, Republicans are refusing. Members plan to leave D.C. for the holidays on December 15. This is a thing for them to do now.

On Thursday, I spoke with two Ukrainian soldiers—the senior intelligence officer of an artillery brigade and a middle-aged volunteer private—who have been fighting constantly on the front lines. Both soldiers told me that Ukrainians are anxiously following the news from Washington. “I really hope that people in the U.S. can understand that this is not only war for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people,” Yuriy Matsarsky, the private, said. “It’s really war for democracy, it’s war for a better world, it’s war against dictatorship, it’s war against modern fascism.” Ukrainians are not asking other countries to send troops, he added. “We only need some metal things to save Ukraine.”

The phrase stuck with me. I had just watched a new documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol, about the Russian siege and destruction of the Black Sea port at the start of the invasion. The film, made by Associated Press journalists who barely got out of Mariupol with their lives, shows in overwhelming detail the effect of metal things on human flesh. The body of a teenage boy, both legs blown off while he was playing soccer, lying under a bloody sheet as his father cradles his head and cries, “Son, son, son, son!” A pregnant woman with a gaping wound in her hip rushed by stretcher from a bombed maternity hospital (neither she nor her baby survived). Doctors unable to revive a small child on an operating-room table while his mother collapses outside in the hall, asking, “You couldn’t save him? But why? Why? Why?”

I wish that 20 Days in Mariupol could be screened for a joint session of Congress. The end of American aid will not end the killing and dying in Ukraine. It will only allow Russian missiles to turn more cities into the hell of Mariupol, and Russian troops to inflict more agony on civilians under occupation. It risks making the immense Ukrainian sacrifices and achievements hollow. Vladimir Putin has never shown any desire to negotiate an end to the war, and now he can smell victory—perhaps not the total elimination of independent Ukraine that he sought in February 2022, but the conquest of the Donbas, the reconquest of territory Russia seized and then lost, and the steady demoralization of the Kyiv government and its allies. For the West to abandon Ukraine now would allow Russia and its authoritarian friends in China, Iran, and North Korea to believe that the 21st century is moving their way—into a future of brutal armies, cowed populations, and endless lies.

“If the Russians are able to win in Ukraine because our political will did not hold out, they will conclude that they can outlast the U.S. and NATO politically in a future war,” Dara Massicot of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told me. “And that will make Russia overconfident and very dangerous in the years ahead.”

Ukraine’s much-anticipated late-spring offensive has turned into an early-winter stalemate. Its forces are now digging in along a 1,000-kilometer front while Russia, with advantages in personnel and weapons, attempts to seize chunks of territory before the deep snow sets in. Predictably, the different parties—Washington, Brussels, Kyiv—are blaming one another. Ukraine’s remarkable spirit of unity in the first year of the crisis has faded, and latent divisions in the government are cracking open. Germany’s promised military buildup has badly lagged. Nationalist governments in frontline countries—Poland, Hungary, Slovakia—are allowing truckers to prevent badly needed supplies from entering Ukraine. Hungary, the Ted Cruz of the European Union, is threatening to veto the next EU aid package of 50 billion euros. Western aid this year—half American, half European—has steadily dwindled, down 87 percent from 2022, and in recent months the Ukrainian army has had to ration supplies.

The brigade intelligence officer, Major Vladimir (he asked that I withhold his surname), described the consequences on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine. In a war largely fought with artillery, Russians fire at least three times more shells than Ukraine does. Ukrainian soldiers who spot enemy troops digging fortifications or transporting munitions can’t fire more than one or two Howitzer rounds before they have to stop. The Russians “feel like they can walk around as if it’s their own house,” the major told me. “Anything that America stops giving has a result in lives of Ukrainian soldiers. No matter how well we fight, we have to fight with something.” Only metal things can stop metal things.

Eric Ciaramella, a former Ukraine expert at the CIA and the National Security Council, now at the Carnegie Endowment, returned from Kyiv this week. “It’s not that they feel abandoned,” he said of the Ukraine officials he’d met. “They feel the wheels are coming off. Partly they worry that the West had unrealistic expectations of the counteroffensive, that politics has intervened, the Middle East has distracted attention. And then these old ways of thinking about trying to work it out with the Russians—they haven’t completely gone away. Many in the West haven’t made a conceptual turn to realizing there’s no way of going back to business as usual: ‘You, the United States and Europe, haven’t decided really, in your heart of hearts, that you want Russia defeated.’”

While Russia turns to a war economy and accelerates industrial production, the U.S. has done little to prepare for a long war in Ukraine. A pair of factories in Pennsylvania continue to make all the 155-mm artillery shells that have become Ukraine’s essential munitions. A new factory, with about 150 jobs, is planned for Mesquite, Texas, over the opposition of the district’s Republican congressman, who would end all Ukraine aid. (Someone should tell politicians like him that 90 percent of the aid money is spent in the U.S.) The Pentagon plans to increase production from the current 30,000 shells a month to 90,000 or 100,000 in 2025. Russia is on track to produce 2 million a year. Along with its material advantage in artillery, it has grown sophisticated on the battlefield at drone and electronic warfare. The long story of American deindustrialization has made answering the threat from Russia difficult. Political polarization makes it almost impossible.

The Biden administration never leveled with the American public about the likely difficulty and duration of the war. Now, when Republicans demand a plan for victory, the White House can’t provide one. Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, told me that at least a dozen Republican senators will never vote for Ukraine aid; only about 10, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, support it. “And then a bunch of people in between could take it or leave it and have said their price for funding it is to do something on the border.” Even McConnell, a passionate advocate for Ukraine, insists that any aid package include measures for border security. In the House, a majority of Republicans—descendants of the isolationists who opposed lending destroyers to Britain in 1940—will vote against any aid for Ukraine. Some Democrats would oppose a new package that includes hard-line provisions for border security and military aid for Israel. In other words, Ukraine’s fight for survival, which unified Americans in 2022, has been sucked into the vortex of our terrible politics.

“The president himself needs to be involved in these negotiations,” Bennet said, his voice rising with uncharacteristic urgency. “He needs to be explaining to the Congress and the American people how important this is.” And, Bennet added, there needs to be an honest discussion of what the battlefield actually looks like. “People should be astonished that Ukraine has been able to achieve a stalemate, and grateful for that.”

            It’s hard to argue for funding an apparent stalemate. With the Republican base turning against Ukraine and the party’s leader an outright Putin ally, a realistic assessment of the war will be distorted as proof of its futility. But the war is not at all futile. Ukraine has held off, and in some places turned back, a far larger and more powerful aggressor. In doing so it has galvanized and expanded NATO. In 2024, with Western help, it can learn from the disappointments of the past year and consolidate its positions while inflicting significant damage on Russia’s military capacity. Ukraine has also shown the world, in a time of surging authoritarianism, that democracy can stand up to the most concentrated onslaught of despotic power. This war’s importance shouldn’t be measured by a tiny percentage of the U.S. budget, or Ukraine’s success by square miles of territory. Our aid amounts to the best deal possible: some metal things in exchange for the prospect of a more decent world.

“It’s so simple—that’s why I’m hopeful,” Yuriy Matsarsky, the volunteer soldier, said. “I want to believe that the United States will not stop supporting us, will not stop the military aid for our common cause. Because it’s really our common cause. It’s a war for our common future.”

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